MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-07-20 19:15:49+00:00
People seem to forget that most countries aren’t down with “adult content.” Japan famously has censorship; while it’s outright illegal and censored online in India, Russia, China, and no shortage of other countries. It’s illegal on both sides of conflicts - like Russia and Ukraine (possession in Ukraine by itself is grounds for up to 3 years in prison). Some countries like Australia permit it, but “extreme” content (aka anything not “vanilla”) is technically illegal regardless of the age of the viewer. This is also not necessarily based on religion: China is officially atheist, Vietnam is as well, but both will put you in prison for importing it. Ironically, it is post-Christian countries that are most tolerant.

From the global stage, America is not some overly puritanical country while everyone else goes along without religious purity concerns. The big view is that the majority of countries censor it or ban it, even democratic ones, with no religious motive required. The Western world is the exception, but that’s changing in the UK, Australia, and now the US with age gating, payment processor refusal, or other restrictions.
by sitkack | 2025-07-20 19:15:57+00:00
I find it serendipitous that Antirez is into LLM based coding, because the attention to detail in Redis means all the LLMs have trained extensively on the Redis codebase.

Something that was meant for humans, has now been consumed by AI and he is being repaid for that openness in a way. It comes full circle. Consistency, clarity and openness win again.
by gmueckl | 2025-07-20 19:16:17+00:00
I am not sure whether calling WPF a huge failure is justified. It works extremely well when everything is adaptable to its MVC-adjcent MVVM design pattern. In this case it's almost child's play to build rich and conplex GUIs that keep in sync with internal state.

Microsoft dropped the ball when they rewrote WPF in incompatible forms for the web (Silverlight) and Windows Phone (WinUI) shortly after releasing WPF itself. That ruined developer trust for their GUI library longevity.
by _aavaa_ | 2025-07-20 19:16:29+00:00
> For young men, I firmly believe society expectations haven't really changed at all actually. They are still expected to be providers, and to make educational/career choices & sacrifices to facilitate that.

That’s because male-coded fields are still seen and treated as more prestigious. Men aren’t encouraged to go into different fields because that would mean encouraging them to go into historically female-coded fields.

Women being told they can do anything and be anything (which overall is good) is a push to get them into previously male-coded occupations, and not a change in how we look down on women-coded work.

Men who are being failed by culture are being failed because as you say they are being pushed further to the machismo extreme.
by bullen | 2025-07-20 19:16:39+00:00
C and Java are the most durable in different ways.

- C gives you the least likely to be broken by evolution of OSes without added effort, because they need backwards compatibility.

- Java will be even more durable as it can be implemented/fixed after you compile your software. I ran my games compiled 20 years ago on a Risc-V computer flawlessly = not a single glitch! That said it requires JVM efforts to be maintained.

Oracle is heading the wrong direction in every aspect (removing fundamental features like sandbox without a clear path to replacement), but the bytecode standard will prevail, ahead of clones like C# and WASM.

That said if you make a VM why not have it JiT/AoT on all 3 bytecodes?

Either way the JVM is the final emulator, as long as it's maintained.
by Retr0id | 2025-07-20 19:17:11+00:00
Doesn't fwrite more or less write directly to the FILE buffer, if buffering is enabled?

I'm curious to take a closer look at fmtlib/fmt, which APIs treat FILE as non-opaque?

Edit: ah, found some of the magic, I think: https://github.com/fmtlib/fmt/blob/35dcc58263d6b55419a5932bd...

I'm curious how much speedup is gained from this.
by mhuffman | 2025-07-20 19:17:29+00:00
Has science gone too far, or not far enough? Surely there are business opportunities for reanimating the dead bodies of animals! Where is the mouse jiggler made from an actual dead mouse being controlled by a Raspberry Pi? Or the carcass of a dead dog controlled by an air bladder that will lurch from behind your shrubs and snap at a prowler using zigbee and connected to your security system?
by coro_1 | 2025-07-20 19:17:49+00:00
Aggressively marketing the imitation meat is what opened up market share for the products in the grocery marts and how they got on menus. Marketing up ramp for subpar products is too common.

