MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fakedang | 2025-07-17 10:58:55+00:00
I know I'm going to get a lot of flak for looking like I'm shilling, but the UAE, ironically. They do not mess around with kids, and make sure they're not exposed to whatever issue the parents might be facing. In many cases, the police allow for lenient visitations for the mother and children. These instances are often not portrayed online because 1.) family guys tend to be less involved in open crime whatsoever, 2.) the UAE has a large singles population so whatever instances happen are very rare, and 3.) the surveillance state ensures that the police already know who's at fault and who isn't.

But God forbid if you're ever caught for any crime whatsoever. Or if you're detained for domestic violence. Especially if not in Dubai (which is miles more lenient than other emirates).
by ghaff | 2025-07-17 10:59:14+00:00
>A credit card size phone would only work for people who basically hate their phones I think.

Probably. It's people who know they have to own a smartphone for so many things like park their car but don't really want one.

This was a number of years back but I know a then tech executive who got a phone (I think it may have been a feature phone at the time) only because their nanny absolutely insisted.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-07-17 10:59:19+00:00
> They don't emit CO2 or Methane in any way that can run out of control unless we pour carbon into the system externally (by digging up oil and feeding it to them for example, or transporting them using cars that run on fossil fuels, or heating them with fossil fuels).

The economic incentives combined with political corruption will continue FF extraction. The root problems are human nature and political in origin and require leadership to pull back on grain subsidies, tax CAFO-grown meat, tax fossil fuels (none of this "carbon offsets" in Africa fraud), and pass on the real future decline in GDP from climate change-driven floods, famines, and wars.
by dns_snek | 2025-07-17 10:59:28+00:00
Neither [1] nor [2] are studies showing that ADHD medication is over-prescribed. [1] isn't a study, it's a glorified blog post. [2] is a study that looked into the rate at which contraindicated medications are prescribed (6%).

Prescribing contraindicated medication is a reason to be cautious and weigh the risks against the benefits. It does not indicate that the combination is unwarranted.

> But if we're at a point where we're nitpicking and saying, "Your kid walks on their toes. That's bad. Let's get them diagnosed. Then get some meds", yeah, it's horrifying and absolutely indefensible.

Nobody is diagnosing anyone with autism based on how they walk, but it might be a sign to seek an evaluation, usually when it's accompanied by other symptoms. Furthermore there's no medication for autism.
by bayindirh | 2025-07-17 11:00:05+00:00
> It's also arguably the reason that the Fediverse can not manage to grow to more than 1 million MAU.

Shall the number go up indefinitely? I don't believe so. Something can be attractive to a group of people and the number may float somewhere as people come and go. If the main aim is to make "the line go up", then the users become the product, and this is what I'm against in the first place.

> The solution to this is not to get rid of power and keep everyone in the same small crab bucket. It's to make access to the powerful tools as universal and ubiquitous as possible.

While stuffing people from a crab bucket is not the correct analogy for removing capabilities from the medium, I also believe giving people power to realize their dreams, but as you can see, this power corrupts (Meta, Google and Microsoft are great examples of things). Also, if we should give people all the power they need, then we arrive to the abolishing all law and regulation in all areas of the life.

What if someone have the dream of owning a bazooka and we enable them since it's a freedom, and they misfire it to a school bus?

What if we deregulate web space because people shall be free to do whatever they want in the internet, and somebody makes a fortune by selling targeted ads, and what if this ad platform is used to manipulate people to vote in a groomed way (Cambridge Analytica, everyone).

> Your friend not being sensible enough to know when to use a tool vs when to keep it simple is not a problem of the tool.

The tool is the result of exponentially increasing complexity of doing something simple. A perfect real-life example how modern web is bloating itself exponentially given its unlimited nature.

> Also, talking about deployment methods seems so orthogonal to the discussion that I am not sure it makes sense to carry this conversation further.

Please refer to above paragraph.

