MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ryandrake | 2025-11-10 16:23:37+00:00
In addition to the great reasons others posted, I'll point out another one: Most airline apps won't even install or run on my device anymore. So, even if I wanted to use the airline's app (I don't), their developers have chosen to not support my device, and therefore I cannot even install or run it.

If a company is going to make something a requirement like this, they need to also invest in the effort to support everyone's device, and not block people with old, icky phones.
by Freak_NL | 2025-11-10 16:24:05+00:00
This announcement is a load of bull. See this page about the new system:

https://www.ryanair.com/gb/en/lp/explore/digital-boarding-pa...

> But what if, and what if, and what if?

> If you have already checked-in online and your smartphone or tablet dies / is lost, you will receive a free of charge boarding pass at the airport.

> If passengers don’t have a smartphone or tablet, as long as they have already checked-in online before arriving at the airport, they will receive a free of charge boarding pass at the airport.
by lxgr | 2025-11-10 16:24:15+00:00
If you own a printer.

I've once been in that situation with Ryanair: I booked through some reseller, not knowing that they'd make all bookings using some omnibus Ryanair account they would not share the password for (so mobile app use was out), and only emailed me the boarding pass PDF. But I didn't have a printer...

The airport business center did have one, with a moderate 50 cent per page fee – except if that page contains a boarding pass, in which case it was 8 Euro.
by buellerbueller | 2025-11-10 16:24:26+00:00
We don't give them legitimacy. The people who govern us do; they don't actually care about democracy, the second it causes them to lose elections. Look at Trump: lost an election, incited a riot to overthrow the peaceful transfer of power, pardoned those who were complicit in it.

The sad thing is, because the Dem playbook is now "fight fire with fire" (cf. the gerrymandering wars), it is only a matter of time until they stoop to the same level of overthrowing legitimate elections, in the name of fighting fire with fire...
by fidotron | 2025-11-10 16:24:26+00:00
> Of course, there are numerous ways in which this role (Mark as Millennial spokesman) is both pretty unfair and highly inappropriate. It is unfair because this much of a burden should not be placed on any single person; and it is inappropriate because Mark is a highly unrepresentative example of the Millennial generation, for a whole range of reasons that we do not need to enumerate. But even with these caveats, I believe that we might be better served by understanding that something like this is going on and trying to think about what it would mean for Mark to think of himself as a Millennial spokesman... and perhaps to contrast this with what I take to be our current policy (at least implicitly) — of Mark as a Baby Boomer construct of how a well-behaved Millennial is supposed to act. If forced to make a choice, I would always rather win popularity contests with Millennials than with Boomers!

That entire paragraph is mind bending. I really wish he had enumerated for a wider audience what was there because you could read something quite profound into it.
by npalli | 2025-11-10 16:24:36+00:00
Seems this is basically DGX Spark with 1TB of disk so about $1000 bucks cheaper. DGX Spark has not been received well (at least online, Carmack saying it runs at half the spec, low memory bandwidth etc.) so perhaps this is way to reduce buyers regret, you are out only $3000 and not $4000 (with DGX Spark).
by fooker | 2025-11-10 16:25:23+00:00
Neat doublethink.

"Right to compute" but does not provide anyone with any right, waives away potential future regulations for tech companies.

BUT who could possibly need an escape hatch from AI regulations? Likely not Nvidia or Google or Apple,...

Companies and agencies making AI drone swarms or whatever the next gen AI policing/surveillance tech though, this is a godsend.

I have to wonder, where the palantir connection is. Is it hidden or are they brazen enough to flount it openly yet?
by throw0101d | 2025-11-10 16:25:26+00:00
> 5GHz effectively has 3ish channels, and 6GHz adds another 3-7 to that.

It would be useful if vendors shipped with 40Mhz channels by default.

A 1x1 40Mhz using 802.11ax will give you a max PHY of 287Mbps:

* https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000...

* https://superuser.com/questions/1619079/what-is-the-maximum-...

