MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tormeh | 2025-10-01 09:25:43+00:00
Stablecoins are interesting, but they're closer to company scrip than to decentralised currency. Anyway, stablecoins are apparently becoming important financial infrastructure, so that's something.

Bitcoin is completely useless as a currency since its value does not decline with time, thereby making it an investment vehicle instead of a currency. An asset can't be good at being both a medium of exchange and an investment. Only criminals use bitcoin as currency, and they do it because the alternative for them is moving cash around in suitcases.
by gambiting | 2025-10-01 09:26:04+00:00
Tbf, the team behind .gov websites has been exceptional and I think that part of the digitization of government services has been done really well. So I think it's definitely possible - the question is will the government do that, or will they pay someone few billion quid for an off the shelf solution from a company owned by someone's uncle/brother/cousin that will be a flaming mess.
by menaerus | 2025-10-01 09:26:22+00:00
Hm, not sure. I can see that shared_ptr::_M_release [0] is implemented in terms of __exchange_and_add_dispatch [1] and which is implemented in terms of __is_single_threaded [2]. __is_single_threaded will use __gthread_active_p iff __GTHREADS is not defined and <sys/single_threaded.h> header not included.

Implementation of __gthread_active_p is indeed a runtime check [3] which AFAICS applies only to single-threaded programs. Perhaps the shared-library use-case also fits here?

Strange optimization IMHO so I wonder what was the motivation behind it. The cost function being optimized in this case is depending on WORD being atomic [4] without actually using the atomics [5].

[0] https://codebrowser.dev/llvm/include/c++/11/bits/shared_ptr_...

[1] https://codebrowser.dev/llvm/include/c++/11/ext/atomicity.h....

[2] https://codebrowser.dev/llvm/include/c++/11/ext/atomicity.h....

[3] https://codebrowser.dev/kde/include/x86_64-linux-gnu/c++/11/...

[4] https://codebrowser.dev/llvm/include/c++/11/ext/atomicity.h....

[5] https://codebrowser.dev/llvm/include/c++/11/ext/atomicity.h....
by sim7c00 | 2025-10-01 09:26:24+00:00
Its actually not though. only certain things are complex, but you will need to play with that either way because they just go from complex to more complex, like virtual memory or interrupts in general.

A lot of newer things offer different ways to design your code and systems around it, more logical and readable ways.

To give an example: it's not easily discovered your machine just emulates pit/pic via IO-APIC routing to LAPIC :') - its transparent! So if you don't know, and someone told you something else that seems to work, there's no trigger for you to even consider it until you stumble across it by chance.

There are many of these things, especially when in QEMU or such platforms. (how fast does your lapic timer run on qemu vs what the intel docs tell u about its speed?)
by KempyKolibri | 2025-10-01 09:26:25+00:00
Yeah, it's that and the relationship between dietary cholesterol and serum cholesterol isn't linear - once you're consuming a certain amount of dietary cholesterol, adding more doesn't make much difference to serum cholesterol.

So for some individuals with a super clean, low cholesterol diet, adding dietary cholesterol would significantly impact their serum cholesterol. But for many (arguably most), it won't make much of a difference, which is one of the reasons DC has moved down in importance in dietary guidelines.
by tsukikage | 2025-10-01 09:27:13+00:00
IP reputation is a gamble, and there is no recourse. If you're lucky, awesome. But if you're unlucky and switching host isn't an option, you pretty much have to involve a large third party to act your behalf - there is zero appetite in the industry for interacting with individuals.

The best solution I've been able to find is to self-host /almost/ everything, but route outgoing mail through Amazon SES.

The pricing for vanity email volumes is negligible (a few cents a year), and they have people whose full time job is wrangling IP reputation / Office 365 / etc.

This setup has survived several ISP/hosting switches; at times when I am lucky with IP reputation I route only mail going to Office 365 recipients via SES and deliver the rest directly; at times when I am less lucky, everything goes via SES.
by nobodywillobsrv | 2025-10-01 09:27:21+00:00
Is there anythong in the "backend" pre-ai, data scraping etc that is open and decentralized that people could use?

