MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by csnover | 2025-07-01 07:57:48+00:00
> Otherwise you’ve abjectly failed to evaluate one of the most important trade-offs in engineering: whether something is even worth your time to think about.

Phew, several folks have replied to me about how it’s not worth the time thinking about these impacts at all, thus creating a paradox whereby more time has been spent thinking about writing about whether to think about it than has been spent in not thinking about it and just accepting that I wrote a reply on HN about how I feel there are more suitable command-line parsers than clap for most Rust projects! :-)

I agree that much of high-level engineering is knowing whether something is worth thinking about; in this case, I did the thinking already, and I am sharing what I know so others can benefit from (or ignore) my thinking and not have to do so much of their own. If my own personal anecdote of significantly reducing compile times (and binary sizes) by taking a few minutes to replace clap is insufficient, and if the aggregate of other problems I identified don’t matter to others, that’s alright. If reading my comment doesn’t make someone go “huh, I didn’t know {argh|gumdrop|pico-args} existed, clap does seem a little excessive now that you mention it, I will try one of these instead on my next project and see how it goes”, then I suppose they were not the target audience.

I don’t really want to keep engaging on this—as almost everyone (including me) seems to agree, command-line parser minutiae just aren’t that important—but I guess I will just conclude by saying that I believe that anchoring effects have led many programmers to consider any dependency smaller than, say, Electron to be not a big deal (and many think Electron’s fine too, obviously), whereas my experience has been that the difference between good and bad products usually hinges on many such ‘insignificant’ choices combining in aggregate.

Assuming whichever command-line parser one uses operates above a certain baseline—and I believe all of the argparse libraries in that benchmark do—it seems particularly silly to make wasteful choices here because this is such a small part of an application. Choosing wastefulness because it’s technically possible, then rationalising the waste by claiming it increases velocity/usability/scalability/whatever without actually verifying that claim because it’s ‘not worth thinking about’, seems more problematic to me than any spectre of premature or ‘unnecessary’ optimisation. I hope to find better ways to communicate this in future.
by mike_hearn | 2025-07-01 07:57:49+00:00
There's no great definition of elite but a reasonable approximation is the one often used for intellectual: people whose income or status in society depends on their production of ideas, without needing to test if the ideas actually work.

This definition captures academics, university administrators, journalists, writers, analysts and other talking heads on TV, Hollywood screenwriters, many kinds of civil servant, people rich enough to be philanthropists, and frequently but not always politicians. Those are the classes of people that are usually being handwaved towards when the word elite is used.
by ivan_gammel | 2025-07-01 07:58:30+00:00
Distribution via alternative stores does not mean there’s no review and moderation. Junk stores may have their fans, but competitive alternatives to App Store will inevitably introduce some controls to maintain reputation and remain compliant. Their advantage will be price, not presence of junk apps. That’s how free market with consumer protection laws works: regulation defines parameters of new equilibrium and eventually all start playing by the same rules to the benefit of the consumer.
by red_admiral | 2025-07-01 07:58:40+00:00
Nowadays to use youtube efficiently with ADHD, you practically need all of:

(a) uBlock - this one is debatable but deals with the worst distractions especially if you're trying to learn from a video your professor put up and you have an exam to prepare for, (b) unhook - hides most of the "recommendations" that attempt to keep you on the site because you're planning to do the copmprehension questions your professor gave you for after the video, (c) something to disable "autoplay next" for the same reason as above (a uBlock rule will do it), (d) no translation. Soon we'll probably need (e) something to block AI.
by aa-jv | 2025-07-01 07:58:59+00:00
The aborigines practiced a very sustainable agriculture, such that the first European arrivals couldn't believe their eyes and arrogantly assumed that the lands must've been tended to by a lost European tribe.

5 years after settlers arrived with their sheep, the plenty was ruined and the land decided to make subsistence harder for its new occupants.

Your dismissal of the efficiency of their methods is, to my eyes, just European bluster.
by darkoob12 | 2025-07-01 07:59:23+00:00
How about killing a scientist that they claim is trying to make a bomb with 15 members of his family and several neighbors including children under age 10.