The US is primed for this. Buy the market, invest a lot, then invest less in the product. Hate to say, RFK may be on to, some things. Plain Heinz catsup in Canada makes the US versions (plural) just seem sort of gross.
by somat | 2025-07-20 19:18:19+00:00
To misquote the street fighter movie: OpenBSD to Linux:

"For you the day you changed your ABI was the most important day in your life, but for me? It was Tuesday"

I enjoy the dichotomy between how bad the Linux project is at changing their ABI and how good OpenBSD is at the same task.

Where for the most part Linux just decides to live with the bad ABI forever. and if they do decide it actually needs to be changed it is a multi year drama with much crying and missteps.

I mean sure, linux has additional considerations that make breaking the ABI very scary for them. the big one is the corpus of closed source software, but being a orders of magnitude bigger project and their overall looser integration does not help any.
by maxlin | 2025-07-20 19:18:50+00:00
gluing together third party stacks like there's no tomorrow doesn't make you better evaluating how a vision-only ML model with limited, yet uniquely hardware-accelerated, one-task actual real life, real-time ML model running right now would integrated with foreign data, especially as the actual relevant engineers have directly talked against such things.

It might make you headstrong in believing against something that'd be easier to see the core sensibility of if you weren't so invested in just a specific corner/angle though.

I've avoided working a work project involving LIDAR scanning before, even back then the hellishness of the hardware was a large factor. I wouldn't mind playing around with a Jetson Nano though.
by trod1234 | 2025-07-20 19:18:51+00:00
The noise is so loud, you can't find any signal. Shannon's Limit has been reached.

Also, the knowledge needed to differentiate has been lost by many, and suppressed given the economic disadvantage of quality vs cheap in a money-printing economy.

Unless you have a fairly good knowledge of sewing, construction, chemicals/materials, you end up getting things that look the same but aren't the same.

With Jeans, most of the durability came from the weave with extra strength from rivets at the stress points in the fabric and the properly locked-off stitching, at the seams; which a lot of industrial machining can't duplicate at the same cost (that's why you get the unraveling with those stitches using 4 threads at once). Then there is the synthetic fibers that are mixed in for flexibility/comfort that become stressed or dissolve upon exposure to detergents, and the use of low-quality cotton thread, or full synthetics and sometimes just glue to bind the seams instead of nylon/silk (both extremely strong).

You won't find any company offering Jeans that last more than a year or so, and any fraying near the belt loops, or main seam lines is a sign of poor worksmanship. I've had Walmart jeans, both the offbrand, and triple price regular brand rip, belt loops break, seams show signs of unraveling within 20 minutes of first use (brand new).
by woodpanel | 2025-07-20 19:18:55+00:00
The Beyond Meat story for me is a boon since its IPO. I made a good fortune betting against the post-IPO rally.

Let's not forget how, in the late 2010s, VC money successfully pushed the idea that Beyond Meat et al didn't just taste as good as what it mimmicks, but that it acutally tastes better.

Then-Celebrety Chef David Chang even said "it melted my brain" (Impossbile Foods). Chain stores around the world fell over each other to first announce stocking their shelves with it, then told their customers they had to wait due to too much demand in existing markets, and ultimately that they won't be selling any actual meat at all in in a couple of years.

It was the full display of top-to-bottom class-war, elitist groupthink drooling over the power to pull a staple of our cuisine, culture and life quality from us – exactly because we like it. And then shove super processed improvements into the mouths of the dull plebs. And make a killing with eyewatering stock prices of up to 190 USD.
by const_cast | 2025-07-20 19:19:19+00:00
Healthcare is not, and will never be, a free market. Applying free market dynamics to it just does not work. It's bad reasoning.

