MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by xandrius | 2025-08-15 11:44:43+00:00
The difference is that for most words you can easily get 90% there in English and, even if you don't read it properly, the listener can somewhat get what you are trying to say.

And say you don't know how to read "conscientiousness" but you know how to read "con" and "ousness" you can try to go for con-shu-tiouness and at least you're somewhere.

It's not the case with Kanjis, sure you might know one part of a word but you might be wrong. Also similar looking kanji don't read similarly at all, so even that is out of the window.

And don't get me started on the approach of applying memoization techniques purely on the strokes of a kanji, that's gonna hurt more than not.

Simple examples:

- 末 and 未

- 大 and 犬

- 千 and 干
by alpaca128 | 2025-08-15 11:45:12+00:00
Does speaking in your native language, speaking in a second language, thinking about your life and doing maths feel exactly the same to you?

> Prove to me that human thought is not predicting the most probable next token.

Explain the concept of color to a completely blind person. If their brain does nothing but process tokens this should be easy.

> How can you tell a human actually understands?

What a strange question coming from a human. I would say if you are a human with a consciousness you are able to answer this for yourself, and if you aren't no answer will help.
by K0balt | 2025-08-15 11:45:40+00:00
The most clever lines of code are the ones you don’t write. Often this is a matter of properly defining the problem in terms of data structure. LLMs are not at all good at seeing that a data structure is inside out and that by turning it right side in, we can fix half the problems.

More significantly though, OP seems right on to me. The basic functionality of LLMs is handy for a code writing assistant, but does not replace a software engineer, and is not ever likely too no matter how many janky accessories we bolt on. LLMs are fundamentally semantic pattern matching engines, and are only problem solvers in the context of problems that are either explicitly or implicitly defined and solved in their training data. They will always require supervision because there is fundamentally no difference between a useful LLM output and a “hallucination” except the utility rating that a human judge applies to the output.

LLMs are good at solving fully defined, fully solved problems. A lot of work falls into that category, but some does not.
by el_jay | 2025-08-15 11:46:02+00:00
While there is certainly an argument to be made that many contemporary “Western” Pseudo-Christian Superempire nations face a crisis of short-termism, there are also ancient bits of “Western” infrastructure like the Roman aqueducts still in use today - off the top of my head, the Aqua Virgo which supplies Rome’s Trevi Fountain, dated either 19BC or 19AD, I forget; Spain’s Segovia Aqueduct from the first century AD; and the Pont du Gard in Nîmes, from the same period.

Not quite as old, or at the scale of the Dujiangyan system, but still evidence that the “Western” culture did once build for long term. Less ancient, but more indicative, are the European cathedrals built by multiple generations over a century.
by druskacik | 2025-08-15 11:46:45+00:00
I always wondered about the idea posed in this short story. Does the "everything that can happen does happen" theory apply to free will? If there really are infinite universes, is there a one when I'm walking a street full of people and out of nowhere we all start singing Ode to Joy in perfect unisono? Or get naked and have a massive orgy? No law of physics rules this out.

(Sorry, I'm a layman.)
by ivape | 2025-08-15 11:46:59+00:00
Makes good sense. If we were like Lions, every action we’d ever do would be roughly correct (can still be a mistake, but not wrong). To echo Death, you can see how I’m failing at describing this because I’m still constrained by right and wrong.

For example, a Lion committing infanticide is not immoral. By all definitions of an animal, nothing a human does is immoral.

So why are we immoral then?
by pantalaimon | 2025-08-15 11:47:22+00:00
What does the Swiss method (predicatable and consistent funding for the railway) have to do with population size and density?

Germany has the same problem. The railway can't plan much ahead as funding is always at the political whims of the next government, prestigious mega projects get funded while existing infrastructure crumbles - and now you have another mega-project to remediate existing infrastructure over the next years all at once, but for this they throw copious amounts of money at construction companies to ramp up that fast.

