MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by chiefalchemist | 2025-08-22 10:35:43+00:00
Let’s sum up the Fed’s accomplishments:

- wider and wider financial inequality

- more money and assets in fewer hands

- excessive federal gov debt

- more frequent bubbles of some sort (that lead to bailouts by taxpayers and consumers)

- etc.

What do we propose then? Keep lying to ourselves? Keep doubling down on insanity?
by bubblyworld | 2025-08-22 10:35:43+00:00
I think people react to AI with strong emotions, which can come from many places, anxiety/uncertainty about the future being a common one, strong dislike of change being another (especially amongst autists, whom I would guess based on me and my friend circle are quite common around here). Maybe it explains a lot of the spicy hot-takes you see here and on lobsters? People are unwilling to think clearly or argue in good faith when they are emotionally charged (see any political discussion). You basically need to ignore any extremist takes entirely, both positive and negative, to get a pulse on what's going on.

If you look, there are people out there approaching this stuff with more objectivity than most (mitsuhiko and simonw come to mind, have a look through their blogs, it's a goldmine of information about LLM-based systems).
by account42 | 2025-08-22 10:36:35+00:00
ASCII compatibility isn't the only advantage of UTF-8 over UCS-4. It also

- requires less memory for most strings, particular ones that are largely limited to ASCII like structured text-based formats often are.

- doesn't need to care about byte order. UTF-8 is always UTF-8 while UTF-16 might either be little or big endian and UCS-4 could theoretically even be mixed endian.

- doesn't need to care about alignment: If you jump to a random memory position you can find the next and previous UTF-8 characters. This also means that you can use preexisting byte-based string functions like substring search for many UTF-8 operations.
by zenoprax | 2025-08-22 10:36:55+00:00
Without IP law it is all or nothing: obfuscate, hide, encrypt, and protect lest it become public domain.

With IP law you are given the exclusive, enforceable right to control the distribution and sale of an idea for N years... at which point it becomes public domain.

In either case the decision to publish an idea will inevitably make it public domain. The government protects their shit because $REASONS but there is absolutely no obligation for it to be made public until that protection lapse. In matters of human culture this seems like a bug, not a feature but enforcing some standard of "reasonable worldwide availability" by force seems impossible. The invisible hand of piracy "solves" this oversight and functions like a safety valve.

Not an endorsement of either side, just an observation.
by delta_p_delta_x | 2025-08-22 10:38:09+00:00
I've been working on macOS and Windows drivers. Can't help but disagree.

Because of the absolute dearth of high-quality open-source driver code and the huge proliferation of absolutely bottom-barrel general-purpose C and C++, the result is... Not good.

On the other hand, I asked Claude to convert an existing, short-ish Bash script to idiomatic PowerShell with proper cmdlet-style argument parsing, and it returned a decent result that I barely had to modify or iterate on. I was quite impressed.

Garbage in, garbage out. I'm not altogether dismissive of AI and LLMs but it is really necessary to know where and what their limits are.
by Georgii007 | 2025-08-22 10:38:26+00:00
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by birn559 | 2025-08-22 10:39:19+00:00
I don't see why it should. I also believe parent is wrong as there are unambiguous rules about when to use ß or ss.

Never thought of it but maybe there are rules that allow to visually present the code point for ß as ss? At least (from experience as a user) there seem to be a singular "ss" codepoint.
by phrotoma | 2025-08-22 10:39:24+00:00
I met a cave diver recently. Dude is retired now but ran a consultancy for decades through which he and his team would go in and map previously unexplored caves (or someone had died trying).

He was a chill guy but like ... he was just steely af. Can't imagine the nerve it takes to crawl around in those places. Gives me the willies!
by sieve | 2025-08-22 10:40:55+00:00
> Their no-bullshit returns policy.

I have been waiting for three weeks for them to pick up some fake POD-crap they delivered instead of the books that I had ordered and refund Rs. 800 (~ $8). I have had about 8-10 phone calls with them regarding this issue and CS is completely unbothered (with one exception, but too little too late). They do their fake apologies and set up another return pickup.

These last three weeks have been absolutely terrible as far as deliveries and Amazon CS are concerned. I have been moving all new purchases to Walmart-owned Flipkart as I no longer have the mental bandwidth to deal with these people.
by hdgvhicv | 2025-08-22 10:41:14+00:00
Typical package in the U.K. is about 3 minutes, the main story will have 10-15 minutes on it, with probably two pieces from different correspondents on different angles, an in studio interview, and a live.

