MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by piva00 | 2025-12-05 11:44:34+00:00
> In my opinion this is not a good trade off. It puts vehicles that would be perfectly serviceable out of circulation, which has other environmental implications for breaking them down, and also another vehicle replaces it. I see the point behind it, but I still find it wasteful considering that we could have a machine last longer.

Bearings suffer wear and tear, and needs replacement, you don't replace your whole car because of worn bearings unless you're talking about complete engine rebuilds (like piston rings/rod bearings/camshaft), I still would like some data to substantiate this discussion because I don't have it.

> Sorry, I wasn't aware of your pollution situation. For me, it makes bottles harder to reuse because you kinda have to detach them if you want to refill and reuse the bottles, which leave sharp plastic barbs at the attachment points. Also, annoying when you're trying to have a drink while driving. It's not a big issue, but where I leave, pollution from bottle caps was a non-issue from the start, so I don't really have a reason to like the change.

It's not a dire pollution situation, it just normally done by teenagers not caring too much and littering their soda bottle caps around. I don't see why you need to remove the bottle cap for refilling, I do it just as I used to and nothing has changed that requires me to remove bottle caps for them to be refilled/reused.

So it's not a big issue, it made it harder for people to litter while not having big drawbacks, I don't understand why it was an example of bad regulations...
by throwawayqqq11 | 2025-12-05 11:44:35+00:00
The same can be said about the right, but you are correct, infighting is stronger on the left.

But...

Orthodoxy (or better: tribalism) is actually stronger on the right, the key difference is, the right has less political complexity to argue over. "Our pure native culture will fix our problems and the other left outgroups must be suppressed" is pure identity politics, which is imo the core of the right.

The left has, tribalism aside, at least identity independent topics like wealth distribution. Which, unfortunately, threatens the existing power structures.

I can confirm the left ostracizing their own. It happened to me too, but i still consider myself left, because my political ideals are based on more than a group membership.
by rsynnott | 2025-12-05 11:45:02+00:00
> At what point can we verifiably say we heard a loud pop?

Usually, well after the fact. Especially in a case like this, where most of the money is being spent by the hyperscalers, who are unlikely to outright _collapse_ or anything. There are exceptions, where a bubble popping is accompanied by a massive single-day market crash, but that's not _really_ the norm.
by iberator | 2025-12-05 11:45:36+00:00
You are wrong mate. 80% of EU decisions are good for average joe (health, pollution, labour laws, agriculture boost, funding of A LOT of infrastructure like roads, railroads, airports, power plants and science.

For example Poland and similar countries are amazing at the moment because of EU funding and protection.

Without the EU half of the members would be like Ukraine (rampant corruption, pollution etc etc).

In the essence the EU is net positive, despite some stupid ideas(government spying, free trade deals with south america and rushed green revolution). But still: it's very positive. Just compare Poland to Ukraine. (Ukraine was richer than Poland in 1993...)

Mass migration is real issue now and that's about it.

My 2 cents
by oarsinsync | 2025-12-05 11:46:22+00:00
> It is also about autistic person having complete emotional meltdown ... because something was not exactly to his/her liking.

This usually happens when the person's needs have been repeatedly ignored, either because the person isn't aware of their needs, and thus isn't able to communicate them; or because the person has tried to communicate their needs but not been understood; or because the person has tried to communicate their needs and had their needs disregarded.

This isn't unique to people with neurodivergence.

> with yelling abusive things or even hitting things

Eventually communication fails and all that's left is violence. History (and the present day) is full of examples of this happening on an individual, national, and planetary scale.
by LiKao | 2025-12-05 11:47:31+00:00
Test theory is a very complex topic within psychology. But there is a lot of insight that you can gain into this based on psychological test theory.

One Problem is, that we first have to clearly define the construct that we want to measure with the test. That is not often clear and often underdefined. When designing a test, we also need to be clear about what external influences contribute to noise / error and which are created by the actual measurement. There never is a test that does not have a margin of error.

A simple / simplified example: When we measure IQ, we want to determine cognitive processing speed. So we need to have fixed time for the test. But people also may read the questions faster or slower. This is just a typical range, so when you look at actual IQ tests, they will not give a score (just the most likely score) but also a margin of error, and test theorists will be very unhappy if you don't take this margin of error seriously. Now take someone who is legally blind. That person will be far out of the margin of error of others. The margins of errors account for typical inter-personal and intra-personal (bad day, girlfriend broke up) etc occurrences. But this doesn't work here. So we try to fix this, and account for the new source of error differently, e.g. by giving more time.

So it highly depends on what you want to measure. If you are doing a test in CS, do you want to measure how well the student understood the material and how fast they can apply it? Or do you want to measure how fast the student could do an actual real-live coding task? Depending on what your answer is, you need a very different measurement strategy and you need to handle sources of error differently.

