MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-07-21 21:11:52+00:00
"People would like to have a house that's large enough for their family and access to good employment."

"Over the last 50 years, America has kind of told them, 'You can't have both'."

I'd go past that and say you probably can't have a home over 3 bedrooms without already being in an upper income bracket.

So no large families (to offset population challenges). No extended families to help the existing family. No space to help relatives relocate.

No homes for four income earners in a 4-income economy.
by rnhmjoj | 2025-07-21 21:11:52+00:00
Tokamaks can also be operated in steady-state, at least theoretically. The reason a tokamak is pulsed is due to the fact the toroidal current is driven inductively, so there is a limit to how long you can keep increasing the current in the central solenoid. However there are other methods, for example, neutral beam injection and electron cyclotron current drive. You can even exploit the bootstrap current (self-generated by collisional processes in the plasma) to obtain a near 100% non-inductive toroidal plasma (this is called "advanced tokamak" regime).

Anyway, the older generation of devices was pulsed for engineering reasons (like non-superconducting coils getting too hot). The current generation of device is solving most of these and is limited by MHD instabilities alone (neoclassical tearing modes, mostly), if we can get active control mechanism working, then will be finally approach the long-pulse or steady-state regime.
by thewebguyd | 2025-07-21 21:12:44+00:00
For the file storage/sharing/collaboration part, yeah - there's plenty, and sharepoint arguably sucks even for that.

What trapped a lot of orgs is making use of the whole PowerPlatform around sharepoint. There's a lot of crusty old LoB apps built with MS's no code tools (PowerAutomate, PowerApps) which run on SharePoint as the delivery platform. Some of these even hook into Excel files stored in the various document libraries, etc. There are entire, large business processes being handled by this platform, and so migrating will require actual dev time, which automatically makes it a non-starter for most, unfortunately. Doubly so when you consider that a lot of these "solutions" were built by non-devs, long since gone from the company and no one knows how deep the tentacles go.
by itake | 2025-07-21 21:12:52+00:00
I didn’t have that take. My understanding is the only time you’re guaranteed to have low-cost ticket availability is when the flight is initially allowing booking.

Later, as more tickets are sold they have more information about the flight and thus they may make adjustments to the ticket pricing. Either opening up more low-cost tickets that were sold at the beginning of the flight or reducing the number of low-cost tickets to meet high demand.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-07-21 21:12:52+00:00
https://web.archive.org

https://commoncrawl.org

I would prefer more of these.

Alas, archive.today (archive.ph, archive.is, archive.vn, etc.) is sometimes blocked in some countries, it sometimes serves CAPTCHAs, it tries to create a "fingerprint" using Javascript, and it contains a tracking pixel.

Neither Internet Archive nor Common Crawl do those things. (There are other archives I am not mentioning that do not do these things either.)

When it works, archive.today may seem like a perfect solution to "paywalls". And then it stops working. In truth most paywalls are solved by controlling HTTP headers like UA and X-forwarded-for, controlling Javascript and controlling cookies. This control requires no third party intermediary (middleman) like Archive.today. Or Internet Archive, for that matter.

None of these archives are perfect and it's true the public could use more of them. But there are better ways to avoid "paywalls" which are just a means of collecting data about non-subscribers while deliberately annoying them with Javascript.
by mingus88 | 2025-07-21 21:12:59+00:00
I set up accounts with my full legal name on them a while ago. There is minimal activity on them. If anyone wants to find me, msg me there.

I do all my actual online activities with handles as God intended back in the good old days.

Social media’s goal of connecting everyone with real names never was for our benefit and we all should stop giving them this data.
by matthewdgreen | 2025-07-21 21:13:06+00:00
I’m going to push back on this and point out that the major difference between expensive and inexpensive power isn’t really safety choices, it’s the ability to mass-produce power generation components. Solar PV is at the far end of the spectrum, since panels are essentially printed in a factory. Late 20th century French nuclear is in the middle, because many nuclear power plants were constructed at the same time using nearly identical specs. Today’s nuclear power is at the opposite end, where virtually every plant is bespoke. Even China hasn’t fully standardized on a single plant that they’re building in huge numbers without customization.
by tossandthrow | 2025-07-21 21:13:48+00:00
Practically, it hardly makes a difference as wallets are disposable.

