MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cjs_ac | 2025-11-12 11:28:53+00:00
I live in the UK; my postman walks up to my house and posts my letters through a flap in the door. I grew up in Australia, where our postman used to ride up to our letterbox on a postal-service-issued motorbike, because the suburban houses are too far apart to make walking economical.

The fact that putting EV chargers in lampposts works in Europe doesn't necessitate that doing so will work in the natural environment, built environment and cultural context of the US. They have to do their own assessments to work out the best solution to the same problem in a different context.
by Y-bar | 2025-11-12 11:29:00+00:00
This is not entirely correct. The hobbits were very good with slings and spears and bows according to Tolkien.

Before the events of The Lord of the Rings, hobbits maintained a tradition of archery and other martial skills, partly due to past conflicts such as the Battle of Greenfields (1). By the time of the Scouring off the Shire, Merry, Pippin, and other veterans of the War of the Ring organized quickly taking up arms. According to the appendices, they managed to eliminate nearly two-thirds of Saruman’s invading force , displaying both tactical coordination and surprising courage. (Treebeard also notes this in The two towers) It’s a powerful reminder that, in Tolkien’s world, even the humblest people are capable of heroism when defending their home.

1. https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/Battle_of_the_Green_Fields
by vlovich123 | 2025-11-12 11:29:37+00:00
I think more about the timing being incorrect - betting on software in an era of exponential hardware growth was unwise (software performance can’t scale that way). The problem is that you need to marry it with a significantly better CPU/architecture because the JIT is about not losing performance while retaining back compat.

However, if you add it onto a better CPU it’s a fine technique to bet on - case in point Apple’s move away from Intel onto homegrown CPUs.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-11-12 11:29:54+00:00
Telepathy in principle could be easily tested in well controlled experiments. However, so far every time that it has been tested with rigorous controls (e.g. James Randi type of scepticism as regular scientists can be easily fooled) it has disappeared. Now, that's not proof that it doesn't exist, but it is very strong evidence that it doesn't exist and it means that you cannot meaningfully say anything about the behaviour of telepathy except that there's no reason to think that it exists.
by benchly | 2025-11-12 11:30:17+00:00
I get this, but thankfully the regrettable tattoos I got back in the day were small/simple enough to hide under cover-ups. My former tattoos were drug-related, but these days, they're all themed with the retrovideo games I still love play, especially when I need a breather from everything else.

As a result, I am that guy that tells people a few rules about tattoos:

1. Don't get a tattoo of a band. They will eventually fall out of favor or do something stupid.

2. Don't get a tattoo of any person unless they've been dead for a long, long time. Like a band, a person will also eventually fall out of favor or do something stupid. Even after they're dead, it may still be uncovered that they did something stupid in secret.

3. Don't make your self-expression about other people. Rules 1 and 2 should have already put you on this path.

4. Consider time. So you like cars, especially the 1987 Pontiac Firebird you had in high school. Have you always liked cars? Will you always like cars? Have you and will you always like that car? If there is doubt, rule it out.

5. Are you drunk or high? Best sleep on it.

6. Can you be honest with yourself? This is the Catch 22 question, but an important one. We tend to have a few versions of ourselves to contend with; the one we want to be, the one others perceive us as, and the one we need to be. Sometimes they align, sometimes they don't, but self-expression hinges on understanding the difference and allowing that we might be deceiving ourselves about who we really are, sometimes.

Getting a tattoo is a remarkably difficult and personal thing that I see a lot of people not take seriously enough, then live to regret it, myself included. The artist who has now done all my visible work is an absolute master at getting people to slow down and think about what they want, which was a terrific boon in my life, because he probably did more for me as a person than my therapist did. His clients are life-long, one even having traveled from another country to get more work done by him. That's to say nothing of his absolutely radical art and style that always produces something unique and fit for the person to make part of their lives.

It's something I often think about when I look down at my arms, see those old game homages and realize, regardless of what else has happened in my life or whoever I thought I was at the time, they have been with me since the beginning and are still here, helping me through it.
by piltdownman | 2025-11-12 11:31:29+00:00
The EU Commission is attempting to nullify significant privacy protections regarding GDPR and AI under the guise of the "Digital Omnibus" provision, intended only for minor adjustments. These proposed revisions cut to the very core of the ethos and intent of the GDPR legislation - affording BigTech an arsenal of avoidance in terms of future compliance.

Narrowing "Personal Data" Definition: Companies could argue data isn’t "personal" if they can’t identify individuals, exempting them from GDPR compliance.

Weakening Data Subject Rights: Rights like access, deletion, and correction could be limited to "data protection purposes," blocking their use in labor disputes, journalism, or research.

AI Training Free Pass: Tech giants (Google, Meta, OpenAI) could use Europeans’ personal and sensitive data for AI training with minimal safeguards.

