MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by r_singh | 2025-08-31 14:53:31+00:00
I can understand the sarcasm and respect your take

Science has helped reduce mortality at birth and manage or even eliminate a lot of diseases like malaria, HIV, small pox, polio and many more. Also for burns, broken bones and accidents. And continues to. I advocate vaccines. I myself took the Anti Covid shot 3 times. And use medicines and supplements regularly.

There’s another side to it though.

At what point do I just take an Adderall that’s prescribed to me? Or a pain killer? Rather than trying preventive lifestyle cures? We need a way to tell when to apply what but IMHO in practical life what gains ground is what serves the providers more rather than the beneficiaries. An interesting example is that Anaesthesia was a more quickly adopted invention than Anti-Septic. Even though the latter is more important for the safety of patients. But the former makes life easier for docs, hence it was adopted much faster.

There is a place for both and knowing when to apply which is key. You cannot trust HCPs using allopathy aka science backed by academia in every case cause they’re motivated by self interest and aren’t perfect! Even people like Gabriel Weinberg have acknowledged this in his book Super Thinking when touching upon inefficiencies in healthcare and academia.

I believe that to be able to trust science more we need to save science from p-value manipulation by self-interest groups…

This video by Veritasium also talks about how the accuracy of most published research is contestable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42QuXLucH3Q

I don’t think this is an easy problem to solve or has ever been
by uzerfcwn | 2025-08-31 14:53:37+00:00
The core difference between sums and unions is that sum types have cardinality |A+B| = |A| + |B|, whereas union types have cardinality |A∪B| = |A| + |B| - |A∩B|. As you noted, type systems with union types, such as Typescript, also support sum types because you can create disjoint wrapper types (like Ok and Err) and their union type will be semantically equivalent to a sum type, since the intersection is an empty set. In this sense, union types are strictly more powerful than sum types.

The downside is that union types require some notion of subtyping, since otherwise A∩B is always empty for distinct A and B. Unfortunately, subtyping is apparently very difficult to implement in HM-like type systems (like Rust and ML) such that it plays well with type inference.[0] Hence, the downside of having union types in a language is that users have to write out types more often.

Unlike kibwen, I don't think Rust's type system is particularly essential for new languages. It's a design choice where one side has more powerful types but the other side has more powerful type inference.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindley%E2%80%93Milner_type_sy...
by fijiaarone | 2025-08-31 14:53:45+00:00
NCR maintains legacy POS systems with a mostly outsourced labor force.

Splunk maintains a logging aggregator with a mostly San Francisco staff.

A manager’s job at NCR is mostly about cracking the whip to try to get your team to solve boring enterprise client technical problems, but they usually don’t have enough context to understand the problem.

A manager’s job at Splunk is to motivate a team that used to work at a hip, fast growing startup who just got their payout from an Cisco acquisition and feel like the product is getting sidelined.
by blfr | 2025-08-31 14:53:58+00:00
Yeah, if Google kills ReVanced, I may as well get an iPhone. What's the difference at this point. You can't even unlock the bootloader on most of the quality Android phones.

However, the crusade against the word and concept of "sideloading" is really weird. Yeah, installing from the repo is normal, and all the windows-land "download an .exe/.msi to invoke an installer" ways that then may or may not update the app are unusual and apart from an ordered process of system management.

The proper alternative to Google Play is F-Droid, not downloading/baking .apks.
by ndriscoll | 2025-08-31 14:53:58+00:00
Handheld PCs like steam deck or legion go seem like a compelling value, at least if you were going to consider a phone in the $500+ price range. Maybe also something like the Mecha comet on the lower end. If you're in an area where banks require an app, you could then go for the absolute cheapest phone you can find (which can probably be years out of date since the whole exercise has nothing to do with security) and treat it as a single purpose device.
by diggan | 2025-08-31 14:54:01+00:00
> Better results if you… tip the AI, offer it physical touch, you need to say the words “go slow and take a deep breath first”…

I'm not saying I've proven it or anything, but it doesn't sound far-fetched that a thing that generates new text based on previous text, would be affected by the previous text, even minor details like using ALL CAPS or just lowercase, since those are different tokens for the LLM.

