MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by chad_oliver | 2025-10-12 01:28:38+00:00
Mostly it's a consequence of population density. There's just not enough large cities close together.

I think it's probably also correct to say that New Zealand could sustain a larger passenger rail network if made the right investments. For example, Auckland <-> Hamilton <-> Tauranga could profitably support at least a few trains per day in each direction... _if_ it was electrified, with passing loops where needed, and with well-sited stations, and with the ability for trains to run into Britomart or at least Newmarket (both being stations close to central Auckland). However, there's a chicken and egg problem: unless you make investments like that, the service you can offer will be pretty crap and no one will want to ride your slow trains.
by evanelias | 2025-10-12 01:29:04+00:00
> Why shouldn't this to apply to every company - including the one ostensibly shepherding the open source project?

Because that's simply not how copyrights and trademarks work. The licensor doesn't need to abide by the terms of the license, by definition. The purpose of a license is to grant rights from the licensor to the licensee.

> employing a bunch of core developers doing 10% of the work doesn't entitle you to be the sole entity to monetize the work of the other 90% of the community

Very few of these cases are 10% company / 90% community. If anything, it's usually the other way around. Not to mention the huge amount of time spent on code review and ongoing maintenance of third-party contributions.

> I don't think anyone has come up with a proper license to defend against that yet.

That wouldn't really make sense; a software license isn't going to remove rights from the licensor. More realistic solutions are things like intentionally not having a CLA (effectively preventing the project creator from relicensing) and/or reassigning copyright and trademarks to a foundation.
by j45 | 2025-10-12 01:29:59+00:00
I generally agree that vague 1 shot prompting might vary.

I also feel all of those things can be explained over time into a compendium that is input. For example, every time it is right, or wrong, comment and add it to an .md file. Better yet, have the CLI Ai tool append it.

We know what is included as part of a prompt (like the above) is more accurately paid attention to.

My intent isn't to make more work, it's just to make it easier to highlight the issues with code that's mindlessly generated, or is overly convoluted when a simple approach will do.
by Noaidi | 2025-10-12 01:32:08+00:00
> Have you ever cared for someone with late stage Alzheimer or other forms of severe dementia?

Yes.

Did I say that it was easy? Did I say that the spiritual way through all this was just pretending like everything is OK? No, it’s a very difficult process.

Avoiding suffering is impossible. Choosing to die to avoid suffering does not guarantee non-suffering. Only understanding suffering and where it originates can get rid of suffering, and you don’t do that by avoiding it.
by FloorEgg | 2025-10-12 01:33:00+00:00
I've raised from angels in Vancouver. There is definitely a VSE hangover culture there. During the grind I had some strange experiences.

One involved an argument with the prospective investor over the share price. In their view it had to be between 20 and 50 cents. They didn't care about the valuation, or typical investment terms, only the share price.

Another invited us to an IPO party for another company they invested in (TSX if I remember correctly). At this party we learned that the company that IPO'd had less than 100k revenue (and huge losses). They were out of business within 3 years.

I guess it is hard for old dogs to learn new tricks... They made their millions off pump and dumps in VSE days and just didn't stop playing those games even long after the exchange shut down.
by int_19h | 2025-10-12 01:34:49+00:00
> No one wants an actual touch screen, but they definitely want a really narrow touchscreen directly above their keyboard. It’s contextual

The reason why I don't want an actual touch screen on my laptop (after using two laptops with one) is because it's just not ergonomic. For one thing, operating it strains the arm very quickly. For another, it means covering the screen with fingerprints, although that's less of an issue with modern ultrabright screens (but sometimes I don't want bright).

A dedicated touchscreen that's located in an area where it's actually convenient to use is a very different story though.
by axiolite | 2025-10-12 01:35:07+00:00
Circa 2009 when analog TV was first shut-off in the US, each DTV station usually only had one channel, or perhaps a second basic one like a static weather radar on-screen. Some did have 3 or 4 sub-channels early on, but it was uncommon.

