MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Nevermark | 2025-08-19 02:58:12+00:00
I have keratoconus, which is where a lack of strength in my corneas has resulted in their losing their proper shapes.

I have several focal points in each eye, randomly clustered together. And unfortunately, there is no correlation (or reason for a correlation) between my eyes.

Imagine not being cross-eyed with two focal points, but with well over a baker's dozen. Even if I could line up one pair of points between my eyes, any improvement would be indiscernible in the mess I see.

Because the focal points are clustered close together, their impact is less at a distance (it just feels hard/impossible to properly focus, like looking through very slightly warped glass), but it is devastating up close. For reading.

Without help, I see so many copies of all the letters, randomly and tightly stamped all over each other, I could stare at a short line of text all day and never figure out what it said.

And this after having better than 20-20 vision at all distances, for most of my life.

(Fun fact: if I am in a dark room, and look at one of those tiny power-on LED lights on some media equipment with enough distance that it is basically a point, I can clearly see all my focal points - and also a dimmer curvy, spaghetti crossover mess of focal Beziers between and around them. My corneas are neither convex or concave. They are chaotic. Evil.)

Fortunately, I have hard gas-permeable "scleral" contact lenses. They form a near perfect cornea for me, so when I wear them, my awesome vision and glyphs live once again. "Scleral" refers to the fact that they are wide enough to rest on the whites (sclera) of the eyes, to completely cover and fill out my lame natural corneas.

So I am in pretty good if inconvenient shape.

But I would absolutely love it if this new method allowed my corneas to be reshaped. Any improvement would be a big deal.

(There is surgery where corneas are soaked with a binder, which is fixed with a laser, that strengthens them and stops/slows Keratoconus from getting worse. But it cannot recover what has already been lost.)
by neilknowsbest | 2025-08-19 02:58:15+00:00
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York has a great quarterly report on consumer credit [0], which the article briefly mentions. The latest report (Q1 2025) is here [1]. Student loan delinquencies shot up in the last ~2 quarters, which checks out with TFA. It's amazing how the age 50+ cohorts carry substantial student loan debt (slide 21). Is this original debt from their own time as students or is it, for lack of a better word, "second-hand" debt from supporting their children through school?

[0] - https://www.newyorkfed.org/microeconomics/hhdc/background.ht...

[1] - https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/Interactives/househo...
by nis0s | 2025-08-19 02:58:50+00:00
Well, semen is literally the byproduct of sapient beings. What moral and ethical considerations are given to it, or should be given to it?

LLMs are an advanced automata which lack self-regulation and self-reflection, similarly to NPCs. NPCs cannot exist outside of rules set out for them, and neither can LLMs.

I’ll add that semen is in fact a better candidate for moral and ethical consideration given that it can produce conscious beings. As soon as NPCs and LLMs do that, please give them moral status.
by shkkmo | 2025-08-19 02:58:51+00:00
Your approach only works with massive assumptions about the structure of the data or a very simplistic data structure.

SELECT statments don't just use table names, they can use aliases for those table names, views, subqueries, etc.

The FROM / JOIN blocks are where the structure of the data your are selecting from is defined. You should not assume you understand what a SELECT statement means until you have read those blocks.
by TheDong | 2025-08-19 03:00:01+00:00
> you have different environment variables for user and system units

Really? I thought the point of the environment variable was it was the same, and the directory it pointed to differed depending on the service type.

I'd love a reference since at least for every systemd version I've used, you're wrong.

> Proper error handling and graceful fallback

That's application specific, so it can't really fit in a generic library well.
by lock1 | 2025-08-19 03:01:13+00:00
Or "point-less" style ;)

Could you elaborate? AFAIK tacit programming tend to be scrambling around composition, paren, and args which makes left-to-right reading significantly harder for function with arity greater than 2.

I find Java's method reference or Rust's namespace resolution + function as an argument much better than Haskell tacit-style for left-to-right reading.
by Terr_ | 2025-08-19 03:03:21+00:00
> A blockchain is merely a distributed ledger with certain properties from cryptography.

