MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by diggan | 2025-07-06 09:51:05+00:00
> You can't . If you talk to modern city people the way you casually said 'hi' to strangers in the 90s

It is true, in some places, that talking to strangers are generally frowned upon without having a good reason to do so.

The trick is to either only open up the conversation when you have something relevant to say (or funny, seems to work sometimes too), or move to city/country where it's socially accepted.

As someone who used to live in a country where talking with strangers is basically implicitly forbidden and straight up weird, but then moved to a country where it's completely normal, the amount of interesting conversations easily skyrocketed as soon as I landed in my new home country.
by hnaccount_rng | 2025-07-06 09:51:13+00:00
But in order for an unskilled (no value judgement intended) person to fix that, this means having the technician run out to their house and find out whether that's the case. That's an hour of work, at least. What does a new oven retail for? Add to that the expectation value of "need to come back because it's not the first thing I tried" and that replacement oven with fresh warranty starts looking even cheaper
by surgical_fire | 2025-07-06 09:51:45+00:00
> It’ll make licensing more expensive because the net result is more permissive

The current state of affairs is that the net result is such that consumers are stripped of their rights. I find it more unacceptable.

If the licensing costs without fucking over consumers is prohibitive, then maybe those games should not exist. If no one is licensing the brands/assets/music/whatever because the licensing costs are too high, it's likely that in time the costs will come down.
by anticodon | 2025-07-06 09:52:24+00:00
> Nothing appoints the dollar a reserve currency, it's use makes master.

Hundreds of US military bases around the world makes sure that no "stupid" leader of some nation makes a decision to switch from US dollar for international trade.

Those who dared to attempt to give up USD for trade, died horrible death like Muammar Gaddafi. It's a direct message to the remaining leaders: "Don't even think about it"
by johnisgood | 2025-07-06 09:53:58+00:00
eshell:

Welcome to the Emacs shell ~ $ btop ERROR: Failed to get size of terminal! ~ [1] $

shell:

$ btop Terminal size too small: Width = 79 Height = 22Needed for current config:Width = 80 Height = 24

If I increase the width and height, I get an extremely weird output.

ansi-term:

Same as shell.

Any other Emacs shells I missed?

In any case, I do not use any shells within Emacs. I use XTerm separately.
by meheleventyone | 2025-07-06 09:54:41+00:00
When you’re licensing content from third parties the more permissive rights you need the more expensive it is. Music is a very good example where it might not even be possible to get a perpetual license. A bunch of games have removed music as their license to it has expired for example. In the context of EOL of a game if you have to provide it for free to owners in perpetuity any third party content, code and so on needs to have been licensed for that use. That is typically more permissive than licenses as mentioned up thread and so more expensive.
by agumonkey | 2025-07-06 09:54:45+00:00
There's truth to this. Emacs is large. I tried RTFM twice, thrice .. not skimming, taking time. And even then I learn later that there was some feature in it that I completely missed. And it's a common joke in the community "I've been using emacs for <N> decades and I didn't know that...".

Blessing and a curse ? Maybe they should rebrand emacs as a universe and not an editor.. so that people know there are many galaxies to explore
by boje | 2025-07-06 09:55:26+00:00
I feel like articles like these almost always leave out the people who want these questions to be answered:

* "Why would I want to network with people?"

* "I don't feel like engaging with anyone."

* "I don't enjoy or feel fulfilled doing any of this. I'd rather be home or by myself."

* "I have never enjoyed doing this. I have to keep up a facade in front of other people at all times. It makes me angry and resentful."

They should expand upon why networking is a thing, why having a social rapport among peers and coworkers is important to healthy relationships both inside and outside of work, how you can have your connection to your social circle weakened if you don't, and spell out clearly why that's a bad thing.

Maybe an article like this should look at it from the perspective of mental health and neurodivergence, but that might be pushing it.

From the article: "The next morning, I’d wonder if anyone even remembered I was there."

