MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sakisv | 2025-10-21 21:46:27+00:00
I think I agree with what I think you're trying to say.

However I don't agree with the repercussions of this, which are the same ones that make all reasonable people, security experts included, oppose EU's ChatControl or the UK's backdoor requests: There is no way to ensure and protect the people that need protection, as there is no way to ensure that only "the good guys" have it.

We tend to bullshit ourselves into believing that because spyware software like Predator are weapons, meaning that only countries would be allowed to buy them and use them (same way that Jeff Bezos cannot buy and use an F-35 for example). We see though, that certain individuals _can_ get their hands on these things and use them however they want.

For example, 3 years ago someone adjacent to the greek government bought and used Predator against MEPs, journalists, army generals, mafia bosses, MPs of opposing parties and even MPs of their own, ruling, party. The greek government of course denied that they did it, and they said that this individual did not act under the instructions of the government (though they then changed the law to prevent anyone for learning details about it, but that's a different story).

So, apart from adopting the same approach as with ChatControl and encryption backdoors, i.e. banning them, I don't know how we could protect ourselves against them.
by marcosdumay | 2025-10-21 21:46:36+00:00
> "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger" makes for a fun little statement.

It comes from a philosopher, talking about something that is completely not related to health-care, and ironically a strong criticism claiming that people that say things like that are stupid by one of the people most vilified in history by being misunderstood when claiming that things are stupid.
by wafflebot | 2025-10-21 21:47:49+00:00
I have no doubt that civilizations are out there. Maybe a handful, maybe nearing infinity. But out there.

The problem is "out there" is so far away, we are all isolated on our own island worlds. An ocean of space so vast we cannot meaningfully traverse it with probes or radio, to say nothing of manned interstellar flight.

But it never gets boring for me to imagine what other civilizations there might be, and how they might be different from us and from each other.
by asdff | 2025-10-21 21:47:52+00:00
The advice about diet and exercise did not fail to work. What failed was listening to that advice. It works for people who listen.

And what is more you will not be healthy at 80 years old living otherwise sedentary life with ozempic keeping the weight you should be carrying off. You will have no muscle mass. You will be frail and in poor health compared to your peers who cultivated and maintained muscle mass through their life. You will not only have a weak body but your organ health will be in decline. You will have weak lungs and heart. This is going to make medical intervention at the end of your life all the more complicated. Make it difficult for you to survive from things.

Now imagine how much of the world might change if we solved the issue of "uninformed people failing to listen to expert advice." I imagine we'd meet all our climate goals and pollution goals in a generation if not less.
by cryptonector | 2025-10-21 21:48:06+00:00
We have on-call duty for this. It should perhaps be compensated differently, and certainly one person should not always be on-call (though I have been at times on-call for months at a time, but for a thing that normally does not page at night). But what are we do to, have staff around the world so that someone can be on-call during their local business hours so we can have 24/7 support?
by dghlsakjg | 2025-10-21 21:48:07+00:00
Easily Checked:

Wikimedia accepts Paypal, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Check, ACH and Money Order.

Pretty hard to argue that mainstream processors don't like them.

Processors charge higher fees to merchants that are in lines of business with high fraud and chargeback risk, has nothing to do with whether they agree with them morally.

They refuse merchants with business they don't like.

If it were the case that processors didn't like what wikipedia publishes, they would not be able to accept payment, not have high fees.

I can't imagine that wikipedia has high chargeback rates, and clearly the processors don't mind doing business with them.

The processing line item probably includes not just the fees that they have to pay to processors, but FX fees, the cost of banking, the cost of paying people to open envelopes, the cost of accounting, etc.
by mrguyorama | 2025-10-21 21:48:14+00:00
>Is the lesson that the Trump administration learned from all the failed wars of the past 50 hears

The lesson they learned was that if you put a (R) next to your name, you will never face repercussions.

Bush Jr lied about weapons of mass destruction and perpetrated illegal wars that seriously harmed our economy, and he got re-elected for it

Donald Trump negotiated with the taliban to promise them we would leave Afghanistan on a stupid schedule, and Biden took the blame.

