MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Radim | 2025-07-20 07:13:33+00:00
Reminds me of an "actual Dutch" AI scandal:

https://www.politico.eu/article/dutch-scandal-serves-as-a-wa...

> In 2019 it was revealed that the Dutch tax authorities had used a self-learning algorithm to create risk profiles in an effort to spot child care benefits fraud.

This was a pre-LLM AI, but expected "hilarity" ensues: broken families, foster homes, bankruptcies, suicides.

> In addition to the penalty announced April 12, the Dutch data protection agency also fined the Dutch tax administration €2.75 million in December 2021.

The government fining itself is always such a boss move. Heads I win, tails you lose.
by btilly | 2025-07-20 07:16:06+00:00
They still do this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meg_Tilly is my sister. It claims that she is of Irish descent. She is not. The Irish was her stepfather (my father), and some reporter confusing information about a stepparent with information about a parent.

Now some school in Seattle is claiming that she is an alumnus. That's also false. After moving from Texada, she went to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belmont_Secondary_School and then https://esquimalt.sd61.bc.ca/.

But for all that, Wikipedia reporting does average out to more accurate than most newspaper articles...
by whatever1 | 2025-07-20 07:16:29+00:00
Is anyone tracking these platforms? Today coincidentally I got a Lyft from the airport to home and due to traffic it would take 1 hour, the price asked was $125. Ok steep, but the poor driver would be stuck with me for an hour.

BUT NO! I asked the driver and at the end of the trip he kindly showed me how much Lyft gave him.

$62 before tip.
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2025-07-20 07:17:35+00:00
The author of this notebook does not appear to agree with you. They describe Python in the beginning as "beautifully designed".

This is not idiomatic Python code. It's code designed to demonstrate Python performance optimizations, through use of relatively obscure Python functionality which exposes details of the internals in situations where you need that.

"its implementation, ecosystem and tooling are fundamentally at odds with correctness and productivity"

You'll need a lot more than just this notebook to argue for that position.
by verisimi | 2025-07-20 07:18:16+00:00
Legislating against genocide or whatever, doesn't make it so. What you have is a society with lots of legislation. Lots of well-meaning legislation has a genuine negative impact on people daily. Think about queues in airports because of terrorists, or traffic cameras, or - the issue we have at present - the developments towards de-anonymising the internet because of children, terrorists. Legislation has a cost.

One has to wonder whether the 'side effects' of legislation were actually the intended effects, and that the main target the legislation was intended to solve was merely an excuse.

Edited for clarity.
by pyman | 2025-07-20 07:18:31+00:00
Yes, Wikipedia is an organisation, not a company (my bad). They spent years improving its tools and building a strong community. Volunteers review changes and some edits get automatically flagged or even reversed if they look suspicious or come from anonymous users. When there's a dispute, editors use "Talk" pages to discuss what should or shoulda't be included.

You can't really argue with those facts.
by drabbiticus | 2025-07-20 07:19:31+00:00
That regular layout also makes it likely to feel better to the hand to play diminished or augmented chords, while comparatively punishing major/minor chords. It would be an odd choice considering the traditions of western music.

There's also something to be said about each key having a specific motor pattern/spatial layout. Sure, it makes it harder to move knowledge of one key into another, but during playing it also makes it easier to not accidentally completely change the key unless you mean to. It's all tradeoffs.
by ffsm8 | 2025-07-20 07:19:33+00:00
Same in Germany (~1€/l for milk, 2€/l for pretty much all milk replacements.

You can obviously buy more expensive milk to, which would give it price parity... But there are also more expensive replacement products. On average, the replacement products cost about 50-100% more.

