MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by noisy_boy | 2025-06-21 01:02:29+00:00
> Don’t mistake the recognition of very real hurdles to widespread adoption (brought on by fragmentation) with some sort of lack of experience on my part.

Everybody recognizes the hurdles. But they are there because of the nature of the ecosystem. Unpaid skilled maintainers are hard to get and it takes specific kind of people to maintain a driver or a subsystem, for sometimes decades. Those personalities sometimes come with strong opinions and prejudices and such. Does that delay fixing of end user issues? Yes. If there was an easy solution, it would be implemented by now.

Funny you bring up Mandrake because I paid a good chunk of my salary to buy a box that came with the CD and a small printed book. I have been using Linux through thick and thin everyday since then.

> I love Linux

Me too! Let's not be too harsh on our loved one :)
by akersten | 2025-06-21 01:03:07+00:00
Thank you for your important work fighting this battle, it must be exhausting.

The more Google insists on forcing advertising on us, the more we should look closely at the wildly inappropriate and downright scammy ads they are hosting. If they can't leave well enough alone and look the other way on ad blocking, (which is the only way to avoid exposing myself and family to these dangerous ads), they need to be under a lot more scrutiny for the ads they choose to run.
by const_cast | 2025-06-21 01:03:10+00:00
> Now a massive gamergate-esque coordinated character assassination campaign against the creator of xlibre

Sigh. People repeating absolutely batshit things people say right back to them is not character assassination.

If you want to talk about anti-woke this Make X11 Great Again that then go for it. But you sound crazy. Okay? You sound like there's something wrong with you. So when people are off-put by this super weird and unnecessary politicization that's your problem.

It is not cancel culture. If you don't want to be accountable for the things you've said then I don't know what to tell you. That's not compatible with our current reality, so until inter-dimensional travel is invented, you're gonna be in for a rough ride.
by HDThoreaun | 2025-06-21 01:03:33+00:00
> I never made that agreement

By clicking on the video you did. It is in their terms of service.

How is you purposefully trying to block ads not your fault? Whose fault is it that you installed an Adblock? If you went to a grocery store and told the clerk you already paid and they let you leave would that not be your fault either?
by sodality2 | 2025-06-21 01:03:39+00:00
> Few shows are relentless about it.

My favorite relentless one is Tracker (Amazon Prime), who spend approximately 30% of screen time dedicated to showing off a GMC pickup and Airstream, but the most egregious was one dialog line:

> As Colter enters and gives them hugs, Velma remembers that they got a gift for him. Reenie hands him the gift - very conspicuously packaged in an Amazon box with its trademark logo and blue tape - and says, "I've gotta say, next-day delivery is pretty sweet. Thank you, Amazon Prime!"
by josephcsible | 2025-06-21 01:04:14+00:00
> This locks a few global objects by using Object.defineProperty to set them as non-writable, which prevents later code from overwriting them with a Proxy that alters their behaviour. So uBlock Origin can only proxy JSON.stringify if it can run before this locker script does.

This seems like a bug in browsers, or possibly in the spec. Page content and scripts should never be able to restrict what browser extensions can do.
by 1oooqooq | 2025-06-21 01:05:07+00:00
the sociology/anthropology explanation is: politics is about violence. (game theory optional). in the best possible case humanity have achieved, it's veiled violence thru community participation. in the most common, it's via money. and the actors choose the fights based on return. so you fight (with money) when you have something to gain. and you have nothing to gain improving a system that changes nothing in your life. yet someone who employees lots of illegal immigrants will want deportations so they can pay even less. the protests happen when people see a return on something they didn't before.
by voidhorse | 2025-06-21 01:05:17+00:00
I agree with the phenomenon you are talking about, but for mathematics, beyond calculation, the situation isn't really different (and no wonder since you'll quickly end up in the philosophy of mathematics).

