MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by otterley | 2025-07-21 15:46:08+00:00
> To be an effective alternative to Elasticsearch we needed to support high ingest workloads in real time.

Why not just use OpenSearch or ElasticSearch? The tool is already in the inventory; why use a screwdriver when a chisel is needed and available?

This is another one of those “when you have a hammer, everything looks like your thumb” stories.
by wkat4242 | 2025-07-21 15:46:16+00:00
It's a lot easier now because there's a huge demand all of a sudden for local services.

Previously it was hard to compete with the US because the lack of regulation there and investors in the EU having more expectations rather than just throwing money at the wall and hoping it sticks.

But with the exploitative business models like Google's consumer tracking and now with Trump and his trade wars the US is no longer viewed as a friend or a country to look up to. I think it will only increase the EU's push for more privacy and ethical business models.

There's a big grassroots movement like "BuyFromEU" to cut US products and services out of our lives. I think that trade balance is only going to get worse. And really it was actually not bad at all, the problem is that Trump was only counting products not services when looking at the trade balance. I guess because his voters are primarily blue collar workers.
by jrockway | 2025-07-21 15:46:17+00:00
I don't think anyone's surprised by that. Our emails have literally been used to target ads at us since like 2006. Cell phone carriers are happy to mine voicemail, call logs, SMS, etc. in the hopes of finding a revenue stream that doesn't involve them having to do irritating work like running fiber to cell phone towers.

This leaves contact mining as the odd one out, but given how many apps want to see your contacts, you know that those are being sold by at least one of those apps.

None of this stuff has ever been end-to-end encrypted, so there can't be any way people expect it to be private.
by kazinator | 2025-07-21 15:46:33+00:00
Dates are not given in the article, and a bit of a puzzle.

Karolina's mother died in 2019. This was supposedly 28 years after being diagnosed, which brings us to 1991. And that was when Karolina was 12. (Her DOB is defying attempts at uncovery.)

They supposedly fled Poland around ten years before communism fell, according to a remark in the story, so maybe 1980. But Karolina would have to have been an infant; she wouldn't remember anything about Poland, let alone a camp in Treiskirchen, Austria. Her mom remarked during their visit to the camp, "You chased a boy for bread. [...] You were always hungry.” So at least a toddler, perhaps as as old as 3 or 4?

Maybe they left Poland more toward the mid 1980's; not ten years before communism fell.
by latexr | 2025-07-21 15:46:34+00:00
> I just downloaded it to see what size it was, and it's 2200 KB.

We both saw different versions. You looked at the Linux one, but I looked at the macOS one. The version which ships with macOS is smaller than the one on the website, but even so the website version is under one MB.

I’m intrigued by what causes the large difference.

> Busybox doesn't include curl or jq.

Thank you for the correction. In that case I don’t know what the other user meant. Perhaps they’ll come back and can clarify.
by Symmetry | 2025-07-21 15:46:49+00:00
In the US the federal government uses numbers around $10 million for the statistical value of a human life when doing cost benefit analysis for various programs or interventions. Any sort of lifesaving medical care can easily come in at more than $50,000. The operators shouldn't be hesitating to shut down that machine to save someone's life, and I would be willing to be that they are trained to do so.
by lupusreal | 2025-07-21 15:47:04+00:00
People like to give America shit for anti-porn activism and laws but it really seems like America is just trailing behind the rest of the anglosphere. This case for instance, of Australians imposing their prudish values on American companies that were content to tolerate these naughty games. And those porn ID laws that Texas/etc get flack for are just on the path already trail blazed by the UK.
by ben_w | 2025-07-21 15:47:05+00:00
> It also remains to be seen what % can be decoupled by pure solar and wind

That's entirely dependent what % of the planet we feel like tiling in PV; wind is ultimately solar powered, and there's more places we can usefully put PV than wind anyway.

