MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tialaramex | 2025-08-02 10:06:51+00:00
The UK. It had this huge navy, which amusingly is where its central bank comes from. An English Parliament wanted to buy the greatest navy the world had ever seen but that's very expensive, so their cunning scheme was, license some business people to run an exclusive Bank of England, secured by the word of the British government, the income from this funds a navy and the successors of that navy were still dominant into the 20th century.

The fact that the Bank of England was historically a private business is awkward when it comes to explaining to some modern country why it's not OK that their central bank is giving the leader's nephew $100M in unsecured loans, and this sort of discomfort is part of why it was bought by the British government and gradually ceased operating as a private bank in my lifetime. When I was younger I knew people whose mortgage was issued by the country's central bank. Not like celebrities or politicians or anything, just bureaucrats who got a good deal, sort of "mates rates" but for a house loan.
by precommunicator | 2025-08-02 10:07:17+00:00
Yes. There are solutions to that though, that are cheap and work worldwide wherever there is a cellular range (e.g. Hologram, SimBase). They only lost cellular when I was at a really weird place (Faroe Islands), and only one of them. Trackers use very little data (depends on the tracker and config I guess, I use branded ones i.e. Teltonika)
by casenmgreen | 2025-08-02 10:08:02+00:00
So the end game is;

1. Support unresponsive.

2. Signing in to first attempt account causes an error on the site.

3. Signing up to first attempt account now starts from scratch but remembers old, incorrect address, which cannot be changed.

4. Signing up with new account is blocked, as passport already used.

Seems to be a dead end.

Couple of observations;

1. The break in sign-up flow is a pretty big oversight.

2. Seems to be a bit short on testing.

3. Customer support, with my one attempt to use them, actually appears not to exist at all. Something to keep in mind when putting funds into the account - probably best only to put in funds you'd be 100% fine to lose.

Finally, it seems to me it is usual for sites not to tell users what's involved in signing up, but to present a first sign up screen with almost nothing on it, and then run the user through a sequence of screens, each asking for additional information.

The key problem with this is that it means you discover each problem only by coming to it, and when you're then blocked by a problem and have to go away to fix it, you then need to start again from the beginning.

If I'd known up front what Gnosispay were going to be doing, I would have avoided most of these problems.

The post which set me off down this path is here;

https://x.com/Louis_Tellier/status/1903734019449123184

I'm not involved with the poster, or any of the companies here, in any way, shape or form. Link is for reference as may be of interest to others.
by johnisgood | 2025-08-02 10:08:08+00:00
The major problem is that I could up-vote and down-vote as many times as I want. It is rate-limited, however[1]. I know, because I wrote a script. :D Seems like someone else did, too, except to down-vote.

Please fix it.

Edit: these down-votes are going down by the 100s or so, someone is really bullish to have "RiverToSea" fish down-voted. Ironically, the "RiverToSea" fish was made by someone who named himself "f**k palestine".

[1] After refresh, you can continue voting till you reach the limit, which is problematic.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-08-02 10:08:53+00:00
Personally, I hate the whole concept of tipping as promoted in the USA.

I see it as a way that owners can avoid paying the relevant taxes for employing their staff and instead offload part of that payment onto the customers. The arbitrariness of it also annoys me - why just waiting staff?

I'm in the UK, so we mainly have service charges added to the bill to take the place of tips which is a much better system. I also like the Japanese culture of non-tipping and that they may get offended by customers leaving tips.
by shakna | 2025-08-02 10:09:43+00:00
Ladybird is 425k LOC. Chromium is 3.5m LOC.

Starting a new browser, using LLMs... Is not going to maintain enough context.

Whilst Andreas does use Copilot a fair bit [0], he tends to do a line at a time, frequently disagree and rewrites his own, before prompting again. That is... He basically uses it as a fancy autocomplete. Not much else.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mxubNQC5O8&t=3099s
by jrflowers | 2025-08-02 10:10:40+00:00
> However, I'm not against the concept of age verification

Why did you not tell the stranger on the internet how old you are?

