MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by EvanAnderson | 2025-10-11 12:39:07+00:00
I'll check that out. Thank you.

I actually like the idea of art mode, but I'd only want to use something like that if it were a passive technology like e-ink. Otherwise I think the electricity use and wear and tear on the display would eat at me. The device is well built and the presentation is lovely, but I just can't stomach the idea of it burning electricity all the time. (I don't know what its standby draw is, sadly. I do have a lot of stuff on power strips because I worry about standby draw. You're making me realize that this TV, being built-in to the wall, has escaped that scrutiny.)
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-10-11 12:39:13+00:00
I'm reasonably sure this is not what happened, judging by my own recollection of when I have been tempted to write similar things, and my discussions with people who have written similar things. However, your story is both simple and coherent.

It's much easier to point out others' alleged irrational thinking, but the main purpose of books like this is to help you better understand your own thinking.
by squeedles | 2025-10-11 12:39:14+00:00
Thanks for that. We seem to have lost sight of the importance of "commercial biodiversity" in the past 40 or more years of continuous M&A concentration.

Happily, I saw a little discussion of it in 2008 when the advocates of letting the auto companies fail were pushed back by statistics showing how many second and third tier suppliers would be destroyed. But the fourth tier, the shenzhen / radio alley-type stuff is still ignored. Very similar to how most companies want to simply hire skills and assume that they will magically appear when in years past, companies took an active hand in creating them by having a career development path in-house.

Perhaps the AI bubble will be viewed in the future as the last gasp of companies that depleted the soil that they grew in and now struggle to survive without anyone that knows how to do the work anymore. Maybe LLMs will be all that remains, our Moai.
by Applejinx | 2025-10-11 12:39:25+00:00
I'm familiar with it. In my opinion, Adam Curtis's moviemaking style is strongly informed by attention-getting, which is relevant to his subject matter: it's like how the youtuber Harry Litman produces salient and reasoned content (albeit opinionated) but never fails to label it with completely clickbait titles and thumbnails.

If your concept is that your work should be heard, you're obligated to take whatever steps are accepted to meet the bar for 'culturally being heard', a bar that you don't yourself set.

I think Adam Curtis makes non-tinfoil points and takes pains to present them as explosively as possible, something he's good at doing. I sympathize with the idea that it's distasteful to do that, but within the culture that hosts him, it's correct action.
by sillyfluke | 2025-10-11 12:41:44+00:00
Yes, there is a danger of that in general. I think someone made a movie in Japan about the subject, specifically because there is a culture of the elderly not wanting "to be a burden on the younger generation." Some said it hit closer to reality than science fiction because of that specific cultural characteristic in Japan. It also supports Kahnemen's position of pulling the plug when "the going is good" from a ethical point of view, since it leaves no doubt of intention.
by rafaelmn | 2025-10-11 12:42:10+00:00
PC costs a lot and depreciates fast, by the end of a console lifecycle I can still count on developers targeting it - PC performance for 6+ year hardware is guaranteed to suck. And I'm not a heavy gamer - I'll spend ~100h on games per year, but so will my wife and my son - PC sucks for multiple people using it - PS is amazing. I know I could concoct some remote play setup via lan on TV to let my wife and kids play but I just want something I spend a few hundred eur and I plug into the TV and then it works.

Honestly the only reason I caved with the GPU purchase (which cost the equivalent of a PS pro) was the local AI - but in retrospect that was useless as well.
by crazygringo | 2025-10-11 12:43:19+00:00
First of all, this is super super cool. I love these cards, and how he's doing this for his son.

But it also makes me sad when people write things like:

> My 10-year-old doesn't have that. Music just sort of... happens. It's like it's infinite and invisible at the same time, playing from smart speakers, car stereos, my phone. Endless perfectly curated playlists, designed to fade into the background. The default listening experience has become both literally and figuratively formless.

That doesn't match my experience with Spotify, for example. By using things like related artists and radio stations based on an obscure track I've discovered, I've been able to become far more intentional about my listening and discover far more music than I ever could when I was younger.

