MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jltsiren | 2025-09-22 06:08:29+00:00
I said that the dominant constraint is road capacity. Which means that buses must be large enough to carry the required number of passengers on the streets that exist. When you have buses running on ordinary streets with dedicated bus lanes (but no bus rapid transit), peak capacity is around 120 vehicles/hour/lane. Even mid-sized cities can have bottlenecks where that limit is reached due to geographic constraints.
by leakycap | 2025-09-22 06:08:31+00:00
> not only is eSIM a way for operators to impose restrictions on unlocked pre-paid phones

Are you outside the US? I've used eSIM on iOS many times with a number of carriers and MVNOs and never noticed a fee (unless you're talking about a postpaid carrier's line activation fee, usually around $36, not related to esim or not)
by flowerthoughts | 2025-09-22 06:08:59+00:00
> We first show how travel eSIMs often route user data through third-party networks [---] Second, we analyze the implications of opaque provisioning workflows, documenting how resellers can access sensitive user data [---]. Third, we validate operational risks such as deletion failures and profile lock-in using a private LTE testbed.

So not about eSIM the technology, but the business landscape inviting opportunistic business people when the bar of entry is lowered. Table 1 is worth a read. The outrage bait about traffic being routed through China shouldn't matter too much to the common person, since we're mostly using TLS. If you're on DoH (DNS over HTTPS), you're even using it for host lookups.
by jemmyw | 2025-09-22 06:09:19+00:00
It seems like the big improvements in the current AI flavor are done. It happened very quickly, and so did the diminishing returns. It's amazing compared to 2 years ago, it's great compared to a year ago, it's not that different to 6 months ago.

Lots of room in optimization and figuring out how to actually use it usefully. But I don't think any one country is now poised to take a leap ahead on this stuff. And Chinese researchers kind of showed that once the technique was out of the bag, catching up wasn't hard.
by upmostly | 2025-09-22 06:10:09+00:00
A new kind of database workbench for developers/founders/teams for:

- managing your database

- creating beautiful dashboards quickly

- writing, running and sharing queries (think postman but for db)

- visually building workflows to export and manipulate your database (so underrated)

- eventually building apps directly on to your database (think retool but a desktop app)

It's an all in one, modern way to interact with your database. Desktop app.
by lelanthran | 2025-09-22 06:10:53+00:00
> A recent paper argued those dots and Ys might form a kind of lunar calendar tied to animal life cycles. That’s where the headlines about “the earliest written language” came from. But specialists in Paleolithic art have already pushed back pretty hard: the associations are often mis-read, the counts don’t fit neatly, and there’s no sign of syntax or actual language encoding. At best it looks like a notation system or proto-writing, not “writing” in the Mesopotamian sense.

> So the consensus is: yes, Ice Age people were doing more with symbols than just decorating caves — but no, we haven’t pushed the invention of writing back 35,000 years. The earliest real writing systems still show up in Sumer and Egypt ~5k years ago. These cave signs are another reminder that symbolic thought is very old and very human — but we shouldn’t confuse notation with language

Okay, so what's the bar for "written language" then?

The specialists in this field appear to be using some criteria for "written language" but it is not clear to me how that criteria might accept maths symbols or maybe roman numerals to indicate counters as a written language while discarding a notation system.

Personally, I would consider that any form of intentional knowledge transmission a "written language".

Scratch a line onto a rock each time you see a full moon? That's written language.

Paint handprints on a cave wall? That's written language too.

How does this discovery fail my criteria?
by b112 | 2025-09-22 06:11:07+00:00
I think that we should consider "the future". Yes, it's intangible but consider this; go back 2 centuries and ask someone if they could setup a business concern which produced millions of widgets a year.

They'd think you daffy.

Now beyond that, ask them to produce any manner of modern device with the precision and high consistency we have. Again, they'd think you mad, and think that such was impossible.

Yet here we are.

The next stage in our development via LLMs is not about AI helping humans. It's about robotics. Automated assembly. Robots (not Androids) able to interact with the environment and able to problem solve akin to say.. a mouse.

