MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by serf | 2025-06-20 22:18:16+00:00
it's obvious to anyone watching Amazon from birth until now that an underlying theme for the way their business is ran is by conjuring profitability by taking advantage -- they're good at that.

To me, the belief that Amazon would stand a chance at being as big as they are without taking advantage of people/culture/society is bizarre.

To be frank : if it were true we'd see more competition from groups that don't grind their assets to dust.. and we don't. Amazon is at the top of the game, and they grind things into dust while lobbying for further ability to do so in the future.

In other words : how many more precedents need to be set before we can tell beyond a reasonable doubt that full-bore-capitalism leads to disempowerment of the individual at the behest of corporations, and that it's rigged to do exactly that?
by asmxyz | 2025-06-20 22:18:44+00:00
Yes, Bezos only owns ~10%, but I think it's fair to say that, of Amazon employees and owners, he has more than 10% of the power within Amazon.

If warehouse workers want better conditions they have to solve a national coordination problem without getting crushed. If Bezos wants their working conditions to be more efficient he has to write a memo.

Edit: to connect this back to ownership. This disparity is directly responsible for determining whether profits pay fair wages or got to Bezos and the other owners.
by anigbrowl | 2025-06-20 22:18:58+00:00
I have had this experience with some EU companies too. They seem oblivious to the idea that renting an inferior service is going to cost the client more in lost productivity or similar. I don't think it's ideological, more they're worried about getting stuck with an unpaid bill; but in my case I couldn't even get thme to accept a deposit or prepayment because they weren't used to that sort of request.
by GauntletWizard | 2025-06-20 22:19:43+00:00
What really set Alpha Centauri apart for me was the fictional history and how it is presented. Civilization's tech tree is a form of human history, accompanied by famous quotes contextualizing the importance of the discoveries.

Alpha Centauri presents its tech to you the same way, but it's inventions are science fiction, and likewise the quotes [1] are fictional, from the important characters, the major players of the various factions within. You get a real sense for the groups involved and the major players from such. You get a sense of the civilizations involved, sometimes presented in their folklore or humor. For example, the militaristic Spartans quote a variation of an old marching cadence - "I don't know but I've been told / Deirdre's got a Network Node / Likes to press the on-off switch / Dig that crazy Gaian witch!"

My favorite, though, and feeling ever more prescient:

"As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.

Commissioner Pravin Lal U.N. Declaration of Rights"

[1] A good compendium of them - https://www.generationterrorists.com/quotes/smac.html
by r14c | 2025-06-20 22:20:18+00:00
Communes of that sort don't really have anything to do with Communism. At least not the political traditions that the word is typically associated with originating with thinkers like Marx, Bakunin, Lenin, Mao, Kropotkin, &c. Which specifically define communism as a level of economic development with certain specific prerequisites that none of these "intentional community commune" projects even attempt to meet.

Communism as a pure failure is literally propaganda, but I don't have time to cover the full comparative history of economic development under capitalism and socialism in a comment. All human projects have flaws and it's hard to compare them if you don't get into the nitty-gritty of both the successes and failures.
by beagle3 | 2025-06-20 22:20:21+00:00
One thing humans are good at is pattern recognition. Terse APL is - once you are used to it - very recognizable.

Many constructs take less characters to algorithmically specify than to name: (Examples in K because that’s what I know best):

(+/x)%#x computes the average of a vector x; or the average of each column in a 2D matrix x; or other averages for other constructs. It takes about as much characters to spell “average”, which is considers too short a name in modern C or Java - and yet, the code is instantly recognizable to any K programmer, needs no documentation about how it deals with NaNs or an empty vector or whatever (which your named C/Java/K routine would - does it return 0? NaN? Raise an exception? Segfault?)

And ,// (yes - that’s comma slash slash) flattens a recursive list. Way shorter than its name , and it’s the entire implementation.

Are these the most numerically stable / efficient ways to average or flatten? No. But they are the least-cognitive-load, fastest-to-grasp-and-pattern-match when reading code. Once you are used to them.

The appeal of Iverson languages also comes from a good selection of primitives. Most modern languages such as C++, Python, Nim, even Rust have an implicit focus on the “meta” programming: they give you the tools (templates, macros, classes) to build abstractions, with which you later build your actual computation. K / J / APL / BQN expect you to do the computation with much fewer abstractions - but provide primitives that make that incredibly easy.

For example, there is a “grade” primitive which returns a vector that - if used to index your original list - would sort it.

Now, say you have a list of student names, and ages, and you wish to sort them - once alphabetically, once by age. In idiomatic C++/Python etc, you’d have a “student” class with three fields. Then you’d write some comparator functions to pass to your sort routine. (I am aware of accessors and the key arg to pythons sort; assume for a second they aren’t there).