Circa 2019, after the FCC "repack" / "incentive auction" (to free-up TV channels for cellular LTE use) it became very common for each RF channel to carry 4+ channels. But to be fair, many broadcasters did purchase new, improved MPEG-2 encoders at that time, which do perform better with a lower bit-rate, so quality didn't degrade by a lot.
by xeonmc | 2025-10-12 01:35:41+00:00
See also: various points in the Evil Overlord list[0]. Selected examples:

#12: One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation. #60: My five-year-old child advisor will also be asked to decipher any code I am thinking of using. If he breaks the code in under 30 seconds, it will not be used. Note: this also applies to passwords. #74: When I create a multimedia presentation of my plan designed so that my five-year-old advisor can easily understand the details, I will not label the disk "Project Overlord" and leave it lying on top of my desk.

[0] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EvilOverlordList
by evanelias | 2025-10-12 01:35:54+00:00
> It's happened to me a number of times now where the license for the features we were using went from open source to proprietary with 5-6 figure cost.

In those cases, prior to the project going commercial, did you contribute nontrivial code to the project and/or financially sponsor the project?

I could see being upset in those situations, but in most cases I find the answer is no.

> If I had known this would happen, I would never have used it in the first place, used an alternative, or maybe just never bothered with the project.

If you had used an alternative, the same scenario could have played out with the alternative.

Realistically, what are the "never have used it" / "never bothered" scenarios? Presumably you chose the project because you needed it for something; that implies the never-bothered alternative is essentially just writing something from scratch instead. Which you can still do now. And you can use the last FOSS version of the project as a starting point, which saves a tremendous amount of time. So how exactly were you burnt by a supposed "rug pull"?
by staviette | 2025-10-12 01:38:12+00:00
I think - at least for the people who stick with a career in PR - that they enjoy playing the game of giving an answer that is sort of related to the question but doesn't actually give a single bit of useful information. That they enjoy seeing how far they can push it without the interviewer straight up accuse them of not answering the question.

At least that's the only way I can imagine them keeping their sanity.
by dragonwriter | 2025-10-12 01:39:10+00:00
> It's not the 70s, the cops can't keep up with robberies and theft, turn a blind eye to drugs and illegal immigrants, and don't even bother with murders and rapes in some places.

Actually, no, literally all of that (except the "It's not the 70s" part, obviously) more of a problem at any point during in the late 20th Century (1960s-1990s. peaking in the 1980s) crime wave than it has been any time since.
by julianlam | 2025-10-12 01:39:32+00:00
I've read something like 5 or 6 HN threads about a dumb TV, and without fail _this_ is always one of the replies.

Another benefit — advertising displays are also designed to be always-on and last much longer than consumer devices.

The other side of the coin? Because of the first two points, they are also rather cost-prohibitive.

Nevertheless, anyone know where I can pick up a good one?
by mindslight | 2025-10-12 01:40:26+00:00
Personally I think it's a bona fide societal mental health problem. The American ideal of hyper-individualist self-reliance implies you are utterly on your own. This means that everything that happens to you is your fault, and you can only right it by taking responsibility to fix it yourself. But it's kind of impossible to simply stop yourself from being bullied, because "if you could have, you would have".

Coupled with entertainment that primarily revolves around people aiming guns at each other while barking orders, then shooting to see who gets to be in charge, then more aiming/barking. Guns are framed as the obvious solution to problems, and the media reinforces this by making sure every shooter gets their 15 minutes (or days). Frankly with this setup, the surprising thing is that there aren't more mass shootings.
by femto | 2025-10-12 01:40:45+00:00
> and their fall kicked off the decline