Environmentalists will be Very Unhappy if we tile the Sahara with something as close to black as PV is; but that location alone (we have more deserts), using middling quality PV (20%, we have stuff more than twice that good), and the current global average capacity factor (13%, but it's a good latitude and could plausibly get 23%), would still be 11.8 times current global primary energy demand, which itself is 6-7 times current global electricity demand.

> hydro is already tapped out

As a source, yes; as storage, no. I only mention this because it's very easy to mix them up.
by zahlman | 2025-07-21 15:47:07+00:00
The cryptography package is very popular, but "critical to virtually every Python project on Earth" is massive overstatement. It's not even in the top 20 most downloaded from PyPI (https://pypistats.org/top). I've never used it, while I've used Numpy many times.

The new scheme is fine. They are correct to describe it as semver-compatible — they assess that every time they add functionality it is backwards-incompatible, and their backwards-compatible changes are inherently just bugfixes. And they are correct that Firefox version numbers have been doing the same thing, and thus their way is not unique.

The old cryptography version numbers were not "floating point numbers" (as demonstrated by the fact that they often had two decimal points). They were just incorrectly using the major and minor parts of a version number to communicate what changed between releases. They weren't doing anything like expecting version 1.11 to be treated as older than version 1.2. I can't fathom how this is supposed to have broken CI pipelines.
by rorylaitila | 2025-07-21 15:47:28+00:00
Yeah I agree there. The challenge is the order of the test drive. The ideal validation goes like this in my mind: 1) Will anyone buy it at all? 2) Will they buy it greater than its costs to produce at reasonable margin? 3) Are there enough assessible marketing channels at that margin? 4) Is the overall size of the business viable for my goals?

What the indie builders are often doing is starting backwards. Starting with something that should ostensibly be a large market (4) or seemingly timely. Then they find that the marketing channels are hard (3) so they work on that. Then they lower their margin or increase marketing spend (2) hoping that fixes conversions. Then maybe they learn that no one actually wants their product at all (1).

It definitely is not easy, especially novel ideas. Existing markets you can largely skip #1 and #2 as proven.
by lxgr | 2025-07-21 15:47:32+00:00
Payment for order flow is not front running. The PFOF trader only gets right of first refusal on every trade; whether they take it or not, the broker is still obliged to execute the trade at NBBO or better.

It actually gets retail investors better prices than institutional or professional ones, since the counterparty can safely assume that there's "dumb money" on the other side of the trade.

That's not to say it's not controversial in some aspects, but it's not as simple a situation as you make it out to be.

Also, somewhat ironically, the front running risk on many decentralized exchanges is much higher due to MEV being a hard problem to solve trustlessly.
by chrisandchris | 2025-07-21 15:47:35+00:00
> The journalist missed a golden opportunity for education here: most MRI scanner magnets cannot be turned off like that.

Thanks for that - and it reminded me of the sad state media is today. I read the same story in about 4 papers and nowhere was written _why_ they couldn't turn off the machine.

Miss the days where journalists actually read what they have written.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-07-21 15:48:31+00:00
>Then Steve Jobs invented the smartphone. This caused the world to get dumber and dumber.

Preposterous. Did the invention of the calculator make people dumber? A smartphone is another tool. Not Steve Jobs's fault people use it for TikTok or gooning instead of studying programming, math, medicine or whatever. Stupid people are gonna be stupid with or without smartphones.

Plus, we already had smartphones before Jobs, they were Pal OS, Windows Mobile or Symbian based.
by fsckboy | 2025-07-21 15:48:48+00:00
you've lost the plot

>There's just a handful of audiophiles that would be replacing their speakers every year

then the carbon footprint is negligible also, which is what this discussion is about, not total sales of high end speakers

but if you were a more flexible thinker, you would have noted that the explanation I gave works at any level of the product stream and it illustrates how economic activity works "at the margin" all the time; the carbon footprint argument I'm explaining against did not take this into account and gave an incorrect picture of the carbon situation.

