MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by karlgkk | 2025-12-07 21:44:12+00:00
Rent? Ever heard of equity? If you make 250k you can afford a nice condo. Right away that blows a huge hole in your math.

Also $1k month on bills? Groceries too?

Judging by your inflated costs for everything, and ann idea that a house (versus more modest accommodations) is what the goal is, you’ve got Lifestyle creep. And, things certainly get a lot easier when your spouse also works.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-07 21:44:31+00:00
Saying it only targets the vulnerable because of high unit prices is like saying the local gas station is a rip off that only targets the vulnerable because prices are higher.

I lived in a city that’s in North Metro Atlanta (Johns Creek) where the median household income was $160K. There was a Dollar General right by a Publix. People still went in the Dollar General for little things where the small packages that you could buy was feature and not a bug.

We still stop by the dollar store for snacks sometimes because it is convenient just to get things to pack for a flight. It’s especially popular for tourists in Orlando where I live
by doctor_radium | 2025-12-07 21:44:34+00:00
So this means I would get the app-only sale price, without using the app?

While doing some research into state retail pricing laws a few years ago, I discovered how tough Massachusetts is, being one of the last holdouts mandating ticketing on all items, and only relenting in exchange for price scanners every so many aisles. Living in Pennsylvania and annoyed by stores tying their best prices to their apps, I fancifully emailed Elizabeth Warren, asking if she'd prod a friend in state government to consider a legislative end run around apps. I had no idea such a law really existed. "First in the nation" I expect. Wonder how long it's been around?
by chrislguo | 2025-12-07 21:44:38+00:00
Author here. With the Netflix/Warner news, I noticed a lot of discussion about content libraries but very little about the actual mechanism for employee retention/severance. I'm an economist and ex-investment banker, so I wrote a guide on how to find the specific documents based on my experience navigating a similar merger. The post also includes a satirical story about a hyperscaler acquisition to illustrate the culture clash. Hope it's useful for anyone currently navigating M&A.
by sph | 2025-12-07 21:45:01+00:00
Wrong. Knowing to customize a theme != knowing to use a computer != knowing how computers work.

I can say I know computers and how they work pretty well, but these days I have much better things to do to learn the best way to themes my shell so that it matches my waybar, and that both switch colourscheme when dark mode activates. I could learn if I wanted, but I’m not a teenager anymore; I don’t care. Incidentally, when I had the time concern myself with GTK themes and wallpapers and Compiz, my knowledge in computers was a tenth of what it is now.

It would be like saying a car decorator is the most expert of mechanics.
by masswerk | 2025-12-07 21:45:17+00:00
Hum, table cells provide the max-width and images a min-with, heights are absolute (with table cells spilling over, as with CCS "overflow-y: visible"), aligns and maybe HSPACE and VSPACE attributes do the rest. As long as images heights exceed the effective line-height and there's no visible text, this should render pixel perfect on any browser then in use. In this case, there's also an absolute width set for the entire table, adding further constraints. Table layouts can be elastic, with constraints or without, but this one should be pretty stable.

(Fun fact, the most amazing layout foot-guns, then: Effective font sizes and line-heights are subject to platform and configuration (e.g., Win vs Mac); Netscape does paragraph spacing at 1.2em, IE at 1em (if this matters, prefer `<br>` over paragraphs); frames dimensions in Netscape are always calculated as integer percentages of window dimensions, even if you provide absolute dimensions in pixels, while IE does what it says on the tin (a rare example), so they will be the same only by chance and effective rounding errors. And, of course, screen gamma is different on Win and Mac, so your colors will always be messed up – aim for a happy medium.)
by pipes | 2025-12-07 21:45:32+00:00
To be fair, I did read that, but didn't state why I was sceptical: I've been playing UT since UT99, it's one of my favourite games. I wasted hours of my life in unreal ed 1. Anyway Epic removed UT from all online stores, I still have access to my gog version but in general as far as I know it's impossible to buy a legit copy these days. They also shut down it's master servers. To be fair I haven't tried playing a few years so maybe that is fixed and maybe they have restored it to gog or the epic store. I don't know I haven't checked.