My feeling is that the response was the thing that kicked off the decline. At the time of the attack, the US had quite a bit of goodwill around the world. The US could have surgically gone after the people responsible, with minimum civilian deaths, and most of the world would have backed them to the hilt, and the US would have come out stronger. Instead we had spurious claims of weapons of mass destruction, the coalition of the "willing" going into Iraq with jackboots on, over the widespread objections of their own populations, and abuses in Guantanamo Bay. That response burned an awful lot of goodwill around the world: which kicked off the decline.
by Noaidi | 2025-10-12 01:41:53+00:00
It’s interesting to read here how many people believe their thoughts are themselves. They are more worried about losing their minds than losing their limbs. Your thoughts and memories are as much you as your hand or your foot. As a society, I think we’ve become so attached to our “self“ that we think is “me“. These people who lose their minds, do they have a sense of self? And if they have a sense of self, do they suffer? Cause you really can’t suffer if you have no sense of self. It may look like you’re suffering from the outside, but it’s hard to say with someone deep in dementia or Alzheimer’s if they’re suffering. I don’t know if it’s something that ever can be known or if it’s ever been asked. I know I have a friend‘s mother right now pretty deep into dementia and she seems OK with everything.

But this is what happened with the man in the original article. He had a sense of himself that he wanted preserve. And that to me as a sickness, a spiritual sickness, greediness almost.
by like_any_other | 2025-10-12 01:41:58+00:00
> While not documented in the official changelog, Google appears to have quietly patched this particular exploit.

So Google and phone carriers conspired to secretly sabotage user devices. Isn't that patch the actual "hack", given that it is undisclosed and against the device owner's wishes? Why are we going along with this deranged pretense that even if you buy something, it still belongs to the manufacturer?
by Brian_K_White | 2025-10-12 01:42:04+00:00
Most everything banking related works for me. 2 different credit unions, roboinvesting, paypal & paypal-alikes, credit card, car insurance, etc.

What does not work? An LG app to control an air conditioner.

Also I have to hide root from the roku app, which I use for the headphone because it works better than the headphone on the remote.

Super important stuff, no wonder they lock that down so much.

Ok I did skip one real thing for the sake of the funny. I can't do google tap to pay. That's about it.

This is all the same on a rooted standard rom as on Lineage.
by kcexn | 2025-10-12 01:43:28+00:00
I think the takeaway should be you really don't want Alzheimer's regardless of what people think of you.

Think about what is happening from his point of view. The condition has fundamentally changed his perception of reality. You are trying to tell him that this perfectly cooked chicken is pink all-over when it clearly isn't. Everyone else has gone mad and he doesn't know why.
by int_19h | 2025-10-12 01:44:38+00:00
Most people only have one mobile device, a smartphone. Those that have more than one usually still have those with matched OSes. No-one cares about "looking like the OS", but people do care about looking (and, more importantly, behaving) like all the other apps they use.

And as far as manuals and customer support, what you're saying is that you can't afford to do cross-platform properly, and so you're cutting corners. Which is fine if it's stated explicitly upfront, and having an app that behaves weirdly (for a given platform) is better than no app, but please don't insult your users' intelligence by presenting that as some kind of feature.
by famouswaffles | 2025-10-12 01:44:51+00:00
>That's the "orders and orders of magnitude more expensive" part.

It's not orders of magnitudes more expensive and if we take the most recent report for the half year, then they need a per quarter ARPU of $8 for their free users to be profitable with billions to spare. That is low. This is not some herculean task. They don't need to 'overtake google' or whatever. They literally don't need to change anything.
by zbentley | 2025-10-12 01:45:12+00:00
What would baseband usage look like in a deregulated world?

I’m skeptical, but the question is honest. Without the (quite corrupt) allotment of frequencies and broadcast radio tech by the FCC and government, I’m having trouble envisioning a future that doesn’t end up back at the bcm/qcm/etc. near-monopoly … just via market collusion rather than state orchestration. Is there a better future there that I’m missing?
by padolsey | 2025-10-12 01:45:25+00:00
Beautiful images in some ways, but so raw and stomach-churning in others. I am not American but feel sick to this day at the thoughts of these events. On the day of 9/11, I was 11 and went to my IT class that afternoon in Sussex, UK. Our teacher set a task that we thought was hypothetical. They said something had happened in NYC and asked for us to put our investigative hats on and find information about it online. I suppose, in a way, it made sense as a task, to treat it as an exercise. It slowly came to realization that this was a real thing. Looking at these images now, the people in the foregrounds in 1970s attire, going about their days, it feels like a nostalgic optimism. Earth-shattering loss followed it. The ephemerality of optimism for our pockets of lived humanity in this lifetime are not to be taken for granted. We should remember and value what positive and pain-free times we are able to each be priveleged enough to enjoy. Time is short.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-10-12 01:45:46+00:00
By the time you've done that, why not repeat it yourself?

