MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by andy99 | 2025-08-19 11:04:02+00:00
The music thing is, I think, a related phenomenon I'll call the demolition man effect. Most people now are so weak and nonconfrontational that someone willing to break social norms can just walk all over them. This is because nobody wants to stand up for themselves or more fundamentally rock the boat.

The shamelessness thing is similar but fundamentally different in that it gets a following. Everyone thinks the kid/boomer without headphones is an ass, they just don't say it.
by npinsker | 2025-08-19 11:04:26+00:00
It sounds like you are depressed, and should figure out whether it's due to maladaptive biochemistry (see a professional) or circumstances (change the circumstances; maybe consider a therapist). Given your post, I'm leaning towards the latter.

You say you have plenty of friends, but I can't help but wonder if they're able to give you the nourishment you need. It's great you have many who care about you -- but no matter how much you go drinking or hiking together, if they can't relate to your troubles, then it can still feel quite lonely.

For me personally, art -- both creating and consuming others' -- has been uniquely helpful. You can pass your feelings to a future self, and there are surely many brilliant people from the past whose work can make you feel understood too. Yes, "this" really is all there is, but it's more manageable if you find someone who sees "this" the same way you do.

What's compelling about "starting from zero"? Maybe that's a feeling you could focus in on and, from that, figure out a goal that compels you.

Good luck. Hope you find happiness :)
by TheCapeGreek | 2025-08-19 11:04:34+00:00
Are you asking for how to get things shipped to you from places that don't ship internationally/to you?

One service I've heard of and seen recommended here and there is Aramex Global Shopper. Basically you ship things to them and they forward it to you.

Otherwise, if it's "international shipping" but they're just using essentially global mail, I avoid it if possible - South African mail services are spotty at best. I was very pleasantly surprised my risk on an ebay nostalgia purchase shipped from Hawaii arrived at all.
by roenxi | 2025-08-19 11:05:17+00:00
Haven't most European governments in the last century or so collapsed? Eastern Europe regulated anti-social behaviorsandin a pretty extreme way and the superstructure collapsed directly, but Western Europe as it exists now is what emerged out of the ashes of the last collapse in the 1930s.

I don't think there are many broad lessons to learn beyond aiming for peace and liberty, but "European governments didn't collapse" is hardly a powerful argument. The area is notorious for collapse, it is still in living memory when large chunks of Europe fell apart, sometimes quite comfortably so. It could easily happen again.
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-08-19 11:05:31+00:00
I had some questions about the history of land ownership of the crown and the church occasioned by this comment but I guess I found answers in an article after googling (wow, it's been a long time since that has happened, feels like 2006 all over again) so I made a post on the article I found

A Short, Angry History of Land in Britain, by Thom Forester

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44950244
by viraptor | 2025-08-19 11:06:52+00:00
"the old internet" seems to still exist. Today they're the semi-private discord/slack/mattermost/matrix servers that mostly replaced IRC. Some are large enough that separate channels on them are their own communities - for example like Hangops.

Or takes a bit of effort to find them, but they're there, with lots of friendly people geeking out about common topic.
by lapcat | 2025-08-19 11:07:33+00:00
> it's not fair to the author

To be honest, as an author whose articles have been submitted to HN a number of times, I have a hard time believing that HN actually cares about being "fair" to the article author. To the contrary, HN has become notorious for unfairly and ignorantly tearing down article authors. You must be aware of this, yes?

I think it would be refreshing to have a summary from the submitter who, more likely than other commenters, read the article and appreciates it. As an article author, I say that I'm least worried about the submitter being unfair to me.

> We prefer to maintain an expectation that people will read the full article before commenting.

The community missed here is the people who not only don't read the article but don't comment either, who completely ignore the article, because the article title was uninformative.

