MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tannhaeuser | 2025-09-11 10:21:53+00:00
The postulate for EU structural reform towards perfection is typical of HN and other nerds drooling over their programming language and frameworks ;) but in real life had been tried with the Lisboa treaty to the extent it was deemed possible, and no-one involved with it wants to reopen the case. I'm also sometimes angry at EU as well, but the reality is there are over twenty member states, with their constitutions, languages, democratic and other traditions such as federalism and minority rules, bilateral treatments, special interests, and backroom deals to take care of. It's a miracle the EU exists at all.
by ngetchell | 2025-09-11 10:21:56+00:00
I must have imagined the hang Mike Pence chants. You know his kids were in the building, huddling in a secure location and could hear those chants. They probably also saw the noise they made for him during subsequent news reports.

The capital police saved lives that day and prevented assassinations. Some of those officers died from injuries sustained by the attack on America.
by esperent | 2025-09-11 10:22:12+00:00
> Typically you’d need some sort of long-term visa.

You only need a six month visa so it's not that bad. You need a year visa to get a bank card though, but that's not such a big deal since everywhere uses QR code payments here, and you can even withdraw cash from ATMs using the app. I only ever use my Vietnamese bank card for Spotify since that gets me a nice discount.

The big problem is that, whatever type of visa you have, if it expires for some reason then your account gets locked. Hasn't happened to me so I don't know how quick/strict they are. But the rules are changing so quickly here - both for visas and for banking - that I don't feel secure keeping any amount of money beyond my daily needs in my Vietnamese bank.
by schroeding | 2025-09-11 10:24:44+00:00
You cannot prove the absence of e.g. a Veracrypt hidden volume or similar, though. Even if you honestly give up your key, you could still be either

A) held in contempt of court, if the authorities do not find what they expect for some reason and accuse you of using such techniques or

B) if you specify that such behaviour by law enforcement is overreach, have a clean way out for criminals, codified in law, heavily damaging the impact you may expect of such a law.
by ljm | 2025-09-11 10:25:54+00:00
Farage only has this traction because he's financed and platformed by interests (Russia, conservative Christian groups in the US, right wing media) that benefit from the division his inflammatory politics creates. This gives him and his party a disproportionate amount of attention compared to other, larger parties with more MPs.

The playbook that was overwhelmingly successful for making Brexit happen is being used again, but this time for immigration.

The fact he got elected as MP only serves to give credibility to his backers' narrative, given that he does not serve his constituency and is too busy schmoozing the US right wing. At one point in time he would have been forced to resign in disgrace for backroom dealing like this (as previous MPs have before).
by metalman | 2025-09-11 10:25:55+00:00
Pb car batteries are optimised for automotive use and the alternators are matched. car batteries have many thin lead plates that will deliver, or take, a lot of current, even when very cold or hot and the alternators can recharge the battery quickly for lots of quick starts and stops in.the coldest weather, taxi/mom, winter, chicago,christmas,school as to reprograming, not so much, automotive "charge controllers" were/are designed around Pb batteries ,which are robust beasts with a high tollerance for momentary fluctuations, and as the primary goal is durability ,they are dumb devices I live off grid, and use a variety of battery types, and voltages, so end uo reprograming regularly, and have even gone as far as to do an alternator deleet on a w250 3/4 4x4 cummins dodge ooerated at the 45'th parallel, and only the solar pannels installed on the hood for electrical power, worked with some limitations in winter, but not for the faint of heart. As soon as sodium batteries are cheap enough to play with I will be experimenting, but do expect there tobe pecuiarities to there charging cycle, and perhaps limintations on high current discharge. The test will be getting a DI diesel to start in the cold, after say forgetting to turn on the fuel for 10min, having to then boost from a Pb battery conected to a BIG regular alternator, no fires or bieng "dissabled" allowed. So the real answer is that the whole automotive sector will have to be compatable for rescue and emergency services to function, not counting just normal "hey,gimi a boost" calls costing $5000 in repairs or whatever
by whilenot-dev | 2025-09-11 10:26:44+00:00
> how soon an AI will be able to make a movie that you, AIPedant, will enjoy as much as you've enjoyed Mulholland Drive

As it stands, AI is a tool and requires artists/individuals to initiate a process. How many AI made artifacts do you know that enjoy the same cultural relevance as their human made counterparts? Novels, music, movies, shows, games... anything?