Regardless, it depends on what risks we a looking at. Wait you raise is not really a credit risks - though I do understand why it concerns you.

Btw: https://www.theblock.co/post/349168/circle-paid-210-million-...
by ajsnigrutin | 2025-07-21 21:14:55+00:00
Yep, there is an interesting book "Poorly made in china" talking about the same thing... not powerbanks but same modus operandi.

For example (hope I didn't mess up the details, it's been some time since I read it), a cosmetics manufacturer vendor replaced shampoo bottles with ones made with less (thinner) plastics multiple times, untill they started being destroyed in shipping... without notifying the company that ordered the shampoo... and then wanted more money for the "better" shampoo bottles.

Also some very questionable practices:

-----

The hair gel that we produced at the factory was green. One day, I noticed that the worker who filled the gel bottles had a skin condition. His hands were covered with the slick formula, and beneath the green, shimmery layer, I could see that the skin on his hands was peeling. Small, raw patches of flesh were exposed, and you didn’t have to be a dermatologist to see that his skin was infected.

“We should probably do something about this one,” I said to Sister, trying to sound calm, while in my head alarm bells were ringing.

Sister did not see the point. “Why?” she asked.

“It might be a health issue?”

“But the worker has done nothing wrong. It’s just an allergic reaction.”

Trying to press the matter, I suggested that the worker might contaminate the product.

Sister twisted around the argument. “How can he harm the product when it was the product that caused him the harm?”
by Ajedi32 | 2025-07-21 21:16:03+00:00
My point is I don't think McDonalds needs to be legally dissuaded from serving hot coffee in the first place, certainly not by a court with no law making powers. The minutia of the legal statues aren't relevant to my argument.

I'm open to the idea of awarding damages for harms caused by inherently risky activities as a way of incentivizing companies to take extra steps beyond what is legally or morally necessary to mitigate those risks, but in such cases the damages should be compensatory, not punitive, and use a comparative negligence-like standard based on the degree to which the risks could have been realistically mitigated and the degree to which the plaintiffs are themselves personally responsible.
by LexiMax | 2025-07-21 21:17:16+00:00
There's a difference, though. From your post, it doesn't sound like you actually enjoy your line of work at all. Instead, it sounds like work is merely being the thing that happens to annoy you the least - something to occupy and stimulate your mind to pass the time.

If my hunch is correct, I think it's only fair to point out that the grandparent was arguing against the career advancement at all costs mindset that the blog is talking about, not situations like yours.

Speaking of which, I am truly sorry you feel the way you do about social stuff. I've grappled with social anxiety and lack of social awareness before, and although I don't think I was ever angry at humanity to the degree you are, I can appreciate how isolating and miserable that headspace can get.
by danie123 | 2025-07-21 21:18:00+00:00
Humans certainly can get gold at IMO: the threshold is chosen each year such that around 8% of students get it. So about 50 students (worldwide) per year are awarded it. Also note that the competition is only for students who are still in school.

Getting a gold is considered very impressive, but there are certainly plenty of humans in the world who can solve problems at that level, and even more so if you relax the time constraints of it being a competition environment. If you include people who are too old to be eligible for IMO, then there are maybe around 1,000-100,000 people in the world who could get a gold at IMO (the large range is because I think this quantity is quite hard to estimate).

Another important thing to bear in mind is that research mathematics is quite different to competition mathematics, so it is quite tricky to tell how good these AIs will be at research maths.
by hyperpape | 2025-07-21 21:18:05+00:00
So, it seems like there is some kind of national variance here? Bolt works well in Portugal, I've used it in Porto, Lisbon, and even Caldas da Rainha (smallish town an hour north of Lisbon). All told, we've taken more than a dozen trips, I think.

