MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AnyTimeTraveler | 2025-10-05 22:07:11+00:00
Have you thought about just not making the variable global and instead adding it as a parameter to the functions that actually need it?

You can also create a struct, put your "global" variable inside it and then put all the functions that need the variable into an Impl block of that struct. If you then add the parameter `&self` to these functions, you can access the "global"variable any time via `self.global_variable`.

If that is not enough, then you can always make an actual global variable by first wrapping it in a Mutex, to prevent simultaneous access and then wrapping that in an Arc for Atomic Reference Counting. That allows you to pass "copies" of that variable around anywhere, satisfying the borrow-checker (since the variable is now reference-counted in a thread-safe way).

If you need a lot of parallel reading, replacing the Mutex with an RwLock is a good idea, since it allows locking from multiple threads, if you want to read it in most cases.
by pedalpete | 2025-10-05 22:08:11+00:00
I'm really torn by this.

As a hardware founder, who takes great pride in our industrial design and how we've made the thinnest, and most sleek EEG ever, we wanted the device to basically disappear. Nobody wants to wear an EEG headband, it isn't what they are buying. They are buying the neurostimulation that provides better sleep.

On the other hand, our industrial engineer wanted our headband to look just like a headband. It would be completely enclosed in fabric.

I wanted it to be appealing visually, not look "weird" but also, remind the user that there was magic inside. This is one of the reasons we left a bit of the electronics poking out the back and that element has a bit of ornamentation to it. (https://affectablesleep.com).

I have a folding phone. It isn't devoid of design. The design makes it function.

I think the article is confusing ornamentation with industrial design.

My laptop (Asus something) has a ceramic something finish with some etching on it. That's ornamentation. It's feel. Same with the speaker grill holes, they have some design to them.

Is it dull? It certainly isn't ground breaking. But it's pleasing, and it gets out of the way. But how much ornamentation do I want?

Most people just want the apple logo to show status. I want the non-Apple logo.

The TV example in the post doesn't really explain that we needed to have these plastic gray cases for TVs with speakers and buttons. But why was that a better look than just a screen?

To my eyes, those old TVs are ugly. But I remember when Sony brought out an interface where the channel showed up on the screen and had faded away after displaying the number, and I was blown away at how beautiful the interface was.

Additionally, my Kindle Scribe is a pretty boring slab, but I've tried buying nice pens to go with it. I don't think the Lamy (which I currently have) is a beautiful design, but it is better than the pen that comes with the device, which is devoid of any emotion.

As we move to glasses interfaces, I think we'll see a new heyday of electronics design.
by bonoboTP | 2025-10-05 22:08:21+00:00
Yes, this is the curse of specialization due to ever more intellectual works in existence but the same amount of time per person.

I think it's much better to learn in an integrated way, so history, art, science, politics, philosophy, technology, math, economics in a sort of horizontal, cross-cutting way.

For example to understand the political relevance of some art movement, you need to know the history of the period, understand the art, the political climate, the philosophical underpinnings. To understand the impact of Darwin on his time, you need to know the historical context, and I'd argue you should actually understand evolution too (not in a comic book fashion, but quantitatively including our modern understanding and what he couldn't know then), also his religious background, you should understand what is Unitarianism and what is Anglicanism, how the Catholic Church reacted, and how their general situation was at that time, etc. etc.

But in my experience academics really dislike interacting with their neighboring fields, they look down upon each other in a mutual way, or they simply don't see any benefit in an exchange because their publications are aimed at extremely narrow specialized journals, and a "hybrid" work will not fit either journal. Of course sometimes it works, but in my experience "interdisciplinary" is mostly a buzzword that admins like to use a lot and academics also pay lip service to but in reality they highly prefer just sticking to their well known bubble and be left alone.
by ChuckMcM | 2025-10-05 22:09:22+00:00
Article comments aside, it is entirely unclear to me whether or not there was no backups. Certainly no "external" backups, but potentially "internal" backups. My thinking is that not actually allowing backups and forcing all data there creates a prime target for the PRK folks right? I've been in low level national defense meetings about security where things like "you cannot backup off site" are discussed but there are often fire vaults[1] on site which are designed to withstand destruction of the facility by explosive force (aka a bomb) or fire or flood Etc.