> How old are you

You obviously didn’t miss the question. You saw it and threw it back at them.

Why did you do that instead of answering with your age when somebody asked for it?

Apropos of nothing I’m going to include a link in my post

https://www.google.com/search?q=boob
by diggan | 2025-08-02 10:10:40+00:00
> Consider that the fatality rate is roughly 30 times higher per mile for motorcycles vs cars.

I guess it's worth asking, what country? In Spain, I think it's closer to ~10x, probably because we're very used to motorcycles driving all around us all the time. But still, riskier, no doubt.

I'm guessing that numbers come from the US in some way or similar? Watching dashcam footage sometimes, I keep seeing people riding motorbikes in the US without helmets, something I almost never seen in Spanish traffic, I can only recall seeing that once in my life, and it's really uncommon to ride a bike without a helmet here.

> But it’s really god damn dangerous. Let’s not kid ourselves.

Agree, I'm not trying to convince anyone of otherwise. But lets have nuance as well, riding a motorcycle isn't the same everywhere, especially where motorcycles are really, really commonplace in daily traffic.
by Cyph0n | 2025-08-02 10:12:52+00:00
Firstly, as others have noted, the claim that these protests were anti-Jewish is used by detractors to denounce the topic of the protests. There is absolutely zero evidence that Jews were targeted or excluded in any way.

Secondly, protests are escalatory by definition. If no one is listening to a protest, and absolutely no one is impacted, it will escalate until people listen.

You can denounce this form of protest - which I would argue is the only form of protest - from a high perch, but when push comes to shove, if it were your cause, you would do the exact same thing.

Look back at history, and you’ll see the same pattern in all high stakes college protests, from anti-war protests to anti-apartheid protests. The fact that you are either unaware or indifferent to this truth means the machine is working as intended.

https://epicenter.wcfia.harvard.edu/blog/student-protests-an...
by hcknwscommenter | 2025-08-02 10:13:02+00:00
As best as I can tell, the protestors committed a trespass and used their free speech rights to espouse certain racist ideologies. Protesting against alleged (I take no position here, it's complicated is all I got) mistreatment of Palestinians and Gazans is not a crime or anti-Semitic in itself. The administration committed no crime by failing to immediately remove the trespassers. It is reasonable for the administration to have taken some time to assess the issue and develop a plan and execute the plan. It is reasonable to change tactics as new facts arise. It is reasonable to re-assess the situation as the public and government provides their input on the situation. Did the protestors do some gross/racist things? Yes I think. Did they commit a serious crime? Probably not I think. Did the administration? I doubt it.
by chiefalchemist | 2025-08-02 10:13:09+00:00
> Despite the extraordinary efforts of millions of Americans who called, wrote, and petitioned Congress to…

It’s ironic. The Mainstream Media - including CPB / NPR - has been effectively silent as the federal debt has ballooned more and more. Ballooned to the point that the interest payments alone are over $1 trillion per year. $1T can buy 10 DoEs. $1T can buy even more CPBs.

https://youtu.be/PdX3nOo7BCQ

No doubt our priorities seem misguided. But you don’t get to $37 trillion+ - and growing - because your priorities are in good standing.

We are here because of us, not despite us.
by idoubtit | 2025-08-02 10:13:18+00:00
This paper repeatedly asserts that the formations they studied have a practical impact for professional cycling. They claim that, to bring back a leader into the peloton, the teammates could use formation different from the usual single line. For example, 2 riders upfront shielding 1 protected rider behind them. Or a diamond of 4 riders, with the protected one in the back.

I doubt this practical value exists. The paper completely forgets one important element¹: having a single rider at the front saves the energy of the teammates. If a team was to put two riders upfront and then the chase takes more time than expected, they have no backup. And even if the strategy was to succeed and the leader gets back into the peloton, he/she will have two tired teammates instead of one, which means a reduced help for the remaining of the stage.

I also suppose pro teams already know all of this, even if they didn't have the precise benchmarks of this paper. It's just unpractical most of the time. For a diamond shape, the aerodynamic gain is pretty obvious, but with a high price to pay in order to protect a rider.

