MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by grishka | 2025-08-22 07:48:51+00:00
Your instance is in your username. The full username is "@grishka@mastodon.social". You use WebFinger (https://mastodon.social/.well-known/webfinger?resource=acct:...) to convert that to the ActivityPub actor ID, which in my case would be "https://mastodon.social/users/grishka".

And yes, that's one weakness of this system — there is no "real" account migration. Most you can do is set up two-way references between your old and new accounts and ask your followers to unfollow the old one and follow the new one. But your past content doesn't carry over.

But then idk, Bluesky's identity service is completely centralized, so the fediverse is better with regard to independence?
by baq | 2025-08-22 07:49:08+00:00
ASCII is very convenient when it fits in the solution space (it’d better be, it was designed for a reason), but in the global international connected computing world it doesn’t fit at all. The problem is all the tutorials, especially low level ones, assume ASCII so 1) you can print something to the console and 2) to avoid mentioning that strings are hard so folks don’t get discouraged.

Notably Rust did the correct thing by defining multiple slightly incompatible string types for different purposes in the standard library and regularly gets flak for it.
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-22 07:49:18+00:00
> The legal right to open a bank account in her own name was codified at the federal level in 1974, but that's all it was - codification. Women had already gained that right on a state-by-state basis prior to 1900.

What's your source on this? What I seem to be able to find that seems consistent is:

* California was the first state to guarantee women the right to independently open bank accounts in 1862.

* Some individual banks not subject to a state mandate to do so chose to allow women (often with restrictions, conditions, e.g. relating to marital status, that did not apply to men) to open accounts independently.

* I can't find any source that indicates that being able to open independent depository accounts on the same basis as men was nationally acheived state by state as a legal right at all, much less prior to the 1900s.

* There's a common, consistently unsourced claim that the right to open an account (but not to be free of discrimination in terms, or to access credit on equal terms to men, etc.) was generally guaranteed by the states "in the 1960s"; but at least several sources expresses skepticism of this consistently unsourced claim and suggests it may be a myth originating in the fact taht Canada protected women's right to open bank accounts in 1964.

* Technically, women didn't get federal protection of a right to open bank depository accounts in their own name without discrimination in 1974, either, they got a right to equal treatment by institutions issuing credit. This had a side effect of guaranteeing equal access to those depository accounts that came with credit features, because those constituted issuing credit.

So, when did women federally get guaranteed equal treatment in bank depository accounts indepedently of those that also count as issuing credit? The same time that was guaratneed on the basis of race -- never. (There have occasionally been efforts to address this, and other permitted-disccrimination effects of the fact that banks are not included as public accommodations under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but none have passed that explicitly did so; the CFPB's power under the CFPA to address "unfair practices" was used to target race, gender, and other discrimination in financial services not subject to the ECOA or CRA, but that that was within the scope of "unfair practices" was a matter of agency rules and interpretation, not explicit in statute.)
by pydry | 2025-08-22 07:49:40+00:00
I suspect it comes down to how novel the code you are writing is and how tolerant of bugs you are.

People who use it to create a proof of concept of something that is in the LLM training set will have a wildly different experience to somebody writing novel production code.

Even there the people who rave the most rave about how well it does boilerplate.
by sigmoid10 | 2025-08-22 07:51:34+00:00
I have wanted string length many times in production systems for language processing. And it is perfectly fine as long as whatever you are using is consistent. I rarely care how many bytes an emoji actually is unless I'm worried about extreme efficiency in storage or how many monospace characters it uses unless I do very specific UI things. This blog is more of a cautionary tale what can happen if you unconsciously mix standards e.g. by using one in the backend and another in the frontend. But this is not a problem of string lengths per se, they are just one instance where modern implementations are all over the place.
by ruszki | 2025-08-22 07:51:43+00:00
> The Economist started adopting the "shove our opinion down your throat" editorial style

That’s their intention since the beginning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_editorial_stance

I’m a subscriber for about 15 years now, and they shoved their opinion down my throat even 15 years ago. That didn’t change. Unfortunately, they are still better than almost anything else imho.
by ceejayoz | 2025-08-22 07:51:56+00:00
Google wasn’t really an ad company on day one, either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google?wprov=sfti1#Early_years

> The next year, Google began selling advertisements associated with search keywords against Page and Brin's initial opposition toward an advertising-funded search engine.

