MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ffsm8 | 2025-07-06 09:16:49+00:00
I don't agree with that whatsoever.

If you want to use a the software analogy it's advocating for using a simple monolith you can maintain with <10 people vs a distributed micro service architecture you're working on with hundreds of devs and has countless non essential features which can break the spirit of the system if used in conjunction.

Drafting a simple tax system is easy. The thing that would be borderline impossible is getting it passed into law because of vested interests
by kragen | 2025-07-06 09:16:53+00:00
Right, you need something more specific than Lua to actually write most complete programs in. The LuaJIT REPL does provide a C FFI by default, for example, so you don't need to install C modules.

But my concern is mostly not about needing to bring my own batteries; it's about instability of interfaces resulting from evaporating batteries.
by mynameisvlad | 2025-07-06 09:17:02+00:00
That might be true generally and shallowly, but I've gotten way further both professionally and personally by being vulnerable and honest with my anxieties and insecurities.

Especially with other neurospicy folks, it's a very easy way to bond. My issues might not be the exact same, but it's close enough that they can empathize and grow closer as friends/coworkers.
by ben_w | 2025-07-06 09:17:14+00:00
> they just can't do it _before_ you correct them

The screenshot literally shows the LLM used bold text for "not supported by mainstream archaeology or Egyptology."

> LLMs cannot differentiate between a good source and a bad source.

Can you?

A not insignificant part of my history GCSE was just this: how to tease apart truth from all the sources, primary and secondary, which had their own biases and goals in the telling. It was an optional subject even at that level, and even subsequently in adulthood there were a lot of surprises left for me about the history of the British Empire, surprises that I didn't learn until decades later when I met people from former colonies who were angry about what was done to them by my parents' and grandparents' generations.

It's not a coincidence that the world "story" is contained within "history", the etymology is the same: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/story vs. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/history

Likewise in German where both concepts are the same word: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Geschichte

My mum was New-Age type, had books of the general category that would include alien pyramids, though I don't know if that specific was included. She didn't know what she didn't know, and therefore kept handing out expensive homeopathic sand and salt tablets to family members (the bottles literally had "sodium chloride" and "titanium dioxide" printed on them).

People, including you and I, don't know what they don't know.
by aniviacat | 2025-07-06 09:18:15+00:00
USD predictably loses value over time. That means a stablecoin issuer can invest the gained fiat dollars in stable stocks, and make a reliable profit.

Gold can (and does) rapidly rise in value. An issuer of a gold stablecoin could only ensure avoiding bankruptcy by actually owning that amount of gold.

That would probably be difficult to do in practice. (And would also significantly cut into the profit potential of the issuer.)
by seanhunter | 2025-07-06 09:18:20+00:00
The google AI clippy thing at the top of search has to be one of the most pointless, ill-advised and brand-damaging stunts they could have done. Because compute is expensive at scale (even for them) it’s running a small model, so the suggestions are pretty terrible. That leads people to who don’t understand what’s happening to think their AI is just bad in general.

That’s not the case in my experience. Gemini is almost as good as Claude for most of the things I try.

That said, for queries tgat don’t use agentic search or rag, hallucination is as bad a problem as ever and it won’t improve because hallucination is all these models do. In Karpathy’s phrase they “dream text”. Agentic search and rag and similar techniques disguise the issue because they stuff the context of the model with real results, so the scope for it to go noticeably off the rails is less. But it’s still very visible if you ask for references, links etc many/most/sometimes all will be hallucinations depending on the prompt.
by impossiblefork | 2025-07-06 09:18:40+00:00
Personally I believe that the days of the reserve currencies are close to over, and that they will go away with the going away of the oil trade.

The present situation is one where if one wants oil, which everybody does and has nothing to trade directly with the oil countries, must export something to someone else who either exports or sells something to the oil countries, or who in turn exports or sells something to someone who exports or sells something to the oil countries. I believe that once this ends trade itself will become less important. Today it's mandatory to get oil, but once we don't need oil, the export of goods to acquire dollars to buy oil becomes optional.