Reduced Protection for Sensitive Data: Health, political, and sexual orientation data would only be protected if "directly revealed," not if deduced.

Remote Device Access: Companies could pull data from users’ devices for vague purposes like "security" or "statistics," risking invasive data collection.

tl;dr Germany is again pushing for macro-level EU reforms that bypass legislative safeguards, violate existing precedent, and disenfranchises EU Citizens in favour of BigTech. The legitimacy of GDPR as a democratic safeguard against Corporate Malfeasance will be effectively nullified in one fell swoop.
by arghwhat | 2025-11-12 11:31:33+00:00
> It is weird to proscribe that a human should act in an inhuman way,

No, it is weird to suggest that just because humans do something it becomes "human" and acceptable (it is not), just like it's weird to suggest that humans generally accept this (they don't).

Theft, abuse (verbal or physical), slavery, murder, rape, etc., are all "human" in that many humans do it, might have it stem from relatively natural urges, and might have internally reasoned that their actions are sound and justified. It is normal and accepted to classify certain human behaviors as "wrong" and unacceptable. See: any country with a legal system.

Outside legal concepts, humans also strongly and explicitly discriminate in who they find acceptable and pleasant by virtue of including (and exclusion) from their social circles and choice of partner, with responses ranging from procreation to complete exclusion, active avoidance and even intense reactions upon unwanted meetings.

Actions have consequence, and accepting/including an abusive individual is masochism.

> How did it translate the fact that humans are pattern recognition machines into my personal stance

The problem here is that you confuse the concept of "fact" with "opinion". Your definition of humans as "pattern recognition machines" is neither fact nor decisive in the matter. It's just an idea and belief that you personally prescribe to, which I neither agree with nor find relevant.

If anything, we're stimuli-optimizing, work-minimizing procreation machines, and neither that nor your description is relevant to the discussion. Even if we did fit your description, it has no implication on the outcome of "acceptable behavior".

> So why haven't you walked away from me? :)

Discussing unreasonable and abusive behavior is not the same as enacting or experiencing unreasonable or abusive behavior. Imagine if you got a speeding ticket for dicussing that speeding should be okay.

Granted, I might walk away anyway by virtue of the discussion being rather unproductive, but hey it's my time on the planet and so only I get to decide if I want to waste it. :)
by poncho_romero | 2025-11-12 11:32:06+00:00
As someone who has used Goodnotes 5 for years, my experience is that it’s getting new bugs—not new bug fixes. Anecdotal of course, but since Goodnotes 6 released, I’ve started seeing frequent issues with erased text not disappearing and menus behaving poorly. This is on a brand new iPad Air.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2025-11-12 11:32:37+00:00
> Do you also make everyone drive the same vehicle

Good analogy. If, say, your organisation maintains a fleet of cars - it needs to keep them on the road, get them serviced, replace parts, refresh individual cars regularly etc.

How many different makes and models do you support? A small org might decide that it only makes sense to support one. A larger org might have the resources for 3 or 4, so that there is 1 or 2 "general purpose" models, and then other ones suited to specialised tasks.
by tialaramex | 2025-11-12 11:32:38+00:00
Very few people on HN will have been alive when there was a county of London. It ceased to exist in the 1960s.

The UK does not require this layer of subdivision to exist, so it's not that there's a different county or set of counties covering the same area now but rather there is no county. This is a contrast to say the US system where AIUI there must be a county and in some cases that county doesn't really matter (e.g. New York County in New York City aka Manhattan) but it has to exist anyway.

City status is very different here, the Monarch (ie now Charlie) gets to decide what is or is not a city, but because that's arbitrary it also has very few consequences, it's a cosmetic basically, you can write "City" on some signs if you like, but if you feel like a small town you still feel like a small town, and if you already feel like a bustling city then having the word doesn't make a real difference.
by FatalLogic | 2025-11-12 11:32:55+00:00
The online edition was edited later.

"This newspaper report was originally edited using AI, which is in violation of Dawn’s current AI policy. The policy is also available on our website. The report also carried some junk, which has now been edited out. The matter is being investigated. The violation of AI policy is regretted. — Editor"

https://www.dawn.com/news/1954574

edit: Text link of the printed edition. Might not be perfect OCR, but I don't think they changed anything except to delete the AI comment at the end! https://pastebin.com/NYarkbwm
by fwn | 2025-11-12 11:33:11+00:00
> Getting scars on purpose is a quite questionable decision.

Interesting. Why?

Isn't it a common and longstanding cultural practice, even among indigenous peoples? Intuitively, I'd say body modification is based on the desire to shape one's own body, something we usually embrace in fitness culture and medicine, for example.

I don't have any tattoos or scars, but I can't think of anything that would make them questionable.