Ads are coming. https://www.theverge.com/news/759140/openai-chatgpt-ads-nick...
by v5v3 | 2025-08-22 07:52:27+00:00
Money laundering at the high level works as unless you are on the USA watchlist, it's the USA and it's allies that are the vehicle which facilitates it.

Offshore vehicles? Most are British islands.

Onshore vehicles? Delaware and similar

Unless the west puts you on a list, it's professionals will happily help anyone in the world.
Ask HN: Why is Prolog not gaining traction?
by 0x07ca | 2025-08-22 07:54:06+00:00
I sometimes enjoy programming in Prolog, although I see that it is not a very popular programming language, despite being invented many years ago. Why is it so?

Personally, I think that these are the three main problems with the current ecosystem: i) there are too many implementations, some more advanced and well-maintained, so it is not clear where to start. Furthermore, these implementations often differ in the syntax, so it is not always possible to directly port a Prolog program developed with one system into another system. ii) there are few libraries and they are not compatible among the different systems, so one often has to reimplement everything from scratch. iii) debugging programs is painful and locating an error is very difficult and time consuming
by physicles | 2025-08-22 07:54:52+00:00
I’m finally waking up to how great views are for building abstractions within the database. They’re not as versatile as actual code, but still worth thinking about.

Triggers, however… as the years have gone by, I like triggers less and less. Triggers for complex validation are ok, but triggers that mutate data are a code smell. Our database contains some triggers that denormalize data to make some queries faster, and they’ve proven to be an endless source of problems.
by camillomiller | 2025-08-22 07:55:07+00:00
It seems to me that probabilistic approaches are more akin to magical AI thinking right now, so defending that as the new paradigm sounds quite egregious and reeks of (maybe involuntary?) inevitabilism.

Even if the assumption is correct, forcing a probabilistic system on a strongly deterministic society won't end well. Maybe for society, but mostly for the companies drumming up their probabilistic systems and their investors.

Also, anyone who wants to make money probabilistically is better off going to the casino. Baccarat is a good one. European Roulette also has a better house margin than chatGPT's error margin.
by deadbabe | 2025-08-22 07:55:44+00:00
Scooters are just deceptively dangerous. The ease with which you can just hop on and go 20, 30, 40mph in instant is a false sense of security. There’s no drama, no warning, just pure speed standing upright, feet mere inches off the ground. Crashing on a 100mph scooter is sure to end gruesomely.
by Ghoelian | 2025-08-22 07:56:27+00:00
> That always made me chuckle, since the entire point of the system is that you're supposed to be incentivized to return the cart to get your money back

I always kinda doubted that part, or at least its effectiveness. Iirc a 50 eurocent coin will unlock most trolleys, which is pretty cheap for a whole ass trolley.

And sure enough, there's a lot of elderly people that just have a shopping trolley in their yard or something. This morning I found one randomly in our bike shed.
by maccard | 2025-08-22 07:56:41+00:00
That’s fair, but surely you must see that’s a very simple build.

The complicated part comes when you have job A that builds and Job B that deploys - they run on two different machine specs so you’re not paying for a 16 core machine to wait for helm apply to wait for 5 minutes - they need somewhere secure to shuffle that artifact around. Their access to that service is likely different to your local access to that service, so you run your build locally and it’s fine but then the build machine doesn’t have write access to the new path you’ve just tested and it fails.

90% of the time these are where I see CI failures
by prmoustache | 2025-08-22 07:57:31+00:00
over what?

Gmail is not easier than any other mail provider. Quite the contrary as traditionnal email providers are usually more user friendly.

A store is a store. In my experience aurora is not more complicated than the google playstore.