I agree that we look to the problem with a very different window, and you are not interested in a more minimal, saner or calmer space for distraction and abuse-free (or hard to abuse) environment. We're talking past each other. There's no need to continue this, since there's no desire to flex and widen the perspective.

With no hard feelings, have a nice day. :)

Hope to see you around in another thread.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-07-17 11:00:34+00:00
IMO things have never been better.

Vulkan works approximately everywhere (except Apple, but that's entirely self inflicted and there's a compatibility layer so it's NotMyProblem). OpenGL is more portable than ever thanks to software implementations that yield far more consistent behavior between platforms than was available historically. WebGPU is actually fairly nice to work with, has a well maintained native implementation for two major systems languages, and both of those implementations have (AFAIK) fully functional WASM support. If it happens to gain a native Mesa implementation once everything stabilizes that will merely be icing on the cake. OpenCL has multiple competing implementations, including PoCL which is an adapter providing decently broad support on top of other backends.

And if you don't want to fiddle with native APIs (which no offense intended but you very clearly sound like you don't) there's quite a few choices available to abstract all the low level details away with cross platform cross API middleware which are FOSS and actively maintained.
by JdeBP | 2025-07-17 11:01:21+00:00
Strictly speaking, one couldn't do it properly, rendering the pages as actual text for TUIs rather than graphically for GUIs, until Unicode version 13 came along, which included the necessary block graphics characters and which was only 5 years ago.

And even then one needs modern fonts like Viznut's Unscii or GNU Unifont or which cover the necessary code points (or one of the terminal emulators that algorithmically constructs block and line characters, and has been updated for Unicode 13).

* https://github.com/jdebp/unscii/blob/2.1.1f/src/grids.txt#L4...

* https://github.com/jdebp/unscii/blob/2.1.1f/src/grids.txt#L9...
by jsnell | 2025-07-17 11:01:56+00:00
I mean, the GP made a point about "per-user costs" that I believe was false, so that was the specific thing I was commenting on. Steering the discussion to a totally different topic of research costs doesn't help us reach closure on that point. It's basically new objections being thrown at the wall, and none being scraped off.

I think what you're not realizing is that OpenAI already has the kind of consumer-facing business that makes Google and Meta hundreds of billions of revenue a year. They have the product, they have the consumer mindshare and usage. All they are missing is the monetization part. And they're doing that at a vastly lower cost basis than Google or Meta, no matter what class of spending you measure. Their unit costs are lower, their fixed costs are lower, their R&D costs are lower.

They don't need to stop R&D to be profitable. Literally all they'd need to do is minimal ads monetization.

There's all kinds of things you can criticize the AI companies for, but the economics being unsustainable really isn't one of them. OpenAI is running a massive consumer-facing app for incredibly cheap in comparison to its peers running systems of a similar scale. It'd be way more effective to concentrate on the areas where the criticism is either obviously correct, or there's at least more uncertainty.
by sjw987 | 2025-07-17 11:02:07+00:00
I hope that what comes from the LLM (I can't call it AI) revolution is a serious society-wide look and discussion about the false economy we currently live in and some ideas to change it.

Let's face it. Huge portions of the population are performing unnecessary jobs in order to sustain themselves. Most products and services available to us today are unnecessary, unsustainable, destructive (economically and socially), and many represent a huge bubble which will hurt us down the line. LLM have exposed the sort of office jobs which have been automatable for years.

We are killing ourselves mentally and spiritually, as well as the planet we live on, so everybody can drive to offices to respond to emails or to create carbon-copies of the same already existing products and hoping marketing makes the difference.
by atoav | 2025-07-17 11:02:11+00:00
I program both C/C++ and Rust (the latter to a lesser degree currently). Rust is far superior to C in Error locality, if you write ideomatic Rust. Most of the types of errors I make in C would have been cought at compile time in Rust.

