MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by domenicd | 2025-07-26 07:01:18+00:00
I honestly would be totally fine with large providers being the ones to host and "own" all my media---_if_ they were obsessive stewards of data quality.

To me it seems very reasonable to have these things hosted in central repositories, with large corporate stewards of the creative works, which I can access on any device for a monthly fee. The creators and owners of the works could then upgrade them over time, e.g. to newer formats or to fix errors.

But in practice, this isn't how it turns out:

* Tons of Kindle books have minor typos or OCR errors. These will never get fixed. If I had local copies, I could fix them... But nobody else would benefit from my fixes.

* Disney+ has misconfigured four episodes in Daredevil season 1 to show forced English subtitles for when English is on the screen---e.g. when there's an exit sign, there will be forced subtitles for "EXIT". I can only imagine if I submit some sort of ticket for this it'll just disappear into the ether.

* The Marvel Unlimited comic app, to their credit, is doing a great job digitizing their giant backlog. But they haven't paid a lot of attention to the flow of series, so e.g. "annual" issues are not slotted into the series they're part of. Back in the days when I collected cbz files, I painstakingly placed them all in sequence.

* Spotify's music metadata is pretty bad, and its collection is missing things like game soundtracks. (Although it has plenty of indy remixes of game soundtracks, clogging up the search results.)

* I worry that the "original quality" of all this media is getting lost over time. Certainly watching shows on Netflix is going to be lower quality on an absolute scale than Blu-ray rips, right? Similarly, comics are transmitted to my device as JPGs---I hope someone has the original, uncompressed pages stored somewhere.

If I had local copies of all this media, I could organize it beautifully, fix typos, set up perfect metadata/subtitles/etc. I used to do that, with pirated media, back in college. But it doesn't feel like a great use of time these days, mainly because nobody else will benefit from my obsessive work.

I wish the custodians of this media would care more about it, or put in place systems for community contributions to improve it. But the incentives are not there in terms of $$$, sadly.
by motorest | 2025-07-26 07:01:43+00:00
> People say that about hard things, and I only want to do hard things.

That's perfectly fine. Your time, your hobbies.

> Nobody wants people who can do easy things, people want people who can do hard things.

No, not really. People want people who do easy things, because they are clever enough to avoid needlessly wasting their time having to do hard things when they could have easily avoided it.

It's your blend of foolish mindset that brought us so many accidental complexity and overdue projects. There's a saying: working smart instead of working hard.

> So go ahead, write your own date library, your own Unicode font rendering, compiler, OS, game engine or what ever else people tell you to never do because its hard.

You can cut it out, this isn't LinkedIn.
by Retric | 2025-07-26 07:03:00+00:00
You’re misunderstanding what the issues with US healthcare are.

I’ve had significant medical issues in the US and received truly excellent care without significant out of pocket costs, the same is true for many of my friends and family. There’s a reason there’s significant medical tourism to the US and from the US. However on population wide measures like life expectancy you’re better off providing basic care for 100% of the population than world class care for 40%.

There’s also major underlying issues like decades of obesity and ignorance around ‘alternative medicine’, vaccines, etc.
by elric | 2025-07-26 07:03:43+00:00
I wish my bank had a setting I could toggle so 3DS would always trigger. I've had my card blocked twice because someone asshat made a bunch of online payments with it, some of which failed, but some succeeded. Presumably some shitty website leaked my details, but ideally 3DS should ensure that those details are unusable. Alas that wasn't the case.
by RealCodingOtaku | 2025-07-26 07:04:09+00:00
This. I dislike most mobile websites as much as I hate the mobile apps. So to pick my poison, I have a formula.

- Banking: Install it on a different android profile because my websites forces me to use the App one way or the other anyway.

- If the site uses an existing open protocol to interact (IndieWeb, Fediverse, etc), use a non-browser/non-electron app that can handle multiple instances of such protocols.

- If not, and it has PWA, is responsive, and I use it at least twice a day, use the PWA (so far I have one).