That said, people do make bad calls, and this would be an epically bad one, if they really don't have any form of backup.

[1] These days creating such a facility for archiving an exabyte of essentially write mostly data are quite feasible. See this paper from nearly 20 years ago: https://research.ibm.com/publications/ibm-intelligent-bricks...
by johnnyanmac | 2025-10-05 22:09:26+00:00
Yeah, after doing the numbers, 5M makes sense for my generation. But of course it depends on what "financially successful" means. This isn't defined in this piece, so I defined it as "can myself for a career, save for retirement, and pay off any emergencies". My current yearly expenditures are $60k or so, so if I give a 50% buffer for taxes, savings, and emergencies funds, then take that over a career of 40 years... 3.6m dollars.

And to be fair, my expenditures are very small compared to most others. No loans, no major medical issues, single person living alone. Having a family easily triples this number and we get right on that 10m figure.

The incomes are still wonky, though. I don't know how financial success is double, but income demands are tripled.
by grafmax | 2025-10-05 22:10:07+00:00
I’m not excusing China’s government but criticizing our own. The wealthy control our political process. Money buys politicians, elections, laws, media companies. It’s money and those who have it who govern our political process. Do you really think your vote carries equal weight as Elon Musk’s billions? And with Trump even the veneer of democracy is being cast aside.
by trimethylpurine | 2025-10-05 22:11:15+00:00
>resorted to yelling "violence" at the top of your lungs

Shouting at the top of my lungs? If you can hear me shouting through the glass then you can probably hear my eyes rolling right now too. Of course I did neither. You should consider how often you might be doing this in your daily life, because assuming the worst in the people you interact with is a sure way to be treated like garbage (and justly so).

Back to the point, I understood from your commentary that you mean violence when you refer to unlawful behavior. If you don't then you have every opportunity to say so.

I don't think I was presumptuous in my understanding, because I can't think of a way for you to interact with violent, armed forces, unlawfully, without inciting violence. And that's my point.

That and more so that it's not a duty of every citizen to behave unlawfully. In fact, it's been the successful approach of maybe 10 such citizens in history. You can see the other commentor's examples. It's unlikely you're going to be one of them. It would show humility to, in the least, admit as much.

Also because you've made no substantial justification for it to be a duty. Afterall, that's the comment you responded to.
by pron | 2025-10-05 22:11:19+00:00
See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relations_between_Nazi_Germany...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_fascism

As to it being a reaction, be careful not to look at things from a perspective that sets out to pass a moral judgment on history. Virtually everything in history is a reaction to something else. Zionism was a reaction to antisemitism and part of a larger trend of national movements; even Nazism was, in a way, a reaction to Germany's defeat in WW1 and what ensued (and a minority ideology until they took control and then that didn't matter anymore) and so on and so on.

It's perfectly okay to say that certain actions in history were morally right, wrong, or complicated, but everyone involved in any of them felt their actions were justified by something they believed or had experienced. There are no good or bad nations. Virtually every society has done both good and terrible things at different points in time.
by imiric | 2025-10-05 22:11:42+00:00
> My point is if we were to have sincere solidarity with Chinese people against the international ruling class we would look at our domestic members of that class first.

I see your point, but disagree with it.

Having solidarity with the Chinese people is unrelated to criticizing their government. Bringing up sinophobia whenever criticism towards China is brought up, when the context is clearly the government and not its people, is distracting from discussing the problem itself.

The idea that one should first criticize their own government before another is the whataboutism.

