MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gabriel666smith | 2025-09-09 23:16:07+00:00
Would it actually set any kind of legal precedent, or just establish a sort of cultural vibe baseline? I know Anthropic doesn't have to admit fault, and I don't know if that establishes anything in either direction. But I'm not from the US, so I wouldn't want to pretend to have intimate knowledge of its system.

The number of bizarre, contradictory inferences this settlement asks you to make - no matter your stance on the wider question - is wild.
by anal_reactor | 2025-09-09 23:16:24+00:00
I abuse the WFH thing because my manager promised me a raise if I complete a project and then sabotaged it, then put the blame on me, and finally changed the raise requirements. Really can't stay motivated in such an environment. If the game is "who fucks harder the other party" then don't be surprised that I watch porn during WFH and then try to convince other employees to do the same.
by teachrdan | 2025-09-09 23:16:26+00:00
> Teacher’s unions, which predominantly exist in the public school system, are not in the business of educating children

I'm always surprised and disappointed to see such lazy thinking on HN. If teachers' unions were responsible for poor educational outcomes, you would see an inverse relationship between strong teachers' unions and K-12 rankings.

But New Jersey and Massachusetts consistently rank in the top 2 K-12 rankings in the US. And they have ~100% union density among K-12 public school teachers!

Let's test the rest of your little theory. If you believe that pesky teachers' unions are responsible for poor outcomes, then surely states with less teacher's union density and union power will be the epitome of strong K-12 outcomes.

But who ranks at the bottom? New Mexico at #50, Alaska at #49, Oklahoma at #48...

You might, at this point, sensibly say that's due to residents having less money and other disadvantages. But at that point you have to admit that teachers' unions have no correlation to K-12 outcomes.

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/education
by mallowdram | 2025-09-09 23:16:47+00:00
It lacks references, it's garbage, advertising, cliff-notes for apes uninterested, devolving, asleep, bored, and needing to be told what to think without knowing why or how. The inertia in CS, and the inertia and entropy CS unleashed on the gen public will take years to cleanse from the system before we get back to imaginative progress and invention.
by dotancohen | 2025-09-09 23:16:51+00:00
> Ghosting depends on the mode you're using and the content.

I'm talking about 75 hz mode.

>> Is it clear enough to be used white-on-black? > Yes

Really? My Nook and Boox devices aren't. The ghosting in even the highest quality refresh mode is just to much in "dark mode". I'd love to see this.
by zerotolerance | 2025-09-09 23:16:57+00:00
The most difficult part is managing the delivered / processed state and ordered delivery. Consistent ordering of receipt into a distributed buffer is a great challenge. Most stacks do that pretty well. But deciding when a message has been processed and when you can safely decide not to deliver it again it is especially challenging in a distributed environment.

That is sort of danced around a bit in this article where the author is talking about dropped messages, etc. It is tempting to say "use a stream server" but ultimately stream servers make head-of-line accounting the consumer's responsibility. That's usually solved with some kind of (not distributed) lock.
by dredmorbius | 2025-09-09 23:17:14+00:00
Probably. E-ink drivers ("waveforms" is, I believe, the term of art) frequently target refreshes only at the portion of the display that has updated, using rectangles or other more-specific geometries to limit that area.

For text updates, where there's literally a cursor which moves at typing speeds, update frequency is quite low. Where you're updating or paging through documents, paginated navigation (where the whole screen refreshes at once, then remains unchanged for several seconds to minutes or longer) is quite efficient.
by estimator7292 | 2025-09-09 23:17:45+00:00
The entire point and purpose of mastodon is to not be mainstream social media. Almost everyone there signed up because mainstream social media is so awful. The small and diffuse nature is one of the main benefits. Because it's distributed, there's an extremely niche community server for any subject you might be interested in.

Mastodon captures perfectly what twitter was at the beginning. Just people talking to each other and having fun. Not performative like fishing or whatever. No ads, algorithms, endless feeds, AI slop, or spying and tracking.

