MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by simianwords | 2025-09-27 08:14:59+00:00
Companies are incentivised to keep costs low and the feedback loop for this incentive is much smaller. What I mean by feedback loop is: the cost of running the company directly affects the stake-holders in a meaningful way. The CEO is probably has stock options and has to hit a target so that they can be paid well. To do so they need to be more sensitive with prices or shareholders or the board will be on the CEO’s behind. There is a direct monetary incentive relation here.

There is one for the government too but the feedback loop is much bigger. If some one in the government makes a suboptimal decision, what incentives exist to penalise them?
by debugnik | 2025-09-27 08:16:52+00:00
They didn't misunderstand, they're calling out Bevy's priorities.

Bevy is still incomplete as an engine. AFAIK there's only one commercially successful game made with it, Tiny Glade, and it doesn't even use Bevy's renderer but a custom one.

Yet the Bevy developers distract the project with essays and debates about the politics of their federated social media presence. You don't need that to build a game engine, but you do to build a "GITHUB OPEN SOURCE" game engine. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with it, but that's clearly the focus here.
by godelski | 2025-09-27 08:17:00+00:00
Run a game of life for a billion years and tell me if your answer is the same. You can accelerate that so I'll wait.

Does the time matter? A ruleset doesn't change with time.

If you're still unconvinced, get a degree in physics. I'm not sure how you could get through that and still not believe that complexity rises from simplicity and how you end up getting drops in that complexity, which we call emergence, before becoming more complex than before.
by motbus3 | 2025-09-27 08:17:25+00:00
Thank you for the numbers. Could you please clarify how much money this translates to, both in terms of income and expenses generated by skilled workers who are legally employed in the UK?

I must say I am not doubting nor being pedantic. I am indeed trying to have a conversation based on the facts and people I know. I would happily change my mind if I find reasons for that. At the same time, I would like to share my views which might give some perspective on my opinions.

Based on government figures I've saw, the annual economic contribution from skilled workers alone is estimated to range from 4 billion to gbp. Moreover, it's important to note that these skilled workers generally don't receive government benefits. Literally. They pay double on nurseries, they pay for NHS in advance, they do not have any financial government assistance at all, contrary to what people believe.

I do not understand what kind of problems they cause. Would you mind explain it to me? I am not being pedantic nor ironic. I want to understand what is the complaint?

I agree about drug dealers, rape gangs and etc, but they in the UK before and they will remain independently of the political changes regarding immigration.

Ten years and no settlement will only put away skilled workers as they will not be able to retire on time, nor have any financial safety as the UK only provides 8 weeks for them to leave after the contract termination.It also means spending more on health, education, and living, which is already a struggle.

Refugees receive £50 per week, which isn't enough for groceries and rent. The system is broken, but attacking another unrelated group does not seem to be the answer.

While I acknowledge that some individuals are abusing the system, I maintain that the overall impact is likely positive, especially when considering the near-zero population growth among native populations.

Who will pay for pensions 10 years from now? The money you pay now goes towards current pensions, and the government does not save taxes for future generations.

So 1 million people per year was the supposed peak, right? The actual numbers are definitely far lower than 5 million, I think.

More than that, NHS workers in hospitals are immigrants because no British person is insane to work for it under current conditions.

At the same time, no Brit wants to increase taxes even more to cover the costs of paying more for health.

A short-sighted solution will be another blow to the UK economy as the Brexit was. Well, they are being orchestrated by exactly the same folks.

This also bothers me because there's a clear conflict of interest. Trice is married to an editorial lead at The Telegraph and receives funding from Lloyds.

Not sure about Sky News and others, but I would not be surprised that some digging would lead to the same people.

There is a clear financial cost related to the war in Ukraine. Whether it is a fair cost or not is a moral and ethical point, which I think is an individual opinion. But there is a cost regardless. Money spent in war is money that will never ever come back at any proportion to its society.
by ojosilva | 2025-09-27 08:19:57+00:00
In CS most security issues are treated separately from the fundamental engineering core. From the sw engineering standpoint the bridge is solid, if later some crooks can use it to extort users or terrorists can easily "make people fall into the water", then that's someone else's job downstream.

