MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by evolve2k | 2025-11-05 20:37:48+00:00
While the mystery of the story has always been attractive the maybe more obvious moral truth within the tale is part of its enduring nature.

In short the town screws the piper for his work with the rats, in what looks to be an act of greed and arrogance by the town leaders, likley even having done this before (tales of exploited contractors are easy to find even to this day).

But the moral was in the way the piper responded, shockingly and surprisingly taking off with (per the plaque) some 130 children at midsommer no less.

It’s a little abstracted here as the article doesn’t start with the legend (of course cause it’s so famous); but I think the historical reframe to draw from this is that after not being paid for his work removing rats he “takes payment” by recruiting 130 children and taking them to settle new lands (being paid then for the provision of the children to the settlors).

I think for those interested in the histories, it somewhat solves the mystery and clarifies how the piper was paid in the end. The beauty of the narrative and the core moral of the story remain. And likely this story is still relevant for us today.

Make good on your promises especially around payment lest the other party takes payment in other ways, with possible costs that you never first considered.
by Arainach | 2025-11-05 20:37:49+00:00
Move them to where? Cities large enough to merit an airport generally either have development which has expanded around them or physical features not conducive to development (mountains, lakes, etc.).

It's easy to say "just build bigger elsewhere" but unless you go dozens of miles out and add hours to every trip to/from the airport there's no options.

And no, "just fill in every body of water" is not an option. It doesn't work at all in many cases, is hilariously expensive in all cases, and has enormous environmental impact.
by kelnos | 2025-11-05 20:38:54+00:00
Or maybe she just doesn't believe it's worth discarding anti-trust law over the bogeyman of the day.

The two train companies that couldn't merge can still make trains, and still sell them to whomever they want. European purchasers can still buy them. And after reading articles like this one, these two companies have a big competitive advantage: they don't include Chinese backdoors. Maybe they're small now, but if the Chinese train/bus/etc. manufacturing companies end up being blacklisted in the EU, these two companies will grow. And, better yet, there will still be some healthy competition in the space.
by JCM9 | 2025-11-05 20:38:57+00:00
The medical profession has generally been more open to AI. The long predicted demise of Radiology because of ML never happened. Lots of opportunity to incorporate AI into medical records to assist.

The legal profession is far more at threat with AI. AI isn’t going to replace physical interactions with patients, but it might replace your need for a human to review a contract.
by nicoburns | 2025-11-05 20:39:00+00:00
> but many of them require JS to perform the check

Yeah, if we add JS support to Blitz then one of our initial targets will probably be "enough to run the WPT test runner".

> I was also reading how you do it in blitz

We are able to run ~20k tests (~30k subtests) from the `css` directory without JS which is IMO more than enough for it to be worthwhile.

> Probably the best indicator of which features are supported is to pass as many tests as possible from WPT that cover that feature.

Yes, and no. It definitely is an indicator to some extent. But in implementing floats recently I've a lot of the web suddenly renders correctly, but I'm only passing ~100 more tests!
by eitally | 2025-11-05 20:39:00+00:00
You probably won't have much to worry about until you have to decide whether screen time for your kid (at age 3-4) is a reasonable trade-off for you and your partner to have peaceful time to yourselves. Then it'll rear it's head again, after lulling you into complacency, when the kid is middle school age and all their friends have smartphones. Then you have to decide whether the convenience factor (for you) of your kid having a device is worth the trade-off of... them having a device.

Fwiw, my older two are 14 & 16 and we still use device control software on their phones and laptops. The younger of the two complains a bit periodically but the older one just accepts that it's the way it is and gets on with his life [most of the time].

I personally advise you not to let your young kid get into e-gaming. Things like Fortnite, Roblox and Minecraft are gateways to increased device usage, and the benefits are (again, imho) not remotely worth it nor irreplaceable by much healthier alternatives.