If we charitably assume "blockchain" has some engineering meaning (and it isn't purely a word for marketing/scamming) then there's some new aspect which sets it apart from the distributed-databases we've been able to make just fine for decades.

Uncontrolled participation is that key aspect. Without that linchpin, almost all the other new stuff becomes weirdly moot or actively detrimental.

> If you spin up a private bitcoin network, it's a blockchain even if nobody else knows or cares about it.

That's practically a contradiction in terms. It may describe the ancestry of the project, but it doesn't describe what/how it's being used.

Compare: "If you make a version of Napster/Gnutella with all the networking code disabled, it's still a Peer-to-Peer file sharing client even when only one person uses it."
by toomuchtodo | 2025-08-19 03:05:11+00:00
China is decreasing the cost of energy by manufacturing clean energy, battery storage, and EVs at scale. China builds new coal plants as peakers, but is also installing as much new clean energy in a year as most countries have built ever. No need to blame them for the laziness and incompetence of the supposed developed world.

If you don’t buy solar and batteries (the cheapest source of new power in ~97% of the world as of this comment), yes, your energy will cost more than China’s. Make better policy choices?

https://apnews.com/article/climate-change-solar-wind-power-f...

https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=ember-energy.org
by glenstein | 2025-08-19 03:05:56+00:00
Characterizing meat alternatives as "ultra processed" has been a propaganda coup for the meat industry, allowing for an equivocation between categorically different nutritional profiles of products like Twinkies and Pringles on the one hand, and meat alternative products which have absolutely nothing to do with refined starches, sugars, or trans fats on the other and which in fact have better cardiovascular outcomes, cancer outcomes and environmental impacts than the meats they are replacing.

They're both ultra processed in the same way that a jellyfish and a California Redwood are both carbon based life forms.
by simpaticoder | 2025-08-19 03:06:32+00:00
Ted Chiang does love to explore the counter-factual with empathy and openness where he somehow manages to take himself out of the story in the admirable Virginia Wolfe sense. The OP misses the biting critique hidden in these tales. For example Omphalos, Hell Is the Absence of God, and Tower of Babylon, can all be read as a devastating critique of religion. They all clearly articulate what the world would be like if certain religious beliefs were true. Since those worlds are nothing like our own, the beliefs are false. There is a strong element of cosmic horror in each of these stories that implicitly make a strong case that we are quite fortunate that our religions do not accurately describe nature.

Exhalation is one of my favorites. There is profound lesson about the nature of the mind, expressed simply as a sequence of discovery by a lone scientist in a very alien world. But the world is an idealized, simplified version of our own with much simpler source of work in the physics sense. I very much wanted to know more about the nature of that world, and for the people there to find a way out of their apocalyptic predicament. But that story, like it's world, is hermetically sealed perfection. The fate of our own universe is the same, but with more steps in the energy cycle and a longer timeline. The silence bounding that story is a beautiful choice, one that makes it a real jewel.
by chrisco255 | 2025-08-19 03:07:00+00:00
If you have little experience programming, JS/TS is arguably one of the best choices for making a game. You have a built-in rendering engine in the form of the browser and it's universally accessible by nearly any device. There's no permission needed for distribution: just create a web page with a live demo and share the link. It's a great way to learn about game loops, pathfinding algos, state management, physics and world building and there's tons of free tools. A couple of my undergrad projects were JS games and they were very fun to work on. Clearly not the right choice for AAA game dev or a full length indie game, but definitely solid choice for learning.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-08-19 03:07:31+00:00
I think Optimize-VHD will do the same thing as messing with diskpart.

It's a shame you can't just turn on live TRIM support.

This kind of disk image is a bunch of multi-megabyte blocks of data, plus a list of where each block goes on the virtual disk. Implementations can support TRIM by deleting the block that's zeroed and moving the block at the end of the file into that spot. VirtualBox can do this, shrinking the file when the guest OS TRIMs, but Hyper-V can't.
by mjevans | 2025-08-19 03:08:17+00:00
I was extremely dismayed when that supermarket simulator game that got popular on Twitch called 'pizza' something along the line of 'frozen dessert pie'...

