MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by PaulHoule | 2025-06-27 18:04:58+00:00
Homiconicity can get you into trouble.

CSS and HTML have a dual relationship. You could certainly write CSS with an XML-like syntax but people would always get confused at whether they are looking at style or markup. Because HTML and CSS look completely different you never have that problem.

XSLT shares the same problem with the RDF specs coming out at the same time that it hid the production rules/logical nature of the system, had it looked more like

<someElement someAttributeattribute=$x/> -> <anotherElement>$x</anotherElement>

it could have been quite different. But production rules never really sold (got told that by the marketing chief of vendor at a hotel bar after a conference they sponsored) and it's an interesting question why. They can do all kind of neat things like manage asynchronous processes that happen over a long period of time (like having a loan officer approve a loan) but nobody ever tried to use them to deal with the async comm problem in Javascript as far as I can tell.
by cooppearson | 2025-06-27 18:05:00+00:00
Would like to second ear plugs, it took some testing to find the right softness/size because I have very small ear canals, but these slim-fit earplugs have been life-changing for my sleep: https://a.co/d/38Kftbm

The earplugs don't completely cut out environmental noise, but they dampen it enough that I don't find myself being awakened by any bumps in the night.

And snipping down the tail ends of the earplugs with scissors helps reduce pressure if you're a side sleeper.
by bevr1337 | 2025-06-27 18:05:01+00:00
Given all mass has gravity, and gravity can be metaphorically described by a well, all mass has a gravity well. It is not necessary for mass to capture other mass in its gravity. A well is a pleasant and relative metaphor humans can visualize - not a threshold reached after certain mass.

"Large" is almost meaningless in this context. Douglas Adams put it best

> Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.

From an education site:

> Everything with mass is able to bend space and the more massive an object is, the more it bends

They start with an explanation of a marble compared to a bowling ball. Both have a gravity well, but one exerts far more influence

https://www.howitworksdaily.com/the-solar-system-what-is-a-g...
by gcau | 2025-06-27 18:05:30+00:00
So, people are being treated differently entirely on the basis of their race - but it's not racist because they're lazily cutting corners in following a regulation? If they actually cared why would they not just blur all faces instead of looking at their race to decide whether or not to do it?

> Business don't exist to respect or care about people they exist to generate profit so the idea of a business "respecting" something is not even realistic.

People work at businesses, and those people make decisions that are influenced by their personal feelings. In a free market people will boycott them for doing bad things. Racist businesses being outted, receiving bad press and losing revenue - in this scenario it sounds like the japanese are okay with it. Being respectful is profitable.
by drdaeman | 2025-06-27 18:05:50+00:00
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24a884_8n59.pdf

Justice Sotomayor dissents:

> Instead, the Government says, it should be able to apply the Citizenship Order (whose legality it does not defend) to everyone except the plaintiffs who filed this lawsuit.

If that’s the case, I’m curious if it could be fixed with a class action, so everyone (or everyone born in the US) is a plaintiff? If that’s legally a thing.
by gabordemooij | 2025-06-27 18:05:58+00:00
Thanks, I thought I was the only one noticing this.

One interesting point you make is that young people have a very hard time with the economical situation. A lot of them seem apathetic, they literally say to me that they don't want to work because they cannot afford anything anyway (here in the Netherlands the housing prices are insane, an simple appartment now costs half a million euros in the Hague, and that's not even the city center).
by miki123211 | 2025-06-27 18:06:03+00:00
The problem with immediate mode is that most a11y frameworks expect all UI elements to have a stable identity.

