MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by edbaskerville | 2025-09-25 22:47:28+00:00
The linkage between hand position and visual location on the staff is so hard to relearn for someone that only plays one instrument that the music is written so that notes to be played on the B string (the C tuned down) and the F# string (the G tuned down) are written with incorrect pitches.

That is, an actual D# played on the actual B string is written as an E on the staff.

It's weird to learn the Kodaly this way, but the piece is hard enough that, at least in my case, I basically have to memorize it to have a fighting chance. I still haven't performed it for a real concert after 20 years of thinking about doing so.

This also creates some ambiguities, since you can play many notes on either the F# string or the D string. But context is enough to tell what Kodaly meant.

Relatedly, the fifth Bach suite is also written for an alternate tuning ("scordatura"), with the same "wrong note" approach to notation (at least in modern editions). The A string is tuned down to a G, giving you beautifully transformed resonances for the key of C minor.
by tuckerman | 2025-09-25 22:47:32+00:00
As an example, parts of the C++ standard library (none of the core language I believe though) are covered by complexity requirements but implementations can still vary widely, e.g. std::sort needs to be linearithmic but someone could still implement a very slow version without it being UB (even if it was quadratic or something it still wouldn't be UB but wouldn't be standards conforming).

UB is really about the observable behavior of the abstract machine which is limited to the reads/writes to volatile data and I/O library calls [1]

[1] http://open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/open/n2356/intro.html

Edit: to clarify the example
by vidarh | 2025-09-25 22:47:33+00:00
I'm Norwegian, and we're down to 7th place, but I've lived half my life in the UK, and I can tell you that Norwegians will complain just as much as people in the UK, if not far more whenever I visit family.

It's the national sport. In fact, if you tell most Norwegians about coming 7th on a World Happiness ranking, odds are high most of us will complain loudly about that too, thinking we deserve a higher spot, and that there's no ways the Finns and especially Swedes can be higher than us on the list (being beaten by the Danes is okay).

In other words, I don't think this matches cultural acceptability of complaining at all. Norwegians will express dissatisfaction loudly and about everything (don't get a Norwegian started on the quality of the roads, or taxes; at the same time, don't get a majority of Norwegians started on "American conditions" or the political parties that might bring them about by lowering taxes), while still generally living pretty great lives.
by EasyMark | 2025-09-25 22:47:34+00:00
It was an effort in spirit only. It was aimed almost entirely at damaging those agencies that Trump hated and that Musk wanted to muck up so he could gain advantages from less government oversight and regulations. In the end it had almost no effect on overall government spending, but it certainly helped Trumps aims to damage the government departments he didn't like, undo what Biden had done, and gain some advantages for Elon's companies.
by BobbyJo | 2025-09-25 22:47:37+00:00
Wasn't intending snark. I figured it was a goofy way to point out the flaw in your implicit position that emigration data would be more meaningful than the survey. It still might be, it would just depend a lot more on laws and the marketing of economic opportunities than happiness IMO.

> Point being, some people like to whine even when they know damn well 99% of the world would happily trade places with them, and for very good reasons.

Well yeah, but this is an broad survey, not people whining.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-09-25 22:48:07+00:00
> Start a revolution? You have no weapons. (...) You have neither the pen nor the sword.

We still have Euros. As long as enough companies and rich folk are more on our side than theirs, the government still has some incentive to serve us.

I know, I know - money and politics, wealth and power, they go together at the high end. But there is the oft forgotten long tail, the rich and powerful at the scale of a city, a neighborhood, a niche market. Those tend to side with communities they live in, and in aggregate they still have plenty of pull with the rulers (which in stable times they use to block all kinds of potentially useful legislation, but still, good to have them come the hard times).

Weapons won't matter all that much anyway, for several reasons:

1) Life, especially in the EU, is not like in an American action movie;

2) Citizens here may be significantly less armed, but the same is true of government officials, and even law enforcement is significantly less armed. It kind of evens out, unless military gets involved, but at that point all bets are off - no different than in the US.