Democrats are the ones called warmongers.
by jungturk | 2025-10-21 21:48:34+00:00
Don't disagree with any of that, and I don't want to minimize the seriousness of the issues you've cited, but that kind of reinforces the implication of the scorecard?

People are persistently presented with perils (plagues, parasites, pollution, power-hungry politicians, propaganda, plutonium-powered projectiles, etc...) and humanity keeps finding a way through (though certainly at great personal and population-wide cost sometimes).

Some pretty serious chokepoints in the full history (including research suggesting that something reduced our ancestors numbers by ~99% a little under a million years ago) and yet this particular strain remains.
by varispeed | 2025-10-21 21:48:36+00:00
Why people discover it only today? I remember making comments about it years ago.

I even shown one customer that their elaborate cluster costing £10k a month could run on a £10 vps faster and with less headache (they set it up for "big data" thinking 50GB is massive. There was no expectation of the database growing substantially beyond that).

Their response? Investors said it must run on the cloud, because they don't want to lose their money if homegrown setup goes down.

So there is that.
by bluGill | 2025-10-21 21:48:37+00:00
What is the point of winning though? We could be doing other things in stead, and I'm going to submit that they are more valuable (you are of course welcome to disagree - this is an opinion).

Personally I hope no human lands on the moon again. I like telling my parents they are so old humans walked on the moon in their lifetime (last human left the moon December 1972 - before I was born). There is no value in this statement, but it is still fun.
by wernerb | 2025-10-21 21:48:38+00:00
This is referenced in a sci fi book "The dark forest" of the series "The 3 body problem". It sets a convincing narrative that because of time taken for observation and response and development speed of society it is most likely that all civilizations that announce themselves would likely be a threat in terms of technological supremacy eventually to observing civilizations. In other words, we don't hear anything because any sufficiently advanced civilization would not want to risk being discovered. I.e., the "dark silent forest".
by jbjbjbjb | 2025-10-21 21:48:53+00:00
In my experience there’s still much more to this. I’m sure it helps at population level like the article describes but it’s not foolproof. For our first we were feeding nuts early and still developed an allergy to all nuts. Our second didn’t get nuts until much later and he’s fine. There’s more to the story than timing, notably my first has eczema and asthma too so there’s that atopic march.
by crazygringo | 2025-10-21 21:49:12+00:00
At that point why not abandon databases entirely and use a key-value store?

The answer, obviously, is because traditional tables make lots of things really easy. SQL is designed for that use case, and it's performant.

You're not even talking about traditional relational databases anymore. You're trying to construct tables inside of tables, which means abandoning performance, indexes, etc.
by noosphr | 2025-10-21 21:49:26+00:00
The cloud was a good deal in 2006 when the smallest aws machine was about the size of a ok dev desktop and took over two years of renting to justify buying the physical machine outright.

Today the smallest, and even large, aws machines are a joke, comparable to a mobile phone from 15 years ago to a terrible laptop today, and take about three to six months to in rent as buying the hardware outright.

If you're on the cloud without getting 75% discount you will save money and headcount by doing everything on prem.
by jorvi | 2025-10-21 21:49:47+00:00
Not "everyone". The G Pro Wireless is one of the most popular mouses and polls at 1KHz, and it works just fine. Polling a keyboard beyond 1KHz is utterly useless. The only time you're gonna want more fidelity is with stuff like Snap Tap, which is considered cheating and is banned.

In a similar vein, >120Hz screens are of doubtful utility. The performance gain is insignificant, considering top human reaction time to visual stimuli is ~150ms and the jump from 120Hz to 240Hz is -4.17ms, 1/36th or 2.77% improvement.

Even then, most pro FPS players also still play on 200-800 DPI when 1600 DPI and preferably even 3200 DPI is much better. Those low DPIs are purely cargo culted from the 2000s era CS Pros their .cfg, when sensors were still pretty crappy, and those players are effectively running lowgrade mouse smoothing.

