MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dudeinjapan | 2025-07-11 18:01:38+00:00
No, I really don't. Chefs and restaurant operators chose their profession out of a genuine desire to share cuisine and hospitality experiences with as many people as possible, and the vast majority genuinely appreciate meeting international guests who share their love for food. I've even heard Michelin chefs go as far to say that they feel their culinary art is more appreciated by international guests than the domestic audience.

In Japan there is a "system" ("kata") for everything, and in addition, there is a concept of hospitality called "omotenashi" which means something like "the host will anticipate the all guest's needs" (you can think "omakase"--meaning "chef chooses"--is a facet of "omotenashi")

To illustrate these concepts: I had two friends visiting from India who were religious vegetarians, they had asked me to book a traditional Japanese restaurant but almost everywhere I called used "dashi" (fish-based soup stock) as a core ingredient. I asked if dashi could be removed, but nearly every restaurant refused as they "didn't think it would taste as good"--I tried to explain my friends really wouldn't know the difference, to no avail--the system is the system, the goal is "omotenashi".

Language tends to be an issue as well, but many restaurants will say "We don't speak English and we don't have well-translated menus, but if you want to try it anyway we'll welcome you." Another example here: Tokyo Disney gives a VIP tour only in Japanese, and you have to pay extra for an English translator. I asked them why they can't just have the English speaker gives the tour; the answer was "Because the tour is in Japanese." The system is the system.

So it's easy to mistake this "omotenashi" insistence to follow the system as "(intentionally) not catering to foreign guests", but it has much more to do with "quality control" like you might find in a Toyota factory.

Are there a handful of close-minded bigots in the Japan, who refuse non-Japanese speakers/non-Japanese people? Sure, there are in any country. You are not likely to encounter them on a trip to Japan--in 17 years living here I really haven't encountered many--and if you do, just take your business elsewhere.
by mrtksn | 2025-07-11 18:02:31+00:00
I'm very excited for solar. In Europe we don't have much fossil fuels, so our "hippiness" is not really a choice. I see some people campaigning against European green energy or the renewables and it doesn't make sense whatsoever unless you are aligned with Russia or USA.

The coolest thing about solar is that the devices to capture the fusion energy in the skies are manufactured, unlike other options being built. I'm not anti-nuclear but I don't like its extremely long building phase.

I sometimes fantasize about closed loop fully automatic solar PV panels factories that we can build on some remote area, just bring in the raw material and let it auto-expand using the energy it captures. As it grows geometrically at some point we can decide that we no longer want it to grow and start taking out the finished PV panels and installing them everywhere.

Storage for the night probably wouldn't be that much of a problem, not everything needs to work 24/7 and for these things that need to work 24/7 we can use the already installed nuclear capacity and as the energy during the day becomes practically unlimited we can just stor it however we like even if its quite inefficient. With unlimited energy space wouldn't be a problem, we can dig holes and transfer materials into anything we need with the practically free daytime energy.
by arp242 | 2025-07-11 18:02:44+00:00
> Note that the article we’re discussing specifically mentions “people who believe in conspiracies” in the first line.

Which obviously refers to conspiracy theories in this context. Words can have more than one meaning (again: see "theory", among others).

Watergate was a government cover-up. No one denies that happened. Or Iran-Contra, or the Snowden leaks. Or the WMDs in Iraq.
by nwienert | 2025-07-11 18:03:09+00:00
Source being that ridiculous fanfic Cheney movie? You’re even further off than me, even high level CIA was divided, along many other orgs that supported it. Where did Colin Powell get his evidence from? And the OSP?

Even if we agreed Iraq wasn’t a good example, it’s irrelevant to the point as I don’t think anyone actually thinks there aren’t powerful and largely behind the scenes figures - defense, lobbying, billionaires, and so on that aren’t actively steering the government away from the will of the people.
by zarzavat | 2025-07-11 18:03:25+00:00
> And I hold no hard feelings toward them for that.

But isn't that why Japan ended up like this? Every country needs either immigration or babies, and Japan chose option C: neither. And now the decision has been made for them, a very high dose of immigration is required.

