MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bluedino | 2025-06-07 19:57:46+00:00
> In fact the folks at PARC had never accomplished it, and they later told him they were amazed that he had done so.

Reminds me of the story where some company was making a new VGA card, and it was rumored a rival company had implemented a buffer of some sort in their card. When both cards came out the rival had either not actually implemented it or implemented a far simpler solution
by rickydroll | 2025-06-07 19:58:50+00:00
I'm basically in the same camp as you. However, nuclear plants take over 10 years to build. Battery capacity has increased dramatically over the past few years. Current projections indicate that 2025 will see more batteries brought online than there were in total in 2023.

With that rate of growth for batteries and the current improvements in battery capacity, will there be any need for a fusion plant, given that we won't see one come online for at least 10 to 15 years?
by spwa4 | 2025-06-07 19:59:14+00:00
In case you don't understand: obviously you still pay income tax. What you suggest would mean you now pay income tax on that $10M, which is going to be 40% or even 50% depending, far higher than corporate tax.

So with your suggested tactic the engineers get $2.55 million each. The rest, $4.5 million, is tax.

If those 2 engineers paid themselves $0, and instead paid the $10 million as dividends, they'd get 4.25 million each, and only 1.5 million would be paid as tax.

(Yes, this is a simplification, both situations are artificial and in both cases there'd be other taxes to pay, however, they'd be similar in both cases)
by awbvious | 2025-06-07 20:00:15+00:00
I feel sad for you that are actually humans and are saying negative things against this extremely well written post.

Perhaps you are doing it out of cognitive dissonance that you could be a baddie too. Perhaps you have lost the ability to read long form, it's certainly not encouraged any more. Perhaps doing it because you are being paid to shill a narrative (I still feel bad for you).

And for those of you that are bots saying these things, I probably feel bad for the ones who programmed you.

And I feel bad for us all that it is now almost impossible to know who is human, what is paid for, and what is real discourse.

I do not think the original post was propaganda. I think this was just someone who cares and wrote something because she wanted people to care. I applaud the author. I feel good knowing that something like this got written and read and shared.

Could it be that I am wrong in my assessment that this is excellently written and negative assessments are unfounded? I could be, but I wanted to add my assessment to the fray. I identify as human and not paid to write this comment, btw.
by bigyabai | 2025-06-07 20:00:28+00:00
I can explain it to you, I just expect a good-faith response in return. From the outside looking in, it doesn't even feel like you're trying to argue your point. Your example is a self-made webapp, which seems to be unsuccessful and not very popular among game developers. You have one success story, your own, and it isn't for a popular video game or a difficult, creative task.

How am I supposed to believe you when other people don't want what you have?

From your other comment:

> I can generate a really good looking one for 10 cents because this component of art has been commodified.

You can 3D print a decent carburetor, but that doesn't mean that component of car manufacturing has been commodified. You have to compete in the market, and AI-generated art (much like 3D printed carburetors) has to live in it's own niche submarket. It is not an acceptable substitute for downstream consumers of this medium. Look at the backlash to Marvel's Secret Invasion when they thought AI was "good enough" for prestige television.

Nobody's going to stop you from chasing this dream, but I'll tell you outright that I don't want to pay for a game with AI art. The games industry is commodified well enough that I don't have to settle for your product.
by 5mv2 | 2025-06-07 20:00:39+00:00
You're right that I was arguably irrationally attached to not ending uni with too much debt.

For the rest, I'm with you it might be hard to replicate beyond this n = 1 sample, but I'm convinced this experiment's ROI is actually much more positive than suggested in the post.

Not only did I get better grades that semester from being forced to spend more time in the library, but I learned a lot living at people's places afterwards, and, most importantly, the feeling of freedom from materials matters allowed me to make bolder bets that paid back multiple times over.

You can even go further: even if my grades had gone down, I still would have been more employable for many types of companies, starting with early stage startups.
by zahlman | 2025-06-07 20:00:42+00:00
>prevent your browser from requesting the advertisers' JavaScript code. Your browser not only won't show the ads, it won't run the code that was supposed to show them or even send a request to the advertisers' servers.