Personally speaking, this question has never popped into my mind. I suppose that's owing to the fact that it's simply not in my nature to actively seek out people or connections.
by ben_w | 2025-07-06 09:55:27+00:00
To reach that conclusion for all of them, that none of these are bugs, you must think the legislature is much smarter than I think they are.

We can't write bug-free software even with unit tests and formal methods, what hope does a legislative body have? Debate before a law passes may be like code-review (and for big bills this debate is essentially "LGTM"), but most-to-all of the testing is in production: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_case_(law)

This is not to say that no deliberate tax doges, they certainly do exist, but there's a lot of bugs too.
by diggan | 2025-07-06 09:56:14+00:00
> 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?

It could have been more convenient if the fees weren't sky-high and the receivers currency wasn't tanking as the transfer was being made, yes.

But because of the context, and the middle-men involved (no direct bank<>bank transfer possible at all, needed 3rd party), the fees would have made the transaction cost about the same as the value that was being transferred.

I'm also not disputing that the existing "traditional" players could make to things cheaper and actually useful for more people, but they seem to refuse to do so as I'm guessing they'll lose out on a lot of profits if they did.
by mradek | 2025-07-06 09:56:52+00:00
Do you think it’s because they’re using diesel?

In my layman pov… A diesel engine can take the least aerodynamically shaped body and move it at 60 mph for 1k miles no problem. As an American, I guess it’s just natural to me that if it can move, then it should move with glory!!

Edit: my bad I didn’t properly read your post
by DidYaWipe | 2025-07-06 09:57:53+00:00
I've always considered the Mac's shared menu bar a GUI 1.0 mistake that should have been fixed in the transition to OS X. Forcing all applications to share a single menu that's glued to the top of the screen, and doesn't switch back to the previous application when you minimize the one you're working with, is dumb.

Windows and Unix GUIs had it right: Put an application's menu where it belongs, on the application's main frame.

But now on Windows... NO menu? Oh wait, no... partial menus buried under hamburger buttons in arbitrary locations, and then others buried under other buttons.
by cherryteastain | 2025-07-06 09:58:09+00:00
Article does not make sense to me. Starts off with the Triffin dilemma; its definition of the concept as "the incompatible conditions that dollars must be supplied to the world, but at the same time, they must maintain trust and control" has nothing to do with the actual Triffin dilemma. The actual dilemma does talk about the need for the reserve currency issuer to supply the world with the currency, but the actual concept juxtaposes this obligation with the inevitable trade deficits which the reserve currency issuer incurs.

The Triffin dilemma famously led to the Nixon shock in the US which ended the convertibility of the dollar to gold in the 70s, due to massive US trade deficits making it impossible to keep 1:1 backing for the USD in gold. The Nixon shock is mentioned in the article, but not how/why is happened. Neither is there an explanation of what the "second Nixon shock" is.

There is some mention of EUR/CNY digital currencies; perhaps the point is that these can challenge the USD hegemony by creating alternate globally accepted payment systems, with the second Nixon shock being the "end of USD hegemony" scenario brought up every few years?
by sveme | 2025-07-06 09:58:11+00:00
I wouldn't believe that any sort of economy or governmental system would actually survive any of this. Ford was right in that sense, without people with well-paying jobs, no one will buy the services of robots and AIs. The only thing that would help would be the massive redistribution of wealth through inheritance taxation and taxation on ownership itself. Plus UBI, though I'm fairly sceptical of what that would do to a society without purpose.
by diggan | 2025-07-06 09:58:37+00:00
> Literary vs visual porn is strongly gender divided. I would be very surprised if you were into erotica and weren't aware of AO3; I find it more likely that as a male you aren't actually very into erotica, as is the norm.

Well, I've read my share of erotica, maybe I wouldn't say "very into erotica" but well-read enough it seems, compared to my peers.

I guess everyone who happens to read erotica automatically isn't interested in fan-fiction, so they never stumble across AO3, I can hardly be alone in this situation.
by jksflkjl3jk3 | 2025-07-06 09:59:10+00:00
> Not where I live

I never understand why people make comments like this and leave it to the reader to guess where they live. Your profile has your email and linkedin, so it's not like you're trying to stay anonymous.