Perhaps some of the objection arises from a confusion between body modification and self-harm?
by rs186 | 2025-11-12 11:35:14+00:00
Still doesn't make any sense.

The company that I work at makes sure anything that uses third-party library, whether in internal tools/shipped product/hosted product, goes through legal review. And you'd better comply with whatever the legal team asks you to do. Unless you and everyone around you are as dumb as a potato, you are not going to do things that blatantly violates licenses, like shipping a binary with modified but undisclosed GPL source code. And you can be sure that (1) it's hard to use anything GPL or LGPL in the first place (2) even if you are allowed to, someone will tell you to be extra careful and exactly do what you are told to (or not to)

And as long as Amazon is complying with ffmpeg's LGPL license, ffmpeg can't just stop licensing existing code via an email. Of course, unless there is some secret deal, but again, in that case, someone in the giant corporation will make sure you follow what's in the contract.

Basically, at company at Amazon where there are functional legal teams, the chance of someone "screwing up" is very small.
by simoncion | 2025-11-12 11:35:30+00:00
> [ping and pong] only exist for their side effects.

Yes, these are really obviously two functions that exist to mutate state by printing to a console somewhere then communicating with another process.

> If they were functional, they'd be optimised away by the compiler (for being irrelevant).

I'd expect -say- Haskell to not optimize away functions that exist just to print to a console.

So, is your complaint that Erlang is (like Prolog) not a purely functional language, and that the author has asserted that Erlang is a functional language (in the same way that Prolog is) [0] but provided example code that produces side effects?

[0] Be very careful when reading here. I'm fairly aware of just how much Prolog is a functional language.
by camillomiller | 2025-11-12 11:35:54+00:00
In this comment you proceeded to basically reinvent the meaning of "profitable company", but sure. I won't even get into the point of comparing LLM to humans, because I choose not to engage with whoever doesn't have the human decency, humanistic compass, or basic phylosophical understanding of how putting LLMs and human labor on the same level to justify hallucinations and non-determinism is deranged and morally bankrupt.
by jitbit | 2025-11-12 11:38:27+00:00
True - if we're talking about actual security bugs, not the "CVE slop"

P.S. I'm an open source maintainer myself, and I used to think, "oh, OSS developers should just stop whining and fix stuff." Fast forward a few years, and now I'm buried under false-positive "reports" and overwhelmed by non-coding work (deleting issue spam, triage, etc.)

P.P.S. What's worse, when your library is a security component the pressure’s even higher - one misplaced loc could break thousands of apps (we literally have a million downloads at nuget [1] )

[1]: https://www.nuget.org/packages/AspNetSaml
by drexlspivey | 2025-11-12 11:40:21+00:00
But practically speaking, is Meta going to be generating text or video content itself? Are they going to offer some kind of creator tools so you can use it to create video as a user and they need the compute for that? Do they even have a video generation model?

The future is here folks, join us as we build this giant slop machine in order to sell new socks to boomers.
by badestrand | 2025-11-12 11:40:32+00:00
I am so glad that so many people in this thread confirm how bad the native date pickers are; i thought I was alone.

Just picking the year is so difficult already on both Android and iOS as well as desktop Chrome, so a custom widget is immediately 100x better.

Yes, in theory it would be best to display the native picker because in theory it has a great UX, but in practice the native browsers' implementations are mostly just really, really bad, for whatever reason.

That's what I really dislike about the linked article - it doesn't even check the native implementations for their quality but just argues as if they are great.
by potato3732842 | 2025-11-12 11:41:12+00:00
You'll never find evidince hard enough to fashion the sort of club people who ask such questions ought to be bludgeoned with.

Do you really think anyone would be so stupid as to leave hard evidince? That's the magic of the whole process, they can do those things fully within the bounds of the process. They decide (or don't), often at the urging of lobbyists, or non-lobbyists parties who themselves typically aren't completely impartial, what they want. And often they have a specific product in mind that they want, but they can't say that so they write the requirement to all but say it.

Often times this is very reasonable and comes as the result of the end user having used multiple products or having used multiple contractors and knowing from experience with near certainty what or who they want.

In the alternate case where it's pork, this is often how upstarts get their start. Whoever the prime is doesn't wanna pay out the ass for someone else's pork that's been inserted into the requirements so connections get leveraged and several dominoes later a subcontractor to someone is under contract + NDA to buy a controlling stake in an idling paper mill and refit as necessary the small town's wastewater plant it dumps into because that is how they are going to provide the filter media meeting the performance specified in the requirements without being forced to pay out the ass for the product the lobbyists ghost wrote into it. The prime has basically entered into contract to create a company making a competing product out of thin air. There are many funny stories like this kicking around the beltway.
by hans0l074 | 2025-11-12 11:41:28+00:00
I do not have any benchmarks other than this[1] to refer to, but I work with Quarkus[2] and Java 25 LTS (just recently released) services deployed on AWS EKS and we are very happy with the performance (for mobile game backends)

[1]: https://sharkbench.dev/web [2]: https://quarkus.io/
by dahauns | 2025-11-12 11:41:57+00:00
>- Less bugs (Visual Studio has been progressively getting worse).