3) Firearms have a habit of magically appearing in bulk the moment a revolution starts. When it happens, it's a good indicator you should GTFO somewhere far away, as you're being played by whoever is supplying the weapons to your side.
by drewg123 | 2025-09-25 22:48:13+00:00
It didn't help that Itanium was late, slow, and Intel/HP marketing used Itanium to kill off the various RISC CPUs, each of which had very loyal fans. This pissed off a lot of techies at the time.

I was a HUGE DEC Alpha fanboy at the time (even helped port FreeBSD to DEC Alpha), so I hated Itanium with a passion. I'm sure people like me who were 64-bit MIPS and PA-RISC fanboys and fangrirls also existed, and also lobbied against adoption of itanic where they could.

I remember when amd64 appeared, and it just made so much sense.
by smnplk | 2025-09-25 22:48:21+00:00
But noone wants to look at another website anymore. People dont browse the web like in the old days or in the 2000s or in the 2010s. People are just used to being siloed now. Many dont even know what the old web was and how it felt. There are just a few silos now, FB , reddit, X and this is all they know, many dont even know much more than FB.

Internet has become dogshit wrapped in catshit.
by citizenkeen | 2025-09-25 22:48:23+00:00
I have a very big hobby code project I’ve been working on for years.

AI has not made me much more productive at work.

I can only work on my hobby project when I’m tired after the kids go to bed. AI has made me 3x productive there because reviewing code is easier than architecting. I can sense if it’s bad, I have good tests, the requests are pretty manageable (make a new crud page for this DTO using app conventions).

But at work where I’m fresh and tackling hard problems that are 50% business political will? If anything it slows me down.
by Tsiklon | 2025-09-25 22:48:30+00:00
I think Itanium was a remarkable success in some other ways. Intel utterly destroyed the workstation market with it. HP-UX, IRIX, AIX, Solaris.

Itanium sounded the deathknell for all of them.

The only Unix to survive with any market share is MacOS, (arguably because of its lateness to the party) and it has only relatively recently went back to a more bespoke architecture
by Arathorn | 2025-09-25 22:49:04+00:00
> The real crucial missing piece in Element X compared to Element is key/device/session/verification management and insights.

Hmmmmmmm. Are you running EX against an older homeserver which doesn't have matrix-authentication-service and native OIDC? On my EX on matrix.org, I have "Manage account" and "manage devices" options in Settings which takes me through to manage the current devices and sessions.

In terms of managing verification and cross-signing, the reason there's no longer explicit controls for verifying your sessions is that the model going forwards is that users must verify all their devices: in future any devices not verified by the user will be excluded from conversations. EX does this by forcing you to verify when you login (and Element Classic also does this).

In other words, the missing functionality you're talking about is deliberately removed because it was never a good idea in the first place - it was a backwards-compatibility side-effect of the way that encryption and cross-signing incrementally landed in the first place. Now, we're moving towards a model like Signal or iMessage or any other E2EE messenger where all your devices should be verified and cross-signed and trusted automatically, and so the UX reflects that.

Obviously if you have other Matrix clients or bots flying around which don't verify by default, this then becomes tricky, but it's very unclear that the right solution is to bog EX's UI down with the fragility and complexity of the old apps. If you're a poweruser who needs to juggle dangerous Matrix arcana like unverified devices, then the right solution probably is to use a poweruser app to do so. Meanwhile, we want EX's UI to be simple and just work out of the box, rather than getting tangled up with these complexities.
by pavel_lishin | 2025-09-25 22:49:23+00:00
It's not that, although COVID has something to do with it. Under lockdowns, most people were told not to go outside, so we stayed put. Meanwhile, the Zetans were finally free to take the skies, and improve their cloaking technology without billions of people seeing them zoom across the stars. Now it's good enough that they can hover a few feet above you, spreading their rays. That's the cause of the memory and thinking issues.
by crazygringo | 2025-09-25 22:49:31+00:00
> The breakthrough combines neural networks...