People are quick to jump to free market reasoning because it's quick, easy, and requires little to no thought or nuance. But step number 1 is you have to prove said market is a free market. And, if it's not, you then have to prove forcing it to be a free market is not only possible, but beneficial for society as a whole.

Nobody does that though, because it's hard. So they just hope if they skip the most fundamental part of free market reasoning that nobody would notice. No, we notice.
by atoav | 2025-07-20 19:19:20+00:00
You don't want to know what my headphone extensions (TRSm 3.5 -> TRSf 3.5mm) or my XLR3 cables go through. That is way, way worse than anything the HDMI cables experience, based purey on the look of the cables returned.

I get that HDMI is higher frequency and smaller faults show earlier, but the plug is just inadequate. The plugs are levered off by the stiff cable, the thickness of the cables would require at least something like a Neutrik-D-norm connector, but they do as if something smaller is ok. By this point I am just glad that the receiving side seems to be sturdier 90% of the times, but by this point I also wonder why the heck we don't just use BNC connectors and coaxial cables..
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-20 19:19:30+00:00
I also don't see it as much better than Boca Burgers or Quorn or many other earlier generation products never mind tofu, tempeh, seitan all of which can be great on a bed of rice or as sandwich fillers.

Ecologist Howard Odum developed a system of environmental accounting based on tracing energy back to the sun

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergy

a calorie of vegetarian food is estimated to require 200,000 calories worth of sunlight when you factor in energy to drive the wind, make rain, all of that.

Invariably there is part of a product or service that you can't account for in detail so you take the remaining dollar cost and multiply it by the emergy/$ ratio for the economy as a whole.

Although you can argue a "cheap" product has a price that is subsidized or doesn't represent externalities, this leads to the corollary that an outrageously expensive product is not green because the money is a license for somebody to do things that impact the environment be it the employees driving around in a big-ass pickup truck or the executives or investors flying in private jets.

There's that and there's also the fact that most people's main objection to meat substitutes is high cost.
by kadoban | 2025-07-20 19:19:39+00:00
I am curious how these work for people with common kinds of colorblindness. The author mentions at the end that they likely don't work for that case, but they don't seem to have spent much time thinking about it.

Would it be possible to generate ones that _would_ work for specific kinds of colorblindness? Or is the entire concept doomed due to the specific way(s) that colorblind eyes are messed up?
by JodieBenitez | 2025-07-20 19:20:01+00:00
Laszlo... I remember this one, dipped my toes in it, like many, many other GUI tools. I've been using the same backend framework for 20 years with no need to change but I can't decide which frontend GUI library I should invest my time for the future. It all looks like constant rehashing of the same ideas but with limited lifespan.
by mikeschinkel | 2025-07-20 19:20:50+00:00
I ran a very successful company (successful for a time) that sold Visual Basic developer tools via a printed mail-order catalog named VBxtras.

Two things killed Visual Basic:

1. The web. Visual Basic was first and foremost a Windows desktop app development tool, and their UI-first model of app development did not translate well to the web, or at least the attempts to translate to the web did not resonate.

2. Microsoft. Rather than continue the simplicity Visual Basic offered, Microsoft "improved" it by releasing VB.NET which abandoned the core simplicity that made Visual Basic so wildly popular among "Occupational Programmers," as Kathleen Dollard[1] and I lamented back in the day. The upshot was that former Visual Basic programmers fell into two (2) camps; they either:

A.) Abandoned VB for something else, or nothing at all, because they did not want to have to become a professional programmer, OR

B.) Switched to C# because if they were going to learn how to be a "real" programmer they might as learn C# and not C#'s disfavored sibling VB.NET.

I blogged about occupational programmers several times back then: https://mikeschinkel.com/tags/occupationalprogrammers/

BTW, the company that has developed XMLUI was one of our better vendors of VBX components for Visual Basic. They have since renamed to /n software, but at first they were named IP*Works (I think I stylized that name correctly per how they did at the time.)