It's like ignoring a cavity and eventually needing a root canal.

Xenophobia is simply an unworkable idea, like eugenics and other discredited beliefs. Or at least it needs to be paired with a religion that encourages having kids.
by mattgreenrocks | 2025-07-11 18:03:38+00:00
IME, there's usually not a moment of absolute clarity where I know what's wrong with me. Instead it's a lot of wandering, digging, and, very occasionally, finding little nuggets of info and wondering, "what the hell do I do with this knowledge?" Gradually, what happens is the process of doing this helps you understand yourself, which, over time, can change perceptions and actions.

The clarity usually comes in retrospect for me.
by Havoc | 2025-07-11 18:03:44+00:00
Just needs more storage. Europe benefits a lot from diversification and transfers but there are still some pretty wild swings happening.

e.g. The UK grid fluctuates between 25% and 75% renewable. That only works because there is significant gas capacity on hand plus France nuclear and Norway hydro can cover about 15% with interconnects.

Only way to get this even more renewable is with plenty storage (or nuclear if you're of that persuasion)
by wonder_er | 2025-07-11 18:03:59+00:00
I started blogging in 2012, have been going pretty consistently since then.

I currently 'go hard' on tiktok, because I've recently been collecting tons of footage of mobility networks via drone and 360 camera (mostly while I ride my scooter/small motorcycle around)

the tiktok editor is pretty good for that purpose, and then I bring some clips back to my blog.

For instance, https://josh.works/traffic-bean has text, links to some substacks I wrote, a youtube video embed (drone footage) and tiktok embeds (insta360 footage).

It does the trick.

But everything that isn't on my website I count as ephemeral, discard, creative detritus that I create lots of so I can occasionally get the good bits.

I love having my website. I can write whatever I want. I can write about grief, or supremacy, or ruby, or american road networks, and I have a list of subscribers (~300) via email that I can talk to directly.

I love to see other people's blogs. It's so much more interesting to me than an instagram or tik tok or whatever.

:)
by tom_ | 2025-07-11 18:04:13+00:00
> Europe just sucks in oil, gas, uranium and some coal from the rest of the world to give back what exactly?

It's called "money". Numbers on a screen that you can exchange for goods and services. The people with the oil are typically quite happy to give Europeans that oil in exchange for some European money - and the Europeans don't have to give anything back at all. The exchange has been made.
by gpm | 2025-07-11 18:04:49+00:00
Hmm, analytics appear to default to enabled: https://github.com/BloopAI/vibe-kanban/blob/609f9c4f9e989b59...

It is harvesting email addresses and github usernames: https://github.com/BloopAI/vibe-kanban/blob/609f9c4f9e989b59...

Then it seems to track every time you start/finish/merge/attempt a task, and every time you run a dev server. Including what executors you are using (I think this means "claude code" or the like), whether attempts succeeded or not and their exit codes, and various booleans like whether or not a project is an existing one, or whether or not you've set up scripts to run with it.

This really strikes me as something that should be, must legally be in many jurisdictions, opt in.
by pa7ch | 2025-07-11 18:06:00+00:00
I worked on a linux distro some years ago that had to pull btrfs long after people had started saying thats its truly solid because customers had so many issues. Its probably improved since but its hard to know. Im surprised fedora workstation defaults to it now. I'm hoping bcachefs finds its way in the next few years as being the rock solid fs it aims to be.
by belter | 2025-07-11 18:06:01+00:00
That explanation based on lies by the tech staff, is another variation of the Volkswagen explanation that the emissions scandal, were just some low level engineers.

The essence of this story is how the UK establishment can lie, and be corrupt to levels that will shame big time criminals.

[1] "...Vennells was the CEO of Post Office Ltd during the latter part of the Post Office scandal, which involved more than 900 subpostmasters being wrongly convicted of theft, false accounting and fraud between 1999 and 2015 because of shortfalls at their branches that were in fact errors of the Horizon accounting software used by the Post Office.Thousands of subpostmasters paid for shortfalls caused by Horizon and/or had their contracts terminated. The actions of the Post Office caused the loss of jobs, bankruptcy, family breakdown, criminal convictions, prison sentences and at least four suicides. In total, over 4,000 subpostmasters would eventually become eligible for compensation..."