You can take an entire mathematical theory on faith and learn to perform rote calculations in accordance with the structure of that theory. This might be of some comfort, since, accepting this, you can perform a procedure and see whether or not you got the correct result (but even this is a generous assumption in some sense). When you actually try to understand a theory and go beyond that to foundations, things become less certain. At some point you will accept things, but, unless you have enough time to work out every proof and then prove to yourself that the very idea of a proof calculus is sound, you will be taking something on faith.

I think if people struggle with doing the same thing with literature/philosophy, it's probably just because of a discomfort with ambiguity. In those realms, there is no operational calculus you can turn to to verify that, at least if you accept certain things on faith, other things must work out...expect there is! Logic lords over both domains. I think we just do a horrible job at teaching people how to approach literature logically. Yes, the subtle art of interpretation is always at play, but that's true of mathematics too and it is true of every representational/semiotic effort undertaken by human beings.

As for use, social wit and the ability to see things in new lights (devise new explanatory hypotheses) are both immediate applications of philosophy and literature, just like mathematics has its immediate operational applications in physics et al.
by ethbr1 | 2025-06-21 01:05:30+00:00
> That is the point of decentralized protocols. They prevent a single entity from creating a monopoly over the entire market.

Eh, I would phrase it differently -- decentralized protocols ensure that new competition can stand up services.

There's nothing about them that inherently prevents monopolies from forming, as this thread discusses re:Gmail. Usually there are enough value adds around the decentralized protocol that a smart first mover can establish a de facto monopoly.
by StillBored | 2025-06-21 01:05:31+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_panic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_queen

Once you get a few of them, the search engines will start pointing out a long list of other moral/etc panics.

https://www.ourhistory.org.uk/ten-times-america-created-a-mo...

Overwhelmingly, it does seem to be the same group of people fomenting these.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_panic
by appreciatorBus | 2025-06-21 01:05:51+00:00
The existence of premium is not the same as parent poster’s, “make us pay for it” idea, aka a paywall.

If YouTube and its content actually has value, then presumably a paywall would have no effect of revenues of YouTube or creators. On the other hand if the content is actually nearly worthless, the vast majority of people would find something better to do with their time.

I know which outcome I’d be betting on!
by brulard | 2025-06-21 01:06:07+00:00
SQL is simple for simple needs, basic joins and some basic aggregates. Even that you won't learn in 2 hours. And that is just scratching the surface of what can be done in SQL and what you need to query. With LLMs and tools like this you simply say what you need in english, you don't need to understand the normalizations, m:n relation tables, CTEs, functions, JSON access operators, etc.
by varenc | 2025-06-21 01:06:26+00:00
This is quite cool! Very excited for this concept. Kudos to launching on HN!

some genuine feedback on a frustrating early experience:

- I ran the suggested "Group all my tabs by topic" in productivity agent mode. It worked great.

- I then asked it to remove all tab groups and reset things, but was told this:

This is a browser automation task. Please use **Agent Mode** for web interactions like clicking, filling forms, navigating sites, or extracting web content.

- Tried "agent mode" and was told:

This is a productivity task. Please use **Chat Mode** for tab management, bookmarks, sessions, history, and content analysis.

- Basically was being sent back and forth. Went back to productivity mode and argued with it for a bit. The closest I could come to it removing all tabs groups was creating a new tab group encompassing all tabs, but couldn't get it to remove groups entirely. I'm guessing it might lack that API?

Overall, it'd be nice if every browser level action it took had an undo button. Or at least if it was smart enough/able to remove the tab groups it just created.

Will keep playing with it more.

edit1: one more weird issue: While running the chat interface on chrome internal pages like chrome://extensions, it would randomly browse me to google.com for some reason.

edit2: confirmed that productivity mode lacks a tool to ungroup tabs, just a tool to create tab groups.
by dh2022 | 2025-06-21 01:06:27+00:00
Having lived through communism I can say the only good things were equality of men and women (in my communist country there were just as many women doctors, engineers, managers, accountants as men) and equality between people (students from Africa were very much welcomed). Everything else though was miserable: our free healthcare, our free cold apartments that had electricity 2 hours a day, our free education, our cheap on paper but non-existent food and medicaments.
by saghm | 2025-06-21 01:07:32+00:00
As the person you originally responded to, I have to agree with the one who you're responding to now; I don't really understand at all what endowments have to do with any of this. My argument is that the goal of education isn't helped by being intrinsically tied to a large amateur sports league. If you're trying to argue that public schools require sports teams in order to succeed financially due to them not having endowments, I think you skipped a few logical steps that I'd disagree with before you got to the question of endowments, e.g. the premise that being profitable is a primary goal of public universities.

