MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by scrubs | 2025-12-21 06:34:13+00:00
Lights? Human aircraft have lights for a reason ... for safety, movement on runways, and to aid with tracking among others. If alien ... why lights, and why lights in our visible spectrum? Aircraft lights are placed at extremal positions to help work out the approximate size and extent of the wings, tail, nose. They are not decorated with lights like a Christmas tree.

I checked reports on linked site ... triangular shapes and lights are a common theme. It seems both vaguely human designed to be seen without function just the kind of ambiguity that doesnt help. I remain skeptical.
by lioeters | 2025-12-21 06:35:44+00:00
This is a paper by Leslie Lamport, a computer scientist who created LaTex and TLA+ (Temporal Logic of Actions), among other innovations in the areas of distributed computing, concurrent and reactive systems.

He retired from Microsoft earlier this year. A draft of his newest book is available on the same site as this post.

A Science of Concurrent Programs - https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/tla/science-book.html
by afiori | 2025-12-21 06:36:55+00:00
I agree that it is a bad idea to describe rust this way but they likely meant memory safety as used in https://www.ralfj.de/blog/2025/07/24/memory-safety.html . Meaning that shared mutable is thread unsafe, I am unsure about Java and JavaScript but I think that almost every language on the popular memory safe list fails this test.

Again the statement is probably still untrue and bad marketing, but I suspect this kind of reasoning was behind it

Of course Rust technically fails too since `unsafe` is a language feature
by wkat4242 | 2025-12-21 06:37:34+00:00
> Piracy is your preferred option, but when that became more mainstream we actually ended up creating the market for more DRM, in the form of iTunes, Spotify and others. I’m not sure I want the future of digital media to be entirely subscription-based like that.

Nah DRM and subscription models would have arrived even if there were no piracy. Subscription models because they guarantee income and most people use less than it's worth. And DRM because companies are paranoid.

In fact even now DRM serves no actual purpose other than harassing legitimate buyers. Pirates have no issue getting content and in the case of books they never will because copying can even be done by OCR.
by terribleperson | 2025-12-21 06:38:05+00:00
In my experience, humans respond incredibly poorly to traffic lights being out. There's no sense or reason, just people deciding to drive across the intersection when they feel like it's okay.

Presumably Waymo will make sure they can handle this situation in the future, but I'm not sure there's a really satisfactory solution. The way you're supposed to handle an intersection with no lights (treat it as a stop sign intersection) doesn't work very well when no one else is behaving that way.
by TheAceOfHearts | 2025-12-21 06:38:14+00:00
I wonder if they'll explore other music services as well. As I understand it, Deezer, Qobuz, and Tidal can all get ripped easily enough. Although I'm not sure if they rate limit downloads past a certain point.

I'm a bit sad that they chose to focus on music rather than audiobooks. Creating an archive of audiobooks seem like it would be more aligned with their mission.
by troglo-byte | 2025-12-21 06:38:18+00:00
The difference between being taxpayer-financed and user-financed is that Ellison is on the hook for 10000x as much as granny instead of 20x. If it's a public good it should be paid by the public. A six-year-old keeping the light on at night should not incur a 120% surcharge for burying the transmission lines to a mansion in St. Helena.
by pepperball | 2025-12-21 06:38:36+00:00
> I'm kind of ok with it. All the kids who fucked around in school and picked on the nerds for just existing are kind of getting their comeuppance

I have yet to see it. All the stereotypical “asshole jocks” I can recall from school tended to be from upper middle class families. They’re doing much better than many of the nerds many of who are unemployed NEETs.

Though I admit these sort of social cliques are much more complex in real life than in a corny 80s coming of age movie.
by analyte123 | 2025-12-21 06:39:46+00:00
One of those specific issues is that California electricity prices include what amounts to a redistributive tax, in the form of programs like CARE and FERA - probably about a third of households in the state are eligible for CARE which provides a 30% or more discount on normal prices. While there are low-income discount programs for other states none of them have nearly the reach of the CA programs.
by pjmlp | 2025-12-21 06:41:26+00:00
There was no DIY market on 8 and 16 bit home computers with fixed hardware, yet bedroom coding (aka indies) not only did thrive, they were the genesis of many AAA publishers, and to this day those restrictions keep the Demoscene alive and recognised as World culture heritage.