At least the way it tends to get made in the US, a sugary pastry that's stuffed full of sugar, carbs, fats and cheese? Ok yeah, my favorite foods are _all_ terrible for me and I can't eat them anymore. This makes me very sad.
by ethbr1 | 2025-08-19 03:09:36+00:00
I doubt repricing after market capture is going to work in this case. There's too much total addressable market at stake, and the end product (running code) is fungible.

The only scenario where that happened was if one company (e.g. OpenAI) was multiple generations ahead and incredibly profitable.

That's not the reality we live in: even if the other models all froze themselves they'd be close enough to serve as a springboard for a competitor, and OpenAI isn't even profitable.
by SOLAR_FIELDS | 2025-08-19 03:09:40+00:00
Indeed, the grandparent post is a pretty good summary of the takeaways you get from taking PADI’s enriched air nitrox course (which is a requirement if you ever want to dive with enriched air).

In the olden days this was tracked manually (the ratio of your depth to percentage of air and time under water) via so called “dive tables”. The purpose and output of the dive table is to determine the safe amount of time you could dive at a certain depth without risking narcosis.

As this is a sliding window based on multiple variables - and you are very rarely maintaining a constant depth as you dive - it’s of course annoying and less accurate to hand calculate this. Modern dive computers just seamlessly calculate it all for you nowadays.
by BenFranklin100 | 2025-08-19 03:10:15+00:00
You’re not the only one. I invested months on Obsidian before walking away and returning to OneNote. It’s advertised as a ‘second brain’ but at its core it glorified overlay to the file system and a Markdown viewer. You can’t even manually sort notes and folders. Directory Opus can do that and more.

Moreover, the community plugins model is a fundamental security risk and the community plugins themselves frequently break on Obsidian updates. I’m not going to invest months to years building a curated personal knowledge base only to have it fall apart when a community plugins breaks.
by scarface_74 | 2025-08-19 03:12:49+00:00
And allowing student IDs for voting isn’t some crazy liberal idea. Plenty of conservative states allow it.

https://campusvoteproject.org/student-id-as-voter-id/

You really think it’s an apolitical policy in Texas?

And states don’t have a carte blanche ability to have whatever laws they want to about voting, there were a bunch of lawsuits and laws passed in the sixties about that….
by its-summertime | 2025-08-19 03:14:05+00:00
for stories of the past year, and due to algolia not presenting removed threads:

"Palistin" returns 142 results (typo tolerance to catch both relevant endings)

"Brazil" returns 366 results

"Israel" returns 401

"Ukraine" returns 632

"Gaza" returns 842

"China" returns 3,436

Could probably total the points as well, see how many points per story, etc
by mrangle | 2025-08-19 03:14:20+00:00
Is the counter argument that Australia has compulsory voting and that you think it's a fine place? I don't dispute the right to an opinion. You can think that Australia is great and compulsory voting is great and "works". Go in peace.

Whereas my arguments are referencing democratic logic. I'm attempting to speak to a general logical framework of principles, rather than to (too much) give specific place opinions.

I took your "counter argument" statement about the existence of Australian compulsory voting as fact.

I'm not sure what the point is of returning to, what, partially contradict me on the details of Australian voting and where it isn't exactly totally compulsory?

Truly with all due respect, I think that you're having an argument with yourself at this point.
by RajT88 | 2025-08-19 03:14:32+00:00
Jeanine Pirro likes to talk about Treason for example.

When Trump is accused of it, her background as a lawyer kicks in and she can correctly articulate the reasons why Trump has not committed Treason.

However, in any other case she will accuse all manner of folks of committing treason and request they face harsh consequences.

Fox News is lies and rage bait.
by 3vidence | 2025-08-19 03:14:36+00:00
After bouncing off of Unity the first few times, I finally decided to commit to it after trying out some of the JS game frameworks (like Phaser)

Absolutely worth it, have made lots of games in Unity just for myself that feel pretty polished, there are just so many systems to make a game work.