Also, you're making some strong and unfounded claims about the motivations of the US government in this case. I'm an impartial observer with a distaste of both governments, but how do you distinguish "sinophobia" from genuine matters of national security? China is a political adversary of the US, so naturally we can expect propaganda from both sides, but considering the claims from your government as purely racism and propaganda seems like a dangerous mentality to have.
by prisenco | 2025-10-05 22:11:59+00:00
It won’t be portable or a good idea but you can use os/hardware specific directives.

But this is drifting. The point of it all is that the ambiguity of programming languages are already high despite all our best efforts.

The ambiguity of natural language is many orders of magnitude worse.

Which is great for poetry but we’re not writing poetry.
by marcodiego | 2025-10-05 22:12:12+00:00
That was for show purposes. It was certainly intended to display OS capabilities while impressing people at the same time. Linux eventually came to dominate the live-cd scene in the early 2000's but, to this day, people still cute this demo as specially incredible. Actually, there was Linux with X11 and a functional browser that run from a floppy. And that is something that is really impressive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28515025
by vkou | 2025-10-05 22:12:20+00:00
Overnight, Canada went from being an ally of the US to being threatened by annexation (and target #1 of an economic war).

If the US wants its state-puppet corporations to be used for integral infrastructure by foreign governments, it's going to need to provide some better legal assurances than 'trust me bro'.

(Some laws on the books, and a congress and a SCOTUS that has demonstrated a willingness to enforce those laws against a rogue executive would be a good start.)
by Terr_ | 2025-10-05 22:12:30+00:00
> The cause becomes circular: orbital power only works once space industry is cheap, and space industry only becomes cheap if orbital power already pays for itself.

I'm still hoping (but not expecting) some kind of magical material suitable for space-elevators and skyhooks. The half-n-half idea of launching rockets from big balloon structures is also interesting.

> [At a level where it won't injure people] a gigawatt-class space beam needs a rectenna covering tens to hundreds of square kilometers. [...] The same footprint could host conventional photovoltaic panels that would quietly produce the same or greater power without any orbital complexity.

Also if one wants to make the "beam" more intense, that gets into concerns about military use or accidents.
by BrenBarn | 2025-10-05 22:12:38+00:00
I more or less agree with that, with the proviso that I think academia in general (not just the humanities) would benefit from easing up a bit on the insistence on "producing new knowledge". It's good to produce new knowledge, sure, but I think the way that's been pushed has led to a situation where people just publish a lot of papers without necessarily creating a lot of new knowledge. In part this is due to Goodhart's law and people optimizing for publications. In part though it's due to the two-tiered (tenure/non-tenure) academic job system.

Even in fields quite remote from humanities, we have, for instance, a bunch of people who need to be taught calculus and so on. And it would be fine for them to be taught calculus by someone who isn't "creating new knowledge" in mathematics. But you can get paid a lot more to create new knowledge while begrudgingly teaching calculus now and then than you can to just teach calculus with gusto.

Likewise in the humanities, I think your argument leaves open the possibility that there could be new knowledge produced there, but that we just shouldn't expect everyone who's teaching Intro to American Literature or whatever to be producing such knowledge.

In my view a good step would just be to significantly reduce the pay gap (and gaps in benefits, job security, etc.) between teaching jobs and research jobs. There are many people who love Moby Dick or basic calculus and could ably and happily teach it for years without feeling any need to write a novel or prove a novel theorem themselves. We'd all benefit if such people could get a steady job doing that.
by mountainriver | 2025-10-05 22:13:24+00:00
> This is incomplete in key ways: it only increases knowledge if people practice information literacy and validate AI claims, which we know is an unevenly-distributed skill. Similarly, by making it easier to create disinformation and pollute public sources of information, it can make people less knowledgeable at the same time they believe they are more informed. Neither of those problems are new, of course, but they’re moving from artisanal to industrial scale.

Totally agree with this

>The more successfully businesses are able to remove or deprofessionalize jobs, the smaller the pool will be of people who can afford to build skills, compete with those businesses, or contribute to open source software

I'm mixed on this, ultimately its the responsibility of individuals to adapt. AI makes people way more capable than they have ever been. It's on them to make something of it

> but it’s worse for society since it accelerates the process of centralizing money and power.