I know, it sucks. But that's how the entire web was built. Everyday you visit websites from foreign countries and click on extraneous links on HN that run code on your machine, next to a browser tab from your bank account, and nobody cares because it's all sandboxed and we really trust the sandboxing even though it fails once in a while, has unknown bugs, or simply can be bypassed all together by phishing or social engineering.
by commandersaki | 2025-09-27 08:21:34+00:00
These are some notes I wrote when I started out with typst when comparing with LaTeX:

1. It doesn't generate 5 bloody files when compiling.

2. Compiling is instant.

3. Diagnostics are way easier to understand (sort of like Rust compiler suggestion style).

4. List items can be either - item1 - item2, etc. or [item1], [item2]. The latter is way better because you can use anchoring to match on the braces (like "%" in vim), which means navigating long item entries is much easier.

5. In latex you have the \document{...} where you can't specify macros so they need to be at the top, in Typst you can specify the macros close to where you need them.

6. It's easier to version control and diff, especially if you use semantic line breaks.

7. Changing page layout, margins, spacing between things, etc., footers with page counters, etc. just seems way easier to do.
by kerningije | 2025-09-27 08:21:45+00:00
Yes! Thank you!

I have read Wiener and Ashby to reach this conclusion. I've used this argument before. A piece of software capable of creating any possible software would be infinitely complex. Also the reason I don't buy the "20 w general intelligence exists". The wattage for generally intelligent humans would be the entire energy input to the biosphere up to the evolution of humans.

Planetary biospheres show general intelligence, not individual chunks of head meat.
by mixedbit | 2025-09-27 08:22:32+00:00
Unfortunately, for products with batteries in non-standard form factors, we rarely have a choice of a manufacturer. For example, with home robot vacuums, we can only hope that brands will use top quality cells, but the information what cells are used is not even available to the customer. My Neato vacuum still runs great, but now that the company is out of business, my only battery replacement options are from no-name brands, with zero visibility of what cells are used internally.
by gr__or | 2025-09-27 08:22:35+00:00
While I agree with the sentiment, I think it confuses ISPs with registrars. There are still many ISPs that do that service as well, it's less common than it used to be.

It is quite common for national TLDs (like .de, .jp or .cn) to be managed by not-for-profit entities, under contract with their respective governments... which might also not be great wrt censorship.

There is also the general issue of equal access, where shorter, more memorable domains get more expensive and hodling domain names is only disincentivized for people without enough funds. I would very much like to see an alternative system to domain names, probably something more in the web of trust space.
by jimnotgym | 2025-09-27 08:22:40+00:00
There was recently a request by the police for new laws about overpowered electric bicycles being ridden on pavements. Yes, they want a law against riding an already illegal vehicle in a place it is already illegal to ride it.

Now they want to make it illegal for employers to illegally give a job to people it was already illegal to give a job to by making them have a new ID, when it was already illegal to give someone a job without getting proof of their right to work in the UK!

You are 100% right
by petepete | 2025-09-27 08:23:29+00:00
There's a gov.uk wallet app and digital service in beta already. I don't think it does very much yet.

https://www.gov.uk/wallet

It's backed by gov.uk one login, which is already a database that contains a fair chunk of the populations' details.

To me, it feels like the digital id is more a case of joining existing things together than creating something brand new from scratch.
by duskwuff | 2025-09-27 08:24:07+00:00
> > "If you are more annoying to work with than your contributions justify, you'll be ejected."