As for storage I don't think google drive is less complicated thant the competition. I don't need cloud storage anyway except from secondary backup site which would be stupid to use throguh google anyway even if I was using an account.
by Leynos | 2025-08-22 07:58:31+00:00
That's interesting. I am curious about the extent of the training data in these models.

I asked Kimi K2 for an account of growing up in my home town in Scotland, and it was ridiculously accurate. I then asked it to do the same for a similarly sized town in Kerala. ChatGPT suggested that while it was a good approximation, K2 got some of the specifics wrong.
by evilmonkey19 | 2025-08-22 07:58:32+00:00
Personally I use SQLite in production environments and I don't regret it at all. I don't use Go (I develop in Python - Django mainly) and it has been the best decision ever: no management overhead, easy to backup, no need for difficult environments, etc.

I feel like SQLite is undervalued. I do agree that in particular cases might not be the best, but more often than not I see that SQLite is more than enough database. Using Postgres or MySQL for the sake of being "production grade" is never a good idea. SQLite is also production grade. Watching at the statistics (look at sqinn) I would state that 90% of the internet could use SQLite without any issue and only benefits.
by akimbostrawman | 2025-08-22 07:59:42+00:00
Turns out if you only look at people trying to turn a profit you will find bad people. It's like complaining about investment being seedy because you only watch wallstreetbets.

That should be the point where the intellectual curious hacker should try to broaden there horizon beyond the superficial surface.

I don't see the seedy nature you try to apply to a whole industry if anything i experience the opposite.
by fertrevino | 2025-08-22 07:59:50+00:00
That would be an interesting extension. MedGemma isn't part of the original benchmark either [1]. Since Gemini 2.0 Flash is on 6th place, expectations are for MedGemma to achieve higher than that :)

[1]https://crfm.stanford.edu/helm/medhelm/latest/#/leaderboard
by teekert | 2025-08-22 08:00:49+00:00
"...among 100 women who have less than one drink per week, about 17 will develop an alcohol-related cancer."

How does this insane number get unnoticed for so long. I really find it hard to believe. < One drink per day more dangerous than smoking a pack per day?

Edit: Ok, looked into the reference and it's a bit more subtle, though I can't find numbers for people not consuming anything, allthough one would think they'd get 0% alcohol related cancers.

"For example, a study of 226,162 individuals reported that the absolute risk of developing any alcohol-related cancer over the lifespan of a woman increases from approximately 16.5% (about 17 out of every 100 individuals) for those who consume less than one drink per week, to 19.0% (19 out of every 100 individuals) for those who consume one drink daily on average to approximately 21.8% (about 22 out of every 100 individuals) for those who consume two drinks daily on average (Figure 5). That is about five more women out of 100 who would have developed cancer due to a higher level of alcohol consumption."

Pretty significant, although "less than one drink per day" is a bit vague.
by ljf | 2025-08-22 08:01:20+00:00
This brought back a memory of living in Byron Bay Australia in 1999 - there was a person who’s full time job was driving around town with a trailer, collecting shopping trolleys and returning them to the Woolworths supermarket.

I’d never seen that in the uk - but maybe that town was the sweet spot in size where it was small enough that you could actually get home with a trolley (and it was nice and flat), and maybe the number of visitors passing through meant rules got broken more - though the trolleys were more in the suburban areas than just where the hostels were.
by deadbabe | 2025-08-22 08:01:52+00:00
There is no amount of alcohol that is good for you. It is a toxin that only harms your body. The rising popularity and creativity of mocktails shows that people can still have a fun drink that doesn’t involve poisoning their body.