- If it does not have PWA, but have has nice responsive layout, Firefox Android with uBlock Origin (I use Iornfox).

- For everything else, if I'm outside without a laptop, whine, complain, and use the website in the mobile browser, enable desktop mode if it has a crappy UI.

- If I'm not outside, browse it from my laptop.
by RamblingCTO | 2025-07-26 07:04:25+00:00
Can confirm from my experience. Although not everyone is like this. Sent me into burnout that I didn't wanna be a dick and extract as much "value" from the employees by walking over them and fucking them over when the chance arises. It's always empty promises to string people along. From my experience, these people (the resource extraction dicks) are also some of the must unlikable and unhappy people I've ever met.
by motorest | 2025-07-26 07:04:27+00:00
> Your customers will pay more for things that are hard to do. Ask ASML.

What a silly example. ASML is valuable because it does something no one else does. It's not because it's hard, it's because they have the know-how and infrastructure to do it whereas others don't.

Juggling is hard. Do you know any millionaire jugglers?
by d13z | 2025-07-26 07:04:36+00:00
I think we are missing the biggest elephant in the room: advertisement.

An ad show on a native mobile app pays between 5x to 10x more than the same ad in a webpage.

Advertiser's also get way more data from the mobile app than the data they can get from a webpage.

The company I work for makes 75% of their revenue from showing ads and they pushed very aggressively to install their app.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-07-26 07:05:43+00:00
For what it's worth I myself am actually quite opposed to the status quo when it comes to freedom of expression. Most people, notably even most US nationals, seem to feel that the US permits too much. In contrast I favor compete abolishment of the obscenity carveouts.

However that isn't a free standing view on my part. I acknowledge that the conservatives raise a number of hard hitting points about corrosion of the social fabric, but observe that even jurisdictions with far stricter laws than the US still appear to suffer the same ills (in addition to those caused by the laws themselves).

My view is that this is due to modern technology having fundamentally changed the social dynamic. Continually eroding civil liberties in a doomed attempt to regain some imagined ideal of the past strikes me as nothing more than an obscene parallel to the war on drugs.

Given that we clearly recognize that certain activities are detrimental to society when flaunted in public surely we could apply the same principle to various forms of expression? It's not much of a leap - you'll already land yourself in trouble if you go around shouting your head off or intimidating people for example. Analogous to alcohol consumption, I'd much prefer a clear distinction between standards for public displays, secluded public business establishments, and private gatherings than the bizarre scenarios that the current obscenity laws inevitably give rise to.
by anonymid | 2025-07-26 07:07:22+00:00
I added next-edit-prediction to my neovim plugin.

This was pretty interesting to implement!

- I used an [lsp server](https://github.com/dlants/magenta.nvim/pull/162/files#diff-3...) to track opened files and aggregate text changes to get a stream of diffs.

- I then feed that along with the [context surrounding the cursor](https://github.com/dlants/magenta.nvim/pull/162/files#diff-1...), and a [system prompt](https://github.com/dlants/magenta.nvim/pull/162/files#diff-a...) into an LLM, [forcing a tool use for a find/replace within the context window](https://github.com/dlants/magenta.nvim/pull/162/files#diff-1...)

- Finally, I show the find/replace in the buffer using [virtual text extmarks](https://github.com/dlants/magenta.nvim/pull/162/files#diff-1...), applying a comment effect to the added sections, and a strikethrough to the removed sections

One thing that is interesting about this is that I wasn't able to get good results from smaller/faster models like claude haiku, so I opted to use a larger model instead. I found that the small delay of about a second was worth it for more consistent results.

I also opted to have this be manually triggered (Shift-Ctrl-l by default in insert or normal mode). This is a lot [less distracting](https://unstable.systems/@sop/114898566686215926).

