MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by no_wizard | 2025-10-24 01:01:37+00:00
>politeness and conflict avoidance over avoiding actual problems

Those two things are not coupled. You can maintain a sense of politeness in face of conflict. This is the entire basis of Nonviolent Communication, a great book about handling and resolving conflict in such a manner.

It’s extremely effective in my experience and results in overall better clarity and less conversational churn.

>Why would anyone do that if they can't even be called out for messing something up, yet alone being held accountable

You can be, that is in part a definition of accountability and you’re conflating a lack of accountability with some idea that it requires behaving in a manner that may be construed as rude, and that’s simply not true.

So like anything, you hold them accountable. You can do that without being rude.

>In all of those projects and organsiations which value respectful language and inclusivity and all sorts of non-results-oriented crap

I’m getting a sense you have a predisposition to disliking these things. They’re really important because they are, when correctly understood, results oriented. It frees up people to feel comfortable saying things they may not have been otherwise. That is very productive.

Abusive and abrasion language does not do that.

>This is how you get design-by-committee lowest common denominator slop

No, in my experience and many reports from others you get this for a myriad of reasons, but consistent theme is lack of ownership or organizational politics, not because people level up their communication skills

>avoid criticising their ideas because they might feel offended". There was a recent HN thread about AI-written pull requests and how people have problems with them, because tactfully rejecting 10k lines of pure bullshit is very hard without making the submitter upset. Guess what, if they were allowed to say "no, you aren't going to be merging slop you can't even explain" the average code quality would skyrocket

I don’t disagree with you because I don’t believe in proper criticism, I do. I disagree with you because the implicit messaging I’m getting here is the following

- you sometimes have to be a jerk

- therefore it’s okay to be a jerk sometimes

- somehow having an expectation of treating others with respect somehow equates to poor accountability

I’ve spent a good chunk of my years learning a lot about effective communication and none of it is about avoiding accountability, of yourself or others. It’s about respecting each other and creating an environment where you can talk about tough things and people are willing to do it again because they were treated respectfully
by kelthuzad | 2025-10-24 01:01:39+00:00
This is the "think of the children" equivalent that is being regurgitated ad nauseam. Anyone who pretends that Apple cares about anything other than profit is lying to others and themselves.

>I agree there should be personal accountability, but that clearly hasn't been working.

It has been working on Android just fine. And if Apple is supposedly so concerned with security, then why did it take them so damn long to implement a simple mechanism to stop thieves from simply changing your password using your pin? Only after relentless pressure did they implement additional security, which took them far too long. The "security" ruse is nothing but propaganda to protect Apple's monopoly on app distribution.

[0] https://tidbits.com/2023/02/26/how-a-thief-with-your-iphone-...
by Liftyee | 2025-10-24 01:02:19+00:00
I needed that paragraph about reading. I think I absorb text in a similar way - not really "sounding out words", but somehow just absorbing concepts. Your explanation is a lot clearer than my hand-wavy rationalisation.

It makes me not very good at anagram/word rearranging/finding games where you have to test for a large number of possibilities.
by sjsdaiuasgdia | 2025-10-24 01:02:49+00:00
> That's illegal?

The school bus' stop sign was extended and had red lights flashing. With the proximity to the intersection, it's most appropriately treated as an all-way stop.

Regardless of whether the bus' stop sign applies to cross streets, at some point in the turn the car is now in parallel with the bus, and the sign would apply at that point.

Also, you're blind to anyone who may be approaching the bus from the opposite side of the intersection.
by mjb | 2025-10-24 01:03:49+00:00
Best of all, /dev/null is also serializable (but not strict serializable) under many academic and textbook definitions.

Specifically, these definitions require that transactions appear to execute in some serial order, and place no constraints on that serial order. So the database can issue all reads at time zero, returning empty results, and all writes at the time they happen (because who the hell cares?).

The lesson? Demand real-time guarantees.
by kazinator | 2025-10-24 01:04:47+00:00
It's painfully simple. When vendors follow an algorithm, they are colluding.

Imagine if multiple vendors in a product or service area form consortium which launches an "independent price determination task force". If everyone follows the recommendations of the task force, they are colluding, even if they don't talk to each other to set prices.

Replacing "task force" by an algorithm changes nothing. The agreement to use the algorithm rather than to compete is the collusion.
by Spooky23 | 2025-10-24 01:04:58+00:00
I disagree about the fixing, because ultimately self driving services will have political power to cap their liability. Once they dial in the costs and become scaled self sustaining operations, the incentive will be reduced opex.

