MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ReaperCub | 2025-07-15 22:11:34+00:00
> I disagree that writing to MPs is always ineffective. Some campaigns have been successful. Whether it will be effective in this case is another matter.

It won't be effective in this case. It been going in the same direction of travel and none of the parties (including outsider parties such as the Greens, Reform etc) proclaim to believe in in reversing this direction of travel. They are much more interested in other issues that are much more hot button. Those issues are easy for the public to understand because they are likely to have encountered them often.

> Maybe when people start to experience the block it will gain traction.

No it won't. People will either find a way to circumvent via VPN/Tor or some other mechanism (which is what they already do) or they will simply shrug their shoulders and won't bother.

There has already been a large number of forums/sites that have been shutdown or site been blocked in the UK and there hasn't been any significant traction on this issue.

> Of course if you don’t even make low-effort attempts to make your voice heard and exercise your democratic rights, you can be certain that you’ll lose them.

I don't really know how to respond to something like this because I believe it is naive on a number of levels. I consider myself a realist. I believe "making your voice heard and exercising your democratic rights" is about as effective as talking to a brick wall (at least on a national level).

I have personally made attempts. I wrote to my MP often. I cited links, news articles etc to back up my argument. It was an utter waste of time. At best you may get a short response. I realised I was ultimately wasting my time, I stopped and will never do it again. I actually feel stupid for believing that I could make any difference at all. I suspect this is the experience for other people and is often not spoken about.

Moreover much more notable people have tried to make themselves heard around a number of related concerns about freedom of speech, threats to privacy, iffy counter-terrorism laws etc. More often than not has always been either ignored entirely, responses that completely ignored the crux of the issue, or straight up lies from successive governments for almost two decades now.

Realistically our options will be to learn to live with the poor legislation, circumvent it, or leave the country.
by Quarrelsome | 2025-07-15 22:11:36+00:00
yeah but compared to the entirity of human history, its still pretty good. Like, I prefer the era I grew up in but so does my dad probably, so its hard to work out if its just a "when I were young and could run a mile without wheezing thing". i.e. We could paint similar tales of woe during the cold war about the uncertainty of the future.

But that aside, I can live out my life in considerable security in the western world, earn enough to never go hungry and if I'm smart enough I can learn a skill or forge out some opportunity that gets me enough dollar to join the asset class. That's some real post 1950s opportunity for most people. Bear in mind that post-war rationing meant many people in Europe rarely ate meat. You could eat a burger for every meal today, even on a relatively low budget.

I think many of us underestimate the opulence of our society. Take anyone from the pre-1950s to a supermarket and watch them lose it at how incredibly bourgeois that shit is. Show any non-elite from the 2nd or 3rd world in the late 20th century that you have your OWN ROOM or maybe even OWN BATHROOM! That's proper living. My gramma would always whine about how they were like 8 to a bed or whatever during the war. Single paned windows, cold af. My eastern european grandparents didn't even have running hot water (which was an alien experience to me) and heated their place by going to the forest and chopping wood.

Even 80s or 90s kids would be exceptionally envious at the incredible access to entertainment and software of this era. Figure how spoiled a society is when it buys dreams of a violent world (fortnite, game of thrones, gta) because its own world is so secure that is doesn't have a grasp of how harrowing that shit is. My western euro grand parents who survived the war only wanted a sunny day, a patch of grass to sit on and some peace and quiet, and we have ample supply of that, even today.
by aequitas | 2025-07-15 22:11:47+00:00
But there is only so much room for muscle memory or context to switch between. I tried Helix for a while, got used to it and I really liked it, especially the noun verb order being different from vim. Seeing what you have selected before performing the action. But for me the problem is that vim is everywhere I go or will eventually end up. All my servers have vim. Every server I need to randomly debug has vim or vi. So my muscle memory for vim keeps getting refreshed as well. And switching between the two constantly is just a pain. I could take along Helix to all these servers. But that is not practical nor do I need all the features Helix uses. Or I would miss specific feature which I then also have to bring along.

