MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hansmayer | 2025-07-29 15:05:21+00:00
So they could be profitable, but the conditions to achieve the profitability are dumb and unrealistic. Your own words. Somehow you claim to have still made your point, because a company firing all its employees and stopping all product development could be profitable, right? Because thats what companies do routinely, they just maximise profits by firing everyone once the product is mature enough and can practically take care of itself. I wonder why all the e-commerce companies just dont apply this one simple trick? Is that the argument that you are making? Now for the calculations - are you sure the losses are only 5B? Well, if we just account for the Microsoft donated Azure credits, they run a lot of their workloads on, its probably a lot, lot more than that. Unaccounted for in the OpenAI books perhaps, but still a huge material investment, that does not make any returns to anyone, hence a (by definition) loss.
by pjc50 | 2025-07-29 15:05:28+00:00
.. for Category 1 services. I've already noted that several age verification services explicitly promise _not_ to retain your identity.

I'm having trouble working out what's category 1. Schedule 1 defines exemptions https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2023/50/schedule/1/part... ; otherwise this refers OFCOM to "critera" which I can't find.

As I understand it, Wikipedia are seeking judicial review of OFCOM's placing them in category 1, which requires the most stringent checks including identity.
by norir | 2025-07-29 15:05:40+00:00
I agree and disagree completely with this statement. Syntax is superficial. It is the first thing that people will notice about the language (unless you hide it from them). One quickly notices that if you don't like a language syntax, you can always write a compiler that operates at a purely syntactic level to transform your desired syntax to the actual target language.

But just because syntax is superficial doesn't mean that it isn't important. If a language has such poor syntax that I feel the need to write my own compiler to work around its syntax, I have to seriously question the skills and/or motivations of the author. If I am capable of writing a compiler at the syntactic level, why not just go all in and write my own compiler that implements _my_ desired semantics? A language that I find subjectively distasteful at the syntactic level is nearly guaranteed to be filled with semantic and architectural decisions that I also dislike. Consider Rust, I do not think that its syntax and abysmal compilation times can be decoupled. I would rather write my own borrow checker than subject myself to writing rust. And the reason is not the syntax, which I do strongly dislike, but the semantic properties of the language, such as horrible compilation times and compiler bugs (if a language has more than 100 open issues on github, I consider it broken beyond repair).
by bicx | 2025-07-29 15:05:55+00:00
I'll check out the Decimo! And maybe I should just size up my Vanishing Point nib. I've had it for a few years and it's just too scratchy.

I have a few other fun (relatively) cheap fountain pens I like: brass Kaweko Sport, Muji fountain pen, other random finds. However, the downside of fountain pens if that if you don't use them, you end up with a bunch of clogged nibs.
by alias_neo | 2025-07-29 15:06:50+00:00
Infrastructure is still lacking in the UK, and not everyone has the possibility of charging at home, but the Chinese EVs are the only ones not reaching into luxury vehicle price territory (and the associated costs) in the UK.

If the pace of EV sales picks up (and I'm not convinced it will soon), it's hard to see Chinese EVs at the prices they are, not becoming extremely popular.

What could turn it around, is, as you say, terrible reliability records, but even then, that didn't seem to stop people buying ICE cars, so I'm not sure how much of an effect it'll have here either. I guess we'll have to wait and see.
by kristianc | 2025-07-29 15:06:51+00:00
> Of course, this is all rife for abuse. Of course, there are immense downsides. Yet the downsides of leaving an endless stream of propaganda, disinformation spewed at everyone including our youth, unchecked, is far far greater.

Or we could, you know, trust people to exercise their critical faculties without the intervention of overbearing Civil Servants, Cabinet Office officials or the guiding hand of the BBC. Radical idea, I know.
by adamtaylor_13 | 2025-07-29 15:07:03+00:00
They “all” lack that awareness, eh? I’m glad to have finally met someone who met EVERY SINGLE homeschooled kid and interviewed them.

I was worried for a second we might’ve been over-generalizing for the sake of online karma.

Seriously though, your superiority complex is showing, you may wanna cover that up.
by ACCount36 | 2025-07-29 15:07:05+00:00
Not every book is readily available as a digital copy. Things like textbooks, older technical books or just books that weren't too popular can be easier to source as physical books and scan destructively.

A lot of digital copies are also DRM'd to shit - to obtain raw text usable for AI training, you'd have to break DRM. Which isn't that hard, on a technical level - but DMCA exists.

DMCA is a shit law that should have been dismantled two decades ago - but as long as it's around, bypassing DRM on things you own can be illegal. Scanning sidesteps that.
by briandw | 2025-07-29 15:07:32+00:00
I home schooled my kids during the pandemic. It was amazing how quickly we got through the material for the year. We did all of 5th grade math in 3 months of 40 minutes a day. It not just my experience, 1 on 1 tutoring has been shown to be dramatically more effective than classroom instruction.