I think the net improvements will come from the quantitative aspect of lots and lots of video. We don’t have good facts about these friction points on the road and rely on anecdotal information, police data (which sucks) and time/morion style studies.
by Aargau | 2025-10-24 01:05:06+00:00
My wife was confounded when I told her I don't think in words. For her, it's a one to one correlation.

She had assumed that all people think in this mode. I had assumed that all people think in "thoughts" and went through a separate step to articulate them.

Made both of us aware of a difference in people.

I don't feel vibrations or sensations though, and I definitely don't think in images. I only have a thought level, and it's very independent of any external presentation.
by Sophistifunk | 2025-10-24 01:05:58+00:00
Thing is that's a question for the market to decide. Which is why we have anti-trust / anti-monopoly laws in the first place. We don't want the state setting "fair" prices for anything, it always backfires. We want them ensuring the market is free to set prices. Monopolies granted by the state (trademarks, copyright, patents) are specific and limited, and ideally we want monopolies that arise naturally to be similarly limited, or broken up if they are being weaponised against the public.
by alganet | 2025-10-24 01:06:03+00:00
I'm trying to simplify the live-bootstrap project by either removing dependencies, reducing build time or making it more unattended (by automating the image creation steps, for example).

https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap/

Other efforts around the same problem are trying to make it more architecture independent or improve regenerations (re-building things like automake during the process).

It's free and open source, you're welcome to fork it and try your best with the aid of Claude. All you need is an x86 or x86-64 machine or qemu.

The project and other related repositories are already full of documentation in the markdown format and high quality commented code.

Here's a friendly primer on the problem:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fu3laL5VYdM

If you decide to help, please ask the maintainers if AI use is allowed beforehand. I'm OK with it, they might not be.
by thegrim33 | 2025-10-24 01:06:21+00:00
Ah yes, the classic - a European guy who was born in Europe, lives in Europe, works in Europe, who's decided to come to a US-based forum, to a thread about a US-based company, that breaks multiple rules, to add in their political take / rant about the supposed "fascist take over" of the US. Surely this is really constructive, surely this is what belongs here.
by Terr_ | 2025-10-24 01:07:00+00:00
> There should be a limit

There is, and the Constitution says the limit is impeachment and removal from office by Congress. That won't happen unless we fix how we talk about the ones responsible, to wit:

The Republican Party pardoned these criminals. The Republican Party is snatching Americans off the streets. The Republican Party is using the military to murder people on boats. The Republican Party is demolishing down the White House. The Republican Party is deporting people over free speech. The Republican Party has imposed the biggest tax increase in living memory with tariffs/import-taxes. The Republican Party is going pay itself your tax dollars in "lawsuit settlements".

There were 4 years of his first term and now 10 months of... all this. Today there is zero possibility of an oversight or mistake, any legislator who won't impeach and convict is choosing to support these things.

Nothing will improve while those legislators believe the blame will sail past them and stick solely to Trump.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-10-24 01:07:11+00:00
> What matters on any stage is … power. Pure, unadulterated power.

This is some straight-up nihilistic BS. Might does not make right, instead standing for what is right is what creates might.

> Soft power is for pansies.

Here are some quotes you may want to familiarize yourself with:

https://www.azquotes.com/quotes/topics/lack-of-empathy.html

Maybe one or more of those will resonate and provide perspective as to many of your recent posts in this thread.
by nonfamous | 2025-10-24 01:09:15+00:00
Great link, thanks for sharing. This point below stood out to me — put another way, “fixing” a system in response to an incident to make it safer might actually be making it less safe.

>>> Views of ‘cause’ limit the effectiveness of defenses against future events.

>>> Post-accident remedies for “human error” are usually predicated on obstructing activities that can “cause” accidents. These end-of-the-chain measures do little to reduce the likelihood of further accidents. In fact that likelihood of an identical accident is already extraordinarily low because the pattern of latent failures changes constantly. Instead of increasing safety, post-accident remedies usually increase the coupling and complexity of the system. This increases the potential number of latent failures and also makes the detection and blocking of accident trajectories more difficult.
by kragen | 2025-10-24 01:09:20+00:00
> There is no sensible OS API that could support this, because fundamentally memory access is a hardware API.

Not only is there a sensible OS API that could support this, Linux already implements it; it's the SIGSEGV signal. The default way to respond to a SIGSEGV is by exiting the process with an error, but Linux provides the signal handler with enough information to do something sensible with it. For example, it could map a page into the page frame that was requested, enqueue an asynchronous I/O to fill it, put the current green thread to sleep until the I/O completes, and context-switch to a different green thread.

Invoking a signal handler only has about the same inherent overhead as a system call. But then the signal handler needs another couple of system calls. So on Linux this is over a microsecond in all. That's probably acceptable, but it's slower than just calling pread() and having the kernel switch threads.