Even if you half that, that's (IMHO) probably sufficient for the vast majority of online activities. And if you have a 2x2 client you double it anyway.
by jcranmer | 2025-11-10 16:25:38+00:00
The noob-expert meme is really apropos here, as floating-point is really the option to go for if you know nothing about it or you know a lot about it.

The "problem" with floating-point is that you have to deal with rounding. But in financial contracts, you have to deal with rounding modes. Fixed-point (aka integers) gives you one rounding mode, and that rounding mode is wrong.
by miningape | 2025-11-10 16:25:46+00:00
> "Don't just trust wikipedia, check it's resources, because it's crowdsourced and can be wrong"

This comes from decades of teachers misremembering what the rule was, and eventually it morphed into the Wikipedia specific form we see today - the actual rule is that you cannot cite an encyclopaedia in an academic paper. full stop.

Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia and therefore should not be cited.

Wikipedia is the only encyclopaedia most people have used in the last 20 years, therefore Wikipedia = encyclopaedia in most people's minds.

There's nothing wrong with using an encyclopaedia for learning or introducing yourself to a topic (in fact this is what teachers told students to do). And there's nothing specifically wrong about Wikipedia either.
by blululu | 2025-11-10 16:26:00+00:00
Ironic that RyanAir’s press release website has a print button as if anyone prints websites. There are a lot of advantages to paper and printers. As a general policy policy point I don’t love this direction. But also it’s RyanAir. This is by far the smallest customer rights violation that they have and will continue to commit. And at this point everyone should know that a 25 quid flight from Manchester to Madrid on RyanAir has a catch. Just be glad your luggage wasn’t jettisoned over the channel to save weight.
by bee_rider | 2025-11-10 16:26:04+00:00
What does modern manufacturing look like? Are you limited by a lack of people who can, like, use a screwdriver? Or by a lack of people who can use a CAD package?

I worry that kids might hear “not enough people in the trades” and work on their hammer swinging skills. But in the US at least, you can get through k-12 without learning basic intro math stuff, like linear algebra or calculus.

If that was the minimum, we could, I guess, handle basic applied math like intro differential equations in the first year of a 2-year degree, and then spend the second year figuring out how to ask the computer to solve those problems…
by lxgr | 2025-11-10 16:26:12+00:00
Wow, this might just be an improvement on the status quo (app optional, but high boarding pass printing fee if it's not used).

I don't think this policy will hold up in the face of Ryanair ticket resellers though, since it seems to be pretty clearly designed to make their life harder once again, but free replacement printing would offer them a way out.
by CharlieDigital | 2025-11-10 16:27:00+00:00
I find it relatively easy to build "modular monoliths" by starting from "vertical slices"[0] at the outset. Vertical slices being primarily a feature organization strategy scales well pragmatically over time, IME. So when first starting out, you can keep it simple and just one monolith and one unit of deployment, but keep everything separated into their own feature folders with common things in a `shared` folder. When you get further along, it is possible to consider splitting things out by feature teams (if that's what works best) and still keep one runtime (just enabling/disabling different features at startup).

The common bits can eventually be moved into a package dependency and referenced. Separate features if they become large enough can also be moved into separate packages, but part of the same monolithic codebase.

In some cases, it can be easier still and just ship the entire runtime as-is (without any additional work to enable modularity) and simply route different endpoints (e.g. https://feature1.domain.com -> node set 1, https://feature2.domain.com -> node set 2) so you still have the option to monitor and scale the features differently based on their load profile and needs. This works great as long as cold starts are not a big concern (thereby adding a requirement for minimizing package size).

I find this particularly easy on AWS, especially when deploying with Copilot CLI[1] because it makes it relatively easy to just route different sub-domains to different target groups. Now you have one singular container image that just gets scaled differently by route (e.g. a high volume feature gets bigger nodes and a dedicated route in Route 53).

