MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by graemep | 2025-09-10 10:17:23+00:00
I think there is a lot going on that contributes to this.

1. Adults read less, so children see their parents reading less often (it at all!) so do not grow up thinking it is a fun thing to do. I love reading because my parents did, and my kids do because I do.

2. Schools do not make reading enjoyable. A teacher I know suggested that their school did somethings to make reading fun, and the management refused because it improve any of their metrics. A friend of by daughter's went to a school where there were times when they had to sit and read a book - nothing kills enjoyment better than being forced to do something. You are telling kids its a chore you have to do, not something done for fun.

There are other things do. There are schools that teach Shakespeare for English literature GCSE without giving them the whole text, and without watching a video of the play, let along going to the theatre.

3. There are fewer and smaller local libraries so kids cannot discover what they like as easily. There are fewer bookshops too, because people read less.
by gettingoverit | 2025-09-10 10:17:54+00:00
That's not idealistic, that's how arithmetics work. If you use the same generic thing more times, you have the higher chance of discovering it broken. The fact that you've run into cases means that chance is never zero, and is irrelevant to the discussion.

As was already mentioned in the article, PB solve a problem that likely only Google has, even if that. State of the art nowadays is JSON/JSONL. If it grows too large, gzip it.

When someone is using third-party closed proprietary technologies to be "not like the rest", it usually doesn't work that well for their business.

The technology is "alive" until it didn't follow the path of Closure, GWT, and the rest of "we use it on the most loaded page of the world" technology. PB will be on the same graveyard soon.
by ClaraForm | 2025-09-10 10:18:12+00:00
I'm not convinced the brain stores memories, or that memory storage is required for human intelligence. And we "hallucinate" all the time. See: eye witness testimony being wrong regularly, "paranormal" experiences etc.

It's a statement that /feels/ true, because we can all look "inside" our heads and "see" memories and facts. But we may as well be re-constructing facts on the fly, just as re-construct reality itself to sense it.
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2025-09-10 10:19:52+00:00
No reason to speculate. I certainly do that sort of thing: I read a bit of news, wonder about some of the details, look them up (on wikipedia or anywhere) and then post an in-depth article I find on the subject to HN. Usually I do that after someone's posted the main news article on HN, but sometimes I manage to ninja the ninjas. Some times the in-depth article is more interesting, or more HN-interesting, than the related news article so the news don't get posted on HN at all.

Anyway if I do that, there must be others who do so too, and probably not just a few.
by graemep | 2025-09-10 10:20:26+00:00
I agree. However you use them less often, so its far harder for someone to time it right.

If you use username instead of email address attackers have to guess that too.

One quite serious problem I see quite often is using email plus password for login, and notifying on failed login that the email is not in the system, letting attackers validate which emails are logins.
by fedeb95 | 2025-09-10 10:20:31+00:00
Monopolies naturally come from doing a thing the best possible way. YouTube does it. I personally use it very rarely and wouldn't care about its disappearance, but I don't know of other services serving its users needs better.

So: YouTube will cease to be a monopoly if 1) user needs change 2) it stops being the best at serving videos. Until then, it's not mysterious.
by Aeolun | 2025-09-10 10:20:37+00:00
I think it’s so weird that your level of education in the US (and most of the world really) seems to depend on which specific school you went to.

The Netherlands has settled on three levels of schooling and within that level (according to capacity, and desire to learn) most of the schools show relatively little variation.

The same thing continues into university, with pretty much 99% of all the universities in the Netherlands being public.

You don’t select a university based on level of theoretical educational attainment, you select one by virtue of proximity, or which of them teaches the specific courses you are interested in.
by hilbert42 | 2025-09-10 10:21:09+00:00
"…because why would we use machines when we could just walk into a shop and buy cigarettes without ID?"

Exactly, I'm not in France but that practice was pretty common in most Western countries not that many decades ago (see my reply to this post). I didn't mention it but where I am (Australia) it also was pretty common for a kid to go to the shops to pick up cigarettes for, say, a parent.

When I first went to France decades ago (I've relatives in Paris) I found smoking was even more culturally entrenched than where I am, there were posters everywhere for Gitanes, Gauloises and other cigarettes. In fact, France is the home of many classic posters advertising or showing people smoking, many are so good they're now considered works of art.

I've not been to France for some time but I gather in recent years the French's attitude towards smoking has changed dramatically and the practice is now frowned upon culturally—or at least that's my perception from a far. Correct me if I'm wrong.

That's not what I'd have expected (anyway, not to such a degree); unlike the puritanical guilt-ridden English, I'd have thought French culture was more resilient. What brought this change to my attention was the recent kerfuffle over the French icon Jacques Tati's M. Hulot where posters on the Métro were censored—M. Hulot is portrayed sans pipe!

