MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by YawningAngel | 2025-07-06 15:10:23+00:00
I don't think anyone is able to learn many languages very easily. If you want to have meaningful discussions in a language you need a vocabulary on the order of 5-10k words depending on the subject and how much exposure you have, which is a cool year of study for even the fastest learners and more akin to 2-3 for us mere mortals.

Most cases of people speaking 10+ languages lean heavily on speaking many closely related languages in a family, which most people already cope with pretty well.
by brundolf | 2025-07-06 15:10:26+00:00
You're spot-on that excel managed to break through because it's one of the few kinds of rigidness that was both legible and familiar enough to the average person. But very little else is, because the average person doesn't think in precision.

> they lack the training to fully specify their ideas (it's tedious for a reason)

> almost no one wants to spend the day trying to get it out a probability machine

These are opposing statements. What AI does best is taking fuzziness or under-specification and making sense out of it. For the first time in history, computers don't need precise instruction to be useful.
by mopsi | 2025-07-06 15:10:38+00:00
This goes beyond games and calls for regulation of anything sold as a product, but working more like a subscription service. Similar issues also affect an increasing number of appliances that rely on apps and connect through manufacturer-hosted services. If the manufacturer goes out of business or shuts down a service, fully working devices can lose some or all of their features. Manufacturers should be required to open up their devices and provide a documented local API, if for no other reason, then to reduce the huge amount of electronic waste created by making devices artificially obsolete.

I think that approaching the problem from the perspective of a physical product, like a smart lightbulb that doesn't work anymore because the manufacturer shut down its servers, would be easier for non-technical people to understand and would likely have a better chance of success.
by hodgesrm | 2025-07-06 15:11:11+00:00
Here's how we do it for analytic systems: data and software. The software services are open source running on Kubernetes. If you don't like the vendor or the vendor goes away, the existing services keep running. You can also maintain them because the stack is open source.

This is different from what the local-first article is describing, which addresses data for individuals. That's a much harder problem to solve at scale.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-07-06 15:11:33+00:00
Here is the core problem laid out:

1.) Owner needs workers and wants to make the position attractive.

2.) Owner is given the option to enable tips, and entice works with "Pay, plus tips!"

3.) Owner doesn't pay tips, patrons do.

4.) Workers blame patrons, not owner, for not tipping.

5.) Patrons feel guilty and tip. Workers make pretty good money from this, and enjoy the job more.

In a way it's kind of like a social mind virus, where the workers and owners benefit, and the patrons feel pain for not going along with it.

The only fix I can come up with is a law that tips can only be solicited after a service has been rendered. And entering something into a computer is not a service.
by lordnacho | 2025-07-06 15:12:15+00:00
Random thoughts after skimming this...

First of all, why had nobody mentioned linguistics as a field of study by the time I had finished school? I don't think I had learned anything at all in this area until after university, and it's so incredibly rich and fascinating. I reckon the kids lose a lot by having French/German/Spanish/etc without any form of linguistics involved, where they can have a little look at the language from a different perspective.

Second, I take issue with the idea that you can't learn a language to fluency in adulthood. Like the guy in the article. I think it's really all economics:

- When you're a kid, you have no opportunity cost. Taking the time to repeat something you pronounced wrong costs you nothing, because you're just playing.

- When you're a little bit older, you want to socialize. You can socialize with your friends without speaking perfectly, and they find it awkward to correct you.

- When you're an adult, you have to work. Most jobs don't require you to speak fluently, so you don't. Jobs that require native fluency will be taken by people who had low opp cost, aka natives or early learners.

The only people who consciously try to learn a language to native level are the people in this article, who seem to be able to do it. To me they are the evidence that this would work, if only you defied your economic incentives.

The obvious parallel is coding languages. You might have dabbled in Rust as a JS or cpp guy, but once someone is paying you to write it for a living, you take the time to actually learn the idiomatic ways to do things, the libraries to use, and so forth.