When looking at grades people usually account for these margins of errors intuitively. We don't just rely on grades when hiring, but also conduct interviews etc so we can get a clearer picture.
by rsynnott | 2025-12-05 11:48:12+00:00
> We’re pizzagate / Qanon folks changed by that misinformation or were they looking for an excuse?

They're arguably a special case, in that qanon was primarily a fantastical conspiracy theory along the lines of the blood libel or the satanic ritual abuse thing, and arguably only incidentally political. People who end up getting into that sort of thing are an edgecase. They are not simply believing disinformation; they are believing in _magic_.

But RE more _conventional_ misinformation, IIRC there was polling showing, for instance, that a substantial minority of British people believed various common 'euromyths'. Since the 70s or so, British tabloid media has pushed various bizarre claims about European legislation, and a lot of people seemed quite happy to believe, for instance, that Europe had banned jam, even though jam was still clearly available in the supermarket. Many people even believed that Europe had banned or had tried to ban sausages, apparently due to misremembering a joke in Yes Minister as actual news. Given how tight the Brexit vote was, it's fairly plausible that euromyths swung it.
by grafmax | 2025-12-05 11:48:16+00:00
Markets are the expression of an unfree society because they concentrate power in the hands of the few. Those with more money benefit by exploiting those with less - exploiting workers on the one hand and consumers on the other (through rent extraction). Stalinism is one form of planned economy but in your view the choices are Stalinism vs unregulated markets as if no other options exist. Absurd.

After decades of neoliberalism (thanks to politicians like Thatcher) we can see what a failure it has been. Wealth inequality is growing, climate change is getting worse, far right movements are spreading, governments are run by oligarchs, industry has declined, the working class is squeezed, labor movements have been crushed, housing shortages.. it’s an ideology of class war by the rich against the working class.
by estsauver | 2025-12-05 11:48:38+00:00
For some context on why the original law was introduced:

When you're making a seed that you want to make the best crop possible, the way to do that is to take two great lines of maize that share relatively little genetics, cross them at the last step, and enjoy the hybrid vigour that results. This is one of the most important practical advancements we have for getting good yields from crops: the yields are dramatically better for this seed then if you plant the seed kernels that are made by the hybrid. When you plant saved seed (which many poor people are forced to do through not being able to afford hybrid seeds) you get dramatically worse yields and often even doing things like using fertilizer doesn't make economic sense (https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/low-quality-low-ret... is frequently cited.)

However, to the naked eye, there's basically no distinction between a hybrid seed and stored seed. A lot of seed companies sell seeds that are coated to help protect the seeds from pests/blights, but seed counterfitters have learned how to copy this. To distinguish them, you either need to run genetic testing or plant them and wait a season. If you get scammed, the result can be devestating for a smallholder farmer's family.

I don't necessarily think community seed banks should be banned, but I think it's important context to know. There are people for whom they really need any seed, crops which are not served commercially well, and a whole bunch of other use cases I immediately understand for a community seed bank. But seed counterfitting is a real problem that is hurting some of the world's poorest people. (I'll also just say I'm not up to date on this law, the court case, or how it's been applied in the country.)

Disclaimer: I'm one of the founders of Apollo Agriculture and still serve on the board, which operates in Kenya and a few other countries trying to help smallholders get access to better agtech (which includes hybrid seeds and fertilizer and other high roi agricultural tools.)
Most prediction market users aren't trading–they're gambling
by Miramaps | 2025-12-05 11:48:50+00:00
Prediction markets surged 700% recently, but structurally they favor informed actors.

83% of participants are net negative because sentiment-driven trades lack edge. Academic studies show LLMs outperform human forecasters in financial domains. Autonomous systems that score events, monitor volatility, and execute based on evidence—not intuition—represent the likely optimization layer these markets have been missing
by ndr | 2025-12-05 11:49:18+00:00
Yes, Clojure doesn't have TCO either.

You get `(loop ... (recur ...))` or `trampoline`.

Naive recursion will consume the stack.

https://clojuredocs.org/clojure.core/loop

https://clojuredocs.org/clojure.core/recur

https://clojuredocs.org/clojure.core/trampoline
by sublinear | 2025-12-05 11:49:37+00:00
I agree it seems error prone. I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding something, but I use `git cherry-pick` when I know I need to move commits around that might have conflicts. The problem with rebase can be that the user doesn't fully understand all the options being applied and end up with a "bad" merge.

I don't usually want to rewrite history. I just want the target branch with all my commits on top (I usually squash the feature branch into one commit anyway). I have yet to run into a situation where this isn't good enough.

If the branch diverges so much and has so many commits that this simpler approach doesn't work, that might not be a git problem, but a project management one. It's still always nice to know git has tools to get me out of a jam.
by seec | 2025-12-05 11:50:33+00:00
Yeah but this is what I mean. They are unable to produce a decent AI solution so they have to outsource. And if it was just about being limited by on device processing power, they could just switch to using their cloud infrastructure.