Soon, entire factories will be entirely automated. Many almost are. We don't need Von Neumann machines to see this future, but we will certainly have robots capable of building entire factories, collecting resources and processing them, and further building machines to spec. And those machines will be able to self-drive, self-operat autonomously.

Anyone playing typical resource games knows about bootstrapping, but once in the asteroid field we're basically resource infinite. Building engines to attach to asteroids, mining asteroids, building factories to create more robots and engines, all of it will be automated.

We toil at self-driving cars, yet this same tech enables self-driving robotics of all types.

So I honestly think that once we bootstrap in space, this sort of thing can happen fast, fast, fast. Decades to send hundreds of thousands of ice-rich resources to Mars.

The soil? Ah, genetic engineering. Really, this is an entirely new field, and frankly is beyond the danger yet benefit of nuclear science. We have the bomb, yet we have nuclear energy and medicine. Well genetics can obviously be far more deadly, and research all over the world, and startups, are already working on employing bacteria and organisms as self-replicating machines to do our bidding.

The dangers are in our face, but oh well! So if we presume survival, then once an atmosphere is produced we can seed the planet with organisms which can survive on rock and yet work with a mania to process it. It's OK if we immediately have moss like grass substitute everywhere. As long as it's working its magic, we get continued O2 production, and we can always create a rabbit pet or something that licks moss to survive. Or are tasty.

My point is, there are indeed many barriers. But we need to view them with where we will be in decades, not where we are now.
by drysine | 2025-09-22 06:12:30+00:00
>Everyone of importance on the Soviet/Russian side has refuted this.

Whose people you cite also happen to emigrate to the West or at least from Russia.

>Soviet diplomats were not dumb.

Or very interested in not looking dumb after it turned out that they were fooled. In other words, what they say happen to make them look good.

It makes incredibly valuable when American diplomats say that the promises were given even though it makes them look bad because the promises were broken (or about to be broken).
by mmmllm | 2025-09-22 06:13:17+00:00
"You're still fully participating in the daily destruction of nature, animals and living things just about as much as anyone who eats meat" - I mean, that's categorically not true. All else equal the meat eater has a far more destructive daily impact on nature.

I can also pet a dog with a good conscience, because I don’t turn around and eat an animal just like it. I don’t see one as a friend and the other as food just because society dictates that
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-09-22 06:13:33+00:00
> the country it's discovered in matters much less than the people it's loyal to. (If GPT or Grok become self aware and exponentially self improving, they're probably not going to give two shits about America's elected government.)

People are loyal (to whatever degree they're actually loyal), because it is a monkey virtue. Why would an AGI be loyal to anyone or anything? If we're not smart enough to carefully design the AGI because we're stumbling around just trying to invent any AGI at all, we won't know how to make loyalty fundamental to its mind at all. And it's not as if it evolved from monkeys such that it would have loyalty as a vestige of its former condition.
by BiteCode_dev | 2025-09-22 06:14:05+00:00
Yes, but critical policies stayed the way they were, and the social order didn't smooth back to pre 2001. There was no move in that direction.

It was a short break, not a rebuilding.

Hence, what's happening today is not going to be a one time event. It's been escalating since 2001, and at best, stagnating under Obama.
by chocoboaus3 | 2025-09-22 06:14:15+00:00
I think onboarding subscriptions could be a bit better.

Reading bank statement CSVs (and yes, there will be some customers who won't do that and its fine AND you will have to be more security conscious about how that works, dont store it etc) is likely going to see more onboarding success.

I really think the friction to solve here is onboarding, make that smooth and you will get better conversion.

You could of course go down the path of direct bank connection via aggregators but i'd leave that until PMF is found. I do think this will be your main friction point.
by ocimbote | 2025-09-22 06:14:42+00:00
Any kind of documentation has a target audience. Your test is very valuable if and only if the target audience is a total beginner. Of course it's still very hard to write good documentation even if you have identified your target, but having someone totally illiterate on the subject matter review your documentation is as useful as if I'd have to review a PhD thesis in quantum physics. It just doesn't make sense (trust me :).

