MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by krisoft | 2025-07-22 09:59:38+00:00
> It would be interesting what this functional reserve is, right?

It is most likely not a single thing.

Looking for "the functional reserve" is like looking for which part of an airplane is the "multiple redundancy". Or which line of code is the "fault tolerance" in google's code base. It is not a single part, it is all the parts working together.

Just looking at the kidney example (which is not the only kind of function we can describe having functional reserve.) functional reserve is that there are two kidneys, and each kidney have multiple renal pyramids, and if this or that part of the kidney functions worse other parts compensate and will work overtime.

Depletion of functional reserve is not something literally running out (like a fuel tank running empty), it is more like a marauding gang shooting computers in a cloud data center. Sure initially all works as it used to, because the system identifies the damaged components and routes the processing to other ones. But if they keep it up they will damage enough that the data center will keel over and can't do what it could do before.

(No, I'm not saying that a human body is literally a data center, or literally an airplane. What I'm saying is that all three shares the common theme that some process is maintained in the presence of faults.)
by ks2048 | 2025-07-22 09:59:44+00:00
In Wiktionary,

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sinister#Latin

it shows a few definitions of "sinister" in Latin that seem contradictory. "left", "perverse/bad", but "auspicious" for Romans, while "inauspicious" for Greeks. And a Proto-Indo-European source which is positive.
by asquithdenardis | 2025-07-22 10:00:15+00:00
The small-web never left—it just got buried. Three zero-friction ways to dig it back up:

1. Marginalia Search → pastes only lightweight, hand-curated pages; add your keyword in quotes. 2. Feedle.org → RSS-only index; most 5-reader blogs still ping it. 3. `site:blogspot.com inurl:2025` on DuckDuckGo → bypasses Google’s engagement layer.

If you want to see these forgotten sites instead of just reading them, I built a micro-tool that screenshots every result and auto-caption it with FLUX Kontext (https://flux-kontext.io). Ten lines of code—grab it from the repo linked on the landing page.
by inglor_cz | 2025-07-22 10:00:15+00:00
Extra Terrible Lines are indeed fun. We've had 9 months of development since then, though; maybe it would make sense to repeat those experiments twice a year.

IIRC Scott Alexander is doing something similar with his "AI draws nontrivial prompts" bet, and the difference to last year's results was striking.

Also, this really needs blinding, otherwise the temptation to show off one's sophistication and subtlety is big. Remember how oenologists consistently fail to distinguish between a USD 20 and a USD 2000 wine bottle when blinded.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-07-22 10:01:35+00:00
> people have to prove their identity when boarding flights, so pairing them with their DNA trace is feasible

Feasible and present are entirely separate.

Look at illegal immigrants today. The ones who co-operated with the government by e.g. showing up to court appointments or registering in apps are easier to catch because of that documentation. So they're prioritised. Same with DNA. Yes, you could pass a rule and then slowly collect DNA from all Americans who fly. But it's a lot easier to start with those who have already given it up.
by chiefalchemist | 2025-07-22 10:01:41+00:00
It’s interesting they make no mention of trying to understand the body’s ability to self-defend and self-heal. That is, it’s possible to get X (e.g., cancer) and the immune system wins the fight (before it’s even detected).

In theory it’s possible the best early treatment is no treatment at all; that there might be such a thing as too-early detection.
by retinaros | 2025-07-22 10:01:52+00:00
4chan is a vast website with hundreds of communities. One or two are far right leaning and very extreme for sure. The integrality of reddit is left leaning with moderators actively suppressing thoughts and speech that does not align with the beliefs of the Company and the left. For instance criticizing immigration policies would get you banned on reddit. Same for the prevalence of far right figures. I am not seeing this prevalence. Most of european union elected governements that are pro immigration, left leaning, pushing a bigger state interventionism in our daily lives under this premise that far right is prevalent. I am not seeing it.

