MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lazide | 2025-09-06 10:58:11+00:00
Higher bandwidth means less time to transmit a given packet. Just like more light gathering in a lens allows faster shutter speeds.

If you had to move 100 tons of packages, which is going to be faster - a Lamborghini going 200 mph, or a tractor/trailer going 50mph?

If you’re trying to set a speed record and don’t care about bringing anything along, which is faster?

Neither meaning is necessarily wrong.
by kelnos | 2025-09-06 10:58:37+00:00
> The settlement should reflect society's belief of the cost or deterrent

Settlements have nothing to do with either of those things. Settlement has to do with what the plaintiff believes is good enough for the cost that will avoid the uncertainty of trial. This is a civil case, "society" doesn't really come into play here. (And you can't "settle" a criminal case; closest analogue would be a plea deal.)

If the trial went forward to a guilty verdict, then the fines would represent society's belief of cost or deterrent. But we didn't get to see that happen.
by twoodfin | 2025-09-06 10:59:05+00:00
I can’t vouch for its scientific plausibility, but one of my favorite bullets to add to this list comes from Frank Robinson’s novel-length scifi exploration of the plausibility of extraterrestrial life:

“The next step is crucial. The simple organic molecules have to be shielded from the ultraviolet radiation of the primary. That requires a large body of water—an ocean—to protect them. No protection and the molecules break up as soon as they're formed. And oceans of water are … extremely rare.”

…

“But something else is rarer still. The next step in the creation of life is when the amino acids form into long chains.

Left in the ocean, they drift apart as easily as they join together. There has to be a means of concentrating them. Once a certain level of concentration is reached, they'll form long chains, more complex molecules, automatically. Heating isolated bodies of water would help, say tidal pools warmed by hot lava and occasionally replenished by the sea.”

…

“Do you understand, Sparrow? Tidal pools implies tides and that means a moon large enough to raise them—though not too frequently, because you might dilute the pool too much. A combination of the primary and the moon would raise larger tides less often, and that would be a happy medium. What's required, then, is a planet that has land surfaces, oceans, and a large enough satellite to raise suitable tides. The action would concentrate the simple amino acids and they could combine into the longer chains.”

The novel is The Dark Beyond the Stars, and I recommend it highly.
by xyzzyz | 2025-09-06 10:59:08+00:00
Granted, on paper it’s a cool feature. But I’ve never once seen an application that will actually preserve that property.

Chances are, the author literally used software that does it as he wrote these words. This feature is critical to how Chrome Sync works. You wouldn’t want to lose synced state if you use an older browser version on another device that doesn’t recognize the unknown fields and silently drops them. This is so important that at some point Chrome literally forked protobuf library so that unknown fields are preserved even if you are using protobuf lite mode.
by michaelt | 2025-09-06 10:59:27+00:00
I think you might be under-estimating the importance of not hitting things.

If you look at the statistics on fatal car accidents, 85%+ involve collisions with stationary objects or other road users.

Nobody's suggesting getting rid of machine vision or ML - just that if you've got an ML+vision system that gets in 1 serious accident per 200,000 miles, adding LIDAR could improve that to 1 serious accident per 2,000,000 miles.
by 1dom | 2025-09-06 10:59:46+00:00
That's fair. I was aware of that, but I wasn't thinking of that use of the word when I read it, I thought of the other meaning of "seamless".

> Seamless is a word with a specific meaning within the context of VMs.

The problem is it also has another specific meaning in the context of integrations in general: it means low fuss, minimal setup, no troubleshooting.

A different selection of words (windowless?) would have avoided this debate.
by throwawayqqq11 | 2025-09-06 11:02:28+00:00
unless you make that privilege about a universal resource like money, which can be translated to political power. You are right, many societies have that feudalism-like problem (social mobility), when you look at it that way, even without a royal family.

https://www.wired.com/story/yanis-varoufakis-technofeudalism...
by kelnos | 2025-09-06 11:02:40+00:00
> It was broken by a company of people who were not very rich at all

I think the company's bank account would beg to differ on that.