I find some teams have trouble thinking this way because devs many times are not involved enough in the deploy time considerations. For more involved app-level partitioning of modules, I have a practical example in C#[2] that would work equally well with something like Nest.js (or Elysia or Hono) by simply using environment variables to declare a "feature role" for the instance and dynamically enabling/disabling feature modules.

[0] https://www.jimmybogard.com/vertical-slice-architecture/

[1] https://aws.github.io/copilot-cli/

[2] https://github.com/CharlieDigital/dn8-modular-monolith
by rpdillon | 2025-11-10 16:27:02+00:00
Some smaller titles in there, which makes sense! I'll admit I haven't heard of any of those games, so this may be ignorance on my part. I was thinking of the games from the bigger studios and their general desire to retain complete control of the multiplayer aspects of their games, but I concede that while they have the most players, they are not most of the games. =)

Appreciate you doing some legwork to make your point!
by fumeux_fume | 2025-11-10 16:27:35+00:00
I noticed the tags could be improved by implementing some kind of standardization. You may be interested in this post on HN from a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45571423. The comments also have some useful recommendations.

I just finished working on consulting project that involved tagging corrective and preventative actions (CAPAs) for a lab to help them organize some of their QA efforts. The use of LLMs for tagging free-form text is a common task and I thought it would be fun to experiment with different strategies for improving the consistency of tags. The article above presents a good approach because it's a streaming solution, but does come with drawbacks (more overhead to set up and treats older data differently than new data). Commenters recommend using a batch approach by collecting all the text up front and then using various strategies to cluster and generate tags, then use an LLM--giving it the predefined tags in its prompt. Once you have enough good tags you could train your own smaller model to generate tags. The batch methods have lower overhead, but take more time for tweaking and experimenting for your specific dataset.

For generating embeddings, I used Cohere's v4 embedder. I found that using HDBSCAN for clustering the embeddings of the tags was much more helpful than using K-means. I also learned that training a Pytorch MLP to predict multiple tags was superior in every aspect to training a tree-based model and gives very good precision, but just OK recall due to the difficulty of nailing all the tags right. I also compared gpt-5-mini and claude-haiku-4.5 for generating tags. Gpt-5-mini was much slower, but cheaper and better at generating good tags. Claude-haiku-4.5 was not far behind and was much faster due to the absence of thinking tokens, but much more expensive. The metric I used to compare the LMMs on their raw tagging ability was Scikit-learns's homogeneity_score.
by techblueberry | 2025-11-10 16:27:35+00:00
I think too often, we conflate the words of a policy with it's values. Like

"The impact of President Trump’s law is clear: affluent students will manage, while lower-income students will think twice about going to medical school, if not forego it altogether. Fewer students will hail from rural areas, and therefore fewer will return to such communities to care for patients. By selecting for those who can afford to pay, the loan cap may appear to reduce average medical debt. But the physician shortage will worsen and health care access will grow even more unequal."

Poor students shouldn't be taking out $300k worth of student loans.

"With the government abrogating its role in supporting medical students"

Supporting poor medical students taking on 300k of debt is not supporting medical students. This is something of the subject of this article, but we need innovation in this space, or more rural/poor grants for medical students. Student loans as a solution to all education problems is more and more showing to be bananas.
by shagie | 2025-11-10 16:27:57+00:00
The relevant xkcd - https://xkcd.com/1040/ (there's a large version of it too)

There's a mentioned fun fact that is what reminded me of this:

The Edmund Fitzgerald, the Kursk, and the Lusitania all sank in water shallower than they were long.

Elsecomment there was a mention of diving, there are lines for diving records too.
by PaulRobinson | 2025-11-10 16:27:59+00:00
> Out of curiosity, what happens when someone does not own a smartphone (or the battery is dead)? They just can't fly?

Yup, based on this announcement, and previous policy calls they've made, that person won't be able to fly. End of. They lose their seat, kthxbye!

Ryanair has made its way in the budget market (arguably inventing the budget market to some extent), by employing money-making practices of dubious need from charging people to use toilets on-board, to flying with so little fuel that they regularly call fuel emergencies on approach.