Incidentally, just blocking JavaScript with NoScript kills quite a lot of ads (obviously, not first-party ones if you've white-listed their JavaScript for site functionality; but I try to avoid that when there isn't real demonstrated value) without any need for an explicit ad blocker.
by the_af | 2025-06-07 20:01:24+00:00
It's extremely tiring to have to write informal comments while couching them in all kinds of caveats and clarifications to make them iron-clad and beyond reproach by even the most persistent of nitpickers. It makes pleasant conversation impossible.

And for what? Instead of focusing on the question I actually asked, you decided to correct me on something tangential for meaningless internet cred.

Congrats, you won 1000 megacredits.
by turtletontine | 2025-06-07 20:03:35+00:00
The future of Google as Chrome’s owner is genuinely in question now due to Google’s antitrust losses, in case you weren’t aware.

There’s a few different cases, one recent one Google has lost and is now in the “remedy” phase. Meaning the court has officially decided Google did bad, and is now considering what to make Google do about it. And splitting up Google into separate Chrome, search, etc companies is completely on the table.

Some reading:

https://www.theverge.com/23869483/us-v-google-search-antitru...

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/google-found-guilty-of-mo...
by sltkr | 2025-06-07 20:04:03+00:00
Where's your evidence for that claim?

Personally I worked for a FAANG company that took data protection quite seriously. I would love to say that it was because they cared so much about their customer's privacy (which was of course the official position) but I think the reality was at least partially that the people in charge knew that if data was leaked and it could be pinned on lax internal policies, the company would be liable for millions if not billions in damages.

From that I conclude that the legal framework does provide a certain degree of protection to customer data. Nothing is perfect, of course, but that's true for every law: a red traffic light doesn't force drivers to stop, and in fact people run red lights every day. But the threat of getting fined for running a red light is pretty effective at forcing most people to stop for a red light most of the time, which is not nothing.

Also consider the logical conclusion of your cynical argument. If the laws and regulations that require companies to guard their customers privacy are almost entirely ineffective, as you claim, then shouldn't we abolish them? After all, they impose a burden on companies, which makes goods and services more expensive for consumers, without providing any non-material benefits in return.
by thegrimmest | 2025-06-07 20:04:08+00:00
I would disagree. Many ideological worldviews are taught in the curriculums of the public education system. For instance, the idea that homosexuality is wrong (not a view I personally hold) is not tolerated. Students are taught that homosexuality is a valid, normal, way to live (and I happen to agree).

However, whether it is right or wrong, valid or invalid, is an ideological argument. Schools should simply teach that it occurs in humans, and leave the question of whether to accept or reject it to parents (there are plenty of other natural behaviours many of us reject on ideological grounds, polygamy for instance). There are countless other examples where ideology is taught as curriculum.
by ungawatkt | 2025-06-07 20:04:21+00:00
I gave this a go about 3 years ago when the hackday project[1] first got published, it turns out choosing the parameters is _very_ disc dependent, since every disc is a little bit different (possibly even between lots of the same type, not published anywhere, and quite sensitive. I got it working for the CD-R's I got, but it took ~50 experiments to get ok parameters (the image was pretty good, but still wobbly in some areas of the disc).

That said, the end result is pretty cool, if hard to photograph.

[1] https://hackaday.io/project/186303-burning-pictures-on-a-com...
by b112 | 2025-06-07 20:04:22+00:00
Interesting.

I'm on a well, but with super hard water. So I have a water cooler, which I empty into a Brita pitcher, but just for drinking.

Just for the flavour.

I cook with my hard water though. Lots of stews and soups too, make bread, etc. So I suspect I get sufficiently mineralised as a result.