Fun tidbit: my 8yo has a Kindle Fire and we've let her have Netflix & Disney+ installed on it. She also uses the Kindle & Libby apps to read voraciously, and Khan Academy for math. When she watches streaming media, though, she frequently watches it on mute with subtitles. That shocked me to see, and I asked her about it. She's 100% cool with that and appreciate the "privacy" of being able to watch things without other people meddling in her business. Shrug.
by ajross | 2025-11-05 20:39:08+00:00
> Tesla fanboys don’t realize

I don't know who you're addressing. Lots of people, me included, don't like the conspiracy minded politicization of his fortune but still think the cars are pretty great. Seems like a boring opinion that wouldn't be controversial, but we still find ourselves subtweeted anyway.

(Edit: three downvotes and a Godwin's Law reply drop within seconds, as expected. Seriously folks there are 125k people who work for that company, must everything about it be judged entirely on the last twelve months of one guys mania?)
by fragmede | 2025-11-05 20:39:47+00:00
I was referring to alcohol as a social lubricant leading to relationships leading to children. If we look to Asia, and at South Korea and Japan's issues with existentially low birth rates, the question flips. From "would an alcohol tax possibly dissuade people from hooking up" to "what can the government do to help more babies be born", and under that framing, subsidizing alcohol to everyone of baby making age starts to look almost reasonable.

As far state run liquor stores dissuading alcoholism, Scandinavian countries state-run their liquor stores for that expressed reason. Their hours are intentionally bad, the products expensive and small. No 1.75 L handles of 80 proof vodka to be found. It's mostly effective, but it's also not New England where if you just drive for an hour or two, you can hit multiple states and jurisdictions with different blue laws, limiting the effectiveness of state run stores.

What state run stores, ostensibly force, is better adherence with the law. The corner shop where you've gone to for twenty years and are friends with the owner, is totally just gonna give you beer Sunday morning when it's illegal to do so, but record it in the system on Monday. A bit harder to do in a state run store with more oversight. Also, it's harder to import prohibited kinds of alcohol with said. oversight vs a privately run store. As with any law though, it's not 100% effective, but that's not a reason to not have a law.
by autoexec | 2025-11-05 20:40:03+00:00
> This eventually leads to competitors taking over and those business failing

If only that fairytale were true. In the real world bloated inefficient companies bribe government, install themselves into government agencies directly (regulatory capture), and hire lobbyists to write laws which protect them from pesky upstarts through unchecked anti-competitive practices and anti-consumer regulation allowing them to stay wealthy and in power forever while killing off innovation and progress.
by pinkmuffinere | 2025-11-05 20:40:12+00:00
> You can’t improve what you don’t measure

I hate the way this saying is commonly used today. I think a literal interpretation is untrue, but many people feel that a literal interpretation is true. For instance, humans get better at speaking whatever language they are surrounded with, even though that is not being actively measured by some metric. It is probably being measured by some implicit cycle in the human brain, but that is not the kind of explicit measurement that people would demand based on this saying. Some other examples that you can improve without an explicit measurement:

- Camera stability (you can usually "see" it immediately, without an engineering metric)

- Large changes in customer satisfaction (for fine tuning you probably need a metric, but for large changes, it will be obvious)

- Kindness

I'm not saying that measurement is purposeless. Just that it is not always necessary. Not everything needs to be measured. Also, why do generally smart people buy this platitude, when others will obviously not be taken as law? I don't see engineering orgs living by "closed mouths don't get fed", or "tidy desk, tidy mind", or "if momma ain't happy ain't nobody happy". But somehow "You can't improve what you don't measure" became law.

I realize this is only tangential. I guess I've been saving this rant for a while.
by bitwize | 2025-11-05 20:40:21+00:00
12-year-old you would have resonated powerfully with that sort of thing. Adult you probably realizes that being smarter than everyone else really doesn't matter as much as you think it does. And even (especially!) the smartest people show their work if they want credit for it. Age is like that. It puts things in perspective.

The enduring bit of the Manifesto, I think, is the idea that we need to cultivate our curiosity even when society tells us we shouldn't. I mean that in the sense of both "we ought to" and it being a physical need, like an addiction.

