MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hsn915 | 2025-12-05 08:06:48+00:00
There are two issues:

- Hosting a website is not so easy for the average person, even the tech savvy person, specially if you try to learn it now using the way large websites are developed.

- Static site blogs lack interactivity: people can't comment on your blog. You have to post a link to Twitter or HN (here!) and interact with people over there.

- Static site blogs also don't usually let people "subscribe" by email or whatnot, so unless people bookmark your website or follow you on Twitter, they are not going to find your content.

P.S. this is a problem area I'm trying to work on, at least on the technical front.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-12-05 08:06:49+00:00
> Hard to argue that trump didn't do tariffs in the dumbest way possible.

That is certainly one of my frustrations with Trump. He has this tendency to take things which aren't necessarily bad ideas, and pursue them in such stupid ways that he is poisoning public opinion of those concepts for a long time to come.

Take tariffs. I really want the US to have manufacturing again, in fact it seems to me that it is genuinely an issue of national security that we don't have the ability to manufacture things. So I'm ok with tariffs in the abstract, as part of a larger plan to build up industry in the US.

But of course that isn't what we got - we got something which is causing a lot of heartburn for (probably) no benefit to our manufacturing industry. So not only is Trump not effectively advancing the ends I would like, in the future when a politician suggests tariffs people will pattern match it to "that thing Trump did which really sucked" and reject the proposal out of hand even if the details are different. And it's like this for so many things Trump sets his mind to. It's really frustrating.
by toast0 | 2025-12-05 08:07:29+00:00
Nobody is currently selling new, small pickups. Maybe if the Slate materializes, that'll prove the market and we'll see them again.

In the meantime, 200x Ford Ranger or 200x Chevy S-10 are the last of the small pickups where you can get a 6 foot bed and a single row of seats. (Afaik)

I sold my small white pickup once, and ended up with a different small white pickup a few years later. I do enough (small) truck things that having a truck on hand just in case is worth it for me; but even with minimal miles per year there's certainly added expense from maintenance some of which ends up being time based, registration fees, and incremental costs for liability insurance on another vehicle. For quite a while, my family vehicles were a 4-door car/wagon and a small pickup, but that doesn't work for everyone; I feel better served with a minivan, a 4-door phev, and a pickup (and a silly old rear engined vw van with only the front seats, mostly for midlife crisis, but also handy for picking up large items that don't want to be inside for transport)
by pjmlp | 2025-12-05 08:08:12+00:00
In the specific case of the OpenJDK, there isn't the one JVM, rather a standard[0], like in ISO languages, with a reference implementation to go along it,

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

And the list doesn't include all, e.g. PTC (https://www.ptc.com/en/products/developer-tools/perc)

[0] - https://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/index.html
by goku12 | 2025-12-05 08:08:26+00:00
> I think this is living in fantasy land.

As opposed to corporations extracting an insane amount of wealth from the struggling public? Such shallow dismissals ignore the fact that ordinary people know how exploitative these companies are and that they are interested in resisting - if only they knew how.

> Normal people aren't hyper concerned about boot loaders, sideloading or custom ROM's.

I have been guilty of this too. But let me say this. We on HN have been quite contemptuous towards 'normal people', especially regarding their technical competence.

Besides, you pretend as if everyone needs to know all those stuff to take advantage of it. Back in the past when mechanical watches and repairable automobiles were common place, we all took advantage of their serviceability, despite that only a rare few of us knew how to service it. We just paid those independent experts to do it for us. Everybody knew some basic economics to realize how this was in their favor. The argument that serviceability has no use to the majority is a disingenuous and harmful, all by itself.

> Normal people just want to buy a phone and use it and they can do that today. They don't want the added complications.

Just go ahead and ask these 'normal people' whether they prefer a serviceable device or one that suffers deliberate obsolescence in less than 3 years and forces them to buy an entirely new one.

> There is a reason Amazon is so popular and massive. The goal should be to add simplicity and not add complexity if want something to be popular.

Look at how many of these 'normal people' actively try to avoid the likes of Amazon. Their insane wealth allows them to manipulate the market in their favor. People learned this well during the post-pandemic hoarding epidemic.

So please stop pretending that essential features and freedoms are too complex to be worth it. People can take advantage of them even if they don't know how to do it themselves - like by paying independent professional servicemen. And at least in the current smartphone market, its complexity is entirely the contribution of the OEMs. Also, one of the reasons why the old PCs running windows 10 doesn't have to be junked immediately (due to win 11 requirements) is because it is so easy to install an up-to-date and modern OS on it.

Security, convenience etc are false arguments against user freedoms, and are most often the result of the deliberate choices by the OEMs. They're are just consumer gas lighting tactics.
by rmunn | 2025-12-05 08:09:22+00:00
Oh, pi has its place: in engineering, for example, it's much easier to measure the diameter of a pipe than its radius: just put calipers around the widest point (outside or inside depending) and you have the diameter. In fact, you probably wouldn't ever measure the radius; in places where you need the radius, you'd just measure the diameter and divide by 2.