Imagine you have a to-do list of 100 items. What happens when a remote user drags and drops item 100 to lie between items 1 and 2? In retained mode, that's clearly communicated to the UI toolkit; the widget representing that todo is told to change its position in the list. In immediate mode, you can't just destroy and re-create the a11y tree on each render. You need some kind of tree diffing algorithm to figure out that it's one op (move item) instead of ~200 ops (change the name and checkbox state for all items between 2 and 100).
by kunley | 2025-06-27 18:06:25+00:00
While I can understand (while disagreeing) why my comment was downvoted, it is beyond my comprehension why it was in addition _flagged_. I expressed my view on usefulness of one's effort and I barely scratched the surface. Nothing in my comment was even remotely disrespectful to the author; I am in fact sympathetic to the guy and I think I was in his shoes many times. I can't think of any other violation of anything that led someone to flag. If someone was feeling strange or dubious about my comment, a civilised way is to ask "what did you mean", wait for reply and then judge.

This site is a democratic place; thus I am asking the flagger to tell what in his mind was the alleged reason for flagging.
by piker | 2025-06-27 18:06:40+00:00
Hmm. It seems to me that one of the features of an immediate mode library is that if you don't call something, you won't suffer overhead consequences. If you aren't trying to align things in a manner that triggers the two-pass rendering, then you shouldn't be affected by the associated performance hit.

I guess you worry that the feature creep dilutes the maintainers' focus, but opening it up to a broader audience might get access to more contributors.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-06-27 18:06:41+00:00
> if I download HBO's collection but don't seed or use for any commercial reasons it will be considered Fair Use ?

Fair use is just about how you use it, not how you get it. If you download HBO's collection and just watch it, that is fair use even if you are dinged about how you acquired the collection.

If you make a parody of a work in HBO's collection and publish/distribute it, the only question is whether or not the parody is a copy of their work. If it is, then you cannot distribute it; if not, then you can. You may "use" elements of their work in yours (as that is the point of a parody) but that can still be "fair".

Notice how none of that has anything to do with how you acquired the work. It is just not relevant to the question of fair use.
by trhway | 2025-06-27 18:06:56+00:00
> A second order effect is to make building things domestically relatively cheaper, all other things being equal, because those things won't be subject to the tariff.

that is just opposite of reality. Several people explained that to you here, yet you state :

>But people refusing to even acknowledge that there are effects that cut both ways tells me that they are dishonest or stupid and you probably can't have much of a conversation with them.

People brought you a ton of arguments, yet you haven't addressed any of them, haven't produced any counter-example, and instead shouted that bizarre statement.
by roryirvine | 2025-06-27 18:07:32+00:00
Have a look at libeatmydata - https://github.com/stewartsmith/libeatmydata

Things will still get written to disk eventually, it's just that fsync() returns instantly without actually doing anything. It's sometimes used in CI and similarly-ephemeral systems, and can produce a noticeable reduction in i/o.

Be warned, though, that it has that name for a reason!
by LordDragonfang | 2025-06-27 18:07:40+00:00
> Source? Links?

Okay, it seems like I misremembered, because the ones I'm thinking of have "(renewed)" slapped onto them, but literally the first result for "budget desktop" on Amazon (And the second for "Dell desktop", a brand that boomers trust) has a seven year old CPU:

https://www.amazon.com/Dell-Optiplex-3060-Computer-Professio...

And I don't expect an average consumer to know that "renewed" is code for "literally no parts are new and it's probably worse than the product you're replacing" - because why would they? No other product category this way. Obviously we know enough to not trust it, but they have no reason to believe that "reliable companies like Dell" are selling already-broken merchandise.

And no, it's technically not Microsoft's fault (in fact, the TPM requirement is probably good exactly because it prevent vendors selling these pieces of crap) but it is the reality we live in, so you have to account for it when you act like all computers bought today have processors manufactured in the last few years.

> If you buy a new iPhone 6 today and realize you don't get any more SW updates do you blame Apple?