There’s then the in depth programs which spend half an hour or an hour on a specific subject (dispatches, panorama etc)

People are less interested in long form news though, so public service broadcasters in the U.K. have a duty to reach as many people in as many ways.
by rkangel | 2025-08-22 10:41:40+00:00
Shipping binary artifacts isn't inherently a bad thing - that's what (most) Linux Distros do after all! The important distinction is how that binary package was arrived at. If it's a mystery and the source isn't available then that's bad. If it's all in the open source repo and part of the Python package build and is completely reproducible then that's great.
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-08-22 10:41:49+00:00
My link has a link to 240p, which also goes into 480i.

That aside, all that stuff was made for CRT technology, with dot/slit masks, and phospors with varying intensity of afterglow. Bigger computer CRT screens worked similar in principle, just not interlaced(mostly), and higher resolutions.

What they both have in common is resolution independency within their technical limits.

Flat displays of today don't have that, no matter which panel technology they are based on.

Their internal upscalers may compensate for the resolution, but not for the effects of phosphor, and it's afterglow, after the beam raced over them, until its hitting them again, through the mask.

There is a reason that hardware stuff exists, more so than much so called 'audiophile' stuff, though it's still 'niche'. Once you have seen it in direct comparison, with, or without, you'll know.

Or you've been lucky, and have a really good screen.

Or bad eyesight/perception, not noticing the difference. ^^^^ Not meant to be condescending, but I've seen that IRL.
by ghaff | 2025-08-22 10:42:24+00:00
In fairness, "amber waves of grain" can probably get old after a while. But absent time (and, to some degree, money restrictions), I'd probably get somewhat bored after a while given that I've seen a lot of that scenery from a car or hiking around.

But to the point some people here are making, I've done some fairly long distance train travel in Europe, including sleepers, and, while I tend to prefer it to planes especially budget ones which I basically never take, I'm not sure it's an especially efficient way to travel for the most part if you want to get from point A to point B as quickly and cost effectively as possible.
by prmoustache | 2025-08-22 10:43:00+00:00
That is a US thing.

While things are improving in europe, many sidewalks still have a tiny step. Not high enough to be a problem for someone in a wheelchair but definitely for a loaded cart with shitty plastic wheels. Also it is not uncommon to have people parking where they shouldn't so you can't rely on it. In many part of the world people living in a wheelchair tend to spend a significant amount of time in the street instead of the sidewalk because of "stuff" that block their way on a regular basis.
by dsign | 2025-08-22 10:44:36+00:00
This is, in my opinion, quite accurate.

In the world of software development I meet a breed of Swedish devs younger than 30 that can't write code very well, but who can wax Jira tickets and software methodologies and do all sort of things to get them into a management position without having to write code. The end result is toxic teams where the seniors and the devs brought from India are writing all the code while all the juniors are playing software architect, scrum master an product owners.

Not everybody is like that; seniors tend to be reliable and practical, and some juniors with programming-related hobbies are extremely competent and reasonable. But the chunk of "waxers" is big enough to be worrying.
by MattPalmer1086 | 2025-08-22 10:44:51+00:00
You can absolutely say things that other people may find offensive on Bluesky.

The difference is there's no algorithmic feed pushing stuff at you and it's easy to filter or block things you personally find offensive.

So you can totally have an audience of people who like what you say, but you have no right to annoy an audience who dislikes it.

If you like being outraged all the time, then fine. Many people don't want that experience.
by simoncion | 2025-08-22 10:45:51+00:00
The quote you pulled suggests that if the work is majority machine-generated, then it loses copyright protection.

That is, it suggests that even if there are elements of human-generated content in a larger machine-generated work, the combined work as a whole is not eligible for copyright protection. Printed page iii of that PDF talks a bit more about that:

* Copyright does not extend to purely AI-generated material, or material where there is insufficient human control over the expressive elements. * Whether human contributions to AI-generated outputs are sufficient to constitute authorship must be analyzed on a case-by-case basis.
by Saline9515 | 2025-08-22 10:46:09+00:00
On the contrary, the French "dissertation" exercise requires to articulate reasoning and facts, and come up with a plan for the explanation. It is the same kind of thinking that you are required to produce when writing a scientifically paper.

It is however not taught very well by some teachers, who skirt on explaining how to properly do it, which might be your case.
by giantg2 | 2025-08-22 10:47:24+00:00
I'm convinced that for coding we will have to use some sort of TDD or enhanced requirement framework to get the best code. Even on human made systems the quality is highly dependent on the specificity of the requirements and the engineer's ability to probe the edgecases. Something like writing all the tests first (even in something like cucumber) and having the LLM write code to get them to pass would likely produce better code evene though most devs hate the test-first paradigm.
by 0x000xca0xfe | 2025-08-22 10:48:07+00:00
Well I'm not American and I can tell you that we do not see English source code as imperialism.

In fact it's awesome that we have one common very simple character set and language that works everywhere and can do everything.