PC was largely ignored for gaming, until finally EGA/VGA card, alongside AdLib/Soundblaster, became widespread in enough households to warrant development costs.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-12-21 06:42:41+00:00
Isn't this an artifact of using the median when the majority of families in both countries own a home, and housing prices in Australia are somehow even crazier than they are in the US?

When housing prices are high, anyone who can't afford a down payment is completely screwed, because they're paying the high rents which inhibits saving, but the high rents they're paying aren't turning into principal. So the savings of most of the people who can't afford a home end up being ~0 or negative (in debt). But this will be worse, i.e. more inequality, in the country with the higher housing costs.

It just doesn't show up in the median when the median is a homeowner and then the higher housing costs increase their number.

But the "extra" wealth is mostly on paper because you have the house but you also need somewhere to live. If you sold it to get the money you'd have to pay the crazy rents, so all the value really does is give you the capacity to borrow against it, which is only useful if you wanted to borrow more than a smaller amount of equity would have allowed you to, which most people wouldn't. And if they did they wouldn't have that "wealth" anymore because they'd have borrowed and spent it, and would then be paying interest on the debt.
by lurk2 | 2025-12-21 06:42:51+00:00
> that to evade such insanity is wrong in some way.

There’s a commons problem at play here. Most habitual pirates couldn’t pay for what they are pirating even if they wanted to, so restricting their access just makes the world worse-off; but who is going to finance the creation of new content if everything is just reliant on completely optional donations?

The 100 year period is absurd and does nothing to incentivize art, but there are costs involved in production of these works. People are always going to make music and write books regardless of the economic outcome; far fewer are going to write technical manuals or act as qualified reporters without being compensated.
by tripletao | 2025-12-21 06:43:07+00:00
If Chomsky were known only as a mathematician and computer scientist, then my view of him would be favorable for the reasons you note. His formal grammars are good models for languages that machines can easily use, and that many humans can use with modest effort (i.e., computer programming languages).

The problem is that they're weak models for the languages that humans prefer to use with each other (i.e., natural languages). He seems to have convinced enough academic linguists otherwise to doom most of that field to uselessness for his entire working life, while the useful approach moved to the CS department as NLP.

As to politics, I don't think it's hard to find critics of the West's atrocities with less history of denying or excusing the West's enemies' atrocities. He's certainly not always wrong, but he's a net unfortunate choice of figurehead.
by vlovich123 | 2025-12-21 06:46:47+00:00
Very famous Johnson quote

> If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.

> Lyndon B. Johnson

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9150190-if-you-can-convince...
by chistev | 2025-12-21 06:46:59+00:00
The Persistent Self-Documenter

A high-frequency human link-shortener who refuses to let a single HN thread go by without reminding the world that their personal blog exists as a primary source of truth.

Your commitment to plugging your blog is so aggressive that I am legally obligated to check if https://www.rxjourney.net/ is actually a horcrux for your digital soul.
by TOGoS | 2025-12-21 06:47:17+00:00
> The awful thing about OpenSCAD is that what one can model in 3D is limited by one's ability to mathematically stretch, rotate, and/or arrange spheres, cylinders, and cubes in 3D.

Not at all. You can build any polyhedron you want using the polyhedron command.

Which would be an enormous pain to write out by hand every time, but I wrote a function once upon a time to generate a polyhedron from a stack of layers, each of which is a list of points, and haven't had to mess with old cubes and spheres since.

One annoying thing is that the default way of writing programs in OpenSCAD uses 'modules', which are a bit limited compared to functions (you can't store them as values to to functions or other modules). I worked around that by writing a module that interprets arrays (think S-expressions) that representing the shape, and then just build up that S-expression-like thing with functions and whatever.