As for sports being part of the college experience, I don't disagree with you that they are right now, but I don't see why that would have to be the case, since it certainly didn't use to be the case historically and still isn't the case in many parts of the world. From my perspective, they're so far removed from the actual purpose of universities that they've essentially marginalized the actual point of them for many schools, and the idea that they're integral to the experience is a sign of how much they've failed at their actual goal.
by const_cast | 2025-06-21 01:07:55+00:00
I'm not saying I don't believe you. But I am saying that, as a programmer, if you told me I had to only use an iPhone at work I'd probably set myself on fire.

> It's practically inevitable that XR devices will become the standard computing platform in the near future

Yeah I mean I just really doubt it. I'm not seeing a whole lot of benefit over smartphones, which are already ubiquitous. At best, I'm hearing that it won't suck that much. Which... okay not really high praise.

I'm sure, like the smartphone, it will replace SOME usecases. The difference is that the usecases the smartphone replaced were really important ones that cover 80% of common stuff people do. So now everyone has a smartphone.

Will that be the case with XR? I doubt it. The usecases it will cover will be, at absolute best, incremental as compared to the smartphone. And, I presume, the smartphone will cover those usecases too. Which is why I think it's more likely smartphones swallow these glasses thingy than the other way around.
by tialaramex | 2025-06-21 01:08:48+00:00
Greg Egan's story "Riding the Crocodile" features a fancier version of this trick, fire three objects from three origins at close to maximum speed, precisely timed to arrive at a point despite the enormous relativistic delays, the objects incorporate powerful magnets, and are designed such that they don't actually collide per se if timing is correct - but as they pass each other at the point where they would collide if shaped differently the magnetic force slows them all and so they eventually stop, together, at this focal point.

The Amalgam in that story have fantastically better technology than we do, but this is certainly at the edge of what's practical for them. It's a fun idea though, I wonder how close we could get with our technology.
by aeve890 | 2025-06-21 01:08:56+00:00
>Parasites. Period. This thing fills my head with a bunch of images from distant warped realities, summoned up out of thin air, it clogs my brain with a flood of other voices,

It does all that by it self? Of course not. This thing is not autonomous. Every app that _fill your head_ was your choice to install, signup and OPEN every time. It's like saying drugs are parasites. Of course they aren't. Your choices made you addicted to the thing. What happened to agency? Everyone is now a slave of social media apps?
by qingcharles | 2025-06-21 01:10:59+00:00
There's a reasonable chance someone has the painting on their wall. I know people in Hollywood who have some incredible items on displays they only show to trusted friends.

There was a time when Universal and others would put the primary hero props from their movies straight into their prop warehouses to get rental income from them for other productions. Some clever chap realized there was only a $300 damage/loss fee on each item, and word spread throughout the production personnel in Hollywood. Lots of irreplaceable props were suddenly "stolen" from productions.

I was involved in tracking one down to return to Universal (now in a museum) and the guy who had it made a fatal mistake of boasting about it one time in a forum. He wouldn't give it up, even with a letter from their lawyers, but we realized the writer of the movie lived nearby, so we had him go knock on the guy's door and it was handed over then.

I don't know what the value of the original painting would be. I got to see the BTTF posters before the painter, Drew Struzan, shipped them out to the buyer. I was surprised how cheap they were, I think he sold the three of them for $90K/piece. Mary Steenburgen was glued onto the third poster since they cast her late, after the painting was finished.
by sheepscreek | 2025-06-21 01:11:02+00:00
Or a really solid better-in-every-way yet ecologically sound alternative. Then again, the battle is not on one turf - we need alternatives for a whole host of plastics and synthetic plastic like compounds (nylon, rayon, Teflon and friends…). Think PVC pipes, the rubbery insulation on wires, tires (which can have nylon and other synthetic materials other than rubber), high quality ropes/harnesses, nets, clothing of-course - the list is endless and each use case is unique.