It feels to me like the bigger problem is more about assembling time series of "news" not "news today".

Like if you wanted "show me all stories about crime X from the BBC since 1980" or whatever but then you want to do this across many sources.

This is the missing piece for most new analytics. I think there are legal blockers to getting this done and why I mention decentralization.
by babel_ | 2025-10-01 09:28:09+00:00
Well, each `defer` proposal for C agreed that it shouldn't be done the way Go does it, and should just be "run this at the end of lexical scope", so it'll certainly be less surprising than the alternative... and far easier to implement correctly on the compiler side... and easier to read and write than the corresponding goto cleanup some rely on instead. Honestly, I feel like it becomes about as surprising as the `i++` expression in a `for` loop, since that conceptually is also moved to the end of the loop's lexical scope, to run before the next conditional check. Of course, a better way of representing and visualising the code, even if optionally, would help show where and when these statements run, but a standard feature (especially with some of the proposed safety mechanisms around jumps and other ways it could fail in surprising ways) it would hardly seem exotic, and inversely is quite likely to expose things currently fail in surprising ways precisely because we don't have a simple `defer` feature and so wrote something much more complicated and error-prone instead.

So, I completely understand the sentiment, but feel that `defer` is a feature that should hopefully move in the opposite direction, allowing us to rely on less exotic code and expose & resolve some of the surprising failure paths instead!
by alexey-salmin | 2025-10-01 09:28:14+00:00
Duolingo is surely flawed, but realistically I don't see any other way how I could have progressed in French by spending exactly 3 minutes per day with near-zero mental effort. I do it on auto pilot before going to bed, usually being dead tired after work. After 1000 days (so like 50 hours) I can have simple conversations, I can read and I have a rather big vocabulary.

Of course learning in other ways could have given me more in 3 years but the amount of time and efforts would be orders of magnitude bigger, impossible at this point in my life.

I think the trick with Duolingo is to resist the temptation of easy paths the damn app pushes you into.

* Maintain the streak by progressing in the course. Don't redo old lessons, don't do pairs matching or other side quests.

* Ignore XP and leagues and challenges and any other shit.

* Ignore music, math and other courses

* Stick to 1 language, at most 2.

Just do N lessons per day (N=1 for me) and you'll most likely see progress. The lessons are too easy IMO, I rarely make mistakes which is a strong signal. I have to make them harder on purpose: I don't look at the screen to force myself to listen instead of reading, I close the right half of the screen with my palm when I need to do pairs. Even then the progression is too easy and too slow BUT it's a progression.
by bonoboTP | 2025-10-01 09:28:39+00:00
Exactly. Pushing a photo through a Van Gogh filter doesn't get near what a real Van Gogh expresses. It's in a temporal context, communicates something about the person and their thoughts about reality. Their artistic choices matter, because they can't just put out 10 different variations, instead they have to pick one. And then we can think about why that one was chosen.
by fancyfredbot | 2025-10-01 09:28:47+00:00
To be honest I don't think the skeptical people thought bitcoin's success was probable and that's why they didn't bet on it. It's not really anything to do with them being content with what they have.

But it could be this too in some cases.

Some people do things unless they find a reason not to but so a skeptical person will only do things if they find a reason.

People who really feel they have enough might not see any reason to spend their time or effort placing bets, even on things they think are probable. But I don't think many people think that way.
by maccard | 2025-10-01 09:28:47+00:00
> only works on a weird combo of (src platform / dst platform). Why????

Stadia ran on linux, and 99.9999999% of game development is done on windows (and cross compiled for linux).

> Fingers crossed that these can be fixed, or this project is dead in the water.

The project was archived 9 months ago, and hasn't had a commit in 2 years. It's already dead.
by Hackbraten | 2025-10-01 09:28:48+00:00
Anecdata: I have `urw-base35-fonts` [0] installed (as a system package called gsfonts, which was pulled in as a dependency for GNOME Document Viewer).

The gsfonts package comes with a fontconfig file that automatically aliases `cursive` to the Z003 font, which is also what the browser shows me.