You're arguing that the types of film cameras play some part in the significant identity that makes Mulholland Drive a work of art, and I'd disagree. While artists/individuals might gain cultural recognition, the tool on its own rarely will. A tool of choice can be an inspiration for a work and gain a certain significance (e.g. the Honda CB77 Super Hawk[0]), but it seems that people always strive to look for the human individual behind any process, as it is generally accepted that the complete body of works tells a different story that any one artifact ever can.

Marcel Duchamp's Readymade[1] (and the mere choice of the artist) gave impact to this cultural shift more than a century ago, and I see similarities in economic and scientific efforts as well. Apple isn't Apple without the influence of a "Steve Jobs" or a "Jony Ive" - people are interested in the individuals behind companies and institutions, while at the same time also tend to underestimate the amount of individuals that makes any work an artifact - but that's a different topic.

If some future form of AI will transcend into a sentient object that isn't a plain tool anymore, I'd guess (in stark contrast to popular perception) we'll all lose interest rather quickly.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_CB77#Zen_and_the_Art_of_...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_(Duchamp)
by AnonC | 2025-09-11 10:26:46+00:00
Tarsnap has always been expensive. More than a decade ago (April 2014, to be precise), @patio11 suggested that tarsnap should increase its pricing. [1] Here’s the HN thread on that post. [2]

All the granular calculations (picodollars) on storage used plus time are fine. But tarsnap was always very expensive for larger amounts of data, especially data that cannot be well deduplicated.

[1]: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/04/03/fantasy-tarsnap/

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7523953
by Dylan16807 | 2025-09-11 10:28:03+00:00
Let's look at the subtraction in this case.

If evaluation is lazy, then the subtraction operator gets fed two unevaluated matrix multiplies.

If it's a dumb subtraction operator, this gives us no benefit. Eventually it evaluates both and then subtracts. And it has some extra overhead like you said.

But if it's a smart subtraction operator, it can realize that both parameters are the same equation, and then it can return all 0s without evaluating anything.

And even better than just skipping the matrix math, "all 0s" can be a stub object that takes O(1) time to set up. And then .abs().max() will be instant too.
by psd1 | 2025-09-11 10:28:19+00:00
There are a few services best left in the public sector - e.g. defence, water, mail delivery.

When one government, for its own reasons, sells a service, intervention is required to return it to public hands. The cost of that intervention was created by the government that sold the service.

The intervention could be more or less problematic, but it isn't the problem.
by Lerc | 2025-09-11 10:28:55+00:00
I don't understand why people can't handle metaphors to explain things in AI so much.

The same terms exist in other fields. Physics has things that want to go to a lower energy level, the ball wants to fall but the table is holding it up. Electrons don't like being near each other, The hugs boson puts on little bunny ears and goes around giving mass to all the other good particles.

None of these are said in any way as a suggestion that these things have any form of intention.

They also don't in AI. When scientists really think those abilities are there in a provable way (or even if they suspect), I can assure you that they will be prepared to make it crystal clear that this is what they are claiming. Critisising the use of metaphor is kind of a pre-emptive attack against claims that might be made in the future.

Some AI scientists believe that there is a degree of awareness in recent models. They may be right or wrong but the ones who believe this are outright saying so.

I'm also inclined, if you'll excuse the term, to be critical of anything suggesting the assumption of smooth progress when they declare something to be the first step. Steps are not smooth. That's a good example of ignoring the what of the metaphor.

I don't really know what to make about the embodiment position, it feels like it's trying to hide dualism behind a practical limitation. Once you start drilling down into the why/why not and what do you mean by that, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see the expectation that you can't train an AI because it doesn't have a soul

I agree with xkcd 1425 though.
by tgv | 2025-09-11 10:29:09+00:00
True.