In K/APL/J, you’d just have 3 lists whose indices correspond: and then it is just:

name[<age]

Read “name indexed by grading of ages”. They’re a terser version: name@<age read: “name at grade of age”

The terseness compounds. Once you are used to it, every other programming language seems so uselessly bloated.

None of these things apply to obfuscated or shortened C.

Arthur released K source code, which is C written in the same style. It does not have the same appeal.
by quickthrowman | 2025-06-20 22:21:25+00:00
Homeowners should not be installing their own EV chargers and definitely shouldn’t be installing bi-directional EV charging equipment. I wouldn’t do my own natural gas pipefitting because I don’t know how to do it correctly, I would hire a pipefitter to do it. Electrical work is just as dangerous if you don’t do it correctly.

Homeowners are terrible electricians that don’t understand that every termination needs to be done with a torque wrench or torque screwdriver that has been inspected and verified to be accurate within the past year or it doesn’t meet code.

Homeowners do dumb shit like tapping multiple circuits off a single breaker, stripping off too much insulation and leaving live conductors exposed, using a coffee can as a junction box, or using the wrong size wire because they don’t know how to read an ampacity table.

50 to 60 amps at 240 volts is over 10kW, terminations matter a lot more at 10kW than they do at 1.8kW (15A @ 120V)

Please pay an electrician unless you have a copy of the NEC and understand it.

I sell and run commercial electrical work for a living.
by eddythompson80 | 2025-06-20 22:23:37+00:00
It's been decades for me since I've had a machine with an important device that is completely "unrecognizable" without a custom driver. Generic drivers work for almost everything.

Because Windows gets direct support from most HW vendors, it's generic drivers don't have to be as good as Linux's in general, but still they work fine.

Printers are very special case. They are a shitshow in different ways between Windows and Linux.

Windows printer support is from like 1920s or some shit and they can't change it and it's just bad. BUT, if you have weird ass Xerox or HP with crazy features like a printer that will print, stable, copy, re-copy, and then automatically shred the documents and their copies is likely to only ever be controllable through some HP software from 2006 that hasn't been updated since then but somehow still works on Windows.

On linux, you get much better printing service and generic support, but depending on the popularity of your office printer and the popularity of particular feature you're trying to use, it might not be in the drivers.
by dang | 2025-06-20 22:24:06+00:00
Yup, thanks! I put together this list at one point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44203869.

Btw, this thread got a callout in https://www.axios.com/2025/06/20/silicon-valley-big-tech-tax... today, though they didn't link to it.
by chneu | 2025-06-20 22:24:27+00:00
More excuses. This is how people justify that SUV or truck when a subcompact works fine.

I agree we should save time in some aspects of our lives. But justifying more excess because we think we might one day cure world hunger is asinine.

I have the imagination. I just don't agree with using such shallow excuses to justify destroying the world. Its such a lame argument to make and can be used to justify anything.

Your thinking is "race to the bottom". Justify everything until we destroy it all.

Also please drop the attitude. Its in violation of HN's rules.
by godelski | 2025-06-20 22:25:35+00:00
> if he had "revisited his early work".

Given that you're a researcher yourself I'm surprised by this comment. Have you not yourself experienced the harsh rejection of "not novel"? That sounds like a great way to get stuck in review hell. (I know I've experienced this even when doing novel things just by too closely relating it to other methodologies when explaining "oh, it's just ____").

The other part seems weird too. Who isn't upset when their work doesn't get recognized and someone else gets credit. Are we not all human?
by CPLX | 2025-06-20 22:25:51+00:00
Well yes if you are in a car on the congestion pricing area it costs money. Of course it does, that the point.

Your argument is that there are indirect costs. That’s the part that has to be proven.

Some company using it as an excuse to add a junk fee is anecdotal but hardly conclusive. It’s about as much evidence as a hotel saying they didn’t bring me new towels because they care about the environment.
by lolinder | 2025-06-20 22:26:38+00:00
> I know its not completely true, I know read-mode can help you bypass the ads _after_ you already had a peek at the cluttered version

What about reader mode that is auto-configured to turn on immediately on landing on specific domains? Is that a robot for the purposes of robots.txt?

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/automatic-rea...

And also, just to confirm, I'm to understand that if I'm navigating the internet with an ad blocker then you believe that I should respect robots.txt because my user agent is now a robot by virtue of using an ad blocker?

Is that also true if I browse with a terminal-based browser that simply doesn't render JavaScript or images?
by incendies | 2025-06-20 22:27:15+00:00
Hi HN,

I created a fan website for the Roblox game Grow a Garden. It includes a trading section, item calculator, and detailed database of all items. I'm currently working on adding a blog with guides and updates.

The goal is to make it easier for players to trade and plan their inventory.