As a side note, the paper authors should learn about PDF metadata. It's quite ugly that the file's title is "Microsoft Word - 2025_Preprint_Formations_V2".

[¹]: Except when they quote a cycling specialist about the goal to "reduce the leader's effort without sacrificing too many team members".
by niemandhier | 2025-08-02 10:13:41+00:00
Every phd student of Terence Tao is probably welcome at the Max Planck Institute For Mathematics:

https://www.mpim-bonn.mpg.de/application

Usually you need 2 letters of recommendation, I’d strongly assume that in the case of Tao one is enough.

Generally please consider the new „ Max Planck Transatlantic Program“:

https://www.mpg.de/25034916/max-planck-transatlantic-program
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-08-02 10:14:04+00:00
Every accusation is an admission.

What puzzles me is after all the accusations of "stealing the election", why did people not put the election results under extra scrutiny and demand access to details of the voting machines anti-tampering technology? Trump has said things that hinted at Musk maybe altering voting machines/counts, so why has this not been followed up?
by RedNifre | 2025-08-02 10:14:13+00:00
While you're at it, could you also change YouTube so that captions being on/off is a per-language thing and not a "The user turned off subtitles for language X, therefore it's the only they speak, therefore let's turn on subtitles for all other languages." thing? It's really annoying that whenever I watch a video that has a language different from the previous video I watched, the first thing I have to do is to turn off the captions.
by luckylion | 2025-08-02 10:14:19+00:00
I wouldn't say it's "just as bad", but I also couldn't imagine a big university publicly and strongly going against the federal government in Germany on "culture war" issues.

If you're fully aligned, there's no telling what would happen if you weren't, and you can't use "nothing happens" as evidence that nothing would happen - you're always allowed to share the opinions of whoever funds you.

If Germany got a right-wing government on the federal level, I expect to see either funding being slashed or universities adjusting their positions.
by 14 | 2025-08-02 10:14:41+00:00
FortNine is a hidden gem of a YouTuber. Many of his videos are just showing his passion for riding and interesting facts like "different ways to mount a motorcycle" and are entertaining to watch him climb up the back tire and hop onto the bike. But then some of the videos are actually highly educational and he incorporates tested science and studies and explains why things are they way they are like the science of different leaning styles while riding and their science.

The video that has always stuck with me is when he explained the science behind how motorcycles are hard to gauge their speed and distance and related it to how pigeons see. It showed me that a lot of why drivers have a tendency to pull out and cut off riders is more to do with not being aware that it can be very difficult to calculate the distance and speed of a motorcycle the same as we do with a car. With that knowledge as a rider I have actually changed my driving and really make sure I fully check both directions before pulling out. I also, as a rider, pay attention to side roads and driveways and always assume the car is going to pull out. I have never almost pulled in front of a rider but I can say I have many times avoided cars by riding defensively.
by delta_p_delta_x | 2025-08-02 10:14:49+00:00
> Even if bounds checks were only active in debug builds

In MSVC or Clang, when compiled against the Microsoft C++ STL, they already are. So,

auto x = std::vector{1, 2, 3, 4, 5}; std::println("{}", x[5]);

throws a very specific exception at runtime under debug mode.

In fact on Windows, even the C runtime has debug checks. That's why there are four options to choose from when linking against the modern UCRT:

/MT (static linking, no debug) /MTd (static linking, with debug) /MD (dynamic linking, no debug) /MDd (dynamic linking, with debug)

For what 'debug in the C runtime' entails, see this comment I made a while ago[1]. As I mentioned, Unix-likes have no equivalent; you get one libc, and if you want to statically link against it, you have to release your own source code because it's GPL. Not sure why people put up with it.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40361096
by sirwhinesalot | 2025-08-02 10:14:51+00:00
The "bad thing" is that it's effectively getting abandoned, open sourcing it won't make any difference.

It's not like external contributions will suddenly turn it into something usable, and they'll just have a skeleton crew maintaining it, like they do WinForms and WPF.