I'd argue that this is unreasonable for any project large enough to need a CoC at all. What it amounts to is excusing misconduct by project insiders, while allowing them to drive off new users by declaring their behavior 'annoying'. This isn't a code of conduct at all; it's a formalized "old boys club" dynamic.
by defanor | 2025-09-27 08:24:45+00:00
Among alternative typesetting systems, there is also SILE, which supports two syntaxes (XML-based and TeX-style), supports scripting in lua, comes with freely available sort-of-specification (unlike (La)TeX or Typst, unless one counts program sources as specification). For formulae, it additionally allows direct MathML input. I have not used either Typst or SILE though, only looked into their documentation.

HTML with MathML may make a decent system as well; possibly with an XML source and XSLT for templating, which is apparently how OpenStax textbooks are composed (via CNXML, though that also has just a couple of rain frog pictures in its documentation repository -- seems to be a common pattern around typesetting systems).

Then there is troff with eqn(1), which looks simpler, but not sure if there is an actual specification for it around, either.

And then there are Texinfo, org-mode with LaTeX embedding, other TeX-adjacent options, perhaps Markdown with HTML and MathML embedding.
by blagie | 2025-09-27 08:25:20+00:00
The cycle has been:

Piracy -> Friendly ways to buy -> Unfriendly ways to buy -> Piracy -> ...

Unfortunately, giving money back to writers involves hopping through piracy. At that point, a new, consumer-friendly service will sprout up. Everyone will use it.

Over time, the service will want to profit-maximize, and will adopt anti-consumer techniques. Leading people to go to Pirate Bay. Leading to friendly services.

Rinse, repeat.
by atoav | 2025-09-27 08:26:44+00:00
Having been extensively on computers for the past 25 years and I have never experienced the whole keyboard-/mouse-pain thing even in the slightest on myself. I know many collegues who did tho.

I wonder whether this has to do with me being a bass and guitar player. Playing an instrument where you essentially press down thick steel wires with your finger tips with full force, while your fingers are in odd angled ("unhealthy") positions for hours certainly does something to your motoric system.

I know anecdotal evidence with n=1 is useless, but the idea that motion is important to reduce body pains isn't exactly new or unresearched. A whole family of ergonomic chairs have evolved about that very idea. I know multiple people whose only solution to excruciating back pain was simply to exercise and build muscles in the back, and they tried every ergonomic chair in the book. The only thing that really helped was excercise.

Since I don't have RSI take all that with a grain of salt, but maybe trying with those guitar-finger-strength-trainers for a month isn't that big of an investment?
by nbernard | 2025-09-27 08:28:04+00:00
> If you're routinely using LaTeX to write papers, the time spent learning something new isn't comparably large.

I don't know. By then aren't you quite comfortable with LaTeX?

It may be Stockholm syndrome and sunk costs speaking, but I'm using LaTeX all the time: I quite like it and I don't feel any need for something else to replace it...
by iotku | 2025-09-27 08:28:08+00:00
From a marketing perspective perhaps, but it's still a supported LTS release of Ubuntu at heart and having two different version numbers would create ambiguity.

Things that should work on that particular Ubuntu LTS should work in Pop_OS! And at least you don't have to cross reference things.

Thankfully they keep important things more up to date with newer kernels/hardware support than the version numbers would suggest, but I think that it's a common point of confusion.
by presentation | 2025-09-27 08:28:12+00:00
Part of it is that most of the libraries that came before we’re tightly coupled to a particular framework that itself went out of fashion, like Passport and Express, which is a problem because frameworks themselves have been moving in and out of fashion very rapidly; or are coupled with service offerings from vendors, like Auth0.

Auth.js is actually one of the first attempts that tries to be framework and vendor agnostic while still including a good deal of the batteries you need to make a full authentication system, which they only recently did, as they were originally tied to next JS like every other library in the graveyard of authentication libraries.

