MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 9x39 | 2025-07-25 19:33:46+00:00
Centralized delivery of content licenses might be more accurate. Similar to your point about using public utilities as examples, I think it's a distinction without difference for what the OP was talking about.

I think the point is in a delivery of commodities (storage, IP licenses, water, power) there is some benefit from the generally fungible nature of the commodity, which makes it harder to put high prices on them, which makes doing it yourself more expensive and inefficient unless you value something very specific.

It's true I don't own the water from my city nor own access to it (it's a license, effectively), and I pay a delivery fee and purchase units of water. But like most people around, I don't value the intangible of truly owning access to the water under my land and drill a well, I just use the commodity. So it goes with e-book licensing and video licensing, too, and I don't think that they're regulated utilities affects this decision whatsoever - enough people value cost and convenience sufficiently to think licenses are fine for their use case instead of ownership.

>The point of the former is to make money, the latter is to enrich our lives by taking care of basic human needs.

The former could say they make money by enriching lives in their own way.

Is this arguing basic human needs should be charity? If so, even the most humble city will charge for water. Further, companies are often created to make money by providing production and distribution of that human need. Utilities are not altruistic but can be fair enough when held in check by a state.
by epistasis | 2025-07-25 19:34:42+00:00
That's very interesting about the freezing. I wonder if Redwood Materials does that?

https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/news/responding-recovering-...

They've been working hard at recycling, and the biggest challenge at the moment is actually getting old batteries for the process. There's not many in-service batteries reaching end of life yet, so they mostly deal with production scrap.
by chemeng | 2025-07-25 19:34:44+00:00
In the US, professional certifications (PE, Bar, USMLE, CPA) exist to partially solve this problem when the certification is required to perform work legally. These are typically required in industries where lives and livelihoods of individuals and the public are at risk based on the decisions of the professional.

Joining in with some other comments on this thread, if the stamp of a certified person was required to submit/sign apps with more than 10K or 100K users and came with personal risk and potential loss of licensure, I imagine things would change quickly.

I'm personally not for introducing more gatekeeping and control over software distribution (Apple/Google already have too much power). Also not sure how you'd make it work in an international context, but would be simple to implement for US based companies if Apple/Google wanted to tackle the problem.

I think the broader issue is that we as a society don't see data exposure or bad development practices as real harm. However, exposing the addresses and personal info of people talking about potentially violent, aggressive or unsafe people seems very dangerous.
by tialaramex | 2025-07-25 19:34:54+00:00
So, the answer is that I've read that and I wasn't as reassured as I'd like. ECMA definitely isn't enough as it acknowledges. The platforms which exist today are fine. And future platforms? Well we're told it will be difficult to change these assumptions. Yeah, it would be difficult.

For a comparison, the x86 has what that document calls TSO, a very strict "free" ordering (in fact you pay all the time, but, you can't opt out so in that sense it's free to get this ordering on Intel) so 1990s C++ written for Windows just assumes volatile means you get memory ordering -- even though that's not what that means. If you compile brand new code for x86 on Microsoft's compilers today you get the exact same promise, but if you target their ARM platforms you don't get that because it would be expensive so, too bad.
by tux3 | 2025-07-25 19:34:55+00:00
If you read the Github issue, this one was weaponized fairly straightforwardly by taking the difference between the two pointers.

The difference is zero, but the compiler thinks it is non-zero because it thinks they are unequal.

From there you turn it into type confusion through an array, and then whatever you want. Almost any wrong compiler assumption can be exploited. This particular way to do it has also been used several times to exploit bugs in Javscript engines.
by mawadev | 2025-07-25 19:34:58+00:00
I'm waking up personally to the unethical side of Software development as well. You can either do little and get paid pocket change or you can provide a ton of value for pocket change next to some promises lulling you in, where the value of your work exponentially increases, but you will see nothing of it and whatever you do: you are still a replaceable cell in excel to them and there will be ways where you get dragged over the table. If the money isn't directly in your bank account, it might as well not exist or was a lie. Sooner or later you are the horse behind the barn anyway.
by teamonkey | 2025-07-25 19:35:00+00:00
Control was one of the first big games to come out after Nvidia’s first line of GPUs with raytracing hardware (RTX 20xx) and one of the first games to use those hardware features. That’s why it was used as a showcase (there was probably a deal between Remedy and nvidia to make this happen, not sure).

It was a good looking game at the time, but remember it originally came out on PS4/Xbox One and that version did NOT have raytracing.
by fidelramos | 2025-07-25 19:35:21+00:00
That was precisely Bitcoin's goal as stated in its whitepaper [0]

> A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.

> Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments. While the system works well enough for most transactions, it still suffers from the inherent weaknesses of the trust based model. Completely non-reversible transactions are not really possible, since financial institutions cannot avoid mediating disputes. The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions, and there is a broader cost in the loss of ability to make non-reversible payments for non-reversible services. With the possibility of reversal, the need for trust spreads. Merchants must be wary of their customers, hassling them for more information than they would otherwise need. A certain percentage of fraud is accepted as unavoidable. These costs and payment uncertainties can be avoided in person by using physical currency, but no mechanism exists to make payments over a communications channel without a trusted party.

> What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party. Transactions that are computationally impractical to reverse would protect sellers from fraud, and routine escrow mechanisms could easily be implemented to protect buyers. In this paper, we propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer distributed timestamp server to generate computational proof of the chronological order of transactions. The system is secure as long as honest nodes collectively control more CPU power than any cooperating group of attacker nodes.

[0] https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
by matthewdgreen | 2025-07-25 19:35:23+00:00
Current BESS are rated to last 10-15 years. Battery makers are already moving to lithium-free sodium chemistries. It's hard to imagine what we'll be using at the end of seven full cycles (70-105 years from now.) Sodium? Tiny fusion reactors? Firewood and charcoal? Yes, we should care about this and try to leave our descendants with good solutions. No, we should not think about it so much that we leave our descendants with a devastatingly acidified ocean and uninhabitable equatorial regions in the process of worrying about it.
by illwrks | 2025-07-25 19:36:16+00:00
When I was looking at it a few months ago, vector lettering (an outlined name in a logo) when exported the curves were goofy. I brought them into Illustrator and overlaid it on the actual logo and there was a clear difference.

Couldn’t find the source of the issue so could only assume the SVG data was being compressed on export.

We decided to only use it to share graphic across the team, in any instance we were working with type we used illustrator.
by o11c | 2025-07-25 19:36:46+00:00
There's a lot of dishonesty relating to this. This really isn't about Puritanism, unless you're redefining Puritanism to mean having any morality at all.

Do you really want to compel selling access to pedo games?

Do you really want to compel selling access to rape games?

Do you really want to compel selling access to incest games?

Do you really want to compel selling access to domestic violence games? [this is the only addition that I wasn't aware of from previous investigations, but I still don't think it's valid to call it a "slippery slope" yet]

A lot of customers don't want to be shown such games in the first place (keep in mind that most tag systems are pretty bad at negative filtering, either due to platform limitations or due to not being used in practice).

We can argue about whether "it's better to sell pedos fake content rather than real content" etc. (keep in mind that some of these things are actually illegal in many countries even when no real people are involved), but if so we should be explicit that that is our argument, and not falsely claiming this is some attack on sex in general. (Also keep in mind that free games are immune to payment processor decisions.)
by MichaelNolan | 2025-07-25 19:36:50+00:00
Copy from Reddit. (So take with a hefty pinch of salt) Tesla can not legally launch a service in California. They do not have the permits.

“”” CPUC requires either an AV Drivered Pilot permit, or AV Driverless Pilot permit. (or Drivered or Driverless Phase 1 Deployment permit, but that would typically come after the pilot permit). [Source: CPUC permit guidance PDF] Tesla is not currently listed on the CPUC's Autonomous Vehicle Program Permits Issued page as having been granted any Pilot or Phase 1 permit.

Tesla has a CPUC permit to operate a limo service with human drivers. (Which does not cover ride share services)

If they maintained that the humans are actually driving and otherwise charged for rides the way they do in Austin, the current app model would make them a TNC. TNCs also require a permit to operate in California, which Tesla does not have. “””

https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/-/media/cpuc-website/divisions/consu...

https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/regulatory-services/licensing/transp...

https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/regulatory-services/licensing/transp...
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-07-25 19:37:22+00:00
Doesn't a DB9 connector include all the DB25 RS-232 handshaking lines, even if not all devices actually use them?

I grew up in the 70s-80s with serial connectors and a drawer full of cables, DB25-DB9 adaptors, gender-benders, null modems, breakout boxes, etc, and the only (very common) source of incompatibility that I can recall was connecting devices where one side wanted hardware handshaking but the other didn't provide it, so having to make custom cables with handshaking tied hi/lo to fake it.

Some devices used software XON/XOFF handshaking, so for example on a typical terminal, depending on what you were connected to, you could pause text being sent to the terminal with XOFF (Ctrl-Q), and resume with XON (Ctrl-S).

I've got a softspot for serial communications - used be more a source of fun rather than frustration to dip into the draw of cables/etc and get two devices happily talking to each other.
by horsawlarway | 2025-07-25 19:37:26+00:00
If this is the goal (and I think it's a perfectly commendable goal), you being afraid of the public web makes it basically impossible.

Honestly - just make the service public. Let your wife share links to her photo albums with her friends - have them point to your domain.

