MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by math | 2025-12-28 06:19:39+00:00
Saw this last year and liked it so much I added something very similar to it to Infumap (https://github.com/infumap/infumap). You can drag items of arbitrary type onto dates. When more than one item is associated with a date, a numbered button appears; clicking it lets you cycle through them. Items can be pages or links to pages, which when clicked show the page as a popup. Calendar pages in the parent page display as a list of all items scheduled for the next seven days.
by tapoxi | 2025-12-28 06:20:14+00:00
It was an "online service", basically a dedicated client and a curated experience before the internet and web standardized things.

When you logged in, you'd get a "Welcome" screen with news, if you had any mail, etc. Most of AOL was organized into "Channels" which were different sections focused on things like Sports or Kids.

You could jump to a channel with a keyword, somewhat like a URL.

The channels looked somewhat like hypercard decks. Everything was designed to load fast on a slow modem and assets were shipped with the client, typically on floppy or CD. Occasionally a channel would download an "art pack" which could take 5-10 minutes, but this was rare.

After AOL 2.6 or so it had internet functionality and became an ISP. You still needed to use the AOL software to dial in (it didn't use PPP like others) but otherwise it worked fine.

It was the easiest "one of those" at the time, competing with CompuServe and Prodigy. Apple had a rebranded AOL briefly called eWorld.
by taklaxbr | 2025-12-28 06:20:14+00:00
Thanks for the kind words regarding the self-healing logic!

To answer your question about v6/Phi-2: It uses a session-based RAM residency approach rather than a background daemon or per-request loading.

When you toggle the offline mode (or if it starts in that mode), the OfflineModelManager class loads the weights into memory once. Since the shell runs in a continuous while True loop, the model stays 'hot' in RAM for the duration of that session.

This eliminates the cold-start latency for every error correction, making the 'self-healing' feel instantaneous. The trade-off is, of course, the sustained RAM usage while the shell is open, but I found this preferable to waiting 10+ seconds for a re-load on every command failure.
by Brajeshwar | 2025-12-28 06:20:44+00:00
I did something, much simpler, some time back in Google Sheets. Around year-end, I go and edit the location of the starting dates each month (drag around, some formatting). I also like the weekdays lined up instead. Use it more as a bigger-picture timeline/schedule for the year, for the family, and me.

Here is the template from last year that I shared with friends. If you are looking at it, take this as a base or an idea and build on it — finances, big life events, travel, etc.

The “Year” tab is kinda like a big-picture plan of where family members are in their years, education, and, hence, significant life events. As the months go by in the year, just fold/hide that portion.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1YwAf8vgVR0FbTU6n1dVO...

PS. I’m tinkering with moving to a plainer text format this year, in MarkDown planning for a 10-year, 20-year, 30-years, and then kinda brain-simulation of what might be in 50 or even 100 years after I’m gone. I plan for the family/generation as an entity and I just insert myself as one of the role in it. ;-)
by throwaway2037 | 2025-12-28 06:22:19+00:00
> Tokyo is in a literal housing price bubble in a country with a _shrinking_ population.

No, this is wrong. (1) There is no housing price bubble in Tokyo. Yes, some very central "ku's" (Shibuya-ku and Minato-ku) are seeing a rise in home prices, but it is nothing ridiculous. It is no where near a repeat of the late 1980s. You can easily select a neighborhood just ten minutes away and it will have sharply lower prices. Also, Japan effectively has zero NIMBYism due to a national building code. New housing is constantly being built in Tokyo. (2) Yes, overall, the population is shrinking in Japan. However, the population of Tokyo continues to rise.
by b112 | 2025-12-28 06:23:02+00:00
The article doesn't cover the inane stupid that is:

* NTP pool server usage requires using DNS

* people have DNSSEC setup, which requires accurate time or it fails

So if your clock is off, you cannot lookup NTP pool servers via DNS, and therefore cannot set your clock.

This sheer stupid has been discussed with package maintainers of major distros, with ntpsec, and the result is a mere shrug. Often, the answer is "but doesn't your device have a battery backed clock?", which is quite unhelpful. Many devices (routers, IOT devices, small boards, or older machines, etc) don't have a battery backed clock, or alternatively the battery may just have died.

