MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Certhas | 2025-07-06 18:15:14+00:00
The statement was pretty clear, right? Most European countries are less than 500km wide is almost certainly true, no matter how you define width. There are only 8 EU countries that are larger than 500km^2. And that includes the vast spaces of Scandinavia where no one lives.

Driving from Warsaw to Lisbon, 6 countries, and crossing 4 of the largest, is 3.300km.
by tombert | 2025-07-06 18:15:46+00:00
Most Americans have families and shit and don't want to go to jail for doing something violent towards a politician. This is, broadly speaking, a good thing, we really don't want any random schmuck vigilante to constantly attack politicians that they don't like.

I'm not going to judge the majority of people for "not doing anything", because what you're suggesting would put them (and a lot of other people, some of which are innocent) at risk. I'm certainly not going to risk going to jail or facing capital punishment to hurt a politician, even if I thought it was a net good for the country.

I'm definitely not a "second amendment" guy though, I don't really think most people should have guns.
by alganet | 2025-07-06 18:15:50+00:00
Maybe the endgame is honesty. Not pretending you're several people, or other convoluted ways of misdirection and disguise.

Just honestly acknowledge that profiling exists, and explicitly work against it.

That should be enough to make any algorithm company that notices something is wrong to trip on its own wires, thinking some more elaborate form of hackery/covertion is being employed.

The likelyhood of some company noticing a single user is quite low though, but if you are able to hook even a single person inside that company using nothing but honesty and no tricks, that is the best trick of all.
by echelon | 2025-07-06 18:15:55+00:00
Companies that don't invent the car get to go extinct.

This is the next great upset. Everyone's hair is on fire and it's anybody's ball game.

I wouldn't even count the hyperscalers as certain to emerge victorious. The unit economics of everything and how things are bought and sold might change.

We might have agents that scrub ads from everything and keep our inboxes clean. We might find content of all forms valued at zero, and have no need for social networking and search as they exist today.

And for better or worse, there might be zero moat around any of it.
by tzs | 2025-07-06 18:16:05+00:00
> And deaf people shouldn't be allowed to do either?

That's a poor comparison, for a few reasons.

1. Headphones can prevent you from responding to outside sounds in at least two ways: (1) the sound from the headphones might mask the outside sound so it is not audible to you, and (2) you might be distracted enough by the sound from the headphones that even if the outside sound is audible through the headphones you fail to notice it. Also that distraction can also take your attention away from other important things needed for safe driving.

Deafness only prevents you from responding to outside sounds by making it so you don't hear them. It does not add distractions on top of that.

2. Deafness is a disability. We often relax rules for people with disabilities to help them have a more ordinary life.

In the US less than 2 percent of the population is deaf. Letting that small number of people drive despite not being able to hear provides them with great benefit. It probably does slightly increase the overall accident rate but with it only being 2 percent or less of drivers the effect is limited.

People with headphones appears to be way higher than 2 percent. They will have a much bigger impact the 2 percent who are deaf.

3. Deaf people have likely been deaf for most or all of their lives. I'd expect they have learned to compensate by paying more attention visually to their surroundings. When they learned to drive they were likely taught the importance of such compensation and have been practicing and perfecting it ever since.

Headphones are temporary. Very few people wearing headphones while driving are going to have the compensation skills that deaf people have for dealing with not hearing outside sounds.
by thrance | 2025-07-06 18:16:11+00:00
> Factually incorrect.

How. You only gave anecdotal evidence of some instances where enough complaining got consumers a little concession. Meanwhile, DLCs, microtransactions and lootboxes went from "totally inacceptable" to "absolutely bog standard" in a few years. Do you deny that at each step of this process, many people called to "vote with your wallet"? Do you deny that it failed miserably and that the game industry keeps getting away with more and more, in spite of it?

> This is literally self-contradictory. If individuals can't "vote with their wallets" to achieve change (which, as I described above, empirically does happen), then individuals in a democracy also can't vote to enact their will on the system - and those regulators are appointed by those elected representatives.