People are tired of Microsoft and their ever growing graveyard of ill thought out, half-baked, "native" UI frameworks.
by crook123456 | 2025-08-02 10:15:26+00:00
The numbers on META's earnings report looks fake. Zuck is cooking the books for sure.

I don't think META is the only company cooking the books, Apple's is cooking the books as well. The number of people I see upgrading to Iphone 16 is the lowest in years. Apple reported it was from sales in China, my chinese friends said no one is buying IPhone this year because of the tariff wars and chinese phones are so much better than Iphone.

There is alot of accounting tricks in recent tech earnings report with AI, they are all playing account trick with AI infrastructure spend, funneling the infrastructure spend into revenue and profits.
by dhx | 2025-08-02 10:18:03+00:00
The means be which restriction of user choice of software would occur appears to be Article 3(3) point (i) of Directive 2014/53/EU.[1] But as you point out, Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2022/30 referred to in the source article makes no reference to point (i), only points (d), (e) and (f):[2]

(d) radio equipment does not harm the network or its functioning nor misuse network resources, thereby causing an unacceptable degradation of service;

(e) radio equipment incorporates safeguards to ensure that the personal data and privacy of the user and of the subscriber are protected;

(f) radio equipment supports certain features ensuring protection from fraud;

These so-called "requirements" are so vague that if there was a regulatory body gatekeeping radio devices, I could easily see how the regulatory body could interpret those "requirements" however they wish, including just stonewalling any manufacturer who wishes to argue about the vagueness and interpretation of these so-called "requirements". But the fact that point (i) of Article 3(3) of Directive 2014/53/EU is separated from points (d) through (f) seemingly could be used to argue that "requirements" (d) through (f) were not intended to restrict user choice of software, else point (i) would have also been referenced by Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2022/30?

[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2014/53/oj/eng

[2] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg_del/2022/30/oj/eng
by tzs | 2025-08-02 10:18:16+00:00
A majority of the voters voted for people other than Trump.

Edit: come on people, read things in context. I was responding to someone who was implying that a majority of American voters support this. To support that assertion about any President's policies at a minimum you need that President to have received a majority of the popular vote.

When third parties get enough votes that a President gets a plurality but not a majority you can't really infer anything about what a majority of voters want.

Even if all the third parties were on the same side of the left/right spectrum as the President's party you can't infer much because if those voters agreed with most or all of the President's policies they would have voted for the President.
by bsaul | 2025-08-02 10:19:47+00:00
It was much less a one-man thing, i agree. Looking at the US debates from europe however, I have the feeling monolithic thinking was very much in place in academia on a wide range of topics (gender theory, climate change, israel support, vaccine mandate, etc).

And not just academia if i look at zuckerberg's testimony over federal government censoring people arbitrarily on the platforms.
by mlindner | 2025-08-02 10:20:52+00:00
> Secondly, there’s a very clear way to identify and disable these particular locations and choosing not to do so is an active choice.

This isn't actually true though. For the same reason they had difficulties finding Russian military users of Starlink dishes. They know where the dishes are but they don't know who is using them or what purpose they are being used for.
Ask HN: Will AI push more of us into freelancing?
by gashmol | 2025-08-02 10:20:52+00:00
AI tools are automating bigger pieces of software work every month. Do you think that will shift the market away from traditional full-time roles toward contract or freelance gigs?

What’s your current setup (full-time, freelance, hybrid, student, between jobs, etc.)?

How do you expect AI to change that balance over the next few years, and why?

Curious to hear your experiences, predictions, or any data points you’ve come across.
by davrosthedalek | 2025-08-02 10:21:33+00:00
My point is this: I do think that some universities gave the protestors way too much leeway. It clearly created a hostile work environment for some - Jewish, and I grant you also Muslim students. The universities responsibility is to keep that in check, and some failed badly. Some did better.

I also want to add my own observation, which might be biased: There was a clear, sizeable fraction of the protests that was beyond "pro-Palestine / anti-Israel's Palestine policy". There was celebration of Hamas and of the attack, especially in the first days.
by diggan | 2025-08-02 10:22:08+00:00
Still won't lead to a forced disabling of unlocked bootloaders, or making that illegal, mostly because the directive doesn't outright forbid that. But also because of this section:

> (19) Verification by radio equipment of the compliance of its combination with software should not be abused in order to prevent its use with software provided by independent parties.