And if you use alcohol for social lubrication, you only screw yourself over by never learning how to truly socialize and let go of inhibition naturally.
by jstummbillig | 2025-08-22 08:02:12+00:00
> When the system design is not pre-defined or rigid like

Why would a LLM be any worse building from language fundamentals (which it knows, in ~every language)? Given how new this paradigm is the far more obvious and likely explanation seems to be: LLM powered coding requires somewhat different skills and strategies. The success of each user heavily depends on their learning rate.
by tw1984 | 2025-08-22 08:02:13+00:00
just saw this on Chinese internet - deepseek officially mentioned that v3.1 is trained using UE8M0 FP8 as that is the FP8 to be supported by the next gen Chinese AI chip. so basically -

some Chinese next gen AI chips is coming, deepseek is working with them to get its flagship model trained using such domestic chips.

interesting time ahead! just imagine what it could do to NVIDIA share price when deepseek releases a SOTA new model trained without using NVIDIA chips.
by lmm | 2025-08-22 08:03:50+00:00
> > Japanese people think Buddhism is a thing you do at funerals.

> Buddhism, and Zen especially, permeate Japanese culture very deeply. Japanese aesthetics, architecture, landscape design, visual art, calligraphy, the tea ceremony, and the martial arts, have all been strongly influenced by Zen. And it's all over pop culture, too—just think of how pervasive Daruma dolls are—that's Bodhidharma, the founder of Zen. Sure, Buddhism is at funerals, but it's everywhere, else, too.

Your statement may be true but so is the grandparent's. (Although I agree that there isn't much about not having sex; mainly you hear about monks don't eat meat, or at least not while people are looking)
by VoidWhisperer | 2025-08-22 08:07:12+00:00
Not sure if the original site owner will ever see this, but the hit counter they use (counter12 [dot] com) is flagged by Malwarebytes for phishing (and seems to have a history of popping fake virus links? [0])

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/neocities/comments/1i7di1c/help_fak...
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-22 08:07:52+00:00
> Seems a bit upside down. Should they not approach Google for comment? If a stolen watch turns up at a carbooth sale, I'd in the first place want answers from the seller, not the victim.

Search results indexed from the public web aren't stolen.

Private material exposed on the public web in contravention of the privacy expectation between the user to whom it belongs and the site owner with custody is a problem of the site owner exposing it, not the search engine indexing it.
by ljf | 2025-08-22 08:09:23+00:00
I’m sad that scooters are illegal to ride on the road here in the uk. I’d happily pay maybe £50 a year for insurance and tax if it was an option.

For a while I rode my father’s scooter around town, it was brilliant for short errands and fit easily in the boot of my car. Great for when a bicycle is a little too large or you don’t want to expend the energy.

(My father never actually rode the scooter, he hoped that by adding a seat he could use it instead of an old people’s buggy, but he couldn’t get his feet down fast enough and going at a slow speed on a small pavement was hard to keep balance- he got an electric tricycle instead. )
by spyrja | 2025-08-22 08:10:33+00:00
I really hate to rant on about this. But the gymnastics required to parse UTF-8 correctly are truly insane. Besides that we now see issues such as invisible glyph injection attacks etc cropping up all over the place due to this crappy so-called "standard". Maybe we should just to go back to the simplicity of ASCII until we can come up with with something better?
by crabmusket | 2025-08-22 08:10:52+00:00
I feel similarly to you.

Even amidst the pressure of "client X needs feature Y yesterday, get it done with maximum tech debt!" it felt like there were still chances to carve out niches of craft, care and quality.

The rise of "probabilistic" software feels like it is a gift to "close enough is good enough" and "ship first, ask questions later".

If only we all became scientists. We'll more likely become closer to tabloid journalists, producing something that sounds just truthy enough to get clicks.
by jongjong | 2025-08-22 08:11:06+00:00
Also, I'm convinced that the reason humans intuitively struggle to figure out causality is because the vast majority of causes and effects are self-reinforcing cycles and go both ways. There was little evolutionary pressure for us to understand the concept of causality because it doesn't play a strong role in natural selection.

For example, eat a lot and you will gain weight, gain weight and you will feel more hungry and will likely eat more.

Or exercise more and it becomes easier to exercise.

Earning money becomes easier as you have more money.

Public speaking becomes easier as you do it more and the more you do it, the easier it becomes.

Etc...
by cambaceres | 2025-08-22 08:11:43+00:00
> “I think the skills that should be emphasized are how do you think for yourself? How do you develop critical reasoning for solving problems? How do you develop creativity? How do you develop a learning mindset that you're going to go learn to do the next thing?”