If there had been constant funding and maintenance, the network wouldn't be in such disarray in the first place and it would have come much cheaper than fixing it all at once in a short time frame.
by rs186 | 2025-08-15 11:47:26+00:00
My understanding of what this article does not say aloud: it seems that this startup wants to get "free exposure"* by being the owner of the open source repo and potentially good reputation from media coverage. It's not unreasonable, and I don't want to comment on whether those specific motivations are "good" or "bad", but do want to point out obvious issues:

> we like open source and want Unity MCP to stay relevant and open source indefinitely.

It goes both ways. What happens if your startup goes under, which has a 99% probability? By that time, the project roadmap and governance is completely under your company's control. How/if are you going to "return" the project to open source community, and would it still matter then?

> SEO of the repo gets reset

To be honest it is not completely unreasonable, and that is indeed one more thing to worry if it completely depends on another company's whim. Also, SEO is rarely a thing people talk about when maintaining a project, and this is the first time I see "SEO" and OSS appearing in the same sentence.

> It's possible that nobody cares when tiny companies acquire fairly popular OSS repos. Our social posts barely moved the needle.

What do you expect? If I have to guess, there is not a ton of overlap of (heavy) social media users and open source contributors, and even less so for these projects that focus on specific areas.

* Not really free, there is a one-time purchase fee, apparently.
by potato3732842 | 2025-08-15 11:47:28+00:00
>Somehow there were more undeveloped areas

Everyone lived in suburbs that still had all the B/C/D rate lots undeveloped because it wasn't worth it. The country was still sprawling out, had mostly yet to pass zoning and other asinine regulation, etc, etc.

The incentive to cram industrial parks and office parks and housing into every nook and cranny of our towns and cities came later over the course of the 80s because regulation speculatively front-loaded compliance costs into construction and when that happens it makes more sense to develop a bunch of D rate lots already on roads and bulldoze starter homes and mobile homes already on road and utilities than incur all the "you'll need an engineered site plan for that, that'll be $50k" cost to proactively prevent problems that previously would have been addressed on an as needed basis after the fact where pertinent.

It's basically the same incentive structure you see with zoning wherein grandfathered in stuff goes up in value. Unless you've got some monstrously profitable project to justify the expense the numbers work better to buy out something that exists than to blow untold thousands fighting for permission or jumping through hoops to do greenfield development.
by wzdd | 2025-08-15 11:48:15+00:00
The source includes a direct comment from the secretary of state that Category 1 of the OSA is about regulating sites with a significant influence over public discourse.

Therefore it makes perfect sense to say that the OSA is at least in part about regulating sites with a significant influence over public discourse. I find that at least somewhat alarming; is the "incredibly misleading" part that this is not all that the OSA is about?

(For reference, a rough description of the Categories are: you use a recommender system or allow sharing the site's content (1), you're a general-purpose search engine (2A), or you allow DMs between users (2B). Source: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukdsi/2025/9780348267174 )
by cs02rm0 | 2025-08-15 11:48:49+00:00
I think this sounds a little like it's viewed through a lens of survivor bias.

If the UK had made a success of HS2 (difficult to imagine with governments in much of living memory, but let's sidestep all of that) then it could have been claimed, perhaps with some merit, that the UK was able to do something with rail infrastructure that the Swiss could never because they were hamstrung by their approach.
by exasperaited | 2025-08-15 11:49:02+00:00
I never understood it.

I guess the Sigma film SLRs and DSLRs were in some ways functionally behind (in terms of stuff like handling and autofocus), and it wouldn't necessarily be cheap to catch up. Also early-2000s era Sigma didn't actually own all of Foveon yet, I suppose.

There has always been some suggestion that Sigma didn't entertain offers to become a big camera brand because it would lose the quiet tolerance it had earned from Japanese camera brands that allowed it to make most of its money from third-party lenses without squabbles over proprietary information.
by bawana | 2025-08-15 11:49:18+00:00
‘Why does the logic fail when a nation of 1.5b wants to make stuff cheaply and send it to you for affordable prices? How does it hurt you?’