My immediate reaction was 'sacrilege, the vandal who did that had an unmitigated damn hide—what the Hell's going on in France to allow that to happen?'. You see, I'm a great Tati fan and Jour de fête, Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot and Mon Oncle are some of my most loved films—so the 'desecration' affected me personally.

As I've mentioned, I'm a nonsmoker and I applaud the reduction in smoking in recent years but vandalizing a cultural icon is carrying the anti-smoking message too far, it not only rendered M. Hulot's most idiosyncratic characteristic mute, but also make a mockery of the anti smoking message and it's likely to have been counterproductive. If what happened to M. Hulot had occurred in the UK or Righteous America I'd have said 'that's to be expected' but that it occurred in France was a total surprise.

No doubt, there was a backlash from Tati fans. I've not heard the outcome, what occurred in the wash-up?

BTW, As a kid I saw Mon Oncle not long after the film was released and I was enthralled. I never tire of seeing it.
by joz1-k | 2025-09-10 10:21:28+00:00
The police were correct in claiming that all citizens are unconditionally obligated to obey a police order "in the name of the law," even if they suspect the order is partially or entirely unlawful. Of course, citizens have the right to file a complaint later.

Logically, this is a hard precondition for a police to actually being able to do their work. Imagine, that any person feel the right to question the police request.

I applaud the Czech police to be so gentle with this guy.
by simonw | 2025-09-10 10:21:40+00:00
You can tell it to install uv. I just ran this:

Run "pip install uv" then run "uv tool install sqlite-utils" then "sqlite-utils --version"

And it worked: https://claude.ai/share/df36f3a8-44f0-4c7d-bb64-e5ed57602d79

I imagine they still default to pip because there's more training data about it, and it works fine.
by metalman | 2025-09-10 10:21:51+00:00
This article is a wonderfull fever dream of genisis.Though it's starting point is mundane. The whole vesicle theory is built on a physical/mechanical process ubiquitous in nature,that so far has no connection with life. Wildly suggestive and so so close, but when you look at the actual way vesicles are made, and cell walls are made, they are not the same, but have the same properties, as it lkely that physics and chemistry only allow for tiny bubbles(cue track), to form in a limited number of ways, one is an accident, and the other a mystery.
by eth0up | 2025-09-10 10:22:32+00:00
"The footage was released during a congressional hearing on Tuesday about unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs.

It shows an MQ-9 Reaper drone tracking a glowing orb off the coast of Yemen before firing a Hellfire missile straight at it.

But instead of blowing the object to bits, the so-called “orb” appeared to shrug it off and keep flying.

The video was taken in October 2024, but has only just been released to the public. "

- https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/36642473/ufo-struck-by-us-mili...

Hearing: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4nzlSz3rJBc
by aurareturn | 2025-09-10 10:23:28+00:00
Because they don't want the public/employees to misconstrue those metrics? Maybe they don't want employees to know how they view productivity?

Surely if they're presented with solid evidence that WFH increases productivity, they'd keep it. Execs make millions in bonuses if the performance of the company hits certain goals. It's baffling that people here still talk about real estate conspiracy theories.
by imiric | 2025-09-10 10:24:26+00:00
The way of getting those facts and ideas into your head can be very different, though.

You can either mechanically memorize them, which is a boring and mindless activity, or you can be challenged, participate in discussions, projects, and activities that engage the parts of your brain involved with critical thinking.

Both will technically get you to pass a test, but the latter will be better for retaining information, while developing skills and neural pathways that make future learning easier.

The problem is that most academia is based on the memorization approach. Here are a bunch of ideas and facts we think are important; get them into your head, and regurgitate them back at us later. This is not a system that creates knowledgeable people. It doesn't inspire or reward curiosity, creativity, or critical thinking. It's an on-rails pipeline that can get you a piece of paper that says you've been through it, which is enough to make you a tax-paying citizen employed by companies who expect the bare minimum as well.

I get that the alternative approach is more difficult to scale, and requires a more nuanced, qualitative, and personal process. But that's how learning works. It's unique for everyone, and can't be specified as a fixed set of steps.

After all, what is the point of teaching people to be idea and fact storing machines, if machines can do a far better job at that than us? Everyone today can tell you a random fact about the world in an instant by looking it up in a computer. That's great, but we should be training and rewarding people for things computers can't do.
by dghf | 2025-09-10 10:25:44+00:00
> For those who don't know it, this is the name the department has had for most of its history

Not really. It's the old name of the Department of the Army. Except for the first nine years of the DoW's existence, the Navy had its own, independent department, as did the USAF once it was established as a separate branch.

The Department of Defense didn't exist until after WW2, and was called the National Military Establishment for the first couple of years.

