MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by TeMPOraL | 2025-06-20 12:44:22+00:00
Almost agreed, but I feel compelled to correct one thing, because it's a common and annoying misconception "nature lovers" harbor:

> One of millions of variables we constantly adapt to. If it's slow enough, no problem. But if it's hitting us fast(...), that... we may have problems with. That's when you see unrest, violence, crime. Wars. Famine. Suffering.

No. Famine, starvation, disease, suffering, mass deaths - and even wars - are exactly the process through which life adapts to slow changes. That's what it means for ecosystems to thrive, for nature to be in balance - that balance is held dynamically, by constant cycles of excessive slaughter followed by mass starvation.

We brought a lot of new problems on the table, both for ourselves and all other life, the latter of which can't even keep pace. But senseless suffering and comically painful death - that one came from nature, and we're actually successfully reducing it.
by donatj | 2025-06-20 12:44:39+00:00
I'm not even sure it's entirely a matter of being blocked from doing so as much as the incentives merely not being there. What is the incentive for a developer to build affordable housing? The margins are surely much lower.

The city could set rent restrictions on new development and all that, but that removes the incentive for developers to actually build in that area at all, especially when they can just find an unrestricted space to develop a couple miles away in the next town.

It's a tough problem.
by actualwitch | 2025-06-20 12:45:16+00:00
Based on my perception of where US is now in terms of government, where its going and how seriously people are taking what is happening, I don't plan on going anywhere near it today or in the ~10 years to come. That is an optimistic timeline where trumpism is eventually stomped, btw. If you think it matters what individual states legislate when the entire country's government is being transformed into authoritarianism before your eyes, you are well on your way into pessimist timeline.
by naasking | 2025-06-20 12:45:38+00:00
I don't think it's useful to conflate "the ends justify the means" with "cost-benefit analysis". You sometimes use the latter to justify certain means, but you don't have to, that's why they're different. When you believe that the ends justify the means, you can also just give no consideration at all to the ethics of the means. No doctor triaging patients would ever shoot a patient in the head so he could move onto one they thought was more important. Yes they might let patients die, but that's different than actively killing them.
by dax_ | 2025-06-20 12:45:46+00:00
Why would we embrace that even more? In Software Development we try to keep things deterministic as much as possible. The more variables we're introducing into our software, the more complicated it becomes.

The whole notion of adding LLM prompts as a replacement for code just seems utterly insane to me. It would be a massive waste of resources as we're reprompting AI a lot more frequently than we need to. Also must be fun to debug, as it may or may not work correctly depending on how the LLM model is feeling at that moment. Compilation should always be deterministic, given the same environment.
by kbolino | 2025-06-20 12:45:51+00:00
Unless you're making it possible to access memory on every instruction that takes an argument, or adding more addressing modes that are redundant with ALU operations, or making registers that can only be used for one purpose, etc., it's not really turning into CISC. The acronyms are misnomers, or maybe you just need to think of what's being "reduced" as the number of micro-ops per high-level instruction. Regardless, you don't turn RISC into CISC just by adding more instructions.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-06-20 12:47:08+00:00
There are only 24 hours in a day, and so many days in a lifetime. Everyone is always trading time, since there is a very limited amount of it.

Even in a leisure situation, such as a party, people are going to make choices about how much time to interact with (or not interact with) certain people. Or spending time pontificating on HN.
by mystifyingpoi | 2025-06-20 12:47:17+00:00
> Duh, it's not imperative, for many good reasons

You can be declarative and still have imperative constructs hidden behind pure functions let's say. That's how Ansible does it - it is super useful to define a custom filter that's called like "{{ myvariable | my_filter }}" but underneath there is a bunch of imperative Python datastructure wrangling (without visible side effects, of course - just in memory stuff), with arbitrary code. Doing the same in HCL is I believe impossible in general case.
by ty6853 | 2025-06-20 12:47:58+00:00
Having actually built, planned, and done all the paperwork for a house myself most the extra costs that can't be worked around (you can DIY everything if you want) is permitting, inspection, and codes. I just didn't get my house inspected nor did I submit engineered plans, so saved tons of money, but most people don't have the option to bypass 'safety' inspections and they get gutted like a pig following all those rules.