Their bet - that the market seems to support - is that people will put up with almost anything if it means a cheaper ticket.

They're even expecting to get clearance from authorities to get rid of proper seating and move to "standing seats" so they can get more people onboard, their theory being you'll stand for 3 hours on a plane if it means your ticket is x% cheaper.

I refuse to fly with them on principle - they're a terrible airline owned by a terrible person, run in a terrible way. It's only a matter of time before people realise just how dangerous they are as an operation. I hope it's just a data security issue they run into and people run away from the app scared, and not the increasingly inevitable hull loss that many have been predicting for years.

This is just another reason not to fly with them, for me.
by latexr | 2025-11-10 16:28:09+00:00
Are you aware that Ed Sheeran is one of—and was not that long ago the—best selling music artist in the world?

The fact you only nitpicked a single name from that list is, I think, quite telling. We know who Zuckerberg is. Non-tech-nerds just going on with their lives don’t for the most part, even if they use apps from Meta. If they even heard the name, it was due to some negative news related to Facebook or Meta.
by senfiaj | 2025-11-10 16:28:37+00:00
Some time ago I wrote a 9x9 Killer Sudoku solver (you can solve ordinary as well, the cages are optional) in JavaScript https://github.com/surenenfiajyan/killer-sudoku-solver

It does backtracking with recursion. It uses bitwise operations for fast conflict detection in rows, columns and 3x3 blocks. But one very important heuristics is that it firstly sorts the cells in such a way that the backtracking brute force starts from the most densely filled side. This eliminates a lot of wrong branches early, and actually helps a lot. I'm thinking maybe I can extend this to 16x16 or 25x25 as well. Not sure if this will scale up adequately. But this one usually cracks puzzles in a fraction of second. It only become slow for extremely hard killer sudoku puzzles.
by koliber | 2025-11-10 16:28:41+00:00
> Anywhere between 52,140 tonnes and 184,290 tonnes of pellets entered the environment in the EU in 2019, according to the European Commission, which proposed the regulations.

> "This is equivalent to between 2,100 and 7,300 trucks full of pellets per year," the Commission said.

How? These are unbelievable numbers. Did 2,100 - 7,300 trucks flip over and dump their nurdles into the environment? Are there steady nurdle-leaks which cause a percentage of them to escape? What percentage of nurdles escape rather than getting melted and molded into plastic end products?
by robinhood | 2025-11-10 16:28:58+00:00
Beets is amazing. The fact that it exists is a blessing for those like us who maintain our own music library.

I've been wanting to build my own Plex alternative for a while now. I've tried all the other tools out there, but Plex is definitely the least bad tool that let me enjoy my music without subscribing to Spotify and others.

I've already spent hours trying to figure out all the things that are required to make this new system. And it's unbelievably complicated. From parsing metadata to converting music, to understanding how deep and complex tagging work for music (yeah, it doesn't sound like it at first, but it truly is infinitely complex), I'm overwhelmed by how hard it would be to build a tool that compete with a combination of beets/iTunes.
by necovek | 2025-11-10 16:29:16+00:00
As a youngster entering the IT professional circles, I was enamoured with SGML: creating my own DTDs for humane entry for my static site generator, editing my SGML source document with Emacs sgml-mode. I worked on TEI and DocBook documents too (and was there something related to Dewey coding system for libraries?).

However, processing fully compliant SGML, before you even introduce DSSSL into the picture, was a nightmare. With only one open source and at the same time the only fully compliant parser (nsgml), which was hard to build on contemporary systems, let alone run, really using SGML for anything was an exercise in frustration.

As an engineering mind, I loved the fact you could create documents that are concise yet meaningful, and really express the semantics of your application as efficiently as possible. But I created my own parsers for my subset, and did not really support all of the features.

HTML was also redefined to be an SGML application with 4.0.