And music that "happens" and "fades into the background" isn't anything new. That's what analog radio has been for as long as most of us have been alive. Only with far, far, far less choice.

So I love this project -- aesthetically it's super cool and it demonstrates a lot of love. I just wish the author wasn't trying to paint this narrative that the "default listening experience" is somehow getting worse. It's not. It's better than it's ever been.
by sarchertech | 2025-10-11 12:43:30+00:00
I don’t know how many people are like this. I do know that financial incentives result in more or behavior.

It’s already common for caregivers to begin to resent the people they care for and for old people to worry that they are a liability.

I don’t trust the system to be able to protect vulnerable people who have been coerced. And I don’t want old people in general to feel like suicide is their obligation.
by testdelacc1 | 2025-10-11 12:44:05+00:00
> power usage, lesser battery life, higher energy bills

I like how you padded this list by repeating the same thing thrice. Like, increased power usage is obviously going to lead to higher energy bills.

And it’s especially weird because it’s not true? The current SOTA codec AV1 is at a sweet spot for both compression and energy demand (https://arxiv.org/html/2402.09001v1). Consumers are not worse off!
by stacktraceyo | 2025-10-11 12:46:44+00:00
I know what a router is lol. I just was wondering what are the available options to use all the coax connections already in the house so I could connect everything via Ethernet , if you wanted to avoid running Ethernet through the walls or don’t want Ethernet cables visible

When I was younger and before WiFi was a thing I naively thought I’d just plug in a new modem.
by thunky | 2025-10-11 12:46:58+00:00
I wasn't being snarky or pushing stocks.

My point was: many or most people still think "AI" is limited to the summary at the top of Google search results. In Jon Stewart's recent podcast with Geoffrey Hinton he said that he thinks of AI as "polite Google".

So most people haven't tried applying this tech yet.

Also fyi NVDA is 7% of the s&p so if you own the market you own it too. I don't own it directly either.
by n1b0m | 2025-10-11 12:47:05+00:00
I couldn’t find any evidence of the birth of 17 babies. The claim may be confused with the approximately 100 babies born to women whose husbands died in the 9/11 attacks.

I also couldn’t find any evidence for the 19 murders. Six people were killed in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which was an act of terrorism. Plus 9/11.
by daeken | 2025-10-11 12:47:38+00:00
Back in ~2004, I worked on a project to define a codec virtual machine, with the goal of each file being able to reference the standard it was encoded against, along with a link to a reference decoder built for that VM. My thought was that you could compile that codec for the system you were running on and decode in software, or if a sufficient DSP or FPGA was available, target that.

While it worked, I don't think it ever left my machine. Never moved past software decoding -- I was a broke teen with no access to non-standard hardware. But the idea has stuck with me and feels more relevant than ever, with the proliferation of codecs we're seeing now.

It has the Sufficiently Smart Compiler problem baked in, but I tried to define things to be SIMD-native from the start (which could be split however it needed to be for the hardware) and I suspect it could work. Somehow.
by whodidntante | 2025-10-11 12:47:55+00:00
I have done a lot of research into this area. Obesity and other self inflicted health issues are definitely a factor, but not, by far, the whole picture.

Our cost per service is 2-4x or more, and the larger reliance on specialists creates significant complexity and even more costs. So, we do spend 2x, but we get 1/3 to 1/4 of "care" per dollar. In other words, we get less actual care. And the care is biased to fixing things as opposed to preventing things. And it is also biased to those who are wealthier.

Some of the cost drivers: - Administration is 25% of costs, far less in other countries. Insurance company profits and complex administration with confusing and overlapping methodologies that obfuscate costs and comparisons.

- Capital costs are 25% of costs, far less in other countries. Multiple, private, and overlapping hospitals demand more capital and private capital with its expected returns

- Doctor compensation is 2x to 4x more, nursers 2x. Specialists here get truly rich, not true in other countries.

So, quite a lot of the extra spend is not efficient, and goes to insurers, owners of hospitals, and doctors.