[1] Ironically Kathleen is now leads the .NET Core CLI at Microsoft, and is also lead over VB, I think: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/author/kathleen-a-doll...)
by mixmastamyk | 2025-07-20 19:21:01+00:00
As said I default to deferred %. That leaves judgement for need vs cost of call vs frequency, etc. Also f-string is faster than others with own via instruction, more readable, less likely to throw a runtime error. Judgement call.

Bottom line, still a micro optimization on a modern machine in the vast majority of cases.

If you have a truly costly format op and still want to use fstring, look into .isEnabledFor().
by rybosome | 2025-07-20 19:21:20+00:00
Well, even if we assume for a moment that we aren’t talking about non-public data…

Then RAG which serves up knowledge already in the model’s pretraining data is still useful, because it primes the model for the specific context with which you want to engage it. I maybe can see what you are saying, like why can’t the model just do a good job without being re-reminded? But even in that sense, any intelligence, artificial or otherwise, will do better given more context.

And that ignores the reality of data outside the model’s pretraining corpus, like every single business’ internal data.
by JadeNB | 2025-07-20 19:21:31+00:00
> I don’t really get why anybody would want to rule over an uneducated populace. What’s the long term plan? Modern industry is high tech. Modern war is high tech. Even modern propaganda is high tech!

I think that, for exactly this reason, it makes it easier to have a caste system, with a small educated elite that can exert essentially unchecked control over a populace that is too uneducated to master any of the levers of resistance.

That's among people who think it through. I also think that there are plenty of leaders who don't think it through, and just let expert opinion against them, or whatever other factor, guide them into destruction without any real consideration of what comes after.
by bearjaws | 2025-07-20 19:22:05+00:00
I wish I knew the exact performance characteristics of AWS generations.

One of the most eye opening things to me is how terrible ECS x86 performs vs graviton instances with Fargate.

I've found much lower IO and honestly seems like some instances are 3rd generation Intel instance class.

I guess this is more of a gripe with ECS, and wish it would let me pick the exact generation on Fargate.
by const_cast | 2025-07-20 19:23:01+00:00
It was a policy intervention in the sense that Americans have no choice in policy.

Your healthcare is entirely decided by people who are not your doctors. Every medicine you take, how long you go to the doctor, what surgeries you can get - your insurer unilaterally decides this. Not your doctor.

There's no voting system or merit system. You can't just simply find a better doctor - because your doctor is an empty vessel, they make no decisions. You have, legitimately, zero recourse.

Shooting someone is then very rational. We have made that one of the only choices, period. The insurance companies have all but guaranteed this outcome.
by Gillgard | 2025-07-20 19:24:05+00:00
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by zahlman | 2025-07-20 19:24:15+00:00
> Vegetarians and vegans I know want protein sources in their diets but they don’t necessarily want meat substitutes, so perhaps BM’s products aren’t that appealing to them.

When Beyond Meat announced their IPO, I can recall thinking quite distinctly: "wait, this isn't the Impossible Burger. They aren't even making any kind of breakthrough in the 'convincing meat substitute' department in the first place. And this stuff is expensive. Who tf is this for?"

> Moreover, people I know who are trying to cut down on meat, like their veggie and vegan counterparts, mostly aren’t looking for meat substitutes in their meat-free meals either.

It's true. I eat probably considerably less meat than I did many years ago. Which is to say, still in generous portions, but not every day (I still freely eat dairy). When I supplement with vegetable sources of protein, I'm just preparing legumes (and grains) normally, without even the slightest desire to make them "meat-like".

I've had "ordinary" vegetarian burgers before. I don't even evaluate them as a substitute, but as their own thing.
by palata | 2025-07-20 19:25:14+00:00
My experience in the US is that it's not always worse than a car. I tried multiple times going from the San Francisco airport to Oakland. The BART was systematically faster than a taxi stuck in the traffic. I feel a lot safer going to the airport with the BART than with a taxi, because with the taxi I may miss my flight.