"at the margin" is a related idea to differentials/derivatives in calculus, with a mix of brownian motion or statistical mechanics. Consider the idea that "the economy is so bad, PhD's are driving taxis". If a university opens up in that town and hires a bunch of PhDs, they wouldn't be driving taxis any more. those jobs would be filled by other people who used to be doing other things, and those jobs would in turn be filled. This is not Reagonomics, it's economics.
by xorxornop | 2025-07-21 15:48:54+00:00
I wouldn't be concerned about this, personally, for the precise reason that it is a fusion device - not fission!

Fusion is incredibly difficult just to start, let alone keep burning - unlike fission, which is only too happy to enter runaway conditions if not very carefully regulated. Fusion is like a little ember in your fireplace you have to carefully blow on to keep alight; fission is like keeping a fireplace lit by pouring gasoline into it.
by somehnguy | 2025-07-21 15:49:03+00:00
Just like USPS should not send you images of other peoples mail, a lot of mail isn't in the type of envelope they should be. I'm looking at multiple bank statements where I can read balances.

Another vector is the plastic window many envelopes have to show the addressee printed on the paper inside. I have another healthcare related letter I can read through that.
by inglor_cz | 2025-07-21 15:49:10+00:00
The EU has similar nefarious plans as well, under the Orwellian name "ProtectEU".

https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/the-european-commissi...

I wonder how this clash is going to turn up. I would hate this development. This proposal is worthy of the Chinese Communist Party, and I am aghast just how many member states are fine with the concept of a preemptive surveillance state and breaking privacy left and right.

Of course, that is what we get for giving Ursula von der Leyen a second term (why??) She already has a reputation from her career in German politics, having earned the nickname Zensursula (censoring Ursula).
by speeder | 2025-07-21 15:49:23+00:00
An interesting article I saw today in Portuguese language, is speculating that the real reason USA is threatening to tariff Brazil in 50% is because the invention of "Pix Parcelado" that is supposed to go online soon, will reduce the popularity of Mastercard and Visa, and thus remove an important tool of censorship from US government hands.

Lula also himself accused the USA of putting tariffs because of credit card companies.
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-07-21 15:49:28+00:00
I think it seems like it blocks outside the U.S, some of the other bulk used book sellers seem surprised that you want to use them outside the U.S, so I guess in the EU the one to use would be biblio.

Still seems silly, instead of saying hey you're blocked and nobody knows why it should just say hey we don't serve the country you're in right now.
by wkat4242 | 2025-07-21 15:49:28+00:00
I guess not no, but we don't need those, really. We definitely don't want carbon copies of those companies because they are causing a lot of what's wrong with this world. What we need is more ethical companies that understand the EU market. No paying with our data, no manipulative algorithms. We've been pushing for that for years but Trump has been the turning point, now people are really on board with the idea that leaving US services is better.

It will take time to build local alternatives but I'm sure they will come. We have time. You can see that companies like Microsoft are really shaken up when they're starting appeasement projects like those vows to actually protect our data (though those promises are weak because they remain bound to US law)

And this goes hand in hand with the defense initiatives. IT is important though to society to be considered a critical asset.
by blindriver | 2025-07-21 15:49:32+00:00
No, they are not doing a better job and their goods are still poisoned. This is a complete lie and sounds like Chinese propaganda.

Even mainland Chinese themselves don’t trust Chinese products, meanwhile they are flooding every country around the world with poisoned garbage.

It takes a simple Google search to find recent examples and I’m not even going to bother posting examples because it’s so easy to find.
by NoboruWataya | 2025-07-21 15:49:52+00:00
> Where Google's team put innovative effort into ChromeOS was in making it robust enough to be sold to the masses in the hundreds of millions of units, with no tech support. It's immutable, with image-based updates. It has two root partitions, one of which updates the other, so there's always a known good one to fall back to if an update should fail.

This is probably the only part of the article that is compelling. I guess having a simple, immutable Linux distro that prioritises being hard to break over many other things could indeed be a good thing for getting less tech-savvy users over to Linux.