Literally straw-manning my point. I should have emphasized "isolated". To me calls to "vote with your wallet" are akin to a single worker demanding a raise or better working conditions. Without a union, they're out of luck. On the other hand, a collective effort to change the law like "Stop Killing Games", now we're talking.
by bko | 2025-07-06 18:18:01+00:00
I love these work-arounds and generous tiers. A bit of a tangent, but with very cheap essentially unlimited code generation, are there any active projects that just run this for days straight with an ambitious goal like "Develop an operating system" with instructions to just make all the necessary decisions to continue work?

I would love to see what a system like Claude Code could cook up running continuously for weeks. But I imagine it would get stuck in some infinite recursive loop.
by wussboy | 2025-07-06 18:18:40+00:00
I’m not even sure it’s the right question. No one knew what the long term effects of the internet and mobile devices would be, so I’m not surprised people thought it was great. Cocoa leaves seemed pretty amazing at the beginning as well. But mobile devices especially have changes society and while I don’t think we can ever put the genie back in the bottle, I wish that we could. I suspect I’m not alone.
by alwa | 2025-07-06 18:19:09+00:00
Immensely popular, delicious, and very beautiful on a plate or in a bowl, both whole/boiled/stir-fried and as snack packs of pre-peeled tails! See, e.g.,

https://mychinesehomekitchen.com/2022/06/24/chinese-style-sp...

So yes, I read it the same way you do: “They made us work weekends, but at least they’d order us in some pizzas.”

(…and if you’re in the US, you can have them air-freighted live to you, and a crawfish boil is an easy and darn festive thing to do in the summer. If you’re put off by the crustacean staring back at you, and you have access to a kitchen that operates in a Louisianan style, you might be able to find a “Cajun Popcorn” of the tails seasoned, battered, and fried. Or maybe one of the enormous number of “seafood boil” restaurants that have opened in the US in recent years.)

(I feel like those establishments came on quickly, that I notice them mainly in spaces formerly occupied by American-Chinese restaurants, and that it’s felt like a nationwide phenomenon… I suspect there’s a story there for an enterprising young investigative nonfiction writer sort.)
by SoftTalker | 2025-07-06 18:19:28+00:00
In Messages, to create a new message tap the pencil-in-a-square icon in the upper right corner.

In Notes, to create a new Note, tap the pencil-in-a-square icon in the lower right corner.

In Calendar, to create a new appointment, tap the + icon in the upper right corner.

In Reminders, to create a new reminder, tap the + in a blue circle in the lower left corner. At least it offers a text label "New Reminder"

These are all Apple apps and they all do it differently. And that's not even getting into gestures and other actions that you just have to stumble upon to even know they exist.
by diggan | 2025-07-06 18:19:30+00:00
> moving from one language to another isn’t a matter of simple syntax, trivia, or swapping standard libraries. [...] Java to Scala, js to Java, or C# to Python

I find it kind of funny (or maybe sad?) that you say that, then your examples are all languages that basically offer the same features and semantics, but with slightly different syntax. They're all Algol/C-style languages.

I'd understand moving from Java to/from Haskell can be a bit tricky since they're actually very different from each other, but C# to/from Java? Those languages are more similar than they are different, and the biggest changes is just names and trivia basically, not the concepts themselves.
by willturman | 2025-07-06 18:20:04+00:00
David Foster Wallace made a similar argument about Television being able to absorb, re-contextualize, and subsequently market any effort opposed to it as a cause of malignant addiction and abdication of societal responsibilities in his essay E. Unibus Pluram.