Make your friends make accounts on your services if they need to - or better yet, provision accounts automatically for them (I do this).

I understand the fear here, and I get it, but I also think it's widely misplaced. Pay a small sum for backups, rotate them, and let it rip.

The suburban web is actually pretty good these days (at least in real suburbs, I have 2gbs/down 1gbs/up in mine) and it basically only gets better.

---

My experience comes from hosting several sites for my family (including extended family in several different cities and countries) and also several sites for my neighborhood. The vast majority of them are public (as in - there is a public domain that resolves to my services with no need for preshared secret [aka: tailscale or other wireguard based vpn]).

Yes, you get clearly bogus traffic scanning for the lowest of low hanging fruit (ex - php_myadmin/wp-admin/etc) but auth solutions have come a long way, and I don't even bother blacklisting/fail2banning anymore. It's a waste of time and effort for small peanuts.

It's pretty easy to configure SSO pointed at something like Keycloak/Authelia and then have your friends get a centrally managed account with 2fa required. Ex - Jellyfin, Bookstack, Gitea, Immich etc... I host all of these (and lots more) and SSO support is pretty good these days.

Personally, if all your public infrastructure is behind a keycloak login form... I don't think you're going to have many problems.

---

Side note - this is one perfectly acceptable strategy to reach the point you want (community based self-hosted solutions). I host services for my neighbors & family. Not every household needs to be an expert, and no need to get the gov involved (not that I mind the idea of a new digital services library, either).

But fear of the public web means you can't ever reach that spot.
by quietbritishjim | 2025-07-25 19:37:27+00:00
> so by using tab, one ... allows the developer to determine screen spacing to their comfort

(Allow me to reply to this age-old argument with the age-old counter argument...)

But you also have to decide at what point to hard wrap each line based on a max line length, and you can only do that based on some choice of tab size. Anyone with a different tab size preference would see the right column wandering depending on indentation level. This invalidates the only advantage of tabs (assuming file size is no longer a concern).

A common retort is that each reader's auto format (or soft wrapping) can sort out the wrapping. But if each coder is going to reformat the code anyway then they get the benefit of choosing their own indentation level regardless of tabs vs spaces.
by os2warpman | 2025-07-25 19:37:32+00:00
Watching the slow, then sudden, collapse of Intel as they try to MBA their way out of the state they MBA'd their way into is going to be fun.

What's the end going to be?

DECesque? (sell everything off at bargain prices before the pile of what's left gets purchased by someone else who eventually fails as well, probably due to buying the pile of junk)

IBMific? (just hollow everything out and make your living ripping off an ever-shrinking audience of captive customers, also lie about AI for 30 years)

HPtastic? (spin the good, profitable, solid, parts off in order to "focus on our core business" while a constant parade of more and more morally bankrupt rock star MBA/finance losers who end up getting so paranoid and territorial as the walls close in around them that they make desperate, insane, "plays" like selling an Apple iPod with HP written on the side and doing things that make the actual HP spying scandal look like a cakewalk take the reins)

Straight up financial fraud as things keep getting worse?

Huge government bailouts?

Because I can tell you what it's not going to be: "selling a product that is better than your competitors".
by eggdaft | 2025-07-25 19:37:43+00:00
I agree. I was taught Scheme and I later taught it. It was a much cleaner and suitable language for teaching computer science than Python. Students could completely understand the language and how it worked by the end of a semester.

Scheme is much closer to mathematics, which made it much more suitable for teaching strong mathematicians arriving without coding experience. It also made the hackers more rigorous and broadened their minds from the imperative "do this then that" mindset.

There's a notable difference between those first taught scheme and those first taught Python. Of course, both can go on to learning Python or FP or whatever. But that foundation needs to be there to teach truly great coding for most mortals.
by notpushkin | 2025-07-25 19:37:54+00:00
Type safety is good, but the class soup inside the components is just abysmal. And honestly, more often than not I see it spilling out of the components and onto the page layouts.

Design tokens are the one Tailwind feature I genuinely like. Everything else – kill it with fire. Just use whatever scoped CSS your stack does (<style> in Svelte/Vue, Emotion in React?).
by pixl97 | 2025-07-25 19:38:12+00:00
In the same note of tech in trucking, the large truck manufactures have started 'John Deere-ing' their equipment and making more electronically integrated, non user replicable, non-standard parts.

The newer parts typically are lighter, which means less fuel usage and room for actual cargo. At the same time, if the part breaks in 100,000 miles and costs an arm and a leg to replace the owner/operator doesn't gain anything but paying the manufacture more of an ownership tax.
by tudorg | 2025-07-25 19:38:41+00:00
That is correct, for non-volatile default values Postgres is quick, which means that it is generally a safe operation.