The actual materials cost of a house, you can build one for $60k no problem and absolute shit-tons of cheap land near jobs (ex: unemployment extremely low in the Dakotas, cheap land, high demand for homeless-tier labor in the fields in bumfucklandia as ICE deports illegals making farmers desperate for anybody).
by tbrownaw | 2025-06-20 12:48:09+00:00
> The author provides as counterexamples MacOS and Windows, but that's a silly comparison. Apple nor Microsoft never coordinated with anybody else on their APIs.

No, but each of those two systems is ruled by one dictator and has one blessed way to do things. For example in the Windows / .NET world, it's WinForms, er I mean WPF, er I mean...

> Also, I'm not sure what kind of standard this author is pining for.

It sounds like a wish for the clarity of a cathedral rather than the chaos of a bazaar.
by latchup | 2025-06-20 12:48:21+00:00
> Open source handles conflict by forking. I wouldn’t call that good coordination.

Forking is far from the first step in conflict resolution; it is the ultima ratio between projects in the open-source world, when all dialogue breaks down. In other words, the worst outcome is that people agree to disagree and go their separate ways, which is arguably as good a solution as is possible.

In the corporate world, coordination mostly exists within companies through top-down decision-making, as you said. Between them, however, things look much grimmer. Legal action is often taken lightly, and more often than not, a core business goal is to not just dominate, but to annihilate the competition by driving them out of business.

Coordination between corporations, such as through consortia, is only ever found if everyone involved stands to profit significantly and risks are low. And ironically, when it does happen, it often takes the form of shared development of an open-source project, to eliminate the perceived risk of being shafted.
by perrygeo | 2025-06-20 12:48:29+00:00
Hurl is awesome. A while back I ported a small web service from Python to Rust. Having rigorous tests of the public API is amazing; a language-independent integration test! I was able to swap it out with no changes to the public API or website.

Worth mentioning that using Hurl in Rust specifically gives you a nice bonus feature: integration with cargo test tooling. Since Hurl is written in Rust, you can hook into hurl-the-library and reuse your .hurl files directly in your test suite. Demo: https://github.com/perrygeo/axum-hurl-test
by rich_sasha | 2025-06-20 12:49:14+00:00
UK has a chronic shortage of houses, as in, if you count the people in the country and how many houses you need, that's a bigger number than what you've got.

Building in the UK is also hard. England, which is like 90% of the population, is very densely inhabited. Cities are sprawling, their road and transit infrastructure barely support their current size, never mind bigger population. Plus, with the housing bubble, people who barely could afford their homes in the first place feel understandably terrified of anything that drops these prices down.

What the UK did post-WWII and is proposing to do now feels quite bold, but also smart: build new cities. Milton Keynes, for example, was built from scratch. In fact Bletchley, of Bletchley Park fame and now a small suburb, used to be the train stop.

It was built from scratch with adequate infrastructure, parks, high and low density zones, schools and fire stations, on land which I can only imagine was much cheaper than the equivalent in London zone 7. It hugged an existing train line so was connected to the rest of the country "for free".

Is that a way forward? Bootstrapping whole towns, instead of trying to keep fighting market forces to squeeze more people into existing towns.

I'm not saying you force people to live there, or displace the homeless there. No, simply provide a cheaper decent place to live, and people will come.
by oersted | 2025-06-20 12:49:24+00:00
A translation would be appreciated, OP was asking for an explanation for the general public. Even highly technical people will struggle to understand this if you use such insider jargon without clarification.

Surely expansion is happening at every scale but locally other factors dominate right? To what degree? Is it mainly gravity? Electromagnetic attraction between atoms and/or molecules?