"...In 2013, Post Office Limited hired forensic accounting firm Second Sight, headed by Ron Warmington, to investigate the Horizon software losses. Warmington discovered the system was flawed and faulty, but Vennells was unhappy with Warmington's report and terminated their contract. Prior to her role as CEO, Vennells was the Chief Operating Officer of Post Office Ltd, a position in which – according to the evidence of the then CEO, David Smith – she had responsibility for management of the "operational use" of the Horizon software...."

"...During the case, the Post Office's conduct under Vennells's leadership was described as an instance of "appalling and shameful behaviour..."

"...During her testimony, Vennells consistently stated she was unaware of the facts or, when confronted with documents that showed she had been made aware of them, said she had not understood them..."

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paula_Vennells
by NovaDrift | 2025-07-11 18:06:43+00:00
Hey all,

I made a small tool called ClipCheck that lets you fact-check videos from all major platforms — YouTube, TikTok, X, Instagram, and Facebook. Just paste a link and it tries to extract claims, verify them, and give you a truth score, source links, and a short reasoning summary.

Notes:

Please be a little patient — I'm using proxies to make this work across platforms, and they can get rate-limited or blocked occasionally.

There’s currently a limit of 3 concurrent pipeline runs and 100 runs per days. If the system is full, you’ll see an error saying Too many users. Please try again later. Just wait a bit and retry.

Would love your feedback.
by horizion2025 | 2025-07-11 18:06:56+00:00
A big issue is that the British post office could itself act as the prosecutor. Other entities reporting a crime need to convince the public prosecutor before there even is a case, but due to hundred years old traditions the Post Office had the right act as its own prosecutor. Effectively the same problem as in the LLoyd's scandal where LLoyd's effectively was its own regulator.
by jfengel | 2025-07-11 18:07:05+00:00
Yep. Losing sucks.

Nobody cares what Dick Durbin thinks. He's on the losing side. He might as well stay home in Illinois. He can vote yes, no, or "My name is Elmer J. Fudd, Millionaire". He introduced an amendment solely so that he could get his name in the newspaper, then withdrew it because everybody already knew the outcome.

To the winners go the spoils. Durbin's been in DC for a long time, when there was at least some sense that there was a limit to how much spoils there could be. The answer is "all of it".

Sorry, Dick. Better luck next time. You're gonna need it, because now Virginians are mad at you that your side lost them the Space Shuttle, and Texans are convinced that voting against you gets them what they want. The really sucky thing about losing is that once you start, you tend to keep doing it.
by geerlingguy | 2025-07-11 18:07:27+00:00
This hits home even more since I started restoring some vintage Macs.

For the ones new enough to get an SSD upgrade, it's night and day the difference (even a Power Mac G4 can feel fresh and fast just swapping out the drive). For older Macs like PowerBooks and classic Macs, there are so many SD/CF card to IDE/SCSI/etc. adapters now, they also get a significant boost.

But part of the nostalgia of sitting there listening to the rumble of the little hard drive is gone.
by martinpw | 2025-07-11 18:07:28+00:00
There are contracts around how much water needs to flow downstream, so they can't just hold it back like that. California and Arizona both have allocations that they pull from the river downstream of the dam. Mexico too in theory I think, although I don't know if they actually get their allocation any more.

Given how oversubscribed the river water already is, how the river flow rate is steadily diminishing due to increasing temperatures, and the politics involved, even a small or temporary additional reduction in downstream flow would encounter huge opposition.
by anonfordays | 2025-07-11 18:07:40+00:00
>No, some of us just have apps that let us know when someone replies.

Sad and cringe.

>Whether you were logged in or not, the decision to reply to this thread after a week was the sad bit.

Translation: "You're not as terminally online as I am and I think that's sad."

>I can admit defeat more if that will help you? Or should I try to give you an opportunity to say "triggering intensifies"? Or something else?

No need to admit more, it's done. You replyguying is more than enough admission.

>Just let me know what will let you feel better.