It also seems obviously true that everyone can learn a bunch of languages. The old people in my family speak three languages, plus the local language of where they ended up as refugees, plus English. Most of them are not university educated, they just grew up with a bunch of languages. People who grew up at a language border tend to speak a a couple as well, and people who met a spouse from another place, eg I have a friend who learned Swedish due to moving over the bridge, and Spanish having married a Mexican.

On the computer side, writing more than one language is probably by far the norm, who doesn't write python along with something else?
by georgehotz | 2025-07-06 15:12:16+00:00
Nice try. I worked at Facebook for 9 months and left (before vesting any shares) because I didn't agree with the mission, even back in 2012. I worked at Twitter for 5 weeks and left because I realized nothing was going to change (and the good food went away). I don't regret trying at either, but in revealed preferences, I've spent most of my life writing open source software, even if that's not what attracts most media about me.

I know you think everyone is just trying to "get their bag" and that's the framework you see this in. But I already had more money at 21 than I've spent to date, and not cause I had a lot of money, but cause I don't buy much stuff. I'm sorry you feel played, but don't project that on me.
by nebulous1 | 2025-07-06 15:12:19+00:00
The issue with most of what you're saying here is that all of that works the way it does because it can, not because it has to. Code libraries, for example, may essentially prohibit what is being requested by SKG because they can. However, if they couldn't then they wouldn't. The companies selling the libraries aren't going to simply shut up shop.

Which is just to say, if there's money to be made then businesses will do so within the regulatory framework.
by iJohnDoe | 2025-07-06 15:13:27+00:00
Thanks for your insights. I think it’s good to hear experiences from those who have lived through it.

The actual problem we’re dealing with is that Trump doesn’t have a choice. Putin has helped Trump financially many times over the years. Putin has bailed Trump out in the past. Trump now needs to pay Putin back. Trump simply doesn’t have a choice and he will do anything to save his own skin.
by sandreas | 2025-07-06 15:13:35+00:00
I use a cheap power meter for initial testing and a tasmota plug for having a monitoring solution as well as a second measure and a possibility ro remote hard reset in case of a freeze or something.

Turns out that power supply and motherboard are the most important to save power - besides low C-states (powertop). I had best results with Fujitsu D3x17 / d3644 and Gigabyte C246 wu2.

Today these are unicorns not worth hunting for. Like I said: No modern server grade board is that good while being cheap. You could take a look at

Kontron K3851-R ATX

If i remember correctly. Kontron bought Fujitsus Mainboard segment a while ago.
by soraminazuki | 2025-07-06 15:14:25+00:00
That's quite some wall of one insane libertarian take after another that it's impossible to keep up. Regulating drugs isn't the same thing as turning into a police state.

> The opioid epidemic is not a great example

You think the issue of regulating heroin and fentanyl is comparable to alcohol prohibition, but not the opioid epidemic?

> The problem blew up when authorities started cracking down on those prescriptions

The problem blew up when pharmaceutical companies deceitfully advertised addictive pain killers as safe and aggressively prescribed them to even those who didn't need it. It would've been prevented if the government adequately stepped in before it happened. It was already too late when authorities started cracking down, and to frame that time as the starting point of the problem is blatantly disingenuous.

> It definitely wasn’t the doing of ”humane and sensible” policies!

It's you who's framing the deregulation of OxyContin, heroin, and fentanyl as "humane and sensible," not me.

> So you see, it is actually a choice between legalization of all drugs or violence and corruption.

No, you haven't presented a single supporting argument that stands the test of logic and common sense.

> The system can only regulate drugs when they are legal.

What kind of logic is that? The only way to regulate something is to not regulate? What kind of mind games are you playing here?

> Illegal drugs combined with enforcement of prohibition pits producers, traffickers, dealers and users against the police and ultimately the army, which are usually the only groups of people who have a state-sanctioned mandate to use violence against other people.