I also have personal experience. To get a simple ultrasound, you are talking about $450 for a primary care visit to get a referral for a $650 specialist to get a $1000 ultrasound ($800 scan plus $200 reading), to get a $650 follow-up visit with the specialist to discuss the results. That is almost $3,000 of actual out of pocket costs to me, with a good insurance plan ($2K per month for a couple), the "claimed" costs were significantly higher. MRI and CT are even higher. Similar for a broken ankle, which cost me over $4000 out of pocket.

I am, relatively speaking, well off compared to average, and was able to do this, but that hurt, and significantly disincentivizes me in the future.

Our health system is broken, and pumping more money into only makes it worse.
by sarchertech | 2025-10-11 12:47:56+00:00
Nothing is being taken away. Medically assisted suicide to prevent old age has never been a right anyone has had under any legal framework until very recently. And it’s not a right anyone has anywhere but a few countries.

You can argue that more countries should grant that right. But if you’re going to do so, you need to have an answer for the incentives it creates.
by zahlman | 2025-10-11 12:48:06+00:00
Because if the command is just X then you just input X and the action occurs. There is no need for "immediate contextual help" because there is no time wasted on a useless immediate context.

It's bad UI design to have the user input X and then wait for Y before doing anything when there is only one intention the user could actually have in mind. Having a popup say in effect "hey, I'm not going to do anything until you press Y" is not an improvement.
by carlosjobim | 2025-10-11 12:48:16+00:00
Kaleido color eInk is a dead-end. The displays are too dark to use in anything but direct sunlight. I regret purchasing such a display.

However, black and white eInk is great to use in any well-lit environment and doesn't need direct sunlight. However, the lack of color can be fatal for many workflows.
by Bender | 2025-10-11 12:48:42+00:00
For what it's worth they have added a lot more outbound crap. Even using user.js [1] there is still a lot of leaky outbound noise. Loads of connections to fastly, cloudfront and others. It has gotten worse with time. I would probably also consider using a different browser but I can not give up the addons I use in Firefox. I will just blackhole route those CDN's and see what breaks.

[1] - https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js
by WickyNilliams | 2025-10-11 12:50:34+00:00
Not a screen reader user but I have used them a lot in testing. I'd be surprised if it's meaningfully exposed to assistive tech. Not at the computer right now so I can't test.

That said, I imagine it's more useful to do the opposite, label the output itself e.g.

<label for="output">Total</label> <output id="output">£123.45</output>

That way it will be announced like "Total, £123.45" rather than a random number with no context
by pklausler | 2025-10-11 12:50:44+00:00
The Fortran committee botched DO CONCURRENT badly. The requirements imposed on the program only make it safe to execute its iterations in any serial order, but are not sufficient to allow safe parallel execution. So one can write a perfectly conforming DO CONCURRENT loop that will produce wrong answers when actually run in parallel. The problem in the spec seems to have been inadvertent but they have refused to fix it (and don’t seem to understand the problem either.)
by crabmusket | 2025-10-11 12:51:36+00:00
Exactly this. I really wish browsers would use semantic html to make content more accessible for me, a sighted user! Why does my browser not give me a table of contents I can use to navigate a long page?

I think the parent has a good point: browsers don't do anything with these tags for sighted users, who are unfortunately the majority of developers. If they were to notice benefits to using semantic tags, maybe they'd use them more often.
by rkomorn | 2025-10-11 12:52:04+00:00
I don't necessarily agree with this take but I'd say it's probably because we're only willing to let people who are close to death "make a mistake."

Eg maybe a 16 year old who wants to end their otherwise healthy life might, 20 years later, be glad they didn't.

That seems less likely with someone who is almost certainly going to die (and probably painfully to boot) "soon".
by f311a | 2025-10-11 12:52:23+00:00
I have file reload binded to key:

[keys.normal.space.f] f = "file_picker_in_current_directory" F = "file_picker" b = "file_picker_in_current_buffer_directory" "." = ":toggle-option file-picker.git-ignore" g = "global_search" e = "file_explorer" r = ":reload-all" x = ":reset-diff-change" w = ":echo %sh{git blame -L %{cursor_line},+1 %{buffer_name}}"
by rendall | 2025-10-11 12:52:23+00:00
The article argues that our very sense of what counts as "better" or "compelling" is shaped by the assumptions baked into C-style hardware. Saying no alternative has disrupted them because modern CPUs are efficient enough just restates that bias. It assumes the current definition of efficiency is neutral, when that's exactly what’s being questioned.