For context, I was boiling a large pot of water and got distracted by a call. Most of the water boiled away, well over a gallon. I was left with a solid white disk of calcium at the bottom. Also, when I broke it to get it out, it was super sharp, almost cut myself.
by pests | 2025-06-07 20:04:44+00:00
> visitors in France don't bother with any of that, proving that they aren't actually concerned about being blackmailed or outed as porn consumers by their ISP.

I don’t think that follows. Tons of people don’t have the technical means or ability to use those countermeasures. Some don’t even know they are being tracked.

I don’t think that implies they’re fine with being blackmailed.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-06-07 20:04:52+00:00
> Selecting 1.0.1 with little review

Why would you choose to give little review to a dependency?

> The problem isn't the auto-merging 1.0.2 - it's the lack of attestation in the PR that appears to be code from the foobar authors who were trusted in version 1.0.1.

The authors were never trusted and never will be. What was trusted was the code at the commit hash for the first time 1.0.1 got tagged, and now a bot is saying you should move away from that trusted code.

Is that a good idea? That depends on, among other things: if you need to; and if you trust the new code.

The foobar author could have intentionally or unintentionally included an exploit, or they could have had their account hacked and someone else included one on their behalf, or just changed the code behind an existing tag (see my previous comments for a recent example).

I get what you're saying about this being overwhelming. Without this, though, we've seen it's just security theater, because your code is as strong as it's weakest link. More eyeballs on a given release/commit also means more people looking out for something nefarious, which is counteracted by a shorter time-since-release. Maybe multiple AI agents will make it easier
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-06-07 20:05:19+00:00
> Elon threatened to take his ball and go home in a literally life threatening (to astronauts) way after making SpaceX an essential aspect of the space program

It’s sort of a given in American capitalism that owners are free to be idiots with their money. Nationalising SpaceX would wipe hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth to zero (or close to it). That’s a taking of private property triggered by the personal animus of the President; that characterises Argentina more than America. It would absolutely freak investors out, because now you need to diversify your assets geopolitically in a way Americans aren’t used to (but Argentinians, Russians and Chinese are).

Better: target Elon personally. Yank his credentials. Force him to revoke his super voting status, potentially trim his shareholding.

> Elon also unintentionally gave everyone a pretty good reason to reconsider if its a great idea to allow any privatized entity to become "too big to fail" (or, more exactly, too big to easily replace if their CEO goes crazy) within any important government function

We’re overdue for antitrust reform. The Whigs, in particular, were animated by concerns around undue concentrations of power.
by brookst | 2025-06-07 20:06:08+00:00
First I’ve heard of the show, but as a non-interested party it sure seems weird that someone would do the bare minimum of training to pilot a plane full of people in the name of demonstrating that bare minimum training is not sufficient.

And “they’re dumb” as a closing argument isn’t super persuasive. The guy may or may not have some valid points but he sure comes across as a reckless twit.
by david-gpu | 2025-06-07 20:07:58+00:00
The challenges that arise when you have a massively parallel system are well understood by now. It is hard to keep all processing units doing something useful rather than waiting for memory or other processing units.

Once you follow the logical steps to increase utilization/efficiency you end up with something like a GPU, and that comes with the programming challenges that we have today.

In other words, it's not like CPU architects didn't think of that. Instead, there are good reasons for the status quo.
by scotty79 | 2025-06-07 20:08:19+00:00
> We also make some simplifying assumptions which are known to be nonphysical but which represent very minor perturbations of black hole solutions to the Einstein Field Equations. Otherwise we would have no hope of calculating anything, and could not even approximate astrophysical candidates' behaviour.

I appreciate why we do it. It's better to have a mathematical model of something that doesn't exist but it's close enough to the real thing than not to have any model at all. What I'm objecting to is the claim that spherical cow in vacuum is the reality not just a lame appoximation of the actual state of affairs. Because if you claim that then generations of bright young people imagine that cows probably travel by rolling around.

> There's nothing special about our clocks.

Yes, there is. They are ours. The events that are not on them are physically outside of our scope of knowablility.