The only way to save money via vegetarian meals is by making everything yourself and not the finished products from the supermarkets (at that point the relationship reverses - making meat meals about twice as expensive)

And I feel the urge to point out the obvious: the reason why the vegetarian replacement products get ever more space in supermarkets is precisely because they've got a gigantic profit margin, whereas the "traditional" milk/meat products have razor thin margins
by tomcam | 2025-07-20 07:21:43+00:00
I worked in Building 2 and it was my best job ever. Loved every second of it. They knew the need for thinking time, hence individual offices. Buildings 1-8 were in a wooded area with trails threaded through the area. Gorgeous in any weather but especially snow days. Jogging there in the snow was gorgeous, and of course they had showers so you could change.
by nxpnsv | 2025-07-20 07:22:14+00:00
BM is getting rarer on the shelves in Austria. When it first showed up, it was something special, but now there are heaps of great other alternative meats, often cheaper and made here. I guess BM is struggling because of increased competition. During my 20 years of plant based dieat it has never been easier to find fancy plant based things.
by ggm | 2025-07-20 07:24:28+00:00
I also have faced this accusation. I believe it's indicative of younger people who haven't been exposed to older people who have pompous writing styles, like I unquestionably do. Like using idoneous words such as "unquestionably", or "idoneous"

Em dashes are just an affectation.

Patrick O'Brien (aubrey/maturin) used "idoneous" which is how I learned it, and he was both pompous, and erudite. And plain when it suited him: he translated "papillon" as well as writing lit and biography.
by xmprt | 2025-07-20 07:24:29+00:00
I wonder how well this works in practice with a more complicated project. For example, if you have something that's usually sleeping but still needs access to wifi in order to send data and can also be woken up by another sensor in which case the loop isn't as simple. Throw in some threads running in parallel and it becomes much harder to manage. There are sleep modes that you can use for this but it's not as simple as this.
by jiggawatts | 2025-07-20 07:24:37+00:00
There’s nothing wrong with government ID for government services. They need to know who I am to serve me.

Government tracking which sites I visit is not okay.

PS: I’ve worked for every organisation you’ve mentioned. I trust none of them, at all, precisely because I’ve seen how ineptly they deal with citizen data first hand. Not a single person I’ve met in the IT departments of any of those orgs could spell homomorphic, let alone implement such an algorithm in a meaningfully privacy preserving way.
by perching_aix | 2025-07-20 07:25:09+00:00
The article uses the colloquial definition of fertilization, i.e. that fertilization is a moment, specifically the moment the sperm enters the egg. In literature, fertilization is a ~24 hour long process instead, which kicks off when sperm meets egg, and finishes when a zygote is successfully created [0] inside. The sperm entering the egg is relatively early on during that.

The article further refers to "donor" and "parent" embryos. This is also not correct as far as I undestand, eggs turn embryos once the fertilization process completes, and a zygote is present. [1] Even this could be considered misleading as there's also an "embryo proper" which forms about a week later still, but I wanted to keep to the reference frame of the GP.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_fertilization

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embryo
by weatherlite | 2025-07-20 07:25:23+00:00
> So for me, career-wise, it has come at the exact right time. A few years after I reached a level where the little things were getting tedious, a time when all the architectural elements had come together and been investigated manually.

Wish I had your confidence in this. I can easily see how this nullifies my hard earned experience and basically puts me in the same sport as a more mid level or even junior engineer.
by t0mas88 | 2025-07-20 07:25:59+00:00
Maybe I'm paranoid, but I have a separate VLAN with its own WiFi SSID for iot things like cameras, sensors, washing machine, dryer, solar panels and a bunch of ESP32 based projects. It has no internet access, and is only accessible from my home automation server. Those devices really only need to send data to Home Assistant and expose some basic APIs to it.
by klauserc | 2025-07-20 07:26:37+00:00
Yes! One of the worst bugs to debug in my entire career boiled down to a piece of Java mutating a HashSet that it received from another component. That other component had independently made the decision to cache these HashSet instances. Boom! Spooky failure scenarios where requests only start to fail if you previously made an unrelated request that happened to mutate the cached object.

This is an example where ownership semantics would have prevented that bug. (references to the cached HashSets could have only been handed out as shared/immutable references; the mutation of the cached HashSet could not have happened).

