MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cornholio | 2025-07-05 20:43:53+00:00
> I and others happen to have done at least one transaction with Bitcoin that wasn't illegal or evaded financial regulations

Is it a transaction that would have likely been faster, more convenient, secure, cheaper and with less or zero volatility risk using a traditional, centralized funds transfer system, especially if both parties could agree beforehand on the best modern system for that use case instead of being forced to accept cumbersome antiquated things like credit cards?

Because nobody disputes payments are possible with cryptocurrency; just that the practical benefits for legal activities are non-existent or negative, so the only remaining draw are speculation and circumvention.
by zachbenson817 | 2025-07-05 20:44:14+00:00
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by Aloisius | 2025-07-05 20:44:16+00:00
I'm curious about these similar dressing recipes as I've found nothing similar enough to call them the same thing.

I've seen plenty of anchovy/mustard/aioli dressings that one might call predecessors, but they lack the egg yolks, parmigiano reggiano and Worcestershire sauce, so they would not taste like Caesar salad dressing.

Please share.
by cycomanic | 2025-07-05 20:44:17+00:00
> > journal publishers have been lining their own pockets at everyone's expense > > May I ask two things? First, how much do you think a journal charges for publishing? Second, what work do you believe the publisher actually does? >

I can answer that, it varies by journal but typically between $1k and $5k.

> Consider this: when you publish with a journal, they commit to hosting the article indefinitely—maintaining web servers, DOIs, references, back-references, and searchability. >

I seriously doubt that that is worth several $1000 I mean I can buy a lifetime 1TB of storage data from e.g. Pcloud for about $400 and a single article fits easily into 20 MB.

> Next, they employ editors—who are paid—tasked with reading the submission, identifying potential reviewers (many don’t respond, and most who do decline), and coordinating the review process.

Many journals especially the ones that use domain experts as editors, pay nothing or only a pittance.

>Reviewing a journal paper can easily take three full weeks. When was the last time you had three free weeks just lying around?

Editors don't review papers and reviewers (who as you point out do the big work, don't get paid) > > Those who accept often miss deadlines, so editors must send reminders or find replacements. By this point, 3–6 months may have passed.

Those remainder emails are typically automated. That's infuriating in itself, I have been send reminder emails on Christmas day (for a paper that I received a few days before Christmas). Just goes to show how little they value reviewer time. > > Once reviews arrive, they’re usually "revise and resubmit," which means more rounds of correspondence and waiting. >

And that is a lot of work?

> After acceptance, a copy editor will spend at least two hours on grammar and style corrections. >

And in my experience those are contractors, who do a piss poor job. I mean I've received comments from copy editors, that clearly showed they had never seen a scientific paper before.

> So: how many hours do you estimate the editor, copy editor, and publishing staff spend per paper?

The paid staff? 2-3h combined.

But we don't need to even to tally hours, we know from the societies like the IEEE and the OSA, that their journals (in particular the open access ones) are cash cows.
by serbuvlad | 2025-07-05 20:44:31+00:00
Define "discredit". Define "rely". I administer some servers and a few classrooms at my uni, along with two colleagues. This is not my primary job. This is not anyone's primary job. We went from a bunch of ad hoc solutions with shell scripts that sort of kept everything together to an entirely declarative system, with centralized accounts, access control and floating homes using Ansible, FreeIPA, NFSv4 w/ Kerberos etc. For bringing up a new classroom computer, we went from hard-cloning the hard disk with clonezilla to installing Ubuntu, enrolling the key and running the ansible install everything playbook.

This is serious. Researchers and educators rely on these systems every day to do their jobs. Tell me why this work should be discredited. Because I used AI (followed by understanding what it did, testing, a lot of tuning, a lot of changes, a lot of "how would that work" conversations, a lot of "what are the pros and cons" conversations)?

How about we just discredit the lazy use of AI instead?

Should high school kids who copy paste Wikipedia and call it their essay mean we should discredit Wikipedia?
by sfn42 | 2025-07-05 20:45:48+00:00
Then move out of West Virginia. Or find something that works in WV. Those are their options.

I also can't say I have much sympathy for people who voted for Trump and then got screwed by Trump. West virginians overwhelmingly voted red. You can't vote against social security nets and then complain that you dont have a social security net.

Pull yourselves up by your bootstraps, red blooded patriots. No one can tread on you.
by mtlmtlmtlmtl | 2025-07-05 20:45:48+00:00
Fully agreed. Norway has this same legislation. It's the kind of thing that only makes sense if you only look at it for 2 seconds, through a thick fog of radical sex-negative feminism.