I'm not sure this is true, it enables individuals like they never have been before. Yes there are the model infrastructure providers, but they are in a race to the bottom
by johnnyanmac | 2025-10-05 22:13:26+00:00
I don't know. If you're definition of success is owning a home and having a family, it gets close.

you need to clear 1-2m for that house by itself in any mid-high COL area right now.You need another 1-2m in 18 years to take care of your kids (they can live on less, but is that "successful"?). In 20 years we're already talking about 3-4m dollars before we even dive into the other bills and emergencies to address.

We have to remember that "financially successful" isn't some precise term. Some may treat "able to eat food and keep a roof over head" as successful, where others may see "can raise a healthy family" as so.
by chriskanan | 2025-10-05 22:14:28+00:00
See this study, which is consistent with your thesis: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/814485

Essentially, it claims that modern humans and our ancestors starting with Homo habilis were primarily carnivores for 2 million years. We moved back to an omnivorous diet starting around 85,000 years ago after killing off the megafauna, is the hypothesis.
by Pogiebait | 2025-10-05 22:15:09+00:00
I’ve been buying from Amazon since they begin. I went through the pain of it being new company [missed shipments, wrong product, colors and a multitude of other headaches] back then they extended your membership or something like that. Now you are you are a take it or leave it sucker. Customers who have stuck around you 30 or 20 years should get some kind of discount on their membership fee. I have been slowly going to Walmart and Sam’s Club for a lot they’re slowly cleaning up their act.
by questionableans | 2025-10-05 22:15:22+00:00
It’s undeniably worth investing in immigrants, including refugees. Rhetoric otherwise is just veiled racism. These people already exist. It’s our duty to take care of them as global citizens, just like it’s our duty to care for the elderly and others.

I also think you’d be surprised how little time to pay off would actually be needed. Give people a calm space and community (including their friends and family), and we will all flourish.
by tpmoney | 2025-10-05 22:15:32+00:00
So are you saying that had Hullot taken his ideas to any other company, the result would have been the same phone? Again, no one is saying that Jobs was solely responsible for the things Apple has done, or that other people weren't major parts of that. Even Hullot's own words tell us that the phone design he had in mind was not the touch based keyboard-less design that the iPhone became[1]:

In 2006, Steve decided to make this telephone: the iPod was on the decline and he had the brainwave of producing a laptop without a keyboard - something that was unthinkable at the time, and which caused quite a stir at Apple. We were a secret project, barely known to Apple France.

He says he pushed the idea that Apple needed to create a phone with "the equivalent of Mac OS 10", but that's a very nebulous statement, that could range from iOS style to WindowsCE style. But again, no one who talks about the vision Jobs had for products (or at least no one who actually knows Apple history) believes that Jobs himself was responsible for everything and handing down fully formed ideas and designs from on high.

[1]: https://www.inria.fr/en/jean-marie-hullot-perforated-cards-i...
by zvr | 2025-10-05 22:15:35+00:00
It's not only in the case of plugins.

If a tool has different capabilities that use different imports, why load all of them if only a subset is required?

As a simple example, a tool that can generate output in various formats (e.g., json, csv, xml, ...) should only import the appropriate modules to handle the output format after having determined which ones will be used in this invocations.
by jagrsw | 2025-10-05 22:15:45+00:00
Short answer - treat it as Class I (it has a PE terminal)

Longer: A Class I inverter/appliance relies on PE. A single insulation fault (live -> chassis) will put the chassis at line potential if PE isn’t connected.

If you run other Class-I loads (eg. fridges) downstream of a GFCI but don’t carry PE, a hot-to-chassis fault on the load won’t reliably trip anything until there’s a return path (often a person).
by marklubi | 2025-10-05 22:15:52+00:00
> He wrote Thrones explicitly to challenge Hollywood clichés

Hard disagreement on that one.