The rest of it sounds a bit like Julia Stiles in Ghostwriter (PBS TV series): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLlj_GeKniA
by verdverm | 2025-11-05 20:40:35+00:00
He chose politics that we're opposite and upsetting to their primary consumer market. It's "wrong" not in the sense of morality (though I would argue he has some very morally objectionable politics), but "wrong" because he made a poor decision by dumping money into politics in multiple countries, supporting objectionable candidates (to tesla's consumer base) and hurt his businesses, as we see clearly in sales data
by kelnos | 2025-11-05 20:41:01+00:00
Re: the Newag situation, can their customers not sue them, win, and hurt Newag's bottom line enough that they stop pulling shit like this?

> EU agencies and member states do not have the power to disqualify Newag from future tenders for failing to adhere to prior ones

That seems like a problem that can be fixed, given the political will to do so.
by slabity | 2025-11-05 20:41:05+00:00
https://play.google.com/store/apps/datasafety?id=com.empiric...

Sorry for being pessimistic, it's just whenever I see a health related app I immediately look at the data collected and data shared sections and get concerned. Especially if it's being shared with insurance companies.

Quick edit: That "messages" part might be only in-app ones. Google does not word that well in the summary.
by baranguneysel | 2025-11-05 20:41:10+00:00
DMF Protocol is your digital safety net. It's a dead man's switch that automatically delivers your vital messages, passwords, and documents to trusted contacts if you can't check in. Simply press a button periodically to confirm you're okay. If you miss it, the system warns you first, then automatically sends everything to the right people. No app to remember, no monthly tasks, just peace of mind knowing your family can access what they need, when they need it most.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-11-05 20:41:44+00:00
> look at sources and decide ... which ones are legitimate

> I would say that’s something they’re pretty good at.

Lol. Lmao, even.

Seriously, LLMs are famously terrible at this. It's the entire problem behind prompt injection.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_injection

They're really good at... ingesting the trash. Yeah, that's pretty much their whole purpose. But understanding it as trash? Not even close. LLMs don't have taste. As another commenter wrote, it's just regurgitating it back.
by TrainedMonkey | 2025-11-05 20:41:51+00:00
I think this is really cool, but math seems off:

> A company (Sun King, SunCulture) installs a solar system in your home > * You pay ~$100 down > * Then $40-65/month over 24-30 months

But also:

> The magic is this: You’re not buying a $1,200 solar system. You’re replacing $3-5/week kerosene spending with a $0.21/day solar subscription (so with $1.5 per week half the price of kerosene)

$1.5 week is $6 a month, not $60.
by TheAlchemist | 2025-11-05 20:42:11+00:00
It's not only politics, although it certainly didn't help.

Tesla did not release new cars, except for Cybertruck, for how long ? 5 years ? 10 years ?

Their lineup was great initially, and there was 0 competition. Now there is a lot of competition and their lineup did not change at all.

Their car business is dying. That's why they try to be an AI & Robotics company.

Edit: Here is a good link to follow the sales data - for many countries, it's reported daily. https://eu-evs.com/brandCharts/TESLA/ALL_DAILY/QoQ-Chart
by MrCoffee7 | 2025-11-05 20:42:19+00:00
Mainframes in the early 1980s allowed people to access computer power via interactive terminals instead of sitting at a keypunch machine creating large decks of punched cards to take over to a card reader machine. This was before personal computers were widely available at an affordable price, so office workers did not have a personal PC sitting at their cubicle at that point. The computer monitors at that point were not full color displays - they just had bright green text against a black screen. The language used on the mainframe was COBOL. If your computer job required tapes, there would be a short wait for someone to manually mount the correct tapes needed. You would need to manually go to a room near the computer to sort through printouts to pick up your specific printout of your job yourself, where the job was printed on wide sheets of white and green paper in a font that looked like something from a high-speed dot matrix quality printer. Your printout stack might have been especially heavy and thick if your program terminated abnormally with an ABEND type of error and a sysdump printed out. For references, see the books "Mainframes, Computing on Big Iron" by Patrick Stakem and "IBM's 360 and Early 370 Systems" by Emerson W. Pugh.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-11-05 20:42:30+00:00
Usually something as simple as saying “now give me a devils advocate resoonse” will help and of course “verify your answer on the internet” will give you real sources that you can verify.