I've noticed the same thing with what exact words you use. State a problem as a lay/random person, using none of the domain words for things, and you get a worse response compared to if you used industry jargon. It kind of makes sense to me considering how they work internally, but happy to be proven otherwise if you're sitting on evidence either way :)
by Dylan16807 | 2025-08-31 14:54:13+00:00
> However, it does not really matter whether we can build a perfect sphere or circle.

When talking about whether arbitrarily precise numbers are real in the universe, it extremely matters.

Sadly, atoms exist. In some ways that makes things more complicated, but it's the truth. Anything made of discrete chunks in a grid can't have arbitrarily precise dimensions.
by wowczarek | 2025-08-31 14:54:34+00:00
It amazes me (and that's on the account of me getting older) how people not immediately associate it with the a BB phone. I remember complaining at how BlackBerry 10 took away lots of usability tricks and keyboard shortcuts the classic BlackBerry OS had, and also how laughable it was that the original iPhone didn't even support copying and pasting on release. Oh how things have changed.
by mathiaspoint | 2025-08-31 14:55:07+00:00
Modem Manager on Linux handles ppp and texting (even MMS if you're willing to build mmsd which isn't easy) with just a USB modem. You don't need a phone at all.

All phones have these days is "the app ecosystem" which is designed and optimized just to rent you out to corporations. Exposing yourself to it is almost always a loss.
by nly | 2025-08-31 14:55:16+00:00
This isn't true.

Atomic operations work inside the confines of the cache coherence protocol. Nothing has to be flushed to main memory, or even a lower cache

An atomic operation does something more along the lines of emitting an invalidation, putting the cache line in to an exclusive state, and then ignores find and invalidation requests from other cores while it operates.
by RadiozRadioz | 2025-08-31 14:55:21+00:00
Part of the issue is that phone manufacturers actively make this difficult. Hardly bootloaders are unlocked, barely any drivers are freely available, all the hardware is so tightly intertwined & locked in that you can still brick these things with no recourse (though this has improved). Not to mention 3rd party apps that have built with dependency on Google Play Services which needs to be replaced, banking apps with "security" attestation - using free software on a phone is magnitudes more hostile than doing so on a PC.
by oli5679 | 2025-08-31 14:55:23+00:00
HHI is a pretty interesting metric. It’s calculated by taking each firm’s market share, squaring it, and summing across all firms.

This gives the probability that two randomly chosen customers belong to the same firm.

In one micro models of oligopoly, Cournot competition, it lines up directly with the markup firms can sustain.

Outside of theory, it’s an intuitive way to average together the market power of all firms, with increases in market share for bigger players being weighted more heavily.
by DoctorOW | 2025-08-31 14:55:32+00:00
I'm glad it works for you but I guess that doesn't really cover the use case I was talking about because I want to have a bunch of these. As an example, I threw together a quick web hook processor, data from one service reformatted to fit another. I don't really need to spin up a whole new VPS for an endpoint that'll only be hit once or twice a week, so this is the workflow for doing that on the server I already have.

PHP:

- vim projects/webhook.php

C#:

- vim projects/webhook.cs - Assign a port number - Reconfigure Nginx/Caddy to serve that port number - Reconfigure systemd to dotnet run projects/webhook.cs on startup
by lawn | 2025-08-31 14:55:53+00:00
In Sweden banks require you to have the BankID authentication app to login on web page (and banking apps, and many other pages).

Banks may offer a physical device but that's another device you have to being with you, and it's not supported by all services anyway.

While not required the same way as water or air is required, it's super limiting and inconvenient to live in Sweden and not have access to the BankID app (either on Android or iOS).
by quotemstr | 2025-08-31 14:56:48+00:00
You're staking out quite the postmodernist position there. All models are wrong, so who's to say that Alice's data corruption is worse than Bob's man page typo? The important thing is we stick to process with a proven track record, right?