[0]: https://github.com/ArtifexSoftware/urw-base35-fonts
by athrowaway3z | 2025-10-01 09:29:51+00:00
FP has a small set of primitives that encode everything you can computationally do. One of the first thing you'd learn is how to use those primitives, to 'emulate' anything an imperative language does.

Most definitions of imperative include "unpure editing of global state", which is just the equivalent of passing along a state object implicitly to every function, which is just extra verbose for whatever fundamental type-theory point you're trying to make and would not affect the argument in terms of those fundamental primitives.
by Rogach | 2025-10-01 09:32:01+00:00
> Yes, this means there's the small loophole of traveling to another country (which is usually a long travel, this country is huge and the ocean is wide)

I'm a frequent traveler, so I tend to overlook that not all people have that option, apologies for that.

But in many countries where there are some restrictions or crushing import taxes, I saw that there usually quickly appeared a flourishing network of people that utilize the travel loophole to bring in the necessary items - some even build sort-of-a-business out of that. Many just ask their travelling friends to bring them phones they desire (I've been such a friend on multiple occasions).
by dominicrose | 2025-10-01 09:32:12+00:00
Exactly. History is written by the victors. I call them success stories (when they're not straight lies) but the word survivor is stronger and seems to indicate that the others don't survive.

It's common knowledge that one shouldn't pay back a low-interest loan faster than is expected, because it's better to have liquidity or to invest.

But it's real easy to look at the past and say "oh I could've invested in that". It's also very easy to look at success stories and forget that poverty is widespread and the poor don't talk about their misfortune.

Video games are interesting because you can count how many times your character dies before you actually manage to finish the game.
by Geert86 | 2025-10-01 09:32:24+00:00
I really enjoyed your opinionated article. You put the finger on the weak spot of Duolingo: It's an ineffective way of learning a language. With the advent of AI they, we see a lot of different approaches pop up that might actually be more enjoyable and which might put Duolingo in jeopardy.

However, you also touch upon an other interesting point, namely that learning a language involves many skills, that even differ from language to language. One app pretending to learn it all probably won't work.

I have been making my own language learning app (lingo llama, check out the site :)), and learned the hard way that actually learning a language is not straightforward, and very different for every user. For example, if you want to learn Spanish, and already know Portuguese, you want a different approach then if you come from Japanese. Maybe using tools to learn parts of the language is the way to go.

Anyway, I liked your read, thanks!
by bloak | 2025-10-01 09:33:28+00:00
Thanks! Quick review:

The 25 chapters are mostly independent and some of them are updated versions of something published earlier. Obviously the chapters complaining about the state of science education in the USA in the 1990s are less interesting for a European reading today. For me the most interesting chapters were 4-15 and 24, about witchcraft and human gullibility, for example.

I find the cheerleading for science in the initial chapters rather tiresome. That's just a personal reaction. I don't think the author is in any way "wrong". I suppose it's partly because it's something I feel I've grown out of. I read a lot of science popularisation when I was young, and I studied sciences, but in my old age I usually prefer literary fiction. I can't help feeling that "Science works!" is a very dull claim in view of the fact that anything that works gets accepted as "science". And the much vaunted "scientific method" is really just common sense, isn't it, really? Can that be taught? I have my doubts. Interestingly, his chapter 18 on !Kung San hunters somewhat makes that same point ...

A nit: He repeats the tired old myth about rhino horns being used medicinally to prevent impotence. More credible writers on that subject[] say they are used for jewellery, knife handles and the like.

[] "Last chance to see", co-authored by Douglas Adams, perhaps? I can't remember whether it's mentioned in there but I'd recommend that book in any case.
by seec | 2025-10-01 09:34:51+00:00
Using Cinebench single score to compare desktop chips is very dishonest. It's an extremely parallel benchmark, where many powerful cores get you a much better score.

For example, the M4 does get around 170 single, but the Snapdragon X2E gets just under 2000 for multi, over double what the M4 scores. If your application is relevant to Cinebench, the X2E is a better CPU for that. To match the X2E you need to go up to the 16 cores M4 Max.