Today you can probably substitute television for YouTube, TikTok, etc, but the argument still holds up, perhaps better than ever.
by maccard | 2025-07-06 18:20:06+00:00
Who defined playable? Take Diablo 3 and 4. They are shared world games, are they playable without them? Maybe to you’d but to me they’re not. world of Warcraft has a rich questing experience which doesn’t require playing with other people - is it ok if they just switch off multiplayer content? That’s a different game, IMO.
by klabb3 | 2025-07-06 18:20:41+00:00
Couldn’t agree more. The problem is when the party is over, and another round of centralizing wealth and power is done, we’ll be no wiser and have learnt nothing. Look at the debate today, it’s (1) people who think AI is useful, (2) people who think it’s hype and (3) people who think AI will go rogue. It’s like the bank robbers put on a TV and everyone watches it while the heist is ongoing.

Only a few bystanders seem to notice the IP theft and laundering, the adversarial content barriers to protect from scraping, the centralization of capital within the owners of frontier models, the dial-up of the already insane race to collect personal data, the flooding of every communication channel with AI slop and spam, and the inevitable impending enshittification of massive proportions.

I’ve seen the sausage get made, enough to know the game. They’re establishing new dominance hierarchies, with each iteration being more cynical and predatory, each cycle refined to optimally speedrun the rent seeking value extraction. Yes, there are still important discussions about the tech itself. But it’s the deployment that concerns everyone, not hypothetically, but right now.

Exhibit A: social media. In hindsight, what was more important: the core technologies or the business model and deployment?
by __turbobrew__ | 2025-07-06 18:20:58+00:00
> Honestly, this is a not true

You have a conjecture that all companies keep good jira task tracking and payroll, AND that all companies contract out big accounting firms like KPMG.

From my personal experience I have been at two Canadian companies who didn’t claim SR&ED and therefore your conjecture is disproven with counter examples.

Some companies don’t keep good enough task tracking, some companies don’t know about SR&ED, some companies think the paperwork and auditing is burdensome, some companies are just lazy.
by Peritract | 2025-07-06 18:21:43+00:00
> if OpenAI fails, we get tons of useless tech injected into software products already creaking under the weight of so much bullhockety, and if they succeed, huge swaths of employees will be let go from entry level jobs

I think this is the key idea. Right now it doesn't work that well, but if it did work as advertised, that would also be bad.
by timewizard | 2025-07-06 18:22:23+00:00
In two months they've doubled MAUs? Without an explanation of that specific outcome I don't believe it.

Also:

> As per SimilarWeb data 61.05% of ChatGPT's traffic comes from YouTube, which means from all the social media platforms YouTube viewers are the largest referral source of its user base,

That's deeply suspect.
by ics | 2025-07-06 18:23:22+00:00
IIRC Erik Demaine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Demaine) started teaching at 20 and had his PhD. I can't remember if I first saw his name because of the MacArthur Grant or one of those science documentaries but one of his pages was on the frontpage here a week or two ago and it seems like he's been thriving.
by WillAdams | 2025-07-06 18:23:34+00:00
It is unfortunate that Tolkien's _Old English Exodus_ was written (and marketed/printed) as an academic text --- I found it quite readable and enjoyable (and the second time I asked for it on Interlibrary Loan was sent a compleat photocopy) --- unfortunately, it saw only a single printing, so is not available for folks to read outside of academic libraries.

It and his other works on Old English really should be gathered up in a boxed set and reprinted.

I asked for permission to reprint it, and even put together a PDF, but was rebuffed on the grounds that I am a layman, not an academic --- if an academic is reading this and finds it an interesting project, let me know. I keep asking after it, and even got one somewhat interested response, but haven't heard back.....
by mdavid626 | 2025-07-06 18:24:05+00:00
Sounds good, but it's not reality, at least not for now. What you're describing is the absolute best scenarios - most expensive cars and MW charging stations. These I can't afford and the charging stations don't exist or are very rare (at least here in Europe).

If it would be true, that'd be great.

For me saving time on the gas station is negligible. I drive around anyway, but yes, I agree with you - charging at home is very cool. Just plug it in when you get home and you can drive in the morning.