Yes, it is true that the pimps and human traffickers are the real criminals, and that the vast majority of prostitutes are in fact victims. And yes, it's a good thing not to prosecute them. But when you make buying illegal, you force prostitutes away from the safety nets that could help them anyway. If you're the police, how do you catch johns? Follow the prostitutes, of course. So they're forced to avoid the police, lest they're unable to meet demands from their pimps, and get punished, often violently. And in avoiding the police, they also become more vulnerable to abuse by johns.

The real world just doesn't work like this. You can't nearly separate these things into legal/not legal bins. They're entangled and can't be unentangled merely by way of ideology or wishful thinking.

The other issue is of course, is it wrong to buy sex? If you're a sex-negative feminist, the answer is yes, because your ideology rests on projecting your own sex-negative outlook onto all women, which to me seems hilariously and ironically sexist. Personally I believe women have very diverse attitutes to sex and should have autonomy to do whatever the hell they please with their lives and bodies.

To me, the only thing that really matters if whether the sex is consensual, without clear-cut coercion. Is it wrong to buy sex from someone who is clearly a victim of human trafficking? Absolutely, I think so. This is basically slavery.

Is it wrong to buy sex from someone who's selling it, because it's their only option? This one is trickier, but I think it's about as wrong as getting your iphone screen fixed by someone who couldn't cut it in "real" IT work. Or getting your garbage picked up by someone whose only marketable skill is emptying a bin into a truck. Society is full of people doing jobs they hate because it's all they got. And that sucks, but criminalising their customers doesn't seem like a reasonable solution. It's a systemic issue.

Is it wrong to buy sex work from someone who does it because they genuinely love it(yes, they do exist, though they are awfully rare)? How the hell could it be?

So in summation, it seems to me human trafficking is the real problem. Criminalising johns seems like a stupid way to tackle it, and it demonstrably does not work. Extending it to the online sphere makes even less sense.
by whilenot-dev | 2025-07-05 20:47:59+00:00
> "Did I solve the problem I had"

I really think that's the wrong question, but I don't know how to formulate it any better... it should be somewhere between playful curiosity ("how did it advance me a step in my own interests?"), pragmatic foresight ("how did it open up new possibilities?"), and bland reflection ("why was it the necessary thing to do at that moment?").

> "can i fix this thing that annoys me right now"

Whatever your questions might be, I sure hope they won't only aim for a boolean answer.
by davely | 2025-07-05 20:48:22+00:00
I lived in a semi-rural area with some foothills behind our property growing up.

I distinctly remember that our neighbor had a number of different cats over the years. They were never around that long. He always named them _C.B._

I never thought much of it, maybe he was just a fan of chatting of radios.

I was in my teenager when I finally realized what C.B. stood for in this context: Coyote Bait
by nishiohiroshi | 2025-07-05 20:48:42+00:00
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by free_bip | 2025-07-05 20:48:47+00:00
It looks like Sweden's politicians are too sheltered to understand that there are people who enjoy sex work. Instead of trying to make it safe and enjoyable for all parties, they're systemically punishing sex workers, and even redefining the word sex to include onlyfans content (?!) while simultaneously calling them "victims."

The irony, of course, is that the only thing they're a "victim" of is those same politicians.
by bsenftner | 2025-07-05 20:48:48+00:00
If that's what you're hearing, then you're not thinking it through. Of course one would not want an AI acting as a doctor as one's real doctor, but a medical or law school graduate studying for a license sure would appreciate a Socratic tutor in their specialization. Likewise, on the job in a technical specialization, a sounding board is of more value when it follows along, potentially with a virtual board of debate, and questions when logical drifts occur. It's not AI thinking for one, it is AI critically assisting their exploration through Socratic debate. Do not place AI in charge of critical decisions, but do place them in the assistance of people figuring out such situations.
by HenryBemis | 2025-07-05 20:49:12+00:00
The issue with democracy (which imho is by far the best political system) is that the parties can collect "donations" which (again just imho) is legalized bribing and ultimately ends up creating servants of the sponsors and not the voters.

People are not heroes. They want to be elected, hire the ones they want for their "court" (think Kings and their courts). And politicians want to change only the things that won't stop them from getting reelected.