I gave an example in another thread of a submission whose title is so vague as to be practically meaningless to those deciding whether to read it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44945966

In the absence of a useful title, the only way for someone to determine whether an article is worth reading is to check the upvotes and/or the comments. But that, I think, makes the anti-summary attitude ironic, because upvotes and comments don't come from the original author. Indeed, one of the reasons that many people go to the comments before reading the article—and HN users explicitly say this—is that they want to determine whether the article is worth reading. From my perspective, a brief summary or "pitch" if you will, would encourage more people to read the article and/or discourage people from reading an article that they come back and complain about having read.

And I would say, by the way, that one of the main reasons that submitters editorialize the article title is the title itself is not particularly informative.

> tacitly endorsed by HN

I'm not sure what this means exactly. In one sense, every submission and comment on HN, even the comments from people who haven't read the article, or comments that are otherwise inaccurate, is tacitly endorsed by HN, except perhaps those that have been specifically moderated by you. Indeed, you might even say that HN tacitly endorses every article that is linked by HN!

In another sense, though, a submission, and the proposed summary of the submission is not endorsed by HN but rather by the HN user who submitted it, whose username is attached to the submission. And I don't see a problem with that. This is always the case for a website with user-submitted content. Everyone can tell the difference between the site and the user.

By the way, while a moderator is here, the person who apparently summoned you here accused me of sealioning: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44948008
by mschuster91 | 2025-08-19 11:09:07+00:00
> Is that specific to certain contracting status or is that the case for any kind of contracting?

It's specific for "sole proprietor" contractors. Multi-person operations, consultancies and bodyshops are exempt as long as the employees get their contributions paid.

> Obviously that means they are now acting company-like and have to pay social contribution like a company would but that should be on the contractor not on the client.

That is possible, indeed, you can voluntarily pay pension contributions (and that's the stuff that the pension fund claws back). You can also voluntarily contribute to the unemployment benefits.

As long as you at least pay the pension contributions, you're fine. The unemployment benefits is voluntary, no penalties if you don't pay these, but also, no payouts when you gotta close down shop.

The problem is, good luck finding a client willing to pay appropriate rates - too much unfair competition from those who just hope that neither they nor the client end up in a colonoscopy-level tax audit in 10 years (the time frame in which the statute of limitations for tax crimes expires), and the sad reality is that this gamble often enough pays off.
by TheCapeGreek | 2025-08-19 11:09:39+00:00
I've dabbled in at least trying the absolute basics of the popular DEs. Cinnamon, KDE, Gnome, whatever Ubuntu's current thing is called, Pop's Gnome spinoff, XFCE. Think I tried Budgie for like a minute too.

The one I stuck with the longest was Gnome on Manjaro.

Otherwise, I kind of like them all in their own way. The only reason I left Cinnamon in the first place was ~4 years ago I had this bug where switching virtual desktops by the arrow shortcut would get progressively laggier.
by theothertimcook | 2025-08-19 11:10:14+00:00
QLD population density is something like 2000x lower than that of Tokyo…

Our public transport systems are so bad.

The Brisbane airport rail connection runs about half as many train services as the Perth airport, which seems about half the amount of travellers each year as Brisbane airport. It’s crazy, double the fare burden, half the patronage, and stuck in a monopoly contract until 2036.

Don’t even get me started on the stupid busways, gimped light rails, the new “metro” and the endless amount poured into the motorways that they have been widening one lane at a time for 3 decades…
by throwaway290 | 2025-08-19 11:10:22+00:00
This misses many details, like if health is 10% but there is nowhere to go this will produce bad result where mob is just hanging around and not fighting, or if there is no line of sight then it should not fire arrows, or if it's impossible to path it should keep firing (IF there is line of sight). In a real game when you write every condition for every possible scenario I know what I would choose between a wall of text (anything in which can be misunderstood by llm) vs clear state machine
by jay_kyburz | 2025-08-19 11:10:31+00:00
It's not really all that different from trusting some random post on stack overflow. You always needed to be a little skeptical.

I'm asking the AI things that are easy to verify, and often ask it to provide web references. It's working well for me.