Once you've built your own programming language inside OpenSCAD it's perfectly usable. :-)

This might sound like sarcasm but I actually do prefer this to dealing with Python's mutable state jungle / package management nightmare.
by tokioyoyo | 2025-12-21 06:48:48+00:00
That’s actually really cool, and makes sense in my head! This is somewhat how I imagined it, except my guess would be someone would fine tune a general purpose LLMs (somehow, as it is much cheaper than starting from scratch, idk?) to behave this way rather than instructing it all the way in. And whoever develops the framework would package it with the access to this fine-tuned LLM.

But yeah, what you guys are doing looks sweet! I need to get out of my ass and see what people are doing in this sphere as it sounds fun.
by nerdsniper | 2025-12-21 06:49:08+00:00
To some extent, YCombinator partners are on the record[0] supporting the idea of their startups doing illegal things. Generally they'll frame this as challenging outdated regulations, but they acknowledge that the founders whose strategies they fully support sometimes come into office hours and discuss how they're worried that the strategy puts them at risk of going to jail.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hm-ZIiwiN1o&t=8m46s
by mmasu | 2025-12-21 06:53:13+00:00
I remember a very nice quote from an Amazon exec - “there is no compression algorithm for experience”. The LLM might as well do wrong things, and you still won’t know what you don’t know. But then, iterating with LLMs is a different kind of experience; and in the future people will likely do that more than just grinding through the failure of just missing semicolons Simon is describing below. It’s a different paradigm really
by musicale | 2025-12-21 06:53:27+00:00
You don't seem to be disagreeing.

I assume by hardware margins you are thinking of component and manufacturing cost. However, the largest cost that has to be amortized over the life of a hardware product is R&D cost, which is huge.

Even by the component and manufacturing cost metric, the Switch has always been profitable, though DRAM and flash storage costs are putting pressure on hardware margins at the moment. Still R&D is the largest cost that each company faces.
by srdjanr | 2025-12-21 06:55:35+00:00
I'd say driving only requires not to handle uncommon situation dangerously. And stopping when you can't handle something fits my criteria.

Also I'm not sure it's entirely AI's fault. What do you do when you realistically have to break some rules? Like here, I assume you'd have to cut someone off if you don't want to wait forever. Who's gonna build a car that breaks rules sometimes, and what regulator will approve it?
by skeptic_ai | 2025-12-21 06:57:00+00:00
It’s interesting how the monolith companies with a big ball of shit still stay in business.

But I’d say some projects (I expect to live less than 1 year) I’d just vibe code them so I won’t care much about the code. I just give very high level architectural ideas and that’s it.

Other projects which I expect lifespan to be more than 1-2 years I won’t let it become a ball of shit.

So it depends on the project.
by monero-xmr | 2025-12-21 06:57:44+00:00
Most people agree that we need utilities to be monopolies. PG&E, for all intents and purposes, is an arm of the state. Perhaps it’s private in some sense but we all know it’s the government. It has to abide by all manner of government mandates, there is no competition. If you want it to go bankrupt just let it go bankrupt. Whatever replaces it will be the same thing. I don’t have a solution but all the teeth gnashing isn’t going to change the fact that electricity is a government issue and whoever runs it will work at the behest of the California government and the voters.

Pass whatever rules you want. It isn’t going to change the fundamental nature of the org, which is a reflection of the voters. This is a government problem, through and through
by tsazan | 2025-12-21 06:58:35+00:00
The mapping approach assumes the web is static. In reality, you're building a 'maintenance debt' machine. For every 1,000 stores, you need 1,000 AI-generated mappings that break whenever a dev changes a CSS class.

CommerceTXT isn't just about extraction; it's about contract-based delivery. We are moving from 'Guessing through Scraping' to 'Knowing through Protocol'. You're optimizing the process of scraping; we are eliminating the need for it.
by morsch | 2025-12-21 06:59:33+00:00
50 free accounts continually streaming music rack up 20 TB in a month. So that would take about 1.5 years. Our you use 750 accounts and do it in a month.