Aside from Rusts ownership model you can use the type system to enforce certain things. A typical example is that Rust uses different String types to force programmers to deal with the pitfalls. Turns out if you have a file name in an operating system it could not be a valid string, or you could have valid Unicode text that could not be a filename. Rust having different types for OS Strings and internal Unicode means when you want to go from one to the other you need to explicitly deal with the errors or choose a strategy how to handle them.

Now you could totally implement strings within Rust in a way that wouldn't force that conversion and programmers would then yolo their way through any conversion, provided they even knew about the issue. And the resulting error would not necessarily surface where it orginated. But that would be programming Rust like C.

In my experience many C libraries will just happily gulp up any input of any remotly valid shape as if it was valid data without many devs being even aware there were cases or conversions they would have had to deal with. You recognize exceptionally good C devs by the way they avoid those pitfalls.

And these skilled C devs are like seasoned mountaineers, they watch their every step carefully. But that doesn't mean the steep north face of the mountain is the safest, fastest or most ergonomic way to get to the summit. And if you believe that C is that, you should be nowhere near that language.
by skissane | 2025-07-17 11:02:55+00:00
> The more I think about it, I can't help but think that pedagogy is borderline quackery

I had this high school computing studies teacher, I’ll call her Dr B. She knew absolutely nothing about the subject she was supposed to be teaching us, but was beaming with pride as she told us about her PhD in education, for which she sat in on university-level engineering classes - she claimed she didn’t need to understand engineering to understand how engineering students learn

That said, once upon a time, I happened to stumble upon an education PhD thesis which I enjoyed reading and personally thought had something worthwhile to say: https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/10373/ - even though I live on the other side of the planet, its accounts of the personal experiences of parents resonated with some of my own experiences
by simonw | 2025-07-17 11:03:06+00:00
It's just YOLO.

This problem remains almost entirely unsolved. The closest we've got to what I consider a credible solution is the recent CaMeL paper from DeepMind: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.18813 - I published some notes on that here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/11/camel/
by leereeves | 2025-07-17 11:04:36+00:00
This seems relevant:

"It doesn’t matter how smart teens are or how well they scored on the SAT or ACT. Good judgment isn’t something they can excel in, at least not yet."

"The rational part of a teen’s brain isn’t fully developed and won’t be until age 25 or so."

"In fact, recent research has found that adult and teen brains work differently. Adults think with the prefrontal cortex, the brain’s rational part. This is the part of the brain that responds to situations with good judgment and an awareness of long-term consequences. Teens process information with the amygdala. This is the emotional part."

https://www.stanfordchildrens.org/en/topic/default?id=unders...
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-07-17 11:04:54+00:00
Krzanich and Swan were catastrophically bad. Both of them are among the worst bigcorp CEOs ever, with asleep-at-the-wheel Krzanich in the running for the worst of all time. Intel's board tried to right the ship with Gelsinger, but it was too little and too late, especially given slow development cycles in the semiconductor industry.
by ben_w | 2025-07-17 11:04:55+00:00
Broadly agree (I see lots of "ideas people" who have no interest in doing), the only thing I would say is that the occasional results from the big AI groups suggests it takes less than 1e6 machines — but probably more than 100 even for low-hanging fruit, which is already too much for a lot of people to stomach, so the point is still valid.
by Calavar | 2025-07-17 11:05:52+00:00
Seems like exactly the opposite. He is saying the common finding (75% of people) is abnormal.

He also says "These weren’t overweight or sedentary individuals" which makes me think he didn't thoroughly read the abstract, which says the main finding is that sedentary people have decreased markers of mitochondrial respiration relative to moderately active people.
by shakna | 2025-07-17 11:05:55+00:00
A lot of pacemakers on the market today are remote access. They can be dialled into by your doctor and adjusted, in concert with live alerts and logs. Thats not infintisimal power requirements. (Cellular is cheap, but not nothing.)

Whilst we do have long lasting applications in places, a pacemaker was a poor choice of the article.
by whytevuhuni | 2025-07-17 11:06:05+00:00
> You would just end up with a bunch of functions that take a struct of that type as their first argument.