Now I’ve settled with Zed as desktop editor/IDE and still use vim on remotes. The context switch between a desktop app en cli is big enough that it’s never a problem. I don’t even use the vim bindings in Zed.
by itake | 2025-07-15 22:12:27+00:00
My $0.02 is being a mom sucks.

In modern relationships, men just want to work and come home to a cooked meal and clean house, but their wives are working just as many hours the men are. Having kids means tension in relationship, unpaid labor by the woman, and stress parenting kids. Even if the husband steps up, he still can't breast feed for 3 hours per day.

Pregnancy is really terrible on the woman's body. Post-partem disorders, child birth problems, its just not nice.

Then when you finally get back to your career after 3 months - 5 years, you're passed on promotions, you're n-months behind your peers, and you just don't have the time to hustle for a promotion if you're time is consumed raising kids.

Or if you choose not to have kids, you get financially rewarded for your time. You get more professional responsibility and career development. You get external validation for your hard work (bonuses, promotions, etc). You get full control of your own money, without needing to budget with your partner. You get to live in a better location, because smaller places are more affordable near your work. You don't have a 1+ hour commute to your job.

Being a mom just sucks.
by itake | 2025-07-15 22:12:35+00:00
My $0.02 is being a mom sucks.

In modern relationships, men just want to work and come home to a cooked meal and clean house, but their wives are working just as many hours the men are. Having kids means tension in relationship, unpaid labor by the woman, and stress parenting kids. Even if the husband steps up, he still can't breast feed for 3 hours per day.

Pregnancy is really terrible on the woman's body. Post-partem disorders, child birth problems, its just not nice.

Then when you finally get back to your career after 3 months - 5 years, you're passed on promotions, you're n-months behind your peers, and you just don't have the time to hustle for a promotion if you're time is consumed raising kids.

Or if you choose not to have kids, you get financially rewarded for your time. You get more professional responsibility and career development. You get external validation for your hard work (bonuses, promotions, etc). You get full control of your own money, without needing to negotiate spending your partner's money. You get to live in a better location, because smaller places are more affordable near your work. You don't have a 1+ hour commute to your job.

Being a mom just sucks.
by hamilyon2 | 2025-07-15 22:13:03+00:00
The optimistic scenario for current ai bubble: long careful deflation, one flop at a time.

The cautious scenario of llm usage in daily life: in 36 years, it is invisible and everywhere. Every device has a neural chip. It replaced untold trillions of years of work, reshaped knowledge and artistic work, robotics, became something as boring as email, TV, SAP, or power cable today. Barely anyone is excited. Society is poor, but not hopelessly so.

Humanity forgotten LLMs and is hyping gene engineering.
by ecocentrik | 2025-07-15 22:13:39+00:00
Stephenson's pre-cyberpunk first novel, Zodiac, is about an eco-warrior uncovering a chemical company pollution scheme. In Diamond Age, he talks about an air pollution crisis caused by dead nanobot swarms. From what I remember, most of his anti-corporate messaging was strongly tied to pollution but I don't even see that popping up in his later novels and I never really thought of anti-corporatism as a recuring Stephenson theme.
by Animats | 2025-07-15 22:15:09+00:00
Well, let's see how it works for Russia. Russia has a 1.41 fertility rate (2.1 is breakeven). Plus Russia has lost somewhere around a million soldiers so far in Ukraine. Deaths outnumber births by 1.6 to 1. They need fresh meat for the grinder.[1]

Current steps being taken include:

- Emphasizing family values via the Russian Orthodox Church

- Restricting abortion, which was cheap and easy in the USSR days

- Encourage teenage pregnancy (there's a "Pregnant at 15" TV show)

- Encouraging immigration

So far, it's not working much.

[1] https://nationalsecurityjournal.org/russia-might-be-losing-1...
by ben_w | 2025-07-15 22:16:06+00:00
To quote, "if the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t".