I would say it's weird they don't rate limit accounts but probably having a device play music pretty much all the time isn't even that rare of a use case.
by musicale | 2025-12-21 07:00:15+00:00
I'm a bit surprised that the DMA etc. didn't end up applying to Xbox, and how Microsoft has tried to make implausible arguments about how iPhone should be open but Xbox should be closed.

The killer app for jailbreaking game systems is and has always been running unlicensed games, a scenario which Apple, Xbox, and Nintendo vigorously object to. It's also why Sony killed Linux on PS3. On the other hand, you can run unlicensed games on Android and it hasn't killed Google Play.
by eqvinox | 2025-12-21 07:03:24+00:00
> That said... This is from early 2023. Any chance it's better now?

I accidentally went IPv6 only on my home wifi for a few weeks a while ago. I only noticed when GitHub didn't load (I avoid work things at home, hence accessing GitHub being rare.)

Relatedly, fuck GitHub and their incompetence at rolling out IPv6. It's nothing other than that at this point. Blank, unadulterated incompetence.
by johnwheeler | 2025-12-21 07:03:33+00:00
I've been doing this for 25 years though so maybe that's why. But the bigger point is that again you're not giving me anything more than "it makes mistakes" Sure it does but it makes less of them now. It will make less in the future. Also Anthropic guys are in the same boat: They don't write _much_ code anymore. They just use Claude code, So I'm not the only one.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-12-21 07:04:46+00:00
> The idea that some policies are okay for state governments to do but not okay for the federal government to do also makes no real sense.

There are many issues on which not everyone agrees what should be done. If the federal government does them, the same solution is forced on everyone even if a large plurality of people would prefer something else and those people constitute the majority of various states, so it makes more sense to let each state decide for themselves. There is nothing stopping them from all doing the same thing if there was consensus.

And when there isn't consensus, you get to see how each of the alternatives turn out when different states do different things:

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

But if the federal government is even allowed to do them then whichever faction has the federal majority imposes their will on everyone else and prevents that from happening.

> Talking about "breaking the rules" in this context

The post I responded to was the one that brought up "breaking the rules". My point is that you should follow the rules if you want to complain about others breaking them.
by romanleeb | 2025-12-21 07:05:58+00:00
Thank you! Well, I built it in a way that the format is kinda universal – expenses are categorized but not with tax codes. Instead I am using labels like e.g. 'Cloud Infra & Hosting'. Plus apart from the basic infos I even extract things like reverse charge y/n or validate VAT IDs to make it as easy as possible for my tax advisor.

So it will not file your taxes for you but it prepares the raw data for your tax guy in a way that they have minimal effort and you can save quite substantially on the bookkeeping part. I'm in Austria and it is a bit cheaper here but also quite costly. Now I only pay for the tax filing, annual accounts and consulting when I need it.
by almostgotcaught | 2025-12-21 07:06:25+00:00
> The time it needs to run is irrelevant for its correctness. And so they can stack and stack and stack

This is a very naive take - the very direct translation of what you're saying doesn't happen does in happen in analysis all the time: there are many inequalities which can be "stacked" to prove a bound on something but their factors are too large so you cannot just stack them if you need a fixed bound for your proof to go through. Unsurprisingly this is exactly how actual runtime analysis also works (it's unsurprising because they're both literally math).
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-12-21 07:06:40+00:00
OK so its not trivial, but I really don't think it's a UX problem. Your grocer and your landlord don't accept crypto not because they can't figure it out, but because so far it hasn't shown itself to be an improvement.

It's got superior privacy properties, sure, but for most people that's not enough. Its gotta be better on other merits too. Until then it wont matter how easy it is to use because you'll still have to turn it back into fiat to use it and now you've just reinvented the problem you were trying to solve with crypto in the first place.
by bytefish | 2025-12-21 07:06:56+00:00
Making software is 20% actual development and 80% is maintenance. Your code and your libraries need to be easy to debug, and this means logs, logs, logs, logs and logs. The more the better. It makes your life easy in the long run.

So the library you are using fires too many debug messages? You know, that you can always turn it off by ignoring specific sources, like ignoring namespaces? So what exactly do you lose? Right. Almost nothing.