I think we look at it from different sides. Mine is "how good will this be in independently running code" (where 80% correctness is minimally needed), yours seems to be more "how well does this represent our knowledge" (from different angles).

> you could make this point about tokens also ("take any bunch of characters that happens often enough, and call it a token").

My reason was more that such an approach doesn't work well with (unrestricted natural language) text. E.g. side_effects => physical_damage: What side effects? (Why plural?) Not all cause physical damage. And not all side effects that cause physical damage cause the same damage. The differences are described elsewhere in the text, but not consistent enough to extend the token with that information, so just associating literal excerpts from a text will practically guarantee underspecification (except for practically unambiguous term). The effectiveness will be language dependent, of course.

Anyway...
by madaxe_again | 2025-09-11 10:29:49+00:00
Man, I was near A Coruña a few weeks back and was marvelling at how great it was that I could stick my friends on a bus in a small town and they’d get to Santiago. You have public transit.

Where I live in Portugal, there’s nothing - no buses at all, no taxis, zero public transit of any kind. You drive, you walk, or you ride your donkey.

There are bus stops, from when there used to be buses, but there have been none in 20 years.
by weweersdfsd | 2025-09-11 10:29:57+00:00
The solution is simple. Just build big parking lots outside the city where land is cheap, and a bus service from these parking lots to the inner city. That way commuters can get to their workplace and back fast enough.

Making commuting viable that way is beneficial to inner-city folk too. When people who want to live further away from city can do it effectively, housing will become cheaper for those who actually want to live in the city.
by ehnto | 2025-09-11 10:30:08+00:00
I suspect the logistics of having such a ship close enough to the conflict at the right time would be the biggest challenge. You wouldn't want to drag them around with you on larger ships. I think you're right though, there's probably an appropriate balance of range, size and location where it makes a lot of sense, especially during wartime where it's harder to spin up complex weapon pipelines and simple stuff can be churned out faster.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-09-11 10:30:30+00:00
> he's head of a company with 4 MPs, same say as the Greens

The electoral system has been working against him. At the last general election Reform got a larger share of the vote than the Lib Dems, yet the result is that they got 5 MPs while the Lib Dems got 72.

The Brexit referendum and the current national polls that put Reform in first place at 27% (YouGov) show that they are not just "steering the conversation". When people's concerns keep being ignored at one point someone will come up to fill this "gap in the market", this is legitimate and how democracy works.
by traceroute66 | 2025-09-11 10:31:36+00:00
> Is $95 million just cheap enough that they don't want to fight it?

IANAL, but...

Not necessarily.

Bear in mind the other side will also be incurring costs and, if the court were to rule against them, be subject to Apple's costs too.

So if you're going up against a large multinational like Apple, its almost certain that your legal advisors will steer you in the direction of your endgame being an out-of-court settlement.

Also, don't forget pre-trial discovery which is a double edge sword.

Sure you can TRY to go for a discovery fishing expedition against the multinational. Most likely you will fail miserably. But in certain instances settlement can be preferable to potential disclosure of sensitive information.

HOWEVER the other edge of the sword is that the multinational can also take up your time requesting expensive and time-consuming disclosure from your side.

Finally, there's the question of time.

Courts are busy. It may be a year or more until you get your day in court.

Do you want to wait a year or do you want to take that reasonable offer put on the table ?

Bearing in mind of course, that if you reject the reasonable offer, the judge may not look kindly on you...
by qalmakka | 2025-09-11 10:33:09+00:00
RIP BCacheFS. I was hopeful I could finally have a modern filesystem in Linux mainlined (I don't trust Btrfs anymore), but I guess I'll keep on having to install ZFS for the foreseeable future I guess.

As I predicted, out of tree bcachefs is basically dead on arrival - everybody interested is already on ZFS, btrfs is still around only because ZFS can't be mainlined basically
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-09-11 10:33:12+00:00
An 8kB program loads and runs much faster if the .so it uses is already cached due to prior use.