Beyond that, the ntpsec codebase has a horrible bug where if DNS is not available when ntpsec starts, pool server addresses are never, ever retried. So if you have a complete power-fail in a datacentre rack, and your firewalls take a little longer to boot than your machines, you'll have to manually restart ntpsec to even get it to ever sync.

When discussing this bug the ntpsec lads were confused that DNS might not exist at times.

Long story short, make sure you aren't using DNS in any capacity, in NTP configs, and most especially in ntpsec configs.

One good source is just using the IPs provided by NIST. Pool servers may seem fine, but I'd trust IPs assigned to NIST to exist longer than any DNS anyhow. EG, for decades.
by toast0 | 2025-12-28 06:27:27+00:00
AOL started off as something different from an ISP.

Like Prodigy and Compuserve and GEnie and some others, it was an on-line information system. Chat, message boards, news, stock quotes, (limited) shopping, games, software downloads, etc. But all within a single system. Kind of like a nationwide/global BBS, but with a GUI interface. In the 80s, all these systems were independent, in the early 90s they got internet email, and the mid 90s added web browsers and (eventually) real tcp/ip.
by b112 | 2025-12-28 06:28:33+00:00
Unfortunately, some of us have to deal with things like billing, transaction timing to validate what a client's logs might have on their systems, and so on.

My take on this is that second timing is close enough for this. And that all my internal systems need agree on the time. So if I'm off by 200ms or some blather from the rest of the world, I'm not overly concerned. I am concerned, however, if a random internal system is not synced to my own ntp servers.

This doesn't mean I don't keep our servers synced, just that being off by some manner of ms doesn't bother me inordinately. And when it comes to timing of events, yes, auto-increment IDs or some such are easier to deal with.
by WoodenChair | 2025-12-28 06:28:58+00:00
I was envisioning the latter (changing behavior on the fly). Think the hot-reload that Flutter/Dart provides, but on steroids and guided by an LLM.

Interpretation isn’t strictly required, but I think runtimes that support hot-swap / reloadable boundaries (often via interpretation or JIT) make this much easier in practice.
by tombert | 2025-12-28 06:29:00+00:00
Yeah, a decade or so ago, I was constantly looking for GUIs to drive ffmpeg, but eventually I kind of realized I was spending more time playing with GUIs compared to just learning the basics of ffmpeg.

I will admit that I still do need to occasionally look up specific stuff, but for the most part I can do most of the common cases from memory.
by MobiusHorizons | 2025-12-28 06:32:02+00:00
Obviously I am aware that not all user actions represent choices, but the hypothetical being proposed was specifically in the context of good established free software alternatives existing. In that context users switching to software with more permissive licenses would imply a choice on the users part. It is reasonable to assume this choice implies the users value something about the other software more than they value what the GPL incumbent has to offer. Of course such a choice could be motivated by many things like newer features, slick website, the author’s marketing, but whatever the case if the license was not sufficient enticement to stay, this feels significant.
by karlitooo | 2025-12-28 06:33:32+00:00
Mostly the x is evil crowd are reasoning based on political affiliation. As is the GoodLaw Project and Jolyon Maugham who have a history of doing so.

All media is agitprop now. If the CEO of a company says things that oppose the political chorus of either side, they become subject to witch hunts such as this.

Individuals are losing their ability to reason with ideas
by mjevans | 2025-12-28 06:33:50+00:00
You speak of an already dense place laid out like New York City, or maybe Japan. Where there are regions that HAVE density and typically a matched civic infrastructure.

I am speaking of most of America, where that is NOT happening because densification of areas is blocked by those already nearby who like the way suburbs near jobs are. (I don't blame them, apartments and probably condos SUCK, the building codes don't protect me from the choices of those nearby so everyone suffers the most annoyance.)

In effect, I am encouraging at least some of those nearby areas to experience zoning upgrades. Like in a city simulator when low density residential gets replaced with high, and mid and high rises replace older single family homes and suburbs.
by throwaway2037 | 2025-12-28 06:39:28+00:00
> Doesn't Sydney also have world class public transport infrastructure?