The naive mental model that I have is of two balls tied with a rubber band, each on a treadmill going in opposite directions. Since the rubber band attraction dominates, they slip on the surface of the treadmill and their distance is barely affected even if the surface underneath “expands” outwards quite quickly. Is this a reasonable analogy or is it too simplistic?

Of course the rubber band force is proportional to the distance, while the attraction forces we are talking about are inversely proportional. And I have no idea if the expansion of the universe can be reasonably modeled as an outwards “drag force” on matter. How “sticky” is matter with respect to space?
by mr_toad | 2025-06-20 12:49:38+00:00
A third stage with the current Starship design would have to be under 100 tonnes and the payload would be small. It would have to do all the work of injecting into a transfer orbit, landing on Mars, and returning. It’s hard to imagine such a small craft getting all the way to Mars, with a crew, and returning them.

Starship is just not a good design for pushing a third stage into a transfer orbit by itself. It’s totally dependent on the idea of in-orbit refuelling and refuelling on Mars. Once you refuel it, the game changes completely.

It’s also not a workable solution for landing on the Moon without refuelling for the same reasons. In some ways the Moon is more problematic because you can’t manufacture methalox on the Moon.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-06-20 12:49:56+00:00
If the "autocorrector" can do anything that used to be a paid wage/salary "cheaper", this isn't the case of another job being automated away. Either something is grossly wrong in that some are willing to have a stupid machine do that poorly (writing Sports Illustrated articles), or something was always grossly wrong in that we were paying someone to do something that never did matter (paying someone to write SEO spam). This isn't a swift kick in the economy, this is a "your economy was so weak a soft breeze knocked it over".
by Gareth321 | 2025-06-20 12:50:04+00:00
> You think mentally ill do not need a place to shower and sleep safely?

Giving a locking door to an addict is a death sentence. As countless experiments have proven, unsupervised shelters all over California have been literally destroyed by addicts and the mentally unwell. I'm talking faeces on the walls, blood and urine everywhere, horrific attacks in the units, and eventually the place just gets burnt down. So these people need supervised shelter. In a facility. Where they're prevented from harming others and themselves. De-institutionalisation was a huge mistake. There were abuses and they needed reform, but throwing schizophrenics and addicts into the street was not kind or humane, and leaving them there is just as immoral.
by viamiraia | 2025-06-20 12:51:08+00:00
The results for attempts are underpowered and they acknowledge this (note the p-values too), but not for ideation. From the discussion:

> We did not detect a difference in the odds of lifetime or past-year suicide attempts or attempts resulting in hospitalization. It is possible that we were underpowered to detect these differences given that suicide attempt items were less frequently endorsed than suicidal ideation items (Table 3). Given this study’s retrospective self-report survey design, we were unable to capture information regarding completed suicides, which may have also reduced the number of suicide attempts we were able to account for. Given that suicidal ideation alone is a known predictor of future suicide attempts and deaths from suicide, the current results warrant particular concern.
by iknowSFR | 2025-06-20 12:51:31+00:00
I often think about this as well. If you have a problem to solve, it’s easiest to use the internet and find threads or videos to solve that problem. But in the “before times” you would need to seek out someone with experience and have a full conversation. While having the information at our fingertips is much more convenient and helps bridge gaps in communities that would lack experienced experts, it does cut the opportunity to socialize but at least 1 conversation per problem.
by isaacremuant | 2025-06-20 12:51:39+00:00
> It's surprising how we ended up with such a robust open-source OS ecosystem (pretty much every server running Linux) with such emotional people at the helm.

As opposed to what? Unbiased and dispassionate? There's no such thing. What you're probably thinking of is careerist and authoritarian within a corporation. It's not more efficient than the darwinism of open source.

Naturally, passionate builders and experts who rise to prominence controlling a tool will feel strongly about the vision for that tool. That's how it gets made in the first place.