The examples of GPUs, DSPs, and hardware video decoders don’t really contradict the article's point. Those are domain-specific accelerators that still live comfortably inside the same sequential, imperative model the author critiques. They expand the ecosystem, but don't escape its paradigm.

Your Colemak analogy cuts the other way: alternatives remain niche because the surrounding ecosystem of software, conventions, and training makes switching costly whether or not they are actually "better." That is the path dependence the article calls out.

As to the article's not proposing an alternative, it reads like a diagnosis of conceptual lock-in, not a design proposal. Its point is to highlight how tightly our notion of "good design" is bound to one lineage of thought. It is explicitly labeled as part two, so it may be laying groundwork for later design discussion. In any case, I think calling attention to invisible constraints is valuable in itself.
by Intermernet | 2025-10-11 12:53:36+00:00
Australia's startup scene is doing ok, but the funding model is lacking. There are a few reputable VCs, and very limited government funding. I don't think it's regulations that are cramping Australian startups, I think it's more lack of investment from both private and public sectors. I know many people who are running successful startups in Australia.

I'd argue that having a system of lobbying government and lax rules on political donations would have a much greater effect on stymying competition. It seems that monopolies in the US are very much protected by a lack of regulation on political donations rather than too much regulation.
by 1dom | 2025-10-11 12:53:55+00:00
> Everyone becomes a liability at some point. By that logic we should just go full Logan’s run and kill people as soon as they stop being productive.

That's ridiculous. People can be unproductive, but not a liability.

> But I don’t want this attitude of “you should kill yourself so you don’t burden your family” to become the norm either.

I can see that, but you haven't explained why. Personally, I don't want to burden myself, my family and those I care about, that's important to me. There must be something more important to you that justifies burdening loved ones with a hard painful death of a loved one. Help me understand: what's that thing for you, if not ego/fear?

> What if your partner’s grandad heard you calling him a rude obnoxious liability and felt pressured into killing himself?

The alternative is he's unnaturally kept alive in a perpetual state of suffering for him and the people around him. If he hadn't suffered mental decline, I know he'd never consciously choose that, another reason why I'd like to make sure I'm gone before serious decline kicks in.

> But many people die suddenly with no serious mental decline at all. That can happen at 95 or 100 the same as it happens earlier.

That doesn't change anything. I agree with Kahnemans point that becoming a burden is too late. If I accept that, without being able to predict the future, it then becomes a game of risk. Kahnamen decided the risk of him becoming a burden was greater than the risk of him continuing to live what he would consider a productive (edit: "valuable" is probably a better word here) life.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-10-11 12:53:55+00:00
Maybe Sony should focus on getting a half-respectable library out on the PS5 before touting the theoretical merits of the PS6? It’s kind of wild how thin they are this go around. Their live service gambles clearly cost them this cycle and the PSVR2 landed with a thud.

Frankly after releasing the $700 pro and going “it’s basically the same specs but it can actually do 4K60 this time we promise” and given how many friends I have with the PS5 sitting around as an expensive paper weight, I can’t see a world where I get a PS6 despite decades of console gaming. The PS5 is an oversized final fantasy machine supported by remakes/remasters of all their hits from the PS3/PS4 era. It’s kind of striking when you look at the most popular games on the console.

Don’t even get me started on Xbox lol
by xpe | 2025-10-11 12:54:07+00:00
> It's much easier to point out others' alleged irrational thinking, but the main purpose of books like this is to help you better understand your own thinking.

That sounds right. I only can make probabilistic guesses as to what is happening in someone else's brain. By posing a question to someone else, there is some chance that person may ask it of themselves. If not today, then perhaps in future.
by netsharc | 2025-10-11 12:54:45+00:00
This was also mentioned in the debate about euthanasia in the UK; that it could lead to pressuring elderly relatives to off themselves. I can imagine the pressure might not even be explicit, it could be implied, and maybe not even consciously, but through behavior.