In the Swedish schoolsystem, the idea for the past 20 years has been exactly this, that is to try to teach critical thinking, reasoning, problem solving etc rather than hard facts. The results has been...not great. We discovered that reasoning and critical thinking is impossible without a foundational knowledge about what to be critical about. I think the same can be said about software development.
by 8fingerlouie | 2025-08-22 08:13:20+00:00
> You can continue to use that version of Sublime Text until the end of time.

Or until some change in the underlying OS makes it no longer able to run. Not saying that happens frequently, but it does happen.

> I'll stop there. Those are just the largest, most user facing new features, not any of the new settings, new APIs or improvements that I'd argue are new features.

New font pickers, settings dialogues and other "polish" is hardly what i'd call new features. I listed those as "improvements".

I'm not trying to start a fight, and i respect the work that has been done, but VS Code releases more features in a month that ST has released in the entire ST4 lifecycle, as does Zed. I understand the team is (a lot) smaller. My frustration is that when a new release comes out, it's mostly polish, and not fixing the real problems, such as lack of integration and plugins.

You may choose to brush it off as just an old fart rambling on the internet, but i'm not alone with this opinion, and i have ST licenses dating back to the original version, and i have chosen not to renew my ST4 license. When you start losing the "religious" users, maybe it's time to reevaluate ?
by PeterStuer | 2025-08-22 08:13:37+00:00
How did they establish causality, or is it just a correlation potentially resulting from hidden variables? E.g., I do not know many smokers that do not touch alcohol, but plenty of non smoking abstinates. I also know plenty of sedentary obese heavy drinkers, where a higher percentage of the teetotal lot are more health obsessed in other ways.
by evolve2k | 2025-08-22 08:13:45+00:00
I’d like to posit a scenario that I’ve often thought on. Imagine you and 100 people all working together to say build a road. These are your friends, some family and other local community members many of whom you also care for and have known for many years.

As a group you work a 5 day week, 40 hours laying roads together.

There’s an especially hard part of the process, and you’ve been thinking on it and realise that with a new approach it can save 20% of the total effort.

To whom do you want the benefit to go. All to the boss, as they pay everyone and run the business? All to you as it was your idea. Or alternatively it could mean that everyone works 20% less, translating into that now everyone can do a four day week and have that extra day back to do and help with other things.

Consider less how it’s split now, and more how you’d want it to be split.

The big idea of yours is like the tech, consider also if others had come up with the improvement.

I’d be interested in what folks saw as fair splits and why. Boss, inventor, the collective.
by Sniffnoy | 2025-08-22 08:13:50+00:00
Another little thing: The post mentions that tag sequences are only used for the flags of England, Scotland, and Wales. Those are the only ones that are standard (RGI), but because it's clear how the mechanism would work for other subnational entities, some systems support other ones, such as US state flags! I don't recommend using these if you want other people to be able to see them, but...
by close04 | 2025-08-22 08:14:29+00:00
> Fresh, clean water is astonishingly cheap

Because you can find it in "concentrated" form (think entropy), all in an aquifer or a river, and these are everywhere. But these dry up because of our usage and the climate, and when they do you still have the same amount of water on the planet, it's just not as easily accessible. It's super spread out, it's too far away, it needs a lot of expensive processing to make usable, or all of the above.

What's cheaper and easier for you, to condense a cup of water from the air or to just turn on the faucet?

> we should be using solar and nuclear for everything

Why solar? Energy is not lost/consumed in the universe, so why not collect it from anywhere else. Energy is astonishingly cheap, that's why we use so much of it. If you know what I mean...
by Hikikomori | 2025-08-22 08:14:58+00:00
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1890842231180816419

Just because you can find a bad article with bad examples, and some are for sure coincidences, but that doesn't mean its not true. Musk did heil, Musk does post well known white supremacy signals. Trump might be a racist and like the fascist power but he is not a white supremacist christian like the rest of his cabinet of project2025 people.