You see a similar pattern in the UK, which had the War Office for the Army, the Admiralty for the Royal Navy and the Air Ministry for the RAF: after WW2, the Ministry of Defence was created, initially liaising and co-ordinating between the service ministries, and then fully absorbing and replacing them.

tl;dr the Department of War is the old name of the Department of the Army, not of the Department of Defense.
by ReptileMan | 2025-09-10 10:25:45+00:00
>If it's layoffs aren't there a very real risk that the most talented people, who enjoy working from home will simply leave, while the less talented returns to the office because they'll have a harder time finding new jobs?

The corporate structure is not created around talented people, but around mediocrity. In Dilbert land you have no use for brainiacs.

In my current environment one line bugfix takes 3-4 workdays to release. Does it matter one bit if you will do the fix in 10 or 100 minutes if it will be overshadowed by the time THE PROCESS consumes.
by Razengan | 2025-09-10 10:25:53+00:00
I'm still salty that the Special Edition versions of Monkey Island that I purchased on iPad like 10 years ago can't be played anymore. They weren't updated and LucasArts pulled the games from the store, which is a damn shame because they were the PERFECT examples of paid-games on iPad that were a great experience on the iPad given the point-&-click nature translating quite well to a tap interface.
by squigz | 2025-09-10 10:26:45+00:00
> A friend of by daughter's went to a school where there were times when they had to sit and read a book - nothing kills enjoyment better than being forced to do something. You are telling kids its a chore you have to do, not something done for fun.

This is, I think, a tricky line to walk. Reading is, like most things, a skill that must be practiced, and school is a good place to do so. I think a bigger part of this practice that kills enjoyment is not being able to choose what you're reading; of course kids are going to dislike reading when they're forced to read books or stories they have no interest in at all.
by coldtea | 2025-09-10 10:26:47+00:00
>If a 14 year old watches porn and decides to copy what they see, that is a failure of sex education

Sex education is just another school class that in goes one ear, out goes another.

The kids will follow what they see (including in porn), what the culture has normalized, not what some teacher tells them in class...

So, "porn normalizes X, but it's the duty of sex-education to prevent kids copying it" is a lousy and losing approach.
by KoolKat23 | 2025-09-10 10:27:07+00:00
Again Thanks, extremely interesting insight.

I'm not sure they're entirely to blame although I'm sure they've played their part.

Look at the shareholding changes (2011-2017 Macquarie) and dividend payout percentage. It seems the current shareholders were left holding the bag, and perhaps we should be pointing fingers at Macquarie. When they left the debt had been increased by £2bln. If you look at their dividend payout ratio, in most of the years it held the investment, this ratio is extraordinarily high. Perhaps they sucked this dry, necessitating a price increase. (Current shareholders have barely paid anything).

Capital expenditure has been flat, only really increasing in 2021-2024. Perhaps chickens coming home to roost?
by luckys | 2025-09-10 10:27:31+00:00
There's something about analog I can't quite put my finger on it. Take digital photography for example. No matter how sharp, how "vibrant" the photos from a really good digital camera of today, it doesn't feel the same as photos from some 50 year old Nikon or Canon. Call it nostalgia if you will, but digital for all its strenghts seems to miss something
by valleyjo | 2025-09-10 10:27:59+00:00
I strongly prefer RTO for myself personally. I can’t stand working from home. I believe the solution is have a shorter commute and live closer to the office (even though I live far away, I am trying to convince my wife to move). I have mixed feelings about forcing RTO because I know some strongly prefer WFH. Maybe 2 or 3 days is the best middle ground. Personally I miss when everyone was at the office 5 days a week.
by sokoloff | 2025-09-10 10:28:09+00:00
Things that are inherently "about spending time with people" are very likely to be more effective in a higher bandwidth, more natural setting (read: in-person).

On the spectrum from postal mail, e-mail, text/instant messaging, phone calls, video calls, in-person discussions, the quality of "spending time with people" is increasing as you go farther down the list.
by regularfry | 2025-09-10 10:29:01+00:00
Commercial real estate value is directly connected to occupancy. If I own an office building which was valued ten years ago at $10M (to pick a random number) and today is valued at half that because nobody's going in, that's a direct $5M loss on my accounts, and any loans outstanding secured on it are potentially now underwater. Not only that, but it also weakens the rent I can demand from the tenant not just because the value of the building has dropped, but because they demonstrably don't need all that space any more.

Microsoft is almost certainly a special case in a number of ways, but the incentives are absolutely there for commercial landlords to try to force their tenants' hands.
by olive-n | 2025-09-10 10:29:35+00:00
I'll take csv over xlsx any time.

I work a lot with time series data, and excel does not support datetimes with timezones, so I have to figure out the timezone every time to align with other sources of data.

Reading and writing them is much slower than csv, which is annoying when datasets get larger.

And most importantly, xlsx are way more often fucked up in some way than any other format. Usually, because somebody manually did something to them and sometimes because the library used to write them had some hiccup.