Also interesting, `now()` is non-volatile because it's defined as "start of the transaction". So if you add a column with `DEFAULT now()` all rows will get the same value. But `timeofday()` is not volatile, so `DEFAULT timeofday()` is going to lock the table for a long time. A bit of a subtle gotcha.
by userbinator | 2025-07-25 19:38:42+00:00
It's stupid to have a huge monitor (or monitors) and then use only a tiny fraction of it. I don't need a little window showing a few lines of text to be any bigger than it needs to be.

You should try it.

I've used an Android phone plugged into a monitor before when I had nothing else. Doesn't work for anything but the most trivial of situations, which IMHO says just how much work you actually do and how much information you actually use in your work. I need to look at multiple documents simultaneously to compare and refer to them. Switching between windows all the time and trying to memorise what they showed for a second or two is a stupid inefficiency.
by iLemming | 2025-07-25 19:38:48+00:00
I'm not sure what you're saying, but just in case if you're implying that choosing to use something like Clojure or Elixir adds "unnecessary layer of problems" just because they are not statically typed, let me remind you that "simplicity" is basically Clojure's middle-name. Rich Hickey made a seminal talk on simplicity, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxdOUGdseq4 it's quite eye-opening and isn't really about Clojure. Every programmer should watch it, perhaps even multiple times throughout different stages of their career progression.
by gilbetron | 2025-07-25 19:38:49+00:00
Definitely a good point. I live in a college town and know many people that read all the time, but don't actually do anything active with what they've read. They just consume it continuously and think the understand many topics. Except when you talk to them, it comes out quickly that they didn't actually understand what they read on a deep level, they just went along for the "thinking ride".

And, as you point out, if you push yourself to read actively, it helps a lot!
by crinkly | 2025-07-25 19:39:31+00:00
Well we have a couple of problems on the table at the moment. Stop Killing Games is a good exemplar of one so I won't go there. But the other is "what happens if Steam goes evil?". Remember Google's old motto?

The only solution is you download stuff and it remains runnable and usable without any connection or authorisation to any service. The distribution of it can remain wherever and you can go via a side channel if you want. But being tied to a platform is utterly wrong.

If the payment processor shuts your revenue down you can move elsewhere. With Stream as the distributor, you can't. It's a single point of failure.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-07-25 19:39:44+00:00
I disagree; if you suggest doing something, and someone points out a (legitimate) potential flaw/problem/shortcoming/difficulty, then that person has helped you and improved the conversation. Full stop. It might be nice if they can also suggest something better, but it's not necessary. It might even be in the final outcome that the original idea is still the best option, and even then it is preferable that its problems are known and hopefully considered for mitigation.
by ericmcer | 2025-07-25 19:39:45+00:00
I had a similar situation in my early 20s.

My conclusion was that past a certain point you need to use liquid sugar (soda especially) to get your body to put on weight past a certain point.

Even with absurd amounts of fat, carbs and proteins I could not process enough food to put on the weight I wanted too. Sugar is the backbone of massive weight gain.
by IncreasePosts | 2025-07-25 19:39:48+00:00
This sounds like a just so story. There were all sorts of groups who set up shop in America, and all contributed to its success and influenced the culture.

Virginia was the most populous colony during the revolution, did English planter society just disappear and the Puritans made it all the way down to the South?

What about the Quakers in Pennsylvania?

Dutch society in New York?

Poor Scots in Appalachia?

And, in any case, this campaign started in Australia. Were there a lot of Puritans there?
by csours | 2025-07-25 19:40:00+00:00
The problem with slippery slopes is that the world is made of them. You can't leave the slippery slope, at BEST you can choose which slope you're sliding down.

Another way to think of this is 'long tail risk'. Some subset of people out there will develop real life problems from: porn, sex work, alcohol, weed, drugs, gambling, other 'moral' issues. It is difficult to meaningfully address both the median user and the problematic user.

See also decrim.
by solari | 2025-07-25 19:40:37+00:00
In case you weren't aware, Instapaper has an RSS feed of your saved articles. In your web browser (on desktop or ask for desktop version on mobile device) go to Instapaper.com and click on your username/email address in the upper right corner. Select download and a box pops up with several options -- select RSS feed and copy the URL over to yer favorite RSS reader.

Ray
by Aurornis | 2025-07-25 19:40:40+00:00
> It is an electric motorcycle.

The laws generally require that an e-bike must be under a certain power limit and the user has to pedal to keep it going. The power is for pedal assist only.

This is the difference between your links. The e-bike and the electric motorcycle have very different power limits and are controlled differently.

The unlocks remove the power limit and the mods can add a throttle so the user doesn’t have to pedal.

These turn it into an electric motorcycle under the law.

One is allowed on certain bike trails. An electric motorcycle is not.