MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kstrauser | 2025-11-05 17:10:36+00:00
Without saying whether I think that's a good or bad thing, as a practical matter, I 100% agree. Approximately no major websites spend any effort whatsoever supporting non-JS browsers today. They probably put that in the class of text only browsers, or people who override all CSS: "sure, visitors can do that, but if they've altered their browser's behavior then what happens afterward is on them."

And frankly, from an economic POV, I can't blame them. Imagine a company who write a React-based website. (And again, I'm not weighing in on the goodness or badness of that.) Depending on how they implemented it, supporting a non-JS version may literally require a second, parallel version of the site. And for what, to cater to 1-2% of users? "Hey boss, can we triple our budget to serve two versions of the site, kept in lockstep and feature identical so that visitors don't scream at us, to pick up an extra 1% or 2% of users, who by definition are very finicky?" Yeah, that's not happening.

I've launched dozens of websites over the years, all of them using SSR (or HTML templates as we called them back in the day). I've personally never written a JavaScript-native website. I'm not saying the above because I built a career on writing JS or something. And despite that, I completely understand why devs might refuse to support non-JS browsers. It's a lot of extra work, it means they can't use the "modern" (React launched in 2013) tools they're use to, and all without any compelling financial benefit.
by danbruc | 2025-11-05 17:10:38+00:00
From school you are used to think of function in their explicit form y = f(x) but you can easily turn that into the implicit form f(x) - y = 0 or more generally f(x, y) = 0. With that you can plot the graph of f(x, y) either as a 3D surface with f(x, y) being the height at point (x, y) or encode the function value at (x, y) into some color at (x, y). Where that surface is equal to zero, i.e. where it intersects the z = 0 plane, that are the points of y = f(x). Points (x, y) at which the value of f(x, y) has small non-zero magnitude are what the article calls low error points or regions, points or regions that almost satisfy y = f(x).
by spwa4 | 2025-11-05 17:10:59+00:00
> The UN is an empty shell

Because sovereign states demanded that it would be an empty shell, and this was accepted because otherwise there would be nothing.

For example, the ICC. Nobody can be convicted by the ICC unless their country allows it. And even that is going too far for essentially all countries, even founding member states like South Africa (who explicitly went against UN treaties they signed to protect Al-Bashir and Putin)
by goodthink | 2025-11-05 17:11:03+00:00
If you love the keyword syntax of Smalltalk, the reflectivity, the incremental compilation, live debugging in the environment, check out https://newspeaklanguage.org for theSmalltalk experience in the web browser.

This is my favorite video by Newspeak's creator Gilad Bracha: https://youtu.be/BDwlEJGP3Mk?si=Z0ud1yRqIjVvT4oO
by cogman10 | 2025-11-05 17:11:14+00:00
Other than merchandising (why is that important?) nothing you describe is an issue with the Idaho liquor stores.

Prices are pretty in line with market rates. The selection is really pretty good. The shopping experience is the same as any other store (what makes a shopping experience "miserable?")

> Compare them to a nice wine

In Idaho, wine is allowed to be sold in grocery stores and specialty shops. The liquor stores are for hard beverages.

> They also never have staff that know anything about the products

Staff seems just fine with the products. But again, don't see why that's important in general.

> just a shitty DMV like experience.

I don't really know what you mean by this. You go in, find the booze you like, pay for it at the register, or ask a clerk a question if you have one (Do you have a lot of questions purchasing alcohol? Every time?) If you want a more expensive experience you can go to a wine shop in Idaho and let someone blow smoke up your ass about the notes.

Look, Idaho might just be particularly good at running a booze shop, but I doubt it. It may be that because Idaho only has liquor stores for hard alcoholic beverages it's made for a better experience all around. It certainly doesn't suffer from selection, knowledge, or experience problems. I think the only issue you might take is that it's just sorted shelves of alcohol with little flashy theming.
by piltdownman | 2025-11-05 17:12:24+00:00
For something of the value proposition of an Mazda MX5 with Nissan Figaro styling, I mean it's not terribly far off the mark. If you want the average Top Gear readers budget choice, the Renault 5 with 255 miles of WLTP range is about €32-34k as an 'everyman' Supermini without serious compromises in any particular area.