Obviously yes? If I (or again, my Dad who know nothing about computers) can walk out of an Apple store with a device that is already unsupported, that's Apple's fault, not his.
by NobodyNada | 2025-06-27 18:07:56+00:00
In practice, it's quite a useful feature, because you can write things like this:

let day_number = match name { "Sunday" => 0, "Monday" => 1, "Tuesday" => 2, "Wednesday" => 3, "Thursday" => 4, "Friday" => 5, "Saturday" => 6, _ => return Err("invalid day") };
by bumby | 2025-06-27 18:08:00+00:00
>The utility of having a backup beeper or any noise making device on that site is thus zero.

This strikes me as an odd take, maybe from someone who has never worked on a construction site.

Our auditory sense is more than just a binary “present/not present” detection. We can sense distance and direction. Just because there is a backup beeper somewhere on site does not mean there is no value to any other auditory signal.

Think about when you’re in a congested city. There’s probably a lot of ambient car noise, including horns, in the background. That doesn’t mean you’re unable to react to a honking car in your immediate vicinity.
by ElevenLathe | 2025-06-27 18:08:30+00:00
The "April Fools" incident is VERY concerning. It would be akin to your boss having a psychotic break with reality one day and then resuming work the next. They also make a very interesting and scary point:

> ...in a world where larger fractions of economic activity are autonomously managed by AI agents, odd scenarios like this could have cascading effects—especially if multiple agents based on similar underlying models tend to go wrong for similar reasons.

This is a pretty large understatement. Imagine a business that is franchised across the country with each "franchisee" being a copy of the same model, which all freak out on the same day, accuse the customers of secretly working for the CIA and deciding to stop selling hot dogs at a profit and instead sell hand grenades at a loss. Now imagine 50 other chains having similar issues while AI law enforcement analysts dispatch real cops with real guns to the poor employees caught in the middle schlepping explosives from the UPS store to a stand in the mall.

I think we were expecting SkyNet but in reality the post-AI economy may just be really chaotic. If you thought profit-maximizing capitalist entrepreneurs were corrosive to the social fabric, wait until there are 10^10 more of them (unlike traditional meat-based entrepreneurs, there's no upper limit and there can easily be more of them than there are real people) and they not-infrequently act like they're in late stage amphetamine psychosis while still controlling your paycheck, your bank, your local police department, the military, and whatever is left that passes for the news media.

Deeper, even if they get this to work with minimal amounts of of synthetic schizophrenia, do we really want a future where we all mainly work schlepping things back and forth at the orders of disembodied voices whose reasoning we can't understand?
by pyuser583 | 2025-06-27 18:09:11+00:00
I have kids and try very hard to keep them from inappropriate material online.

The real dangers aren’t dedicated porn sites, but poorly managed social media sites. You can’t just block the domain.

In many cases, the bad material comes from peers. Kids have always talked about “bad” things, but the internet super charges it.

I generally support these efforts, but I’m also very cynical they help.

Politicians focus on the problems they control, like rules for sites that rigorously follow the laws and fit in a clear category. They care far less about the grey areas where the most harm is often done.

I think this is a good thing. I’d feel a lot better if these efforts were combined with rigorous privacy protections.

For example, third party identity verification services should be civilly liable for privacy breeches, and required to carry insurance to meet the obligations.
by mindslight | 2025-06-27 18:09:26+00:00
I think an early major mistake was that Matrix spent all this time and energy designing a general synchronization protocol, but not doing it in terms of native encryption and cryptographic identities. This was post-Snowden, and it was glaring at the time.

Bolting on encryption after the fact then sucked so much energy out of the ecosystem for clients. This one doesn't implement encryption, that one does but it has bugs/warts/etc, this other one does if you pull this year-old experimental branch and build it yourself. The web (-technologies) client became the de facto one because it "worked", despite being bloated and laggy - reliable tools don't even have the code to show these spinning delay circles that have become synonymous with the web ecosystem.