I have only encountered source code using my native language (German) in comments or variable names in highly unprofessional or awful software and it is looked down upon. You will always get an ugly mix and have to mentally stop to figure out which language a name is in. It's simply not worth it.

Please stop pushing this UTF-8 everywhere nonsense. Make it work great on interactive/UI/user facing elements but stop putting UTF-8-only restrictions in low-level software. Example: Copied a bunch of ebooks to my phone, including one with a mangled non-UTF-8 name. It was ridiculously hard to delete the file as most Android graphical and console tools either didn't recognize it or crashed.
by the_biot | 2025-08-22 10:49:42+00:00
This policy, and most of the comments on here, miss the point entirely.

Open source is supposed to be primarily a labor of love, scratching your own itch, done for pride and a sense of accomplishment of having done it right.

Using an AI chatbot achieves none of that. It's an admission that you don't have the skills, and you're not wanting to learn them. Using AI to contribute to an open source project makes NO sense whatsoever. It's an admission of incompetence, which should be profoundly embarrassing to you.

I realize I'm screaming into the void here on HN, where so many people have bought into the "AI is just a tool" bullshit. But I know I'm not alone, even here. And I know that e.g. Linus Torvalds sees right through the bullshit as well.
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by callahad | 2025-08-22 10:51:29+00:00
For me, it was the challenge and allure of doing something relatively difficult and rare. The first time I saw a Stop - Prevent Your Death sign[0] at depth, I knew I wanted the training to go beyond it.

It's also really peaceful underground.

Amusingly enough, I can't handle blue-water or wall dives (vertigo), nor wrecks (those aren't supposed to be there!), but caves are no problem. You've got walls, floor, and ceiling as a frame of reference, and everything is nice and cozy. It's like the Earth is giving you a hug.

[0]: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vortex_Spring_cave...
by ghaff | 2025-08-22 10:51:52+00:00
I've taken a "luxury" bus from the Boston area to NY once. I'll stick to Amtrak although, given where I live, it's not very efficient. Boston area to DC really takes too long though I've done it.

I hate driving into NYC though I've done it with someone else (or because I was headed somewhere else afterwards). As you say, with multiple people, the numbers don't really pencil out--especially given it takes longer for me.
by flohofwoe | 2025-08-22 10:52:03+00:00
> Please stop pushing this UTF-8 everywhere nonsense.

I was with you until this sentence. UTF-8 everywhere is great exactly because it is ASCII-compatible (e.g. all ASCII strings are automatically also valid UTF-8 strings, so UTF-8 is a natural upgrade path from ASCII) - both are just encodings for the same UNICODE codepoints, ASCII just cannot go beyond the first 127 codepoints, but that's where UTF-8 comes in and in a way that's backward compatible with ASCII - which is the one ingenious feature of the UTF-8 encoding.
by queenkjuul | 2025-08-22 10:52:48+00:00
Ridership keeps increasing as the system rebuilds from the mass staffing shortages of the pandemic. Every time they increase the frequency of a bus line, ridership increases. The trains will be the same as operators continue to be hired.

State/Lake has been sorely lacking an in-system transfer for damn near a century, and the feds are funding the rebuild. It's one of the busiest stations in the whole city, and evening rush demand still exceeds capacity on two of the six lines it services.

As someone who actually uses the station to get home from work it's ridiculous to hear you talk about this project like it's a bad thing.
by eru | 2025-08-22 10:53:14+00:00
> Wouldnt you need the T_zero configuration of the universe for this to work?

Why? We learn about the past by looking at the present all the time. We also learn about the future by looking at the present.

> Also we are assuming there is no non-deterministic processed happening at all.

Depends on the kind of non-determinism. If there's randomness, you 'just' deal with probability distributions instead. Since you have measurement error anyway, you need to do that anyway.

There are other forms of non-determinism, of course.
by pas | 2025-08-22 10:53:42+00:00
companies that use LLM for support already were pretty deep in the woods with some outsourced unfortunate agent behind the curtains, so they replaced one not very good solution with an even worse, but cheaper one.

and since the whole world was (is) doing it at the same time customers doesn't really had a choice. (but of course having real support is still a differentiator in the market.)
by ksec | 2025-08-22 10:56:05+00:00
Sort of off topic but I really wish Zig would put Date in their release notes.

For instance I didn't know if 0.15 is new, or from a few months ago. Every time a new release I had to go to Github and check the release date. It doesn't even need to be exact but something like August 2025 would have been fine to give some context of when this was released.

> - async and await keywords removed

I think by all accounts Andrew has continue to show he is extremely pragmatic with every decision, trying to test new and old theories to the limit and pick what is most coherent and best for Zig. Cant wait for 1.0
by griffzhowl | 2025-08-22 10:56:20+00:00
> The biggest problem I see with "establishment" science today is that it doesn't work this way [i.e., make accurate predictions].