The ownership model is about much more than just memory safety. This is why I tell people: spending a weekend to learn rust will make you a better programmer in any language (because you will start thinking about proper ownership even in GC-ed languages).
by Y_Y | 2025-07-20 07:26:55+00:00
The sellers are definitely price-sensitive though. The choice isn't between a $350 trip and a $20 one (because demand far outstrips supply at the point), it's $350 or no deal, or at best a lottery ticket to see if you're one of the lucky 5% of people who can get a ride at the old price.

When the rate shoots up like this drivers will get a message, and plenty of them will get out of bed or stop whatever they're doing and get on the road. The platform will probably take a nice cut, but otherwise to meet demand they'd have to subsidise most of the difference. That would be some very expensive PR.
by adammarples | 2025-07-20 07:28:06+00:00
Because the brain has to continually monitor hundreds of inputs like gravity, pressure, balance, visuals, muscle feedback, etc and integrate them with hundreds of outputs to muscles and coordinate the whole thing which keeps changing, that's walking. All this mushroom does is emit a signal that it was already emitting (ie. It's learned nothing) and the robotocists build a walking system around that which handles all the complexity of walking.
by IshKebab | 2025-07-20 07:28:16+00:00
This isn't true in practice. People don't write impossibly comprehensive test suites in C, and they don't use extremely loose types in Rust either.

It really does matter which language you choose if you want correct code.

> programming in something like C is going to be more efficient, whereas the second language will force you write a lot more code for basic things.

Like how string manipulation is so much simpler and easier in C compared to Rust? Hmm.
by PaulRobinson | 2025-07-20 07:28:31+00:00
OK, we need to pick something apart here, because I see this a lot and it's annoying.

UPF is not inherently bad. Some UPFs (Pasta, wholemeal bread, baked beans, probiotic yoghurts, wheat biscuit cereals), are actually good for you.

The problem is that UPFs come from manufacturers who are trying to get you to buy more of their product, by playing tricks with the brain's response to it.

There are food labs where people are having their brain scanned while they sip different soda formulations, tobacco companies buying food companies to apply their research methodologies, and people figuring out packaging noises and shapes in order to make your old/slow brain excited at the crap you're about to eat (the pringles can is hard to use on purpose, for example). This is all symptomatic of a global food industry that needs you to buy more food, so needs you to consume more food, regardless of nutritional impact.

I recommend reading Chris van Tulleken's book and watching (if you can) the documentaries he made on the subject.

Yes, the Brazilian paper that started all this said "UPF is harming the health of the nation", but the root cause was not UPF processes, it was food industry processes that often require them to produce UPF.

It isn't the UP that makes the F bad, it's that some profitable but bad F needs UP to be viable.

It is therefore perfectly possible for meat substitutes to be UPF and healthy, just as some other UPFs are healthy. In fact, arguably they need to be both to survive.
by abeyer | 2025-07-20 07:29:40+00:00
Not to mention that some people always used the golf course code names for clusters of buildings, too... which were never "official" so there wasn't even any signage or anything to refer to for those. I remember being pointed to a pile of "stuff new people ought to know but HR won't tell you" on some random share in NTDEV when I started and it had a map with those marked on it.
by wbolt | 2025-07-20 07:29:47+00:00
Exactly! The way in which the LLM is used here is very, very basic and outdated. This experiment should be redone in a proper „agentic” setup where there is a feedback loop between the model and the runtime plus access to documentation / internet. The goal now is not to encapsulate all the knowledge inside single LLM - this is too problematic and costly. LLM is a language model not knowledge database. It allows to interpret and interact with knowledge and text data from multiple sources.
by AAAAaccountAAAA | 2025-07-20 07:30:57+00:00
Oh, it seems you are here to just troll and insult everyone. Matrix by calling it just a some sort of volunteer project run by nerds in basements, and those too, who are not pleased with it's problems.

What exactly does have a "call for volunteers" to haul around stuff in a some sort of conference has to do with anything? What has Nextcloud to do with this?

You'd have known that Matrix ecosystem has lots of paid professionals working on it, if you made even a cursory research on the subject before starting to write cheeky comments.