Like a more subtle form of Shakespeare's "Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?".
by DrewADesign | 2025-10-11 12:55:19+00:00
Provable moral facts have nothing to do with this because humans aren’t philosophically consistent, and societies are ruled by humans. Defining them and getting enough people to agree to those definitions to enforce them is the problem democracy is supposed to solve, but in the end, flawed leaders will be ruling a flawed populace. No matter how cut-and-dried those moral facts are through rigorous philosophical analysis, societies always navigate through the lens of perception, which can be swayed.
by ninkendo | 2025-10-11 12:55:35+00:00
It’s interesting, because if you imagine sites actually using these tags to be maximally compatible with reader mode and other accessibility modes, they’re setting themselves up perfectly to be viewed without ads.

I use reader mode by default in Safari because it’s essentially the ultimate ad blocker: it throws the whole site away and just shows me the article I want to read.

But this is in opposition to what the website owners want, which is to thwart reader mode and stuff as many ads in my way as they can.

It’s possible good accessibility is antithetical to the ad-driven web. It’s no wonder sites don’t bother with it.
by redbell | 2025-10-11 12:55:41+00:00
> But <output>? Most have never touched it. Some don’t even know it exists.

Yeah, count me on with those who don't even know it exists. I'm adding this to my TIL.

> When I searched GitHub public repos, it barely showed up at all.

> That absence creates a feedback loop: if no one teaches it, no one uses it.

This has triggered an instant question in my head: Do LLMs actually use it when generating code or they are not well-trained for this specific tag?
by ThatPlayer | 2025-10-11 12:56:37+00:00
To me, the appeal is that game environments that can now be way more dynamic because we're not being limited by prebaked lighting. The Finals does this, but doesn't require ray tracing and it's pretty easy to tell when ray tracing is enabled: https://youtu.be/MxkRJ_7sg8Y

But that's a game design change that takes longer
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-10-11 12:58:09+00:00
I think that Hunter Thompson basically did this. Kinda "on-brand" for him, really.

I had a friend that decided to stop treatment (dialysis), when he realized that he'd never get off it (he couldn't get a transplant). He was in his late 60s.

It was both a sad, and joyous experience. He took about a month to pass (renal failure). He was Catholic, and wouldn't do assisted suicide.

During that month, a bunch of us would go over to his house, almost on a daily basis, and we'd just hang out. It was actually a great experience.
by condiment | 2025-10-11 12:58:11+00:00
Modern video codecs are what broke the telco monopoly on content and gave us streaming services in the first place. If the cdn bill is make or break, the service isn’t going to last.

And there’s no transfer of effort to the user. Compute complexity of video codecs is asymmetric. The decode is several order of magnitude cheaper to compute than the encode. And in every case, the principal barrier to codec adoption has been hardware acceleration. Pretty much every device on earth has a hardware-accelerated h264 decoder.
by eviks | 2025-10-11 12:58:40+00:00
> input X and then wait for Y before doing anything when there is only one intention the user could actually have in mind

That's obviously false, the second possible intention is... cancellation. For example, you can bind Q,Q to quit the app (and no other key is prefixed with a Q), but then you could press Q mistakenly or change your mind at the last moment.

But you continue to argue with your own strawman - nothing about helpful popups changes the underlying behavior. So if your magic design is to run XY just on X press, that would be bad design, but you can still do it! And the popup will never appear because the action is complete, so no help needed.
by dbZJtFuAXUrVLmY | 2025-10-11 12:59:46+00:00
This comment really bothers me. I am not put off by the idea that the memory of a person is worth protecting, what I am put off by is the suggestion that death is a good option here, or that death is better than having lived those 3 years of life. The idea that when someone loses the capacity to retain their reputation and dignity it would be better for them and others that they were dead and that they have nothing good to offer is such a dangerous one and is just wrong. It applies to many people who are not near their end of life too. I am really pro assisted suicide as a way of shortening suffering when made as a conscious decision by people of sound mind, but comments like these make me very very uneasy.