X is one social network that indeed does not suppress some of the far right opinions. All the others social media are mostly left leaning and leaving content that is blatantly racist but targeting only one kind of people that they deemed ok to discriminate based on some crazy ideas that you cannot be racist against a majority.
by ben_w | 2025-07-22 10:02:41+00:00
> When you're cooking a piece of fish, you're not changing its structure using heat and pressure so that globular plant cell structures are transformed into stuff resembling fibrous animal cell structures.

You are if the fish ate any plants before they died (and you cooked with heat, I'm vegetarian so am unfamiliar with the other poster's a la Ceviche).

And even if the fish didn't eat any plants, you're still changing the protein structures — this is even part of the point of cooking, as amongst other things this does, changing the proteins inside the food is a process that kills any bacteria and other parasites.
by 0points | 2025-07-22 10:03:07+00:00
> I don't think that there are any clear examples of cases where ONLY downloading has resulted in huge fines.

They [1, and others] been hunting and fining downloaders for over a decade now, with the only "evidence" being IP addresses connected with the torrent [2].

1: https://www.njordlaw.com/filesharing-and-downloading-films/q...

2: https://admin.ovpn.com/en/blog/online-integrity-new-threats-...
by thrance | 2025-07-22 10:04:37+00:00
Nah, don't buy it. That's a poor excuse for America's bad internet infrastructure and another one of those "it's because we're the first/best/bigger actually".

I live in France, growing up most homes were equipped with ADSL. Optical fiber was rolled slowly but surely over the entire territory, systematically replacing older infrastructure. It's now to the point that everyone I know enjoys fast internet, from the center of Paris to the middle of nowhere.
by pjmlp | 2025-07-22 10:04:57+00:00
Personally, by now I would already be happy with Pascal like enumerations, instead of the stupid iota/const hack, yes it is an hack.

type StatusCodes = (Success, Ongoing, Done)

or if you prefer, while bikeshedding what keyword to use,

type StatusCodes enumeration (Success, Ongoing, Done)

Naturally, it is so much better to write

type StatusCodes int const ( Success StatusCodes = iota Ongoing Done )
by refurb | 2025-07-22 10:05:06+00:00
Love your attempt at bringing in Holocaust denial to evoke emotions.

The total funding was $7M over 2 years. The strike involved 250,000 trucker drivers, or $28 per striker.

As the source said in a NY Times article..

““The whole point of this is that covert action provides a 1 per cent impetus for something that the people want anyway,” he said.” - CIA source

https://www.nytimes.com/1974/09/20/archives/cia-is-linked-to...
by adrian_b | 2025-07-22 10:05:10+00:00
I doubt that he understood how unions must work, because the "variant record" he has put in Pascal in 1970 was really bad, worse than even the initial proposal of John McCarthy, while the "union" of ALGOL 68 was pretty decent.

Implementing correctly disjoint unions, i.e. allowing them to be used only exactly like an enumeration in the variable tested by a select/case/switch statement, and then only as the correct type in each of the alternatives, introduces a little overhead in a compiler, but it is certainly not a serious source of bloat in comparison with most other things that must be done by a compiler.

If the programming language designer had clearly in mind how disjoint union types must work, they would have been easy to implement even for the minicomputers and microcomputers of the seventies.
by rester324 | 2025-07-22 10:05:41+00:00
I am not sure what do you mean by forward looking? There are huge shopping districts under construction even right now in very central locations in Tokyo, basically building office towers and shopping malls.

What's forward looking about that? Other than that, the japanese tend to build roughly the same kind of low-riser/high-riser condominiums with varying quality literally everywhere. So it's not very easy to find and buy truly livable areas in downtown Tokyo right now, unless you are highly above the 80th-90th wage bracket.

Also, I find it odd to say that it's a society which only looks forward right now, when a right-wing populist party has just become tenfold stronger in the last parliamentary elections by propagating the idea of "traditional family values" (as in women to stay home instead of working).

While it's true that there are aspects of life which are more advanced than in other countries, but after living here for a decade, I can confidently say it's a mixed bag.