This claim is not proved. In Europe there is no capital punishment for mass murders but Israel can kill anyone they want with their family without trial or even conclusive evidence and no one can condemn it.

If you do it with a crude hand made bomb it is called terrorism but if you do it with F35 it is called self-defense.
by AussieCoder | 2025-07-01 07:59:47+00:00
I invested in Small Robots Co (https://smallrobotco.com/) who were doing something similar. They had a good product, good brand, raised some funding, and were starting to get traction, with robots in trials on a number of farms, but at the end of the day they ran out of funding before they reached default-alive.

It's a tough space - convincing farmers to give it a go and running trials takes time and the UK isn't a very startup-friendly environment - investors are too often looking for a quick return.

This is such an important area - it's only going to become more critical to be able to grow more food whilst using less fertiliser and weed killer - so I wish you the very best of luck!
by heavyset_go | 2025-07-01 08:00:16+00:00
As someone who had psychedelic experiences, I thought they'd be like that.

In the few hours I experienced hallucinations after not sleeping for ~7 days, I also heard a radio playing faintly in the background. "Faintly" doesn't do it justice because it was very much undeniably audibly there, even if I knew it wasn't.

I also heard footsteps, felt their vibrations, heard and felt stuff on shelves shake in response to the stepping. It was stunning how in concert and real it was. It was like it was more real than reality itself.

I was aware it wasn't real which made it fucking terrifying, but it was both beautiful and absolutely fascinating at the same time. I was both in awe and horrified that it could be permanent.

Brains are crazy stuff and I can see just how easily someone can become delusional based on what is very much factual in their own experience of reality. There literally is no boundary between reality and true hallucinations, which is a terrifying prospect and
by palmfacehn | 2025-07-01 08:00:46+00:00
I have all of my language settings configured to en_US. I've explicitly configured YouTube's country setting as well. I still get autotranslated titles for the local language in the search results. There are so many irrelevant results that YT search has become unusable. I'm increasingly noticing similar behavior in Google search, especially around news and current events.
by godelski | 2025-07-01 08:01:02+00:00
I really just wish YouTube would detect captions embedded in their videos and stop displaying the same text (often incorrectly) on top of it. You do all this machine learning, why not put it into production? It's easy to cache the results and you're already scrubbing audio data and automatically doing STT, so extend it to do video to text and compare. It's not like this is an unsolved problem, even if imperfect. The audio provides a strong feedback for OCR errors
by Majestic121 | 2025-07-01 08:01:29+00:00
Protein per 100g of meat (let's say beef): ~26g

Protein per 100g of soy beans: ~40g raw, ~30g cooked

PDCAAS for beef (Protein Digestibility Corrected Amino Acid Score): 0.92

PDCAAS for soy: 0.91

Approximately no additional grams, if you pick the right legumes.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_quality

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soybean

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beef
by hammyhavoc | 2025-07-01 08:01:36+00:00
Do you know if there's any way to `Recognize this image now` via the GUI? Whilst twiddling my thumbs for a few decades of photos to import, I go through what's there and occasionally a family member will point and tell me who a pic is of, but can't seem to immediately prioritise or `Recognize` the specific pic so I can add a name to the face.
by rwmj | 2025-07-01 08:01:47+00:00
Don't just plug them in randomly! The original power brick can get out of spec (delivering over-voltage), and the voltage regulator on the PCB commonly fails. In the worst case this can end up permanently damaging other components. There's a routine you can follow to test each part, although you'll need a multimeter and some experience, and a bench power supply will come in handy as well.

I'd recommend looking at these sites: https://retrorepairsandrefurbs.com/sinclair-computers/ https://www.retroleum.co.uk/

and Lee on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@MoreFunMakingIt/videos https://www.youtube.com/@morefunfixingit/videos plus Lee has a Discord where they discuss fixing old Sinclairs, linked here: https://www.morefunmakingit.co.uk/links/.
by alias_neo | 2025-07-01 08:02:23+00:00
Haha, my wife says she gets similar when trying to give things away on apps like Vinted etc. List it free and nothing, put it up there for a few quid and people will do their best to get a "deal".