I did a double take when I read that. Where did you get that idea? By world class, let's say top 10 or 20 cities. Surely, there are plenty of these cities in East Asia and Europe that are far better than Sydney. I wonder if Mexico City or Sao Paolo has better public transport than Sydney.
by barishnamazov | 2025-12-28 06:40:56+00:00
CSS rules for printing is one of my favorite features of the web. You get a powerful typesetter directly in your browser. For those wondering how it's done, I wrote about it [0] recently for my friends who frequently asked how I generated PDFs for my blogs.

[0] https://barish.me/blog/make-your-website-printable-with-css/
by throwaway2037 | 2025-12-28 06:41:24+00:00
> Other mechanisms like adding lanes just invite more cars and traffic is not relieved.

I have been seeing this argument for 30 years, and, yet, rich cities in the US (and Canada) continue to add more lanes. My guess: It is just so politically positive to build more lanes that politicians continue to approve them. Why doesn't this happen as much in other rich countries?
by amluto | 2025-12-28 06:42:33+00:00
Home Assistant takes this one step farther. There is a pre-run hook that goes out its way to make it hard to run an “integration” that doesn’t meet its quality standard. I get that they don’t want to get PRs for integrations that don’t check the checklist, but as someone writing an integration (which I’m currently doing, for better or for worse), I want to run my own incomplete integration, thank you very much.

(One very nice thing about AI-assisted programming: Claude is not offended by duplicating the same code over and over and using utterly awful APIs, and Claude feels no particular compulsion to get distracted thinking about how the APIs I’m targeting could be made to be less awful. Try asking the Home Assistant docs how an integration is supposed to handle a hot-added entity after an integration finishes setup: you will not get an answer. Ask Claude and it will cheerfully copy the ludicrous and obviously inappropriate solution used by other integrations. Sometimes semi-blindly doing something that works is the right solution when writing piles of glue code.)
by anon7000 | 2025-12-28 06:43:34+00:00
Subsidized transit has legitimately nothing to do with distorted housing costs or labor markets. Housing market is simply supply vs demand. Housing markets like Seattle are incredibly expensive because so many people want to move there, partly because local middle class wages are fairly high.

If you’re saying subsidized transit increases local quality of life, leading to higher demand, sure. But the cost itself has nothing to do with housing prices. Property taxes do not make mortgages more expensive. (Wouldn’t it have the opposite effect, high property taxes making houses harder to afford and therefore decreasing demand?)

Or is it that subsidized road systems don’t work? The pure miles of a system are completely irrelevant. Transit systems are meant for high density areas, costing more but covering less ground. The cost of tunneling under a mile Seattle for a road is absolutely more expensive than building a mile of highway in the middle of nowhere.

What the fuck are you on about re:democracy? “Thoughtless social experiments” are pretty far from the truth there. Democracy gets ruined by political parties unwilling to hold their own members accountable and by allowing corporations to exert more political power than human beings.
by 1659447091 | 2025-12-28 06:44:03+00:00
> US free speech is not absolute

Correct. As its sole purpose is to prevent the Government from restricting speech for viewpoints it does not like from anyone living under that government. Any laws restricting Free Speech have to be narrowly defined and/or viewpoint agnostic; military secrets, sedition, etc. And those restriction can only be created by law, not a mayor's or governor's or president's whims.

Advocacy or speaking to others, including business owners, with viewpoints the government doesn't like is allowed.

It's the main point of Free Speech -- to prevent the government, and only the government, from censoring or interfering/restraining the expression of opinions. Especially if those opinions are not in alignment with, or favorable to, any sitting government.

This applies to both citizens and those who reside in the US. The person in the article is a US permanent resident.
by timr | 2025-12-28 06:46:27+00:00
> You're saying that a group having to spend all of its time fundraising has always been true in your lifetime and you link it to your time as a grad student decades ago and earlier when you were an undergrad. Do I have that right?