Secondary consequences are irrelevant to many politicians' mindset.
by sigmoid10 | 2025-07-05 20:49:26+00:00
They don't have an additional capital gains tax, but they still tax you on capital gains. In fact they even tax you specifically on capital gains from savings and investments, but using a fixed assumed percentage gain irrespective of whether your actual gains were lower or higher than that percentage. And they are also going to change that law by 2028 so that it works like any normal capital gains tax. So if you can 10x an investment in the next 2.5 years you might save a bit, but after that it hits you like everywhere else.
by satyrun | 2025-07-05 20:50:00+00:00
Not to mention you can't have a robust credit market built on top of a deflationary currency.

Imagine you take out a 30 year mortgage in 2025 with 12 periodic payments of .01 BTC a year.

Imagine offering a 10 year bond that will make quarterly payments of .01 BTC. What is the price of this bond? It is just a meaningless question practically.
by sillyfluke | 2025-07-05 20:50:22+00:00
>the concentration of wealth

On this topic, I'm curious what others think of the renaming of this post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44435732

The original title I gave was: "Paul Graham: without billionaires, there will be no startups."

As it was a tweet, I was trying to summarize his conclusive point in the first part of the sentence:

Few of them realize it, but people who say "I don’t think that we should have billionaires" are also saying "I don't think there should be startups,"

Now, this part of the sentence to me was the far more interesting part because it was a much bolder claim than the second part of the sentence:

because successful startups inevitably produce billionaires.

This second part seems like a pretty obvious observation and is a completely uninteresting observation by itself.

The claim that successful startups have produced billonaires therefore successful startups require billionaires is a far more contentious and interesting claim.

The mods removed "paul graham" from the title and switched the title to the uninteresting second part of the sentence, turning it into a completely banal and pointless title: Successful startups produce billionaires. Thereby removing any hint of the bold claim being made by the founder of one of the most succesful VCs of the 21st century. And incidentally, also the creator of this website.

I can only conclude someone is loathe to moderate a thread about whether billionaires are neccessary for sucessful startups to exist.

ps. There is no explicit guideline for tweets as far as I can tell. You are forced to use an incomplete quote or are forced to summarize the tweet im some fashion.
by ryandrake | 2025-07-05 20:50:27+00:00
> That case also arose when a driver was found guilty of violating the law because he was looking at a map on his phone while driving. But when the case reached the court of appeal, it interpreted the word “using” in the law’s language as prohibiting listening and talking while holding a cellphone and driving.

Legislators seem to love to do this. They deliberately write these laws using vague terms like "using" and then expect people (and the courts) to read their minds later on.

> In issuing its ruling on Tuesday, the California Court of Appeals noted that, when the current law was being drafted, the Assembly Committees on Transportation and Appropriations concluded that the new law would prohibit wireless phones from being used “for any purpose” while driving, and would include “all distracting mobile device-related behavior.”

No shit. The spirit of the original law was pretty clear. Why couldn't they have simply written what they meant in the first law without it having to be amended? Sloppy people writing sloppy laws.

[EDIT: Wow, the up-and-down voting swings on this comment have been wild. Is this really that controversial?]
by tombert | 2025-07-05 20:50:49+00:00
I recently started using Typst instead of Pandoc->LaTeX.

I held off on playing with Typst for years because I was under the (incorrect) impression that the only way to use it was with their web editor. I'm sure that their editor is completely fine, but I am pretty entrenched in Neovim and Pandoc had been serving me well.

Once I found out that Typst has a command line version that I can use directly, it became more appealing, because I'm pretty sick of cloud shit.
by nunez | 2025-07-05 20:51:08+00:00
The few times I've used Google to search for something (Kagi is amazing!), it's Gemini Assistant at the top fabricated something insanely wrong.

A few days ago, I asked free ChatGPT to tell me the head brewer of a small brewery in Corpus Christi. It told me that the brewery didn't exist, which it did, because we were going there in a few minutes, but after re-prompting it, it gave me some phone number that it found in a business filing. (ChatGPT has been using web search for RAG for some time now.)

Hallucinations are still a massive problem IMO.
by Spivak | 2025-07-05 20:51:17+00:00
Because I don't think it's vestigial, I think it's serving an important function of governance that never made it into the official rules but is nonetheless necessary as a stabilizing effect. It doesn't have to be the filibuster but something ought to provide the effect. It should be easier to block legislation than to pass it. It wouldn't be a good thing if you could have huge policy swings when a 51-49 becomes 49-51. Being able to, with effort, demand specific pieces of legislation reach a higher bar biases us toward the status quo.
by anenefan | 2025-07-05 20:51:29+00:00
I tried to replicate with no luck - however I also block a bunch of BS API / script servers.