I have very mild cerebral palsy[1], the doctors were wrong about so many things with my diagnosis back in the mid to late 70s when I was born. My mom (a retired math teacher now with an MBA back then) had to go physically to different libraries out of town and colleges to do research. In 2025, she could have done the same research with ChatGPT and surfaced outside links that’s almost impossible via a web search.

Every web search on CP is inundated with slimy lawyers.

[1] it affects my left hand and slightly my left foot. Properly conditioned, I can run a decent 10 minute mile up to a 15K before the slight unbalance bothers me and I was a part time fitness instructor when I was younger.

The doctor said I was developmentally disabled - I graduated in the top of my class (south GA so take that as you will)
by maxglute | 2025-11-05 20:42:31+00:00
Glad you listed, because that data shows apart from Sino Vietnamese almost half a century ago, PRC launched basically no wars of aggression, i.e. everything including SCS was territorial defense, i.e just. And if it was in chart form, the peace disease lull in last 30 years relative to PRC growth makes modern PRC rise the most unprescedently peaceful in modern history, borderline on absurdly serenity. Truly somehting to emulate. Can you believe those Eurocusk gave a Peace prize to Obama?
by nekusar | 2025-11-05 20:42:38+00:00
Possibly, yeah. Make a "Deal" <spit> with AI companies to have back-end access to all the Archive org's content. Get 'permission' to copy EVERYTHING and have billionaires run interference.

The AI companies already got blank checks to do that. Anthropic is paying what, like $3000 per book? I remember when the fucks at the RIAA were suing 12 year olds for $10000 for Britney Spears albums.

Or better yet, if it's just $3k a book, can we license every book and have that added into Archive.org? Oh wait, deals for thee, not for me.
by fellowniusmonk | 2025-11-05 20:42:39+00:00
Literally grind up 2 tbps of Hulled Barley, take 2 mins to boil it in a microwave with a bunch of water, drink your barley water and call it a day.

Humans effectively co-evolved with Barley drink, it's insane we try all this other stuff.

The benefits of barley and beta glucan are well established.

People don't seem to appreciate that it aids in more thorough digestion while protecting your digestive tract.

Eat roughage and greens all you want, but barley in a spice grinder is 100% the base layer for everything else and it takes 3 mins a day to microwave and drink.

Incidentally this also helps regulate the water content in your colon, so hydration curves improve as well.

Bulking with greens without laying down a soluble fiber base is why people get the salad shooter expierence, the greens don't stay in your digestive tract long enough.

All these lesser grains have to have ad campaigns and health fads, barley is the goat and always in demand and so people over look it.
by wiz21c | 2025-11-05 20:42:42+00:00
maybe over the lifetime of the installation ? But then they say the battery must be replaced after 5 years... So 5*12 - 30 months = 30 months without paying. So one pays about half 2.17 per day over the 5 years. But that's still about 5 times more than 0.21$/day... I'd love to believe the article, but you're right, the maths seem wrong.
by alephnerd | 2025-11-05 20:43:44+00:00
As I keep saying ad infinitum, Africa is not a single unitary region.

Different countries in Africa have better grids than others, and different countries in Africa have stronger penetration of digital banking and DBT than others.

A country seeing a boom in domestic solar because of government subsidies and policies like Nigeria [0] is different from a country seeing a domestic solar boom because of a collapsing electric grid and regulatory failure like South Africa [1] or Pakistan [2] (not Africa but the same point holds).

At best this is an AI generated article, at worst this is someone who is truly misinformed and thinks about Africa this reductively.

[0] - https://nep.rea.gov.ng/solar-hybrid-mini-grid-for-economic-d...

[1] - https://globalpi.org/research/south-africas-solar-boom/

[2] - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/pakistans-solar-revo...
by w10-1 | 2025-11-05 20:44:16+00:00
TLDR: dirty fuel is being displaced by clean electricity for 500M+ Africans beyond the grid via combination of cheap solar panels + batteries, microfinancing, electronic payments, and a carbon-credit kicker. Two main players captured most consumers and farmers via hard-to-reproduce integration. TAM should increase 3X with China's continued oversupply and govt-backed financing. Case studies available for key points.