- Someone else says it's good in Portugal https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44640459

- Someone says Malta is good, France is bad: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44640424

- Someone says Northern Europe is fine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44640369

- Another saying Denmark is fine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44640111
by bgirard | 2025-07-21 21:18:55+00:00
How does Bolt retain customers? Why would they burn customers to get 1-3 x €7 fees? If OP's account is representative then wouldn't all the customers switch to Uber and never look back?

It doesn't make sense to me so it feels like there's relevant information is missing. From a quick search, it has a 4.8 on the Apple and Google store. So I'm leaning towards this being an isolated experience.

I've used Uber 100s of time. One time I had 2 drivers cancel on me back-to-back during a surge in the rain and one of them drive off forcing me to cancel and it was a very bad experience. But it's not a representative experience of my other rides.
by legitster | 2025-07-21 21:20:07+00:00
Depending on where you are going, ridesharing provides much better point to point service. Also, if you are not familiar with a city or it's language, sometimes trying to understand the public transit on your first day can be a nightmare.

I love taking public transit, but also, after a really long flight I can understand not wanting to think really hard about getting to the hotel.
by rawgabbit | 2025-07-21 21:20:15+00:00
In a recent trip to Rome, I tried using FreeNow which I had used many times in the past. My success rate of actually getting a ride was 0 out of 7. By which time I gave up. I was more successful with Uber. I was able to get about 12 rides in.

I think with the Jubilee many drivers just switched to Uber.

I also took rides in official taxis. They all wanted to negotiate the fare, refused to run the meter, and absolutely refused to take credit cards.
by pclowes | 2025-07-21 21:20:33+00:00
I don't understand what you are trying to claim. 1. Booking.com is owned by Booking Holdings which is an American parent company. 2. US GDP growth has been massively outperforming the EU since 2008.

I am saying tourism is not something governments should want to heavily optimize an economy for. No amount of taking money from people on vacation will translate into building a more competitive or innovative economy.
by wmlive | 2025-07-21 21:20:41+00:00
Development of Window Maker (as in the window manager) unfortunately seems to be almost abandoned. The last few years of it's development saw the inclusion of rather superfluous additional features (e.g., screen capture, hot corners) instead of concentrating on it's main purpose of being a window manager.

It's a pity no one ever tried to replace the WINGs widget set with actual GNUstep components, thus adding the full GNUstep themeability WINGs is not capable of, in order to finally get rid of that crufty NeXTSTEP look.
by rednafi | 2025-07-21 21:20:55+00:00
Sums up European tech in general. Moving to Germany from the US made me realize how broken basic things are in Europe overall. But I was told Germany has it the worst, and it’s a bit better in other places.

I’ve encountered similar issues before and ended up switching to Uber permanently. Luckily, Uber is available where I live. The same goes for banking apps and brokers here. Half of them have a weird mix of German and English when you try to change the language, and most of the time they just don’t work at all. I guess the cliché that tech has never been Europe’s strong suit has some truth to it.
by postalrat | 2025-07-21 21:20:58+00:00
MRI machines use a superconducting electromagnet that once energized will run forever. The only power it needs is to maintain the low temps for the superconductor.

The "OFF" switch vents the coolant (helium) outside the hospital so the electromagnet stops superconducting and can turn off.