This article sounds like the usual ideological objections, lots of vague claims that amount to “I don’t like it”.

There is nothing more threatening to a failing institution than a solution that delivers results.

The US education sector is quick to embrace any new fad that sounds good but doesn’t work, building thinking classrooms is the latest. Productive struggle is another.

Yes learning takes time, but it doesn't have to be painfully slow and unproductive.

The education system in US is a disaster and getting worse. The response from schools like the San Francisco school district has been to lower standards and remove higher level material.

I see tremendous potential in Ai tutoring. I use chatgpt to help me learn new material daily. Why should school be any different?
by talkingtab | 2025-07-29 15:07:54+00:00
The propaganda name for it is AI. I am not opposed to AI, I think it will have far reaching benefits for all of us. However, people are trying to make as much money from it as possible and so would like to influence how we think of it. If we consider it Intelligence then more people will throw more money at it. But it is not.

When you think about it, what is now gently called AI is more like think by number - TBNI. You take all the current thinking, you search it and compile it. How you get AI should tell you something. Searching. So it tells you what color to paint the square with a 7 on it. That is the good part.

The bad part is that if the drawing is wrong, so is the color. If your paint-by-number kit is titled "A Duck" and the numbers are on a drawing of a dog, then TBNI will not really help you.

As I look around I notice the degree to which we humans use following. You learn to do things by watching others. A map tells you how to go some place. Why go to college? The curious thing to me is that so much of what we follow is wrong already. People follow a well worn path even when they see it leads know where. Why? Because many people are unaware there is an alternative.

I blame our education system for this. The essence is to trust what other people know, not what yourself. Silly educators.

If you are a follower, TBNI will make you redundant, because TBNI will be faster and cheaper.

But you can think if you try. Perhaps the most important thought any person can have is when they experience something and say to themselves "This is stupid". Follow that thought. :-)
by RankingMember | 2025-07-29 15:08:11+00:00
> it's a complete myth that some people keep pushing for whatever reason.

I think it's simply because the top cyclists are now blowing the performance of doped cyclists of decades past out of the water and people get suspicious. I personally think huge advances in nutrition + altitude training are making the difference, but I understand people being suspicious especially in this sport.

I agree with you, btw- I've yet to see anything proving conclusively that this form of doping even exists.
by isr | 2025-07-29 15:08:14+00:00
And that kind of myopic, self indulgent, genocidal/racist/apartheid -apologist tone, trying to obfuscate plain truths...

that pretty much sums up much of the responses on this forum, and the US tech sector (or at least its managers) in general.

Leaving aside the moral bankruptcy, it also displays a stunning and fundamental ignorance of the flow of history. How many of you will end up having to pretend, 5 years from now, that this wasn't your online username, just to be allowed to function in "polite society".

It also shows how much of a self-deluded echo chamber you live in, not realizing how completely such genocidal apologist propaganda has been debunked & discarded amongst the wider population - even within the US.

It all smacks of the apocryphal saying of Marie Antoinette of "let them eat cake", weeks before she has a load taken off her shoulders
by joshstrange | 2025-07-29 15:08:16+00:00
I'm currently running the interview process for the company I work for and I allow AI on the coding tests for the same reason I allow googling/etc:

I want to simulate as close to the real environment you will be coding in if you come and work here.

My "rules" on AI/LLMs at work is that you can use whatever tools you want (much like SO before) but any code you commit, you are responsible for (also unchanged from before LLMs). I never want to hear "the LLM wrote that" when asked about how something works.

If you can explain, modify, build on top of the code that an LLM spits out then fine by me. We don't require LLM usage (no token quotas or silly things like that) nor do we disallow LLMs. At the end of the day they are all tools.

I've always found leet coding, whiteboarding, memorizing algorithms, etc to just be a silly form of hazing and a bad indicator of how well the employee will perform if you hire them. In the same way I still think my college was stupid for making us write, on paper, a C program with all the correct headers/syntax/etc for an exam or how I got a 90/100 on my final SQL exam because I didn't end my, otherwise perfect, queries with a semicolon.
by skrebbel | 2025-07-29 15:08:54+00:00
You have a very American idea of “rich”. For you, it’s being worth 100M. But for me it’s being able to lead a life without financial worries doing a job relatively few hours a week, regardless of whether I code or wait tables.

By this second definition, a country can definitely be rich across the board without having a “poor” second class. Just make sure people earn a decent living wage, and then some. There will be low crime (no need for gated communities!), high trust (no need for a lawyer on retainer!), and good education and health care (no need for private schools or hospitals!)