Would really appreciate any feedback on the design, usefulness, or anything else you think could be improved. Thanks!
by kianN | 2025-06-20 22:27:34+00:00
Unrelated: I initially expected this articles to be referring to public libraries. I think that would be a challenging connection to prove despite it making intuitive sense.

On the article: some use cases eg handling dates, fault tolerant queues have so many edge cases and are so mission critical that relying on a battle tested tool makes a lot of sense.

However, in my career I’ve seen a lot of examples of a package being installed to avoid 40-50 lines of well thought out code and now a dependency is forever embedded in the system.

I think there is a catch with replacing libraries with LLM generated code. Part of the benefit of skipping third party libraries is the domain knowledge that gets built up: this is potentially lost with llm generated code.
by zwnow | 2025-06-20 22:29:29+00:00
I learned Javascript was made for making the web interactive. I choose to use it this way. There's nothing wrong with using it for backends too, I just prefer using other langs for that domain as it just doesn't feel right to build my backend in Js/Ts.

For small and moderate projects I dont see issues, but I always build with scaling in mind and I'd like to keep the bill for that small.
by lolinder | 2025-06-20 22:30:04+00:00
robotstxt.org [0] is pretty specific in what constitutes a robot for the purposes of robots.txt:

> A robot is a program that automatically traverses the Web's hypertext structure by retrieving a document, and recursively retrieving all documents that are referenced.

This is absolutely not what you are doing, which means what you have here is not a robot. What you have here is a user agent, so you don't need to pay attention to robots.txt.

If what you are doing here counted as robotic traffic, then so would:

* Speculative loading (algorithm guesses what you're going to load next and grabs it for you in advance for faster load times).

* Reader mode (algorithm transforms the website to strip out tons of content that you don't want and present you only with the minimum set of content you wanted to read).

* Terminal-based browsers (do not render images or JavaScript, thus bypassing advertising and according to some justifications leading them to be considered a robot because they bypass monetization).

The fact is that the web is designed to be navigated by a diverse array of different user agents that behave differently. I'd seriously consider imposing rate limits on how frequently your browser acts so you don't knock over a server—that's just good citizenship—but robots.txt is not designed for you and if we act like it is then a lot of dominoes will fall.

[0] https://www.robotstxt.org/faq/what.html
by hypercube33 | 2025-06-20 22:30:15+00:00
I don't think 7zip really can see into a lot of janky MSI files to get the actual installed content, can it?...it can technically break open NSIS files and get the source but that is disabled in code after 15.05 (GitHub has a mod to renable source extraction fyi) and yes self extracting exe files.
by biglyburrito | 2025-06-20 22:30:42+00:00
You're absolutely right -- I didn't know that until today. However, the official FAQ is very clear that searching file contents is slow because the content isn't indexed:

https://www.voidtools.com/faq/#does_everything_search_file_c...

Filelocator is insanely fast at searching file contents, so long as your data is on an SSD (which is generally the case these days).
by devilbunny | 2025-06-20 22:31:14+00:00
> ~400+ miles per full tank

My car gets ~500 miles/800 km per tank. My wife's car, which has a more efficient engine and transmission and is also smaller, but with the same huge tank, gets ~600 miles/960 km per tank. I will have to stop for a bathroom somewhere along a route that long, but only once or twice. I used to have to stop three times for a ~900 mile/1500 km trip that I did a few times.

This is a problem with EV proponents who try to argue that "you'll stop every couple of hours for half an hour or so anyway, so charging isn't an issue". No, I won't. I'll drive 1000 miles with less than 45 minutes of downtime on the whole trip. I don't stop every two hours. Maybe 15 minutes every 4 hours, of which 10 is fueling and going to the bathroom and 5 is getting off and back on the highway.

That's not a slam against EV's, but let's acknowledge their weak points honestly.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-06-20 22:31:40+00:00
The primary transportation risk is that spent fuel contains cesium metal, which is reactive with air and water, so if you expose it to air you get a fire.

It seems like a pretty obvious solution to this would be to purposely do the reaction under controlled conditions before transporting it, so then you're transporting stable cesium compounds instead of elemental cesium metal.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-06-20 22:31:44+00:00
> It's just the most important dimension, by far

Strongly disagree.

New Delhi’s has gotten more polluted over the last decades, to the point that it’s almost comical. (400+ AQI being normalised.) Post pandemic, it’s done a decent job in some parts at reducing the amount of trash on the roads. On the balance, I find it more pleasant now than before.