Short of getting some sub-BYD CDM manufacturer to compete directly, there's not much scope out there to cut much further than that for an acceptable 2+2 QOL car in 2025. Mainly I can see the likes of Dacia cutting corners in the interior to crew-cab standard and releasing a low-tide mark EV like their proposed 'Hipster'.

Dacia has stated that the target price for the entry-level Hipster is planned at around €12-15k - undercutting Dacia's most affordable electric model, the Spring, with an entry RRP of around €18,000 euros.

https://www.carscoops.com/2025/10/dacia-hipster-previews-dir...
by spongebobstoes | 2025-11-05 17:12:26+00:00
the author uses hyperbole, yeah. they're an artist, I think it's expected. I don't find anything personally offensive in the exaggerated framing of this art

I think your critique would be more effective if you left out the part where you shame the author's lack of knowledge about level sets

I think it hides your valid (if overstated) criticism of the author's exaggeration behind a non-constructive insult, and your comment would be better without that tone
by resonaX | 2025-11-05 17:12:46+00:00
Right now, we validate twin responses in a few ways:

Ground truth comparison: When users upload CRM notes, Gong call transcripts, or win/loss data, we benchmark the twin’s language and objections against what real prospects actually said.

Confidence scoring: If a twin sounds overly confident but doesn’t have enough supporting data (e.g., limited context or sparse history), the system flags it with a lower reliability score rather than pretending it’s certain.

Iterative calibration: Each feedback cycle — whether a message worked or not — helps fine-tune the twin so its “voice” and reasoning evolve over time.

The end goal is that twins shouldn’t pretend to know — they should learn continuously from every interaction and new data point.
by SoftTalker | 2025-11-05 17:12:54+00:00
As it would happen, we're currently in open enrollment so I looked at what is coming for next year. OOP medical max is $4,000 for employee or $8,000 for family for the HDHP plan. So in the ballpark of what I guessed.

It's an amount that would be somewhat disruptive but would not be bankrupting. That's exactly what you want insurance for. People misunderstand insurance when it comes to health care, they think they should never have to pay out of pocket for anything, but that isn't how insurance works for anything else. Insurance is protection from catastrophe, not something that makes routine, predictable expenses go away.

And yes I have an HSA, it is required for HDHP plans. And I make close to the max contribution every year. I've been at that long enough that I have several multiples of my max OOP saved.
by EGreg | 2025-11-05 17:13:08+00:00
Oh yes I remembered, wargus exists!

Also Microsoft claims this after buying Blizzard:

Through great teams and great technology, Microsoft and Activision Blizzard will empower players to enjoy the most-immersive franchises, like “Halo” and “Warcraft,” virtually anywhere they want.

https://news.microsoft.com/source/2022/01/18/microsoft-to-ac...
by burkaman | 2025-11-05 17:13:29+00:00
I guess the complaint is that electricity production is not zero emissions in most of the world, so it could be considered misleading.

I don't think it makes sense, ICE vehicle emission ratings have never included the drilling, refining, and transportation of fuel, and the alternative is for every vehicle to just advertise "unknown emissions" because it's impossible for the manufacturer to know anything beyond what the vehicle itself produces.
by b2ccb2 | 2025-11-05 17:13:36+00:00
TIL that the term Baader-Meinhof phenomenon is based upon this nugget:

> The name "Baader–Meinhof phenomenon" was coined in 1994 by Terry Mullen in a letter to the St. Paul Pioneer Press.[1] The letter describes how, after mentioning the name of the German militant group Baader–Meinhof once, he kept noticing it.

Thanks!
by teraflop | 2025-11-05 17:14:00+00:00
> Software isn’t the only place where big-O scaling is relevant.

> Fully connected graph topologies are great on paper, but the number of connections scales quadratically. For a 64-core fully connected CPU topology you would need 2,016 separate data buses.

Nitpick: I don't think the comment you're replying to is proposing a fully-connected graph. It's proposing a hypercube topology, in which the number of connections per CPU scales logarithmically. (And with each node also connected to its diagonal opposite, but that doesn't significantly change the scaling.)