You have a very zero-sum view of wealth, the idea that to be wealthy means it’s gotta be to the detriment of others. I’m not saying Norway’s got it all figured out, but they’re definitely gunning for something closer to what I describe than what you do.
by fnordian_slip | 2025-07-29 15:09:16+00:00
Well, that situation has a bit more complexity, my comment was getting rather long anyway, and I didn't think it would help anyone if I also tried to address it. I also suspect that this comment won't help, either, but I'll try.

But as we are supposed to steelman others on hn, I will pretend that your comment was made in good faith, and that you are actually amused by "Europeans gloating" and just want my take on the rest of the parent comment.

Of course, some of the price difference between US and the rest of the world comes from research and development, along with price segmentation, the latter being pretty much standard in capitalism on a global scale.

But as long as your drug companies spend so much on marketing and making intermediaries rich beyond measure, and your government doesn't negotiate the prices down and doesn't properly regulate them, it seems a bit strange to me to completely focus on the r&d part when talking about the 10x difference.

While the US isn't willing to meaningfully address any of the other major issues with healthcare pricing, it feels like this issue is just an excuse for some Americans to see themselves as victims on the global stage, which has become rather fashionable with supporters of the current administration. To an outside observer, the situation looks very similar to the ongoing embarrassment about the tariffs, or the examples I have already given about defense spending and vacation time.
by CyberDildonics | 2025-07-29 15:09:19+00:00
There is a lot to unpack here.

First, neural networks don't have anything to do with this.

Second, generating a new frame would be optical flow and it always is 2D, there is no 3D involved because it's from a 2D image not a 3D scene.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_flow https://docs.opencv.org/3.4/d4/dee/tutorial_optical_flow.htm...

Third, optical flow isn't moving blocks of pixels around by an offset then encoding the difference, it is creating a floating point vector for every pixel then re-rasterizing the image into a new one.
by alias_neo | 2025-07-29 15:09:31+00:00
Oh interesting, I had no idea.

I've really not looked too much into Chinese EVs beyond some YouTube channels talking about some of their sketchy tactics to incentivise "influencers" and presumably subsidies to get to the kinds of prices they're selling at in the UK.

I wouldn't consider buying any of them so all I really know is what I see on the streets.
by exasperaited | 2025-07-29 15:09:37+00:00
It has broad public support.

The law was passed in 2023 by the tories, and Ofcom has concluded what the tories asked them to do -- write the statutory instruments that implement the law.

The Labour government would have to repeal the law (really unlikely; governments don't usually rip down their predecessors' laws because if they did no progress would occur) or set the statutory instruments aside.

I think the "true motives" are what the law says. I don't think they will ban VPNs (which would support an alternative reading of motive).

I also, again, encourage US readers to understand that your own supreme court has rubber-stamped a law that requires US porn firms to do all this and more for the benefit of Texas, and there are 24 more state laws that have similar impacts.

Pretending this is just something crazy we Brits are doing out there on our own is disingenuous at best and often hypocritical and whiny at worst.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2025-07-29 15:09:39+00:00
> Chinese EVs are the only ones not reaching into luxury vehicle price territory (and the associated costs) in the UK.

I didn't mention Polestar until now, as they don't sell in volume, although I do see some of their vehicles on the roads.

But they do fit this bracket of "(mostly) Chinese EVs, in the luxury vehicle territory".

Arguably also Volvo. Or even top models from Zeekr and Xiaomi.

If you're talking impractically high-end cars, look out for MG Cyberster, BYD Yangwang U9.
by nordsieck | 2025-07-29 15:09:59+00:00
> What suggests that people are becoming less capable?

From the root level comment in this thread:

> Student test scores have worsened more than in other Scandinavian countries, and critics of the government say there are too many boondoggle tunnels and bridges to nowhere.

-

> More importantly, what suggests that people are becoming less capable in an irreversible way? If people are less capable, but it is reversible, then wealth can fix it.

I don't think anyone is suggesting that this trend is irreversible.

But big trends like this can be difficult to turn around - if it were easy, the trend wouldn't have happened in the first place (or, at least, it wouldn't have been detectable).

> If people are less capable, but it is reversible, then wealth can fix it. As you said, you can use wealth to get other people to become more capable.

You can't just say "wealth will do x". That's really a semantic shortcut for saying "people will do x". But presumably people are already trying to improve the countries test scores. And people are already trying (at least to a certain extent) to spend government funds wisely. I'm not really sure how wealth will change what's currently occurring.
by makeitdouble | 2025-07-29 15:10:00+00:00
The names don't seem to resonate to you. CIO is a japanese company specialized in batteries, chargers and charging cables, and they're consistantly outranking Anker in third party tests. And their products usually cost more than the equivalent Anker ones.

https://connectinternationalone.co.jp/

Aohi is in a similar niche, but with more attention to design and high capacity models

https://iaohi.com/
by wongarsu | 2025-07-29 15:10:20+00:00
I love the syntax for checked math. a + b for wrap around, a +? b to raise an exception on under/overflow, and a +~ b for maximum performance, leaving behavior on under/overflow undefined (including floats having undefined behavior on +-Inf and NaN).