Outside the hospital it would look something like: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/krMbFT0Ums0
by Jtsummers | 2025-07-21 21:21:02+00:00
What people want are systems that compose and work well together. That's what MS provides, or at least attempts to provide, with SharePoint. When you start trying to tack on collaborative document editors, workflow management systems, shared storage, and other capabilities from different providers or systems you run into more and more complications (especially because most of these don't offer any kind of standards compliance that lets them be used interchangeably). That's also why G-Suite works as a competitor to MS, it covers at least the more critical integrations that people want to work smoothly without needing to combine multiple maybe compatible things together.
by formerly_proven | 2025-07-21 21:21:23+00:00
As far as I can tell there's two vulnerabilities bundled up here. One is an unauthenticated command injection (!) vulnerability to steal some keys and the other is of course yet another serialization-based RCE in a safe language, mediated by signed cookies (signed with the keys stolen in step 1).

I don't understand how often this design has to blow up in people's faces until they stop doing this and use something dumb and safe instead.
by x______________ | 2025-07-21 21:21:35+00:00
This.

After lazily splurging on bolt for a few years after they offered service in this central European city, the only problems as a user that I've noticed were price increases over time on fares in general, and peak hours pricing that increased pricing 3-7x. Uber was and has been always more expensive and rarely used for that matter.

While these seem to be standard issues in the tech world, this is nothing compared to the horror stories one can find on /r/doordash.

https://reddit.com/r/doordash
by dragonwriter | 2025-07-21 21:21:40+00:00
Apparently while accusations of "foreign interference" are part of the background of the investigation, the actual charges that are the main current focus of the criminal investigation are (roughly translated) modification of an automated data processing system by an organized gang, and fraudulent extraction of data from an automated data processing system by an organized gang.

https://www.tribunal-de-paris.justice.fr/sites/default/files...
by crazygringo | 2025-07-21 21:22:08+00:00
Completely agreed. Also literally the only topic I've ever had to avoid with friends. It's not just that we can good-naturedly agree to disagree (like we can with religion, politics, etc.), but they are allergic to even the mention of it. It is something they very actively want to not talk about, which I've never experienced before.

You're right that it's weird in a different way, and I still can't quite put my finger on why.
by vikingerik | 2025-07-21 21:22:58+00:00
I managed to figure out hacking NES Game Genie codes pretty well at about 14, even without any documentation besides the Genie book itself.

I'd read enough library books about computers to understand binary and hexadecimal. So from the existing codes in the Genie book (like 5 lives / 99 lives / etc), I figured out how those values were coming from some of the letters defining binary/hex values. So I could extrapolate to more codes for different values. And from there I realized the other letters must specify the memory location, so I could bump that too and change some different stats that weren't in the book. I particularly had fun with Final Fantasy 1, where I figured out how to set inventory values and even tried out-of-range values and got items that didn't exist.

What I didn't know until years later was the difference between 6-letter (3 byte) and 8-letter (4-byte) codes. The additional byte in the longer code specifies a value such that the override takes place only if the memory location already equals that value. The purpose is to handle bankswitching (memory mappers), to have the code active only when the correct memory bank is. In practice, what this meant was that randomly trying 8-letter codes almost never did anything (1/256 that you happen to hit the right value) and so I only tried the shorter ones, and found a few weird effects from them.
by ben_w | 2025-07-21 21:23:10+00:00
That's a very different problem than what I was replying to, which was about them being tools that "shields you from learning" and "using the tool that let's you avoid understanding things was a bad idea".

I agree that AI have risks specifically because of memetic monoculture, in that while they can come from many different providers, and each instance even from the same provider can be asked to role-play in many different approaches to combine multiple viewpoints, they're all still pretty similar. But the counter point there is that while multiple different humans working together can sometimes avoid this, we absolutely also get group-think and other political dynamics that make us more alike than we ideally would be.