I’d also guess that most people would prefer trading emissions for e.g. not living next to a carcinogenic or toxic-waste dump.
by why218 | 2025-06-20 22:31:44+00:00
even for actual calculations? if so then touche. But (and I may be wrong) I feel like this comment is coming from a place of I need to look up some formula which for some other task. Like say im making a video game and I want some geometry formula. In such a case what you care about is not how easy a notation is to use but simply getting info as fast as possible in which case learning new symbols just gets in the way rather than actually writing correcting algebraically manipulating and extending (keep in mind im using math as an analogy for programming in not actually speaking about array languages being used _for_ math necessarily). This is a fair criticism of array langauges you do need to learn something which is quite different from the usual english based languages and they are not great for black boxing i.e you have to know the domain of your problem because relying on libraries is impossible at worst and not any better than python or java at best. That being said I find them more scrutable than most langauges partly because of the tersity. And partly because of the limited vocabulary. You can look up unfamiliar operators very easily in array languages because they all come with multiple (some more for reference some more for learning) easy to go to places to do so. But more importantly there really are only so many so you can learn them all (in the same way you already learned your numbers + - 3 %, and so on) once you do you dont feel the need to look up 6 or & or + mean you just know them. In contrast in a language like python or javascript im constantly looking up how things work because there are just infinitely more things the source code of which is often hard to get to and when you find it it is very long (and therefore (for me) hard to read). When I see an array function I actually can scrutinize them when I see a python function I need to hope that its simple and named in a way that makes automatic sense to me or give up and look it up somewhere else (in docs say).
by teekert | 2025-06-20 22:32:12+00:00
30 years ago my math teacher already referred to our calculators (Casio fx82s) as “cerebral prosthetics”. I’ve always used that for our bicycles of the mind.

Computers change who I am, for example they make me remember better and be more punctual. Probably indeed my smartphone messes with my ability to hold sustained attention.

But this article. it feels like one of those “why so complicated” ones. Why “our consciousness is partly in a machine”. It’s all just a matter of definitions. For example advocates of EMT and non-advocates probably just differ in some definition. It feels so unimportant. Other than that, nice read.
by jll29 | 2025-06-20 22:34:04+00:00
I have seen many cases where people -- accidentally as well as intentionally -- copied or re-invented the work of others (a friend posted on LinkedIn that someone else plagiarized his whole Ph.D. thesis, including the title, so only the name was changed; only the references to seperately published papers on which the individual chapters were based at the end still had my friend's name in it, so you could see it was a fake thesis).

If a bona fide scientist makes a mistake about missing attribution, they would correct it as soon as possible. Many, however, would not correct such a re-discovery, because it's embarrassing.

But the worst is when people don't even imagine anything like what they are working on could already exist, and they don't even bother finding and reading related work -- in other words, ignorance. Science deserves better, but there are more and more ignorant folks around that want to ignore all work before them.
by godelski | 2025-06-20 22:35:00+00:00
I think you sum up my feelings about him as well. He's a bit much sometimes but it's hard to deny that he's made monumental contributions to the field.

It's also funny that we laugh at him when we also have a joke that in AI we just reinvent what people did in the 80's. He's just the person being more specific as to what and who.

Ironically, I think the problem is we care too much about credit. It ends up getting hoarded rather than shared. We then just oversell our contributions because if you make the incremental improvements that literally everyone does, you get your works rejected for being incremental.

I don't know what it is about CS specifically, but we have a culture problem or attribution and hype. From building on open source, it's libraries all the way down, but we act like we did it all alone. To jumping on bandwagons as if there's a right and immutable truth to how to do certain things, until the bubbles pop and we laugh at how stupid anyone was to do such a thing. Yet we don't contribute back to those projects that have US foundation, we laugh at "theory" which we stand on, and we listen to the same hype train people who got it wrong last time instead of turning to those who got it right. Why? It goes directly counter to the ideas of a group who love to claim rationalism, "working from first principles", and "I care what works"
by felarof | 2025-06-20 22:35:04+00:00
Thanks for raising this - it's a critical concern and you're absolutely right to be cautious.

This is exactly why we're going local-first and open source. With cloud agents (like Manus.im), you're trusting a black box with your credentials. With local agents, you maintain control:

- Agents only run when you explicitly trigger them

- You see exactly what they're doing in real-time and can stop them

- You can run tasks in separate chrome user profile

- Most importantly: the code is open source, so you can audit exactly what's happening.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-06-20 22:35:18+00:00
> cars are extremely useful in every single city and people only choose to forgo them when the city makes them too expensive or difficult to keep and use

I happily take the train and ferry in New York over a car. For some journeys, e.g. into Long Island with a group, renting a car would actually be cheaper.

If you haven’t spent any time not driving, it’s hard to imagine the luxury going car-free brings. Not the least of which is the ridiculous amount of privacy and law-enforcement interference we tolerate for drivers.
by georgeecollins | 2025-06-20 22:35:44+00:00
I agree! With all the debate about Civ vii vs Civ vi, the group I play civ with sometimes debates what was the best version of civ. SMAC might be my choice! It was only a single player game but as a single player game it had great balance and strategic choices. The map art was a little ugly and customizing units was not that interesting.