You coping and seething is enough. Sad.
by toast0 | 2025-07-11 18:08:51+00:00
What sort of proper schooling allows one to detect lead in ground turmeric?

I guess proper schooling would help one understand the analysis techniques, but the machines are pretty expensive and most people don't have one at home.

Regulations that require food products to be regularly surveyed for heavy metals or other contaminants seem more effective than requiring every household to own and operate analysis machines.

Regulations that require foods to be tracked with origin and batch information makes it a lot easier to find out where contaminants entered the system, rather than requiring kids to go around playing Carmen Sandiego. It also helps save money with recalls when there's specific evidence to include only specific batches.
by notahacker | 2025-07-11 18:09:05+00:00
> The alternative to "local land value improvements feed the local tax base" is that schoolteachers who make the local schools good make the local landlords more money

Or indeed that a headteacher works long and hard to improve their school and all they get for it is a reduction in their real income because the plot of land their house sits on costs 20% more.

Or the schoolteachers get driven away by a horde of NIMBYs who really don't want to be forced to move because the schools are good...
by mekster | 2025-07-11 18:09:06+00:00
Isn't part of the reasons to run a public DNS to sell these hard earned info for profit to marketers etc but they just release publicly? Of course this is just the tip of the iceberg of the information they gather.

Really interesting to know though.

Some just look way high up and could mean buggy implementation without proper cache usage or persistently banging the domain.
by brilee | 2025-07-11 18:09:21+00:00
Back when Claude Code had per-token pricing, almost nobody used it because it was clearly much more expensive than the Cursor pricing - $20 a month flat for Cursor vs $5-10 a day for per-token Claude. The incentives manifested in the way both products used tokens - Claude Code has no particular qualms about submitting a gigantic number of tokens and letting Sonnet figure it all out, whereas Cursor puts in a lot of traditional software engineering to figure out the correct minimal context to put in. Now that Claude Code is on a fixed price plan, it strangely doesn't seem like Anthropic is doing anything to optimize the number of tokens consumed by Claude.

I think it's quite plausible that Anthropic is bleeding out ~100/month on token costs per $20/month user, and even at 80% margin, this is just merely breakeven. Their limited capacity also means that they are _losing_ the opportunity to sell the same capacity at a per-token marginal profit. I think the only plausible endgame here is that Anthropic uses the usage data to RL-finetune Claude Code to the point where it is actually worth a $200/month subscription.

Enjoy the $20/month Claude Pro plan while it lasts; I don't really see it sticking around for more than a year at best.
by GuB-42 | 2025-07-11 18:09:24+00:00
It used to be the case, now the majority of the people in high-income countries and the high earners of medium-income countries can globe trot, it is a massive increase.

As for the "colonial" aspect, Japan is not exactly a poor country. It is, in fact, a rather expensive destination (a bit less now because the Yen is cheap) and you will certainly not be seen as an aristocratic elite. You will be respected as a guest because that's how Japan works, but there is a line and it will become very clear if you ever attempt to cross it.

I think that "colonial style" tourism is on the decline, simply because the world is developing and what used to be poor countries now do very well by themselves. They will still accept your money though.
by w10-1 | 2025-07-11 18:09:44+00:00
Not sure why this has drawn silence and attacks - whence the animus to Ng? His high-level assessments seem accurate, he's a reasonable champion of AI, and he speaks credibly based on advising many companies. What am I missing? (He does fall on the side of open models (as input factors): is that the threat?)

He argues that landscape is changing (at least quarterly), and that services are (best) replaceable (often week-to-week) because models change, but that orchestration is harder to replace, and that there are relatively few orchestration platforms.

So: what platforms are available? Are there other HN posts that assess the current state of AI orchestration?

(What's the AI-orchestration acronym? not PAAS but AIOPAAS? AOP? (since aspect-oriented programming is history))
by IlikeKitties | 2025-07-11 18:09:47+00:00
> I'd even wager that you've never even set foot in a meeting in an attempt to alleviate your naivety.

I don't need to join a meeting to criticize what the organization setting up that meetings is widely publicizing as a treatment for a medical condition (addiction) when what they publicize is obvious religious nonsense.