This is the important part. It's not guaranteed to be accurate. They claim it "delivers essentially the same correctness as the model it imitates -- sometimes even finer detail". But can you really trust that? Especially if each frame of the simulation derives from the previous one, then errors could compound.

It seems like a fantastic tool for quickly exploring hypotheses. But seems like once you find the result you want to publish, you'll still need the supercomputer to verify?
by Aloisius | 2025-09-25 22:50:26+00:00
I'm not rich, but I'm still happy. I have little reason not to be.

I woke up today and the sun shining and birds chirping. I made myself and my partner breakfast, greeted people on my way to work. I got a good amount of work done, then had a nice lunch and now I'm taking a little break.

My life is better than it was growing up and substantially better than how bad it was for my ancestors.

Perhaps my expectations are lower than yours or perhaps I'm more focused on the present and my actual experiences rather than ruminating on whatever sensationalistic news story of the day is or what could happen, but while I can't say I'm happy about most of what you describe, they don't affect my day-to-day happiness. I'm not going to worry about things I can't change that may or may not affect me.
by crockeo | 2025-09-25 22:50:51+00:00
Half Dutch half American. I find the Dutch complain a decent bit more, but I find that there is more to complain about in the States. Maar wat is het leven zonder klagen?

One thing I've noticed being back recently: cost of living has gotten very unaffordable in Amsterdam the last time I was back. Cost of basic goods is on par with what I'm used to paying in major American cities, but my Dutch relatives often earn a decent bit less. I wonder if this will affect Dutch happiness in future surveys once affordability exceeds more and more people's earnings.
by vidarh | 2025-09-25 22:50:55+00:00
Is it? As someone from Norway, who has spent plenty of time in the other Nordic countries, I'd disagree strongly. We'll complain a lot. Until you ask us to actually rank how happy we are with our lives.

If you base you impression on what people are saying without explicitly asking how happy they are with their lives, then you're getting an impression that's biased by almost an eagerness to complain, despite at the end of the day generally being very satisfied.
by Vivtek | 2025-09-25 22:50:56+00:00
Gary McGraw was the first doctoral candidate to work on the Letter Spirit project:

https://web.archive.org/web/20220331021500/http://goosie.cog...

And John Rehling did a second portion in his doctoral work:

https://web.archive.org/web/20150320160815/https://www.cogsc...

(Thanks for this complaint - I hadn't realized that Rehling's thesis was linked from the Waybacked version of his personal page, and that finally completes my collection!)

You can also read Chapter 10 in Hofstadter's 1995 book "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies" for a pretty solid overview.

But yeah, seeing this project immediately reminded me of Letter Spirit, since it's basically a web editor for gridfonts.
by quotemstr | 2025-09-25 22:50:56+00:00
> be careful in critical code because things like integer overflow can also raise a panic

So you can basically panic anywhere. I understand people have looked at no-panic markers (like C++ noexcept) but the proposals haven't gone anywhere. Consequently, you need to maintain the basic exception safety guarantee [1] at all times. In safe Rust, the compiler enforces this level of safety in most cases on its own, but there are situations in which you can temporarily violate program invariants and panic before being able to restore them. (A classic example is debiting from one bank account before crediting to another. If you panic in the middle, the money is lost.)

If you want that bank code to be robust against panics, you need to use something like https://docs.rs/scopeguard/latest/scopeguard/

In unsafe Rust, you basically have the same burden of exception safety that C++ creates, except your job as an unsafe Rust programmer is harder than a C++ programmer's because Rust doesn't have a noexcept. Without noexcept, it's hard to reason about which calls can panic and which can't, so it's hard to make bulletproof cleanup paths.