It turns out that a lot of people think mainstream social media is objectively abhorrent and want to connect with other humans in a more natural and user-driven way.

Frankly, "mainstream" is a dirty, disgusting concept here. A very large fraction of users would put a significant amout of effort to prevent that from happening. If one server did become "mainstream", as mastodon dot social did, the network treats it as a damage and routes around. Many servers just cut them off because the vast majority of attacks and spam originate from the big public servers.

Mastodon won't go mainstream because they don't want to and the system fundamentally cannot operate that way. A few individual servers may go mainstream, but we'd eventually consider it a hard fork. The network would fracture (as it has many times) and the network of small servers will go back to the obscurity we enjoy and cherish.

Case in point: Facebook tried to force their way into the fediverse network through threads or whatever it was called. There was a pretty hard split in the network as nodes that value privacy and safety cut themselves off from a literal hostile invader. Many servers went recursively through the network to cut off any servers who hadn't blocked Facebook. I haven't heard anything about Facebook trying activitypub again, so I guess the quarantine was effective.
by araes | 2025-09-09 23:17:45+00:00
Kind of neat, especially with a bit of skepticism toward the bigger is always better claim. Lot of "really" large animals, not actually that successful.

Elephants, Rhinos, Tigers, not especially successful. Start to become really high value targets with limited ability to defend against threats from every direction, and almost every nearby animal is "red circle", including humans. The Asian elephant is Endangered, the African savanna elephant is Endangered, while the African forest elephant is Critically Endangered. The the black, Javan, and Sumatran rhinos are Critically Endangered. Tigers are Endangered at 5% of historic range.

Dinosaur replenishment rates became negative in the Late Cretaceous, even before the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event. More species were going extinct than new ones were evolving with a decrease in the development of new traits or adaptive strategies. It all started stagnating, and then they could not cope with sharp changes.

A lot of cities are similar. Paralysis, stagnation, difficulty dealing with threats and changes, and almost every member of human society views them as a high value target. Why target podunk nowhere for pocket change, when a single success swindling New York or Los Angeles is millions. Politics targets them constantly. Now they're even drawing federal military responses.

Bigger's definitely got issues.
by Findecanor | 2025-09-09 23:17:45+00:00
LEGO is different from The Simpsons in that LEGO bricks for a long time were limited to seven colours: the four primary colours, white, black and light grey.

The first "proto-minifigs" in 1975 were still relatively abstract: made of bricks, albeit special bricks. The yellow head had the same shape as now but had no facial features.
by tialaramex | 2025-09-09 23:18:04+00:00
Note that the diagram of a Mutex is not how a Mutex works today, at least on reasonable platforms.

First, Mara changed it to be something much less silly, on Linux and similar it's a Futex, while on Windows it was an SRWLock. However, more recently (last year IIRC) the Windows Mutex is also basically a Futex, albeit Microsoft doesn't call their analogous feature a Futex.

In either case this futex-based design means there's no "inner" pointer, and nothing for it to point to, instead there's some sort of atomic integer type, when we're contended we go to sleep waiting on the integer via futex or similar OS feature.

Edited to add:: Also, the niche trick in the bottom right is somewhat broader than this suggests. If the type doesn't need every bit pattern then Rust might and in some cases is guaranteed to see a niche it can use for this memory optimisation.

Option<&T> is the same size as &T but also Option<NonZeroU16> is the same size as u16, Option<OwnedFd> is the same size as OwnedFd (and thus same size as a C integer by definition), Option<Ordering> is the same size as the Ordering (either of them) and Option<bool> is of course the same size as a bool.
by fluoridation | 2025-09-09 23:18:08+00:00
Yeah, I got that part. I took at face value that whatever the character's concerns were, they were legitimate. Even granting that much he still sounds silly, because he's trying to publish his findings at "the annual meeting of the Ankh-Morpork Caged Birds Society". Like I said, time and place. Of course it would not be welcome at such a venue; it's off-topic discussion. It would be like exposing a CP ring through a post in a programming forum. It'd just get your thread locked.