You claimed the problems with Matrix can be solved with a few pull requests. It's your duty to back it up.
by tlb | 2025-07-20 07:31:19+00:00
The recovery process is to "only apply operations that have both intent and completion records." But then I don't see the point of logging the intent record separately. If no completion is logged, the intent is ignored. So you could log the two together.

Presumably the intent record is large (containing the key-value data) while the completion record is tiny (containing just the index of the intent record). Is the point that the completion record write is guaranteed to be atomic because it fits in a disk sector, while the intent record doesn't?
by jpc0 | 2025-07-20 07:32:33+00:00
> Golang has a whole lot of weird, pointless quirks in both its base language and standard library

Having used go in anger I don’t necessarily agree with this, could you point out an example. Maybe I just accepted it and work around it without paying much attention.

If you are referring to interface types being able to be null, well they are allocated on the heap and have dynamic dispatch, this isn’t particularly a surprise if you have worked in a lower level language but might be a surprise if you come from a language where that isn’t the case.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-07-20 07:32:48+00:00
> Those young engineers, in 10 years, won't be able to fix what the LLM gave them,because they have not learned anything about programming.

I have heard a version of this plenty of times, and it was never correct. In the early 90s it was the "electronics" people that were saying "I come from an electronics background, these young'uns will look at a computer and don't know what to do if it breaks". Well, bob, we did, the whole field moved to color coded anti-stupid design, and we figured it out.

Then I heard it about IDEs. Oh, you young people are so spoiled with your IDEs and whatnot, real men code in a text editor.

Then it was about frameworks. BBbbut what if your framework breaks, what do you do then, if you don't know the underlying whatever?

... same old, same old.
by ownagefool | 2025-07-20 07:32:52+00:00
The underlying problem is the UK is reverting back to a system where you have property and can then therefore build wealth, or you don't have property, and somewhere to live costs over 50% of your net income.

This isn't to say taxing wealth is actually the solution, but it's the catch all that people like to scream about.

30% of pensioners are millionaires in the UK, and they recieve a state pension. Fixing that would probably immediately turn a massive budget surplus ( albeit a nasty suprise for financial planning ).

However, suddenly if you find pensioners releasing funds from their property, you affect what's going to be inherited and that's a no go area. There's no real concept of fairness in the debate, just the politics of it all.
by AuryGlenz | 2025-07-20 07:33:17+00:00
That’s awfully hard to do well though, especially setting up a system quickly.

Sure, you can limit amount per customer per store. But then someone comes in with their husband and double dips, and then go back through in 10 minutes hitting different checkouts, or just go through self checkout, and then go to different stores…

All the toilet paper is still gone, encouraging fear in other people to do the same as the couple above.

The alternative would have been “you idiots are buying all the toilet paper? Fine. It’s 5x more expensive now.”

People then see that toilet paper is still in stores and prices can come down gradually but rapidly, and if people start being nervous again prices can quickly raise to stamp that out.
by dwattttt | 2025-07-20 07:33:31+00:00
There's no free lunches. But I could take a problem, make it arbitrarily harder, then take that arbitrary limit away. If someone thought they had to solve the harder problem, and found out they only have to solve the easier one, did they get a free lunch?

This isn't meant to be allegorical or anything specific. I guess it's just an observation that sometimes your lunch can be cheaper than you thought.
by rgovostes | 2025-07-20 07:33:51+00:00
When Impossible was new and only available in burger format at a small number of partner restaurants, I ventured out to SF to try two of them. I concluded that it can make for a genuinely convincing substitute, but the key is preparing it with a sleight of hand to misdirect from the noticeable imitation texture and flavor. Those early burgers were made with thin patties, with flavorful burger sauces and toppings.

As Impossible expanded beyond their launch partners, they lost their control over the consumer experience. I think many restaurants now serve wretched Impossible Burgers because they just substitute a beef patty and don't try to accommodate the differences.

If you are savoring it as part of a taste test, it will never fool you; the first impression isn't the takeaway. If beef is not the focal point of the dish, as in their Impossible Mapo Tofu recipe (https://impossiblefoods.com/recipes/impossible-mapo-tofu) or a chili or something, it can slot in pretty well. They are nowhere near substitutes for ribeye steak or smoked brisket.
by banashark | 2025-07-20 07:33:52+00:00
>> Can you use LINQ against databases like Postgres on Linux, without having to buy into a lot of Microsoft/.NET stuff?