I don't buy it. Object level considerations do matter. Alice's bug really is worse than Bob's. That "proven track record" shouldn't apply to Alice, and insisting that it does for the sake of process, in a way indifferent to the facts of the situation, is just a pretext for doing primate social hierarchy deference rituals in a situation in which they're producing a worse outcome and everyone knows it.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-08-31 14:56:50+00:00
Possibly, but never underestimate the short-sightedness of real estate developers. In places like Florida, they force them to design storm-resistant housing (post-Andrew, mainly).

Up here, after Sandy, any house south of Montauk Highway, is basically uninsurable. So you have a lot of waterfront property, that people can't sell. The insurance companies basically enforce it.

My mother was big into managing stormwater runoff (in Maryland). It was one of her casus belli (She had more than one –She was pretty scrappy).

Real estate developers hated her.
by adolph | 2025-08-31 14:58:14+00:00
I recall mentioned here ttl.sh, which as I looked it up [0], uses through Docker a CNCF project called Distribution Registry [1] which implements the core container registry functions (and appears to have additional utility, like being a pull-through cache).

0. https://github.com/replicatedhq/ttl.sh/blob/main/registry/en...

1. https://distribution.github.io/distribution/
by gruez | 2025-08-31 14:58:20+00:00
I'm not claiming that they're literally unusable, only that they're unusable by most people's standards. Case in point, when was the last time you've seen a touchid iPhone? The last such device was introduced as recently as 2022 (or 2017 if you only count "mainstream" models). The 2022 model is still in support, and 2017 models were still getting security updates as of 5 months ago, yet virtually nobody uses them. If so many people ditched their iPhones while they're in support, what gains could there possibly be to allow people to flash third party ROMs? I'm sure there's some diehard enthusiasts that'd keep it alive, but as I argued above, it's not going to make a meaningful difference.
by slug | 2025-08-31 14:58:23+00:00
All my personal and family computers are more than 10 year old, running latest Ubuntu. They have probably slower CPUs than that 8 year old iphone, but can run the latest web and email clients just fine. These are almost all salvaged from e-waste. I have a drawer full of old phones that could make very useful computer nodes, but instead of that I have to get (buy) some semi open raspberry pis since those phones are locked down.
by mzajc | 2025-08-31 14:58:58+00:00
> Plenty of banks will say "only available in Chrome" or "you must be running version xyz of your browser".

Despite bogus requirements like these, websites have to rely on hacks to figure out what browser you're using, usually making it trivial to spoof (especially between browsers using the same engine). More importantly, websites can't prevent extensions from running, which I believe was one of WEI's goals.

> You'll also notice that modern phones have a "spam caller" feature.

I have yet to see a smartphone that enforces such feature and does not allow the user to disable or configure it.

> At a network level, STIR/SHAKEN is also trying to block you from answering fraudulent calls.

I am unfamiliar with STIR/SHAKEN, but Wikipedia describes it as "a suite of protocols and procedures intended to combat caller ID spoofing". This is fraudulent in the sense of "the caller is not who they claim to be," and not "this caller is on our blacklist" or even "is not on our whitelist". YMMV as some countries require GSM subscribers to ID themselves, but it's still far from a central entity deciding who is allowed to call you.
Show HN: A Simple Demonstration of PassKeys in iOS
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-08-31 14:59:09+00:00
This is a short series that I wrote up, demonstrating a [crazy simple] CRUD client/server app, in native Swift (iOS), that implements PassKeys (Authorization Services SDK, and lbuchs/WebAuthn on the server).

It demonstrates both UIKit and SwiftUI.
by garciasn | 2025-08-31 14:59:37+00:00
I don’t care at all about the pope; they’re meaningless entities.

The President, however, especially when Congress is forced to toe their line, is. No president should be permitted to be more than 20 years older than the median age of the general population when they’re done leading the country. In this case, they shouldn’t be more than 58y old when their 8y term is up. This way, they and their progeny need to live with the decisions made for at least ~20y after they’re out of office.