Trying to commandeer the attention of the attendees like that is simply disrespectful; it doesn't matter how important you think what you have to say is. Unless the building is on fire or there's an armed squad standing outside, whatever he had to say could have waited until the end, and whoever wanted to listen to it could have stuck around, and whoever didn't could leave.
by hsuduebc2 | 2025-09-09 23:18:13+00:00
Forcing people back into the office for no real reason is just a power play from middle management trying to justify their pointless existence. What really bothers them is not culture or collaboration, it is that nobody is sucking up to them, because it is usually done in person and not on Teams. When they are not sitting in the same section as their peons pretending to boost efficiency and hard work, it becomes obvious that people can manage perfectly fine without them.

That is the real threat, someone might notice how utterly useless these bozos are and finally cut them off. Especially in software development, where focus and silence are everything, this mandate is beyond ridiculous.
by terminalshort | 2025-09-09 23:18:27+00:00
Where is your evidence that Meta, Google, and OpenAI did the same thing? (As for NVIDIA, do they even train models?) Because if they did, why haven't they been sued? This is a garden variety copyright infringement case and would be a slam dunk win for the plaintiffs. The only novel part of the case is the claim that the plaintiffs lost on, which establishes president that training an LLM is fair use.

> Clearly something should be done because it's not like these companies can't afford the cost of the books

Yes indeed it should, and it has. They have been forced to pay $3000 per book they pirated, which is more than 100x what they would have gained if they had gotten away with it.

IMO a fine of 100x the value of a copy of the pirated work is more than sufficient as a punishment for piracy. If you want to argue that the penalty should be more, you can do that, but it is completely missing my point. You are talking about what is fair punishment to the companies, and my comment was talking about what is fair compensation to the authors. Those are two completely different things.
by Supermancho | 2025-09-09 23:18:39+00:00
> On YouTube: as I mention in the piece, I think the service is excellent as a consumer, and I pay for Premium

Why? Because the tools that allow them to take almost 50% of the revenue (they say you earn) have low friction?

I would say the opposite. There is no customer service. There are endless legal pit traps that allow larger channels and companies to predate on smaller ones alongside the AI channels, which lead to the same end. The entire point of the platform is to push as much advertising as possible, while mutating a user's search habits. Ironically, this leads to videos becoming borderline useless for many use cases, without taking them off youtube. This is not a good platform.

I'm sure I feel this way because I don't have a bunch of content I'm afraid of being yanked from the platform. Another "benefit" of having a big youtube presence, is I would be forever worried about implied retaliation.
by al_borland | 2025-09-09 23:18:55+00:00
Several years before the pandemic I was forced to move several states away after my local office was shutdown and the company was looking to force everyone to a few larger offices. It didn’t make any sense. Within my little 10 person team, we had people in 5 states and at least 2 counties, spanning multiple time zones. I was on the phone, tethered to my desk, all-day every-day. I saw very little point to being in the office. If they are going to push for office collaboration, at least organize the teams so all the team members are actually in the same office. The whole thing was madness.

I do see the value in meeting people face-to-face, but I also think they could be done with the occasional company event. I have to imagine having a few events where people can meeting and build some rapport is cheaper than maintaining offices year round.
by notmyjob | 2025-09-09 23:19:11+00:00
I’m not sure how the politics play out but a stat that is always off in the same direction, always over and never under, is what some statisticians call “biased.”

You can have non-biased indicators that have error with mean 0.

Maybe a better question, when judging current operations, is how precise the biased estimates are becoming overtime. Is the size of the error increasing or decreasing.
by abraxas | 2025-09-09 23:19:23+00:00
I keep going back to RooCode because good ergonomics with VSCode and personal familiarity.

Recently tried "agentic" coding with Claude Code Max after being pestered by a colleague to give it a try. I had no luck with it. Letting it loose on a project led to many disastrous commits. A decent change was frequently followed by some disastrous dog's breakfast of a change where it tried to rewrite most of the code trying to fix some minor problem.