Calling them "emotional" is just cheap.

Your so called "rationality" is easy when you're not the one pouring your intense effort into something.

You keep diminishing and attacking these "arrogant" creators while you're clearly the model of rationality who habe built... No, you use what they build. Funny that.

Maybe take a humble pill.
by jqpabc123 | 2025-06-20 12:51:59+00:00
In other words, what we have running the country is really a fascist dictator.

Any "policy" is the result of how one person "feels" at any given moment.

The really odd part is the number of people who've been lead to believe this will somehow be good for them and the country. These folks are either choosing to ignore history or more likely, are just ignorant of it.
by transcriptase | 2025-06-20 12:52:09+00:00
Until someone wants to switch from Windows/MacOS to Linux and is presented with two dozen popular distros, half a dozen desktop choices for each with no explanation of what the acronyms mean or why someone should care, immediately gets prompted about things like bootloaders and various partition schemes, until they finally get to a desktop and their mouse is stuck at 0.01% pointer speed regardless of what the mouse options are set to because the maintainer of sdctlxinputmd got mad at the maintainer of some dependency and decided the user can install and configure what lets sdctlxinputmd work with the OS settings panel. Oh except installing those requires configuring new sources and overriding disallowing proprietary drivers because some other maintainer is a purist who added friction because Nvidia doesn’t provide their firmware source code under the PLGPPGL 4.1 Licence.
by pseudocomposer | 2025-06-20 12:52:19+00:00
I think the “cure” to this is fostering curiosity within ourselves, and learning to balance our curiosity in real world objects, locations, people, activities, etc. in a way that’s balanced with digital information. And understanding that all digital information is really just an approximation of these real-world things.

Put another way… you have to let yourself be curious about, say, the garden in the park, rather than looking at your phone. And when it comes to people - talking to a stranger rather than looking at your phone - you have to not only let yourself be curious, but also be vulnerable enough to make that curiosity known (a secondary skill, that I think can be built on a foundation of curiosity).
by lobsterthief | 2025-06-20 12:52:39+00:00
Agreed. Without standards, we wouldn’t have the rich web-based ecosystem we have now.

As an example, anyone who’s coded email templates will tell you: it’s hard. While the major browsers adopted the W3C specs, email clients (I.e. email renderers) never adopted the spec, or such a W3C email HTML spec didn’t exist. So something that renders correctly in Gmail looks broken in Yahoo mail in Safari on iOS, etc.
by tome | 2025-06-20 12:52:48+00:00
> Assuming you do believe that genocide is extremely shitty, wouldn't that imply that defense of (actual) genocide, or the principle of it, is in all likelihood shitter than a false accusation of genocide? Otherwise I think you'd have to claim that a false accusation is somehow worse than the actuality or possibility of mass murder

I'm struggling to follow, sorry.

I certainly agree with you that a false accusation is not worse than the actuality (I don't know why you brought up "possibility") of mass murder. Very far from it. But why does that imply that it's better than the defence of mass murder? After all, the "defence" here is not engaging in the practice, it's just saying something like "I condone that". Or did you think that by "defence" I actually mean committing the mass murder?

The reason that emotive false accusations are very, very harmful is that they can cause mobs to murder in (supposed) retaliation. Here's a story about someone in the UK who was killed by a riled-up mob, due to a false accusation:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3535839/Father-42-k...

One ought to be very, very cautious about making accusations that can rile up mobs.

Regarding your other comments directed at me personally, such as "you would like to make light of cities being decimated and innocent civilians being murdered at scale", "inability to concretize the reality of human existence beyond yourself", "outright callousness", "approach to social problems is highly if not strictly quantitative", "you view other human beings as nothing more than numerical quantities", they are completely unfounded speculation on your part. They are rude and completely inappropriate for a reasoned discussion.