So what we might see is - an early adoption in some industries and use-cases and a slower adoption in others while better materials are invented/discovered.

On a brighter note, with all the kick-ass compute we’ll have in triple digit billion dollar AI facilities, that opens up scope for new discoveries in science. Hopefully, accelerating its pace.
by tass | 2025-06-21 01:12:35+00:00
I’m lucky to be able to charge quickly at home.

I’m currently on a road trip and was leaving the car at a nearby charger which was walking distance from where I’m staying - I can’t imagine owning one where either this wasn’t available or there wasn’t a fast charger I could spend 10 minutes at.

The actual long distance drives were super easy thanks to Superchargers - 5-10 minute stops keep you driving for hours! It doesn’t feel disadvantaged compared to gas so long as the infrastructure is there.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-06-21 01:13:52+00:00
$3.7mm per mile is around California’s highway-construction costs.

EDIT: To be clear, $3.7mm is what it would have cost if that $3bn paid for 805 miles of fence. For these 64 miles, Texans paid $47mm per mile. That's more than it would cost Amtrak to build high-speed rail [1]. It's a quarter of what California's high-speed rail costs per mile.

[1] https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/high-speed-money-sink-w...
by brulard | 2025-06-21 01:13:56+00:00
> most queries I’ve ever seen are just simple joins

Good for you. Some of us deal with more complex queries, even if it may not seems so from the outside. For example getting hierarchical data based on parent_id, while having non-trivial conditions for the parents and the children or product search queries which need to use trigram functions with some ranking, depending on product availability across stores and user preferences.

I agree knowing SQL is still useful, but more for double checking the queries from LLMs than for trying to build queries yourself.
by const_cast | 2025-06-21 01:14:20+00:00
I disagree fundamentally - as more things got privatized in the US, you can clearly see the degradation of our services. For example, the NYC subway.

The reality is we are now paying a lot of money for some of the worse public services we've ever had. In the 50s, 60s, and 70s, our public services were considerably higher quality - AND this is with increased labor. We've managed to significantly lower labor cost through technology, and yet the quality has degraded.

We've tried the theory of privatization. In fact we keep trying it over and over. Look around you. Is it working? Yes or no? No, right? Then we should be on the same page.
by Groxx | 2025-06-21 01:14:40+00:00
Ah, yep, you're correct - I was misinterpreting the pictures in the paper. On rereading, they seem pretty clear about it being paint on the outside that somehow gets on the inner surface.

Though also:

>The results show that glass containers were more contaminated than other packaging for all beverages except wine, because wine bottles were closed with cork stoppers rather than metal caps.

So yeah. Cap differences, probably for fashion more than function, which are probably easily remedied.
by sidrag22 | 2025-06-21 01:15:52+00:00
there are an absurd amount of different takes on it, its pretty crazy. I probably focus too much on the bad content, meant to grab attention. For that reason i have a distaste for youtube because it sorta pushes that type of stuff to the top, which in my mind makes more people make similar cash grab type content.

meanwhile youtube is actively attempting to keep user's viewing as long as possible... netflix probably doesnt really care if you watch for 2 hours a week vs 10 hours a day, they just want the monthly payment.
by akersten | 2025-06-21 01:16:14+00:00
Harder than it sounds! So much of what we interact with online winds up with YouTube in the dependency chain. Kids' coursework, how-to videos, etc. I could also just pay the $$/month to "solve" this problem, but I need my petty cash more than Google does. I'm confident the brilliant minds there can figure out how to monetize my visit even without the real-time bidding industrial complex burning my CPU cycles.
by sheepscreek | 2025-06-21 01:16:16+00:00
You bet - I’m sure it’s the only fool proof way to get rid of all microplastics. Cumbersome though. But realistically, I no longer think they can be avoided. Probably already lodged all the way up in my brain waiting to cause some nuisance as I get older :-/