Also you're comparing a group humans vs. one AI. I meant one human vs one AI.
by echoangle | 2025-07-21 21:23:16+00:00
> Glass doesn't need to be thicker than it currently is (I can press on my 13 Pro's screen about twice as hard as was needed for 3D Touch's max depth, and no issues with the screen)

I dont think this is a great argument. The glass maybe needs to be thicker so the sensors on the border can properly measure the pressure, not because the screen is close to shattering.
by 4hg4ufxhy | 2025-07-21 21:23:35+00:00
I think it's a drivers market. When the ridesharing apps cannot afford to fire drivers in fear of losing market share, that allows the drivers to pull of scummy behaviour for maxing profit. I heard uber drivers go out of their way for 5 star reviews in America. Sounds like the balance of power is on the plaforms side over there and in some specific markets in Europe.
by twiss | 2025-07-21 21:24:27+00:00
How so? At least Booking.com shows me the total price for an accommodation up front, without any additional fees or surprises coming up later in the booking process.

The same cannot be said for AirBnB: if I go to the home page right now it lists a bunch of bookings for e.g. "€ 80 for 2 nights", while when I click through the total price is €160. So apparently what they meant is "€80 per night". I'd call that much more of a dark pattern than anything I've seen Booking do.
by CoastalCoder | 2025-07-21 21:24:29+00:00
Not sure how representative I am here, but I had no idea that the magnets were powered up except during the scan.

My layman's understanding was that they always kept the superconductors fully chilled, but I assumed they only ran electricity through them when needed.

Only as I'm writing this does it occur to me that because of the superconduction, the magnets will remain energized for a very long time unless intentionally discharged.
by mek6800d2 | 2025-07-21 21:24:52+00:00
This Substack article should not be trusted - there are no sources given. I google'd each of the 4 example satellites and "netbsd" and the only results were the Substack article and people referencing the article. NetBSD may have been used in ground systems, but (i) that would have been a non-story and (ii) I couldn't find any evidence of that, so I wonder where the author picked up this information.

I am most familiar with SAMPEX, which was launched in 1992. The initial release of NetBSD, version 0.8, was in 1993 according to Wikipedia. Okay, the article says the project "transitioned" to NetBSD in the "extended mission". Okay, maybe in the 2000s, let's say they decided to replace the original OS/real-time-executive on a working spacecraft with a new OS. So you abruptly replace the old OS/RTE-based flight software with software based on a new OS/RTE. (You don't gradually transition from one OS/RTE to another.) I don't buy it. On a working spacecraft? No.

(I realize the article was probably AI-generated.)
by socalgal2 | 2025-07-21 21:24:54+00:00
I know this is an anecdote but I was curious if Europeans can tell me if this is a one-off experience or if there is something more to do this.

I was booked to catch a DBS train from Brussels to Berlin at 9:45 am. I get to the station at 9:25 looking for the train, can't find it. I go to the counter and get told the train came early at 9:15 then "Not my fault" (the first words out of the DBS attendant's mouth").

I got this same thing from a Swiss Air attendant when something happened. Nearly the first words were "Not My Fault"

I'm not sure I've ever heard that from a customer service rep in the USA and it was shocking to hear those words as the first like conditioned/scripted words from these reps.

I only brought it up because of it seemed to fit the previous comment of poor customer service.
by ryandrake | 2025-07-21 21:25:33+00:00
> Second is people saying "I can retire early if I work hard now" I mean sure. Toil away the best years of your life when you have the most youth, beauty, energy and freedom so you can enjoy leisure when your body is aching and getting a good sleep is hard.

This argument always comes up, where we just assume one's "best" years are in their 20s and 30s, and people can't enjoy leisure at 60. My response is always "Make hay when the sun shines." I can accept you're probably at your cognitive and physical peak in your 20s and 30s, and I'd argue that's the time to max out your earnings, because you may not be able to when you're 60+. I look back at my 20s and 30s, and even though I spent most of them working and not really goofing around having fun, I wish I spent even more of them on my career and saving, due to compounding interest and investment gains. If I did, I might be retired already and spending 100% of my time on fun, instead of playing financial catch-up. Probably the worst thing you can do, financially, when you're 22 and just graduated from college is to take a gap year backpacking in Bali or horsing around in Ibiza or something.

In summary: You can have fun and/or work when you're young. You can also have fun, but might not necessarily be able to work when you're older.