> managed to produce billions in value (not dollars, value) by breaking said laws.

Ah, so breaking the law is ok if enough "value" is created? Whatever that means?

> They're not trafficking humans or doing predatory lending, they're building AI.

They're not trafficking humans or doing predatory lending, they're infringing on the copyright of book authors.

Not sure why you ended that sentence with "building AI", as that's not comparing apples to apples.

But sure, ok, so it's ok to break the law if you, random person on the internet, think their end goals are worthwhile? So the ends justify the means, huh?

> This is why our judicial system literally handles things on a case by case basis.

Yes, and Anthropic was afraid enough of an unfavorable verdict in this particular case that they paid a billion and a half to make it go away.
by amelius | 2025-09-06 11:03:55+00:00
Meanwhile, the competition who is using LiDAR has FSD cars. You're understating the importance of this sensor.

You can train a DL model to act like a LiDAR based on only camera inputs (the data collection is easy if you already have LiDAR cars driving around). If they could get this to work reliably, I'm sure the competition would do it and ditch the LiDAR, but they don't, so that tells us something.
by delusional | 2025-09-06 11:04:27+00:00
> No, the left wing wasn't really involved.

That's fair. You didn't mention the left wing at any point, and I made an assumption.

This is veering quite quickly into unsubstantiated claims of collusion and conspiracy. You're weaving a network of secret deep state authoritarians secretly colluding with tech CEOs, and leaving no trace. It's honestly pretty close to QAnon, which is a huge red flag for me. I can't follow you there, and therefore can't make any substantial arguments for you.

What I would like to point out is the historical revisionism of Elon Musk buying twitter to weed out the subversive forces. He tried to get out of the deal, but the establishment forced him to see it through.

> I've kept a copy of Titter's announcement saved to disk as a reminder of how crazy groupthink can get. Anyone willing to state such a stupid theory in public has to believe it.

The announcement twitter made mentions that you have to take those tweets in context of the whole Jan 6. insurrection event. When you say that it's not incitement of violence, should I take that to mean you believe that the armed insurrection was not connected to Donald Trump? or do you believe that it was but that the further tweets weren't a further escalation of that conflict?

> The people have freedom.

I understand your argument for that then. I would caution that by saying that your conclusion hinges heavily on whether you believe Donald Trump is actually a popular reformist, or if you believe he is an elitist authoritarian. Your argument is quite close to "This can't be feudalism, the lords wants what's best for us", which is a quite unconvincing argument.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-09-06 11:05:03+00:00
In the US, as well.

I won't recount what recently happened to a friend in Milwaukee. It was an unpopular story (because the ripoff was Uber-based, and not the traditional taxi).

There's bad actors in every industry. I have found that industries that get "entrenched," tend to breed the most bad actors.

If anything turns into a "pseudo-monopoly," expect the grifters to start popping up. They'll figure out how to game the system.
by Fanmade | 2025-09-06 11:06:02+00:00
Ha, I've written a lot of these Makefiles and the "make dev" command even became a personal standard that I added to each project. I don't know if I read about that, or if it just developed into that because it just makes sense. In the last few years, these commands very often started a docker container, though. I do tend to work on Windows with WSL and I most of my colleagues use macOS or Linux, so that's definitely one of the reasons why docker is just easier there.
by yardie | 2025-09-06 11:06:21+00:00
I think the rest of the world have realized, even before most Americans, just how cheap our politicians can be bought for. Not billions, not millions, but for a few thousand dollars you can get a member of congress to scuttle a bill or praise a despot. A few million dollars gets you a national social media disinformation campaign. And for $200k, membership into Mar-a-Lago “country club”.

Our government sold out our ideals for cheap.
by EwanG | 2025-09-06 11:07:45+00:00
Ironic (at least to me) that trying to go to the URL results in a message that I am blocked because it thinks I'm a bot. I assume for the same reason I get that from the NYT (because I tend to use a VPN... horrors).