Uneducated gamers are kin to uneducated audiophiles. Stop drinking the snake oil.
by etiennebausson | 2025-10-21 21:50:35+00:00
France has 68M inhabitants and is on paper ballots (and function identically to Ireland on such matter).

I don't quite understand how a country with a mere 5 times more population is unable to enact the same solution at their 'so much bigger' scale.

And France is spread over more time zone than the U.S., so that argument doesn't work either.
by levkk | 2025-10-21 21:51:31+00:00
Yeah, no way. As soon as you hit swap, _most_ apps are going to have a bad, bad time. This is well known, so much so that all EC2 instances in AWS disable it by default. Sure, they want to sell you more RAM, but it's also just true that swap doesn't work for today's expectations.

Maybe back in the 90s, it was okay to wait 2-3 seconds for a button click, but today we just assume the thing is dead and reboot.
by _diyar | 2025-10-21 21:51:45+00:00
> [if stainless works] it will be mostly due to the peculiarities of Starship's other design choices.

Yea but isn‘t that the point of the Starship? It has a bunch of unusual design choices regarding reusability and payload capacity, and then the rest of the owl is drawn around them.

I‘m not a rocket-scientist but I would hazard a guess they picked the best material given the options, right?
by conesus | 2025-10-21 21:51:59+00:00
Here's what I did to make voice (now WisprFlow, before Superwhisper) a habit:

1. Install Karabiner-Elements, a free macOS keyboard remapper[0] 2. Map F19 -> F5 (mic button) in Karabiner-Elements 3. Choose F19 as the voice hotkey in your voice app

And now you can use the handy F5 mic button on your Apple keyboard. WisprFlow automatically has it set for:

- press and hold to talk - double tap for indeterminate listening until you f5/esc

That workflow alone, of using the f5 key and switching between the two modes of speaking (holding or double-tap), has freed up a not insignificant part of my working memory. Turning abstract thoughts into text is higher cost than turning them into voice.

I predict individual offices[1] will be more popular as a choice for startups.

[0]: https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org

[1]: https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1281887
by ashton314 | 2025-10-21 21:52:06+00:00
For me, the magic in Magit is how its interface is perfect for new users as well as long-time power users: new users get helpful menus to show them what options are available, but the menus display instantly and are entirely keyboard-driven, so that long-time power users who know the keystrokes by heart are not impeded one whit. There's no trade-off between power tool and beginner-friendliness here: everyone gets all the goodness all the time.

The interface builder has since been spun out as a separate library (and now included with stock Emacs!) called Transient, so there are several packages that leverage it. My favorite LLM interface (gpt.el) makes heavy use of transient menus. I've created my own transient menus for thinks like my PKM (Denote by Prot), my LSP client of choice (Eglot), and my citation manager (Citar).
by WastedCucumber | 2025-10-21 21:52:06+00:00
I don't have an extensive wikipedia career, but I've found that even my few edits to political topics have been accepted.

What did get reverted was a trivial [citation needed] fix, for a musician's page, for a sentence stating they were involved in scoring a film. I found a relevant citation and this was promptly reverted, for reasons that were explained but, at least for me, utterly incomprehensible
by cryptonector | 2025-10-21 21:52:44+00:00
Twice I've had to deal with outages where the root cause took a long time to find because there were several distinct root causes interacting in ways that made it difficult or impossible to reproduce the problem in an isolated way, or to even reason about the problem until we started figuring out that there were multiple unrelated root causes. All other outages I've dealt with were the source where experienced engineers and institutional knowledge were sufficient to quickly find the cause and fix it.