Similar experience driving in Los Angeles. So much traffic, whenever there is a train it's better.

In NYC, the subway works really well, too.
by cryptonector | 2025-07-20 19:26:05+00:00
Correct, TFA needs to wait for the completion of _all_ writes to the WAL, which is what `fsync()` was doing. Waiting only for the completion of the "completion record" does not ensure that the "intent record" made it to the WAL. In the event of a power failure it is entirely possible that the intent record did not make it but the completion record did, and then on recovery you'll have to panic.
by KennyBlanken | 2025-07-20 19:26:29+00:00
Tell me you know nothing about transaction overhead without telling me you know nothing about transaction overhead. All the blockchain currencies require orders of magnitude more power to process a transaction compared to a debit or credit transaction. Bitcoin is primarily used by governments (like NK), hacker groups, and organized crime to launder money.

The solution is not blockchain currencies. European credit card transaction costs are a fraction of what they are in the US because US regulators just sat back and allowed Mastercard and VISA to establish a duopoly.

In much of the rest of the world it's also possible to near-instantly wire-transfer funds to pay for things, at negligible cost. In the US, everything is forced to go through the federal reserve, is expensive, and slow.

We are the laughing stock of the rest of the world. The banks have tried to set up alternatives. Zelle is a good example, but Zelle's most annoying problem is that you can only have one account per phone number or email address.
by llbbdd | 2025-07-20 19:27:36+00:00
It's not a matter of quality, it's a matter of preference. I don't own a car. I live three blocks from a bus stop and I Uber everywhere instead, because it's cheap and predictable. The buses are clean, they run on time, but the population is well-off enough that there's almost no reason to take them, and that filters to buses being full of people who for one reason or another (often significant problems integrating with society) cannot pay for an alternative.

If one takes public transit it's because of convenience, cost, or virtue, and convenience is often the leg lacking, because it doesn't come to your house. I have walked blocks to and stood at many bus stops in my life surrounded by unwell people and telling myself that I'm being socially efficient does not smooth that over particularly well.
by throw0101d | 2025-07-20 19:27:37+00:00
> “Creative destruction” isn’t as fun when it’s a large area’s main access to healthcare. We’re talking hospitals, not Red Lobster.

When the automobile was created it destroyed makers of buggy whips. When steam ships were created it destroyed sail makers.

What exactly was / is being created here? We're talking about asset transfers and shells games.
by kldg | 2025-07-20 19:27:38+00:00
just gonna throw this out there: I started a garden plot this year, all dug up by hand with a mattock, and harvested my first bush beans today; hecking great.

I got components in yday for a variable DC-DC power supply (though I can't seem to find the DACs I know I have because I have everything inventoried -- but I'll find them). Will give me wireless control and read of test routines for products I review (funnily enough, given point about reviews in article) via an ESP32. China takes my eCAD design and ships me PCBs I've had no issue with, and at less than $1/board (granted, it takes them a couple weeks, but I'm in no rush).

if you don't like what society's offering up, DIY. nothing wrong with being a little antisocial sometimes, even if only for exercise; "what would Terry do?" hoist the bird, fly the flag, and reject glowies.
by jefftk | 2025-07-20 19:27:42+00:00
XHTML was not a previous version of HTML; it was a failed successor.

HTML was originally conceived as a subset of SGML, but browsers tried to be as forgiving as possible of malformed markup and HTML-in-practice drove standards folks nuts. XHTML was intended to fix this by making a pure-XML representation of HTML, which would be unambiguous and fast to parse, but its very strict error handling made it extremely difficult to adopt. It turns out people would generally rather have a slightly wrong page than one that just said "XML Parsing Error".

WHATWG broke with W3C in 2005 to standardize HTML-in-practice into HTML5, giving up on XML compatibility and strict parsing.