As for my code and libraries I always tend to do both, log the error and then throw an exception. So I am on the safe side both ways. If the consumer doesn’t log the exception, then at least my code does it. And I give them the chance to do logging their way and ignore mine. I am doing a best-guess for you… thinking to myself, what’s an error when I’d use the library myself.

You don’t trust me? Log it the way you need to log it, my exception is going to transport all relevant data to you.

This has saved me so many times, when getting bug reports by developers and customers alike.

There are duplicate error logs? Simply turn my logging off and use your own. Problem solved.

If it is a program level error, maybe a warning and returning the error is the correct way to do. Maybe it’s not? It depends on the context.

And this basically is the answer to any software design question: It depends.
by rumpelstiel | 2025-12-21 07:06:56+00:00
Using digital money (fiat or non anonymoized crypto) exposes you. you can not be part of a legal business without doing that except accepting real coins, and even then you have fingerprints on it, or maybe they can scan the banknote id and trace that to an ATM, and so on. The only way to be absolute anonymous is stealing some hardware and trying to get it anonymously into some kind of infrastructure you dont own.
by achow | 2025-12-21 07:08:18+00:00
Curious about the bushfire and recovery there after, found this from Lonely Planet (2023)..

A dangerous mix of hot weather, highly flammable eucalyptus oils in the air and strong winds meant that flames quickly scorched their way through the vegetation, burning almost half of the land in the process.

Australia’s native flora and fauna regenerates and even thrives after burns; in fact, some seeds will only germinate after a fire.

Kangaroo Island has turned out to be astonishingly resilient. Just 48 hours after the flames died down, a rock-like fungus started growing on the ash.

As the fungus digested the ash, it changed the pH levels of the soil, allowing other microorganisms and eventually plants to take root. Some of the plants, says McKelvey, hadn’t been seen for decades. Unlike on the Australian mainland, there were no rabbits to eat the new growth – meaning there was nothing to hold back the regeneration.

It helped that donations flooded in from all over the world after the fires. This money helped to eliminate some of the feral pigs and cats that had been damaging the local ecosystem and killing endangered wildlife.

Three years on, Flinders Chase National Park is as lush as ever, with thick undergrowth providing shelter for the island’s camera-shy wallabies.

The only reminder of the fires that ravaged this land? The blackened branches of eucalyptus trees poking out from the greenery below, giving the landscape an eerie, post-apocalyptic air.

Providing a nesting ground for birds and habitat for insects, even these uncomfortable reminders will disappear in a couple of years, as they get swallowed up by the island’s resilient vegetation.

https://www.lonelyplanet.com/news/kangaroo-island-south-aust...
by troglo-byte | 2025-12-21 07:09:15+00:00
Even if SF lost the hydro plant outright (which seems unlikely) there's still plenty of margin for SF residents to come out on top. SVP in Santa Clara doesn't own much generation, yet its rates are 60% lower.[0]

Then there's the state-wide need to increase transmission capacity because of the switch to renewables, the future politics of which are kinda unpredictable. It's hard to imagine SF getting singled out and left out in the cold, considering the state already has many large municipal utilities getting better deals for their residents.

[0] https://www.siliconvalleypower.com/residents/rates-and-fees
by toast0 | 2025-12-21 07:11:17+00:00
I lived in California until 2018; I think I missed the beginning of the premptive outages during high winds/fire danger, but the grid sections I lived in were much more reliable where I live now, near Seattle with PSE as the utility power supplier. I was also out of CA in the post-Enron rolling blackout era.

The PNW has a more challenging environment with respect to trees pulling down lines than suburban California; I expect two nines of utility power availability here; some years will get three nines. When I was in California, many years had no outages and I don't remember any years where I had less than 99.9% availability. Even when I did eventually decide to get a UPS, it was just because one day there were several brief interruptions.

Obviously, local conditions vary, and I managed to avoid the two recent periods of larger scale grid instability, but at least in my bubble, nobody talked about grid reliability, because it was just there. Plenty of complaints about rates and how long it would take to get service changes.