I also don't join spirit healing conventions for cancer patients or homeopathic sales events to criticize those.
by patrickscoleman | 2025-07-11 18:10:04+00:00
Even as a foreigner who speaks Japanese, I frequently got the "we're closed" and crossing the hands in an X response while locals continued eating. Sometime they'd laugh and I'd hear "gaijin" (rude slang for foreigner) as I walked out.

But plenty of places were super warm and friendly after the initial apprehension if you speak Japanese and read some kanji. Worth the effort!
by kadushka | 2025-07-11 18:10:06+00:00
Thank you! I guess if there's enough spelling related text in the dataset, a model is forced to learn some info about token composition in order to predict such texts.

I wonder if it would help to explicitly insert this info into an embedding vector, similar to how we encode word position info. For example, allocate the first 20 vector elements to represent ASCII codes of token's characters (in some normalized way).
by drcongo | 2025-07-11 18:10:19+00:00
I saw a lot of this exact behaviour in Ibiza recently, I will never understand it. I use the iOS photos widget to always have a photo from my camera roll on my home screen, and the little moment of joy I get from that is usually the memory of the event depicted. What future joy is going to come from a photo popping into your day of that time you spent 2 hours standing in front of something doing very slightly different poses while your long-suffering friend or partner was forced to take photos of each and every one of them?
by KerrAvon | 2025-07-11 18:10:37+00:00
West Virginia is a deeply red state; I don't think you want to go there to avoid scams. It's pervasive in the US because the political leadership is all now scam culture, all the time. Trump is, at core, a corrupt, subliterate, small-time real estate huckster. Everybody he's surrounded himself with is either an insincere grifter or severely mentally ill. And they're running the federal government and the red states, and trying to destroy the state governments of the blue ones.
by dbingham | 2025-07-11 18:10:57+00:00
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but my understand of the alien craft theory specifically for Oumuamua wasn't just because the object itself was new, but that it changed acceleration [1] without apparent off gassing in a way that isn't explained by our current understanding of orbital physics for a natural object.

It's not just "New object, must be aliens!" It's "This thing doesn't fit our understanding of orbital motion for natural objects, aliens is actually a rational, if still unlikely, possible explanation."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1I/%CA%BBOumuamua#Non-gravitat...
by horizion2025 | 2025-07-11 18:11:17+00:00
What I've seen so far suggest they were just ignorant and victims of confirmational bias etc. You can see that when they won some cases they wrote internally something to the effect of "Final we can put to rest all those concerns about these cases blablabla". So it became self-validating. Also the courts and defense lawyers didn't manage to the see the pattern and in the huge numbers of such cases. Each defendant was fighting their own battle. Also, a mathematician from Fujitsu gave "convincing" testimony they didn't have any errors. A lot was down to lack of understanding of how technology works. The fact that xx millions of transactions were processed without errors doesn't preclude that there could be errors in a small number, as was the case. In this case sometimes coming down to random effects like if race conditions were triggered.
by jorvi | 2025-07-11 18:11:23+00:00
IBM saw their internal tech support requirement plummet when they switched to MacBooks.

I've never understood companies that cheap out on laptops. Even if you only pay someone minimum wage (€1800), a high end laptop is ~1 month wage, and you get a tax write-off on it too.

Even if that person only works there for 2 years, that's 4.2% of the cost of employing them.

Even worse is when management doles maxed out iPhones and MacBooks Pros out to themselves, but the main workforce has to make do with €650 craptops and cheap Samsung phones. For me that's always a double red flag because it tells me management is both inept and greedy.
by Bender | 2025-07-11 18:11:25+00:00
What keeps you coming back to HN every day?

HN is one of the places I can see a number of news stories in one place. It's nice to both be able to submit stories and also not have to administer the website. HN has been a 10 year vacation from running a similar site that I will not name. Being an end-user is relaxing and nearly care-free. Watching someone else run this site is therapeutic and nearly cathartic. I compare it to watching sped-up videos of people landscaping with heavy equipment. Running something like this 10 years ago was an absolute shit-show so I can only imagine how things have devolved which gives me a tremendous amount of respect for team dang.