At least they are both consistent in that trying to sign up for a subscription leads to the same message.
by rfoo | 2025-09-06 11:08:16+00:00
This is the extracted Arrow C data interfaces as documented in https://arrow.apache.org/docs/format/CDataInterface.html

It's not how you interact with the data in your own C++ code, it's for passing this data to other in-process consumers (libraries etc). While in the example it calls the release function, this is usually just passed to a downstream consumer and it's their responsibility to call it.

I agree that having such an example as the first one is confusing. Given that a large part of the point of Apache Arrow is passing data columnar data between libraries in different languages in memory, it makes some sense.
by npteljes | 2025-09-06 11:08:46+00:00
I have not taken a typography class, but norm seems to be context dependent. On the internet, unjustified seems to be the norm, looking at the random high-traffic websites I visited. Printed media is another beast though. I picked up a random book, justified, random newspaper, justified, random marketing material from my mailbox, justified.

So in this current case, since OP's blog is on the internet and not printed, I would suggest unjustified.
by ddkto | 2025-09-06 11:12:54+00:00
The academic / business divide is a great example of the correct model depending on what you want to do. The academic side wants to understand, the business side wants to take action.

For example, the Viable System Model[1] can capture a huge amount of nuance about how a team functions, but when you need to reorganize a disfunctional team, a simple org chart and concise role descriptions are much more effective.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viable_system_model
by b112 | 2025-09-06 11:13:03+00:00
Holy cow. You really deserved the kick. Fixes the RC in question aren't for bugfixes in general, but bugfixes for existing patches that in that RC.

It doesn't matter if you have bugs in the code still. At all. Having bugs in the code is not relevant. You are 100%, completely, inexcusably wrong if you were providing a bugfix that wasn't fixing something specifically changed in the RC.

Untested and unreviewed? Your own testing process and review process does not meet that. "Since then" is entirely irrelevant. Saying "I've proven it works" means you have no concept of stability in a release process.

I sincerely hope your code gets the boot from the kernel, because you clearly will never be able to maintain it there. You just don't listen. To anyone.

Your personal definitions of the above terms are irrelevant. How you think the kernel should be maintained, is meaningless. Whether you think your code is ready is an insane way to validate that you're "super special and get to have your way".

Personally, I'd never hire you from this alone.
by rfoo | 2025-09-06 11:13:50+00:00
<rant>The official Arrow C++ implementation is just ergonomic warts, full of `const std::shared_ptr<T>&` bs. Trying to use it to manipulate data always give me headache telling apart WTH is an Array, ArrayData, Buffer, and the typed Array interfaces are barely usable. The original official Rust port inherited all the mis-designs too. On the Rust side someone created arrow2 [0] to fix it.</rant>

And I'm glad there's a good C++ impl too.

[0] https://github.com/jorgecarleitao/arrow2
by impossiblefork | 2025-09-06 11:15:06+00:00
We do not designate terrorist organizations. SÄPO does not have such a power. The courts interpret the following definition:

>3 § Med terroristorganisation avses i denna lag en sammanslutning av personer som begår eller på annat sätt medverkar till terroristbrott eller gör sig skyldiga till försök, förberedelse eller stämpling till terroristbrott.

Thus the government, SÄPO, the authorities etc. have no power over what is a terrorist organisation. There's designation or possibility of designation. Only the above definition defines it.

Notice that even state organizations of friendly states can in principle be terrorist organizations according to this definition. It's among the most beautiful laws we have.

I was initially opposed to the inquiry to develop this law, because I feared that we'd something deranged, something against our constitution where the government or some authority designates organizations as terrorist and where it's thus a political matter, but we got really lucky. This law is like a pearl, and it's moral delight, so beautiful that one should cry. Actual generality, actual equality before the law, actual apolitical court-based and truth-based, where others have political determinations.
by dig1 | 2025-09-06 11:15:18+00:00
> Contributors and maintainers often have less power than even the smaller companies, and users have less power yet.

If contributors/maintainers are not happy with what the small company does, they can fork the project (assuming a liberal license) and continue in their own way. Valkey is a good example (with an interesting twist of license dynamics where Redis can use Valkey code now, but not the other way around).