Just because the US tries to solve every social issue with over-policing, police militarization, and mass incarceration doesn't mean that it's the only solution.

> Just add pervasive income inequality, throw in some general lack of future prospects mixed with widely publicized lies about the billionaire class being entirely self-made through hard work, and baby, you got a stew going, and the people getting thrown in the hot water are already boiling over.

Yes, and you think having more would-be Sacklers selling highly addictive drugs without anyone to stop them is a solution to that? Give us a break. Libertarianism doesn't stop billionaires and their exploitation of everyone else.
by jeauxlb | 2025-07-06 15:14:26+00:00
Search, music streaming, books: heavily consolidated markets where the value-based offering has supremacy (Google vs any paid search; Spotify/Apple Music vs Tidal; Amazon vs anything). It's the market supremacy that generally allows this.

If quality were a sufficiently motivating aspect, Google's deteriorating search wouldn't be a constant theme on this site, and people on the street would know where to download and play a FLAC file.
by pjmlp | 2025-07-06 15:15:08+00:00
I like both languages, those are the issues where I see someone looking from outside and having such complexity claim as the OP.

The ecosystem is part of what means to use a specific language, though.

Yeah, having to guess what standards and extensions each C and C++ compiler implement, is also an issue with them, and will eventually come to Rust as implementations eventually come up, originally there was only CFront and UNIX System V compilers.
by jones89176 | 2025-07-06 15:15:25+00:00
I think it's mainly a regulation/law thing:

"In contrast, European regulations are much stricter regarding the dimensions of trucks. In European Union member countries, trucks cannot exceed 18.75 meters in length, which prioritizes the maximum use of available space for cargo. Manufacturers resort to solutions such as the use of smaller cabs and flat bodies to comply with these regulations while still maintaining cargo capacity."

https://www.sgibinc.com/en/differences-between-american-and-...
by koverstreet | 2025-07-06 15:16:52+00:00
Benchmarks? I hope you mean detailed writeups on robustness, because performance is not a consideration yet.

I agree that more thoughtful analysis would be helpful, but I have to work with what I've got :)

One of the recent pull request threads had a user talking about how bcachefs development is being done "the old way", from the earlier days of Linux; less "structure", less process, so that we can move quickly and - critically - work effectively with users.

I liked that comparison, and I think that's a big part of why bcachefs has had the success it's had with users (it's a proven recipe! Linux did displace everything else, after all). And on top of that, we're doing it engineering best practices that have advanced significantly since then. Automated testing, a codebase that heavily uses assertions (there's a lot I've said elsewhere about how to effectively use assertions; it's not preconditions/postconditions), runtime debugging, and more. It started too early to be written in Rust, that's really the only thing I'd change :)

People just need to be patient - this stuff takes time. The core design was done years ago, on disk format was frozen in 6.15, and now we're in a pretty hard freeze and doing nothing but fix bugs. The development process has been working well, it's been shaping up fast.
by ysofunny | 2025-07-06 15:17:08+00:00
don't fall for it, nobody owns the music

the musicians making it know this deep down. it's like the music is there, and the musician who "made" it indeed only brought it from "there" to here. that is it.

at most you own the medium in which the music's representation is stored, which is streaming's problem. the medium is your internet connection if anything
by snozolli | 2025-07-06 15:17:14+00:00
This reminds me of the story of the young man who was walking to get his mail when a helicopter fell out of the sky and killed him. Articles immediately blamed him for listening to his iPod, as if regular people know the subtle (?) sounds of a failing helicopter overhead.

https://en.m.wikinews.org/wiki/Pedestrian,_three_others_kill...

People's rush to blame the victim never ceases to amaze me. I think that people see that the victim did X, and they don't do X, therefore they'll never suffer a similar fate, and they need to proudly proclaim it to the world. Maybe it's related to magical thinking and the just world fallacy.
by zamalek | 2025-07-06 15:17:54+00:00
These concerns have been raised and addressed. Firstly, I am not sure how cars getting damaged means that multiplayer games have to become F2P - but that's not steelmanning your argument.