Just a silly example: when I came to the country, front loading drum type washing machines were a rare sight here, while that had been the norm for decades in many European countries. Also, the idea of insulating the houses from cold and heat and condensation was not at all considered until the government started pushing some tax breaks and whatnot to make the idea catch on and make housing more energy conscious. Etc, etc. Japan in many aspects were/is behind the times.

I wish people would stop idealizing japan as some kind of wonderland...
by soganess | 2025-07-22 10:06:30+00:00
4 x 2.5 inch drives = 1 petabyte.

Some years back, I read this short PR style article[1] about how the LHC produces 10 petabyes of data per second. Which was (then) impossible to store in any meaningful way. So the folks at CERN came up with a clever triggering system that discarded 99.9+% of the data.

Now a wimpy 50 racks can provide minutes (well ~2.5 minutes) of buffer. A well planned 'university scale' data center could give them close to an hour. And a proper state-of-the-art hyper-scale data center would get dangerously close to a day. Wild.

[1]: https://www.wired.com/2008/06/pb-quark/
by nchmy | 2025-07-22 10:08:27+00:00
But in jj you can refer to commits, changes etc by the shortest unique substring in its hash, and it automatically highlights what that is

sjenfidb skeifixu

These could be referred to as sj and sk. And their associated git commit hash might be

2748dn49 48jdj40r

Would be 2 and 4

Again, the output highlights those unique prefixes.

But there's also jjui, which is an incredible TUI for jj. Makes everything even simpler and efficient than it already was.

https://github.com/idursun/jjui
by lproven | 2025-07-22 10:09:30+00:00
I've been on email since 1985 and had the same personal address since 1991. I've used about 20 or 25 email clients across a dozen OSes (counting all Linux distros as one).

Gmail has the best search of any email system I've found.

I think your problems are nothing to do with Gmail or its search, but are to do with things like Unicode character encoding, character sets and codepoint matching.
by refurb | 2025-07-22 10:09:58+00:00
Sources rather than “trust me bro” would be nice.

“ In the best traditions of the CIA, catastrophe ensued. Viaux ignored the explicit U.S. instructions to cease-and-desist; two abduction efforts against Schneider, on 19 and 20 October, failed; the third attempt, on 22 October, ended with Schneider being mortally wounded (he died on 25 October);”
by 0points | 2025-07-22 10:11:22+00:00
> I can see how this might show that subtitles from online sub communities are used, or that maybe even original subtitles from e.g. DVDs are used.

Indeed, the captioning is copyrighted work and you are not legally allowed to copy and redistribute it.

> But isn't it already known and admitted (and allowed?)

No, and I don't see where you got that from. Meta [1], OpenAI [2] and everybody else is being sued as we speak.

1: https://petapixel.com/2025/01/10/lawsuit-alleges-mark-zucker...

2: https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/openai-hit-with-new...
by greesil | 2025-07-22 10:11:36+00:00
They're both riding on the back of the past 70 years of R&D on fabrication, scientific instruments and data acquisition, and plasma physics. My point is what's the marginal research value per euro spent on one vs the other? Tokamaks are sort of a known thing. It's almost pointless to discuss now because the money is spent, but ITER has always felt to me a a very inefficient use scientific funding.
by LatteLazy | 2025-07-22 10:11:48+00:00
Isn't the point of the previous examples that every organisation ultimately works for its own survival/growth?

The cia was basically pointless when the ussr fell (I'm not sure I agree but that's the logic). It needed a reason to exist and Al Qaeda provided that. When that wore thin, it manufactured its own reason in Iraq, a country that had no wdm and was no threat. And so on.

I'm not saying I agree but that is the logic I believe
by redhale | 2025-07-22 10:12:42+00:00
Agree and disagree.

Yes, the bottleneck is going to still be human review. But with only a single Claude Code (or Cursor), I spent a lot of time (a couple minutes at a time) waiting for the agent to run through its loop completing what I asked it to do. In this time I found I was naturally switching context, but not always productively (checking slack, email, whatever). I called it "agent lag" time.