A 34MB static built version will cost that amount of i/o every single instance on a system that did not cache that specific program previously. Also it will take up that full amount of ram while loaded every single time it runs.

Inefficient design, but works fine for other less performant OS =3
by geob01 | 2025-09-11 10:33:20+00:00
SEEKING WORK

Location: EU, EEST Bucharest time zone

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Possibly

Technologies:

C++ 17, Python 3, Linux, OOP, TDD, Jenkins AI: Claude Code, Cursor, RAG, Prompt Engineering

Résumé/CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pnVituSV1qz0hFUMajTj38bi...

Email: (Check Résumé/CV)

About: Software engineer with expertise in C++, Python (14+ years of full time software development experience). Proven track record in designing, developing, and deploying scalable backend systems and embedded applications. Passionate about writing clean, efficient code. Language agnostic, open to multiple tech stacks.
by geob01 | 2025-09-11 10:33:34+00:00
Location: EU, EEST Bucharest time zone

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Possibly

Technologies:

C++ 17, Python 3, SOLID, TDD, Linux, REST APIs, Docker, Git, Protocols, Flask, Django AI: Claude Code, Cursor, RAG, Prompt Engineering

Résumé/CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pnVituSV1qz0hFUMajTj38bi...

Email: (Check Résumé/CV)

About: Software engineer with expertise in C++, Python, and web technologies (14+ years of full time software development experience). Proven track record in designing, developing, and deploying scalable backend systems and embedded applications. Passionate about writing clean, efficient code. Language agnostic, open to multiple tech stacks.
by freehorse | 2025-09-11 10:34:14+00:00
These are not simple questions, especially for people who have not studied law, but constitutional courts have decided in the past to either disregard or not such conflicts. Even if they don't, this may just result to the constitution been amended after some years by the parliament in order to comply to eu law. There is precedence of eu primacy and I do not see anything that can guarantee that a constitutional court will actually rule this way or the other here.
by tim333 | 2025-09-11 10:34:40+00:00
Theories of the origin of life on earth seem to be leaning towards it happening on/in warm damp rocks where RNA like molecules can accumulate in pores. I think there would be problems on Venus - the rocks are too hot, nothing cell like in the atmosphere. But it may be common with a warm damp rock set up which probably was there on Mars.

Organic molecules are fairly common in the solar system on asteroids and the like and probably of non biological origins.
by RossBencina | 2025-09-11 10:36:45+00:00
Before I got the e-ink screen, yes, more or less. At the peak I did little screen-based development and a lot of pen-and-paper maths. I thought I would have to give programming away, and retrained for a different job. I got the e-ink screen 1 year ago and since then have slowly started developing again.
by ben-gy | 2025-09-11 10:36:46+00:00
Yeah - absolutely - every business has risks, but the point here that I’m trying to make is if those risks aren’t fully assessed, and you aren’t willing to risk going to jail based on the “hope” that humans behave exactly as expected and agreed then this is likely a business probably not worth pursuing - of course everyone has different risk tolerances - but there’s risk tolerance assessment and lack of experience in assessing risk - I don’t know the founder here but I believe it can only be helpful if different perspectives are presented.

To go a bit deeper, what you have here is a business where a somewhat unknown person is hired to any address that you type into a website and pay a marginal fee for - I’m struggling to see how you could keep people safe with this concept (not only the contractor, but also the customer).
by rbanffy | 2025-09-11 10:38:20+00:00
> Attacks on free speech - like social media censorship or bans - makes democracy not possible

The use of social media to spread misinformation with a specific agenda also makes democracy impossible.

There has to be a line, however fuzzy, somewhere. Remember Trump used misinformation to steer a crowd who then stormed the Capitol. Incitement should never be covered by free speech protection.
by refurb | 2025-09-11 10:38:57+00:00
You’re quoting statistics that are irrelevant to the point. Mass shootings are not political violence.

I can come up with a multitude of political violence examples in countries with strict weapons laws - New Zealand, France, Japan. Then if you add in other weapons - cars, knives, bombs, the list gets even longer.