Our best hope is nanotechnology and bots or maybe even bioengineered cells or microorganisms that can get in there and eat them or at least reroute them out of the human body through natural pathways.
by dcow | 2025-06-21 01:16:28+00:00
I think the argument is not whether EVs will take an extra 65-80 min to go 1000 miles, it’s whether that matters to the average driver. Realistically for my family it doesn’t. I’m sure for some (predominately) solo drivers it does. But then there’s the question of how often you’re driving 1000 mile trips that an extra 1.5hrs max actually impacts anything real in your life…

I guess if you’re trying to follow an ICE car on a road trip then yeah it might be a weak point. If you’re already stopping every 200 miles then it’s no matter. For us, we enjoy travel days more with the built in stretch/bathroom breaks.
by m_kos | 2025-06-21 01:16:47+00:00
Well done! Very clean design and easy to use. Initially, I missed some conveniences of modern piano rolls (like tap and hold to area select a bunch of notes), but ultimately it just made me more careful, which was an interesting change. Some UX decisions were very thoughtful, like the blue vertical lines.

If I could suggest anything, it would be to let fat-fingered users like me hide the left menu in the landscape orientation (mobile) and stretch the roll sideways.
by lurk2 | 2025-06-21 01:17:00+00:00
> I think you are mad because they are right, and your only refuge is to recycle hipster memes of the 2010s.

They are a particular variety of policy wonk that conflates positive claims with normative beliefs. Normative beliefs are a matter of preference.

Consider urban sprawl; the desire to live in a larger home farther from the city center doesn’t go away with trains, the throughput is just more efficient. The question then becomes whether the denizens of a city would prefer to travel by car or by train. Given that car-centric urban sprawl is still ongoing, Americans appear to prefer the car.
by recursivecaveat | 2025-06-21 01:17:04+00:00
Everything old is new again: in the Alexnet paper that kicked off the deep learning wave in 2012, they describe horizontally flipping every image as a cheap form of data augmentation. Though now that we expect models to actually read text that seems potentially counter-productive. Rotations are similar, in that you'd hope it would learn heuristics such as that the sky is almost always at the top.
by aftbit | 2025-06-21 01:17:06+00:00
I wish it would also remove YouTube's internal advertising. I pay for YouTube Premium, but I can't permanently hide shorts or prevent it from popping up whatever random topic they want me to engage with. Every 30 days or so, I have to click "Show Fewer Shorts" and every week or two, I have to opt out of the topic du jour, and I have to do this separately on every device.
by kadonoishi | 2025-06-21 01:18:06+00:00
To detect a presence, a real brain takes in sensory input and compares it to expectations, and stays calm or registers surprise, and from time to time issues predictions to guide the organism.

To detect an absence, the brain cannot rely on sensory input, by definition. To be surprised if sensory evidence is _not_ there requires a model of the world strong enough to register surprise if the expectation is not there, without a sensory prompt.

It seems to me detecting an absence is a strictly higher-order neurological task than processing sensory input.

If LLMs can't do this strictly higher-order neurological task, is that not a capability currently unique to living things?
by kretaceous | 2025-06-21 01:18:56+00:00
I don't understand so bear with me.

If the Uranium came from multiple supernovae, then why is it shocking that earth has different concentrations of U235? Moreover, how is it proof of a past fission reaction?

What if that "part" of U235 came from a separate supernova which is a little older and some more of its U235 had already decayed?
by mcdeltat | 2025-06-21 01:21:43+00:00
I recently stopped watching youtube altogether and surprisingly haven't been missing it. And I used to watch a LOT (like hours per day) of youtube, mostly quality educational/scientific content. But ultimately you'd be surprised how much you don't need in your life. And side effect is no more ads. If someone sends me an occasional youtube video to watch, I'll take a look, but otherwise no engagement with the platform.

I'd highly recommend everyone try reducing their intake of passive entertainment like youtube and redirecting that time towards more creative or mindful pursuits.