There’s a reason there is forced retirement in some industries and government groups. Why the fuck we don’t enforce similar rules on the president I’ll never know.
by PaulStatezny | 2025-08-31 14:59:42+00:00
> programmers agree that simpler solutions...are preferred, but the disagreements start about which ones are simpler

Low ego wins.

1. Given: The quality of a codebase as a whole is greatly affected by its level of consistency + cohesiveness

2. Therefore: The best codebases are created by groups that either (1) internally have similar taste or (2) are comprised of low ego people willing to bend their will to the established conventions of the codebase.

Obviously, this comes with caveats. (Objectively bad patterns do exist.) But in general:

Low-ego → Following existing conventions → They become familiar → They seem simpler
by otterley | 2025-08-31 15:00:02+00:00
> You didn’t buy a physical book, you bought the paper, but the words are owned and licensed by the publisher.

Correct.

> You will need their permission to read it under an approved light, to sell it again, and even it lend it.

No. The physical media is transferable and the implied license carries with it. You just can’t make a copy and then retain it if you give the original copy away.
by obeyeater | 2025-08-31 15:00:43+00:00
I use https://github.com/nycksw/ocd which is just the famous StreakyCobra suggestion plus a pre-commit hook to prevent accidentally checking in your whole homedir. There's also a big ignore-file to prevent checking in secrets. I use it daily across several systems. It's intuitive if you use Git a lot. I don't miss my old pattern of farming symlinks.
by nullc | 2025-08-31 15:02:10+00:00
One thing to keep in mind is that correction always comes as some expense of detection.

Generally a code that can always detect N errors can only always correct N/2 errors. So you detect an errored block, you correct up to N/2 errors. The block now passes but if the block actually had N errors, your correction will be incorrect and you now have silent corruption.

The solution to this is just to have an excess of error correction power and then don't use all of it. But that can be hard to do if you're trying to shoehorn it into an existing 32-bit crc.

How big are the blocks that the CRC units cover in bcachefs?
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-08-31 15:02:17+00:00
There are no contradictions where you pretend they are. You can’t claim something doesn’t make sense because you have nothing to oppose to it. Nice try in your last paragraph anyway.

Most European countries can fail at the same things while not having a shared culture identity. I have pointed you towards one example.

Same about America. This is not a contradiction. America purposefully doesn’t integrate people because there is nothing to actually integrate them into. America taken as a whole is from my point of view not a nation. It is a collection of groups often with little in common forming a country but in tension about how it should work. Some subgroups in the USA could arguably be considered nations with shared identities but certainly not the federation.

I will hasard you actually are the problem.
by wkat4242 | 2025-08-31 15:02:19+00:00
That is indeed high, I wonder why. I doubt the welfare system is the cause though. Most of the countries in Europe have pretty socialist tendencies. Making it a heartless society like the US certainly isn't the solution.

I think self centered is true but more in terms of the environment, the younger generation will feel the effects of climate change much worse. Whereas the boomer generation still pretends nothing is going on. Another reason I'm glad not to have a car and not consume too much. I don't even have aircon.
by tphummel | 2025-08-31 15:03:33+00:00
I’ve been using Hugo for 7 years on multiple static sites. It has been a joy to learn and to use. I struggled with Jekyll previously along a number of the dimensions OP lists - complexity in the tool chain when there are weeks or months between new posts.

As a number of others have mentioned - pin the version of Hugo you use for a particular project. I do this and it works great for stability. Then I upgrade when I have the time or the need or I want to standardize across projects.
by nathan_compton | 2025-08-31 15:03:58+00:00
Weird!

I think Euclid is fine as a historical document and interesting in a broad sense, but its kind of silly to start with a document from 300 BCE when you could start with, for example, "How to Solve It" (Polya). And even that text could use a rewrite to make it much more readable.

I have completed substantial education in both mathematics and physics and I would say one of the weaknesses of the standard system of courses in physics is that it more or less recapitulates the development of physics in a historical shape, which substantially obscures mathematical structures which are shared between disciplines developed at different times. For example, unless you were lucky or very curious you might never appreciate that the bras and covectors relate to kets and vectors in fundamentally the same way. You might only have had a vague sense that physics involves making a lot of sandwiches.