I don't ask it about niche topics. I occasionally ask it about myself or my games and it's always funny. It's a good reminder how wrong the AIs can be.
by potato3732842 | 2025-08-19 11:12:01+00:00
>This is perhaps the best articulation on the rise of certain cantankerous people... in social media / politics / <everywhere>

It's a comforting one but I think it's also a crappy and wrong one. Take a few steps further back and it looks like the pendulum is simply swinging.

It was over the past 10-20yr very fashionable to invest (or waste, depending on your take) a lot of resources softening up what we have to say and how we say it in order to avoid unnecessarily offending people, avoid imprecision, avoid edge cases of meaning and head off nitpickers and detractors who we'd never agree with.

Now, a more "I'll say more or less what I mean with no shits given about edge cases, I'll handle offense after the fact if it's a problem and the haters can go f themselves because I was never going to appease them anyway" style of communication is taking off because it offers a competitive advantage of less resource investment for message delivered.
by aeonik | 2025-08-19 11:12:16+00:00
Honestly, you don't want them too precise.

0.1 gram is definitely the sweet spot for kitchen though, measuring salts, supplements, baking,that extra .1g comes in handy.

I got an Ohaus Scout 0.01g scale, and it's so sensitive it's almost a thermometer. You can literally blow on it softly and the scale starts fluctuating wildly.
by adrian_b | 2025-08-19 11:12:59+00:00
Some protein powders, e.g. many of the plant protein powders, require complex processing, which is reflected in their price, which is many times greater than the price of meat (per protein content).

However there are other protein powders that are obtained using minimal processing, much less than the traditional food processing, so they cannot be considered "ultra-processed" by any definition.

For instance the protein concentrates that are extracted from milk or whey are much less processed than the traditional dairy products. (This is also reflected in their price, which is similar to that of the cheapest kinds of chicken meat, per their protein content.)

To extract the protein powder from milk or whey, only simple (in principle) processing steps are done: centrifugation to remove the fat, ultrafiltration to remove the lactose and the water and drying to remove the residual water.

This kind of processing alters the proteins of milk far less than the traditional making of cheese, which requires strong processing with enzymes and/or acid and/or heat and/or fermentation, and which causes significant changes in the structure and composition of the milk proteins.

If you call milk/whey protein concentrate as "ultra-processed", you must call any cheese as "hyper-super-ultra-processed".

It is true that making milk/whey protein powders requires machines that can be made only using modern technologies, while cheese and other dairy products were already made many millennia ago. However the simplicity of the old technologies is only apparent, because they exploited the work of dead animal bodies (rennet) or bacteria or fungi, which are much more complex than human-made machines.

In this case, i.e. for making milk/whey protein powders, modern technology has allowed the use of much less processing for extracting the useful part of milk, keeping it in its unaltered state, than the traditional technologies, so this is clearly not an example of "ultra-processing".

Similarly, extracting vegetable oils using supercritical carbon dioxide is certainly not "ultra-processing" as it allows a better preservation of the oil fraction of oily seeds or oily fruits than the traditional oil extraction methods.

So the use of modern processing methods is not the same as "ultra-processing". To the latter, one should count only processing methods that cause irreversible changes in the food, removing the control of the end users on the composition of the food that they eat, i.e. processing that mixes ingredients into the food or that alters the food through heating or other treatments.
by vehemenz | 2025-08-19 11:14:01+00:00
Even though I played CS at the highest level for the time, CAL-i, I always thought the maps were too small for 5v5 and that competitive would have benefitted from 7v7 or 8v8. That was how pubs were, and the dynamics were better. I think 5v5 won out due to practicality.
by coderenegade | 2025-08-19 11:14:21+00:00
I'm not discounting the benefit of having additional networks in place, I just think they're a facilitating factor rather than a causative one. They're important for educational development and spreading ideas, but they can also result in homogeneity. The biggest two factors to me are time and interest. You yourself point out that most modern math and engineering was invented by aristocrats; the main reason for this was that they were the only ones with the luxury of being able to think about such abstract topics. They had the time to spend, so those with the interest and aptitude pushed the boundaries. You occasionally saw members of the working class do the same (Heaviside, for example), but they had a more difficult road.