To me that's just dumb. They are spending money for a competitor solution just to keep control and appearances. At this point they could just forget about AI altogether and/or open their OSs to let others integrate their solutions. But Apple is way too proud to admit being wrong and we will get a half-assed solution that will both cost them money and be inferior to the competition because of their own self-imposed limitations.

They have been riding on their privacy/security narrative for a while, yet they work with governments and ads/tracking hasn't gone anywhere. And they'll have to open up the App Store golden goose at some point anyway. They should recognise when the strategy isn't working for the long run and switch it up...

But they have tried to compete with Google for maps, it is still largely inferior in many ways and they seem to be fine with that. So I think it will end up in a similar situation.
by konradha | 2025-12-05 11:50:44+00:00
I've been trying my hand at RL envs for various sparse matrix algorithms in CUDA. It's easy to generate code that "looks good", "novel" and "fast". Escaping the distribution and actually creating novel sequences of instructions or even patterns (has any model come with something as useful as fan-in/fan-out or double buffering patterns that's now ubiquituous?) seems difficult to say the least.
by JimDabell | 2025-12-05 11:51:06+00:00
> Can it already vertically and horizontally center unknown-beforehand-length multi-line text in a single html element, just like non-CSS table cells could already in 1995?

Non-CSS table cells have never been able to do that – you need a wrapping <table> at minimum for browsers to render it how you want, a <tr> for it to be valid HTML, and <tbody> comes along for the ride as well as an implied element. So that’s four elements if you want to centre vertically with <td> or <th>. If you wait until the year 2000, then you can get that down to three elements by switching from HTML to XHTML because <tbody> is no longer implied in XHTML.

CSS, on the other hand, has been able to do what you want since 1998 (CSS 2) with only two elements:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/strict.dtd"> <title>.</title> <style type="text/css"> html, body { height: 100%; } .outer { display: table; width: 100%; height: 100%; } .inner { display: table-cell; vertical-align: middle; text-align: center; } </style> <div class="outer"> <div class="inner"> Test<br> Test<br> Test<br> Test<br> Test<br> Test </div> </div>

(I’m using a <style> element here for clarity, but you can do the same thing with style attributes.)

https://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-CSS2-19980512/
by fuzzfactor | 2025-12-05 11:51:12+00:00
Interesting, a few organizations can (very) carefully craft their own LOB software over the number of years it can take to fully free themselves from Excel. And then realize the intended advantage for years to come.

At the same time over a period of years the web approach is to make the whole thing more like a bunch of interlocked Excels, more so than it already was before.

Does that mean any resulting disadvantage during following years is intentional? Any more than huge orgs grew to depend on Excel, one physical desktop at a time since that was the only thing in common among all those diverse desk owners that would do the job, plus it was the first thing to come along to fill that niche.
by pjmlp | 2025-12-05 11:51:47+00:00
As someone that was part of such project, the main issue is that Excel is really programming, plus there are macros, VBA, AddIns, lambda, PowerQuery, and now Python on top.

All those migration projects tend to fail on the details, there is always that one customisation point that is easily done in Excel, but requires a whole team with architects and such for getting the same capability on the replacement tool.
by Xelbair | 2025-12-05 11:51:58+00:00
No, their voice should have exactly the same value as everyone else's.

no less, no more.

Unless we are done with pretending that there are no power disparities.

And one of few ways to do so is to either:

- completely ban lobbying, any form of privilege/monetary exchange is considered a bribery. Introduce a public open dialogue when working on a new legislation. Rich can still make their own campaigns for specific issues - just targeting voters, not politicians directly.

- introduce system of checks and balances where any form of lobbying must be publicly visible and attached to image of politician, so voter can easily make informed decision. Including something correlated with amount of money donated, counting shell organizations in it too.

good luck - no politician will vote to cut their own paycheck.
by tedggh | 2025-12-05 11:52:08+00:00
Welp, it has worked ok for most of us. It’s below zero outside my house is at 22C and I have strawberries and avocados on the kitchen counter. This weekend I’ll drive with my family to a wedding 500km away and will spend $40 in transportation. With all I hate O&G can’t deny it has made my life easier in many ways.
by nephihaha | 2025-12-05 11:52:13+00:00
The first would be being honest enough to say that many statements are not hard and fast facts, but opinions. If we say ice is frozen water, then that is a solid fact (leaving aside dry ice etc). But if we say such-and-such is a good/bad leader that is often mostly based on one's opinion of what good/bad leadership entails. In many cases, one person's good leader is another's bad leader.
by dakoosha | 2025-12-05 11:52:45+00:00
That was due to the recent Cloudflare outage. GitLab is usually super reliable, but sometimes things happen outside anyone’s control. Having a backup you can restore — even cross-platform to GitHub, Azure DevOps, or Bitbucket — can be a real lifesaver if your team wants to keep going without waiting. Tools like GitProtect make it easy to have that kind of flexibility in place.
by qnleigh | 2025-12-05 11:53:01+00:00
An interesting thing related to these questions in the context of physics: there was an interesting discussion on Scott Aaronson's blog a few years ago about why the universe should be quantum mechanical. One idea that was brought up is quite related to the open questions you name here.