Now with these worktrees tools, I can easily bounce between tasks I have the agents working on during these natural lulls. Overall I'm able to get more done and spend my time more efficiently.

Also, Cursor has had the option to run multiple agents for a while (in tabs), but I always found it cumbersome because all the agents are operating on the same git checkout, so you have to take special care for them not to conflict with each other. Worktrees completely solve that problem.
by sho_hn | 2025-07-22 10:12:54+00:00
This is something I've really flipped on when I started taking trains more to replace domestic flights (in Europe) to improve my personal CO2 footprint.

I used to be really impatient with travel and tried my best to save travel time, and never took the train. Then I forced my self to change my ways.

Nowdays, I find thst plan the train travel days as part of the trip: Sure, it takes me a whole day to get somewhere, but I allocate that time for hacking on the laptop on a side project, reading a book, or playing a game on the Steam Deck, things I normally don't find that much time for. I find e.g. my vacation satisfaction actually has gone up.

Train travel is also easier with (my) kids than air travel despite the longer duration, because you can roam the train more, change location to the restaurant, etc.
by nicoloren | 2025-07-22 10:13:46+00:00
The name "pedalboard" might not be the most fitting if latency is too high. That said, it could still be very useful in a studio setting for post-production work.

What would be really exciting is a hardware device with all the standard plug-and-play inputs, capable of running Python... essentially a true open-source pedalboard for guitar enthusiasts.
by provinescoch293 | 2025-07-22 10:14:36+00:00
You’re not grumpy—you’re reacting to “micro-aggression UX.” Instant-everything steals your locus of control and forces cognitive load you never asked for.

Easy fixes: • Search: add `?instant=0` or `debounce=300` to the URL (works on most Algolia & Elasticsearch front-ends). • Hover menus: enable “Reduce motion” in OS settings; many CSS media queries will swap to click-only. • Global: uBlock Origin’s `:has(:hover)` filter nukes 90 % of hover pop-ups.

If you build UIs, ship a 150 ms debounce by default—fast enough to feel alive, slow enough to respect human rhythm.

I bake that delay into every demo on my AI image tool: type a prompt, nothing flashes until you stop—then FLUX Kontext renders in 2.3 s flat. Try the no-jitter editor at https://flux-kontext.io
by cess11 | 2025-07-22 10:15:05+00:00
Repeating the same talking points in every post makes you seem like a bot or astroturfing effort.

The US is a criminal state that should have zero presence in Europe from that reason alone, regardless of european politics and societal characteristics. Bickering about mega-clown jobs and presenting US imperial practice as obviously a good thing isn't going to change that.
by jonathanlydall | 2025-07-22 10:16:39+00:00
USPS risks becoming irrelevant if they don't actually start to care.

In South Africa we have the South African Post Office which has consistently and increasingly been made redundant/irrelevant by the actions of one particular organization far more so than any other: The South African Post Office

One of their biggest self-inflicted loss of relevance was due to a large strike by their workers in the early 2010's. Because of the prolonged strike people were not receiving their statements in a timely manner. At the time the law required that financial institutions send statements by post, due to this incident the government allowed the law to be changed and they were now allowed to send them by email instead.

For decades now the Post Office has had a reputation of stealing from mail. When my grandmother was still alive she used to always send a birthday card with a cheque by post to all her grandchildren for their birthdays, for around the last 10 years she was still alive the envelope I received had always been slit open and clearly "inspected", fortunately it seems they didn't feel these low value cheques were worth the effort.

Something else which used to keep the Post Office slightly relevant is that it was about the only place you could go to get your annual car license renewed. Every time you'd go there would be a huge queue waiting for the single teller who could process these while there were like 4 other tellers sitting at the other counters doing nothing. A few years back the organization which manages the licenses (not the post office) made a very surprisingly completely painless online system where you could pay by credit card and have it arrive at your door within a couple of days by courier.

In 2013 when I moved into a new house, I went to the local post office to arrange a P.O. box. To which they said "Sorry, we have none available, we can put you onto a waiting list for if one becomes available", it seems it never occurred to that branch's post master to perhaps look into making additional P.O. boxes available.