>Probably not. This is usually done with EF Core and the Postgres provider.

You can use Npgsql[0] alone or with non-EF Core interfaces, since it's just a ADO.NET Data Provider (for others: the common interface for database access in dotnet).

The GP question is interesting because it asks about using LINQ with databases "without having to buy into a lot of Microsoft/.NET stuff". I'm going to assume they mean "without using all-microsoft-sourced libraries and frameworks like Entity Framework" (since LINQ is a .NET library interface thing anways).

A couple of example of alternatives that support utilizing Npgsql for database access:

1. Linq2DB: https://linq2db.github.io

2. Dapper: https://github.com/DapperLib/Dapper?tab=readme-ov-file#will-...

3. SqlHydra: https://github.com/JordanMarr/SqlHydra?tab=readme-ov-file#co...

There are a number of other libraries, some more or less complete/maintained than others. EF and Dapper are by far the most popular libraries folks are using on top of Postgres, but there are alternatives, and using the ADO interface on its own works fine (I've done this in very small projects to limit dependencies).

[0] https://www.npgsql.org/doc/index.html
by blitzar | 2025-07-20 07:34:14+00:00
I am buying from willing sellers at the current fair market price. The belief that there will be "one true king" in this race has been incepted by VCs and hype men, and is misguided at best and dangerous at worst.

Like many of the companies that have gone before them, if / when the value proposition is gone, and I get less than 10x the amount I spend, I will be gone.
by cfn | 2025-07-20 07:34:36+00:00
Just for fun I asked ChatGPT "How would you ask an LLM to write a drawing program for the ATARI?" and it asked back a bunch of details to which I answered "I have no idea, just go with the simplest option". It chose the correct graphics mode and BASIC and created the program (which I didn't test).

I still agree with you for large applications but for these simple examples anyone with a basic understanding of vibe coding could wing it.
by ksec | 2025-07-20 07:35:17+00:00
Oh wow I had no idea OnlyFans is from UK. Always thought it was US.

>The UK needs to radically reduce its social safety net and simultaneously cut taxes

Unfortunately that is not a popular opinion in the UK. They want to tax everything, taxing the rich is popular among voters which is why they are doing it. And again the consequence have long been known or told. They are doing it anyway.

Most of the street in London is empty. UK is either number 1 or number 2 in millionaires fleeing the country after China. Property pricing are falling somewhat not because of more supply but because those asset are being sold as part of those moving abroad.
by vladvasiliu | 2025-07-20 07:35:33+00:00
When I used to daily drive a mac, I had Macports since day one, with no issue I can remember. This lasted for some 14 years, out of which 8 were on the same machine.

Whenever this kind of discussion comes up around these parts, you can bet on there being a bunch of people complaining about Brew, but Macports basically never comes up.

So I have to wonder: why does everyone use Brew? Does it have features or other advantages which Macports doesn't? Is macports no longer a thing (I've stopping using macs around 2021)? This reminds me of people complaining about what a crappy experience Windows is, but never even contemplating moving to something else.
by Andr2Andr | 2025-07-20 07:35:54+00:00
Here is the AI overview I got just now:

> Dave Barry, the humorist, experienced a brief "death" in an AI overview, which was later corrected. According to Dave Barry's Substack, the AI initially reported him as deceased, then alive, then dead again, and finally alive once more. This incident highlights the unreliability of AI for factual information.
by Taniwha | 2025-07-20 07:37:04+00:00
I made a living porting Unix to new hardware in the mid to late 80s so all the busses of the day came across my desk, and designed graphics card silicon in the 90s

S-100 was very much history by the time the boxes in the article were designed (5-10 years before) VME and Multibus were the first generation workstation busses, PCs had ISA->EISA, Macs had NuBus/NuBus90 - all of them converged on PCI once chips with enough pins were packaged cheaply enough (plastic rather than ceramic - 200+ pins)