Here's an excerpt from a comment of Daniel Harlow (a prof at MIT):

> In order for us to be having this discussion at all, the laws of physics need to have the ability to generate interesting complex structures in a reasonable amount of time starting from a simple initial state. Now I know that as a computer scientist you are trained to think that is a trivial problem because of Turing completeness, universality, blah blah blah, but really I don’t think it is so simple. Why should the laws of physics allow a Turing machine to be built? And even if a Turing machine is possible, why should one exist? I think the CS intuition that “most things are universal” comes with baked-in assumptions about the stability of matter and the existence of low-entropy objects, and I think it is not so easy to achieve these with arbitrary laws of physics.

Scott replies:

> Multiple people made the case to me that it’s far from obvious how well

(1) stable matter,

(2) complex chemistry,

(3) Lorentzian and other continuous symmetries,

(4) robustness against small perturbations,

(5) complex structures

being not just possible but likely from “generic” initial data,…can actually be achieved in simple Turing-universal classical cellular automaton models.

See comments 225 and 261

https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6244
by imtringued | 2025-12-05 11:53:14+00:00
I assume those aren't US dollars? My suggestion is to go on a classifieds site and find a bargain there. You can find 2x8GB SODIMM DDR4 for like 20€ in Germany, because it's the default configuration for laptops and people are buying aftermarket RAM to upgrade to 2x16GB leaving a glut in 2x8GB configurations. Something similar happened to the desktop DIMMs but to a lesser extent because you can put four of them into a PC.
by bflesch | 2025-12-05 11:53:20+00:00
See https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/incidents/lfrm31y6sw9q

"A change made to how Cloudflare's Web Application Firewall parses requests caused Cloudflare's network to be unavailable for several minutes this morning. This was not an attack; the change was deployed by our team to help mitigate the industry-wide vulnerability disclosed this week in React Server Components."

The bug is known since several days, and the hotfix was already in place. So they worked on the "final fix" and chose to deploy it on a friday morning.
by cjs_ac | 2025-12-05 11:53:33+00:00
When we write programs in a conventional programming language, what we're doing with the data is shown front and centre, and the data itself is sidelined or often not even present. In a spreadsheet, this is reversed: the data is prioritised, and the formulae are hidden.

There's an immediacy to a spreadsheet: the user can start with very literal actions on data, and slowly introduce abstractions like formulae. In conventional programming, the programmer has nothing but abstractions with which to work.

It's reminiscent of one of Fred Brooks' remarks about how showing the data structures makes the algorithms obvious, but showing the algorithms reveals little about the data structures.
by nrhrjrjrjtntbt | 2025-12-05 11:53:42+00:00
You dont have kids do you.

My first exception: school homework now done on PC. school requires laptop they can use in classroom. Friends.

Now yeah blame the parents.

But we already restrict alcohol to minors (but what stupid parent gave their kid money!) why not addictive, manipulative apps.

Tldr. Kids need devices of some sort to do life these days. Pare nts will monitor and restrict. But we can also clear the dealers from the corners. That helps too.
by mrtksn | 2025-12-05 11:54:54+00:00
Since "truth" is more of a philosophical concept than anything else, IMHO the problem with "fact-checking" is largely rooted in the framing of it.

Instead of acting like there's some objective truth that some people know for sure, it should have been framed simply as argumentation and exposition so people can follow the logic.

I.e. let's say someone claims that mRNA vaccines are causing widespread heart attacks, the people who push these claims are almost always misrepresenting data through statistical tricks. Instead of just doing "fact checking" in form of "our data says it doesn't" its much more effective to address the original claim and expose the tricks used to give the impression that people are dying of heart attack after vaccination. It not only builds trust and reason but also makes people smart for understanding what's going on instead of feeling dumber than the "experts" who tell them the "truth".

During the pandemic, I recall some conspiracy theorists using official data in such a way that I swear it obviously shoved that vaccinated are about to die off. I spent hours multiple times to dig out and understand what the data actually says. Every single time, it was due to some technicality like the times the data is collected or processed(data entered in batches giving the impression of people dying from something that happens periodically) or something that from a laymans meant one thing but it was actually exactly the opposite when you know it(i.e. some response from the immune systems that looks bad but actually it means that the vaccine is working as expected). Oh and my favorite, change in methodology presented as change in outcomes.