If you just want to specifically do an OAuth handshake or salt and hash a password or produce a JWT, those libraries are all rock solid. But a full batteries included framework and vendor agnostic solution hasn’t really existed until recently.
by dotancohen | 2025-09-27 08:28:48+00:00
I used to customise my car, my keyboard, even my fountain pens. Now, I just want to use them. I bought a car that's quick enough to pass lumbering trucks on tight roads (Tesla Model 3), I bought a pen that fits my hand and writes comfortably (Jinhao A10 EF), and I'd love a keyboard like the Matias Ergo Pro that I don't need to replace every year.
by chanux | 2025-09-27 08:30:31+00:00
I maintained my CV in Latex for years (originally got started on this due to the fear of MS Word) and recently tried out Typst. I agree with you that it's quite simple to get started with. Also, I had to maintain a Ubuntu based Docker image with everything needed for the build.

Also if anyone is looking for a little help in getting started, LLMs are pretty decent at converting (and I forget which one I used).
by cube00 | 2025-09-27 08:31:23+00:00
> > We are 100% at a point where people can just "Tell the computer what you want in a web page, and it will work"

> I await the good software. Where is the good software?

Exactly this, it looks great on the surface until you dig in to find it using BlinkMacSystemFont and absolute positioning because it can't handle a proper grid layout.

You argue with it and it adds !important everywhere because the concept of cascading style is too much for its context window.
by Symbiote | 2025-09-27 08:32:08+00:00
> What purpose does a CoC serve? How does it help?

At work I think it has helped since we now have a clear procedure to follow if there's a problem.

Having the Code of Conduct be a public document rather than only an internal one means there are fewer excuses available for not following it — for example someone can't claim they thought it would be OK to ask a developer for sex since we wrote down that that's not OK.

It's also easier to explain in case the problem individual is employed by a paying customer.
by MichaelRo | 2025-09-27 08:32:16+00:00
>> At least I realized I loose interest in my side projects the moment they become a chore

Unfortunately, any reasonably complex side project eventually becomes work. It's still useful to keep grinding, as it builds perspective on why things are built the way they are, even when you have "freedom" to to implement them any way you like. What you don't have is infinite time though so if you wanna actually be able to use the darn thing, you have to settle for an imperfect design which soon enough will start to show it's limitations but instead of rewriting, you keep duct taping if because something that just works today is infinitely more business valuable than perfect tomorrow. Particularly when you realized from experience that tomorrow still won't be perfect, just late.

For clarification, I'm talking about building an automated trading system. And to get an idea of the complexity involved, just take a look at the "order" class in Interactive Brokers API. If you thought (side, price, quantity) is what defines an order, you're being naive: https://interactivebrokers.github.io/tws-api/classIBApi_1_1O...

Also even when you start with a mindset "I don't need all of this, my stuff will be simple", as I said, over enough time, use cases pile up and your original "simple" design either has to give way or become "useless".
by josephg | 2025-09-27 08:32:50+00:00
> Almost nobody wants to learn something new when they already know something similar.

Yeah, I wrote a paper using typst - which was much more pleasant to draft. But for the final version submitted to the journal, we ended up converting it to latex because that's what the journal wanted.

I think it'll be hard to dislodge latex for academic papers - particularly in CS. But there's plenty of other uses for it. Personally I'm looking forward to HTML output. I want to use it to write blog posts and long form documentation. (Markdown simply isn't powerful enough for my needs.)
by nickjj | 2025-09-27 08:34:59+00:00
I was told it's also illegal in the US for a hospital to bill you as uninsured if you have insurance.

You won't get in trouble but the hospital will, but if they ask if you have insurance and you say no when you do, that could change the situation.

Again, I'm not a lawyer but this was they told me once a few years ago because I got charged a ridiculous amount for something and wanted to see if it would be cheaper if I just paid without insurance considering my deductible was many thousands of dollars.
by rapjr9 | 2025-09-27 08:35:47+00:00
One potential application might be fighting wildfires. Seems like it would be really useful if one firefighter could remotely monitor a dozen autonomous bulldozers that were given general instructions. Would have to acquire a different training data set I'd guess, but the same approach seems applicable, get the data from teleoperated bulldozers used to fight fires. Getting the bulldozers into the right area would require some transport, like a truck or heavy lift helicopter, though maybe mini bulldozers would also work.