One cool thing is that you can use a plugin parameter, or a project-level parameter to [append to the system prompt](https://github.com/dlants/magenta.nvim/blob/main/node/option...). I think by providing additional [examples of how you want it to behave](https://github.com/dlants/magenta.nvim/blob/main/node/provid...), you can have it be a lot more useful for your specific use-case.
by staindk | 2025-07-26 07:07:26+00:00
If everything on show at open sauce were those stupid 3D printed dragons I'd agree with you. But the maker movement is massive and interesting and goes very very deep.

You can self-learn as much about engineering as you'd learn at university. Most kids eventually pivot from wanting to be astronauts/influencers to something more realistic.

IMO tinkering is an amazing hobby which will benefit you in whatever direction your career ends up going in.
by skissane | 2025-07-26 07:07:58+00:00
> While your preferred specification is excellent, It’s “an ethernet port” in ordinary usage. Or “ethernet jack” in more technical contexts and entirely sufficient for Ali Express.

Right, in your average 2020s home or office, "Ethernet" is almost certainly 8P8C (commonly known as RJ-45). In decades past it was more ambiguous – in the 1990s, coax – ThinNet/10Base2 – was still reasonably common; even the older ThickNet/10Base5 would still occasionally be encountered. So to some extent, being specific is a bit of an "old timer" trait–a habit picked up decades ago when it was still important, now maintained when it is rarely still necessary.

But even in the 2020s – in a factory, it could easily be M12 instead. Or even a mix of both – 8P8C in the offices, but M12 on the factory floor.

Honestly, even in a home environment, I hate how fragile and easily unplugged 8P8C connectors are (the worst part is when they get slightly pulled out, so they still look like they are plugged in, but the connection is dead or flaky). I've thought about using M12 at home before, but it probably wouldn't be very practical.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-07-26 07:07:59+00:00
In short no. LFP is very safe. People have done tests involving shotguns, flamethrowers, hammers/nails, etc. And while that destroys the battery, they don't tend to explode, combust, burn uncontrollably, etc. These are nice party tricks with predictable outcome if you understand the chemistry (it's inherently safe).
by crinkly | 2025-07-26 07:08:18+00:00
I hate everything on mobile. The apps are badly put together. The web sites are crap.

I think Apple's core apps that ship with iOS are about the only things that don't annoy me. They work offline and disconnected for days at a time quite happily and generally work as intended. No one else seems to bother with that and rather ships some fat web turd instead that works occasionally and forces you to sign in all the time.
by penguin_booze | 2025-07-26 07:08:32+00:00
On Android, I use the Hermit app. It containerizes webpages to give it an app-like look, feel, and some behaviours. It saves me from installing a lot of apps whose services offer website.

I'd argue that a this task can be taken up by the mobile browser itself: i.e., to offer to install a shortcut icon that'll launch the page within an app container/sandbox. The common resistance to using website directly--and thus the preference to use the app, other than for performance reasons--stems from the inconvenience of typing and navigating on a small screen. If the browser helpfully offers to bypass that step (you've to do that at most once), a large number of apps would suddenly lose their pull.
by bl4ckneon | 2025-07-26 07:08:49+00:00
I would argue that it does turn more people onto engineering paths and will result in more engineers. But it could just be a cool hobby! Does every person who is interested in cooking become a chef? Every person who is into sports become an athlete? Music a musician?

With tech becoming more prevalent, people making more things and people repairing more things, I think it's an overall good thing. Also if they become content creators, then so what?
by donatj | 2025-07-26 07:09:41+00:00
Hear me out - tabs are better because there is no possibility of invalid indentation state. "Make invalid states unrepresentable" and all that,

If your style rule is 4 spaces, you have 3 invalid indentation levels for every valid one. Even if you only use two spaces half your possible indentation levels are invalid.

The number of times in my life I've been editing a space-indented file in vim on some sshed server and had to count spaces is way too high.
by PeterStuer | 2025-07-26 07:10:38+00:00
"And why Python, then? Well, said Sussman, it probably just had a library already implemented for the robotics interface, that was all."

I was from the same "Nouvelle AI"/Robotics cohort as Leslie Kaelbling. Autonomous Robotics in AI back then was a fairly small community, so everyone (at least in the nato and friends) knew each other from conferences and workshops.