I wonder if it's a UX thing in these apps that the "free" stuff isn't surfacing but low-priced things are. Perhaps there's just too much free stuff to stand out.
by yunusabd | 2025-07-01 08:02:58+00:00
I'm working on an app that's based around youtube videos for language learning. I had to solve the same problem of youtube automatically changing the audio track to match the device locale.

Even thought about making a spin off app with only the no-translate feature, that simply always uses the original title and audio. I guess revanced can do this too, but maybe there's enough people who don't use revanced, or don't know about this feature. Thoughts?
by aspenmayer | 2025-07-01 08:03:04+00:00
I guess it’s more likely that they would know locals or someone who does than others in the region due to proximity alone, besides SK, who are on the other side of the DMZ. Supposedly NK main “industry” or economy output is counterfeit US currency, so that has to go somewhere. Maybe that’s why China is buying so much stuff, to have good cash flow to launder these bad bills overseas, and invest the profits in actual bonds instead? Not sure what the strategy is but I know it isn’t coincidental. Organized crime in the area has been happening in earnest since the Opium Wars at least.
by glangdale | 2025-07-01 08:03:33+00:00
I'm not sure what you mean here. A single cache line is 64B, and this table would thus occupy 4 cache lines, but typical x86 cache sizes are 32K or for more recent cores 48K. Whether consuming 1/512th or 1/768th of your level 1 cache is excessive is a value judgement, but most people wouldn't think so.
by DidYaWipe | 2025-07-01 08:03:47+00:00
It's really the most interesting thing I read in this screed, the rest of which seemed to be clueless BS like, "changes to App Store policies that will improve the state of the internet."

No. Unlike Google, Meta, and Amazon, Apple is not a gatekeeper to the Internet. They are the gatekeeper to one thing: their own app store. It's tiresome to hear the same anti-"big-tech" hysteria aimed at Apple. They aren't a monopoly, period.

But back to this: "The App Store policies hurt privacy"

No, they don't. The plaintiff bases this admittedly novel whine on the fact that Google and its ilk make money on things other than their software. So by that logic, every company that doesn't conduct business through its app hurts every company that does. Give us a break.
by ozim | 2025-07-01 08:06:27+00:00
I think you overestimate amount of multilingual users and tourists.

If you have 40 million country and you have 10 mil tourists over whole year given week you might 200k users that happen to be in that country.

Even if you have another 1mil expats living in that country. it still is 35mil of people vs 1mil of people for whom "your IP is from country X you get language X" is pretty good heuristic.

That said I am also pissed off by that approach but I do understand there is much more people who happen to use only that language in that country.

Optimizing for Expats or Tourists would be stupid as those are exceptions not the norm.
by aa-jv | 2025-07-01 08:07:56+00:00
This is just poor language design.

The reason one might find this cumbersome or problematic, is in the case of very large numbers of lines of code - sure, your example is visible and somewhat readable (arguable) in its current form - but tell me you won't have issues when the loop is 80 or 100 lines of code, and you need to add another inner loop as part of the development process.

Are you now going to go through and be sure all your breaks are numbered properly? Are you really, though?

Better, imho, would have been to introduce labels and "break <label>", but even that is going to cause more headaches than its worth.

Ultimately, one shouldn't write such horrid code anyway.
by ClaraForm | 2025-07-01 08:08:05+00:00
I have disorganized thoughts about this, but it's not just a debate about vertical isolation vs not.

1. The size of Apple/Alphabet/Samsung makes it difficult to enter the market (see: factories having ridiculous MOQs for small-batch phone manufacturing), pushing everyone else out.

2. The size of the smartphone market makes it impossible to not have to deal with one of the above companies for certification, market penetrance or such. This makes them kingmakers. If a company somehow manages to become Facebook, Netflix, or Amazon, then the phone companies slide them a secret deal under the table. Everyone else gets a market-limiting set of terms that makes sure "tech" stays one of the "top" industries.