One of the major concerns raised has been middle are: components that developers purchase and use in their server implementation. This is often the largest hurdle to many pro-consumer outcomes: the developers can't share anything related because they don't own it.

The most likely outcome after sensible laws are passed is that the industry evolves just as it did with GDPR. Developers will look to other middlewares that are SKG compliant.

Failing that, gamers have routinely shown that they are capable of clean room implementations of server software (WoW and Genshin Impact) - all that needs be done is the client being released with all server auth disabled and some way to specify the server to use. Developers might even be required to provide basic protocol specifications. Essentially, repair it yourself instructions.

This strawman argument you have provided is exactly the same one used by Pirate Software. It relies on a highly specific interpretation of the initiative. The initiative calls for "reasonably playable state," which can have a vast number of outcomes that are different to the single one that you have chosen.

And if the cars do prohibit a game from addressing server concerns and remaining in a reasonably playable state, remove them. The game will continue to be reasonably playable following that.
by calibas | 2025-07-06 15:18:26+00:00
Video games publishers don't want you to play the same game for too long without spending more money. They don't want to make games like Terraria where you have a $10 game you can play for a thousand hours. They'd much rather you buy multiple $60+ games, plus expansions, "micro"-transactions and subscriptions.

They don't want games that last forever, they want to pressure you into constantly buying the next big thing.
by chickenzzzzu | 2025-07-06 15:18:31+00:00
I work for a game company. I am ardently opposed to this idea.

All you will end up with, in the best case scenario that isn't even guaranteed to happen, is extremely mediocre games for which you will have the server executable along with the client.

Whether you like it or not, thanks to piracy and competition (and yes I've heard Gabe Newell's quote on piracy), server authoritative video games that are eventually turned off is a legitimate business strategy, and not even just for games. And no, "just release your source code then" is not a valid rule to enforce either.

If you like video games so much but don't like the terms of serivce and price, have you tried making your own? It has never been easier to do so, and there are freely usable code and art assets on hundreds of different platforms for you to attempt.
by jgalt212 | 2025-07-06 15:18:32+00:00
Indeed. When I look at our VM spend, it's high because we need servers with a lot of local disk--not a lot of compute. For some reason, you cannot get one without the other.

Can you imagine the size of the business / service you could run with 4 attached 20TB drives, and a modest CPU? Good luck getting such from a cloud provider.
by gavmor | 2025-07-06 15:19:17+00:00
"Field" is a less mysterious term because it's not polysemous with a supernatural being (ghost) or a distilled alcoholic beverage (soluble liquid).

Sure, it's polysemous with "a cultivated expanse of land", but AFAIK there is no popular, problematic pseudoscientific quackery about suggesting our bodies possess rows of oats.
by ta1243 | 2025-07-06 15:19:22+00:00
OK, so I get selected at random.

I haven't got the first clue about governing a country, so I'd rely on people telling me what to do. If they can convince me (which will be easy, trillion dollar companies and powerful billionaire oligarchs convince people to act against their own self interest all the time) they end up running the country, but the blame can be taken by me.
by skeeter2020 | 2025-07-06 15:19:28+00:00
I think the article is a great way to introduce yourself into this type of situation. Lots of people do better at well defined tasks, so I'll give you one: Most people at these events are looking for something, go in looking to give. Connect with one person who you can help. This can be a very modest thing: an offer to lend a book, send a link, connect them with someone else; anything. If you offer something physical, go out of your way to get it to them. Making a connection? Make it a warm hand-off, maybe in person. The keys: follow through on your promise, make it geniune and put some effort into it.

Converting a vague, complex, often scary thing like a networking event into a well-defined mission is a great way to address fear, add value and contribute.
by d4rkn0d3z | 2025-07-06 15:19:55+00:00
'Only for a useless definition of "wrong"....'