I originally frowned on XML as a simplification to make it work for computers vs for humans, but with XML, XSLT, Xpath... specs, even that was too complex for most. And I heavily used libxml2 and libxslt to develop some open source tooling for documentation, and it was full of landmines.

All this to say that SGML has really spectacularly failed (IMO) due to sheer flexibility and complexity. And going for "semantic HTML" in lieu of SGML + DSSSL or XML + XSLT was really an attempt to find that balance of meaning and simplicity.

It's the common cycle as old as software engineering itself.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-11-10 16:29:37+00:00
The key parameter that has changed all over the world is there are more net benefit recipients than net payers in (i.e. far more old people relative to young people).

By far, the largest wealth transfer that happens is young to old, via defined benefit pensions (such as social security), healthcare, and asset price increases (via decreases in purchasing power of the currency).

In a democracy, most voters will vote for these policies, because most voters are or will soon be beneficiaries of these policies. I am betting that Millenials, once they are in their 50s, will continue voting for the same policies that Boomers have for the past 20 years, since they will have the same incentives.
by Jotalea | 2025-11-10 16:29:50+00:00
I am not a parent, but I have a little brother whose technology is partially controlled by me. I control what apps can he install, what games can he play, what ads can he see (almost none), and leave the rest to our parents.

he recently got a "new" PC. it's quite old, it has an Intel Celeron E1200, 2GB DDR3, 300GB HDD, no wifi (ethernet-only), and still runs Vista.

I've been doing my research and found out that I could install a lightweight Linux distro like Arch Linux, with a lightweight window manager like i3 or dwm, and maybe run a few games he likes (Minecraft, some NES/SNES/GameBoy games; I have low expectations from this computer), and a basic web browser.
by nyrikki | 2025-11-10 16:29:56+00:00
You are correct, the problem is that Decimal64 has 16 digits of significand, while items like apportioned per call taxes need to be calculated with six digits past the decimal before rounding which requires about 20 digits.

Other calculations like interest rates take even more and cobol requires 32 digits.

As decimal128 format supports 34 decimal digits of significand, and has emulated exact rounding, it can meet that standard.

While items is more complex, requiring ~15-20% more silicon space in the ALU plus larger dataset size, compared to arbitrary precision libraries like BigNum it is more efficient for business applications.

This looks like a digestible cite:

https://speleotrove.com/decimal/decifaq1.html
by bognition | 2025-11-10 16:30:02+00:00
Hard agree with this article. Split up your application by domains, create public apis between modules, understand your dep tree and keep it clean.

The devil in the details is how you pull something like this off. At the end of the day is boils down to how do you enforce that your team does the right thing. You can have a single person that enforces standards with an iron fist, but this doesn't scale. You can teach everyone how this should work, but you're going to experience drift over time as people come and go. Or you can enforce it using technology and automation.

In the cases of the first choice, its going to restrict how big your team can get and will end up eating all of the time of your one person.

In the case of the second choice, a combination of the tragedy of the commons and regression to mean will degrade the system to spaghetti code.

For the third scenario language choice matters here a lot. In Java with multi maven modules you can setup maven to forbid imports of specific module types allowing you to make modules as private/public. In Python you can't do any of this.
by aprilthird2021 | 2025-11-10 16:30:07+00:00
Did you read your own link?

> Assault is generally defined as an intentional act that puts another person in reasonable apprehension of imminent harmful or offensive contact

The latter part is what the jury and everyone disagreed about. There's no reasonable apprehension of imminent harmful or offensive contact from someone who is drunk, threw a sandwich at you, and ran away.
by reconnecting | 2025-11-10 16:30:12+00:00
Here in some European countries, like France, having a smartphone out in a restaurant is a sign of bad etiquette. It's not crucial, but from some people's perspective it might seem out of place. However, some restaurants tried QR code menus due to COVID-19, but most of them have since stopped using them.

I fully agree that having the latest version of a phone/OS should not be treated as a requirement for access to services, especially essential ones.