Some garbage-collected runtimes do use SIGSEGV handlers on Linux, but I don't know of anything using this technique for user-level virtual memory. It's not a very popular technique in part because, like inotify and epoll, it's nonportable; POSIX doesn't specify that the signal handler gets the arguments it would need, so running on other operating systems requires extra work.

im3w1l also mentions userfaultfd, which is a different nonportable Linux-only interface that can solve the same thing but is, I think, more efficient.
by inetknght | 2025-10-24 01:09:25+00:00
> But you still don't have autonomous flying, even though the case is much simpler than driving: take off, ascend, cruise, land.

Flying is actually a lot more complicated than just driving. When you're driving you can "just come to a stop". When you're flying... you can't. And a hell of a lot can go wrong.

In any case, we do have autonomous flying. They're called drones. There are even prototypes that ferry humans around.
by yellowapple | 2025-10-24 01:09:58+00:00
Love it! I'll absolutely be borrowing some of these :)

On every machine of mine I tend to accumulate a bunch of random little scripts along these lines in my ~/.local/bin, but I never seem to get around to actually putting them anywhere. Trying to knock that habit by putting any new such scripts in a “snippets” repo (https://fsl.yellowapple.us/snippets); ain't a whole lot in there yet, but hopefully that starts to change over time.
by a-dub | 2025-10-24 01:10:00+00:00
doing these sorts of benchmarks is actually quite tricky. you must clear the page cache by allocating >1x physical ram before each attempt.

moreover, mmap by default will load lazy, where mmap with MAP_POPULATE will prefetch. in the former case, reporting average operation times is not valid because the access time distributions are not gaussian (they have a one time big hit at first touch). with MAP_POPULATE (linux only), there is long loading delay when mmap is first called, but then the average access times will be very low. when pages are released will be determined by the operating system page cache eviction policy.

the data structure on top is best chosen based on desired runtime characteristics. if it's all going in ram, go ahead and use a standard randomized hash table. if it's too big to fit in ram, designing a structure that is aware of lru style page eviction semantics may make sense (ie, a hash table or other layout that preserves locality for things that are expected to be accessed in a temporally local fashion.)
by Spooky23 | 2025-10-24 01:10:02+00:00
Flying is the “easy” part. There’s a lot more wood behind the arrow for a safe flight. The pilot is (an important) part of an integrated system. The aviation industry looks at everything from the pilot to the supplier of lightbulbs.

With a car, deferred or shoddy maintenance is highly probable and low impact. With an aircraft, if a mechanic torques a bolt wrong, 400 people are dead.
by WWLink | 2025-10-24 01:10:13+00:00
> How I miss that time on a Macbook, with all the chords you have to press whenever you need a Home or End button to edit the line!

???? ctrl+a and ctrl+e? That works on most Linux setups, too. Only Microsoft screws that up. I love how in Mac Office apps, Microsoft also makes ctrl+a and ctrl+e do what they do in windows lol.
by mitchbob | 2025-10-24 01:10:47+00:00
In 1930, Keynes predicted 3-hour work days in 100 years

http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf

along with other changes when "the economic problem" is solved:

> When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession - as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life - will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semicriminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard.
by grafmax | 2025-10-24 01:12:28+00:00
At least the current moment, the increasing turn to using autonomous weaponry against one’s citizens - I don’t think it says so much about humanity so much as the US. I think US foreign policy is a disaster but turning the AI-powered military against the citizenry does look like it’s going to be quite successful, presumably because the US leadership is fighting an enemy incapable of defending itself. I think it’s unsustainable though economically speaking. AI won’t actually create value once it’s a commodity itself (since a true commodity has its value baked into its price). Rates of profit will continue to fall. The ruling class will become increasingly desperate in its search for growth. Eventually an economy that resorts to techno-fascism implodes. (Not before things turning quite ugly of course.)
by flomo | 2025-10-24 01:12:56+00:00
There was some point around 15 years ago when it was nearly impossible to download and install Windows software without getting some extra adware and etc. This was true even for 'legit' vendors like Sun and Adobe. (Plus Google would offer up wrapped installers for Firefox, OpenOffice, etc.) Honestly if you thought "things were fine", you were ignoring the Linux/Mac people laughing about it.
by WWLink | 2025-10-24 01:13:09+00:00
> The YouTube thing is Google's choice, not Apple's, as those are "premium" features. Install Vinegar (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vinegar-tube-cleaner/id1591303...) to get a standard HTML5 player in YouTube, which will let you make it full screen, PiP it, background it, whatever.

But it IS Apple's choice. The problem is they have a mixed up conflict of interest, and it's even worse when Apple themselves is trying to sell you their own services.