So…

> this is the part where somebody stumbles in to say "dOn'T hUmAnS dO ThE sAmE tHiNg????"

…yes, but also no.

Humans will always seem mysterious to other humans, because we're too complex to be modelled by each other. Basic set of behaviours or not.
by yumlogic | 2025-07-15 22:16:18+00:00
Relative stability, focus on family, growth, men as head of household, minimal single parent families, women spending time with their kids.

Raising kids is a full time job. I am doing both as a father and also as a founder. My wife does not work, does minimal contribution here and there. I dont know where she spends time but she is unavailable. I would rather do it myself than keep fighting.

I think from population front we are not going to have baby boom anytime in next 30 years. Technology will create more isolation than ever. Laws never favor men.

India, most populous country, recently dropped birth rates below replacement level. That is probably most fertile land (for food and reproduction) and yet they are falling behind.

I think unless we see dramatic change in policies worldwide (not going to happen) that puts men and families as center of policy making, it will be all doom from here.

Come back in 30-50 years when new generation is in charge and thinking patterns change.
by ars | 2025-07-15 22:16:34+00:00
> How do you look at a quote stating explicitly that action at a distance is, by definition, instantaneous,

I clicked to the Wikipedia article, I did not see this quote.

> And how has the gravitational attraction of your hand gone more than 200 light years from Earth?

My hand is made of mass collected on earth. Those atoms have been rearranged into the shape of my hand, but their gravity has existed since the beginning of the universe, just in difference shapes.
by _cwpi | 2025-07-15 22:16:44+00:00
I'm totally fine with (re)learning new tools, but having given Helix a solid try found the noun-verb model worse; the visual feedback is fun but distracting, particularly when you're moving around reading code. For it you give up things like repeating edits easily (bound as '.' in Vim). There's also a statefulness to Helix's model that isn't present in Vim; whereas in the latter I only have to care about where I _am_ in the file as I'm making my edit, in Helix I have to care about where I've _been_ because that dictates what I've currently got selected. See my other comment for details.

I want an editor with OOTB configuration and a modal editing paradigm (probably Vim's) that isn't constructed around visually synchronizing every edit action. Doing the latter means relinquishing what's good about an editing language, which is that you needn't actively think about edits so much. It's not about speed, but freeing up mental resources to think about the more interesting programming tasks at hand. Editors that demand more attention are doing a worse job.
by benbridle | 2025-07-15 22:17:00+00:00
> Locked and changed?

That could do with some better wording. Normally the user can freely drag-resize the window, but after the program sets the width or height then the user will be unable to resize that axis. This is for, say, a list program where the screen contents would have a fixed width but a dynamic height, so you'd want to keep the height resizable (unlocked).

> You also seem to be using double to refer to two bytes

Double does mean a 16-bit value, yeah, there's a list of definitions on the main page of the user manual and specification. Short tends to be the expected name for a 16-bit value (from C et al.), but it doesn't make much sense for a short to be the wider of two values. I briefly considered word, but the definition is too broad, with a byte also being a type of word. Double felt like the most intuitive name, because it's double the width of a byte. There weren't really any other decent candidates.

> a individual device for each permission that you wanted to supply and have the host environment optionally provide them

That's more or less the plan, only with a bit more granularity depending on the implementation, so that you can, say, allow reading files but forbid writing or deleting.
by vonneumannstan | 2025-07-15 22:17:01+00:00
I'm sorry but who is out of touch here?

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1460-Latham-St-Mountain-V...

$1.6M 894 sqft 2b1ba

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/4609-E-Mountain-View-Dr-S...

$1.1M 930 sqft 3b3ba

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1763-Fordham-Way-Mountain...

$3.5M 1527 sqft 3b2ba

That last one would be considered a small starter home in my MCOL city and is literally 10x the cost for 300 less sqft of my current home. It's a total joke.