> The hyperbolicity comes from the geometry of the spacetime

I don't mind hyperbolicity. I mind linearizing it with the use of Kruskal coordinates and such just because we are curious what might happen after our clock runs for infinite time.
by tzs | 2025-06-07 20:09:02+00:00
> Whoever is giving the child access is responsible, not the manufacturer. If a parent gives their child a device capable of accessing the internet with no restrictions, that's on the parent.

Suppose a parent lets their 16 year old borrow the family car, the kid drives to a bar, and the bar serves the kid alcoholic drinks.

By your logic would that be considered the parents fault for providing the kid with a means of transport that doesn't restrict where the kid can go rather than the bar's fault for not checking that their customer could legally use their product?

> Pornhub is manufacturing a product and making it available to the open market, just like Jack Daniels. Jack Daniels has no responsibility to ensure a bar is only providing access to legal patrons.

> To make your analogy work for Pornhub, you'd also have to argue "why shouldn't Jack Daniels have to put age-verifying instant blood tests on their bottles in case a parent puts one in their unlocked liquor cabinet?"

That's a poor comparison, because with Pornhub the end user of their product gets it directly from Pornhub. With Jack Daniels most users get the product through resellers. It is the resellers that handle checking that the final sale to the end user is legal.

Users can buy directly from Jack Daniels (jackdaniels.com) and for those sales Jack Daniels does check the buyer's age.
by jhbadger | 2025-06-07 20:09:21+00:00
There's a fair amount of usage of it on Itch.io, if you are into that indie crowd. I was skeptical of it at first -- the whole 1-bit dithering aesthetic seems a bit too retro-twee, but I find it it is the best Hypercard-alike in terms of functionality -- it "just works" as compared to most Hyperclones that seem more like a proof of concept than a functional program.
by Ancapistani | 2025-06-07 20:09:50+00:00
> A good company has management that has a thick skin and acknowledges its missteps and raises up talent.

I've worked in companies where "thick skin" was a critical requirement. It worked OK, but the stress level was high and it was pretty toxic (even for someone with very thick skin).

I've worked in companies where empathy was the critical requirement. That was a better environment to work in, but it wasn't effective. Those companies died.

Where I work now is a mix of both: empathetic, but coupled with intellectual curiosity and respect. We challenge each other's ideas, but it's clear that we aren't attacking each others as people.

It honestly seems to be the best of both worlds. "Thick skin" isn't exactly the right way to put it, though. I'd say "vulnerability" describes it better.
by guywithahat | 2025-06-07 20:10:31+00:00
The author says "It's deeply rooted in a fear of a future defined by uncontrollable, continuous migration crises fueled by a climate-ravaged, demographically exploding African continent", as if this is a bad thing. Uncontrollable, continuous migration is a very bad thing. How is that not a bad thing? Also why would this problem even belong to Europe?

I don't think the politics of the average person think this many steps ahead, but if they did it would be a legitimate concern, especially given the struggles Europe has experienced trying to assimilate the migrants it currently has.
by crazygringo | 2025-06-07 20:10:43+00:00
I don't think rich people have as much influence on public transit as you think.

And in New York at least, truly rich people take a car service. Subways are for the normal people. The truly rich want their own private space and they want sunlight.

In any case, nobody's talking about the privatization of public transport, which is the conversion from public to private. This is about alternate private options becoming available. The public option stays. And it's not about subways, it's about buses.
by Boogie_Man | 2025-06-07 20:11:29+00:00
In the Republic of Congo, where Pygmies are estimated to make up between 1.2% and 10% of the population,[37] many Pygmies live as slaves to Bantu masters. The nation is deeply stratified between these two major ethnic groups. The Pygmy slaves belong from birth to their Bantu masters in a relationship that the Bantus call a time-honored tradition....

In 2003, Sinafasi Makelo, a representative of Mbuti pygmies, told the UN's Indigenous People's Forum that during the Congo Civil War, his people were hunted down and eaten as though they were game animals. In neighboring North Kivu province there has been cannibalism by a death squad known as Les Effaceurs ("the erasers") who wanted to clear the land of people to open it up for mineral exploitation.[40] Both sides of the war regarded them as "subhuman", and some say their flesh can confer magical powers.[41]...