IMHO the company making the hardware, the company making the software, and the company selling the cloud services shouldn't be allowed to all be the same company. There's too much conflict of interest.
by adrr | 2025-10-24 01:13:23+00:00
Six years of investigation and all they could find is that he put false information on a government form and paid his taxes late. Six years. Mueller investigation was only two years and how many charges did he find? Jack Smith investigation was one year before he has charged people with dozens of charges. This prosecutor had six years and couldn't dig up anything. Either hunter biden is the smart person in world that was so smart that he left no evidence of crimes or it was partisan witch hunt.

Also if the gun charges were so serious, why aren't we prosecuting Joe Rogan, its literally a slam dunk case. He smokes pot(a schedule 1 drug) on his podcasts and brags about his concealed weapons permit. You don't even need to find witnesses, just show the jury of him smoking pot and a copy of his federal form. Or we could just cross reference the ATF background database with states' Medical Marijuana Registries. Could prosecute tens of millions of people including Joe Rogan.
by neilv | 2025-10-24 01:14:27+00:00
I think you're onto something, for a kind of second-chance review function, but instead of "with an Ivy League education", perhaps you most want people knowledgeable about both judicial process and society.

"Ivy League education" isn't a totally bad predictor, but it's going to be very biased towards people with privileged socioeconomic backgrounds, who therefore may have blind spots of aspects of society that apply to the situation. (No matter how many books they've read, classes they've taken, years of volunteering with the less-advantaged they've done, and hours of NPR they've listened to.)
by pardon_me | 2025-10-24 01:15:20+00:00
Grieving heals trauma. Death of a child is traumatic but we allow room for this in society. We provide instinctive support to others going through this.

Death in general is an inevitable part of life that can be dealt with in a healthy way. It's still individual but generally there are outlets.

Traumatic disorders are specifically where the symptoms caused by trauma interfere with daily life and are measured in severity and longevity.

We should actively grieve traumatic experiences by paying attention to them where necessary.
by bloppe | 2025-10-24 01:15:34+00:00
Someone asks this every time, and the answer is always the same. Fair pricing can only be discovered in a competitive market. The problem is that Apple moves heaven and earth to prevent competitive markets from doing their thing.

That being said, this is the UK, where even in a reasonably competitive job market people can still sue their employer for "unfair pay" [1], so maybe the thinking here is a bit different than my silly classical liberal brain

[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj0817jd9dqo
by ModernMech | 2025-10-24 01:15:45+00:00
He posted on Truth Social explicitly directing Pam Bondi to prosecute Bolton, James, and Comey. Then the DOJ charged them with crimes.

In the James case, Kristin Bird and Elizabeth Yusi (prosecutors in EDVA) were both fired for refusing to bring charges, only to be replaced by Trump's personal attorney Lindsey Halligan (who is not even a prosecutor).

In the Comey case, again they fired Erik Siebert, also from EDVA, because he wouldn't prosecute. They put Trump's personal attorney on instead and she immediately gave the prosecution a greenlight against a tight statute of limitations deadline.

Just watch: today there was a report that prosecutors in Maryland are hesitant to bring charges against Adam Schiff. My guess is whoever is gumming up the works there will be fired and replaced by another Halligan.
by epistasis | 2025-10-24 01:16:09+00:00
Regulatory costs and waste disposal are not significance cost centers for nuclear, at least as far as I can tell from any cost breakdowns.

One doesn't need super high quality welding and concrete pours becuase of regulations as much as the basic desire to have a properly engineered solution that lasts long enough to avoid costly repairs.

Take for example this recent analysis on how to make the AP1000 competitive:

https://gain.inl.gov/content/uploads/4/2024/11/DOE-Advanced-...

There are no regulatory changes proposed because nobody has thought of a way that regulations are the cost drivers. Yet there's still a path to competitive energy costs by focusing hard on construction costs.

Similarly, reactors under completely different regimes such as the EPR are still facing exactly the same construction cost overruns as in the rest of the developed world.

If regulations are a cost driver, let's hear how to change them in a way that drives down build cost, and by how much. Let's say we get rid of ALARA and jack up acceptable radiation levels to the earliest ones established. What would that do the cost? I have a feeling not much at all, but would like to see a serious proposal.
by rayiner | 2025-10-24 01:17:04+00:00
> President Jefferson did not come out and say he's not enforcing ASA because he disagreed with them. Instead, he (secretly) wrote a memo against them as VP, then as President let them expire and pardoned everyone convicted under them.

He didn’t enforce the ASA because he disagreed with it, just like Jimmy Carter didn’t prosecute people for selective service violations because he disagreed with it. It wasn’t because the resources weren’t available to enforce those laws.