But even then, who do they expect to maintain it? I would guess that many distros are maintained by people who are passionate about using them, and I suspect the overlap of FOSS maintainers and people who want to use such a locked-down, stripped-back system is small. And if the distro really didn't have many native apps, then users would either need to rely on Google for all their services anyway (somewhat defeating the point), or the "FOSS world" would also need to produce (and maintain, and host) a full suite of browser-based apps to rival Google's. Which is very far from easy.

The idea of "friction" comes up again and again whenever we talk about open products (whether it's FOSS or open platforms like the ones in the Fediverse, etc). People want an experience that is completely smooth and frictionless, while remaining free and open. But IMO freedom is friction. Fundamentally it means being able to choose, and not being completely reliant on megacorps, and being able to tinker and explore, and all of these things are sources of friction. Like, the author complains that there are so many distros to choose from, but how would adding another distro to the mix address that?
by kbolino | 2025-07-21 15:49:56+00:00
Probably fine for most people, but not a good choice for low-hassle setup with "recent" nVidia cards (last ~10 years). That's almost all nVidia's fault, and I can't say any distro handles their cards flawlessly, but Debian is one of the worst: the drivers are (accurately) classified as "nonfree" and so not available by default, setup may require config file tweaking, and KDE Plasma prefers to support Wayland while nVidia prefers to support X11, leading to weird issues (more than usual, anyway).
by Lev1a | 2025-07-21 15:50:29+00:00
Not an expert on the topic by any means, but IIRC:

- Those designs have been in parallel R&D for decades

- Tokamaks are conceptually simpler, thus might be easier/faster/cheaper to make into viable installations

- Stellarators are WAAAAAY more complex to design and build but AFAIU they would have the huge benefit of being able to sustain the plasma for way longer for the same "startup cost" of a cycle since the particles of the plasma are routed somewhat like they're on a mobius strip instead of a simple torus (which should make it easier to confine more particles for a longer time).

I recall having read (several years ago) that the simulation technology of the 90's wasn't really up to the task of aiding in the design of those weird wavy magnets for Wendelstein 7-X, an unfortunate reality which delayed the project a lot.
by darth_avocado | 2025-07-21 15:50:38+00:00
As much as I would like to say “What are you doing weight training in an MRI room?”, a bigger pressing question is “How did the staff miss this?”.

MRI is extremely dangerous when it comes to having magnetic metals on you and it’s SOP from the hospital to ensure there is none when the patient goes in. The one time I had to get it done (in a different country) I had to walk through TSA like metal detectors before I get into the MRI room. Is that not common here? Not even hand held wands? We just trust the patient now?
by libertine | 2025-07-21 15:50:41+00:00
Everyone knows that naming fallacies doesn't show it happened. It only shows you can name fallacies.

But you're resorting to:

- fallacy‑fallacy by assuming my argument is wrong just because you claim to see a fallacy.

- and to gish‑gallop by trying to overwhelm and make me look up your allegations of me using your list of fallacies.

Overall, it's a poor attempt to escape the argument. That's a wrap.
by lesuorac | 2025-07-21 15:51:26+00:00
But there's tons of places where the cost of housing is going up. If everybody was uprooting from Philadelphia to go to NYC then only NYC's prices would go up.

It seems to me that we already have multiple Taylor Swifts so having even more shouldn't be a problem. For many people, the school system is the reason why they own the house they do.

In my experience, many of the schools self-report having pretty bad math/reading comprehension amongst their students. I'm not picking a house based on it being "the best" or the one "I hear about the most". I picked it based on it actually having good outcomes. If other districts had that too I would've considered theirs.
by overstay8930 | 2025-07-21 15:51:27+00:00
The US was never a trusted partner, Europeans just didn’t have a choice. No one company was able to spend the amount of money required to compete with American technology, so nobody did.

Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower, the “friendship” is nothing more than economic interdependency. French aircraft carriers are not using Windows because they trust the US government, their diagnostic software just doesn’t work on anything else.
by theshackleford | 2025-07-21 15:51:32+00:00
It means I made calculated purchasing decisions for fans and case.