And to your point, local taxis being less expensive is unusual in my travels from 50+ countries. Uber/Grab/Bolt/Gojeck/Maxim are almost always significantly cheaper and more reliable in my experience, especially for foreigners who aren't familiar with typical fares.
by shelajev | 2025-07-06 09:59:28+00:00
what a strange place to link to. Even Wikipedia has a better entry [1].

The model itself is fun to think about: preventing failures by stuffing more cheese into the system. If you're interested, the classic example of the cheese failure is Chernobyl, where many different things had to fail in order to become a catastrophe.

--- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model
by dr_dshiv | 2025-07-06 09:59:35+00:00
Agreed, it’s astonishing intuition. It’s hard to call it a lucky guess when it is the last paragraph of Newton’s magnum opus. But very hard to explain.

Choosing my words carefully, I think it was a kind of deep and deliberate magic. Of the sort Newton ascribed to Pythagoras as the esoteric discoverer of the inverse square law of gravitation. (see “Newton and the pipes of pan”). Hooke also had a sort of musical, oscillatory, spiraling conception of mental phenomena. So it was in the Zeitgeist.

In any case, it is striking and amazing— and resonant in this age of vibes.
by ost-ing | 2025-07-06 10:00:16+00:00
The value is in the network itself. Lots of people think that its the digital tokens or coins that have value, but its the system as a whole.

The value is also in the “need”. Corporate treasuries need a way to store wealth that doesn't inflate over time, gold inflates 2% per year, bitcoin 0% - so it fills an institutional need
by bell-cot | 2025-07-06 10:00:35+00:00
> What least you to this conclusion? Heat pumps can ...

Yes, at n=1, doing a boiler => heat pump replacement, in a cookie-cutter well-to-do house, will provide both cooling and reduced local carbon emissions.

But "well-to-do" is an important qualification, as your Guardian article notes. Because that expensive replacement work will likely be followed by higher utility bills in perpetuity.

Some well-to-do folks won't mind that. Others will. Less well-to-do folks will generally mind it more. Note that there are far more of the latter. And every one of them has the power to vote against the "heat-pump party".

There are other problems as you scale up - some noted in your cited article, some not. Britain isn't full of idle heat-pump factories and installation firms. You can subsidize - but the British Treasury is in iffy shape, and the pound sterling is no longer the world's reserve currency, to make that low-risk.

In theory (or your article), the right mix of competent policies and good judgement calls could make a British national heat-pump mostly-mandate work out well. But would a rational person, aware of the British government's very mixed track record over the past half-century or so, actually believe that they had the Right Stuff to do that?
by visarga | 2025-07-06 10:00:47+00:00
The way I see it is to use hindsight, not to come with predefined criteria. The criteria is usefulness of one LLM response in the interactions that follow it down the line.

For example, the model might propose "try doing X", and I come back later and say "I tried X but this and that happened", it can use that asa feedback. It might be a feedback generated from the real world outcomes of the X suggestion, or even from my own experience, maybe I have seen X in practice and know if it works or not. The longitudinal analysis can span multiple days, the more context the better for self analysis.

The cool thing is that generating preference scores for LLM responses, training a judge model on them, and then doing RLHF with this judge model on the base LLM ensures isolation. So personal data leaks might not be an issue. Another beneficial effect is that the judge model learns to transfer judgements skills across similar contexts, so there might be some generalization going on.

Of course there is always the risk of systematic bias and random noise in the data, but I believe AI researchers are equipped to deal with it. It won't be as simple as I described, but the size of the interaction dataset and the human in the loop, and real world testing are certainly useful for LLMs.
by gsf_emergency_2 | 2025-07-06 10:01:05+00:00
>wrong ambitions

There are certain narcissists who would be okay with people thinking that their ambitions demand such a great personal sacrifice that society needs to compensate them in advance-- & copiously. I can see that Rand would help to dispel whatever cognitive resonance is bundled up in that.