Most Rust programmers don't think much about panics, so I assume most Rust programs are full of latent bugs of this sort. That's why I usually recommend panic=abort.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_safety#Classificatio...
by pesus | 2025-09-25 22:51:11+00:00
Agreed. Even as someone only on the tail end of the millennial generation, the total disappearance of hope in the past 10-15 years (but especially in the last 5) has been palpable. There's a tweet that's been floating around recently that says something along the lines of "basically nobody under 40 expects good things to happen ever again", and I think that sums it up pretty accurately.
by nielsbot | 2025-09-25 22:51:26+00:00
> some people like to whine

When I say our for-profit healthcare system is cruel, expensive and ineffective overall, am I whining?

When I say it sucks that we spend $1T on "defense" while raising taxes on working class people, is that whining?

Those things make people less happy.

Is your diagnosis the people are whining and that's why the US isn't at the top of the rankings like Denmark is? Do Danes just whine less?

I want to share one of my favorite quotes which is apt:

“I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” -- James Baldwin
by pcthrowaway | 2025-09-25 22:51:55+00:00
The Palestinian-led military operation on October 7 did not involve killing babies.

One baby was killed. Another died 14 hours after birth after its pregnant mother was shot. Only one of those was conclusively shot by insurgents from Gaza (the UN fact-finding report[1], on page 44, notes that many Israelis were killed and injured by "friendly fire")

Out of 1200 non-Gazans killed, 33 were children, or 2.7%, and again, at least some of these deaths can be attributed to the Israeli military response. It should be noted that the casualty rate of Israel's response in Gaza has been at least 30% children.

It's bizarre that you bring up the infant casualties of Hamas October 7, of which there was 1, as evidence for calling it a terrorist attack, when the actual number of babies killed by Israel is an order of magnitude greater than the total number of people killed by Hamas on October 7

[1]: https://www.un.org/unispal/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/a-hrc-...
by jpgvm | 2025-09-25 22:52:08+00:00
All happiness is relative to expectation.

I have lived in Thailand for the last ~8yrs. It's unfortunate not to see it on the list as I think generally speaking Thais are much happier than either US (where I travel a lot for work) or Australians (my home country).

A big chunk of that is the expectations, they don't need many material things to enjoy life and place a much higher emphasis on community and social standing (which isn't primarily derived from material wealth). Your occupation in Thailand has a very large impact on your social standing - more than the income you derive from it. i.e doctors are extremely well respected, however public doctors more so than private ones despite the latter being more wealthy.

Sense of community is something that builds you up rather than the Western trope of comparing yourself to your neighbour that breaks you down.

That very simple difference seems to have an outsized impact on how happy folk are here.

There are exceptions and Bangkok is much more Western but if you live out in the country like me then Thailand is a very happy place.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-09-25 22:52:36+00:00
That's a great insight and one for which I thank you for pointing out as I learned something new thanks to you today.

My question is whether two different cultures can in fact coexist with each other for a single system of governance.

Like, Why do we focus so much on our differences as a species that we forget how much common we are on literally everything.

What is a solution to this problem that's kinda impacting the world right now. America moves in pendulum in a political cycle completely 180'ing but yet at the same time, I feel like no real change is being made against lobbying/corruption which sort of infiltrates the world too.

Bernie sanders and now maybe zohran are the two democrats who are genuinely tryna do something for america which I deeply respect tbh. Yet there wasn't really a way for one to vote for them directly y'know?

Are these differences of cultures really that distinct to basically split a country in half in everything except the borders?

Was there no way of integrating them without having them idk being the way that they are right now?
by TeMPOraL | 2025-09-25 22:52:51+00:00
> Why would the admins of such sites resort to Cloudflare if 'fundamental Internet infrastructure becomes inhospitable for them' by making that choice? They could very well choose to implement their own or no measures at all.

Marketing and free tiers.

But my point is that Cloudflare is addressing threats that predominantly affect businesses, and does so well, but the way it does is effectively changing the whole Internet to be more hospitable for commerce, and less hospitable for any other kind of use.
by hnav | 2025-09-25 22:53:13+00:00
Simultaneously, Waymo is adopting more human-like behavior like creeping at red lights and cutting in front of timid drivers as it jockeys for position.