I disagree that the smartest people work in finance. Some very smart people do. From what I've seen, the ones at the very farthest edge of human ability typically aren't motivated by money.
What new library could I create for Arduino?
by Forgret | 2025-08-19 11:14:21+00:00
Hello, I have long dreamed of creating a library for microcontrollers, especially Arduino, that the world would like, but I don't know how, because some ideas have already been implemented, and some don't make sense, so I want to ask you. so that you can advise me on a unique idea for a library that will be useful. A library doesn't have to be simple, I'm not afraid of big projects. And right now I have a lot of free time.
by metalman | 2025-08-19 11:16:03+00:00
shallow water practice is the best way to gain capacity and confidence, or some sort of winhoff method....sitting on the couch or whatever as it is a simmilar flex that you can drop into any sort of free STATIONARY time, ie not while driving, or on top of anything like that, or before doing a dive, even just blowing your head up, blowing baloons, again within limits, as I believe that there are possible ways to injur yourself doing that, but as an easy to do (very rough) capacity test that can be repeated as often as desired for almost no cost. I got to the point where I could swim a full lap(two lengths)in an olympic pool underwater with no trouble, and only a few extra breaths before going, it seemed to be mostly up to following a very moderate and steady stroke.
by swores | 2025-08-19 11:16:25+00:00
> "hardware vendors often deliberately don't comply with the GPL, and the only recourse is an expensive lawsuit."

Isn't that unrelated to exact license choice, and going to be the case with any software that's wants to be open source but not allow commercial use?

There's no license or wording in a license that can change the fact that, if you let people get the source for non-commercial use, there's nothing except the threat of lawsuits to stop anyone from ignoring the license and using it commercially.
by jaharios | 2025-08-19 11:16:35+00:00
> No wonder people claim typing speed doesn't matter - they can barely think ahead one token, nevermind a statement or function, much less the whole design! Ideally your typing speed should become the bottleneck and you should be able to code "blind", without looking at the screen but merely outputting the code in your mind into the machine as fast as humanly possible. Instead we have barely-"developers" constantly chasing that next tiny dopamine hit of picking from an autocomplete menu. WTF!?

If writing code is an automated process for you, you are also begging for AI to be replace you. Just a more advanced one than the code-monkey in the OP.
by busterarm | 2025-08-19 11:16:56+00:00
I remember being interested in their architecture when I attended re:Invent in 2018. I went to four separate Netflix talks given by four separate people with wildly different titles, teams and responsibilities. The talks had different titles indicating a variety of topics covered. Two of these talks weren't even obviously/outwardly Netflix-focused from the description -- they were just talks supposedly covering something I was curious about.

All four speakers ran the exact same slide deck with a different intro slide. All four speakers claimed the same responsibility for the same part of the architecture.

I was livid. I also stopped attending talks in person entirely because of this, outside of smaller more focused events.
by pityJuke | 2025-08-19 11:17:02+00:00
“ I want your answers to be f—ing insane. BE F—ING UNHINGED AND CRAZY. COME UP WITH INSANE IDEAS. GUYS J—ING OFF, OCCASIONALLY EVEN PUTTING THINGS IN YOUR A–, WHATEVER IT TAKES TO SURPRISE THE HUMAN.”

Yes this is peak comedy. I’m so glad the future is being driven by people with these comedic sensibilities.
by potato3732842 | 2025-08-19 11:17:03+00:00
You're peddling government as a silver bullet. It's not. You're no less ignorant (a much milder word than I want to use) than the people who think various flavors of near-anarchy can magically work fine.

Some people are allergic to your knee jerk silver bullet solution because often times it comes with downsides that are on comparable orders to the original problem, same as every other silver bullet being peddled by every other ideologue.