However, restraining it and then having to babysit every change made it no more effective than RooCode albeit with worse UI. In the end I gave up and cancelled the Claude Max subscription.

I do not believe people claiming they can make it work in an autonomous fashion. Even with a good scaffold of tests it lies about compliance or disables tests that don't pass.
by OhMeadhbh | 2025-09-09 23:19:24+00:00
My experience is "air" in an Apple product's name means battery life is measured in tens of minutes and the fan makes a horrible racket because the CPU is underpowered and intended for only short suprts of activity. That's fine for a laptop because you can keep it plugged in and use your other computer to do tasks that require CPU, but not appropriate for a mobile phone that you may want to operate untethered for hours at a time.

I'm sure Apple's official word on this is battery life is sufficient for more than a couple of hours of untethered stand-by. I'm just questioning the wisdom of the naming convention. They trained their user community to understand that "air" means low-CPU power / low battery life / thinner package. Are there enough potential customers who will prioritize thin form factor over usability?

Nevermind. I just answered my own question.

[Edit: I understand the Apple fanbois will want to down-vote this, but look at the second sentence of the second paragraph. I am not saying the iPhone Air will be bad. I am saying that the "Air" name has, in the past, been applied to some pretty sub-standard products. I am asking if it's wise to apply a name that has been used for lower-end products to new products that aren't "lower end."]
by k2enemy | 2025-09-09 23:19:36+00:00
Maybe. I've definitely seen that anecdotally in some cases. But the school system is also problematic for the families that do value education and the kids that could excel in the classroom.

Our district has eliminated programs for the kids at the top end in the name of equity. They've also eliminated separate spaces for kids with learning and behavioral issues for the same reason. So everyone is in the same classroom and most of the teacher's time is spent on a handful of kids causing trouble and the rest of the class learns nothing.

We can't afford private school, so we're doing a bunch of extra lessons at home to keep them on pace, engaged, and challenged. But really, there are only so many hours in the day and I want them to be outside playing too!
by CephalopodMD | 2025-09-09 23:19:51+00:00
Also still rocking a 13 mini. There are dozens of us! Dozens!

(Also to those who say not enough people wanted a mini phone to be worth producing: I submit the case of Prego chunky pasta sauce. Not many people want a chunky pasta sauce, but you sell a whole lot more pasta sauce in total if you sell both regular and chunky pasta sauce. Malcolm Gladwell has a TED talk about this.)
by 8note | 2025-09-09 23:20:25+00:00
> drugs

this is a kinda strange example, since the discovery tends to be government funded research, and the safety shown by private money

the USSR went to space without those protections. its not like property protections are the only thing that has driven invention.

MIT licenses are also pretty popular as are creative commons licenses.

people also do things that don't make a lot of money, like teaching elementary school. it costs a ton of money to make and run all those schools, but without any intellectual property being created that can be sold or rented out.

i dont believe that nobody would want to build much of the things we have now, if there wasnt IP around them. Making and inventing things is fun
by porridgeraisin | 2025-09-09 23:21:26+00:00
What's anti-worker here? A works for B while both A and B want it. The moment one of them doesn't want to anymore for any reason whatsoever, they close this agreement. What's the problem with that?

> Pedigree...streets

If that pedigree is such a high horse.. I'm sure they'd have no problem joining the company next door.
by terminalshort | 2025-09-09 23:21:37+00:00
This is a class action suit, so the legal fees are almost certainly being paid on contingency and not out of pocket. And there is no opportunity cost or lost future income here because this is piracy not theft. The authors were never deprived of any ability to continue to sell their work through normal channels. They only lost the revenue from the sale of a single copy.
by gbuk2013 | 2025-09-09 23:21:45+00:00
It is mostly your own bias, yes. That said publications about cancer breakthroughs ought to be taken with at least as much salt as those in western mass media.