Combined, with no entry allowed, and with forces exerted outwards, we see broad social structures orienting /around/ how we use our phones, rather than the other way around, and that includes ad-monetized-absolutely-everything.

Phones and social media, today, are where TVs and broadcasts were in the 1950s/60s. Ubiquity and centralizing forces. If someone told us in the 1950s a TV manufacturer was exerting pressure on our forms of information distribution and was choosing which voices get a seat at the table, we'd rightly call that archaic and wonder why people would accept a technology provider as a market-shaping force. But today we accept it nonetheless. I refuse to believe the argument that the world's largest company can't figure out how to build a secure pipeline without making plenty of my decisions on my behalf...
by jraph | 2025-07-01 08:08:19+00:00
> The law requires consent before using a cookie to store even a mundane option that was just directly modified by a user

Nope.

That's exactly why the evil cookie modals are not on the GDPR but only on the sites that want to track you and now need to ask you for your consent before doing so. That's usually exactly where good faith GDPR detractors are wrong, and that's what needs to be repeated again and again in those discussions.
by schoash | 2025-07-01 08:08:31+00:00
Working on https://www.space4ads.com - an Out of Home Advertising Marketplace that connects advertisers with underutilized commercial spaces. Think Airbnb, but for ad placements. We're targeting vacant storefronts, construction walls, cargo vans, box trucks, 18-wheelers, and basically any commercial space with foot traffic or vehicle visibility that's not being monetized for advertising.
by forgotoldacc | 2025-07-01 08:09:18+00:00
> if you eat enough plants, you will get enough protein unless it is processed

You'll get a lot of total proteins, but you'll have a very unbalanced amino acid intake unless you're going heavy on soy. Which most societies had no access to until recently.

> In Rome the heat made that dangerous due to bacteria that get to the milk first, but the Celts had built a lifestyle around milk and they became lactose tolerant, to some degree.

Interesting thing: in a lot of hot climates (Greece, India, Middle East as a whole) heat and bacteria worked together with milk to give us a pretty interesting food product: yogurt. And the bacteria in yogurt is often considered to be beneficial.

> stay off the processed foods and stick to the government guidelines for nutrition.

In the US at least, until recently, the government recommended 11 servings of grains a day. 3 servings of dairy as well.

I think the only real conclusion to make here is: we don't know anything about what foods are healthy, and probably won't in our lifetimes. Everything is fad driven to some extent. Saturated fats were evil and sugar was good. Then sugar was evil and oils were healthy. Now cooking things with solid blocks of beef fat is being done to Make America Healthy Again(tm) because a single serving of seed oils will give you cancer. In a few years the idea of a Malaysian tribal diet will be mainstream and the true solution to becoming healthy again. Then we'll find out, like all diet studies before it, that there's some odd compounding factor and it turns out diet really had nothing to do with the difference.

Open the news any given day and there's an article about red wine and coffee being great for your health. The next day there's an article saying a single sip is disastrous to your health. The day after that, 6 glasses of wine and 4 pots of coffee are the minimum daily intake necessary to stay healthy. The following day, having ever been near wine will ruin your health forever and you are doomed.

Eat what doesn't make you feel or look like shit. We all have different bodies. If what you're eating makes you tired or you're getting unexpected weight gain, try something else. If you feel energized and comfortable in your body and you're at a healthy weight, you're probably okay.
by mike_hearn | 2025-07-01 08:09:57+00:00
It's somewhat irrelevant to this thread because academic CS doesn't have a quality problem on the scale that other fields do, and the NSF cuts aren't directly motivated by paper quality anyway (you could argue the stated motivation traces to the same root causes).

But, "replication crisis" is a misnomer. The problem isn't replication, not really. A better name would be the scientific validity crisis. This comes up in every HN discussion of science and academia so I wrote a full explanation of why here:

https://blog.plan99.net/replication-studies-cant-fix-science...