But for teaching trig? Explaining radians should definitely be tau-based.
by gf000 | 2025-12-05 08:09:52+00:00
The layer is thinner because you can't create abstractions as well in that language.

But that's like saying that a bicycle is better than a car, because the first is simpler to understand. (At the same time, nothing prevents you from assembling a bicycle in Java if that's indeed what you need. But for general long distance travel you are better off starting with a car frame, aren't you?)
by bigtones | 2025-12-05 08:10:03+00:00
Dr Jeyanthi Kunadhasan is an Australian Anaesthetist that has been on this COVID mRNA vaccine is bad rant for a long time, and has been widely discredited in Australia. She is misinterpreting the deaths data in the trial, which unfortunately is a widespread naive error.

1. In the part of the trial in which you can actually compare raw death counts because of the randomization, the deaths were 15-14, with confidence intervals nearly completely overlapping, and so there was no evidence vaccine arm death rates were significantly higher than placebo arm.

2. After the subjects were unblinded, the placebo subjects were allowed to crossover to the vaccine arm, and the vast majority did, with >>90% of the subjects vaccinated in the end and <<10% remaining vaccinated. After crossover, there were 9 additional deaths, 6 of who had been vaccinated and 3 of which had not yet been vaccinated.

3. But one cannot simply add the 6 to the 15 and 3 to the 14 and compare 21 vs. 17 to compare death rate of vaccinated to unvaccinated, since after the crossover, the vast majority were vaccinated and very few remained unvaccinated.

4. If one wants to assess the death rate after vaccination during the post-crossover period, they must treat it as an observational cohort study with time-varying vaccination status, adjusting for the wildly different group sizes and the fact that there were far more person-years of potential risk of death (i.e. denomiantors for death rates) after vaccination than in the pre-vaccination group. If such an analysis is done, there is also no evidence that death rate after vaccination is greater than before vaccination.

So, in the end, there is no evidence that the death rate in the vaccinated group is greater than the placebo/unvaccinated group.

Then her second big error is presuming, without any evidence whatsoever, that the excess deaths in Australia are predominately caused by the vaccine.

https://twitter.com/jsm2334/status/1801347491138293771
by librasteve | 2025-12-05 08:10:15+00:00
I see that my Raku chapter was downvoted a couple of times. Well OK, I am an unashamed shill for such a fantastic and yet despised language. Don’t knock til you try it.

Some comments below on “I want a Go, but with more powerful OO” - well Raku adheres to the Smalltalk philosophy… everything is an object, and it has all the OO richness (rope) of C++ with multiple inheritance, role composition, parametric roles, MOP, mixins… all within an easy to use, easy to read style.

my $forty-two = 42 but 'forty two';

Look away now if you hate sigils.
by qwerpy | 2025-12-05 08:10:31+00:00
We had a 5 day power outage (Bellevue WA, not exactly in the middle of nowhere) and after 2 days both the cable internet and cell towers went down, so even 5G would not have helped. I had backup power but no internet. On the way back from Best Buy with my new starlink, everything came back online of course. But now I’m ready for the next multi day outage.

I have a network cable from my secondary WAN port on my dream machine running to my first story roof where there’s a wall mount ready for starlink to be plopped in.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2025-12-05 08:10:32+00:00
> opens the door to competition. Tariff's change this and make it such that domestic producers can produce things at a cost comparable, and ideally less, than other countries.

Haha, Nope. It's more like closing a door. An actual economist says this:

"If you look at page 1 of the tariff handbook, it says: Don't tariff inputs. It's the simplest way to make it harder—more expensive—for Americans to do business. Any factory around the world can get the steel, copper, and aluminum it needs without paying a 50% upcharge, except an American factory. Think about what that will do to American competitiveness."

https://bsky.app/profile/justinwolfers.bsky.social/post/3lud...
by pyuser583 | 2025-12-05 08:10:43+00:00
The term is “parents.”

I really don’t care about what’s on the internet, until my kids get exposed to it. How grownups talk to other grownups in private isn’t my concern.

But when kids - and I mean my kids - enter the loop it becomes my business, and ideological concerns go out the window.

I’ve ranted and raved about how terrible filtering software is, and how school provided computers contain massive workarounds.

The real concern isn’t porn sites — the real concern is poorly moderated social media sites. Ones where kids post things other kids see. And guess what the kids post?

But a lot of the nasty content shared in these poorly moderated sites gets it start elsewhere.

I’m cynical about any law, but my bias toward legal action is only increasing as the online situation is only getting worse.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-12-05 08:10:55+00:00
Even BMW has a few electrical cars that aren't half bad. The main problem is that they are compromise cars that can be sold as ICE, PHEV, or full EV.

That means more complexity, sub optimal design, less efficiency, etc. However, competition is indeed brutal right now. Tesla did something that only some other manufacturers have managed to copy so far: make cars that are EV only from the ground up. Love them or hate them, they don't make any design compromises to allow space for a combustion engine, a generator, or whatever. There's no room for a transmission, a fuel tank, or even an engine compartment. That's where the Frunk goes. The result is a car that's simpler, more efficient, and more optimal for what it does.