He wrote an epic story known as A Song of Ice and Fire (started in '96) that ended up getting out of hand and tied up with too many Goordian knots to complete. Sadly, we'll probably never get a conclusion to it.

Along the line, a producer came along who thought they could make money with it. First few seasons weren't terrible, but were too short to capture it all. The rest were completely rushed and unable to take on all that was going on. They went off the rails after a few seasons.

I will agree that he doesn't owe anyone anything though. My philosophy is that I create for me, if others also enjoy that, excellent.

Edit: I'm still a little bitter after going to a trivia night and losing a question because I gave the canon answer that was different from the show
by em-bee | 2025-10-05 22:16:02+00:00
curious, i wonder why not online games? i play a few online games on linux just fine. they are not the newest ones, but that's the thing, any older games work, online or not, and only some of the newest don't, and that's only because wine/codeweaver/valve didn't get around to implement the fixes for wine for those games yet.

microsoft doesn't need courage, they just need a few leaders dumb enough to try again.
by al_borland | 2025-10-05 22:16:07+00:00
This was my experience, until a bunch of startups tried to come after the boring business I work for. They’ve since brought in a bunch of new people who brought hype cycles with them, and have pushed out the boring and stable solutions, in favor of more complicated trends that need to be migrated or re-written every couple years.

My job satisfaction has dropped dramatically. I found meaning in the boring stuff. The hyped solutions that will be thrown out in a year feel so meaningless.

This is all to say that not all Main Street businesses will appreciate the boring solutions. And if they do right now, things can and will likely shift at some point.
by zer00eyz | 2025-10-05 22:16:22+00:00
> Do biases go away completely or they just get suppressed down deep in the model's "mind"?

Bias is a human term, and couching the conversation in that context does nothing to address the issue here, because it gets into the quagmire of social context.

Let's say LLM's had taken off 15 years ago at the point system d launched. All the answers given are going to weight toward the old init system simply because there is a lack of information.

LLM's are only repeating the data they are given, and it's cheaper to remove the data after the fact than it is to try to scrub it out of the training data.
by gitremote | 2025-10-05 22:16:26+00:00
You think when ICE arrested over 300 South Korean citizens who were setting up a Georgia Hyundai plant and subjected them to alleged human rights abuses, it was only a perceived slight?

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/south-korea-human-rights-inve...

How Trump’s ICE Raid Triggered Nationwide Outrage in South Korea

https://www.newsweek.com/trump-ice-raid-hyundai-outrage-sout...

'The raid "will do lasting damage to America's credibility," John Delury, a senior fellow at the Asia Society think tank, told Bloomberg. "How can a government that treats Koreans this way be relied upon as an 'ironclad' ally in a crisis?"'
by kergonath | 2025-10-05 22:16:29+00:00
> I always thought it was a little unusual that the state of France owns over 25% of the defense and cyber security company Thales.

Unusual from an American perspective, maybe. The French state has stakes in many companies, particularly in critical markets that affect national sovereignty and security, such as defence or energy. There is a government agency to manage this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agence_des_participations_de_l... .
by efitz | 2025-10-05 22:16:47+00:00
Reinventing? No. Using? Yes, for a lot of good reasons.

LLMs are expensive. Spending tokens to do something in bulk that is well suited to existing tools and algorithms, is wasteful and slow. And the main reason is that, using LLMs, the original author indicated only a 60% success rate for the task. Why spend many times more time and money and energy just to use an LLM on a well-understood preparatory task that it sucks at, when you can get much better results more inexpensively with off-the-shelf tools, and feed their results to the LLM for its unique value.
by david_shaw | 2025-10-05 22:17:16+00:00
> i mean this is cute in an isolated incident, until, you know, all the corporations sell that info to a fascist government who uses it to track dissidents in Portalnd.

The phones (GPS) and cell networks (towers) have your location anyway. The article -- and what the parent comment was talking about -- is social location sharing.

Although citizen tracking is a valid concern, turning on "Find my Friends" isn't going to make you any more vulnerable.