Eeeeeeh...it's not quite roses and rainbows on the Rider side either, and that's coming from a Jetbrains fanboy. (Although admittedly, I'm not really up-to-date on the current state of VS in day-to-day work)

But yeah, the coding/refactoring support (Resharper et al) and general quality and integration of tooling (database tools, package managers, version control, debugging (esp. multi-process) etc.) is the big one for me.
by ants_a | 2025-11-12 11:42:58+00:00
For updating a single resource where the order of updates matters the best throughput one can hope for is the inverse of locking duration. Typical postgres using applications follow the pattern where a transaction involves multiple round trips between the application and the database to make decisions in the code running on the application server.

But this pattern is not required by PostgreSQL, it's possible to run arbitrarily complex transactions all on server side using more complex query patterns and/or stored procedures. In this case the locking time will be mainly determined by time-to-durability. Which, depending on infrastructure specifics, might be one or two orders of magnitude faster. Or in case of fast networks and slow disks, it might not have a huge effect.

One can also use batching in PostgreSQL to update the resource multiple times for each durability cycle. This will require some extra care from application writer to avoid getting totally bogged down by deadlocks/serializability conflicts.

What will absolutely kill you on PostgreSQL is high contention and repeatable read and higher isolation levels. PostgreSQL handles update conflicts with optimistic concurrency control, and high contention totally invalidates all of that optimism. So you need to be clever enough to achieve necessary correctness guarantees with read committed and the funky semantics it has for update visibility. Or use some external locking to get rid of contention in the database. The option for pessimistic locking would be very helpful for these workloads.

What would also help is a different kind of optimism, that would remove durability requirement from lock hold time, which would then result in readers having to wait for durability. Postgres can do tens of thousands of contended updates per second with this model. See the Eventual Durability paper for details.
by Theodores | 2025-11-12 11:43:37+00:00
I liked the Transmeta web page from before they launched. It was just bare HTML with no styling. It said:

This page is not here yet.

The product hype and lack of knowledge about what it was meant that nobody knew what to expect. In these hyped expectations, and with Torvalds on board, everyone expected that everything would be different. But it wasn't.

A similar product launch was the Segway, where we went from this incredible vision of everyone on Segways to nobody wanting one.

The hype was part of the problem with Transmeta. Even in it's delivered form it could have found a niche. For example, the network computer was in vogue at the time, thanks to Oracle. A different type of device, like a Chromebook might have worked.

With Torvalds connected to Transmeta and the stealthy development, we never did get to hear about who was really behind Transmeta and why.
by 1718627440 | 2025-11-12 11:44:01+00:00
If your error codes leak the implementation details through the whole call stack you are doing it wrong. Each error code describes what fails in terms of it's function call semantics. A layer isn't supposed to just return this upwards, that wouldn't make sense, but to use it to choose it's own error return code, which is in the abstraction domain of it's function interface.
by Topfi | 2025-11-12 11:45:02+00:00
> Yahoo has shown that even with immense brand recognition people will still switch if the alternative is really better.

But it didn’t, Google users beyond a few initial super users who switched early on in the late nineties/early two thousands, track directly with the massive growth in new active web users. These new first time web users, far more than switching made up the growth between 2002-2006 that made Google dominant over Yahoo. It also should be kept in mind how much better Google was over Yahoo, whereas I am doubtful LLMs will have such deviations in quality, looks more like the opposite.

Point remains, OpenAI will, in my opinion, retain the strongest consumer share of LLMs, regardless of output quality, introduction of ads, etc.

This is not ecosystem lock in, it is solely branding. What do you think most have in mind when you mention search? What when it comes to online shopping? Now do the same for “AI”. Only one brand comes to mind for most.
by LeoWood42 | 2025-11-12 11:45:32+00:00
I just shipped an unlimited AI video generator powered by Sora 2. No paywalls, no tokens. Just type your idea and get cinematic video results in seconds.

It’s running on top of Sora 2 API endpoint, so you can generate videos with no watermark directly.

I’d love feedback on the generation quality, latency, and UX, especially from anyone working with video or creative automation tools.
by marginalia_nu | 2025-11-12 11:46:17+00:00
That's philosophy just in general though. It's to a very large degree the study of excerpts, and commentaries excerpts, and commentaries on commentaries.

There are people with a degree in philosophy that think Plato's republic was an attempt at designing the ideal state, because they've only seen the middle of the dialogue, and were never shown the beginning and end where the republic is very explicitly introduced as a philosophical device to examine the virtue of justice in the soul.