You might be interested in the work of Peter Corke also, he's automated horizontal mine shaft loaders and huge drag line shovels in his research:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUb9_Ysd2Hw

I think he used a different approach than you do, using visual servoing to get feedback and data from a camera. Maybe there's some value in combining both approaches, learn to control a machine from an operator, and also keep track of what is being moved with a camera to add another layer of control.
by oldie17 | 2025-09-27 08:35:52+00:00
Typst is just wonderful, I hear maths majors now procrastinate on thesis writing by writing typst packages instead. Give it ten years and see how it developed.

Pros:

- Instant compile. It just sits there waiting, and once you save your .typ, boom, your .pdf is ready.

- Surprisingly often I find myself using it as markdown replacement, e.g., for random meeting notes. Syntax is as easy as markdown and without boilerplate it produces a nice pdf.

What's not to like?

- IMO debugging can be tricky with quite concise error messages. And it does not produce any pdf once there is a single syntax error, precluding one favourite latex debugging route.

- When using packages, one does encounter hickups, but no surprise here for long-time latex users.
by delta_p_delta_x | 2025-09-27 08:36:31+00:00
I must say I really like the more straightforward syntax, semantics, and distribution model of Typst. LaTeX is akin to programming with the C preprocessor, it's both ridiculous and amazing what people have done with it but it gets quickly intractable. However, I really do enjoy the quality of graphics, diagrammatic, and scientific output from LaTeX, even if typing them is a pain (LLMs are a huge help here).

So asking the community here: what does Typst offer in place of PGF/TikZ[1], PGFPlots[2], Asymptote[3], chemfig[4], siunitx[5], physics2[6], and how does it work with existing bibliography providers? I use biber[7] with the Zotero Connector and Better BibTeX[8] so any paper I visit on the web is essentially instantly available to cite with one click on LaTeX.

A good test for Typst ought to be reproducing most of these typographic and diagrammatic exemplars: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/1319/

[1]: https://tikz.dev/

[2]: https://tikz.dev/pgfplots/

[3]: https://asymptote.sourceforge.io/

[4]: https://mirrors.ctan.org/macros/generic/chemfig/chemfig-en.p...

[5]: https://mirrors.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/siunitx/siunit...

[6]: https://mirrors.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/physics2/physi...

[7]: https://mirrors.ctan.org/biblio/biber/base/documentation/bib...

[8]: https://retorque.re/zotero-better-bibtex/
by OCTAGRAM | 2025-09-27 08:36:33+00:00
ITX-Llama is good for young kids to learn computer, programming, etc. My first mathematical application was MathCAD 6 on Windows 3.1 with Win32s add-on, and that worked fine for me, and can work fine for young kids. My most used programming language in DOS was Turbo Pascal, and it worked fine for me and can work fine for young kids.

I see nothing good in limited game option. It was inspiring to play game and then want to also program some game. Or to crack that game. DOS games are easier to penetrate with ArtMoney and IDA than modern garbage with closed source servers. So it makes sense which games are playable on device, not playability of games as is.

Parents may spend some time with kids in network DOS games, discuss how it was to experience it first. And that Raspberry Pi, what is it good for? It does not have DOS legacy, it does not have Amiga legacy. It is disconnected from all great stuff of the past, and does not have own charm. Its games are either emulators or some open source games ported to ARM. An architecture that is new on desktops and who knows how long will it be. There is Windows ARM, but it does not run on Raspberry Pi. There is Mac OS ARM, but also won't run. Proprietary ARM is pushed to be replaced by RISC-V, so should we tie ourselves to ARM if it is doomed?

I mostly see Raspberry Pi in hardware. MT-32Pi for Roland sound emulation in ITX-Llama. PiStorm for fast CPU emulation in MiniMig. Not primary CPU for desktop. I don't know what to discuss with kids in Rasperry Pi. No past and no future.