Which is to say: it's entirely possible that the inferences drawn by TFA are just wrong. And it's also possible that TFA is wrong but also right to express concern with how Amazon manages talent.
by mfro | 2025-10-21 21:53:14+00:00
'The world continuing to go on' is the status quo and has been for millenia at this point. Sure, the argument can be made that the world will end eventually, but if we do not have our reference timescale, what do we have? People aren't afraid that the world will eventually end (because 'eventually' should be thousands of years from now), people are afraid the world will end NOW, which does nullify your experience and efforts on the subjective human timescale. Life as we know it continuing to go on without ambiguity on our confidence to prevent world-ending events does resolve those anxieties.
by marcyb5st | 2025-10-21 21:53:15+00:00
A bit in the doomer camp, and what worries me the most are the lifestyle changes needed to not fuck up the climate in the next few hundreds years. I believe I heard that we should slash 7/8th of our emissions (as individuals living a modern lifestyle) to keep the wet bulb temperature in check worldwide by the end of the century. This is, in my opinion, a target that we'll surely miss and it won't be nice.

Europe is already struggling with few millions people trying to enter over several years. I can't imagine what happens when large parts of India/Pakistan/Bangladesh become literally deadly during the hot season. That would displace ~1B people basically at once (if you stay and you don't have Air Conditioning you die). The following turmoil will be like nothing we ever saw before as a species (IMHO).
by ubermonkey | 2025-10-21 21:53:21+00:00
The point is that you came in here with a pasted wall of text with a whole bunch of urls claiming emacs users on MacOS are somehow 3rd class citizens because ... of things from long ago, I guess.

My point, Don, is that these long-ago issues are now irrelevant. Your position here runs utterly counter to the lived experience of Mac emacs users.

I don't care what RMS did in 2005. It's not relevant to using emacs on a Mac in 2025.

I don't even need to care about the history of emacs on the Mac, or whatever other ill-advised chicanery the FSF has committed on this or any other point (and, not to put too fine a point on it, but at 55 I've seen plenty of goofy own-goals from that crowd).

What matters now is "gee, how easy is it for a Mac user to access and use emacs productively?" That answer, for at least the last 8 to 10 years (which is also the answer to your gatekeepy question), has been "very!" You open terminal and type "emacs," or you download a build that runs as a gui from any of several maintainers. You're done.

It's about as simple as it is to run it on a Linux box (which I also do), and far simpler than getting it to behave under Windows (and I have those scars, too).

So what was your point again?
by gregsadetsky | 2025-10-21 21:53:51+00:00
Our library is open source, the price is 0!! :-) Haha

We're actually mostly talking to people (that "schedule a meeting") to see how we can help them migrate their stuff away (from Heroku, Vercel, etc.)

But we're not sure of the pricing model yet - probably Entreprise features like Gitlab does, while remaining open source. It's a tough(er) balance than running a hosted service where you can "just" (over)charge people.
by heavyset_go | 2025-10-21 21:53:55+00:00
Papau New Guinea was ravaged by imperialism, invaded by imperial Japan and then was a meat grinder warfront in WWII. It was controlled by Australia since then.

Similarly in WWI, it was invaded by Australia and only gained independence in 1975.

Before that, it was split between Germany, the British and Dutch.

Before that, its population was impressed and blackbirded by European traders.

Like cargo cults literally developed there lol
by sebastiennight | 2025-10-21 21:53:58+00:00
1 - A copy of me is not me.

2 - There might be a form of hubris in thinking that replicating a conscious person by copying all their neurotransmitters is enough to have a continuity between the original and the copy.

It can be easily evidenced if you consider that the people who tend to believe this, will have a level of granularity in their beliefs that depend on their era and their own knowledge, so maybe a century ago you'd think copying the nerve/neuron arrangement would be enough, and a few decades later someone would've said that you need the exact arrangement of molecules or atoms, while maybe in 2025 we'd be thinking in terms of electron clouds or quarks.

But to think that today we have finally arrived at a complete and final understanding of the basic blocks and surely, there is no possible finer understanding that would make our current view quaint in the eyes of a person from 2085 is the hubris I'm talking about.
by foxyv | 2025-10-21 21:54:16+00:00
Booster re-usability is only the first half of the problem. It's the second stage re-usability that makes Starship viable despite its massive second stage. The re-entry heating is trashing their second stages which would make the killer feature of Starship, fast turnaround, impractical.