The people in power in the US lose their grip. As the rest of us become subscribers to a better economic model, support for the domestic lords wanes. Why didnt Soviets want to be western? What happened to the soviet union when the western meme penetrated their mindshare?
by _1tem | 2025-08-15 11:49:30+00:00
This was Peter Naur’s observation in his 1985 paper Programming as Theory Building. One of the best papers I’ve ever read. Programming IS mostly building castles in the air of your head, not the code on the screen.

If you do the thinking and let the LLM do the typing it works incredibly well. I can write code 10x faster with AI, but I’m maintaining the mental model in my head, the “theory” as Naur calls it. But if you try to outsource the theory to the LLM (build me an app that does X) you’re bound to fail in horrible ways. That’s why Claude Code is amazing but Replit can only do basic toy apps.
by getoffyrhihrse | 2025-08-15 11:50:33+00:00
> Having common sense and wearing protective gear when you have fun is cool, not uptight.

In the 70s, there was little protective gear available for bikers. Motorcyclists had fat helmets, football players had helmets, and maybe some fast roller skaters had fat knee-guards or elbow guards. 80s kids were pampered.
by boricj | 2025-08-15 11:50:36+00:00
> European grids aren't that much better either, loads of investments needed in order to connect more renewables.

On one hand, Spain and Portugal recently suffered a complete blackout. On the other hand, instead of cascading the blackout France shrugged it off.

The last time there was a country-wide blackout in France was back in the seventies. I'm not saying our grid infrastructure is perfect, but here we're not worried about losing electricity for an entire week whenever there's a winter storm.
by rrr_oh_man | 2025-08-15 11:50:39+00:00
AI / scraper bots. Headless Chrome and Puppeteer default to 800x600 iirc.

Edit: Yup, seems correct. See Puppeteer docs [1]. Several issues suggest the same for Chromium. [2]

[1] https://pptr.dev/api/puppeteer.connectoptions

[2] e.g. https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40601921
by numpad0 | 2025-08-15 11:50:40+00:00
It actually works the same way in Japanese. Radicals give rough clues about meanings as well as pronunciation. Similar looking kanji do read similarly. It's just... you can read pronounce "brochures" in either French style or in Southern American, and which one is more appropriate depends.

edit: Simple examples:

- 臆 and 億 - 誤 and 語 - 諦 and 締
by mike-cardwell | 2025-08-15 11:51:00+00:00
> We don't see the debugger output and go "how do I make this bad output go away?!?"

In the past, I've worked with developers that do. You ask them to investigate and deal with an error message, and all they do is whatever makes the error go away. Oh, a null pointer exception is thrown? Lets wrap it in a try/catch and move on.
by mcv | 2025-08-15 11:51:10+00:00
I've often wondered about that, because I often see them used interchangeably (and not just here). But you're absolutely right. Here's a random site I found that explains it: https://www.difference.wiki/bevel-vs-bezel/

Is the similarity of the word the only reason they often get mixed up? I think another factor is that flat surfaces surrounded by an angled bevel are fairly common. For example. I just noticed that the bezel of one of my monitors is also beveled.
by rsc | 2025-08-15 11:51:30+00:00
[Also posted to Lobsters: https://lobste.rs/s/ms94ja/what_is_go_proxy_even_doing#c_vz2...]

I apologize for the traffic. We clearly need to look at the “thundering herd” you are observing. That shouldn’t be happening at all.

Separately, the bug we fixed last time were about repeatedly cloning a repo in sequence even if it was unchanged, not about redundant parallel fetches. We fixed that only for Git, because Git makes it very easy to look at a branch or tag and get the tree hash, without downloading the full repo. This is exposed as the go command’s -reuse flag. The relevant Git code is at https://go.dev/src/cmd/go/internal/modfetch/codehost/git.go#... (CheckReuse).