Don't get me wrong, I'd be delighted if my kid's school broke out The Elements, but I just don't think its an obvious pedagogical strategy to start math instruction (self or otherwise) there.
by gruez | 2025-08-31 15:04:04+00:00
>I have a drawer full of old phones that could make very useful computer nodes, but instead of that I have to get (buy) some semi open raspberry pis since those phones are locked down.

The average person doesn't have any need for "computer nodes". Just because some homelabbers want to create a k8s cluster off their 10 year old phones, doesn't mean any significant proportion of phones are going to be salvaged in that manner.
by JimDabell | 2025-08-31 15:04:31+00:00
This doesn’t make sense. The most locked down mainstream option on the market – the iPhone – is also the one with the longest market life, with iPhones holding their market value far longer than alternatives. So there seems to be a negative correlation between being locked down and e-waste.

I know you have “let’s reprogram old phones” in mind, but approximately nobody does this even when it’s an option. If you don’t like phones being locked down, then argue that on its own merits; e-waste is not a good argument.
by pkphilip | 2025-08-31 15:04:49+00:00
PHP's type system is so "dynamic" that it is very easy to build frameworks for it.

For instance, PHP allows for even function calls like this:

$language = "German";

$functionName = $language."_send_email";

$functionName("Mike", "mike_1@gmail.", "Text ...");

This sort of flexibility has its own problems and it is only possible because of the very lax type system of PHP but it is also extremely powerful when it comes to developing reusable frameworks.
by torginus | 2025-08-31 15:05:36+00:00
I don't think it's fine the way V does it. What V's compiler is essentially doing is that it parses the V code into an AST, then it walks the AST and tries to generate an equivalent C code on the fly:

https://github.com/vlang/v/blob/master/vlib/v/gen/c/match.v

How a proper compiler should work (and how they actually do from what I've seen), is that they first take the AST, try to remove all fancy syntatic sugar by converting it to simpler constructs, and then they generate an intermediate representation that's either stack, or SSA based. It might skip the lowering of syntatic sugar, and generate IR directly. At some point either on the AST, or the IR, you might want to do control or data flow analysis to support some of your features.

From that point on, the backend generates either LLVM IR, C or might even attempt to generate machine code itself.

The problem with targeting C is that you lose access to stuff not accessible in C, like precise variable tracking on the heap/stack (needed for a good GC), or unwinding support needed for exceptions.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-08-31 15:06:10+00:00
My own observation is that a lot of decline happens because people stop living and start coasting to the grave, and that can happen decades earlier than 70.

My great-grandfather was physically very active into his 90s, still running his businesses, working in his orchards, and generally being surprisingly productive. He was mentally sharp too; I remember him teaching me about the physics of vacuum energy at length. Seemed like he could go on indefinitely. Then his wife died and he died less than a year later.

I always have him as my model for what I want to be like when I am old. He was still in the game until he wasn’t.
by namibj | 2025-08-31 15:06:22+00:00
Also, for long haul, you won't get by without dispersion compensation, so the lower noise from the higher signal levels getting into the amplifiers helps you.

There are limits to the amplifier output power due to how tightly single mode fibers concentrate the beam: if you'd send 1W through a 9μm core, you'd have about 1.5 MW/cm² power density. Even carefully packaged laser diodes break around 12~20 MW/cm² (according to Wikipedia; "catastrophic optical damage"), not to speak of open air patch connectors in a fiber hut.

Don't forget the fiber carries around 100 channels that share this power limit.
by gruez | 2025-08-31 15:06:23+00:00
The internet means it's easy to find "lots" of people for anything. Excluding yourself how many iPhones do you see in the wild have a home button? I'd estimate less than 1 in 20, or 5%. If less than 5% of people are keeping their phones while they're in support, how much e-waste can you possibly divert by allowing third party OS?