A random post on Reddit "with epics blessing" looked pretty much throw away to me. But hey, I'm wrong :)
by karlgkk | 2025-12-07 21:45:50+00:00
Well, interest rates are high right now, but you’d be surprised at how little down payment you need for purchasing a house or a condo. If you’re a tech worker with a stable career making that kind of money, most underwriters will just give you the loan.

I think people commonly underestimate how accessible this stuff is

It’s easy to make a 40 year forecast spreadsheet for retirement, including housing costs, property, taxes, maintenance. Include vacation, budget, food, general cost of living.
by pyrolistical | 2025-12-07 21:46:18+00:00
My success rate went way up by only making 4 estimates.

1 day

1 week

1 month

1 year

This communicates the level of uncertainty/complexity. 5 days is way too precise. But saying 1 week is more understandable if it becomes 2 weeks.

I don’t estimate in hours or use any number other than 1
by js2 | 2025-12-07 21:46:45+00:00
I was having trouble getting Verizon to unlock an iPhone that had been purchased (not financed) from Best Buy and that had been on Verizon's network for more than two years. Verizon support said only BB could unlock it[^1]. I thought that was poppycock. I filled out a form on the FCC's web site just before midnight. By 8 AM, the FCC had forwarded the complaint to Verizon. By 9 AM Verizon executive relations called me. 30 minutes later the phone was unlocked.

Which is all to say, for some things, the US also has consumer protection and it's great when it works.

[^1]: Apparently only Apple sells unlocked iPhones. iPhones purchased at other retailers carrier-lock themselves at activation. At least on Verizon they're supposed to automatically unlock after 60 days. When that doesn't happen, you get stuck in Verizon's mindless customer support swamp[^2,^3].

[^2]: https://old.reddit.com/r/Bestbuy/comments/17ae8l2/verizon_sa...

[^3]: https://old.reddit.com/r/Bestbuy/comments/1buemp5/why_is_it_...
by xg15 | 2025-12-07 21:47:58+00:00
> We can prove that in an ideal situation, the die roll will be fair. Assuming both parties can come up with unbiased random numbers ranging from [0;12)...

Doesn't that assumption remove the entire problem though? I thought the whole reason for the method was that people can't easily think of an unbiased random number.

Or put differently, if that's your starting point, what's stopping you from simply doing (A mod 6) + 1?
by westcoast49 | 2025-12-07 21:48:02+00:00
It is possible though, to unify those things, and to see those other effects also as second or third order effects of the same underlying deficiencies that cause problems in social interaction. I believe, for instance, that our super power as neurotypicals is our ability to see, process, model and make sense, especially in real-time, of what's inside the minds of other people. In a way, we are wired to be comfortable with multiple worlds or perspectives around us, because we can see them, process them, and make sense of them. It makes sense to me that a person who is less good at this, will end up seeking a model of the world that is more rigid. If the worlds of other people around you seem chaotic to you, and uncomprehensible, then you will seek an environment and an understanding of the world that is more static, rigid or fixed. So, I think, at least on a conceptual level, it's possible to link the root causes of social problems to the root causes of the need for rigidity and stability.
by monerozcash | 2025-12-07 21:48:51+00:00
I'll repeat myself: Can you actually find a source for your original claim about Russia using the incredibly costly S-400 platform to shoot down thousands of cheap Ukrainian drones? Russia has much cheaper systems better suited for that task, so it'd be really interesting to hear more about this.

Relitigating the India-Pakistan conflict with someone who seems to have deeply held nationalist beliefs is just not all that exciting to me.

>Wow, I would first like your definition of a credible source before bothering even discussing further - it seems you have some extraordinary high standard that neither media nor government sources or international analysts nor satellite imagery nor some of the photos of the crashed aircraft can meet.

Credible source? Someone who doesn't have a documented track record of repeatedly reporting false rumors as facts would be a nice start.

>How about John Spencer then ? He is a US military expert who has also confirmed the efficacy of the S-400 and Operation Sindoor. Is he also an idiot ?