I mean, yes...but everyone on this thread admits that it's still true (in fact, worse today), so I'm not sure what point you're making with this. Y'all are arguing that it's worse now, which is not a claim I am disputing [1]. The entire point of citing my "old" experience is that, in fact, we were all doing the same stuff back in the stone ages. I haven't forgotten or misremembered due to advancing age [2].

> The dominance of fundraising might have been true for your specific experience and viewpoint, but I don't understand your basis for claiming it was universal: it certainly wasn't my experience (R1 engineering, not software) nor my colleagues around that time.

OK. I never said my experience was universal. I was in biological science, not engineering. To be clear, I'm not claiming experience in economics or english literature, either.

Again, I don't dispute that things might be worse today, but the situation is absolutely not new, and any grad student in the sciences who expects otherwise has been seriously misled.

[1] To be clear, I'm not saying it is or isn't worse today. I am making no claim with regard to severity of the fundraising market.
[2] This is a joke. I'm not old, and my experiences not as ancient as you're alluding.
by tapoxi | 2025-12-28 06:47:13+00:00
It's because Microsoft hasn't been inspiring confidence when their five year old Xbox Series X is more expensive than last year's better performing PS5 Pro - which runs an increasing library of Microsoft's own games at better resolutions and framerates. Microsoft didn't even have a Black Friday discount for their hardware this year.

That's not the playbook of a company actively invested in a market.
by jibal | 2025-12-28 06:48:08+00:00
> “This study shows that paternal exercise can confer benefits — enhanced endurance and metabolic health — to offspring,”

So good habits can be good for offspring.

> For instance, mouse fathers exposed to nicotine(opens a new tab) sire male pups with livers that are good at disarming not just nicotine but cocaine and other toxins as well.

So bad habits can be good for offspring.

> “We just don’t have really any understanding of how RNAs can do this, and that’s the hand-wavy part,”

It seems to me to all be the handwavy part. I'm happy to wait until the research is considerably further advanced, past the clickbait stage.
by MangoToupe | 2025-12-28 06:50:07+00:00
> A language sprinkled with "learn by wrote" gender prefixes for every item is just not worth learning.

Bantu languages, which cover much of subsaharan Africa, have many noun classes ("genders")—sometimes as many as 20. You have to learn all sorts of prefixes for each noun class depending on their grammatical role in tying to the noun.

However, it's really not so bad. Once you get the hang of the noun classes, it actually makes picking up the ear for it faster. Of course this is more true the more consistent the language in applying its internal rules.
by abetusk | 2025-12-28 06:50:18+00:00
The neatnik calendar is very nice. Others are talking about enhancements they've done and I've done my own, creating a pretty faithful JavaScript implementation with enhancements:

https://github.com/abetusk/neatocal

https://abetusk.github.io/neatocal/ (demo)

URL parameters can be used to alter behavior. Here's a highlight of some of them:

https://abetusk.github.io/neatocal/?layout=aligned-weekdays&... (weekend highlighted, aligned)

https://abetusk.github.io/neatocal/?start_month=7 (academic)

https://abetusk.github.io/neatocal/?start_month=6&n_month=6 (second half, 6 month)

https://abetusk.github.io/neatocal/?month_code=1%E6%9C%88,2%... (chinese month and day)

There's also a data file option for more complex date notes.
by Animats | 2025-12-28 06:50:43+00:00
This is both impressive and scary.

Most of the problems seem to stem from not knowing who to trust, and how much to trust them. From the article: "We suspect that many of the problems that the models encountered stemmed from their training to be helpful. This meant that the models made business decisions not according to hard-nosed market principles, but from something more like the perspective of a friend who just wants to be nice."

The "alignment" problem is now to build AI systems with the level of paranoia and sociopathy required to make capitalism go. This is not, unfortunately, a joke. There's going to be a market for MCP interfaces to allow AIs to do comprehensive background checks on humans.
by ssl-3 | 2025-12-28 06:51:17+00:00
In the early 1990s, back before anyone was ever sure if this Internet thing would ever take off outside of academic communities (and also ostensibly before Sir Tim-Berners Lee invented the World Wide Web), America Online was a proprietary online community that was reached via dial-up modem over the telephone network.