I once needed to define a large table of trigrams in C (for the purpose of distinguishing "English" from "not English"). Setting it up looked like this:

1. Download a book from Project Gutenberg.

2. Write something that went through the book character-by-character, and for every character, remembered the trigram ending there.

3. Make the form of "remembering" be "append a line of code to this file that says `array[char1][char2][char3] = 1`".

4. Now I have a really long C file that compiles into the dictionary I want.

It sounds to me kind of like you want to replace step 3 with an LLM. If that's right... what value is the LLM adding?
by serf | 2025-10-12 01:46:45+00:00
I just missed an ebay opportunity to get a dell r730xd with 12x 12tb drives for around 400 dollars.

if you're willing to wait and bid-snipe you can find deals like that routinely; just wait to find one with the size drives you want.

if you just need the drives similar lot sales are available for high power-on time zero errors enterprise drives. I bought a lot of 6x 6tb drives two weeks ago for 120 usd and they all worked fine. If you have the bay space and a software solutuon that lets you swap them in and out as needed without distorting data then there is a lot of 'hobby fun' to be had with managing a storage rack.
by exabrial | 2025-10-12 01:49:25+00:00
I’m surprised people are up in arms about this here. First, there has been huge protests about the selling, er “leasing”, of BLM land to millionaires. Do they even realize what was happening here?

The headline would be better written as “some rich guy no longer gets to skip normal environmental procedures for permanently occupying public land”.

Public land should remain that way, forever. Stop selling our children’s future for profit, no matter the cause.
by JimDabell | 2025-10-12 01:49:27+00:00
> Folks did read. They guessed that known hashes would be stored on devices and images would be scanned against that. Was this a wrong guess?

Yes. Completely wrong. Not even close.

Why don’t you just go and read about it instead of guessing? Seriously, the point of my comment was that discussion with people who are just guessing is worthless.
by thegrim33 | 2025-10-12 01:50:25+00:00
"The field, they argue, has discovered little of importance in the last 50 years, because it is dominated by groupthink and silences anyone who dares to dissent from mainstream ideas, like string theory."

Anyways, here's an article that spends every last breath trying to malign, dismiss, and ostracize people who dissent from mainstream ideas.
by Noaidi | 2025-10-12 01:50:29+00:00
I’m sorry, I’m not one of those people. I don’t have “religious beliefs“. There are things I’ve learned in my rather long life and through my suffering and happiness and reading a lot of different spiritual books as well as a lot of materialist books. (my current fascination is the possibility of tubules being the source of a quantum consciousness.)

All I wrote was a remark about how suffering has the same source. Why do we suffer? Isn’t that an interesting question? Do we need to suffer? Can we have pain without suffering? These are not answers I can tell you. These things people have to understand by experience and observation.

I want saw a Whitetail deer with a compound fracture to its rear leg. The bone was sticking straight out. Probably hit by a car. But there it was walking with its herd, calmly eating grass with the rest of them.

So that’s what I do, I look at my life outside of me and I look at the life inside of me.
by jesterson | 2025-10-12 01:50:52+00:00
> going to save the car industry in Europe and stopping it falling entirely into the hands of the Chinese is with.... tarrifs

Europe has destroyed it's own car making industry. Extreme taxation, self-exclusion from usage of reasonably priced resources among things that buried it. While at the same time chinese focused on making their cars better. It's as simple as that.

Now there is no way to stop chinese cars from penetrating markets. Tariffs will just buy some time. Eventually noone will buy expensive and crappy european cars.