Put together with the EU’s broader right-to-repair, if any phone manufacturer disables unlocking the bootloader, they're doing so for other reasons, not because RED rules forces them to.
by brokegrammer | 2025-08-02 10:22:13+00:00
I never found coding to be fun. All I care about is shipping features. However, I do care about maintainability and user experience. That's why I use AI to write much of the "dumb" code, and then I'll spend time doing quality control.

I always hated writing HTML and CSS, so I have AI do that. I always found writing tests and type annotations to be tedious, and would usually avoid those at my own detriment. Now AI is able to do those.

AI in general has been a net positive for me. I hope that it keeps getting better and better so that I can stop coding for good and focus on the products I'm building themselves.
by bsaul | 2025-08-02 10:24:05+00:00
The style is very different, for sure. But testimonies of people feeling threatened over their academic career based on political statements on controversial topics isn't a new thing.

Don't get me wrong : i'm not defending what's happening here. It's absurd and a very bad sign for US democracy. What i'm saying is that people only wake up when they're the ones in the crosshairs.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-08-02 10:24:29+00:00
Don't spin this around, what I asked you is not a negative.

People here argued that the US is fascist because in academia you can't get away with breaking governments rules getting you defunded and pointing at Germany for being superior in this regard.

So then I asked for proof that in other countries you can get away in academia with breaking the government's rules and not get defunded. It really is that simple.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-08-02 10:24:39+00:00
A bit tangential, and speculative anecdote:

A few years ago, in the 2017-19 timeframe, android phones had the best "next few hours" weather prediction I've ever seen. It was way more accurate than wunderground, accuweather and all other web services. Sometime after 2019 it seems to have gone, and I wonder what happened.

Speculation: goog used the barometric sensors in many phones "near you" to increase the precision of their models, making "immediate timeframes" extremely precise.

No idea if this actually happened or it was confirmation bias on my part, would love for someone with knowledge to chime in. I also wonder why they stopped, if my speculation is correct. Data gathering stuff, perhaps?
by jotaen | 2025-08-02 10:24:49+00:00
I think it’s important to acknowledge that peoples’ brains function differently. Only because whiteboard sessions are best for one person to exchange ideas, there may be other ways to do so that work out just equally well. E.g., someone else may rather be confused to deal with made-up pseudo code syntax in an unfamiliar environment, and for them it may work better to explore and discuss ideas while sitting in front of a real IDE.

To me, the crucial question is whether the interview style is subconsciously biased (because the interviewer themselves fails to imagine that there are other ways to produce equivalent results, or is unable to adopt to different approaches), or whether it’s designed deliberately (because the interviewer explicitly wants to optimise and select for a homogenous collaboration style within the designated team).
by hilbert42 | 2025-08-02 10:26:07+00:00
Exactly, I've used unlocked phones for years and treat my smartphone as a pocket computer. I'm fed up with all that security nonsense as it's a fucking hindrance to how I want to configure my devices.

In fact, my actual phone is now just a feature phone and the smartphone my portable computer with internet access via WiFi and a pocket router with SIM card.
by mtlmtlmtlmtl | 2025-08-02 10:26:30+00:00
Stockfish being so strong is not merely a result of scaling of computation with search and learning. Basic alpha-beta search doesn't really scale all that well with compute. The number of nodes visited grows exponentionally with the number of plies you look ahead. Additionally alpha-beta search is not embarassingly parallel. The reason Stockfish is so strong is that it includes pretty much every heuristic improvement to alpha-beta that's been thought of in the history of computer chess, somehow combining all of them while avoiding bugs and performance regressions. Many of these heuristics are based on chess knowledge. As well as a lot of very clever optimisation of data structures(transposition tables, bitboards) to facilitate parallel search and shave off every bit of overhead.

Stockfish is a culmination of a lot of computer science research, chess knowledge and clever, meticulous design.