AOL allowed their users to interact with eachother (chats, forums, multiplayer games), read news, and otherwise kill some time. It was a walled garden that required both money and special software to access.

There were other paid services that were vaguely similar, each with different shapes for how the walls of their respective gardens were arranged. In the US, some of these competing services were CompuServe, Prodigy, GEnie, and Delphi.

Of all of these, AOL became the most-broadly known. As time moved on, they increasingly would mail out floppy discs with their software to millions of households on what seemed like a continuous basis, with flashy color brochures, to millions of homes. (Some weeks I'd wind up with as many as 3 or 4 new AOL disks to use for whatever, delivered right to the mailbox on the front porch. Later, they'd send CD-ROMs instead that were most-useful as drink coasters.)

These services each vied to get as many users locked into their garden as possible, which was important to them because they tended to be metered services: Unlike something like a Netflix or Hulu streaming account, the more time a person spent using these services, the more money they had to spend.

And then, September came again -- and it never ended[1]. The walls of the gardens began to open up and users of these proprietary services began being exposed to what the greater Internet had to offer.

But at the same time, AOL grew. They got proper-fucking big. They went from being a cheeky dialup service with a friendly interface and some pervasive advertising campaigns to buying Time Warner for $182 billion.

And today, all of that business is just kind of a dusty memory.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
by jonlong | 2025-12-28 06:51:55+00:00
While others have addressed the programming case for tagged unions, I want to add that, to a logician, tagged unions are the natural construct corresponding to "logical or".

In intuitionistic logic (which is the most basic kind from which to view the Curry-Howard or "propositions-as-types" correspondence), a proof of "A or B" is exactly a choice of "left" or "right" disjunct together with a corresponding proof of either A or B. The "choice tag" is part of the "constructive data" telling us how to build our proof of "A or B". Translated back into the language of code, the type "A | B" would be exactly a tagged union.
by dev1ycan | 2025-12-28 06:52:43+00:00
FFMPEG is so goddamn cool, I was doing a mod for warcraft 3 where I restore the original Frozen Throne UI and one (especially useful before, Blizzard now restored the classic WEBM models so that part is now outdated but the blue buttons and other stuff are still relevant).

And virtually every method was failing in decoloring the "chains".webm video that Reforged has on the bottom corners (by default it has a very rusty feeling that fits reign of chaos more than the frozen throne)... but FFMPEG via commands did it perfectly fine, extremely easily by doing it frame by frame, actually incredible that this software is completely free.
by albert_e | 2025-12-28 06:55:36+00:00
Daveseah.com was a favorite bookmark for me -- his "printable CEO" series of task planners and calendars were cool.

I have since fallen off the productivity wagon unfortunately.

For many years past I have printed and used stacks of the Emergent Task Planner.

He has a Compact Calendar that has somewhat similar layout as OP.

Edit to add link:

https://davidseah.com/node/compact-calendar/

The website domain seems to have changed a bit.
by survirtual | 2025-12-28 06:57:59+00:00
Disagree.

While what you're saying does seem like a direct solution (congestion), it is the wrong solution.

The solution to congestion is robust public transit. Full stop.

If a light rail is more comfortable and a faster experience than a car, people will use that instead. Public transit has been traditionally so atrocious, for reasoning we can attribute to many factors, that most people don't use it even if it existed.

If public transit was actually done right, people would be happy to use it. It is more energy efficient, more cost efficient, less of a mental burden, and I believe can be significantly more comfortable.

This is the fundamental issue for me. Society keeps taking these horrible shortcuts that cost all of us instead of just doing the right thing to begin with.
by Vincent_Yan404 | 2025-12-28 06:58:07+00:00
Hi HN, OP here.

I grew up in "Factory 404," a secret nuclear industrial city in the Gobi Desert that officially didn't exist on public maps. This is a memoir about my childhood there.

It was a surreal place: we had elite scientists living next to laborers, a zoo in the middle of the desert, and distinct "communist" welfare, all hidden behind a classified code.

This is Part 1 of the story. I'm happy to answer any questions about life in a Chinese nuclear base!