Pygmies are often evicted from their land and given the lowest paying jobs. At a state level, Pygmies are not considered citizens by most African states, and are refused identity cards, deeds to land, health care and education access.
by hatmatrix | 2025-06-07 20:11:31+00:00
> And while base Python I find to be extremely elegant, typical data science and scientific computing workflows are a headache.

That's my impression as well. Going back to the topic of the original post, pandas only partially implements the idioms of the tidyverse so you have to mix in a lot of different forms of syntax (with lambdas to boot) go get things done. Julia is much nicer, but I find myself using PythonCall more often than I'd like.

Scipy was originally supposed to provide the scientific computing stack, but then many offshoots in the direction of pandas / ibis / JAX, etc. happened. I guess that's what you get with a community-based language. MATLAB has its warts but MathWorks does manage to present a coherent stack on that end.
by cocoto | 2025-06-07 20:11:34+00:00
Protecting the kids I think, because if the dad is not known then the mother will have to pay for the child alone (subsidized by the government). In France around 3% of kids are raised from dads not knowing that they are not the biological father. Personally I think this law is completely unfair but in practice I think the judges will not believe the one opposing the test.
by Hamatti | 2025-06-07 20:11:44+00:00
OP here!

That's a wonderful question, sorry it took me over a week to notice it and reply.

A lot of the practical debugging happens with debugging tools on the computer but every now and then I run into issues where it's not obvious why something is acting up. Usually in these cases, there's a conceptual issue, maybe a misunderstanding or an assumption that took me the wrong way.

In those cases, I like to start by writing down my understanding and assumptions of the situation: what is the problem, how does it happen (do I really know how to replicate it), what should be happening.

The act of writing it down (which I call a brain dump) helps me organise my thoughts and often that helps me notice the gaps in my knowledge or understanding which activates my brain to think about the missing bits which often leads to revelations.
by istjohn | 2025-06-07 20:12:20+00:00
There's a place for policing language, but you're not doing anyone any favors by gatekeeping homelessness. This is not involuntary homelessness, but then a large number of unhoused people could live under a roof if they were willing to accept certain tradeoffs, whether that be living with an abusive spouse, with an estranged parent, in a sober house, or far away from a community of friends. There are unhoused people who could scrape by in menial, arduous--and possibly dangerous--jobs who instead choose to live life on their own terms.

Trebaol was not forced into homelessness, but he was not play-acting or apeing a lifestyle for kicks. He was in a situation where he judged squatting four and a half months illegally in the jungle was worth saving a mere $2,000.

If you prefer to describe your past lifestyle as bandit camping instead of homelessness, by all means do so. But don't insist the rest of the world conform to your arbitrary redefinition of a term from its everyday meaning because it doesn't always fit your preconceptions.

Are you really helping the unhoused by insisting that someone is only truly homeless if they are schizophrenic, strung out on fentanyl, or otherwise totally incapable of being a productive member of society?
by simonw | 2025-06-07 20:12:49+00:00
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King back in 2003 used early AI VFX software MASSIVE to animate thousands of soldiers in battle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MASSIVE_(software) - I don't think that was controversial at the time.

According to that Wikipedia page MASSIVE was used for Avengers: Endgame, so it's had about a 20 year run at this point.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-06-07 20:12:57+00:00
Well, I certainly didn't mean for it to come across that way. I wasn't saying this was the case with Bill. To be clear, I saw nothing bad about Bill's photos. (Also I'm not really versed enough in professional photography to have a valid opinion even if I didn't like them and so would not have publicly weighed in on them anyway.)

I was though being honest about how I felt at that time — debated whether to keep it to myself or not today (but I always foolishly error on the side of being forthcoming).

Perhaps it's a strange thing to imagine that someone would pursue in their spare time, especially after retired, what they did professionally.