The 16 cores variant of M4 Max is only available on a 16inch MBP that starts at 4.8K€; it's not clear how much the X2E laptops will cost but I would bet a lot of money that it's going to be much less than that...

As for the desktop's parts, the only Apple product that beats the typical X86 CPUs in multi, is actually the M3 Ultra which is pretty bad deal because it doesn't scale very well in other ways (GPU). Otherwise, Intel (i9s/Core Ultra 9) and AMD (Ryzen 9) still hold the crowns in pure multicore score.

The score of an M4 Max 16 cores, actually puts you down in Core Ultra 7 265K territory. You can put together a system based around that CPU and a 5070Ti GPU (that raw bench around the same as the M4 Max 40 cores variant but will actually perform much better for most things) for a full 1200€ less than a Mac Studio equipped like that (it even has the luxury of double the storage). If you don't need dedicated GPU power or could do with a low-end GPU the savings would be between 2000-1700€ (the 5070Ti is an 800€ part).

Let's be real, the Apple Silicon SoCs are very power efficient but they are definitely not performance maxing and they are even less money efficient. It is very suspicious arguing about top performance while ignoring multicore.

Now here is another fact: the M4 Max 16 cores can draw more power than the 140W power adapter included with the 16-inch MPB. It has a battery capacity of 100Wh. If you run the things at full tilt or near that, it will actually have a runtime of less than an hour. It's actually funny because the Apple afficionados keep singing the praise of Apple Silicon and many have been burned by that unexpected fact. It's easy to shit on the high-power gamer type laptop that can't run well on battery but that's actually true as well if you use the full power of an Apple Silicon laptop. You might get like half an hour more runtime but that's basically irrelevant.

The reality is that everyone singing that Apple Silicon efficiency praise don't have truly demanding workloads otherwise the battery life wouldn't be a meaningful difference.

High performance laptops don't make a lot of sense whether they are Apples or other brands. They are mostly convenience products (for docking/undocking) or status symbols.
by ta1243 | 2025-10-01 09:34:59+00:00
They could have insisted websites include something like a TXT record saying they are "for over 18s only". Or even come up with a standard saying "this website is suitable for under 18s" under a dns record.

Then the bill payer can enable or disable access for three categories

* Under 18s

* Over 18s

* Unknown

as they are the bill payer and entering into a credit agreement requires you to be over 18. If you wanted belt and braces the phone companies doing PAYG could set it to disabled unless you authenticate your age to avoid the "buy simcard for cash" loophole.

ISPs could choose to implement finer grained controls in their routers. The majority of the big ISPs would likely block the "over 18" category by default.
by tormeh | 2025-10-01 09:35:51+00:00
I think the issue is more that a lot of people weren't cynical enough. I knew Bitcoin was a shit currency when I first heard about it, and thought that was all there was to it. I didn't understand that while it was a shit currency, it was a great speculative asset. I thought people would look at it, go "that's dumb", and move on. Apparently I hadn't heard of, or understood the Dutch tulip mania and similar historical events. I presumed people would be better than they turned out to be, and that cost me a lot of potential capital gains.
by tedggh | 2025-10-01 09:36:13+00:00
My wife is Russian and we have close Ukrainian friends and Ukrainian neighbors. We often shop at a Ukrainian grocery store. Her dentist is Ukrainian. It’s never been an issue. She spent many vacations as a child in Ukraine and obviously doesn’t support the war. She still loves her country. We watch Russian classics and I learned how to cook Russian dishes for her. It’s wild to me that people who are neither Ukrainian nor Russian take such extreme positions of canceling an entire nation when not even Ukrainians themselves do.
by Ygg2 | 2025-10-01 09:36:45+00:00
> If I use defer I'd just need the keyword defer and the free() code.

Yeah, and not accidentally forgetting to call it. That's the big part. And before "True Scotsman will always free/close/defer!" - No, no they won't.

Unless the compiler screams at them, or its enforced via syntax constructs, it will always slip through the cracks.
by ExoticPearTree | 2025-10-01 09:37:46+00:00
> A bit ironic though because the CEO of Boing during their best years was William McPherson Allen, a lawyer.

Just as there are good engineers, there are also bad ones. Same for every profession.