Having written kernel and interface libraries for those type of robot systems in those days, it was not that much work that it would need to be an issue determining language choice.

My uninformed guess based on what lived in the community at the time would be that the teachings were so focussed on the ideas of physical grounding, control paradigms and systems, "the world is its own best model" and reaction against the symbolic reasoning systems that came before, that Scheme/Lisp had to go because it was an icon of the symbolic paradigm, and that in the new 'subsymbolic' world we did not pay attention to the programming language at all, because basically it was all data/signal flow and intercoupled and layered differential equations from sensors to actuators anyways.
by codedokode | 2025-07-26 07:12:11+00:00
Age verification should be made on OS or firmware level when buying a device. And not by sending your passport scan to random companies with dubious data collection practices.

A law must mandate that an "adult" version of OS (or device) may be sold only to adult users. It is not difficult for Microsoft/Apple to implement this yet they do not want to for some reason.

This would allow more reliable age verification, without revealing identity of account owners. Well, maybe the govt wants exactly the opposite.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-07-26 07:12:48+00:00
The material difference with the Internet is ROI. If you're going to attack your enemies, the ROI of a troll farm is thousands of times higher than that of a standing army and a conventional military campaign. The ROI of an AI-powered automated troll farm is even higher.

The result is a kind of anti-literacy. Most people can read the words, comparatively few people are media-literate enough to filter truth from lies with any reliability. So the current media landscape is unusually poisonous. It's mostly vested interests lying to you and trying to manipulate you, through ads, troll farms, and mainstream media.

The fix would be AI filtering of content. Right now there's no chance whatsoever of that working accurately, but it's possible in principle to counteract the rise of AI disinformation with AI critiques of it.

Among all of the other revolutionary changes promised by AI, that possibility has flown under the radar. But it would be a political and economic showstopper if implemented, because everyone would suddenly be seeing authoritative, accurate news and analysis - like old-school fairness doctrine journalism, but better because it could presented at a level that matched the reader, while also allowing questions.

Ironically Grok was doing something like this for a while, until it... wasn't any more.
by bjornnn | 2025-07-26 07:12:49+00:00
America's railroad boom isn't a great example, it got us the worst rail infrastructure in the world, built by private monopolies solely for maximum short-term profit, i.e. moving freight and not passengers, and now American industry is largely gone and we're stuck with rail infrastructure that is useless to almost everyone and it costs far more to maintain it than it's even worth.

America's internet infrastructure, like the railroads, was also left in the hands of private monopolies and it is also a piece of shit compared to other countries. It's slow and everyone pays far too much for it and many are still excluded from it because it's not profitable enough to run fiber to their area.

The AI bubble won't leave behind any new infrastructure when it bursts. Just millions of burned out GPUs that get sent to an e-waste processing plant where they are ground up into sand, trillions of dollars wasted, many terawatt hours of energy wasted, many billions of liters of freshwater wasted, and the internet being buried under an avalanche of pseudorandomly-generated garbage.
by 4gotunameagain | 2025-07-26 07:13:03+00:00
> They're going to have to re-learn how to engage with a larger more industrially successful power and keep on good terms with people through diplomacy

This will take decades, if it ever happens. The entire political and power system of the US is rife in arrogance and the thought that they can do whatever they want. Because they could, for quite a while. Look at all the coups, all the meddling.
by crossroadsguy | 2025-07-26 07:13:13+00:00
That is in context of Reddit being Reddit. It kept screwing with its mobile site for years (now it's FUBAR btw), so third-party apps were the only sane way to use it on mobile. Even Reddit’s official app used to be a decent third party app - Alien Blue. Then Reddit bought it and made it pathetic. That’s why people used third party reddit apps.

On desktop, the browser’s always been the best way to use Reddit — as long as old.reddit still works. If you are on a non-Safari browser, there's also RES.