If my math is right, a 64-core system with this topology would have only 224 connections.
by HeinzStuckeIt | 2025-11-05 17:14:02+00:00
How much of that, at least among elites, is due to looking at China's dizzying development, bound straight for the singularity, while the old appeals to liberty and rights seem to have only got the USA bogged down in gridlock and squabbling?

Revolutions happen, inter alia, to break gridlock, whether consciously or unconsciously. The rise of the surveillance state might be seen as the coup by elites that is one of the known forms of revolution.
by spwa4 | 2025-11-05 17:14:11+00:00
We all know why everyone drags every argument out to justify the scream for "justice" against Jews, yet nobody demands anything when Arab muslims kill the black members of their society ...

Which is double bad since the RSF, the Arab army committing genocide belongs to the same organisation as Hamas does. They are both "descended" from the Muslim brotherhood of Egypt, and receive a LOT of support from Arab countries.
by sjsdaiuasgdia | 2025-11-05 17:15:00+00:00
The autopilots in aircraft have predictable behaviors based on the data and inputs available to them.

This can still be problematic! If sensors are feeding the autopilot bad data, the autopilot may do the wrong thing for a situation. Likewise, if the pilot(s) do not understand the autopilot's behaviors, they may misuse the autopilot, or take actions that interfere with the autopilot's operation.

Generative AI has unpredictable results. You cannot make confident statements like "if inputs X, Y, and Z are at these values, the system will always produce this set of outputs".

In the very short timeline of reacting to a critical mid-flight situation, confidence in the behavior of the systems is critical. A lot of plane crashes have "the pilot didn't understand what the automation was doing" as a significant contributing factor. We get enough of that from lack of training, differences between aircraft manufacturers, and plain old human fallibility. We don't need to introduce a randomized source of opportunities for the pilots to not understand what the automation is doing.
by jmyeet | 2025-11-05 17:15:01+00:00
An inevitable consequence of this administration destroying US foreign influence and power at an unprecedented rate is that (IMHO) it is inevitable that the EU builds their own cloud and mandates its use for EU data. It is becoming a matter of national security.

The interesting thing is that the US is acting in the exact way that they accuse China of acting. Companies like Huawei are forbidden from installing telecom infrastructure for "national security" reasons [1]. One of justifications for first banning then forcing a sale of Tiktok was because of possible Chinese government interference. It's only a matter of time before the EU and China start making the same determination against US tech giants (eg Meta executive brags about silencing dissent [2]).

This administration really is killing the golden goose.

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/us-fcc-bans-e...

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eO8byuv6PE
by dragonwriter | 2025-11-05 17:15:02+00:00
> But let's say employee names fail on apostrophe. Won't you just have a unit test that sometimes fail, but only when the testing tool randomly happens to add an apostrophe in the employee name?

If you just naively treat it as a string and let hypothesis generate values, sure. Which is better than if you are doing traditional explicit unit testing and haven’t explicitly defined apostrophes as a concern.

If you do have it (or special characters more generally) as a concern, that changes how you specify your test.
by egypturnash | 2025-11-05 17:15:57+00:00
> We've really lost something very important with the shift to GUI and the shunning of text mode.

GUIs can have keyboard shortcuts too. I'm an artist and I work two-handed: right hand moves the stylus around the screen, left hand floats around the keyboard and changes tools, summons control panels, etc. Whenever I try a different program than the one I'm used to, and have to poke at icons with my right hand because I don't know its shortcuts, I feel like half my brain's idling.
by atkirtland | 2025-11-05 17:16:07+00:00
KaTeX has always seemed pretty inferior to me compared with MathJax. The most significant flaw is that it is very unstable, frequently failing at rendering rendering large documents with many equations. This happens across several applications, though I suppose it could be machine-specific. It also doesn't support several basic packages that MathJax supports. Without measuring the speed difference, I've never noticed a gap anyways.
by caminante | 2025-11-05 17:16:35+00:00
I see your edit.

I would recommend spending that "couple thousand" for quote(s). It's a second opinion from someone who hopefully has high volume in your local market. And your downside could be the entire system plus remediation, fines, etc.