2 FTE Sr SWEs at Google would struggle to even get the downpayment for that last one. The mortgage is like 80% of their after tax salary.
by bigyabai | 2025-07-15 22:17:06+00:00
Apple could just, talk to Khronos again. In any protracted discussion of "how can the industry kill Nvidia", we always circle back around to the lack of communication. There was an era where Apple, AMD and even Nvidia all worked on Open Source non-CUDA acceleration primitives. There were working drivers, (a handful of) users, and bindings in multiple native languages. All they needed was industry applications, which would arrive with the crypto mining boom that Nvidia profited off of hand-over-fist. And by then, Apple refused to cooperate with their industry partners, and refused to support OpenCL on iPhone GPUs or Apple Silicon. Metaphorically, this would be like Apple refusing to implement HTML because they wanted to promote their own Flash alternative.

Nvidia won because they don't deal with this level of asinine infighting. If Khronos could bring back a level of mutual respect to their consortium, they could present a serious threat. Apple is the only business still on their high horse; AMD, Intel and Qualcomm all recognize that they need to cooperate.
by anonym29 | 2025-07-15 22:17:13+00:00
The criminal justice system does not prevent crimes, they just investigate a small handful of crimes, arrest even fewer, and prosecute even fewer.

The federal government, further, has almost zero role in policing. Unless you live in DC, there is a >99% chance that any time you interact with a member of law enforcement, they are state/county/city.

The histrionics over fundamentalist Christians, who make up less than 15% of the country anyway (not some rabid majority trying to stamp out the rights of the minority - they are the minority; most Americans who call themselves "Christian" are closer to atheists in terms of church attendance than the tiny subset of fundamentalists), and are not some dangerous threat.

I grew up in a repressive, fundamentalist evangelical southern Baptist household as a non-hetereosexual. I'm very familiar with that world in the worst of ways, including the loosely regulated Christian boarding schools.

These people are a pain in the ass, but they're not a real danger. To insist otherwise is to critically misunderstand reality, crime rates, and really the general intent of that subset of the population.
by notnmeyer | 2025-07-15 22:17:39+00:00
i know many very smart people that insist that their muscle memory makes it impossible to switch editors or shells.

i respect the perspective of “i like my tools and have no reason to switch”.

what i feel is constantly missed if the understanding that your regular tools are literally one command away. learning something new doesn’t mean you can’t also take advantage of your muscle memory as necessary.
by strange_quark | 2025-07-15 22:17:43+00:00
Ok but isn’t 20 million subscribers out of what, 800 million or 1 billion monthly users or whatever they’re claiming, an absolutely abysmal conversion rate? Especially given that the industry and media have been proclaiming this as somewhere between the internet and the industrial revolution in terms of impact and advancement? Why can they not get more than 3% of users to convert to paying subscribers for such a supposedly world changing technology, even with a massive subsidy?
by aljgz | 2025-07-15 22:18:14+00:00
Consider a function that gets an array of integers and a positive number, and returns the sum of the array elements modulo the number. How can we prove using tests, that this always works for all possible values?

Not discounting the value of tests: we throw a bunch of general and corner cases at the function, and they will ring the alarm if in the future any change to the function breaks any of those.

But they don't prove it's correct for all possible inputs.
by Der_Einzige | 2025-07-15 22:18:45+00:00
The parents might be fine but the kids aren’t. I got my great programmer job entirely because of anger that my family was and continues to be in relatively bottom feeder jobs. The trauma associated with living in even relative poverty compared to your peers is hard to overstate.

Being a parent is a selfish decision - full stop. Antinatalism becoming socially acceptable is entirely due to an authentic ethic of compassion that the older generation and parents have abjectly failed to embody.
by MisterTea | 2025-07-15 22:19:03+00:00
> Costs $2500-4000/mo for infant care where I am.