Same goes for many other sites. Like HN — it’s fine on mobile browser unless I bump the font size, then it pretty much breaks. But I’m not installing an HN app for something the mobile usage time share is barely 5–10%.
by positron26 | 2025-07-26 07:13:24+00:00
Holy shit. We need need better early phase governance tools than handshakes and winks. The SAFE was written to streamline things so that everyone can get to work right now with a reasonable basis of trust. How can we have that basis of trust among founders and early hires when stuff like this happens?

If no founders can be trusted, sweat equity partnerships will become rare. If the only people who can build companies are VC funded founders who hire employees who treat the whole thing like a game, there will not be a good crop of companies to come out of that environment.

Founding is freaking hard. It needs to be reliably and fairly rewarded. Otherwise the people trying to bootstrap and make things happen have nowhere to go if the idea they are completely convinced MUST be built is also a hard hard sell to VC hive minds... because it's too oddly shaped (innovative).

We all have an interest to put the instruments and paperwork into place to make stories like this NOT happen so that sweat equity startups founded on personal convictions and strong cooperative incentive alignment will happen.

https://positron.solutions/careers
by omcnoe | 2025-07-26 07:13:42+00:00
In New Zealand we use a special local coordinate system NZGD2000 that accounts for both tectonic drift and one-off Earthquake slip events.

The numerical coordinate values stay the same but their mapping to real world positions change over time. Hence the coordinate converter requires date as a parameter: https://www.geodesy.linz.govt.nz/concord/

https://www.linz.govt.nz/guidance/survey/earthquakes/kaikour...
by kelthuzad | 2025-07-26 07:13:43+00:00
>We had instructions for how to pin the site to your home screen, and would explain to users how the website does everything an app can do. Still, constant requests for an app.

This is the result of the inconsistent user experience to which gatekeepers like Apple have been actively contributing through active sabotage of web apps, such that all profitable apps can be more effectively and reliably taxed through Apple's App Store.

The manufactured perception of the general public then became that web apps are not "real apps" despite offering the exact same features. They have been dragged down by the subtle artificial friction that makes the UX feel subpar.

This reminds me of my own experience of mobile websites when they first emerged. I thought that the desktop version of a website is the "real website" i.e. that there is only one static original website and that its mobile version was some fake substitute, so I always activated the option "show desktop version". Then I learned about responsive web design and it clicked for me. I predict that a similar epiphany will occur among casuals once the active sabotage of web apps stops due to regulations reigning in the anti-competitive business practices of gatekeepers.

I'm sure that some people will still prefer "native" apps for whatever reason. However, if regulators do a proper job and allow web apps to compete on a level playing field, then a lay person wouldn't even be able to differentiate between them. This is even the case today where some developers simply wrap their web app in a WebView and ship it as a "native" app.
by Nevermark | 2025-07-26 07:14:54+00:00
We just need a site for posting null result reports.

With really good keyword, search functionality.

Much less formal requirements than regular papers, make it easy. But with some common sense guidelines.

And public upvotes, and commenting, so contributors get some feedback love, and failures can attract potential helpful turnaround ideas.

And of course, annual rewards. For humor & not so serious (because, why so serious?) street cred, but with the serous mission of raising consciousness about how negative results are not some narrow bit of information, but that attempts and results, bad or not, are rich sources of new ideas.
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-07-26 07:14:58+00:00
right, and the problem is that even if you have a good site on mobile it is sitting in the browser, the gateway to all the awful site experiences, to get to your good site people may go through a bunch of crap. Thus they would rather have an app.

The problem is not just to make your site mobile friendly, it is also that the rest of the web isn't.
by Xylakant | 2025-07-26 07:15:08+00:00
Legally speaking, it’s probably possible. Practically speaking it almost certainly a guarantee that the company will never see outside investment. On every round someone would need to pony up the cash to fill that employees stock. Anti-dilution clauses exist, but they never work like that.

Such a privilege is also likely to be almost worthless - if the company succeeds and the round makes it worth more, you’ll win even with dilution. If the company doesn’t, then other clauses such as liquidation preferences will make your stock worthless, regardless of how much you own.