I think John Spencer is generally a decent source, but with a quick search I couldn't find anything resembling serious analysis by him on this topic. He does in fact have a post where he quickly states that "one [Saab 2000 AEW&C] was destroyed—likely by an S-400 system", but no explanation as to how he arrived at that conclusion.

However, I find it odd that John Spencer is commenting on this anyway given that his expertise lies mostly in urban warfare.

>What about (Retd) Pakistani Air Marshal Masood Akhtar who was reported as saying an AWACS was destroyed ? Is he also an idiot ?

It took you only a couple of minutes to go from the AWACS being shot down in a record breaking engagement by the s-400 to it being damaged on the ground by Indian strikes, I've never suggested that the latter did not happen.

And for what it's worth, here's another hilarious detail about IAF claims https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/four-air-launched-...

Hindustan Times reports that IAF claims to have destroyed a C130J in Pakistan. Pakistan does not and did not ever have a single C130J. Up to you if you want to blame Hindustan Times or IAF for this obviously false claim.
by tasuki | 2025-12-07 21:49:13+00:00
> Keeping updated libraries is a good practice

First, the "good practice" argument is just an attempt to shut down the discussion. God wanted it so.

Second, I rather keep my dependencies outdated. New features, new bugs. Why update, unless there's a specific reason to do so? By upgrading, you're opening yourself up to:

- Accidental new bugs that didn't have the time to be spotted yet.

- Subtly different runtime characteristics (see the original post).

- Maintainer going rogue or the dependency getting hijacked and introducing security issues, unless you audit the full code whenever upgrading (which you don't).
by Animats | 2025-12-07 21:49:14+00:00
The trouble with estimation is that few places record the estimates and the actuals for future reference.

As I've pointed out before, the business of film completion bonds has this worked out. For about 3% to 5% of the cost of making a movie, you can buy an insurance policy that guarantees to the investors that they get a movie out or their money back.

What makes this work is that completion bond companies have the data to do good estimations. They have detailed spending data from previous movie productions. So they look at a script, see "car chase in city, 2 minutes screen time", and go to their database for the last thousand car chase scenes and the bell curve of how much they cost. Their estimates are imperfect, but their error is centered around zero. So completion bond companies make money on average.

The software industry buries their actual costs. That's why estimation doesn't work.
by bxparks | 2025-12-07 21:49:35+00:00
I don't follow the Syncthing ecosystem, so it's difficult to understand what is happening.

[Edit: The GitHub repos are called "syncthing-android". The Android apps are called "Syncthing-Fork" or "Syncthing-Fork Wrapper", which adds to the confusion.]

If I recall, there used to be a syncthing-android app on Google PlayStore. That was discontinued by @imsodin in Oct 2024 (https://forum.syncthing.net/t/discontinuing-syncthing-androi...).

There was a version of sycnthing-android on F-Droid. I don't remember who maintained that. I have version 1.30.0.4 installed. But I cannot find any information about that version anymore.

The current version on F-Droid is 2.0.12.1. That seems to be maintained by a fellow named @researchxxl. Apparently @researchxxl claims to have inherited the source code and signing keys from a person named @Catfriend1 (Not sure who that is, the maintainer of version 1.30.0.4?)

There is another fellow named @nel0x who seems to be maintaining a different version of synchthing-android? (Edit: Here it is, https://github.com/nel0x/syncthing-android, which says that it is a fork of the one maintained by @Catfriend1).
by victorbuilds | 2025-12-07 21:50:26+00:00
Building something similar - using Claude API to generate mini games from text descriptions (https://codorex.com, still pretty rough).

Can confirm: Claude is weirdly good at generating functional game logic from vague prompts, but spatial precision is a constant battle. Anything involving exact pixel positions needs validation/correction layers on top.

The suggestion upthread about having it write its own measurement tools seems promising - haven't tried that approach yet.
by jijijijij | 2025-12-07 21:50:43+00:00
There was mandatory military service until 2011 when it was paused. Since then Germany had a purely professional army like the US. Mandatory military service was 9-12 months basic training, which could be objected on moral grounds. Objection meant doing alternative (civil) service for the time (e.g. working in a hospital, school, THW, etc.).
by jandrewrogers | 2025-12-07 21:50:53+00:00
It isn't common but it definitely happens in some parts of the US.