What we need from any VCS to implement the reuse check is a cheap way to download a list of every tag and branch along with a cryptographic file tree checksum for each one, without doing a full repo clone. At the time, I convinced myself Mercurial did not support this. Perhaps I was wrong or perhaps it does now. If anyone can help us understand how that works, we could implement the -reuse flag for Mercurial too. (Any other VCSs would be great too, but Git is #1 by a very wide margin and I believe Mercurial is #2 also by a wide margin.)

Again, apologies for all the traffic, and thanks to Ted for the excellent analysis. We will look into both.
by jmclnx | 2025-08-15 11:52:21+00:00
So a case of "socialism" working vs US.

So instead of encouraging roof top solar and wind, the US is now doubling down on fossil fuels.

That means individuals can no longer afford to go with solar these days. Plus in areas that people went with solar, some laws were put in place to force them to still pay utilities even though they supply back to the grid.

I guess this is "winning".
by JKCalhoun | 2025-08-15 11:52:52+00:00
Yeah, trying to think of the origin of the style... Sorayama was the king but perhaps he owes a little to Richard Corben. And perhaps Richard owes something to the guys in So-Cal like Ed "Big Daddy" Roth and his "Weirdo" t-shirts. (Ha ha, notorious enough at the time to inspire a Leave it to Beaver episode.)
by PaulRobinson | 2025-08-15 11:53:31+00:00
Not buying that.

The argument made in TFA isn't that the Swiss method works because of population size or GDP per capita, but because the processes and goals are completely different.

They work backwards from an agreed goal - written into law - that continuous improvement into infrastructure is a requirement of all governments, regardless of political bent. I actually don't think this is controversial, even in the UK, it's why there is now majority support for nationalisation of the railway operators (and water companies, and more) - it effectively forces capital expenditure rather than the decades of capital extraction we've suffered from.

Some of the Swiss projects are simpler because of geography (shorter distances), but some are harder (long tunnels through mountains). GDP per capita is an output, not an input - if we'd started doing this decades ago instead of believing the Regan/Thatcher nonsense we now know just doesn't work long-term, our GDP per capita would have benefited and it would unlikely be a 2x difference.

As a country the UK is so quick to dismiss initiatives from other countries that are shown to work there - from capital investment into infrastructure, to sovereign wealth funds, to encouraging retail investment into stock markets more (compare the US landscape to the UK landscape), to abolishing leaseholds - all because "that won't work here". Yet the data being cited - including by yourself - is not data. It's a hypothesis. Perhaps we should just give it a go, eh? Maybe for 10 years, let's try something different and see if any of it is better than the current baseline? Because it probably will be.

The UK thinks it is special, and in some ways it is, but it is also constantly shooting itself in the foot so that the Duke of Westminster and Duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall can keep making money, and so that the ghost of long-dead prime ministers with nothing to add of value to the 21st century can remain venerated by the political class.

We need to wake the hell up.
by robluxus | 2025-08-15 11:53:32+00:00
Maybe OP just used an ai editor to add their silly comments, so that would be fair game I guess? Or some humans just add silly comments. The article didn't stand out to me as emberrassingly ai-written. Not an em dash in sight :)

Edit: just found this disclaimer in the article:

> I’ll show the generating R code, with a liberal sprinking of comments so it’s hopefully not too inscrutable.

Doesn't come out the gate and say who wrote the comments but ostensibly OP is a new grad / junior, the commenting style is on-brand.
by pu_pe | 2025-08-15 11:54:08+00:00
> [China's] reserve margin has never dipped below 80%–100% nationwide, meaning it has consistently maintained at least twice the capacity it needs (...). That level of cushion is unthinkable in the United States, where regional grids typically operate with a 15% reserve margin and sometimes less

That's a huge difference!