> We have built a world where it is often easiest to just use whatever a cloud provider offers

And, IMHO, this is the major problem in the dev community these days - we've become lazy and focused on nonsense ("pretty"/unusable UIs, web gymnastics, llm, "productivity" etc.). We didn't have problems in the past to fork or reimplement OSes (various BSD instances), compilers (gcc versions), databases (MariaDB), and so on. There are tons of geniuses around hacking on cool stuff, but, sadly, the loudness of various hipsters and evangelists limits their visibility.

> Those providers may not contribute back to the projects they turn into services, though, upsetting the smaller companies that are,

The significant contribution that these providers (AWS, et al.) make to these projects is often overlooked - free advertisement. If I can remember correctly, ElasticSearch got popular when AWS started to offer it as a service. Additionally, cloud providers usually contribute (by employing core developers, shipping patches or testing) to the kernel, gcc or jdk, from which these small companies benefit significantly. In contrast, they themselves could do none of this.

But it is easier to blame "big scary clouds" than to rethink your business model. Be honest, start closed; no one will touch that and no one will be standing in your way.
by Ygg2 | 2025-09-06 11:16:05+00:00
> The compiler isn't ignoring your new types

True, I didn't meant to imply you can just ignore types; I meant to say that the equivalent operations on a naked vs wrapped value return equivalent assembly.

It's one of those zero cost abstraction. You can writ your newtype wrapper and it will be just as if you wrote implementations by hand.

> My favourite as a Unix person is Option<OwnedFd>.

Yeah, but that's a bit different. Compiler won't treat any Option<T> that way out of the box. You need a NonZero type or nightly feature to get that[1].

That relies on compiler "knowing" there are some values that will never be used.

[1] https://www.0xatticus.com/posts/understanding_rust_niche/
by xyzzyz | 2025-09-06 11:16:23+00:00
What you describe using many completely unnecessary mathematical terms is not only not found in “every real-world protocol”, but in fact is something virtually absent from overwhelming majority of actually used protocols, with a notable exception of the kind of protocol that gets a four digit numbered RFC document that describes it. Believe it or not, but in the software industry, nobody is defining a new “version number” with “strictly defined algebra” when they want to add a new field to an communication protocol between two internal backend services.
by kosolam | 2025-09-06 11:16:28+00:00
Pretty cool. Unfortunately, there aren’t enough benefits in webdev to include this technique. Simple human readable flags would usually win because there is no requirement for high performance or efficiency in general (down to a certain level which is considered “good enough”) when doing webdev. There are quite a few low hanging fruits to pick from before going into bits. For example using a stack based on golang, java or other efficient stacks vs ruby,python,node almost automatically gains you a lot of performance and efficiency upsides.
by rendall | 2025-09-06 11:16:32+00:00
Comparing other stars and planets tells us how unusual (or not) Earth is. That perspective matters for understanding climate, habitability, and even life itself.

Most of the imaging and signal-processing tech built for astrophysics ends up in medicine, satellites, and everyday devices. The "wow" factor funds a lot of spinoffs.

Space weather doesn’t stop at the edge of the Solar System. Supernovae, stellar motions, even rogue objects can affect us. Better to understand them early.

It’s long-term thinking. Nobody builds interstellar ships tomorrow, but mapping the neighborhood now is how future generations avoid starting from zero.

Honestly, it also grounds us. Realizing Earth is one small rock among billions changes how seriously we treat our only habitable home.
by adrian_b | 2025-09-06 11:16:57+00:00
Very distant systems, i.e. extra-gallactic, like quasars, are used for the most accurate coordinate systems (e.g. the International Celestial Reference System/Frame, ICRS/ICRF3, the Gaia Celestial Reference Frame, Gaia–CRF3), because their angular velocities are negligible due to the huge distances where they are located.

Basing an inertial coordinate system on the observed positions of the bodies belonging to the Solar System is affected by much greater errors caused by the imperfect modeling of their relatively fast movements.