So I guess a hot take indeed.
by Freak_NL | 2025-09-10 10:30:12+00:00
Emoji were in widespread use in Japan on the mobile phones of the generation before the smartphone. That is a corpus of many years of human communication which falls within the goals of Unicode to unlock. Those emoji may have been invented by AU, Softbank, and NTTDocomo, but they exist.

The recent additions come from a variety of proposals; most seem to be independent initiatives.

Big tech embraced emoji, but they got in the standard without them. Their widespread use was pretty much a given.
by graemep | 2025-09-10 10:30:56+00:00
They need to learn to read but not told "you must read" even if they have a choice.

My kids learned to read with me (flashcards, Ladybird books) for fun (flashcards were a game), and then just carried on by themselves by picking up interesting books (which relies on having access to interesting books - having books at home makes a huge difference, as does access to libraries and bookshops)
by rsynnott | 2025-09-10 10:31:04+00:00
> Anything that can return a sample. Notice that Curiosity collects samples, but omits the sample return rocket.

NASA (and also the Soviet Union and ESA) have repeatedly designed Mars sample return missions, but have not done them for budgetary reasons; it would be tremendously difficult and expensive.

Here's the current one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA-ESA_Mars_Sample_Return - however, given that it was hitting funding problems even _before_ ol' minihands gutted NASA funding, it seems destined to become yet another NASA/ESA canceled program (there's a bit of a history of ambitious NASA/ESA collaborations which die when one side or the other pulls the budgetary plug; JWST was likely lucky to escape this fate, say).

This puts it in a particularly weird place, as the earth return section is already built and due to launch on an Ariane 6 in two years (it will then proceed, slowly, to Mars using an ion drive, and await the lander and Mars launcher, which will presumably never arrive because budgets).
by coldtea | 2025-09-10 10:31:06+00:00
>If I have a question I can just ask ChatGPT, perplexity and Gemini

Which get their knowledge (training data) on relevant topics from analysts. Which increasingly use ChatGPT and the rest to produce them.

Enough loops of this, and analyst writings and ChatGPT responses on market analysis will soon reach the same "useless bullshit" parity.
by jajko | 2025-09-10 10:33:16+00:00
If I would be a commercial real estate mogul, I would invest at least hundreds of millions into covert PR campaigns in various media (including here on HN) to nudge the perception via exactly these sort of claims. And who wants to be seen as anti-business, right?

Just follow the money, it usually works very well. Sometimes, people are just dumb on their own and/or as a group but I don't think thats the case here. Tens of billions if not more in lucrative real estate is at stake.
by roenxi | 2025-09-10 10:33:31+00:00
These stats are hard to interpret - this could all very well be consistent with the kids these days turning out to be the most literate generation in history. There is very strong incentive to get good at reading to interact with the internet even if it isn't reading for 'enjoyment'.

There is a linked PDF, but I'd actually be more interested in reading the original survey to see how 'reading' is being framed. Is an hour in the HN comments section counted as reading for fun?
by Freak_NL | 2025-09-10 10:35:02+00:00
It's an academic paper, so if written correctly it does not make that assumption (about the domain-specific abbreviation at least). Instead, the abbreviation will be written out in full at the first use, and it is:

> Slightly more children and young people who didn’t receive free school meals (FSMs) told us they enjoyed reading compared with their peers who received FSMs
by a3w | 2025-09-10 10:35:03+00:00
> I’ll remind you that biologists do not, in the year 2025, know memory’s physical substrate in the brain! Plenty of hypotheses — no agreement. Is there any more central mystery in human biology, maybe even human existence?

Did they not recently transfer memory of how to solve a maze from one mouse to another, giving credibility to what can store information?

Searching, I only find the RNA transfers done in 60s, which ran into some problems. I thought a recent study did transfer proteins.
by CPLX | 2025-09-10 10:35:33+00:00
I’m an actual progressive who believes government should serve the interests of working people.

We don’t have a party for people like me in the United States any more, we just have two different movements to support corporate hegemony.

And possibly even more corrosive, we’ve just completely stopped enforcing the law against elites. It’s shocking how lawless the world has become, from securities fraud to labor violations to bribery.

I believe there should be strict labor laws that leads to safety and high wages and that multinational companies should not be allowed to evade them to exploit workers.

For most of history that’s just a classic pillar of the progressive left. And by the way it’s almost certainly a majority opinion in this country. The fact that it seems like an alien point of view is a reflection of how completely off the rails the modern political discourse is.
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2025-09-10 10:35:49+00:00
The abstract does use the term "from scratch":

>> To overcome this limitation, we introduce R-Zero, a fully autonomous framework that generates its own training data from scratch.

Giving the benefit of the doubt, they're just using it wrong, but the way they use it sure reads like they claim they found a way to initialise LLMs with 0 data. Only the absurdity of the claim protects the reader from such misunderstanding, and that's never a good thing in a research paper.