The definition of wrong is given in the second part of the sentence you quote. Newton was usefully wrong in a scientific sense; His theory and ontology of time as immutably flowing from moment to moment is fine for beings in a relatively stable gravitational field but fails miserably anywhere else. GR is a theory that gets time less wrong, but entails completely different ontology wherein "forces" disappear. In your parlance, Newton put time below "that level" when he should have lifted it into that which must be reasoned about physically. This means he was wrong conceptually in taking something as an absolute when it was not so.

'Only for a useless definition of "parlour tricks".'

If you look at Newton's work it amounts to little more than a first order approximations, rules to model linear portions of a nonlinear reality. I think you have a very romantic picture of Newton's work. Don't get me wrong, Newton was a giant in his time he had mastered linear curve fitting and to some extent I think he knew what he was doing and that it would be supplanted. I actually think if Newton stood here today he would disagree with you, side with me and take up GR straight away.

"Newton being absorbed into relativity is like the one case where they are commensurable."

Newton's theory was not absorbed, it was supplanted. One cannot absorb the idea of a "force" into GR. This is precisely what incommensurability means.

"Obviously it contains new math and new abstractions..."

It is not about the data, Newton was wrong because non-euclidian geometry wasn't there,

"Postscript"

I have degrees in electronic engineering and theoretical physics. I graduated number one in my class both times. I am not a philosophy interloper as you point out in your ad-hominid attack.

IF you want to make progress in your understanding of physics you best heed the words and thoughts I have provided.
by noduerme | 2025-07-06 15:20:06+00:00
What you are describing is not natural language programming, it's the use of incantations discovered by accident or by trial and error. It's alchemy, not chemistry. That's what people mean when they say it's not reproducible. It's not reproducible according to any useful logical framework that could be generally applied to other cases. There may be some "power" in knowing magical incantations, but mostly it's going to be a series of parlor tricks, since neither you nor anyone else can explain why one prompt produces an algorithm that spits out value X whilst changing a single word to its synonym produces X*-1, or Q, or 14 rabbits. And if you could, why not just type the algorithm yourself?

Higher level programming languages may make choices for coders regarding lower level functionality, but they have syntactic and semantic rules that produce logically consistent results. Claiming that such rules exist for LLMs but are so subtle that only the ultra-enlightened such as yourself can understand them begs the question: If hardly anyone can grasp such subtlety, then who exactly are all these massive models being built for?
by b112 | 2025-07-06 15:20:35+00:00
I agree with your weakened claim that secrets are very difficult to keep

I think the mindspace here is what I was taught. A shared secret is no longer that. That the more people which know, the more impossible it will be.

As humans, we must conceptualize different sides of the problem, differently. As a person attempting to maintain secrecy, the impossible nature must be kept in mind at all times.

This is doubly true with some personality types, which think everything is a game. I've often wondered if some people feel mental pain, when held to their word.

So framing is important.

But from the other side, one can point to exceptions to the rule.
by throw10920 | 2025-07-06 15:20:40+00:00
I think very few people (outside of the industry - important caveat) are opposed to the stated goals of the initiative:

> This initiative calls to require publishers that sell or license videogames to consumers in the European Union [...] to leave said videogames in a functional (playable) state.

The concern that I have is that I have no idea what the actual text of the law is going to be.

You can look at laws like the DMCA, that had a reasonable purpose (made adjustments to the copyright system for the age of the internet) and a royally screwed up implementation that basically everyone can find a problem with.

It's easy to imagine that the laws that pass could be (1) completely neutered by corruption in the EU leading to regulatory capture (2) far too strong and written in a way that imposes unfair burdens on developers (which include indie devs too) or (3) bad just because of technical incompetence of the authors.

I know that there's not much I can do about those things, but that may explain the emotional reactions of some people like e.g. PirateSoftware - nobody actually knows what the resulting law will be like, and everyone familiar with the legislative system knows how bad the outputs can be.