... but tl;dr many papers that are scientifically invalid will replicate just fine. Even if academics suddenly started directing funding to replication studies on a huge scale, nothing would change and there would be no surge in trust in science.
by strogonoff | 2025-07-01 08:10:15+00:00
The entire business model that monetises user data, where the actual customer is the advertiser, users do not vote with their wallets, and honest competition is impossible because no one can compete with free, should simply not exist and maybe regulated against—especially in social media, where it incentivises algorithms to push aggravating content in the name of engagement and ad views.

Whether Apple should be regulated into reducing the fees they charge for access to their hardware and software ecosystem (the ecosystem they unarguably did a pretty stellar job at) is a debatable matter of its own, but it doesn’t strike me as addressing the issue of ad-supported business and how it messes with the way the market is supposed to work.

It is true that platform fee means this distorted business model is unfairly favoured. However, this is just an extension of the business based on ad/data mining (especially social media) being generally unfair in so many ways, and even with zero platform fees that business won’t stop being unfair and won’t be seriously challenged. To reiterate, no one can honestly compete with free; fee reduction merely tweaks the formula from “free vs. $X” to “free vs. slightly less than $X”.

Furthermore, there is the obvious issue that even if an app or service is paid, it can still be additionally monetising user data. Reducing fees will only favour this doubly shady business.

Perhaps what could actually move the needle a bit and make this model less attractive is if walled gardens somehow found a way charge a big fat fee off the ad/data mining revenue, in conjunction with appropriately reducing fees for regular sales of B2C apps and services. Could this be technically possible without walled gardens additionally owning ad exchanges (which might be a can of worms that shouldn’t be opened)?
by mailund | 2025-07-01 08:11:02+00:00
ah yes, and the auto translation on reddit broke a very useful trick I used all the time

- need information about something in general -> search in English - need information about something specific for my home country (laws, local events, local shops, etc) -> search in my native language

now, I get weird auto translated content informing me about laws that are only applicable in the US and recommended products that are not even available in my home country.
by benreesman | 2025-07-01 08:11:20+00:00
Your example / analogy is useful in the sense that its usually useful to establish the thought experiment with the boundary conditions.

But in between someone commuting in a Toyota and an F1 driver are many, many people, the best example from inside the extremes is probably a car mechanic, and even there, there's the oil change place with the flat fee painted in the window, and the Koenigsberg dealership that orders the part from Europe. The guy who tunes those up can afford one himself.

In the use case segment where just about anyone can do it with a few hours training, yeah, maybe that investment is zero instead of a week now.

But I'm much more interested in the one where F1 cars break the sound barrier now.
by raxxorraxor | 2025-07-01 08:11:49+00:00
Windows still has momentum but Microsoft made it clear they lack customer orientation for their OS. Not a new phenomena, just that alternatives get stronger.

I am still using Windows and the platform in general, but privately I moved away from Microsoft software. I doubt they will ever change course, they want to abuse the OS to get people into their cloud environments. I would thoroughly not recommend that.
by sonicvrooom | 2025-07-01 08:12:18+00:00
Premises and conclusions.

Prompts and context.

Hopes and expectations.

Black holes and revelations.

We learned to write and then someone wrote novels.

Context, now, is for the AI, really, to overcome dogmas recursively and contiguously.

Wasn't that somebody's slogan someday in the past?

Context over Dogma
by matsemann | 2025-07-01 08:14:27+00:00
I also have this problem with apps in my native language. I have my phone set to en,no because I prefer the English version over some bad auto-translated crap where some apps try to translate stuff. But then when I download a Norwegian app, then it prefers to use some badly maintained English translation instead, but here I would of course prefer the native version.

Can't win.
by thinkingemote | 2025-07-01 08:14:43+00:00
Anecdotal: cheese often will make me have vivid dreams and remember them better in the morning. About half the time they will be nightmares but sometimes they will be good. Vivid and entertaining.

To experiment: I think some kinds of cheese (blue) affects me differently than others. Although soft cheese has more lactose than hard. Not sure how long after eating cheese makes a difference. Only noticed it in evening. Need to experiment with lactose free cheese.