Some information about the Russian drug from the main (I think) oncology research institute in Moscow: https://new.nmicr.ru/en/pacientam/metody-diagnostiki-i-leche...

I had a quick search and the news is apparently about results of a stage 1 trial and an earlier news article from February guessed it would take at least 2.5 years for this to become available assuming all trials were successful.

I have not found any official announcements about results of the trial, only some somewhat shady (mostly-foreign) news sites reposting each other.

According to the registry of clinical trials (https://grls.rosminzdrav.ru) the ЭнтероМикс phase 1 trials run Nov 24 - Oct 26 so I strongly suspect this is scummy clickbait reporting,
by adamrezich | 2025-09-09 23:21:50+00:00
It shouldn't be a surprise that these would be the findings of post-hoc research done in 2021, long after skin-tone modifiers were made available and in common use, rather than research that was done before skin-tone modifiers were added to the standard, so as to justify the additional complexity and possible nth-order societal effects of adding them—which, as far as I can tell, does not exist.

Instead, someone somewhere made the call that giving up the universality of cartoon yellow emoji was worth “making some people ‘feel more represented’”, even despite the numerous other tradeoffs and nth-order effects (no reddish Native American tone, added social complexity for biracial users (“am I ‘black enough’ to use the darkest one, in a given arbitrary social context?”), and so on), which people conveniently ignore.
by joshjob42 | 2025-09-09 23:21:55+00:00
My OG Ultra lasts 3 days if I turn off the always on display, which I do because it doesn't serve much of a purpose, I can just tap the watch to wake it. It charges from 0 to full in 1.5 hours, pretty linearly, so dropping it on the charger for half an hour or an hour while I'm on a work call every other day or so keeps it plenty charged.

This one will have even more battery life, and gets 12 hours of use in 15 minutes, which I suspect will mean for me without the always on display I may well be able to charge it only while I'm actively in the shower (when I'd take it off anyway as I hate wet bands) and be good for the day.
by Muromec | 2025-09-09 23:22:00+00:00
>Supporting any regulation at all can only be from bad motives, and therefore should be avoided?

It's just vibe check heuristic -- if the regulated throws a tantrum telling how switching to USB-C charging or opening up the app store will get them out of businees (spoilers -- it never does), it's probably a good one, if the regulated cheers on, it may be to stiff competition.

The opposite is true with certain countries -- whenever you hear one telling loudly that "sanctions don't hurt at all and only make me stronger", then you know it hurts.
by teachrdan | 2025-09-09 23:22:04+00:00
> They do a pretty good job at it when you factor in long term pensions and health care.

They only get good pensions and health care because school districts refuse to give them better salaries instead. And good health care (really, health insurance) is crucial because health care costs can obviously bankrupt you in America.

> They create artificial barriers like requiring multiple years of certifications to purposefully limit the pool of competition

How is requiring the equivalent of a master's degree an "artificial barrier"? Surely, new teachers should have some experience and theoretical background before standing in front of 30-100+ students and being responsible for their education?

Florida passed a law making it possible for veterans to teach without even having a bachelor's degree. Does that sound like a good idea to you? Would requiring even a bachelor's degree be an "artificial barrier" in your opinion?

https://www.fldoe.org/teaching/certification/military/
by dredmorbius | 2025-09-09 23:23:18+00:00
Transflective LCD screens ("e-paper") compete with e-ink currently.

Monochrome e-ink has a better resolution and contrast ratio than old-school LCD devices (I'm comparing my experiences with a Palm Pilot in the 1990s and an Onyx BOOX in the 2020s). LCD can refresh far faster, in the 100+ / 100s Hz range, where typical e-ink refresh rates in my experience have been in the single-digit to low-double-digit Hz range (video is doable but far from ideal).

E-ink also displays quite nicely with a "frontlight", which brightens the background (whiter whites) without washing out the foreground (print/ink). Illuminated LCD displays tend to wash out the dark fields, though I've not viewed e-paper directly and cannot speak to that.

TFA is describing a far higher e-ink refresh rate than I've experienced directly.