I note suspend is the term they're using too. Using a somewhat isolated area does make sense but oceans come various other issues / problems. Last few paragraphs sums up the growing discontent of the area of being used as a convenient area for the US.

>The rocket cargo program would use commercial rockets, such as those made by Elon Musk’s Space X, although the Air Force has not announced industry partners.

The Air Force had also considered building the landing pads on Kwajalein Atoll, Midway Island and Wake Island, all of which have ongoing operations by the U.S. military.

Johnston Atoll has also had a long history of military operations — and extensive contamination as a result.

In the 1950s and 1960s, it was used for numerous missile launches during nuclear weapons testing. Launch failures during several of those tests led to plutonium contamination on the atoll.

The Pacific Islands Heritage Coalition, which launched the change.org petition, said in a March 13 news release that building the launch pads on Johnston “only continues decades of harm and abuse to a place that is culturally and biologically tied to us as Pacific people.”

The petition states that under control of U.S. armed forces the atoll “has endured the destructive practices of dredging, atmospheric nuclear testing, and stockpiling and incineration of toxic chemical munitions. The area needs to heal, but instead, the military is choosing to cause more irreversible harm.”
by fainpul | 2025-07-05 20:51:55+00:00
macOS has a history of app icons which are highly detailed and almost photo-realistic. I think this trend started with OS X and the skeuomorphism hype. In my opinion, this is exactly the opposite of what a good icon should be like (reduced, stylized, simplified to the extreme).

Some bad examples you can see in the latest version of macOS:

- Xcode (photorealistic hammer)

- TextEdit (photorealistic pen)

- Automator (rendered robot)

- System Settings (gearwheels with tiny details)

- Preview (literally a photo, with a photorealistic "loupe" in front)

- Trash bin in the dock (photorealistic bin)
by jahsome | 2025-07-05 20:51:59+00:00
You asserted without evidence they "probably mostly" failed. Thats a very different statement than your "tenous grasp" claim. If you're going to make sweeping generalizations, don't be a coward about it.

What's worse, you claimed you didn't make any assumptions, which you very clearly did -- that the writers and performers were uneducated, when in fact they are.

Then when presented with evidence, you doubled down and even still continue to gaslight, hence: disengenous.

Uneducated folks can still make correct assertions, and that's the entire point of science. The idea and supporting observations are meant to drive the conversation, not one's laughably judgemental opinion of the person presenting them.

That's a concept with which you, being so educated, are undoubtedly familiar.
by ben_w | 2025-07-05 20:52:14+00:00
Sometimes law is analogised to software; in this analogy, loopholes are bugs.

One who exploits a bug is a hacker. An example of a life-hack is to arrange things to have lower taxation than those who wrote the laws were expecting.

But just as bugs in software are not meant to be exploited even though they can be, there are many loopholes in laws that are not meant to be exploited even though they can be.

Unless the law has a generic catch-all for tax minimisation schemes*, such minimisation may be legal, and yet frowned upon because it wasn't meant to be legal. Or even if it was meant to be legal, but you're rich and the general public thinks you're being unreasonable.

* I think the UK does? Or at least that's what it looked like HMRC was saying last time I was able to file my own taxes there…
by clickety_clack | 2025-07-05 20:52:30+00:00
I did that at 27, and it took me about 5 years to get into the sphere of where I wanted to be. Best thing I ever did. Even today I was talking about how sad it would be to hit retirement and to never have truly done what I wanted in my life. Now I have none of those regrets.

However, it was a hard road, and I travelled it when conditions for developers were much better. Along the way, I made some missteps, and followed the wrong path a few times out of sheer lack of industry experience. I had to make the kinds of mistakes you usually make at 22, but at that age everyone you know is also going through the same experience so it feels like everyone is going through it together. It’s a lonelier road when everyone you know is hitting senior/executive/management/ownership level and you’re back trying to figure out how to find your footing on the first rungs of the ladder. I didn’t love the work I used to do, but I was becoming respected when I left it and would have done quite well, so for _years_ I had the constant nagging doubt that I had made the wrong choice and that maybe the grass wasn’t greener after all.

That’s my experience. If you wanted advice (which you can ignore a la “wear sunscreen”), I’d tell you to keep your current job while you work on your passion projects. Try to get involved with dev meetups. You want to see if you want to become one of those people, and you want to see if the stuff you’re doing gets any kind of traction. Meetups will help you figure out how to sound like a developer, which can be more important than it should be. You will have to fit in with developers to get past interviews if you’re looking for a job.

Whatever you decide to do, best of luck. I hope it all works out for you!