Writing documentation is hard. Start with: Who am I writing this for?

edit: I may have misunderstood OP's "with minimal expertise" for "total beginner". They're two different things, absolutely.
by timr | 2025-09-22 06:14:54+00:00
> It is also true that 40% of dog owning households don't get their dogs vaccinated because they don't believe animal vaccines are medically necessary or effective.

First of all, no, that's not what this says. The exact quote is:

> according to the survey results, nearly 40 percent of dog owners believe that canine vaccines are unsafe, more than 20 percent believe these vaccines are ineffective, and 30 percent consider them to be medically unnecessary.

In fact, when you look at the paper they're citing [1], they notably do not state if the respondent actually vaccinated their pet. Not sure why....

(EDIT: Actually, it's worse than that! I found a draft of the full text, and a full 84% of respondents vaccinated their pets for Rabies! [2] You can't make this stuff up. See my other comment for more [3]).

Second, it's based on a YouGov (aka, a web survey) of 2200 people:

> The survey was conducted between March 30 and April 10, 2023 among 2,200 dog owners who answered questions through the research sampling firm YouGov.

I would be very hesitant to draw any conclusions from this at all.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02644...

[2] https://ideas.repec.org/p/osf/socarx/qmbkv.html

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45329845
by ryanjshaw | 2025-09-22 06:15:17+00:00
Important to note the various limitations of this approach:

> It relies only on self-reported symptoms, and features requiring clinician observation are missing; symptoms are decontextualized (e.g., insomnia due to substance withdrawal isn’t differentiated from insomnia due to anxiety); all symptoms were assessed using a 12-month time scale, even though different symptom patterns exist at different time scales.

In particular, I’m not sure how this would identify somebody with the traditional schizophrenia + anosognosia combo, which requires another person to help diagnose.
by growse | 2025-09-22 06:15:18+00:00
I agree with a lot of this.

> My experience of Cambridge students (I live in Cambridge) is that I have seen many burn out.

100%. I "burnt out" (actually, I think I discovered there was more to life than the academic slog I'd spent my entire schooling immersed in) and despite 6 A levels came 94/97 in my third year.

It happens a lot, and my suspicion is that the burnout is caused by the whiplash of going from a high intensity/pressure school environment (where you're likely told you're the smartest person in the room), to a more adult, self-driven one (where it's clear you're not).

> You also end up with a very narrow program of study which for children with broader interests forces them into a box very early.

This depends on the course I think. I did natural sciences which is extremely broad, and allows much later specialisation. Other courses are far narrower d think.
by marklubi | 2025-09-22 06:15:20+00:00
I fully disagree with Java as a starting point and it was an interesting conversation with the teacher.

Apparently, "College Prep" courses more or less determine that Java is the language that they should use.

His teacher thought it was stupid as well, but sometimes your hands are tied. That's what the schools are using as a starting metric though.

He was apparently the only person in the class that said he wanted to do software engineering. Don't worry, he'll be a polyglot before he reaches college.
by donkeylazy456 | 2025-09-22 06:15:38+00:00
I can't take these nonsenses anymore.

America has made more profits than countries that take manufacturing jobs from USA. It was totally win-win. Now America destroying these relationships by themselves. Even asking allies economic failure to fulfill their (or trump administration's) greed. Those economic failure possibilities will make their allies' manufacturing capabilities degrade. They don't even have any capabilities and proper plans for re-buliding domestic manufacturing industries to satisfy their needs. (price, capability)
by dathinab | 2025-09-22 06:15:40+00:00
and EU isn't even a country, and all(?/most) EU countries have the budged strictly sitting with the senate, i.e. outside of the hand of any of the leaders discussing deals with Trump

the chance that anything like that will pass those Senats also isn't exactly high

and all of this is public knowledge, so either Trump is incredible badly consulted to a point you wonder if it's malicious or more likely he doesn't care, and only care about a meaningless legally void promise he can present now probably some way smaller immediate subset of the promised actions. And then a few years down it's the "evil other countries" which he knowingly pressured to give him hollow promises they legally can't give, instead of it's seemingly bad/incompetent deal making (if you assume the goal is to actually make working deals and not to rail up people to have excuses for increasingly more extreme actions).
by dotcoma | 2025-09-22 06:16:32+00:00
Yes, please!