It's a sad conclusion for someone who dislike chinese cars and been benz user for few decades. My next car won't be benz and i fear it may be chinese huawei, as the current one spends more time in workshop while being a shadow of technological and design marvel .
by hateful | 2025-10-12 01:50:56+00:00
I don't have a reliable source, but I've heard that the original script had the machines use us for our processing power, not our energy, but that the studio thought it sounded too complicated and had them change it. Of course, changing it makes it make ZERO sense.

Some not so reliable sources I found:

https://www.reddit.com/r/matrix/comments/q2i0by/is_it_true_t...

https://www.reddit.com/r/plotholes/comments/11khig/comment/c...
by talkingtab | 2025-10-12 01:51:02+00:00
It is interesting how opinionated people are. Personally, I think we just don't know enough to do a reasonable assessment. If we had some example of where a knob might be good and then try to understand whether it was good and if not, why not?

One of the issues (in my opinion) is how much control per pixel you get from a control. Certainly a knob has more control factors than a button. If nothing else you can click it and turn it. In the same size, a knob has much more control effect.

The other issue is how easily and comfortable a person can be using the control. This is complicated. If you see something on a screen that looks like something from the real world, then you have an idea of how to use it. And many of us became very comfortable with the old goofy Windows controls. But initial comfort is not necessary. Learned comfort is. If initially we don't know what it can do and how to use it, can we learn and once we do will we be comfortable?

It is not straight forward. The challenge I face is using a very small form factor - a mobile phone screen - to inter operate with complex systems and vast amounts of data.

The fact that it embodies more control factors in a small package makes it interesting.
by jongjong | 2025-10-12 01:51:09+00:00
The notation used in Euler’s totient function reminds me why I chose to study software engineering instead of maths. The same notation can be used to mean 3 different things. Illogical. It baffles me why mathematicians made the language of maths, which is supposed to be the language of logic, so ambiguous. So sloppy to reuse the mod symbol to mean different things and sloppily using an equal sign instead of congruence symbol.

I will henceforth refer to software development as 'software engineering' to convey its equivalence, or perhaps superioriority over other 'engineering' disciplines which are based on ambiguous mathematical language, as opposed to rigorous, machine-verifiable, unambiguous languages.
by jsight | 2025-10-12 01:51:38+00:00
IDK, I've worked in projects that didn't use the magic so much and I honestly think it was worse.

Instead of a config class and a bunch of apps with @Inject Config config;, we'd have giant *Config classes. Each one would have lots of methods like:

@Bean public fooProducer(FooConfig config, BazProvider provider, BarProvider barProvider, SoapClient soapClient) {...}

Want to know how they were produced? Find usages on the class' constructor.

The magic @Inject and @Autowired annotations don't seem worse than that to me.
by CMay | 2025-10-12 01:51:57+00:00
Can someone explain to me why the immediate perception is that this is some kind of bad, negative, evil thing? I don't understand it.

My assumption is that when this feature is on and you turn it off, they end up deleting the tags (since you've revoked permission for them to tag them). If it gets turned back on again, I assume that means they need to rescan them. So in effect, it sounded to me like a limit on how many times you can toggle this feature to prevent wasted processing.

Their disclaimer already suggests they don't train on your photos.
by userbinator | 2025-10-12 01:53:17+00:00
The days of GSM/3G were great. All you needed was a quad-band phone, of which plenty were available from numerous far-East companies but many based on the same or similar chipsets, and you'd have connectivity in the whole world.

The situation with LTE is far worse, with several dozen different bands and many opportunities to whitelist and effectively do user-agent discrimination. Even if you bought an unlocked device, if it doesn't have the bands in the area you want to use it and those your provider has cells for, you won't get any service.

a high-severity privilege escalation vulnerability

This is an extremely clear signal of how they think of the user --- as sheep to be corralled and controlled, not as individuals who have control over the devices they bought. The "security" propaganda they continue to spew has been going on for a while, long enough that increasingly more users are now aware of the truth.

To paraphrase the famous words of Linus: Google, fuck you!