This also means that in a scenario where credible alternatives to Nvidia and AMD emerge in mainland China, the Chinese will win even if their chips are far less efficient.
by taylodl | 2025-08-15 11:54:40+00:00
I read the index every month just to get a pulse on the industry at large. This month has me wondering what's going on?!

- Perl jumped from 25 to 9?! Perl?! Perl's heyday was 20-30 years ago. What has happened to suddenly make it jump?

- ADA jumped from 30 to 13? I know ADA was (is?) a DoD standard at one time but I thought it only hung on the list due to maintaining legacy software. This kind of jump makes me wonder what else is going on?

- Delphi/Object Pascal should be losing ground as like Perl it's time to shine was 20-30 years ago. Due to legacy software being retired I'd expect to see Delphi continually drop down the list. But instead it has ticked up. I wonder why?

- Rust the HN darling should be rising as more new projects adopt it, yet it's falling. Is that a measurement error or is HN a Rust echo chamber and the ecosystem is actually in decline?

- Lisp is ahead of COBOL? Really? Are enough people finally retiring their legacy COBOL systems to drive COBOL down the list?

It's a weird list this month.
by plastic-enjoyer | 2025-08-15 11:54:48+00:00
> They'll grift their way to them gladly, but investing in infrastructure that'll take years to build and won't be useful until they are gone is not interesting to them.

I think this may have something to do with the professionalisation of politics, or the existence of career politicians. If you want to climb up the ladder in politics, working on short-term goals is probably the best way to do this. Infrastructure projects are high-risk, low-reward. Infrastructure projects may take a long time, may be reversed/aborted by the next government, may piss off potential voters, may require to fight off NIMBYs, or aren't noticed due to the preparedness paradox.
by xscott | 2025-08-15 11:55:24+00:00
> Picking at tangential points while avoiding the main argument hmm....

I've tried (and occasionally failed) to avoid the parts of what you wrote which were just the typical flame war bait. And of course I'm guilty of trying to antagonize you in a few places. The topic is interesting, but our conversation about it was not.

I appreciate the link to the UK law, but the rest of this comment thread is mostly two people talking past each other.
by burmanm | 2025-08-15 11:55:35+00:00
By what standard is it superior to WoW on Windows? Starting from the available hardware, the Windows world is far superior for WoW resulting in better visuals and more consistent fps which is a good start of having enjoyable experience.

Also I really can't think of the way Mac's mouse settings in WoW work better than the Windows ones. Scrolling, mouse movement are all having more settings under Windows to customize them compared to the experience on Mac (even with all the tools such as Mos to help with the bad external mouse handling in Mac).

So what exactly is so superior? I play WoW on both platforms and when I have a choice (that is, when playing at my home desktop - on my summer cabin I only have the Mac option) it's always the Windows one I select. It's nice that it works in Mac so I can play everywhere as I only have Mac laptop, but the sometimes weird graphics bugs, worse performance and odd issues with rendering displacing my WAs and other stuff just doesn't inspire confidence in Mac gaming compared to using Windows. And the mouse movement.. ugh.
by fransje26 | 2025-08-15 11:55:35+00:00
> a station wagon version of the W124 chassis with the OM603 turbo diesel.

That's the car my father regretted not buying.. He bought the W124 250D when still in Europe, and imported it to the US, assuming it would be a better car, as being built for the German market.

Once he arrived in the US, he found out that the US version was, in fact, much better. With better suspension, double air-conditioning units (if memory serves), all options included, ventilated front discs, etc. And for a lower price.

In hindsight a bad choice, but that type of information was difficult to find in those days..
by ben_w | 2025-08-15 11:55:36+00:00
The UK — actually, no, just England in this case — less cohesive than Switzerland? Switzerland gives a lot power to each canton. It is also famously mountainous, which is hard on infrastructure projects. They're also a through-route from Germany (and Austria and France) to Italy, so looking at just their own economy for industrialisation and load is insufficient, as this wouldn't explain the existence of e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Base_Tunnel