Also, as far as I can tell from their last test video, they are still shredding their Flaperons at the joint.
by jakub_g | 2025-10-21 21:54:27+00:00
I feel like I went through this stage ahead of time, a decade ago, when I was junior dev, and was starting my days by: first reviewing the work of a senior dev who was cramming out code and breaking things at the speed of light (without LLMs); and then leaving a few dozen comments on pull requests of the offshore team. By midday I had enough for the day.

Now that I'm no longer at that company since a few years ago, I'm invincible. No LLM can scare me!
by makeitdouble | 2025-10-21 21:55:11+00:00
That's a lot to digest for a 7 years old, and you're still brushing over how you do a population survey, count the constituents and how to make that a trustworthy process.

My point: reality is messy and simplicity isn't a guarantee of reliability. The things hat really work in our societies are pragmatic, not simple.
by asdff | 2025-10-21 21:55:26+00:00
Look at the very low rate of accidents for cyclists and then consider the fact that the bulk of that dataset at least among american populations is going to be comprised of cyclists who are drunk, high, both, mentally ill, or otherwise showing little regard for the rule of law on the road. Don't be drunk, be sane, follow the rules of traffic, and you have shifted to an extremely low risk demographic where the accident rate may well be close to zero.
by dotnet00 | 2025-10-21 21:55:49+00:00
The industry is going through growing pains, New Glenn is almost ready for payloads, Neutron is a year or two away from flying, and other small launch companies are in the process of pivoting to either medium launch or space services.

I'm not seeing what makes SpaceX government funded beyond just that it provides services to the government? The same as any other launch provider would be doing? At this point the vast majority of SpaceX's activity, and likely cashflow, is from its mostly self-funded Starlink.

SpaceX won the original HLS contract because their design actually had hardware in testing, actually met NASA's payload, landing area and testing requirements, had a clear path to commercialization and was willing to cover most of the cost themselves, as otherwise NASA wouldn't have been able to choose anyone given the limited funding allocated by Congress.
by davidpolberger | 2025-10-21 21:56:09+00:00
I've been using Claude Code a lot lately, and I've been thinking of integrating it into our SaaS tool (a formula-driven app designer). I've been holding off primarily because I've been afraid of the cost (we're not making much money off our $9/mo. customers as it is, and this definitely wouldn't help that).

However, it's becoming clear to me that individual apps and websites won't have their own integrated chatbots for long. They'll be siloed, meaning that they can't talk to one another -- and they sure can't access my file system. So we'll have a chatbot first as part of the web browser, and ultimately as part of the operating system, able to access all your stuff and knowing everything about you. (Scary!)

So the future is to make your software scriptable -- not necessarily for human-written scripts, but for LLM integration (using MCP?). Maybe OLE from the nineties was prescient?

Short-term, though, integrating an LLM would probably be good for business, but given that I'm our only engineer and the fact that our bespoke chatbot would likely become obsolete within two years, I don't think it would be worth the investment.
by fishmicrowaver | 2025-10-21 21:56:18+00:00
Hmm I have my doubts. I don't really understand the appeal of hyper-consumerism, brand focus, and big SM platform engagement. But I look over at my wife and she is clearly plugged in to a giant worldwide cultural movement of womens interests, product recommendations, and politics. It also appears to be the case that women are less likely to engage with AI. It's one of the big reasons I think it's a massive blunder to pursue AI erotica. I think a big part of the TikTok user base (women) will have to be persuaded to jump on the AI bandwagon and I'm not sure the industry is pursuing any products or features to woo that market.
by kapkapkap | 2025-10-21 21:56:36+00:00
Appreciate it. A lot of challenges, one of the most difficult that sticks out was building out the ability for users to track prices on a custom zone that they define (Sections 101+102, rows 1-4), and making it so that the price trend for this zone would show up retroactively (back to when the event went onsale), not just to "start tracking" prices in that zone once the user created it. There's a lot of cleaning of data that goes on for this, since different sellers might use slightly different section names for the same section, to ensure that you're including all the ticket listings that you should be.