I don't see that as a necessarily bad thing, it brings uniformity with the rest of the functions. I've coded with libraries like APR, Nginx's API, and GTK's GLib, and the result looks quite aesthetically pleasing too (subjective of course).

I'm also not considering this as a deal-breaker or anything. The point is not that this one particular feature makes a language complex, but rather that features like these tend to pile up, and what once looked like a simple language quickly becomes less simple due to dozens of such simple features added together. But one or two of these is fine.
by ghaff | 2025-07-17 11:07:38+00:00
When I was still working full-time, a co-worker told me their kid had told them they didn't need or want a computer. Probably changes at some point with long writing assignments, etc. but still.

I do increasingly think about whether I need to bring a laptop on various trips. It can be handy but I try to pack light and another few pounds is a lot for me. I've experimented with a newish tablet but it's a bit too in-between for my taste.
by torginus | 2025-07-17 11:08:18+00:00
This. I live in a very different place from you and I'm just a humble homeowner, but contractors here are less than competent and I as a layperson can often do better after reading up on the thing and watching a couple Youtube videos.

I know it's meme tier and horrible when a guy who watched some videos tells the tradesmen how to do their jobs, but unfortunately I often end up being right and prove them wrong.

For example one of the last things I experienced was one of the electricians needed to get a cable through the concrete upper floor, and just couldn't do the calculations on where to drill and ended up drilling into the middle of the wall instead of right next to it.

These kinds of fuckups are constant and the contractors are pretty good at hiding these unless I stand next to them.

I've yet to meet a roofer that could properly do trig to calculate the sloped roof area.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-07-17 11:09:14+00:00
You're nothing thinking this through. It could trickle charge a capacitor or supercapacitor that has a very low self-discharge rate. There's a circuit called a Joule Thief that can extract usable power from very low voltage sources. There are other tricks to do voltage multiplication like using diodes and capacitors, but there are also micropower switching boost converters too.
by chamomeal | 2025-07-17 11:09:22+00:00
Copilot is also WAY too eager to pass tests. It will write tests to pass a completely broken function.

We have aggressively high coverage requirements at work, but also really terrible tooling/support for good tests, so everybody uses copilot. The result is a paper-thin test suite that only tests the implementation and none of the intended behavior. It’s so clunky and the tests are so mock-ridden that the only way to make sense of them… is by using copilot!! Thus it continues ;-;
by barbegal | 2025-07-17 11:09:34+00:00
Assuming you could get these to 10% efficiency (which is theoretically possible) and a phone needs 0.2W of energy to function then you would need a source capable of supplying 2W of energy (of which 1.8W would be dissipated as heat). The phone would be fairly hot all the time but 2W could be dissipated without it overheating in most environments. Strontium 90 generates 0.95 W/g so in theory a few grams of strontium 90 would be enough to power your phone for many decades (the half life is 28 years). But if someone were to accidentally put such a phone into an insulating material it might overheat and become a dangerous radioactive mess!
by Protostome | 2025-07-17 11:09:48+00:00
Here is a scenario which is relatively trivial in Nextflow and difficult to write in snakemake:

1. A process that "generates" protein sequences

2. A collection of processes that perform computationally intensive downstream computations

3. A filter that decides, based on some calculation an a threshold whether the output from process (1) should move to process (2).

Furthermore, assume you'd like process (1) to continue generating new candidates continously and independently until N number of candidates pass the filter for downstream processing.

That's not something that you can do easily with snakemake since it generates the DAG before computation starts. Sure, you can create some hack or use checkpoints that forces snakemake to reevaluate the DAG and so on, and maybe --keep-going=true so that it won't end the other processes from failing, but with nextflow you just set a few channels as queues and connect them to processes, which is much easier.
by ggm | 2025-07-17 11:12:40+00:00
I think this is necessary but I also think it's not sufficient: FPTP has to go, it's a cancer on British elections and maintained by leftists who believe in the potential for an enduring super majority which cannot be demonstrated to exist: the socialist democracies of Europe with complex coalitions may appear weak but have enduring qualities a British house of commons cannot demonstrate.