Consequently I see the future as one in which people will manufacture what they themselves need or want, instead of what sells abroad.
by rollcat | 2025-07-06 09:22:21+00:00
What's the landscape like, for when you need to scale your project up? As in: your project needs more structure, third-party integrations, atomic deployments, etc - not necessarily more performance.

Python has Werkzeug, Flask, or at the heavier end Django. With Werkzeug, you can translate your CGI business logic one small step at a time - it's pretty close to speaking raw HTTP, but has optional components like a router or debugger.
by M4v3R | 2025-07-06 09:22:42+00:00
I’ve put some of the things I’ve learned in the README, but in general I feel more familiar with how Phaser works, how to achieve different outcomes, how to properly prompt the agents to get good results when making a game, and what to watch for when creating more complex game systems. The tutorial system in general proved to be challenging and if I had to make it again I would be more specific in how exactly it should be architected.
by pksebben | 2025-07-06 09:22:43+00:00
The workaround for this, ironically, is more tech.

"Sorry, I've got like 20 lith-ions in there. I can pull them out if you'd like to see them." cue shiteating grin and grumping from the airline staff.

On the one hand I feel good about it because your dumb rules are dumb and fuck that shit. On the other hand, it's not the air steward's fault Frank Lorenzo was a lizard person puke pustule.

edit: Appropriate use of 'cue'
by willguest | 2025-07-06 09:23:11+00:00
This post, and presumably its author, is reaching escape velocity, or at least max-Q.

A second-order difficulty is that the tools with which we could go about dissecting, reimagining and reconstructing new society are also tainted by the powers that have delivered such malignant incentives and effects. This is not new and the fervour and insistence will continue to mount as the cracks in the dam grow in number and size.

There are, however, positive routes forward but in my experience they are somewhat alienating because the majority of people around you will think you are mad, weird or simply delusional. To be clear, I am probably all of those things (definitely the first two), but I prefer that to being a commodity powering a machine that is disinterested in anything that doesn't make it bigger. Two illustrations:

First, cognitivism. A sneaky, anthropocentric idea that simulataneously promotes and soothes a sense of dissonance. We don't, imo, create meaning primarily by modelling simulations of the world in our heads and forming goals based on them. Sure, this happens, but to give it primacy will lead to all sorts of unexpected and unpleasant effects. Alternative: constructivism.

Second, systems of perpetual (exponential) growth. Every day we buy into this by transacting within a system that has this implicit assumption built into it. We do not (an cannot) comprehend the scale and influence of this, because society is unpredictable and the effects are often emergent. Example: tragedy of the commons. This system didn't just show up by itself, nor was it the creation of a shadowy cabal - it perpetuates because we all use it, all the time. Alternative: imagine harder, build systems that mimic nature in its sigmoidal beauty, not only their growth phase.

An important milestone is, imo, proper systems thinking. This is no-ones fault and we are all complicit, but we all possess the ability for radical adaptation and, where it has been cultivated, the ability to rebuild all that which is broken.

I regularly think/read about, work towards and promote such angles, including ethical algorithm design, open-model behavioural analysis and value-aware technology. If anyone would like to join my micro-revolution, you are most welcome. I should warn you though, it doesn't pay well.
by imiric | 2025-07-06 09:23:15+00:00
I've been using Emacs daily for well over a decade now, but I just can't get myself to use any of its shells, or features that replace standard shell workflows.

I think the main reason—besides muscle memory and the scripts, aliases, and commands I'm already used to—is because a POSIX-compliant shell exposes a generic interface for both programs and users. Programs can receive and output data over standard file descriptors. They have a CLI with common design conventions regarding flag and argument parsing. Some programs choose not to follow these conventions, and some have a very complex CLI, but for the most part users can expect a specific interface to exist. Man pages have a standard format, and way of accessing them for all programs. And so on. All compliant shells on Unix-like systems work in a similar way, which means that the workflows I'm already used to are easily transferrable to any other system.