This is a gross over-generalization imo. I would say at least the hard sciences are characterized by their extremely accurate predictive models. Are you thinking of maybe string theory specifically? Because that's a minority part of even the field of physics, and exceptional in many ways, so it's not right to generalise from it to the whole of physics, let alone all current science
by bombcar | 2025-08-22 10:57:04+00:00
It’s also called “hotel” power and is provided by the locomotive, but separate from “needed to run” power. A train can run with just air and the physical connection, hotel comes with the big “other cable” connected.

Some private cars do NOT use it and instead have their own generator. In theory you could have one with no lights, etc at all.

I’ve been on an Amtrak where it lost hotel power; nothing but emergency lighting until they got to a station where they could swap the locomotive.

But the train kept running, and the conductor had to walk the entire train announcing stops verbally; with no PA system.
by jve | 2025-08-22 10:57:39+00:00
Oh you put this nicely.

> How does electricity know which path has the least resistance? It doesn't, it starts flowing down all paths equally at a significant fraction of the speed of light, then quickly settles in a steady state described by Ohm's law.

> because all of science and engineering are approximations with limited applicability

Something I heard but haven't dig into, because my use case (DIY, home) doesn't care. In some other applications approximation at this level may not work and more detailed understanding may be needed :)

And yeah, some theory and telling of things others discovered for sure needs to be done. That is just the entry point for digging. And understanding how something was derived is just a tool for me to more easily remember/use the knowledge.
by donatj | 2025-08-22 10:57:47+00:00
Is this the same mechanism for signaling lock/unlock as some moving sidewalks use to lock carts in place on the track to prevent you from pushing them?

One of our local hardware store chains, Menards, have ramps in the form of moving sidewalks to allow customers to get fully loaded carts between floors safely and they seem to very reliably lock to the floor at the start of the ramp and unlock at the bottom. I've always been curious about the mechanism.
by stinos | 2025-08-22 10:58:16+00:00
> The point I'm trying to make is that society can't make progress towards unifying alcohol into a category with fetanyl -- because society will continue to use alcohol in socially acceptable functions.

Yes I get that point. But that doesn't mean rather simple 'semantic' measures could be taken to make it more obvious alcohol is not exactly healthy. Instead of 'person was under influence of alcohol and cocaine' or 'drugs including alohol', instead of just 'drugs and alcohol'.
by josephg | 2025-08-22 10:59:00+00:00
I hear your point, but invalid codepoint sequences are way less of a problem than strings with invalid UTF8. Text rendering engines deal with weird Unicode just fine. They have to since Unicode changes over time. Invalid UTF8 on the other hand is completely unrepresentable in most languages. I mean, unless you use raw byte arrays and convert to strings at the edge, but that’s a terrible design.

> This makes code points less suitable than UTF-8 bytes as mistakes are more likely to not be caught during development.

Disagree. Allowing 2 kinds of bugs to slip through to runtime doesn’t make your system more resilient than allowing 1 kind of bug. If you’re worried about errors like this, checksums are a much better idea than letting your database become corrupted.
by justsomehnguy | 2025-08-22 10:59:08+00:00
> I can confidently say this was exactly "How to buy a SSD".

More like "How to spend $3k and think you did something".

For this amount what you spent you could get any, literally any SSD, use only 64Gb and be fine for decades. Or use more than 64Gb and be fine for... decades anyway.

You literally could buy a server class mixed workload SATA drive with a DWPD of 4.

https://www.solidigm.com/products/data-center/d3/s4620.html

And quite amusingly, any modern SATA SSD runs at the top of SATA3/SATA600 specs, with ~500MB/s for read and write:

Sequential Bandwidth - 100% Read (up to): 550 MB/s Sequential Bandwidth - 100% Write (up to): 500 MB/s Random Read (100% Span): 85000 IOPS Random Write (100% Span): 48000 IOPS

While Intel® X25-E Extreme SATA Solid-State Drive is SATA2/SATA300 and runs at 250MB/s at reading:

Sustained sequential read: up to 250 MB/s Sustained sequential write: up to 170 MB/s Random 4 KB reads: >35,000 IOPS Random 4 KB writes: >3,300 IOPS

https://download.intel.com/newsroom/kits/ssd/pdfs/Extreme-SA...
by eru | 2025-08-22 10:59:11+00:00
You could more or less use the same reasoning to argue for why humans can't write software.

And you'd be half-right: humans are extremely unreliable, and it takes a lot of safeguards and automated testing and PR reviews etc to get reliable software out of humans.

(Just to be clear, I agree that current models aren't exactly reliable. But I'm fairly sure with enough resources thrown at the problem, we could get reasonably reliable systems out of them.)