That's what grandparents are for. Growing up my immediate family lived in the same neighborhood. My mother's parents lived two blocks away and walked over. My fathers parents lived ~15 minutes away. Everyone worked locally. Baby sitters were always named grandma :-)

Now you have to move across the country for a lucrative tech job, leaving behind your support network. You either plan for these things or deal with the consequences. Though I have a feeling many young tech oriented people starting their careers dont have family on their minds...

And lastly, it depends on where you live. An ex military friend moved to a shitty town in PA to be near his mother and sister and bought a hose using the GI bill. He has a federal job, five kids and a stay at home wife. Pretty wild to have a family of seven these days but he is happy and doing good. Family support helps big time.
by SOLAR_FIELDS | 2025-07-15 22:19:24+00:00
As long as it continues to conform to the technical requirements of supported phones on the platform. I can see the reasoning behind wanting to remove it if it's using some API that is not supported in any of the OS's Apple supports, as it's bad UX for their users. That doesn't look like it's the case here though.

The reasoning given by the authors of the article (who are weirdly pro apple and anti this dev) seems also a bit weird

> There is no value to Apple recommending an app that no one else has downloaded for months, since the market has already demonstrated the app no longer has a perceived value to the App Store. Removing it is a better option for Apple than keeping it around and wasting consumer attention, with a high likelihood of it not being bought anyway.

Usually the justification is far more stupidly malicious: Apple instigated a blanket policy that works for 90% of use cases, and this guy fell into the 10% of "Alive, not very popular, but still has value on the app store". Apple being apple, just decides the cost benefit of making exceptions is not worth it and tells the dev to f-off.

Also the comments on that article are pretty rich:

> I get the idea of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it," but I also get that maintaining a level of security and quality in the App Store could require the vendor to provide evidence that they are giving the app a review at least once every three years. If there are no problems, change the date on the splash screen and submit it as an updated app. If that then passes Apple's review, the clock is reset for another three years. This doesn't seem like an unreasonable quality assurance measure.

You mean like the $100 a year that this dev pays to have the developer account to keep the app on the store? What is that money going to, if not for re-review of stuff like this?
by atleastoptimal | 2025-07-15 22:19:32+00:00
He adopts a conspiratorial lens, (or at least implies it), that neurosymbolic AI was "kept down" over the last 4 decades, which is a very funny reframing of the fact that it simply never was useful enough to lift itself off the ground by the virtue of its own merits in the first place. If a ground-up neurosymbolic approached had shown promise in getting an AI system to the general level of intelligence LLM's have reached, it would have been adopted and scaled up. The money, research and effort went to what was useful, and transformers won out by virtue of their undeniable utility.
by evantbyrne | 2025-07-15 22:19:43+00:00
You seem to be lost. While referencing a TV show may or may not be a rebuttal to a very specific kind of worldview, it is out of place as a response to my post to which you've failed to actually directly reference at all.

I'm addressing this point at you personally because we can all see your comments: being nasty to atheists on the internet will never be a substitute for hard evidence for your ideology.
by namibj | 2025-07-15 22:19:50+00:00
AFAIK in Germany for DOCSIS it's common to have DS-Lite in the mode with lightweight 4over6, so the CPE does the NAT and the carrier just range checks the client side IPv4 port to fall within that customer's block.

No state at the carrier; IP:6 native network.

If you buy a full IPv4 you get one for yourself but I expect still through the same tunneling machinery to keep the network IPv6-only.
by rbanffy | 2025-07-15 22:20:03+00:00
Not quite. It’ll first be masticated, digested, and excreted before a simplistic version of it becomes the next mainstream.

Perhaps a more accurate (and less cruel) analogy would be that it will receive some scaffolding to sustain it - the leading edge is always unfinished. By the time it becomes mainstream, it’s closer to a product than an idea.
by bshepard | 2025-07-15 22:21:49+00:00
"It’s November 28, 1660. Europe is in the early stages of transforming from the Middle Ages into something new"

This is a grotesque misrepresentation of European history! By 1660, universities had existed for more than a half millenia, had redeveloped lost roman engineering capacities and invented world-shattering new technologies.

Oy!