Otoh I think there do exist certain "correct" ambitions that are worth funding even if the owner is something of an asshole. Especially if success won't translate into wealth or influence for said asshole :)
by briandear | 2025-07-06 10:01:23+00:00
This is why I really despise “Material Design” and the whole Google aesthetic.

Look at Google Meet for example. How many times and I trying to remember what the Share Screen icon looks like? Apple generally does this stuff far better: text labels for example. Also clicking some “+” icon to reveal more options — how does a “normal” person know what’s buried inside all of those click to reveal options?

Diversity in tech has always been a concern — but one concern I have is that diversity has always meant race, gender, or sexual orientation stuff — but a 28 year old Hispanic LGBT person doesn’t react to a UI much differently than a 28 year old Black hetero person. But a 68 year old Hispanic woman with English as a second language absolutely has potentially different UI understandings than an 18 year old white woman from Palo Alto.

Real diversity (especially age and tech experience levels) should be embraced by the tech companies — that would have a strong impact on usability. Computers are everywhere and we shouldn’t be designing UI around “tech people” understanding and instead strive for more universal accessibility — especially for products we expect “everyone” to potentially use. (Some dev ops tool obviously would have more latitude than an email app, but even then, let’s stop assuming users understand your visual language just because you do.)

I want to see more UX designers who are “old” rather than some clever kid who lives on Behance. I also want to see more design that isn’t created by typical higher educated designers who think everyone should understand things they take for granted. The blue collar worker that works construction, the grandmother from Peru, the restaurant cook, or the literature professor — whatever. Usability should be clear and obvious. That’s really hard — but that’s the job.

One of the original genius aspects of iPad is that a toddler can immediately start using it. We need all usability to be in that vein.
by diggan | 2025-07-06 10:01:52+00:00
What could MI5 possibly stand to gain from hiding a person who is described as "a violent misogynist abuser with paedophilic tendencies who had used his MI5 role as a tool of coercion"?

Is it only because it would "look bad on MI5" if people like that worked there? Seems like such a trivial thing to immediately take a stand against and get rid of as soon as you notice it, rather than trying to hide
by fghorow | 2025-07-06 10:03:11+00:00
If you will permit me one cautionary point, given that the deadly Texas flash floods just happened.

The geomorphic reason that there is flat land next to a river is because it is the flood plane. That kind of land looks tempting, but can be deadly. Obviously, GIS analysis could add some kind of distance metric from a river to a usability score, but the analyst needs to know about the problem first.

Just a bit of "ground truthing" from a professional geoscientist.
by dr_dshiv | 2025-07-06 10:03:34+00:00
Yeah, so I’m working on a piece about this. Of course, “cosmic sympathy” and “harmony of the cosmos” goes back to the stoics and Pythagoreans. The direct use of the term vibration in the context of mental activity (“thought vibrations”) is from the American New Thought Movement and Theosophy — that’s where The Beach Boys got it from. But it extends back over the centuries to Newton and then Willis (who used sympathetic vibrations as the basis of his introduction of associationism in psychology).
by cb321 | 2025-07-06 10:03:36+00:00
The major modern use case I know of is command-line utilities which also benefit from low start-up. Of course, that doesn't mean there hasn't been "perf rot" over the decades as you say. Such rot should never surprise anyone. :-)

Some perl5 lover should take the time to compile all those 5.6 to 5.42 versions on the same host OS/CPU and do a performance comparison and create a nice chart for the world to trap and maybe correct such performance regressions. I just tried getting 5.8.9 to compile on modern Linux with gcc-15, and it seemed like a real PITA. (Earlier didn't even ./Configure -des right.)
by flessner | 2025-07-06 10:03:40+00:00
Interesting question, here are my few cents.

Exports are more "expensive" for countries with reserve currency status. This is a problem for countries that export many primary and "low-tech" secondary sector products. Countries that export many "high-tech" secondary sector products can usually still thrive.