The only way I see this, have 2 cars. One for longer trips (diesel), one for shorter, every day usage (electric). But this needs 2 parking spaces, insurance, taxes etc. I can't affor this either.
by skydhash | 2025-07-06 18:24:18+00:00
> but I guess that 99% of newcomers just want to open tabs and go left/right, not to learn set of byzantine commands like :rewind or :last.

There's nano and multiple other editors for that. You want vim for a more powerful interactions than go left and write.

My need for vim is to open a file, go the the place I want to, quickly edit it, and go back to what I was doing (which is reading and thinking). Editing is just a short bust instead of being a continual activity.

Another annoyance with editors like VS Code (and the like) is how tedious to have information. Every file is in own tab (even though you can show more at once, but that's tedious). So you are always flipping back and forth. With vim, I can have everything at once in front of me, and once I have a clear line of action collapse it to the few (2 or 3) I need. Also quickly.

Vim and Emacs are for those that really needs them. There's a lot to learn, but that's because there's a lot you want to do.
by VeninVidiaVicii | 2025-07-06 18:24:45+00:00
I'm no expert but at least in the initial stages of resuscitation, the cost is relatively low. Paramedics doing CPR, defibrillation, some epinephrine, then in the ER they'll intubate, get some lines in, push more epi and maybe amiodarone - pretty basic stuff that's more about doing it fast than expensive equipment. I don't think it adds up to a ton… well yes American healthcare is absurdly expensive, but this particular aspect isn't extraordinary. The initial resuscitation steps are about timing, not fancy drugs
by tomatocracy | 2025-07-06 18:25:24+00:00
It's not just time but cost of building out charging infrastructure and grid connections. I looked at some numbers on this a couple of years ago and the costs back then were big enough to make anything medium or long distance non-viable absent either huge amounts of subsidy or a big shift in the relative price of electricity vs diesel (which is realistically only likely to happen via big taxes on truck diesel).
by Levitating | 2025-07-06 18:26:18+00:00
I was actually reading the FAQ just now.

From my understanding, a company does not have to release a private server alongside the client while the official servers are live, what I said previously was inaccurate. But when the official servers are closed, they are required to provide them.

However, I don't see how a bankrupt studio can release their server code when they don't have enough money to keep their servers running. An MMORPG shutting down it's servers may not even have any developers left. It may also not have any players left.

The FAQ suggests that this won't burden developnent at all, but I believe that it will.

Regardless if they continuously release their server code or not, they still need to develop an "end of life" plan which means having the server code ready to release when they want to kill their servers.

I think one of the most relevant part of the FAQ is:

Q: Isn't it impractical, if not impossible to make online-only multiplayer games work without company servers.

A: Not at all. The majority of online multiplayer games in the past functioned without any company servers and were conducted by the customers privately hosting servers themselves and connecting to each other. Games that were designed this way are all still playable today. As to the practicality, this can vary significantly. If a company has designed a game with no thought given towards the possibility of letting users run the game without their support, then yes, this can be a challenging goal to transition to. If a game has been designed with that as an eventual requirement, then this process can be trivial and relatively simple to implement. Another way to look at this is it could be problematic for some games of today, but there is no reason it needs to be for games of the future.

I too want online games to be killed responsibly, but I don't think Stop Killing Games is being honest about how this will influence small budget game development as opposed to the big publishers they keep talking about.
by nylonstrung | 2025-07-06 18:26:32+00:00
This article touches on the revulsion "programmers" have toward Excel.

Deep down it's because many can't imagine writing a program in any way besides rigid, idiomatic OOP

Excel is a pure functional declarative DSL w/ immutability. It has lambdas & you can build applications that are fully data driven, like an ECS

These are already paradigms that the software industry is not open-minded about. And here the mediocre programmer is able to appeal to authority. If "non-technical" users like a bookkeeper can program with Excel, it must be dumber and less elegant than the PHP script I would have written, right?