Contrast this with the workflow table in TFA. It's a mishmash of different Emacs modes, each with their own quirks, UI, and ways of interacting with other modes. One could say that Elisp ties it all together, but it's a general purpose programming language which obviously doesn't enforce a cohesive user interface for packages to follow. Eshell even complicates this because it resembles a POSIX shell, but doesn't follow any Emacs interface guidelines, so it breaks conventions of both sides. Sure, I could force myself to learn the intricacies of each package over a long time, and create a cohesive Emacs configuration that works for me, but I would need to lug around that configuration and depend on Emacs for everything. Which I'm sure Emacs purists would claim is the way to go, but I don't like that. The beauty of Unix systems is the ability to easily replace any tool in your workflow without impacting everything else. For example, I've mostly replaced `ls` with `eza`, `grep` with `rg`, `find` with `fd`, `top` with `btop`, etc. These were essentially drop-in replacements with minimal impact to me. Consider what it would take to replace dired or Magit, as perfect as they might be.

The Unix "small programs that do one thing well" philosophy is often ignored, unfortunately. Emacs might be the single biggest offender of it, though I suppose it's to be expected since "GNU's Not Unix"... The benefit of it is precisely the flexibility it gives to users. As much as I love Emacs, I'm not married to it, so relying on one special program that does many things would be harmful for me in the long run if a better alternative appears in the future.
by hnarn | 2025-07-06 09:23:49+00:00
> One of the reasons Uber mentioned when moving to mysql in their engineering blog

If I'm not mistaken, this was in 2016 (that's 10 years next year, time flies when you're having fun) -- which is practically an eternity in IT. I'm no DBA but I'm fairly sure many changes have been made to Postgres since then, including logical replication (which can be selective), parallel apply of large transactions in v16, and so on.

I'm not saying this means their points are invalid, I don't know Postgres well enough for that, but any point made almost 10 years ago against one of the most popular and most actively developed options in its field should probably be taken with a pinch of salt.
by foobarbecue | 2025-07-06 09:25:41+00:00
"If an electric trucks can save money, every business will switch immediately"

Real life is not that simple. Depending on your cargo and routes, profitability might be about might be more about capacity (mass or volume), purchase cost, operating cost, max range, etc. And then... businesses have inertia and are only rational actors the extent that the people who control them are.
by morsch | 2025-07-06 09:26:25+00:00
> the level of adoption of electric trucks as in Germany

2.4%[1], which is more than I would have guessed, but I think that number includes delivery vehicles. For semis, it's 0.4% (and 2% of new registrations in Q1 2025). So, still a long way to go.

That's for vehicles registered in Germany. Half of the heavy trucks on the Autobahn are registered elsewhere[2], which makes sense given geography -- I guess it's similar in the Netherlands.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elektrolastkraftwagen#Deutschl... but the source is government data

[2] https://company.toll-collect.de/de/magazin/lkw-verkehr-deuts... roughly; 5 years ago
by f6v | 2025-07-06 09:26:40+00:00
> With all possible social changes like the article suggests this focus could change too.

I have an anecdote from Denmark. It’s a rich country with one of the best work-life balance in the world. Socialized healthcare and social safety net.

I noticed that during the election, they put the ads with just the candidate’s face and party name. It’s like they didn’t even have a message. I asked why. The locals told me nobody cares because “they’re all the same anyway”.