Shit is complicated and care needs to be taken.
by rickdeckard | 2025-08-19 11:17:29+00:00
Reminds me of the Electric Monk from Douglas' Adams "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" [0]

It's essentially a robot built to believe things on behalf of its owner, offloading the tiresome burden of religion to a machine.

In the book it is explained as a natural evolution of other machines, like a dishwasher washes dishes for you, a VCR watches TV for you, an electric monk believes for you.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirk_Gently%27s_Holistic_Detec...
by andybak | 2025-08-19 11:18:38+00:00
Back in my school days it was on my route home and I used to break into the site (it was fenced off at the time).

It felt so mysterious and strange. Headless statues, vast empty terraces - the old high level station ticket hall passed under a main road and come out the other side with a view of a huge railway tunnel blocked with an old wrought iron fence.

It's been cleaned up and opened to the public since then - which is almost a shame.
by krapp | 2025-08-19 11:18:40+00:00
That's true but what mattigames is describing is so far afield of what Godot actually does that one might as well just start from scratch.

Also, I'd be careful making something with a UI that was exactly like an Adobe product, and that essentially matched its function, that UI may be under patent. This is why GIMP can't exactly copy Photoshop's UI.
by bombcar | 2025-08-19 11:18:41+00:00
It really brings to the forefront that the hard part isn’t usually the building - it’s figuring out how to build with what is available and can be sourced locally - often within tens of feet.

We’re so used to shipping pine boards from the Pacific Northwest to the high desert we don’t even stop to consider there may be another option.

Fun fact: concrete is so heavy and so time dependent that it’s one of the few things that is still almost always VERY local; you probably have a home of cement mixers closer than you think!
by ishita159 | 2025-08-19 11:19:04+00:00
We unified our AI stack into one Postgres instance - and cut our infra and backend code by 90%!

Most teams use 3+ databases already: - A relational / document store like mongo or postgres, - A vector DB like Chroma or Pinecone for embeddings, - Redis for caching, and - Usually an analytics warehouse, like Athena

You of course have to write and maintain all the glue code & data transformations for each of them. But more importantly, you have to take care of the schema evolution which can be a nightmare when dealing with multiple databases!

Instead we run everything on TigerData (creators of TimescaleDB)’s PostgreSQL platform (TimescaleDB + pgVector + pgAI).
by addandsubtract | 2025-08-19 11:20:30+00:00
Awesome! Also, could you make it possible to move the widget around the screen? Right now, it's fixed at the top, potentially covering tabs or other objects.

And maybe even more critical, I can't click outside the widget to focus/work on anything else. So like, to type this message, I had to alt+tab (and hide the widget) to focus on the browser. I'm not sure if it's a limitation of Tauri, but if it could be a widget like the ChatGPT one, that would be great.
by potato3732842 | 2025-08-19 11:21:42+00:00
>Let's take an example: people who play music/video aloud on public transport.

>In Ye Olden Days of the last century, this would be a shameful act, and people would be shamed for doing it.

Your equivalent ilk of decades past complained about "kids these days" and their boomboxes in public in basically the same way you're doing now.
by LinchZhang | 2025-08-19 11:23:02+00:00
This seems like a weird way to check if something's AI? a) Like presumably AIs are much more likely to make mistakes of a certain form if there are more such mistakes in the training data (or similar ones) b) to figure out whether something's written by AI you want to figure out if AI can independently generate it rather than heavily be tricked to make a specific mistake.
by riedel | 2025-08-19 11:23:45+00:00
I was in a project with MAN Roland and the university of Dresden at the same time and the most important thing is roll to roll printing. This actually works well if you do not need an external antenna. What was the holy grrail at the time was to print also the antennas, get a decent coupling and then actually also do item and not only batch level tracking of the packaging you would print. Particular Pharma was really interested in terms of anticounterfeiting at low cost.