Inspiring. My only critique would be that the excited tone (and exclusivity) ends up detracting from the achievement and opportunity.
by rodarima | 2025-11-05 20:44:31+00:00
AFAIK Georg Potthast wrote a port that worked in DOS based on the work that Benjamin Johnson for Windows. I believe it was based on 3.0p4:

https://www.bttr-software.de/forum/board_entry.php?id=10797

Unfortunately, none of those ports made their way back to the main project. However, if there is enough interest I would be willing to merge them. I'm not very familiar with DOS/FreeDOS, so probably someone would have to help us to update the changes, but probably doable between 3.0 and 3.2.0.
by epistasis | 2025-11-05 20:44:39+00:00
These prices are outside of the US, because the US has massive tariffs. But prices like $0.28/W are quite achievable, here's a random link:

https://signaturesolar.com/waaree-405w-pallet-mono-31-panels...

The global average price for solar panels is $0.09/W in 2025. I think India, which also has tariffs to stimulate local factories, is around $0.18/W.

Though at these prices you're likely going to be paying nearly as much for mounting materials as you are for the panels.

Edit: Also, used solar panels are becoming a pretty thriving market. Definitely worth checking those out, especially for isolated projects like a solar car port or something.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2025-11-05 20:44:55+00:00
> M-PESA, a mobile money platform that let people transfer cash via SMS.

This a thing that needs to be more widely known. If you saying, as people here sometimes do, "oh but my new tech could help people move money in poor parts of the world" (not mentioning any specific tech right now) and you're not familiar with M-PESA, then you're just out of your depth and talking foolishly. The real world has already moved past you.
by jamal-kumar | 2025-11-05 20:44:55+00:00
There's a few tools out there, another one I tried in Common Lisp but it was a horrible pain in the ass to get working. Figured to search for perl scripts because it's pretty much fine with old as hell encodings (latin-1) as it was originally developed contemporary to those, and that came up. There's also this, but it was written for dBase III and idk how well it works with fox pro

https://linux.die.net/man/1/dbview
by Munksgaard | 2025-11-05 20:45:14+00:00
Interesting talk. He mentions Futhark a few times, but fails to point out that his ideal way of programming is almost 1:1 how it would be done in Futhark.

His example is:

sequence .map(|x: T0| ...: T1) .scan(|a: T1, b: T1| ...: T1) .filter(|x: T1| ...: bool) .flat_map(|x: T1| ...: sequence<T2>) .collect()

It would be written in Futhark something like this:

sequence |> map (\x -> ...) |> scan (\x y -> ...) |> filter (\x -> ...) |> map (\x -> ...) |> flatten
by senderista | 2025-11-05 20:45:20+00:00
> Perhaps the Piper, emblematic of a pagan shaman, playing his flute, was leading the youth of Hamelin to their midsummer festivities when the local Christian faction, hoping to cement conversion of the region, waylaid and massacred the group.

This passage doesn't make much sense to me, given that Saxony had been converted around 800 CE. What could "local Christian faction" even mean when everyone was (nominally) Christian?
by throw0101d | 2025-11-05 20:45:25+00:00
> UDP-based protocols are well suited for P2P, since hole punching is straightforward if you have predictable port mapping, you cannot disallow it.

"Cannot" is a strong word:

> UDP hole punching will not work with symmetric NAT devices (also known as bi-directional NAT) which tend to be found in large corporate networks. In symmetric NAT, the NAT's mapping associated with the connection to the known STUN server is restricted to receiving data from the known server, and therefore the NAT mapping the known server sees is not useful information to the endpoint.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UDP_hole_punching#Overview

I've also heard lots of people complain about how they're stuck behind CG-NAT and various P2P things do not work.
by dpark | 2025-11-05 20:45:30+00:00
Benefiber is wheat dextrin. It doesn’t have most of the properties that you want from a fiber supplement. It gets digested by gut microbes so it doesn’t provide bulk. It doesn’t gel so it doesn’t help with cholesterol or blood sugar.

Near as I can tell Benefiber is basically a placebo. People feel good for adding “fiber” to their diet but it has none of the effects of psyllium husk or oat fiber.

Psyllium husk by itself (power, not capsules) is utterly disgusting by the way. Tastes like dirt. You can hide it in protein shakes or similar but I personally struggle to get it down with just water.