Two things could be happening: either all the candidates are really the same. Or people choose to focus on doing the things they like with their free time and resources. My feeling tells me it’s the second.
by potamic | 2025-07-06 09:26:43+00:00
This is some remarkable intuition. Electromagnetism wasn't even developed as a theory. To observe such varied phenomena like how nerves communicate or what comprises matter or the behaviour of light and postulate they might all have something in common and something to do with the attraction/repulsion seen when objects are rubbed together, is incredible. Was the idea very unique for its time or did scientists at the time hold similar ideas? Do you think it was just a lucky guess in the end that the world didn't turn out to be more complex or was there some reason behind this craziness?
by danlitt | 2025-07-06 09:27:17+00:00
It isn't a dichotomy! You are trying to argue that cloud storage is a bad choice on pure ideological grounds, but you haven't justified it with any data. It is a matter of fact that you are more likely to misconfigure, lose, destroy or otherwise screw up your self-hosted solution than Amazon are to withdraw service. If your reason is just "I hate Amazon" or "I don't like services that are not under my control" then say that.
by foobarbecue | 2025-07-06 09:27:29+00:00
"If an electric trucks can save money, every business will switch immediately"

Real life is not that simple. Depending on your cargo and routes, profitability might be about might be more about capacity (mass or volume), purchase cost, operating cost, max range, torque, reliability etc. And then... businesses have inertia and are only rational actors the extent that the people who control them are.
by ralferoo | 2025-07-06 09:28:16+00:00
> This is simply not going to be an issue with EV trucks. A fire is possible but much less likely in general, and MUCH less likely in that specific scenario.

I'm actually not so sure. If the gradient is so steep that the vehicle is struggling to move at all, the current through the motor windings will be very high, causing the windings to overheat, potentially fail and potentially short circuit. There's a high risk of damaging the MOSFETs in the motor controller, which very much could lead to a fire risk depending on the failure mode.

There's not really many ways to solve this problem - in a normal 3-phase winding, all you can do is remove the current until it cools down and try again, but that will force the motor to stop and then try to restart, so creating an even larger load. Possibly if you have 6 more more phases and more magnets such that each of the normal 3-phases has multiple windings and magnets, you can cycle through the different ones and still keep applying some torque, but obviously this would still not really solve the fundamental problem.

Essentially the problem is the same for ICE vs EV - if the gradient is so steep and load so heavy that the engine / motor can't provide enough force, then it will be overloaded. Whether that's through pressure / shearing / excess heat in an ICE or through excess current / excess heat in EV, the outcome is failure to continue forward at best.

The only real solution is to massively over engineer the engine for normal situations, but human nature being what it is, there will always push things way beyond the designed limits and safety margins until it fails.
by junon | 2025-07-06 09:28:48+00:00
Chill. This is the defacto statement, they probably just copied it from somewhere.

GA was the only way to get a simple page count view without setting up a database or a backend system before we switched to serverless cloud step function lambda craziness.

Seems like a passion project, and they just wanted to know if their work was used. I give people the benefit of the doubt on all of this when it's a small site.
by VBprogrammer | 2025-07-06 09:29:09+00:00
My trip home to my parents is 400 miles (about 650km) and that's far from the the most extreme journey.

Presumably you mean with recharging? Which is theoretically fine but the charging infrastructure for large vehicles is currently nonexistent. We see some electric busses, from Gatwick if I remember correctly, coming to recharge at Cobham services in the regular car charging spots.
by konart | 2025-07-06 09:29:37+00:00
>This isn't for introverts its intended for people with social anxiety

This.

Introverts (in general) have no problems with communication\networking etc. Introverts simply do not _need_ company.

Extraverts, on the other hand, contrary to what people often think, _need_ company to do stuff, even though they may be not so hot on networking or partying.
by socalgal2 | 2025-07-06 09:30:11+00:00
It is not a schizophrenic zip file to have inline headers that are not referenced in the TOC. the TOC is the only source of truth in a zip file. It was designed this way in purpose so that you can add new versions of files on your 20 disk zip without having to re-write all 20 disks. Pkzip would read the TOC from disk 20, append your new file to disk 20 (or 21 if there was not enough space) and then write a new TOC at the end that does not reference the old file still in the zip. That is by design. Reading anything other than the files in the TOC is an invalid zip reader
by pydry | 2025-07-06 09:30:46+00:00
During the depression this was done with a job guarantee. Instead of paying people to sit on their ass they paid people to build stuff like the Lincoln tunnel, which was preferable for them (and even for us, we still use that stuff).