I have other stories of their general incompetence, but you get the idea. They've only been able to get away with it due to it being a government owned organization with seemingly zero effort by the government to hold management accountable for the grossly poor management, something that's pretty much the norm with most of our government and government run organizations.
by esskay | 2025-07-22 10:16:50+00:00
The same guy who sold a Saas starter kit riddled with security flaws that allowed anyone to just have access to your product, then when it was pointed out to him, he berated the person who told him and said it was 'no big deal' and to 'build something'.

The guy's extremely sketchy and is selling a non existent pipe dream to people who are easily swayed by "how to make money online" nonsense.
by gabrielgio | 2025-07-22 10:17:11+00:00
> "you should use jj because it's a lot better at solving problems you don't have"

It is more like "you should use jj because then you won't have a lot of problem with git that you'd need git to solve"

> it shouldn't be that hard to explain, should it?

It is not. There are plenty of example on this page. For me the biggest one is stacked PR, jj makes it trivial since it tracks the change sets and not commit ids (which are immutable). So you can work on any level of the stacked PR independently, once you're done run "jj git push -r '(trunk()..@ | @::)'" and it will update all the remote branches accordingly. Another feature that works great with stacked PR is that you don't need to solve conflicts right away. You will see a marker in the "jj log" and you can solve it later down the road.

Also another great feature is the operation log, you can just rewind your actions. F'd up a conflict resolution? Just go "jj op undo". That goes for everything, including file changes and rebases. Want to go back the state it was 15 min ago because you didn't like what you did? Merge to the wrong place? "jj op undo"

Adding to that there are hundreds paper cuts that jj fixes, like:

* Simpler mental model for local change, no git stash/add necessary.

* Simpler commit process, you can just work and use "jj describe" whenever where git forces you to write message before creating commit (again because commits are immutable).

* Starting a work is much easier, I can just go "jj new" away without caring about detached head. Nowdays I just use branches (jj bookmarks) for git compatibility reasons.

* Revsets are amazing, much more powerful and expressive than git logs, and since the UX is more consistent you can always work with set of rules that expects a revset with "-r".

Ofc, you can do all of that with git, but it just works better, easier and more consistent with jj.
by immibis | 2025-07-22 10:17:12+00:00
You say "Stalin took over as dictator of USSR" and I say "This seems like a very ominous-sounding way of saying that Trotsky lost an election." That response would make sense if you'd said it about Arsenal vs Manchester, but when it's Stalin vs Trotsky it has real consequences, like the Holodomor, and shouldn't be trivialized.
by bookofjoe | 2025-07-22 10:17:54+00:00
No. I go ahead and do an emergency intubation all by my lonesome.

See also: first responder at countless Code Blues around the hospital (700 beds) where I did just that. On average once a month x 38 years.

>Presumably the patient just dies in that scenario that you are supposedly qualified and prepared for?

P.S. LOVE the snark!
by fedeb95 | 2025-07-22 10:18:02+00:00
I can't edit anymore so I'll comment. My point is that it's epistemically interesting. What makes it so is that it's hard (at least to me) to decide who's right or wrong. To do so would need an expert-level understanding of the matter at hand. That is not possible: I choose my own biased judgement, someone else potentially biased judgement, or I trust experts and a broader group of people that seems to have things sorted? Trusting others, I make the same choice (epistemically, let me stress again) as choosing my own biased judgement, after all it is my biased judgement that makes me choose that way. At some point, you have faith in something: yourself, the media, some partial knowledge of published papers (am I interpreting their relevance correctly?). My guess (but it is mine alone, going back into the loop) is that a broader group of people someone mitigates failures in having faith into the wrong stuff. This again is not true in general. All this to say, it's interesting to note how on some topics the general public seems to split into two groups, one advocating for the complete trust in the expert, the other for more or less complete self made opinions. Usually health, education, ... ? It seems to me that there isn't such a split for other topics.