Using stars that are outside the Solar System is much better, but using distant extra-gallactic objects is even better.

If we did not have the "fixed" stars as a background on which to view the movements of the Sun, Moon and planets, who knows how many centuries later physics and technology would have reached the current level, because when seeing only the relative motions of the planets, without a fixed reference system, those are much harder to understand.

For interplanetary navigation, receiving signals from pulsars can be used as a backup or a replacement for atomic clocks. Individual pulsars, especially when young, are sometimes affected by "glitches" when their moment of inertia, thus the frequency of their signal, changes, but if multiple old pulsars are monitored, any glitches should be detectable and they should not affect operation.

Even the primitive humans of many thousands or tens of thousands of years ago knew to predict seasons by observing the rising stars and to navigate with the help of star gazing.

For the ancient civilizations dependent on agriculture, observing the stars, e.g. to determine when to sow various cultivated plants, could have a life and death impact, not a minor influence upon their life.
by Sharlin | 2025-09-06 11:17:43+00:00
> Ragged-right was the norm for wider media such as printed books

What? I'm pretty sure that if I pick any book in my shelf, it's going to be justified.

> Most web media are narrow-column format, so tend to be fully justified.

What #2? 99% of web media is ragged-right, the biggest reason being that it's the default, and that browsers have terrible line-wrapping and historically had no support for hyphenation. And justified text gets worse the shorter the lines are, because there are fewer options on where to insert newlines, leading to large spaces between words. Also, good justification requires fine-grained word spacing control, which doesn't work well with traditional low-resolution displays.

My MSc thesis advisor recently told that apparently thesis documents should be submitted with ragged-right lines these days because it makes them easier to read for dyslexics; while it makes sense, it must be a quite new guideline.
by themgt | 2025-09-06 11:19:04+00:00
Interesting article by someone who once argued that state-sponsored journalists are legally combatants, "the Voice of Palestine—the official broadcasting arm of the Palestinian Authority ... will remain what it has become: a combatant—and therefore a legitimate target—in a painful, never-ending, low-intensity war"[0]

NED also enjoys deep support across Congress, and has an organizational structure designed to protect it from political attack: It is run not by the U.S. government but by an independent, bipartisan board, which allows it to keep its distance from partisan politics. I was on that board from 2016 until 2024 and can attest that the conspiracy theories are wrong. The endowment’s board members are not secret intelligence officers but former civil servants, members of Congress, academics, and regional experts. Nobody pays them for the work they do, pro bono, on NED’s behalf.

And apparently contrary to conspiracy theories, NED is just a bog standard NGO?

> In 1983, Casey and Raymond focused on creating a funding mechanism to support Freedom House and other outside groups that would engage in propaganda and political action that the CIA had historically organized and paid for covertly. The idea emerged for a congressionally funded entity that would serve as a conduit for this money.

> But Casey recognized the need to hide the strings being pulled by the CIA. “Obviously we here [at CIA] should not get out front in the development of such an organization, nor should we appear to be a sponsor or advocate,” Casey said in one undated letter to then-White House counselor Edwin Meese III as Casey urged creation of a “National Endowment.” [1/2]

> In 1991 a cofounder of the National Endowment for Democracy, Allen Weinstein, explained its work by saying, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”[3]

A bog standard NGO conceived of by the Director of the CIA to fill the role the CIA once did. But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln?

[0] https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2002/01/targeting-radio-...

[1] https://consortiumnews.com/2015/01/08/cias-hidden-hand-in-de...

[2] https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/casey-...

[3] https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/10/21/what-is-national...
by 1dom | 2025-09-06 11:19:33+00:00
I don't doubt that they claim to feel that way, and that they feel they'll be the ones who push back against VC profiteering and enshittification.

That just confirms to me that they're in the same position as any of VC backed founder. That's why the VC firm backed them: because they saw an opportunity to profit from someone else's dream.

I would really, really love to revisit this discussion with you and the founders in 5 and 10 years time - I'd be happier if you proved me wrong:)