UBI is more like the grain dole which Roman Emperors used to temper mass unrest and "prove" their benevolence.

It seems to be in vogue among tech moguls who cant distinguish between abject dependence on the Chinese industrial system/systematic underinvestment in infrastructure and all jobs being automated thanks to their glorious genius.
by hnarn | 2025-07-06 09:31:01+00:00
I guess it all depends on your requirements, since this would still cause data loss for the delta time between failure and your last snapshot, but I'm a huge fan of ZFS, and it might be one reason to try out Postgres on FreeBSD, since the only Linux distro that ships ZFS painlessly out of the box is Ubuntu to my knowledge.

I'm also curious how Distributed Replicated Block Device (DRBD) would perform, it would cause obvious latency but perhaps it would be an easier and more efficient solution for a "hot spare" setup than using Postgres native functionality. To my understanding, DRBD can be configured to protect you from hardware IO errors by "detaching" from an erroring disk.

I also don't know if it's a valid point, but I've heard people say that you don't want a fancy CoW filesystem for databases, since much of the functionality offered are things that databases already solve themselves, so you might be sacrificing performance for safety from things that "should not happen"(tm) anyway, depending on how it's set up I guess.
by eurleif | 2025-07-06 09:31:34+00:00
Node.js actually had no parallelism at the start, other than the ability to manually spawn new processes. Worker threads were only added in 2018 with v10.5.0, and only stabilized in 2019 with v12.

What Node.js had from the start was concurrency via asynchronous IO. And before Node.js was around to be JavaScript's async IO framework, there was a robust async IO framework for Python called Twisted. Node.js was influenced by Twisted[0], and this is particularly evident in the design of its Promise abstraction (which you had to use directly when it was first released, because JavaScript didn't add the async/await keywords until years later).

[0] https://nodejs.org/en/about
by weinzierl | 2025-07-06 09:31:58+00:00
"Personally, learning about this gave me permission to do "social" activities on my own terms and stop worrying about what other people think "social" means;"

So much this.

To have your own terms is always OK. If you think about it, what people think "social" means is not even fixed. It certainly changes with your age and your environment but even the consensus in a society about it changes.

When I grew up it meant being in a deafening loud environment so much full smoke that you could barely breathe. Hated it, but only when I moved to the big city and started university I understood that I am not the only one. Nowadays the smoke is mostly gone and at least it has become accepted to wear hearing protection.
by VBprogrammer | 2025-07-06 09:33:53+00:00
The majority of trucking in the UK is based on the tramping model. A driver gets in his truck at 6am on a Monday and drives it around the country until Friday evening. Sleeping in service stations, lay-bys and industrial estates depending on where they can find availability (often with difficulty).

The idea that electric trucks could just slot into this is extremely naive.
by rlpb | 2025-07-06 09:34:19+00:00
> And if a quorum of mining pools gets together, they can fork the blockchain or do all sorts of other shit.

This is a common misunderstanding. Miners do not have power in the system. Anyone can fork Bitcoin, but when people want payment in Bitcoin, they won't accept ForkedBitcoin regardless of the number of miners shilling it. Meanwhile mining money will be left on the table for anyone who wants to enter mining of the original Bitcoin and at greater mining profit.
by dataflow | 2025-07-06 09:35:40+00:00
Oh come on. Things fall down because matter has a property called gravity that attracts other matter, and below us is a giant earth with a lot of matter. And it has more of a net effect on us than any other matter in the universe because gravity scales with distance and mass in that particular way. That's as darn good of an explanation of why we fall down as one could possibly give. "But why does mass have gravity?" Why does Newton have to have all the answers to every other question too? Maybe ask that and someone will answer that question in a few hundred years? He answered your original question, he didn't claim he can answer every subsequent question you think of. It's quite ridiculous to suggest Newton just tautologically concluded "things fall down because they do" just because he doesn't go on and explain the "why" of every sub-question ad infinitum.