To be clear, I'm not opposed to experimenting, but I wouldn't rely on this. Appreciate your comment for the discussion.
by abtinf | 2025-11-05 17:16:50+00:00
> f(x, y) = 0. With that you can plot the graph of f(x, y) either as a 3D surface with f(x, y) being the height at point (x, y)

If f(x, y) = 0, wouldn’t using f(x, y) for the height just result in a flat graph?
by dmayle | 2025-11-05 17:16:53+00:00
I've been using an 8k 65" TV as a monitor for four years now. When I bought it, you could buy the Samsung QN700B 55" 8k, but at the time it was 50% more than the 65" I bought (TCL).

I wish the 55" 8k TVs still existed (or that the announced 55" 8k monitors were ever shipped). I make do with 65", but it's just a tad too large. I would never switch back to 4k, however.
by chemotaxis | 2025-11-05 17:17:09+00:00
> Neat, but I think it's deceptive

I think your comment is insightful, but it's also a terrible choice of words (and something we probably do too often here). I very much doubt that deception was the intent.

Sometimes, someone just reinvents the wheel (or improves on it). And if it serves to teach several thousand people about a new visualization technique, I think that's a net positive.
by sp4cec0wb0y | 2025-11-05 17:17:27+00:00
It is interesting to see how rapidly social fabrics deteriorated when smartphones came around. I was in highschool from 2014-2018, and for most of the years, I could remember everyone socializing during lunch, break times, and even in the classroom. Which is odd because we had access to smartphones, airpods, and laptops. Perhaps it was because we spent the majority of our lives without them still? Seems to have gotten a lot worse since then.
by logifail | 2025-11-05 17:17:40+00:00
> I remember back in the 2000s writing purely XML websites with stylesheets for display

Yup, "been there, done that" - at the time I think we were creating reports in SQL Server 2000, hooked up behind IIS.

It feels this is being deprecated and removed because it's gone out of fashion, rather than because it's actually measurably worse than whatever's-in-fashion-today... (eg React/Node/<whatever>)
by danhau | 2025-11-05 17:18:04+00:00
I remember using those pre-cloud versions. I loved them. Sketchup was so intuitive (as a 3D modelling noob) it was ridiculous. My tool of choice for making 3D levels for my various OpenGL projects.

I tried to do some rudimentary modelling with modern day Blender and failed. It‘s quite the juggernaut to learn.

What software today do people recommend as an alternative to Sketchup? Is the cloud version any good?
by rich_sasha | 2025-11-05 17:18:14+00:00
As opposed to Sudan, Israel proper is leading the world in HDI, GDP per capita, innovative economy, basically any statistic of progress you want. Sudan is at the bottom of these lists.

It is one thing to read of atrocities commited in an extremely underdeveloped country and another to hear of even notionally smaller ones in an extremely developed one.
by cactacea | 2025-11-05 17:18:39+00:00
Just follow the instructions? From your linked PDF:

> The time needed to complete and file this form will vary depending on individual circumstances. The estimated average time is: Recordkeeping, 12 hr., 40 min.; Learning about the law or the form, 4 hr., 17 min.; Preparing and sending the form, 8 hr., 16 min.
by jm4 | 2025-11-05 17:19:18+00:00
I don't think you're blinded by nostalgia. In the early 2000's, I worked in an organization that was migrating away from TUI to web apps. I was one of the web guys back then. We got modern, more maintainable code at the expense of usability. Those TUI interfaces are way faster.

The web failed to live up to the early promises in a lot of ways. We have complicated frameworks, complex architectures, browser headaches, etc. and what we got out of it are user interfaces that are slower than what we replaced and entire categories of bugs that didn't exist before. There's so much extra bullshit in place to overcome the fact that we are using a stateless protocol designed to deliver text documents.

The only things I would really be concerned about with your family company's app are maintainability, availability of security updates, and the use of obsolete software like XP. It sounds like you're already modernizing the code. That old OS is a disaster waiting to happen though.