I still think that Google isn't capable of scaling a rideshare program because it sucks at interfacing with customers. I suspect that Uber's long-term strategy of "take the money out of investors' and drivers' pockets to capture the market until automation gets there" might still come to fruition (see Austin and Atlanta), just perhaps not with Uber's ownership of the technology.

On the other hand Google has been hard at work trying to make its way into cars via Android automotive so I totally see it resigning to just providing a reference sensor-suite and a car "Operating System" to manufacturers who want a turnkey smart-car with L3 self-driving
by kazinator | 2025-09-25 22:53:13+00:00
But can you escape from that relation being identifiable as having a type or being a type, even if you don't find it interesting/helpful and don't use it?

Also the concept of a proof of equality strikes as relevant, because some equalities are actually incomputable. E.g. suppose you want a an equality type for whether two functions are equivalent (two instances of the same function type).
by bikenaga | 2025-09-25 22:53:23+00:00
Original article: https://www.neurology.org/doi/10.1212/WNL.0000000000214226

They note that data from 2020 was excluded due to covid disruptions. They address the limitations of self-reported data in the discussion section at the end - and actually, the fact that the rates vary significantly depending on age, race, and income suggest that there is something going on here. In other words, the "actual" rates of cognitive disability, if you could measure them in a more objective, non self-reported way, might be different from what they found. But even so, the dependency of the rates on age, race, and income might be real.
by pixelready | 2025-09-25 22:53:36+00:00
I suspect the results would be skewed significantly by whether or not the questions asked seemed overtly political in nature. If you probe people in general quality of life measures and carefully avoid loaded language, you’d likely find both sides are suffering in the US in real terms due to cost of living and loneliness crises. These are trends that have been prevailing since at least the 80s and were accelerated by mass media and the Internet.

But tribal loyalty is a powerful force, so as soon as the questions or questioner appears partisan in any way, people form ranks for “their side” and you’d be hard pressed to get an honest response, least of all one that reflects badly on their team at the helm.
by kc3 | 2025-09-25 22:53:48+00:00
It has been a while, but I have seen some switches that don't "speak" STP but still forward the BPDU messages (so other switches receive them and still detect loops through the "non-STP switch") and other switches that drop the BPDUs (so other switches/bridges cannot see them, possibly leading to a Layer 2 forwarding loop through the "non-STP switch").
by awalsh128 | 2025-09-25 22:54:05+00:00
As a US citizen I just want affordable healthcare, housing, and a system that supports families. I think for the younger generation where this isn't attainable it causes a lot of unhappiness and leads to greater stressors. Also we are at a big low with faith in our political system across the pillars of government. I think for most of us we don't want it all, we just want our basic needs met without worrying about losing then tomorrow.
by m000 | 2025-09-25 22:54:47+00:00
> IMO there's no point having a clean history of commits within a PR. With rare exceptions, if you have a PR with a clean history of commits and each commit compiles and passes the tests... they should be separate PRs! If it isn't clean then it should be squashed.

I think that whether clean history has a point, really depends on how deep are you refinement sessions. And perhaps a bit on the general health of your codebase.

If you don't do refinement with your editors open and grind tickets into dust, there will be side-changes adjacent to each PR which are not directly related to the ticket. These are better to have their own commit (and commit message).
by hashim | 2025-09-25 22:55:06+00:00
You're right, I was operating on the assumption this was the last of their ties before I'd properly read the article and looked into the issue, unfortunately it looks like it's still on the boycott list until they actually divest from Israeli military at the least. Apple is therefore not as unethical as the genocide-enabling companies (and isn't one of them to the best of my knowledge), but it's still far more unethical than most people in tech tend to acknowledge - their pricing practices are akin to price-gouging, including 2-3x markup on like-for-like hardware and locking you into their own accessories before the EU forced them to standardise, and the whole "walled garden" ecosystem was never anything but an excuse to limit what consumers can do with their software/hardware. They almost single-handedly raised the prices of mobile phones for the vast majority of people because other manufacturers saw what their consumers were letting them get away with. And that's before we even get started on the sweatshops.