The world is a complicated place: for example, for some subscriptions, I need to unsubscribe at least 30 days in advance.

For some I get billed every month but I bought a yearly pass, and I need to unsubscribe before the year is over (or, again, 30 days before the year is over).

Other things, such as domains, maybe don't auto-renew, but I better remember to renew them, etc.

It's a lot easier for me to figure out how the rules work case by case and just let you do the task of sending me 1 or 2 emails as a reminder on the dates I choose. Thank you!
by bazoom42 | 2025-09-22 06:17:19+00:00
The association between IO and monads is just that Haskell uses a monad for IO as a clever hack to support IO in an otherwise pure and lazy language. But this is just one use of monads. Monads in themselves does not have anything in particular to do with IO.

Monads are a pattern for function composition. In most languages it is verbose compared to alternatives (like map and filter), but Haskell have some syntactic sugar which makes it a nice succint way of chaining functions.

The problem with monad tutorials is they try to explain monads as some abstract, universal concept disconnected from practical code. But try to explain functions or classes the same way and it would also be incomprehensible for someone unfamiliar with the concept.

It is not due to ill will, it is just that Hakell-fans tend to have a background in mathematics and therefore default to the most abstract explanation possible, where software developers prefer to start with something practically useful and then generalize from there.

You probably wouldnt understand ‘map’ either, if it was explained to you by a haskelite, since they tend to explain functions in terms of their type signatures rather than what they actually does.

Monads should be exlained through practical code examples in Haskell since this is the context where it makes sense.
by lynx97 | 2025-09-22 06:17:26+00:00
(How) did they control for parental influence vs. genetic heritability? I grew up with a pathologically anxious mother. I still remember having to counteract her behaviour to avoid it leaking into my world, before I managed to move out. She is still a trigger for me, 30 years later. I can only stand having her around me for at max. 2 hours, then my vessel is full. IMO, I am not convinced that a sibling study rules out environmental influences.
by itake | 2025-09-22 06:18:16+00:00
1/ ISP or the website Youre accessing can see the DNS queries and block traffic. My eSIM routes through Hong Kong, which means no ChatGPT.

2/ iPhones don't get you set the DNS provider / DoH for cellular

3/ DoH breaks wifi redirect walls, making it tedious to enable/disable. Like you cant just enable DoH for certain apps or disable it for others.
by whatshisface | 2025-09-22 06:18:34+00:00
It's not the message anybody wants to hear, but until the other party makes a clear and irrevocable promise to cancel the tariffs / walk back the tantrum diplomacy if they return to office, I am willing to believe they might not. If the emotional chords being struck by the tough guy act are so positive that they're counterbalancing the negatives from reality, then it is as likely to be imitated as reversed.
by nenenejej | 2025-09-22 06:18:50+00:00
> How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me, a beginner

Such Jargon! What's a developer? some kind of person who takes my fujifilm and gives me photos? And why do I care if someone is not such a person. Tutorial? what is this stuff do I need to sit in a small classroom? How do I read some college students sitting bored in a classroom?
by tho23434234dfdf | 2025-09-22 06:19:35+00:00
> supreme leader of the world, emend educational materials to propound the idea that the US is superior to other tributary states, quell all internal cries of undemocratic practices, and ban books that promote historical knowledge to avoid unnecessary dissent.

You mean just make what is already de-facto practice, de-jure ?

Yay, how benevolent our new masters are.
by mmmllm | 2025-09-22 06:19:51+00:00
The point is that you're not relegating another sentient being's life to lower than that of your own. You refuse to accept the torture and murder of another species.