I guess the question is: can Boeing really design a new plane where cost cutting, regulation interpretation and skirting, and greed are _not_ the driving factors?

It feels like what Boeing is saving from all the nickel-and-dime it does on everything it ends up paying lawyers, fines and damages. I wonder how they manage to see this as good business. Or maybe they hope that "the next" time they'll score big without any penalties?
by bilekas | 2025-10-01 09:37:58+00:00
This is actually kind of cool, I've implemented my own version of this for my job and seems to be something that's important when the numbers gets tight, but if I remember correctly for their case i guess, wouldn't it have been easier to work from rsynch?

> scp always copies full files, there is no "delta mode" to copy only the things that changed, it is slow for many small files, and there is no fast compression.

I havent tried it myself but doesnt this already suit that requirement ? https://docs.rc.fas.harvard.edu/kb/rsync/

> Compression If the SOURCE and DESTINATION are on different machines with fast CPUs, especially if they’re on different networks (e.g. your home computer and the FASRC cluster), it’s recommended to add the -z option to compress the data that’s transferred. This will cause more CPU to be used on both ends, but it is usually faster.

Maybe it's not fast enough, but seems a better place to start than scp imo.
by verisimi | 2025-10-01 09:38:03+00:00
Don't you want ai governance or something? If the last human, political act is to ensure deanonymised data online, and there is then the capacity to slurp all that data up and auto-governance is ushered in, you then just need think about how to tweak the algo to get the effect you want. Who owns the algo, is the question.
by griffzhowl | 2025-10-01 09:38:15+00:00
Oh, true, it was just a mistake to exclude verbs. Of course they should be vocabulary.

But I think of pronouns as grammatical, as well as the auxiliary particles in verb forms like "there is", "to go to", etc. So "have" and "is" can function grammatically when they're part of the verb form of another root verb, like "have been seen" and so on.

"Do" is obviously semantic when it's the main verb, e.g. "I'm doing my job" versus "I'm leaving my job". In the selection you quoted it's also playing a grammatical role which is just to point to the main verb form of the sentence, i.e. it could be replaced by repeating "get exposed to (titbits from)" without changing the meaning of the sentence.

So in "there is also a lot of influence from French", I would put "there _ also a _ of _ from _" as grammatical.

I'm sure my way is naive, but it's based I think on well-established categories. I'm not sure how linguists would distinguish grammatical words or even if they categorize based on words at all. e.g. "a lot of" as a quantifier might be completely grammatical, same as "more", "less", "thirty", etc.
by izacus | 2025-10-01 09:41:31+00:00
Hmm, you now highlighted an interesting thing - every company (I've seen) being run to the ground by MBAs and Lawyers was done so because they outright refused to trust their employees. The usual playbook is severance of any transparency and communication and implementation of more and more paperwork and oversight over their employees with no nuance. In other words - complete lack of trust into employed specialists being able to do their work.
by smartmic | 2025-10-01 09:42:02+00:00
Social media is also a wonderful tool for influencing participants and controlling them in the long term. In other words, behind the economic purposes there is a darker, more profound effect that is dangerous in the hands of a few powerful players. In the case of TikTok, that would be the Chinese state. Why shouldn't US Big Tech also be interested in this kind of power, in addition to the extra revenue?
by usrnm | 2025-10-01 09:42:20+00:00
I'm sorry if I didn't make myself clear. You don't have any problems with imperialism or wars, when you're not targeted by them personally or even can get some benefit out of them, which is normal human behavior. This is why I don't see why the war in Ukraine is any different. If the war in Iraq did not change what people in, say, South America felt about the American culture, then why is the war in Ukraine supposed to have more impact on the same people and their attitude towards the Russian culture? And I'm sad if it does.
by nntwozz | 2025-10-01 09:42:31+00:00
One step closer to The Light of Other Days.

"When a brilliant, driven industrialist harnesses the cutting edge of quantum physics to enable people everywhere, at trivial cost, to see one another at all times: around every corner, through every wall, into everyone's most private, hidden, and even intimate moments. It amounts to the sudden and complete abolition of human privacy--forever."