Compared to e.g. Rust (one of the better modern examples of easy rigorous math) I really like how concise they are. What I'm missing are saturating operations. I know some people find them useless, and through a "perfect results" lens they are, but they still give you the closest representable number. And they are often intuitive for humans since that's how most analog instruments work
by kalberg6429 | 2025-07-29 15:10:55+00:00
>Ben-Gurion himself was witness to pogroms in Poland. Does one need to be murdered or violently attacked to "suffer antisemitism"?

Poor old Ben-Gurion, he "suffered so much from antisemitism" in europe that it turned him into a bloodthirsty racist colonialist who had to engage in a bit of ethnic-cleansing and mass-murder of kushim as therapeutic treatment.

>And, FWIW, Jews are hardly the only ethnic or religious (or mixed ethnic-religious) group which has maintained a distinct identity across millennia and within larger populations, or found itself displaced and then displacing others. In fact, the Middle East has many such groups. The insistence on distinguishing and rationalizing Jews as being peculiar in this and similar regards is a distinctively European cultural obsession,

That's not a "European cultural obsession", it's literally just Jewish Law (Halakha). It's also what Zionist-Jews themselves relentlessly weaponize as myth making tool to justify their occupation of Palestine and to make themselves immune to any criticism, even while committing Genocide.

>Jews are no different than any other group, ethnic or otherwise.

Jews would disagree with you on this, their whole claim to the land and justification for colonization and occupation of Palestine rests on that notion of being different, being the "chosen people" which perfectly aligns with the supremacist zionist ideology which had no qualms about ethnically-cleansing Palestine from those they classified as inferior kushim. ("The British told us that there are some hundred thousand negroes [kushim in Hebrew] and for those there is no value." - Weizmann, quoted by Arthur Ruppin in: Yosef Heller, Bama'avak Lamedinah , Jerusalem, 1984, p.140.)

>There's no need to build a complex, racist, colonial narrative as a way to characterize Jews, Israelis, or Zionists as the bad guy in the unfolding Gaza crisis.

"There's no need to build a complex, racist, colonial narrative as a way to characterize Aryans, Germans, or Nazis as the bad guy in the unfolding Dachau crisis."

>The left's oppressor-oppressed modality perpetuates prejudiced, reductive, racist thinking no less than other modes of reducing people to caricatures, and in the end just an excuse to malign or elevate people on a whim. Zionists emigrating from Europe to Palestine to flee persecution... bad.

"The left's oppressor-oppressed modality perpetuates prejudiced, reductive, racist thinking no less than other modes of reducing people to caricatures, and in the end just an excuse to malign or elevate people on a whim. Nazis emigrating from Europe to Poland to flee persecution... bad."
by TZubiri | 2025-07-29 15:11:13+00:00
Here's a consequence few consider:

Malicious actors are now harder to distinguish than legitimate actors, since they both will use VPNs. This is because in essence what VPNs are used for is always to evade the law, regardless of whether it is a law with high approval, like CASM, malware, spamming, drug trade; or laws with high approval for breaking them, like pornography age verification laws, or Intellectual Property laws on movies and music.

This is regardless of who is to blame for this issue, some will argue that it's the fault of those that break the laws with VPNs, some will argue that it's the fault of lawmakers for making stupid laws that deserve to be broken, muddying the waters. Undoubtedly, the third party, strong criminals, will make or amplify propaganda to legitimize breaking small laws, so that they can have legitimate alibies for breaking the law.
by ajsnigrutin | 2025-07-29 15:11:36+00:00
Statistics are one thing.... individual realities are another. Taking different generations into same statistics makes it even worse.

Can an average young couple earning average pay in norway afford to buy a house/apartment there? Preferably large enough to have space for let's say 2-3 kids and young enough to actually have 2-3 kids (for demographic reasons)?

I live in a small country that used to be a part of a larger communist one, and our homeownership situation seems great, very high percentage of people own their homes, but the reality for young people is, that unless we do some drastic changes soon, buying a home will be impossible for a majority of them, and waiting to inherit their parents' apartment will take too long (demographic-wise... you can't really have kids in a 2 bedroom apartment with 3 roommates).
by oa335 | 2025-07-29 15:11:40+00:00
> You're confusing hatred for Palestinians with hatred for Gazans. Most Israelis do not hate Palestinians.

Hate is an emotion and hard to quantify; what's easier to measure are actions and intentions.

https://archive.is/Fg4OX

E.g. 56 percent of Israeli Jews polloed favored expelling Palestinian citizens of Israel.

Nearly half (47 percent) of respondents agreed that "when conquering an enemy city, the Israel Defense Forces should act as the Israelites did in Jericho under Joshua's command – killing all its inhabitants.