There are no taxes to pay if you aren't earning anything. It is legal, if inadvisable, to raise children this way in much of the US. There is a "live and let live" ethos around it, especially in the western US. The true nomads are probably most common in the mountain West of the US in my experience. While the rule is two weeks in one location, in many remote areas there is no enforcement and no one really cares. They sometimes have mutually beneficial arrangements with ranchers in the area. These groups tend to be relatively small.

Alaska is famously popular for groups of families disappearing into the remote wilderness to create villages far from modern civilization. It is broadly tolerated there. Often many years will pass between sightings of people that disappeared into the wilderness.

I always wondered what a high-resolution satellite survey of the Inside Passage of Alaska and the north coast of British Columbia would find in that vast and impenetrable wilderness. Anecdotally there should be dozens of villages hidden in there that have been operating for decades.
by jaredcwhite | 2025-12-07 21:50:58+00:00
Poor analysis. Apple is doing quite well as a Big Tech company that simply doesn't need to "pivot to AI" like everyone else. Their missteps in "Apple Intelligence" have in fact demonstrated that they don't actually need to have much of a "strategy" here at all. In fact, if they simply link out to other people's chatbots and make it totally opt-in, that would be ideal.

The much bigger problem is that they've lost the wow factor in their software design, and in some regards the hardware as well even though the internals and build quality has never been better. Apple needs a design shakeup far more than it needs anything to do with AI, a poison pill which will bring the entire industry down in 2026.
by jdpage | 2025-12-07 21:52:27+00:00
Bear in mind, the terminal goal doesn't actually require unbiased numbers; the way most TTRPGs work is that you're trying to roll over or under a target number to get a weighted, unpredictable outcome. The idea is that while players (usually) want any given action to succeed, they some of their actions to fail in order to preserve narrative interest, while having their character be better at some things than others.

As such, while randomness is best, the given method is quite sufficient for having fun, and both players can agree that it's fair: they each have equal influence over the result.
by sph | 2025-12-07 21:53:06+00:00
It still is an utter pain if you ever need to get close to the rpm system.

Probably what he means is that a make install (or whatever the incantation, it’s been a while since I compiled a kernel) just works on Fedora and never has to deal with the rpm nonsense (I use Fedora too, but packaging is even more dreadful than deb, if you can believe it)
by knallfrosch | 2025-12-07 21:53:06+00:00
And these are just the citations that any old free tool could have included via Bibtex link from the website?

Not only is that incredibly easy to verify (you could pay a first semester student without any training), it's also a worrying sign on what the paper's authors consider quality. Not even 5 minutes spent to get the citations right!

You have to wonder what's in these papers.
by KaiserPro | 2025-12-07 21:53:13+00:00
> nobody other than me has spent a significant amount of time with severely autistic people.

Yes, most people have not met someone with more than mild autism.

I think the other issue is that people are confused as to _what_ autism is (it doesn't help that its a massive fucking spectrum) For most people, meeting a dutch grandmother for the first time would assume that they count as autistic.

I run a "uniformed organisation" for kids, and as we make sure that we take _all_ kids regardless of who they are, I bump into a large amount of interesting diagnosed and undiagnosed conditions. Currently I look after siblings, one who is mostly mute and diagnosed, and the other who is very much lightly on the spectrum.

There is another kid who is both ADD and autistic(Diagnosed). He is prone to RMS-like behaviour. If you talk to him in the right way, he can understand why certain behaviours are to be not repeated. However, he is and remains a teenager.
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-12-07 21:53:27+00:00
I think the game theory inherit here makes it ok for this purpose. You get an advantage being random. You're likely still not going to generate random numbers but at least there's good motivation to be random and that part just becomes part of the game imho (guess what number the opponent calls to maximize your roll).