I like the idea of an internal enterprise app running in the terminal on a reliable FreeBSD or Linux machine. The people who have to live in that app will be faster with a keyboard-driven workflow. A web front end is for customers and situations where you prioritize looks and accessibility over speed and usability. If you implement the the business rules in a modern middle tier and have a good database backing it, you can have the best of both - TUI for internal users and slap on a web front end for external users.
by bluGill | 2025-11-05 17:19:46+00:00
It would not surprise me. Clothing took a lot of labor to make. A large part of the labor was women's labor which history doesn't record much of. When you are doing that much effort it isn't that much more to die in bright colors, and people like colorful clothing (some like the Amish make non-color part of their identity of course, but they like colors they are just rejecting them anyway because they think that helps them get to heaven). Colors were limited to what they could make so probably not as bright as modern, but not dark in general.
by Zak | 2025-11-05 17:20:03+00:00
Games in 1995 were targeting DOS and Windows 95, not Windows NT. They were doing so because that's what was on the majority of consumer PCs, and their objective was to sell games. People selecting a server-side OS and dev tools didn't have to worry about what ran on end user machines.

If you look hard enough, you'll find exceptions of course. I think Ebay was built on Windows servers, but in the late 1990s, building your web startup on Windows was a sign that your technical leadership had bad taste and a competitor would run circles around you.
by frou_dh | 2025-11-05 17:21:27+00:00
Since Smalltalk is effectively an OS unto itself, when we hear about the days of commercial applications being written in Smalltalk, how did deployment to end-users work?

Were the users running, say, Windows and then the Smalltalk "OS" would be running on top of that, but in a sort of "kiosk mode" where its full OS-ness was suppressed and it was dedicated to showing a single interface?
by kragen | 2025-11-05 17:21:38+00:00
"The system of peer review" in this context is the system where a scholarly journal editor sends your submitted paper out to other experts in the field to decide whether or not to publish it. This system came into use in the middle of the 20th century, and Einstein was famously outraged by it. It does not refer generically to every time someone reads or discusses a paper or replicates an experiment.

I don't think survivorship bias is particularly relevant for three reasons. First, both papers from 50 years ago and papers from 150 years ago are already heavily filtered. Second, if you look at journal issues from 150 years ago, you will find forgotten papers in the same issue with the foundational ones, and the quality is still much better than today's forgotten papers. Third, what I'm really concerned about is not that bad papers about bad research are being published, but that good papers about good research that would have been done are not, echoing Higgs's remark about how he couldn't have done his work on the Higgs boson today because he wouldn't get tenure. Or, read Freeman Dyson's autobiography, and contrast the years when he was working on nuclear energy to the rather uninspired following 50 years, because, as he put it, it stopped being fun.
by ferguess_k | 2025-11-05 17:22:12+00:00
How about per fly versus per drive? This weeds out two issues:

- Most people don't fly often enough to justify Statistics significance (I for one only flied maybe less than 10 flights in my whole life)

- One flight is going to cover a huge amount of mileage anyway

Edit: Just realized that issue 1 is not an issue, we are going to do an average here anyway, so not individual.
by HeinzStuckeIt | 2025-11-05 17:22:21+00:00
Lots of countries use the SSN equivalent as a public ID and sometimes have for decades now. The Nordic countries, for example, often require it on any application that requires your real name. I, as an academic, just put in a grant application to a private foundation, and my number was required there like many other places.

In the US, leak of SSN apparently can result in identity theft and so its public use can seem especially troubling, but other countries use different secrets and processes for identity.
by doctorpangloss | 2025-11-05 17:23:52+00:00
People who are good programmers say this, they have this fantasy, but it's a myth. The opposite is of course true, because there is no maintenance, there are a bajillion agonizing bugs and people simply work around them, the "small fixes" live inside the heads of the people using the application.

Like the fantasy is that the bank uses TUIs and the bank has accumulated years of knowledge and the bank doesn't make mistakes. The bank has extremely well paid staff. Joe Shmoe's TUI app looks like the bank's app, but it is unmaintained, it has accumulated years of problems, not fixes, nobody is fixing them, people who say they fix them cannot possibly be keeping up with the sheer amount of toil and bugs needed for production software. You can see this in any GitHub project, how much insane maintenance is required, for stuff people actually use and has few bugs.