The advice around game engines kind of seems like "to learn how to write programs first create the compiler.

Not to say all games should be made in engines but it certainly helps.
by simoncion | 2025-08-19 03:14:54+00:00
> systemd[-init] ALSO does not constantly change. The init system has been virtually untouched in a decade...

Sure, I'll bite. It'll be more interesting than watching some stupid Twitch streamer.

Gentoo Linux was using OpenRC back in 2002. Looking at the copyright notice in relevant source files, it looks like OpenRC is a project that has been under development since 1999, so I'd expect it was in use back in 1999. However, I will use 2002 as the start date for this discussion because that's when I started using it.

The simple OpenRC service file I mention in footnote 3 in [0] is syntactically identical to the syslogd service file added in to the OpenRC repo back in this commit in late 2007 [1]. The commit that appears to add support for 'command_args' and friends is earlier that day.

So, four years before SystemD's experimental release, the minimal OpenRC service file (that I talk about in [0]) was no more complicated than what would become the minimal SystemD service file no less than four years later. What's more, the more-verbose syntax for service files written in 2002 was supported by 2007's OpenRC, and continues to be supported by 2025's OpenRC.

23 years is quite a bit longer than 15.

> systemd is also not complex, it's remarkably simple. systemd unit files are flat, declarative config files.

See above (and below).

> Here, people get confused between systemd-init, and systemd the project.

In that case, it doesn't do you credit to use "systemd-init" and "systemd" interchangably in your commentary. SystemD absolutely has scope creep. systemd-init... well, I think I remember when it wasn't possible to have it rexecute itself for a no-reboot upgrade of PID 1. And does it still have a dependency on DBus, or did they see sense and get rid of that?

[0] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44945789>

[1] <https://github.com/OpenRC/openrc/commit/3ec2cc50261f37b76e0e...>
by mrangle | 2025-08-19 03:15:02+00:00
Thank you. I see your point.

Colleges, let alone Universities, used to be much fewer in number.

It used to be more widely known that the better Colleges, that is mostly the Ivy League and the top Liberal Arts colleges, were the only educational institutions that mattered in terms of imparting the vaguer yet more elite type of education of which you are likely thinking.

That is, the institutions who reliably facilitate the fuzzy process of becoming an educated person who can think like one. In the elite sense of these things.

What we've lost to an extent, in the multi-decade long taxpayer funded college degree bonanza, is that it is these elite institutions which are still seen as the only colleges that matter in the sense that I think that you are implying.

Other colleges are not truly valuable in this sense. So what are they good for? They are good for work training and certification pathways.

Universities have no problem charging obscene rates, which is hard cash, for something that they too would like to be only distastefully associated with money when debating the merits.

If it isn't translatable to money, then make it cheaper. Or keep the value firm and high, but also let's talk about what is being sold.
by JoeyJoJoJr | 2025-08-19 03:16:21+00:00
Also, 2D assets are much more difficult to change later if you decide you need to change the aspect ratio or scaling later on. While a tile map is comparatively technically simple, the initial choice of tile size carries a rather critical importance to how the game development process unfolds. If you want or need to change it later it is likely going to be a fair amount of work, and that friction can hinder a lot of experimentation. Compare this to a 3d camera, that affords you the ability to completely change perspective with a few lines of code, it’s evident that a 2d game is not necessarily simpler to develop in practice.
by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | 2025-08-19 03:16:53+00:00
It's worth noting that the project is CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0 however it comes with a notice that other licenses are available if you content them directly. So it may not be open source under the strict definition however the project is also not staunchly anti-commercial.

> Feel free to use the design in your private/educational projects, but don't try to sell the design or products based on it without getting my consent first. The idea here is to share knowledge, not to enable others to simply sell my work. Thank you for understanding.
by ThrowawayR2 | 2025-08-19 03:18:03+00:00
From the guidelines linked at the bottom of the page: "Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."
by habosa | 2025-08-19 03:18:46+00:00
So I only use Instagram for the DMs with friends. I don’t follow anyone at all, so my feed should be empty. For years it was.