The best financial modellers are more productive FP devs than many "programmers" deriding Excel, but we've allowed ourselves to think that doesn't "count"
by dummydummy1234 | 2025-07-06 18:27:03+00:00
Ok, so take the example of RF communications:

You need to send data, but only 50% at random comes through. You could move things closer together, send at higher power, improve the signal modulation to give you higher snr.

All of these things are done, this is improving the base system. But at the end of the day rf is in the real world, and the real world sucks. Random shit happens to make your signal not come through.

So what do you do? You design fault tolerant systems.

You add error correction to detect and automatically fix errors on receive.

You add tcp, to automatically retransmit missed packets.

You add validation to make sure that the received data is sane.

You use ecc ram to validate that an ion from the sun has not bit flipped your data.

These are extremely complex hierarchies of systems, and fundamentally they are unreliable. So you design the whole thing with error margins and fall back handling.

Yes a better understanding of the underlying system in question does allow you to make more efficient error correction/validation, but it does not change the fact that you need error correction.

And in the case of RF signals, for example, the most optimal design is not zero errors. In fact they way you design it is so that for a given snr, you expect a given probability of error. To get the maximum throughput, you design your error correction coding to handle that. And because even with that, there can be edge cases, you design higher level Mac layer logic to resend.

Yes, a better understanding of the error cases will make the error correction (agent loops) in llms better over time, but it will not remove the error correction.

there may be situations similar to RF, where a less accurate, but faster model, with more validation is preferred for a variety of engineering reasons, either throughput/cost/creativity/etc.

You need to look at llms as black boxes of the physical world, that we question, and get a answer. At the level of complexity it is more akin to physics, than software, there is no reliability inherent to them, only what we design around.

And there are tons of people doing the fundamental physical research into how they work, and how to make them work better.

But that is a completely different avenue of research from how to make useful systems out of unreliable components.

You do not need to fully model the path propagation of em waves in order to make a reliable communication system, it might help, but it will be fragile if you solely rely on it.

And if you engineer a reliable system architecture, it does not get fully invalidated when the scientists build better models of the underlying systems. You may modify the error correction codes but they do not go away.

For example the original Morse code, had hand handmade validation checks, handshakes etc. the architecture did not get wholly replaced with the advent of Shannon's information theory, even if some of the specific methods did.

And WW1/WW2 telegraphs, and communications were still useful despite not understanding the underlying information theory and being unreliable in many situations.
by mikestew | 2025-07-06 18:27:20+00:00
Manual tranny, why didn't you say so? :-) Yeah, I guess you would notice the difference.

But I think you've hit on the difference, as I vastly simplified what is going on. Not that I expected you to read the link I gave, but it does give some explanation as to what's going on. And what's going is that the pistons are still going up and down because air is continually drawn into the engine. Air is compressed, and even though there is no fuel to make it go bang, that air still needs to uncompress and so returns a lot of the energy back to the crankshaft. Ergo, very little engine braking.

As a personal example, our diesel Sprinter van (automatic tranny, FWIW) had some degree of engine braking, but so little that I wouldn't rely on it for much more than coasting to a stoplight or other low-stakes slowing. If I'd like to stop sometime in the next day or two, I hit the brake pedal.
by kergonath | 2025-07-06 18:28:03+00:00
> For example when it comes to the Right to be forgotten, there were attempts to apply this also to data which is stored and displayed outside the EU. Only after ECJ ruling (C-507/17) such attempts were stopped.

They care to the extent that the situation in the EU is resolved. They did not make any extraterritorial jurisdiction arguments like the US government did with Microsoft’s data centres in Ireland.

> Microsoft does have the N (formerly called "Reduced Media") editions of Windows created in response to legal demands from the EU, but these are available worldwide.

You are right, I got confused. The browser ballot screen was shown only in the EU, but it was not a separate product. Regarding Windows N, I don’t think the ruling forced them to sell it worldwide; it did not even stop them from selling their usual Windows versions in the EU.