In doing so, you dramatically expand your empathy and understanding of what it is to be a living thing, and hence you gain an inner connection to nature and animals that is hard to describe. At least that's my personal experience.
by sflanker | 2025-09-22 06:20:25+00:00
The EU’s oppressive regulations are based an absurd lack of understanding of how technology works. If consumers find an aspect of the protocol bothersome they have the power to use a browser or extension that makes it possible to block or disable it. We do not need a nanny state government imposing fines and threats on legitimate well intentioned websites. IMHO: Good riddance to this broken regulation.
by pas | 2025-09-22 06:21:49+00:00
why things are falling apart? isn't it mostly good old Baumol's cost disease (relative productivity decreasing) coupled with the lack of economies of scale (even more productivity backsliding) coupled with spending priorities (services, aging population, "green" and climate change stuff) coupled with NIMBY issues (which again put a downward pressure on scale, and thus productivity)?

our built environment suffers from the fact that there's no Apple Autobahn, manufactured in China at Foxconn, using competitive cutting-edge tech shit in the most cost-efficient way?
by tetha | 2025-09-22 06:22:58+00:00
This is our documentation workflow as well: Write it, and then have someone less or not experienced with the system execute the runbook. Also, encourage everyone to work on refining and improving the docs, because after 5 years with a system, I will have blind spots someone less experienced can point out.

On lesson I've learned from that: It's a lot about managing confidence of the user.

To do this, the instruction of "invoke this shell command" is now usually accompanied with a number of sections collapsed by default: How does a successful invocation look like - especially if it contains "ignorable warnings"? What errors could occur, and are they fatal or can they be fixed on the fly? Some more complex shell-stuff is often also accompanied by an explanation of what all of this is.

And yes, this means that sometimes one step in a runbook has a page of documentation if you read it all. But we've found that this helps a lot during onboarding new team members, as by now, a lot of the standard runbooks are also a prety good introduction to the quirks and quarrels of the normal tools we use.
by marklubi | 2025-09-22 06:24:15+00:00
Not going to disagree. It's the sandbox that we're playing in though (dealing with, HOORAY JAVA!) since it's a class at school.

Have to start somewhere, teach them better alternatives as they evolve. Not even going to broach the prototype-based programing stuff until he comfortably has the basics understood.

Edit: I don't GAF about downvotes, but I would at least expect a response about why. If you don't like the philosophy, give me some reasons. Don't like something else, tell me why. I'll happily debate anyone all day long
by jandrewrogers | 2025-09-22 06:25:17+00:00
Rabies vaccines have never been required. It is disingenuous to even imply otherwise. Humans are only given a rabies vaccine if there is evidence of exposure. Exaggerating the issue just gives average people reasons to disbelieve you.

Turning vaccines into quasi-religious totems is counter-productive. It should be a pure cost-benefit analysis. I am way more vaccinated than most people, side effects of my interesting career, but I am under no delusions that much of it is not an almost total waste as a matter of science.

Measles, yes. Rabies, lol no. If you conflate them people will rightly not trust you.
by dundarious | 2025-09-22 06:25:31+00:00
You're right that the biggies wouldn't really have that option. I'm sure they're not the only ones that get hit by such attacks, though. Smaller and non-public companies would have to think about it.

I'm not even arguing for a specific policy, but I didn't like how the framing of the post was about being "stupid" enough to break the proposed law. It wouldn't be that simple.
by SllX | 2025-09-22 06:25:35+00:00
> This "pay up for trade access" is similar to the tributary system of feudal China. Every year, neighboring countries of China like Korea, Japan, Thailand, and Vietnam sent envoys to Imperial China, paying gold, women, and exotic products, in return for recognition of their sovereignty (subject to the supreme authority of Chinese emperor), military protection, and access to trade routes within China.

The most irritating thing is that I specifically didn't want to see a return to form for this for China, but I never imagined that America in the 21st Century would somehow get there first. It was just out of fucking nowhere.