This leaves us with the usual suspects: US, China, Germany (-> EU) and Japan.
by rbanffy | 2025-07-06 10:03:42+00:00
There has to be a point where someone’s sphere of influence is so large lying should become a crime. All sorts of dangerous misinformation floats around and ends up killing people, from “FSD is safe” to “vaccines cause autism” to “drink bleach”, there has to be some accountability for these people who use their social influence to manipulate and profit from others.
by mittensc | 2025-07-06 10:04:18+00:00
Allright, had this recently since i keep forgetting luks commands.

How do you set up an encrypted file on linux that can be mounted and accessed same as a hard drive.

(note: luks, a few commands)

You will see a nonsensical ai summarization, lots of videos and junk websites being promoted then you'll likely find a few blogs with the actual commands needed. Nowhere is there a link to a manual for luks or similar.

This in the past had the no-ad straightforward blogs as first links, then some man pages, then other unrelated things for the same searches that i do now and get garbage.
by jongjong | 2025-07-06 10:05:44+00:00
The Greeks already figured out thousands of years ago that the best way to implement democracy was via random selection. Yet here we are, everyone believes that 'democracy' necessitates 'voting'; totally ignoring all the issues which come with voting.

The concept of voting, in a nation of hundreds of millions of people, is just dumb. Nobody knows anything about any of the candidates; everything people think they know was told to them by the corporate-controlled media and they only hear about candidates which were covered by the media; basically only candidates chosen by the establishment. It's a joke. People get the privilege of voting for which party will oppress them.

Current democracy is akin to the media making up a story like 'The Wizard of OZ' and then they offer you to vote for either the Lion, the Robot or the Scarecrow. You have no idea who any of these candidates are, you can't even be sure if they actually exist. Everything you know about them could literally have been made up by whoever told the story; and yet, when asked to vote, people are sure they understand what they're doing. They're so sure it's all legit, they'll viciously argue their candidate's position as if they were a family member they knew personally.
by throwawayffffas | 2025-07-06 10:05:48+00:00
That's a clear failure of culture and leadership in their investigation, how they can't see that defending bad actors in their organization only sheds a shadow on their entire organization is beyond me.

The accused agent, has brought shame and dishonor on their group, he effectively betrayed the organization with his actions, the fact his colleagues chose to break the law to support him is beyond the pale. This is just a symptom of the old boys club that normalizes deviancy, covering up slip ups and inevitably to shit like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Five
by 2b3a51 | 2025-07-06 10:05:50+00:00
I'd just throw in that this idea of universal gravitation coupled with the laws of motion and dodgy ideas like force and momentum enabled a wide range of phenomena to be described and some predictions to be made that could be compared with observations.

Yes, ideas like 'force' and 'momentum' were a bit dubious but the resulting theory was effective[1] within its domain of applicability.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_theory
by dnpp123 | 2025-07-06 10:06:23+00:00
Came here to say this. I'm quite curious to know what the author means by "digital Nixon Shock".

If hard digital assets (i.e. assets the US have limited control over like BTC, ETH, etc) gets shocked by a liquidity shortage it should on the contrary kill more of the USD dominance, which will shock more hard assets, which will kill more of the USD dominance... a feedback loop leading to the obliteration of the USD hegemon.
by hn_throw2025 | 2025-07-06 10:08:05+00:00
Great points in this thread, but I would say another advantage of Docker is that of documentation.

The Dockerfile is a description of a reproducible build, and a docker-compose.yml file documents how running services interact, which ports are exposed, any volumes that are shared, etc.

It’s all too easy for config knowledge to be siloed in people. I got the impression that the Author prefers tinkering with pet servers.
by msgodel | 2025-07-06 10:08:11+00:00
Even Google and Facebook are releasing distills of their models (Gemma3 is very good, competitive with qwen3 if not better sometimes.)

There are a number of reasons to do this: You want local inference, you want attention from devs and potential users etc.

Also the smaller self hostable models are where most of the improvement happens these days. Eventually they'll catch up with where the big ones are today. At this point I honestly wouldn't worry too much about "gatekeepers."