That, and finishing reform of the lords. And separating the English parliament from a federal parliament over the separate nations in the federation.
by ramity | 2025-07-17 11:13:13+00:00
I really want to love rust, and I understand the niches it fills. My temporary allegiance with it comes down to performance, but I'm drawn by the crate ecosystem and support provided by cargo.

What's so damning to me is how debilitatingly unopinionated it is during situations like error handling. I've used it enough to at least approximate its advantages, but strongly hinting towards including a crate (though not required) to help with error processing seems to mirror the inconvenience of having to include an exception type in another language. I don't think it would be the end of the world if it came with some creature comforts here and there.
by anentropic | 2025-07-17 11:13:32+00:00
I've been curious about this project for a while...

If you squint a bit it's sort of like an Airflow that can run on AWS Step Functions.

Step Functions sort of gives you fully serverless orchestration, which feels like a thing that should exist. But the process for authoring them is very cumbersome - they are crying out for a nice language level library i.e. for Python something that creates steps via decorator syntax.

And it looks like Metaflow basically provides that (as well as for other backends).

The main thing holding me back is lack of ecosystem. A big chunk of what I want to run on an orchestrator are things like dbt and dlt jobs, both of which have strong integrations for both Airflow and Dagster. Whereas Metaflow feels like not really on the radar, not widely used.

Possibly I have got the wrong end of the stick a bit because Metaflow also provides an Airflow backend, which I sort of wonder in that case why bother with Metaflow?
by sparkie | 2025-07-17 11:13:46+00:00
But 16 year olds are not mature enough to decide whether they want to drink or smoke. They also should look at least 25 for that.

It's really not a great idea. Most 16 year olds know nothing about the world - they're impressionable and easily coerced by social pressure, and schools are basically state-run indoctrination camps.

Labour are assuming the majority of the youth vote will go their way, but it could backfire heavily. The youth think Reform are cool and Labour are outdated.
by satyrun | 2025-07-17 11:14:17+00:00
If you frame it like a farmer back in the day hearing there will be more jobs because of the industrial revolution so they conclude that means there will be more farmers but just doing a new type of farming, that would obviously be wrong.

To me, it seems obvious the next boom 10 years out is in physical labor and being an advanced robot with your body. That is what will have value with the hugely deflationary knowledge work part going from super expensive to insanely cheap.
by lan321 | 2025-07-17 11:14:33+00:00
> Metropolises are fantastic places to live, especially when you are comfortable spending money to expand your space on demand.

That's a very optimistic perspective, which I somewhat envy. It makes sense in a way, assuming your rent is negligible, but when you're paying out the ass for an apartment, having the privilege of being able to pay short-term rent in the form of coffees and brezels for a shared proper living room doesn't sound great...
by _Algernon_ | 2025-07-17 11:16:29+00:00
One argument for lowering voting age is given by selectorate theory. Basically it argues that higher coalition size (the number of people that participate in decision making) is what causes democracy to benefit the masses. Because parties compete for votes, they are forced to distribute societal goods back to a large portion of the population instead of only distributing it to their cronies. Arguably the quality of voting in terms decision making is secondary, if it matters at all. By this theory, lowering voting age is a boon to democracy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selectorate_theory
by skissane | 2025-07-17 11:16:39+00:00
A radical proposal: there is no minimum voting age, but to enrol to vote you must pass a civics exam-so a 12 year old who passes the exam can vote, but a 50 year old who fails it (or refuses to sit it) can’t.

I really doubt this proposal would ever actually be implemented, but still it is an interesting idea to ponder-in the abstract it seems fairer than a semi-arbitrary cutoff based on chronological age