I don't want to be entirely negative because I do see it as the least-worst messaging option available. I use it for communicating with a bunch of friends and things do seem to be getting better, and I look forward to when I can actually switch to its window to type a message and not wait around for redraw / garbage collection / reloading messages from server /etc. That might be on me for not having surveyed native clients recently or tried Element X on my desktop, but that's exactly the negative momentum I'm lamenting above.
by PaulHoule | 2025-06-27 18:10:13+00:00
In some sense that's a strength. When things can happen in any order you can mash together two things and they work together.

When I was looking for my own revolution in software engineering I saw one part of the low code/no code puzzle was that conventional tools force you to determine what order events happen which was something laymen shouldn't be bothered to do. Some counters are: spreadsheets (they figure out what order to calculate it), make (does a topological sort), dependency injection tools like Spring (writing a FactoryFactoryFactory isn't so bad, but maintaining it is a disaster when a "small" change means you have to reorder the order in which you construct everything)

There is a "freedom is slavery" problem here. People saw the semantic web as "you're going to exhaust yourself arguing with people about standards and ontologies before you even start coding" and not "if my data is properly namespace I can throw data from 10 different sources together into my RDF database and start writing queries".
by bobbylarrybobby | 2025-06-27 18:11:09+00:00
The issue with `return expr` not having a type is that you lose the ability to write something like

let y = match option { Some(x) => x, None => return Err("whoops!"), };

Without a type, the None branch loses the ability to unify with the Some branch. Now you could say that Rust should just only require branches’ types to unify when all of them have a type, but the ! never type accomplishes that goal just fine.
by Brian_K_White | 2025-06-27 18:11:34+00:00
Both SpinLaunch and Solar Roadways are pure farce.

Here is how to think about them: It doesn't matter how open your mind is, you will not fly by believing in your idea and working hard and never giving up developing strength and technique to jump higher.

Even though these things are all true: Everything that ever worked started out not working. You can fly a little bit by just jumping. You can even demonstrate progress by jumping harder.
by tptacek | 2025-06-27 18:11:54+00:00
This is basically false; you might make it true if you cut somewhere other than the middle, but famously IQ has non-uniform reliability (it's heteroskedastic? is that the way to say it?). Pop science and nerd culture have fixated on it as a global ranking of people by cognitive capability, but it's not that at all; past a threshold, the actual numbers (and test-test reliability) get really noisy.

This should make intuitive sense, because IQ was designed as a diagnostic, one in a battery of diagnostics, for people with cognitive dysfunction. It's a useful tool to deploy when you have a patient who, for instance, can't seem to progress in reading class or whatever. It's broadly misapplied in studies like this (but then, this study has deeper faults than that).
by 4k93n2 | 2025-06-27 18:12:02+00:00
resilio sync (formerly bittorrent sync) has a nicer UI and its probably easier to use. ive been using syncthing for 5+ years now though and can't think of the last time i had any issues with it. its probably just a bit more confusing if youre coming from something more polished and centralised like dropbox or those types
by deepdarkforest | 2025-06-27 18:13:15+00:00
What irks me about anthropic blog posts, is that they are vague about details that are important to be able to (publicly) draw any conclusions they want to fit their narrative.

For example, I do not see the full system prompt anywhere, only an excerpt. But most importantly, they try to draw conclusions about the hallucinations in a weird vague way, but not once do they post an example of the notetaking/memory tool state, which obviously would be the only source of the spiralling other than the SP. And then they talk about the need of better tools etc. No, it's all about context. The whole experiment is fun, but terribly ran and analyzed. Of course they know this, but it's cooler to treat claudius or whatever as a cute human, to push the narrative of getting closer to AGI etc. Saying additional scaffolding is needed a bit is a massive understatement. Context is the whole game. That's like if a robotics company says "well, our experiment with a robot picking a tennis ball of the ground went very wrong and the ball is now radioactive, but with a bit of additional training and scaffolding, we expect it to compete in Wimbledon by mid 2026"

Similar to their "claude 4 opus blackmailing" post, they intentionally hid a bit the full system prompt, which had clear instructions to bypass any ethical guidelines etc and do whatever it can to win. Of course then the model, given the information immediately afterwards would try to blackmail. You literally told it so. The goal of this would to go to congress [1] and demand more regulations, specifically mentioning this blackmail "result". Same stuff that Sam is trying to pull, which would benefit the closed sourced leaders ofc and so on.