Regarding proportion, do you believe the actions of the UK and USA against Nazi Germany were "proportionate"? Proportionate to what? What did Nazi Germany ever to do the USA?
by throwanem | 2025-06-20 12:52:49+00:00
Define "good" and see if the question still makes sense. If we define it to mean "fit for the purpose declared as its basis for funding," then either high-dollar-value fraud is so prevalent in this industry as to qualify it for comparison with Scientology and other MLMs, or the industry simply cannot be attempting in fact to do what it claims to be trying to do. Which might amount to the same.

For that matter, how do you know good software really doesn't last centuries? The practice of software's creation has yet to see its hundredth birthday. We have quite literally not had time to tell, and early results seem suggestive in really either direction.
by ethbr1 | 2025-06-20 12:53:21+00:00
Consolidated tech definitely contributes to the phenomenon though, given platforms with substantial market share mandate revenue spend on them.

If there were 100 equal market share ad space providers, what Google does wouldn't have the same impact it does now.

I mean, look at the lobotomized hellscape YouTube's engagement-optimized algorithm has turned its monetized content into, to say nothing of the broader internet, as proof its monopoly hasn't been for the greater good.
by dspillett | 2025-06-20 12:54:36+00:00
> The problem is ‘make -j’ spinning up 100s of C++ compilation jobs, using up all of the systems RAM+swap, and causing major instability.

I would put that in the “using it improperly” category. I never use⁰ --jobs without specifying a limit.

Perhaps there should have been a much more cautious default instead of the default being ∞, maybe something like four¹, or even just 2, and if people wanted infinite they could just specify something big enough to encompass all the tasks that could possibly run in the current process. Or perhaps --load-average should have defaulted to something like min(2, CPUs×2) when --jobs was in effect⁴.

The biggest bottleneck hit when using --jobs back then wasn't RAM or CPU though, it was random IO on traditional high-latency drives. A couple of parallel jobs could make much better use of even a single single-core CPU, by the CPU-crunching of a CPU-busy task or two and the IO of other tasks ending up parallel, but too many concurrent tasks would result in an IO flood that could practically stall the affected drives for a time, putting the CPU back into a state of waiting ages for IO (probably longer than it would be without multiple jobs running) - this would throttle a machine² before it ran out of RAM even with the small RAM we had back then compared to today. With modern IO and core counts, I can imagine RAM being the bigger issue now.

--------

[0] Well, used, I've not touched make for quite some time

[1] Back when I last used make much at all small USB sticks and SD cards were not uncommon, but SSDs big++quick+hardy enough for system or work drives were an expensive dream. With frisby-based drives I found a four job limit was often a good compromise, approaching but not hitting significantly diminishing returns if you had sufficient otherwise unused RAM, while keeping a near-zero chance of effectively completely stalling the machine due to a flood of random IO.

[2] Or every machine… I remember some fool³ bogging down the shared file server of most of the department with a vast parallel job, ignoring the standing request to run large jobs on local filesystems where possible anyway.

[3] Not me, I learned the lesson by DoSing my home PC!

[4] Though in the case of causing an IO storm on a remote filesystem, a load-average limit might be much less effective.
by lapcat | 2025-06-20 12:54:41+00:00
There's no evidence that any such transactions ever took place. That's an anachronism. Hunter-gatherer groups are much more likely to share in everything, including work and the products of work, not engage in capitalistic ownership and economic isolationism. That's only possible in a situation of abundance and governmental enforcement of individual property rights.

How do you even get mammoth meat without having a stone axe?
by diet_jerome | 2025-06-20 12:54:53+00:00
I share your frustration with only overpriced, luxury housing being built. However, I think you are misattributing the blame here. The reason why only expensive luxury housing gets built in so many areas is almost always because the local government only allows developers to build luxury apartments. If housing construction was deregulated, then actual rampant capitalism would see profit in building affordable housing and then build affordable housing. Take a look at things like ibuprofen. Ibuprofen is a pretty awesome medicine, but it isn't only for rich people now. It is very cheap and affordable. Same with cell phones.