The point is - gun control won’t stop political violence. Perpetrators will use other means at their disposal.
by buster | 2025-09-11 10:39:15+00:00
The premise "we write software which is installed on operating systems, so we need our own operating system as well" doesn't make sense. Also the point that there are other operating systems like elementary or gnome OS out there is a moot point. At least for elementary OS i kind of get the promise of some high quality user experience focused MacOS competitor.. But KDE OS? Why should I not just install KDE on my distro?

This distro doesn't seem to be born out of some real need for non-KDE-developers? Maybe it should be just some playground for KDE devs to test drive new tech?
by pradn | 2025-09-11 10:39:53+00:00
They're stuck on the privacy angle, because what it means is you can't call remote services. You'll always have access to more resources at a data-center than a phone. So, while the frontier of what's possible with purely-local models will keep advancing, it'll never exceed what's possible with remote models.

People care about extra privacy when the delta in capability is minimal. But people won't allow a massive discrepancy, like the difference between a 8B model and a 700B model.
by virgilp | 2025-09-11 10:39:54+00:00
> They are simple statistical predictors, now universal anwsering machines.

I see this a lot. I kinda' doubt the "simple" part, but even beyond that, is there any evidence that statistical predictor can't be a universal answering machine? I think there's plenty of evidence that our thinking is at least partially a statistical predictor (e.g. when you see a black sheep you don't think "at least one side of this sheep is black", you fully expect it to be black on both sides)

I'm not saying that LLMs _are_ universal answering machines. I'm wondering why people question that they are/they can become one, based on the argument that "fundamentally they are statistical predictors". So they are. So what?
by bell-cot | 2025-09-11 10:40:27+00:00
> ... already inadequate bilge pump system which failed to remove any water from the ship. Many hatches and doors that would maintain watertight integrity were left open, essentially to facilitate movement of personnel and portable pumps which proved ineffective.

And the article goes on to say that the ship's watertight doors and hatches would have save her from sinking, if the crew had bothered to close those on their way out.

If you are miserably incompetent at the very basics of both design and operation, then "investing" in more advanced stuff is just a cool-sounding waste of money.
by rubzah | 2025-09-11 10:40:35+00:00
Been using a flip for four years (Samsung) and will buy another when the time comes (not necessarily Samsung).

Ever wanted a smaller phone? That's a flip phone, it just happens to expand when you need it. Ever drop your phone and damage the screen ? The closed flip phone is super sturdy. Ever wanted to put your phone on the table and use it with one hand, laptop style? Flip. Even in general use, having it slightly bent towards you is a nicer experience that a fully flat phone.

Yes, it has a slight crease in the middle, it has never bothered me even a little. And now, there's an actual microcrack across the crease, doesn't really bother me either, but for some people it might. Look forward to improvements in the next generations.
by arw0n | 2025-09-11 10:40:55+00:00
Overall, Sweden didn't fare worse than other European countries with harder measures. But these things are really difficult to compare due to geographic and cultural issues. Sweden is quite rural. Swedes value personal distance, and from my limited experience they easily more readily conform to rules and social norms, so I would assume there was less close contact, and better adherence to the few rules given out.

The US btw. also is largely rural/sub-urban, which should significantly reduce the risk of infection. I think almost all of my colds and flues I got on the metro or the overcrowded super-market.
by NoboruWataya | 2025-09-11 10:41:21+00:00
I think this is your "intuition" because it is what you are used to, I see no reason why this would be the objectively correct way to do things. The legislative procedure in the EU is a bit more complex than laws simply flowing "up" or "down". There is a trilogue, which is effectively a three-way negotiation between the Council, Parliament and Commission. But ultimately the approval of Parliament and in most cases the Council is required (ie, Commission cannot force laws).

The EU system is also not without its flaws but it's not the worst. Enacting broad, sweeping legislation is cumbersome and difficult which is a feature, not a bug. If we had a more streamlined system we'd probably already have chat control by now.