[1]https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1ll3m7j/anthro...
by freejazz | 2025-06-27 18:13:39+00:00
>The legal system does not have a monopoly on defining words or being a source of truth. And it is obvious that the legal system's reasoning lines up with the action in this case - otherwise the action wouldn't have happened! If you were merely clumsily making a point about positive behavior (vs normative behavior), that might be understandable. But then we get:

It doesn't. But if you are going to discuss it, you should be discussing the actual thing, not the other thing which is irrelevant. It's no different than in programming. If were discussing programming arrays and you kept butting into the conversation about how arrays can mean other things in english, it would behoove no one.

>You are trying to define away discussion about normative behavior by insisting on the legal system's definitions, as if the legal system's definitions and laws cannot be changed. Either because you think it's an easy way to win the argument, or because the legal definitions have warped your brain so badly that you cannot think outside of that box. Either way, sorry - there are valid concerns here.

I'm not defining anything away. I did not come up with the legal definition for search in the context of the 4th amendment. That's on over 100 years of jurisprudence, not me.

> Putting the way I see it in legal terminology:

Of no use to anyone at all. If we're describing programming, mathematics, any science... it's not relevant what my own definitions, or the other definitions not applicable to the context.

>And once again, since you seem to have a problem keeping this separate - I'm obviously talking about how things ought to be, not how the current laws shake out.

So? A search is still a search in legal terms if we are discussing what the 4th amendment protects. You can either join the discussion we were having, or not. It's your choice. I'm not stopping you from doing anything, all I did was point out that your contribution was so far off from being cognizable in this context that it is doing everyone a disservice. You're clearly intelligent and capable of talking about these things accurately, you just chose not to.
by stego-tech | 2025-06-27 18:13:39+00:00
Apathy is always a symptom, never a cause, or so I’ve come to learn. What I used to blame on “voter apathy” was really just a symptom of politics in the USA becoming so stagnant and detached from the struggles of workers that any intense emotion or platform would’ve lit a fire under the electorate (see the optimism of the initial Obama campaign, the repugnancy of the Tea Party, or the naked hostility of Trump). Likewise, apathy in the case you describe is their way of communicating that they see no value in engaging with a system they perceive is broken, which is itself a profound warning that they’re susceptible to demagogues and populism. A healthy society recognizes apathy as a red flag and addresses it early, while declining societies ignore it (Japan) or blame the apathetic (USA) for the failings of the system.

Do not blame the apathetic for simply refusing to play a rigged game. Instead, listen to their grievances and work with them to bring about positive change.
by mopsi | 2025-06-27 18:13:43+00:00
> "Putin has an eye on Sweden" does not pass the most basic smell test, now even less than during the Cold War...

It does pass. Invading the Swedish island of Gotland would cut off air and sea routes to the Baltics, while a ground move against the Suwalki gap between Poland and Lithuania would sever land routes. Map: https://warsawinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Balti... Keep in mind that Belarus should also be marked in red, because it hosts Russian forces and allows them free passage.

It is one of the most obvious hostile moves against the EU and NATO, and Europe clearly doesn't have the means nor the will to launch a major war to liberate the countries. Everything hinges on the US, and we all know the state of things there.
by vjvjvjvjghv | 2025-06-27 18:14:28+00:00
Now we have "JSON as savior". I see it way too often where new people come into a project and the first thing they want to do is to replace all XML with JSON, just because. Never mind that this solves basically nothing and often introduces its own set of problems. I am not a big fan of XML but to me it's pretty low in the hierarchy of design problems.