Then at some point Instagram decided I must not know what I want, they should show me recommended posts from random accounts.

There’s a setting to turn this off … but instead of being a normal toggle I can only “snooze” the posts for 30 days. 30 days of peace and then the spam comes back.

No matter how many times I make it clear what I want, they don’t care. Just gross.
by charcircuit | 2025-08-19 03:20:09+00:00
>Their goal is to take control away from their users in order to empower their customers - advertisers.

Did you read the proposals to understand the actual goals of them? Taking away control from users or empowering advertisers was never a goal. The goal of the attestation API was for improving the security of the web platform. This is important to do in order to keep the web platform relevant compared to competing app platforms. MV3 was an update to extentions that improved performance, security, and privacy of web extentions. Ad blocking is still possible with MV3, so if their goal was too kill it they did a terrible job. Also if their goal was to kill ad blockers, why did the chromium team work with adblocking extentions to iterate and improve the API to better suit their needs? If they didn't like ad blockers they wouldn't be working with them.
by VoidWhisperer | 2025-08-19 03:21:35+00:00
Can someone help me understand why that 'turfwar game' is in what otherwise seems to be what is meant to be a C library that people include in their projects? It doesnt seem to be automatically built as part of the project, but it still seems very odd to place it in a repo of a library that you want other people using instead of splitting it out to its own repo
by abetusk | 2025-08-19 03:21:37+00:00
For me, the "owl" was all the polish and game feel. "The art of screenshake" by Jan Nijman of Vlambeer [0] was what helped fill in the steps to "making the owl".

I think most people with reasonable know-how can make a basic game, whether it's asteroids, flappy bird, breakout, etc. For me, I never understood how to get past the "finished the tutorial" to "looks like an actual game". Screenshake, aka game feel/polish/production effects, was what made it gel.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJdEqssNZ-U
by rr808 | 2025-08-19 03:21:46+00:00
I'm done with WSL. It just makes life too hard, dual disk is a problem, two network endpoints two firewalls, two different hypervisors you can choose from where some things expect one some the other.

I used to think a windows laptop would be better for hardware management, maybe it is but I just gave up and installed Linux. My life is so much easier.
by red369 | 2025-08-19 03:23:10+00:00
I wonder if you separate plug-in hybrids and non-plug-in hybrids, whether you might gain a more positive opinion of some.

With non-plug-in hybrids, you don't plug them in at night, and you're lugging a lot less battery around. In some sense, you do have all the complications of both, but as an example, the whole planetary gearset, dual motor setup in Toyota's Synergy drive replaces a traditional gearbox and seems to be more reliable and more efficient. I also expected Priuses to have worse reliability than non-hybrid Toyotas, and seem to have been completely wrong.

Also, while what I wrote above probably makes it sounds like I'm against plug-in hybrids, I think of them as a way to reduce the weight of a full electric car, by replacing a lot of the battery weight with a traditional ICE drivetrain, i.e. a range extender/light-weight source of power for acceleration.

I also don't like the weight and complication of modern cars. It's really hard to beat ICE for weight, but seems to be pretty easy to beat it for acceleration and fuel economy at the cost of making it more complicated (and worse handling).

I read a review of the BMW 330e iPerformance once, which messed with my head. They made the point that BMW had basically found a way to make a car heavier, without hurting acceleration or fuel economy (and also not really improving either).

FYI: I am just interested in this area, and have spent way too much time thinking about it. Many people will be more knowledgeable in this space. I just wanted to throw out some ideas to be shot down :)

Edit: Forgot to comment on your Integra - probably nothing modern will rival that for a long time! I was crushed giving up my '94 Celica a couple of years ago when I moved overseas. Basically gave it away!
by aussieguy1234 | 2025-08-19 03:23:15+00:00
Salmon farming is causing huge environmental damage in Tasmania.

https://goodfish.org.au/species/atlantic-salmon-tassal/

They've taken what was a pristine harbour untouched by humans and turned it into a sewer for salmon effluent. There is a prehistoric fish, the maugean skate, that is likely to go extinct if the salmon farming continues.