Of course as others note this is a convoluted mod n process.
by hunterpayne | 2025-12-07 21:53:55+00:00
Because the jit will let the unoptimized code run a few (hundred) times to take measurements to know what needs to be optimized and how it needs to be optimized. This is a good solution and makes hotspot very effective. The problem is that it happens randomly a few minutes/seconds into the operation of the service. So you randomly have a big pause with the performance hit everytime you run the service. The upside is that this only happens once. But you have to plan for a big performance hit to requests which are unlucky enough to be called at the wrong time.
by foxglacier | 2025-12-07 21:54:21+00:00
I'm not really talking about this fridge specifically, but generally vulnerable people making self-destructive decisions out of not understanding the world or of being manipulated.

I agree the test itself would probably be too much of a burden but it wouldn't necessarily tighten the screws. We'd have teenagers who pass and can start a business themselves or get married or whatever, along with adults who fail and are protected from fraud, sexual abuse, etc.

The way we currently do it is like apartheid. Assign rights based on some crude metric that's easy to test (race/age) instead of evaluating everyone individually.
by CamouflagedKiwi | 2025-12-07 21:54:38+00:00
That's a nonsensical connection. "Spaghetti code" is a very general term, that's nowhere near specific enough for the two to be related.

"I know for a fact that Italian cooks generate spaghetti, and the deceased's last meal contained spaghetti, therefore an Italian chef must have poisoned him"
by joshuaheard | 2025-12-07 21:54:50+00:00
I sailed from Norfolk, Virginia, to St. Thomas, Virgin Islands. When we were in the Bermuda triangle, our ship's compass starting veering to one side, then made complete 360 degree turns, then started spinning. We were passing a magnetic anomaly marked on the chart. Fortunately, over time, the compass corrected itself. If we had been in an aircraft with limited time and fuel, I don't know if the compass correction would have occurred in time for the aircraft to resume course and land.
by girvo | 2025-12-07 21:54:57+00:00
For sure, but these new tools spit out a lot more and a lot faster, and it’s usually correct “enough” that the compiler won’t yell. It’s been wild to see its suggestions be wrong far more often than they are right, so I wonder how useful they really are at all.

Normal auto complete plus a code tool like Claude Code or similar seem far more useful to me.
by wild_egg | 2025-12-07 21:55:04+00:00
> Everything you said could apply to a new bridge, building, pharmaceutical compound

"Everything"? So

> predictable and repetitive tasks are also the kinds of tasks that are most easily automated, which means the time it takes to perform those tasks should asymptotically approach 0.

Also applies to bridges? Bridges require a ton of manual human input at every stage of construction, regardless of how predictable and repetitive the work is. With software, we can write software to make those tasks disappear. I've yet to see the bridge that can build itself.
by gruez | 2025-12-07 21:55:20+00:00
>While other retailers try to get me to buy more stuffs, Costco try to make sure I'm satisfied enough that I'll renew my yearly membership (their main profit source). The incentive structure aligns very well.

This doesn't make any sense. Costco makes a profit on the goods sold as well. They have every incentive to sell you as much stuff as possible. That's why they also engage in the usual retail tactics to increase sales, like having the essentials all the way in the back of the store, and putting the high margin items (electronics and jewelry) in the front. They might practice a more cuddlier form of capitalism than dollar general, but they're still a for profit retail business.
by thefaux | 2025-12-07 21:55:23+00:00
It's sad but I generally agree. Scala was in my view pretty well positioned for an up and coming language ~2010-15. Not only did the scala 3 rewrite fail to address many of the most common pain points -- compile times and tooling immediately come to mind -- the rewrite took many years and completely stalled the momentum of the project. I have to wonder at this point who is actually starting a new project in scala in 2025.

It's really a shame because in many ways I do think it is a better language than anything else that is widely used in industry but it seems the world has moved on.
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-12-07 21:55:31+00:00
> listed on the shelf at $5, rang up at $7.65. Bounty paper towels, shelf price $10.99, rang up at $15.50

I'm sure the US obsession with not putting the actual price (tax included) on the shelf helps a lot with this. I would notice quite quickly if a store would systematically overcharge me in Europe. It'd be much harder in the US where I expect the price on the shelf to not match the price at checkout.