Ultra low noise fans from Noctua and the Define R5.

https://www.fractal-design.com/products/cases/define/define-...

> "I can't hear the fans because I use full over ear headphones" :)

I use the open backed AKG K712 Pros :)
by fragmede | 2025-07-21 15:51:35+00:00
I'll take that job for the right pay, so I don't see the problem. Stack overflow gatekeepers close questions, with links to a similar question, and reasons why it's not a duplicate, as a duplicate. Better yet, the answer scoring system keeps accepted answers from 7 years ago as the top rated answer when the library and ecosystem's moved on, and that answer no longer works. Gatekeeping itself is not inherently bad, I agree, but Stack Overflow has become aggressively hostile to its original mission.
by bluGill | 2025-07-21 15:52:11+00:00
Also how they have to get people in. One of my MRIs was hours after surgery - I was wheeled in on a stretcher while attached to IV and other machines. They slid me on and off the machine since I wasn't allowed to move myself (I'm not sure if I could have what with the drugs still in my system. take my story with some salt: because of the drugs I wouldn't trust my own memory of the event). Which is to say they need a lot of space around these machines and the doors/gates would need to be very big to fit all the people involved through.
by ashtonbaker | 2025-07-21 15:52:29+00:00
I suppose that is true. But I imagine that the scale of egg incubation to produce hens is a relatively small portion of total egg production, since each hen produces many eggs. You'd probably have to compare the cost of incubating an egg and the labor to manually sex the chick to the per-egg cost of this technology. I would be surprised if that comes out in favor of the in-egg-sexing tech right now, but it would be great if it did.
by foobarian | 2025-07-21 15:52:55+00:00
It may not be a perfect analogy but I disagree that it's completely invalid. Use some imagination to make it work, e.g. with institutional support instead of having just local acts now there is Taylor, and Beyonce, and a few dozen other famous musicians.

Not everyone can live in San Francisco, but there exist other equivalent "nice places" of which there are too few.
by delian66 | 2025-07-21 15:52:56+00:00
I still use both emacs and jed.

jed starts very fast and has much lower memory usage, so it is well suited for quick edits of configuration files and scripts and other workflows, where you start your editor in your shell, instead of the other way around.

emacs (through packages) can be turned into a custom IDE for a lot of languages, but takes more disk space and uses more RAM.
by tytso | 2025-07-21 15:53:07+00:00
This is ultimately a business model problem. There are FOSS projects out there; some of them are even listed in the article. The problem is that making it "Just Work(tm)" is hard; it's a lot of work, requiring a large number of engineers. And funny thing, engineers prefer food with their meals.

Saying "FOSS world" we need XXX is pretty useless. As a FOSS mainatinaer, the answer I always give people demanding their favorite pet feature is, "clean, maintainable patches are appreciated", ChromiumOS is free software; someone could take it use it as the basis for something like ChromeOS. But the author of the article has basically admitted that the derivitives of Chromium would quickly fail if Chromium stoped being something that they could free ride off of. Shouldn't that tell you everything about what the problem is with this picture?
by babypuncher | 2025-07-21 15:53:08+00:00
I would argue it goes against the desires of the open source world.

ChromeOS is a product designed to suck people further in to the Google ecosystem. All its limitations, like basically being a web browser with access to the Android Play store, are built around that. The simplicity of not having to worry about anything else is how Google sells that as a benefit of their platform to the masses.

I don't know any of my fellow nerds who want a ChromeOS kind of experience, so why would any of us dedicate our free time to making one?
by Mistletoe | 2025-07-21 15:53:20+00:00
Not surprising, that’s where they came from!

>The Puritans were a group of English Protestants who originated in England during the 16th and 17th centuries. They sought to purify the Church of England by removing Catholic practices and beliefs. Driven by their religious convictions and facing persecution, they eventually migrated to North America in the 17th century, establishing colonies in New England.