BYD did the same. Kia and Hyundai are having a lot of success with their electric only line of cars. And in the EU Renault and the Stellantis group have some decent and competitive low cost models on the market. Tesla's advantage is rapidly evaporating here.

Japanese car makers have been more conflicted on this. But Nissan's collaboration with Renault is giving them access to the right tech to adjust course. And even Toyota is now using a lot of Chinese made drive trains and components to finally offer EVs that are actually not that bad. The danger is of course that "made in Japan" has very limited value in this world if all your core tech is effectively Chinese and European. That's something that might change in the next years of course.

Cost wise, buying a compromise car means having to deal with more that can break, more components that may need replacing, and a lot of increasingly obsolete parts and components that are no longer being modernized. Combustion engine R&D ground to a halt about fifteen years ago. All those fuel injection systems, and other computer intensive hardware that keeps them going is aging fast and not really being invested in a lot at this point. Sourcing replacement parts might get harder and more expensive over time.
by Suppafly | 2025-12-05 08:11:02+00:00
A lot of younger people have no idea how great Windows 2000 was. Before that you could run 9x and have it bluescreen all the time, or NT4 and not have drivers for any consumer level products and the really shitty UI from windows 3x. 2000 was the best under the hood and had the great GUI, and had drivers for most things you'd want to install and was stable and handled networking well. Just all around the best OS at the time.
by pech0rin | 2025-12-05 08:13:17+00:00
Depressing how many comments are supporting this practice. The point is tests are supposed to be hard and fair. Everyone gets the same amount of time, same preparation for a presentation. Then you are judged based on your ability, preparation and skill. Pressure leads to growth, competition to effort. I hate this new world where we bend over backwards to make everything “fair”.
by rcarmo | 2025-12-05 08:14:10+00:00
I would counter your three assertions with a few thoughts:

- there are now literally thousands of ways to host personal websites, even if we’re not in the LiveJournal age anymore

- there are also several services out there to host comments (many of which I tried over the years before I realized the absence of comments was a feature, not a bug)

- RSS is still a thing. Very much so. My site publishes a full RSS feed, and I have at least as many individual RSS GET requests as for the rest of my site, bar the homepage.
by nottorp | 2025-12-05 08:14:47+00:00
Replying to myself (hey, I like myself and I'd like to have a conversation with me):

CSS doesn't have it right? Just Chrome.

Considering how all kinds of "experts" have started to make web sites that only work fine in Chrome [1], this is not exactly a useful new feature, more like embrace and extend...

[1] Orange Romania, when will I be able to download my invoices again in Firefox?
by zozbot234 | 2025-12-05 08:15:19+00:00
It's more like a waste-infinite-money glitch, if that's what they're trying. There's no way that a simple speculative attack actually makes DRAM more valuable in the long term on its own, and that's the only win condition for that kind of play. People have tried to hoard all sorts of commodities as a mere speculative play on the market, and it never works.
by ongy | 2025-12-05 08:15:56+00:00
It's about getting a clear statement form the US government that this can be ignored at no risk to them aiding in enforcement.

I.e. peace of mind. Not just for the large~ish (questionable in various ways, as the lawyer points out himself) sites currently under fire, but for all the minor ones that simply don't have the resources to comply with every country.

(I haven't read today's article) in a previous blog post, they did mention that geo-blocking the UK was not enough for ofcom to stop the harassment. So having a clear statement, and potentially using that as angle to accuse Ofcom of harassment should they not stop, would be quite welcome.

While the US has a great track record with protecting their own citizen against legal threats from the outside (maybe a bit too much at times), I'd love the same to be done in the EU, since I'm a lot more doubtful about our relations with the UK in such aspects.
by thatwasunusual | 2025-12-05 08:16:02+00:00
> after 2 days both the cable internet and cell towers went down, so even 5G would not have helped.

I discovered the same thing the hard way myself recently (in Norway); turns out that cell towers only has enough battery for ~24-36 hours (if you're lucky).

However, someone messing with the fibre to my house is a bigger possibility than power outage, so I'll probably end up with this 5G product. :)
by defrost | 2025-12-05 08:16:03+00:00
Equally concerning is the fact that the VRBPAC members failed to ask Pfizer for an update on the number of subject deaths that occurred between Nov 14, the data cutoff date for the EUA application, and Dec 10, the date of the VRBPAC meeting. Had they asked, the VRBPAC would have become aware of an additional six subject deaths that occurred during that interval (two in the vaccinated and four in the placebo arm). A total of 17 subject deaths occurred by the date of the VRBPAC meeting (eight vaccinated and nine placebo). Had these accurate results been presented at the VRBPAC meeting, it would have been clear that the vaccine did not save lives.

It's equally troubling how much deadlier than a mRNA vaccine this placebo appears to be !! ( /s obviously(?) )
by moritzwarhier | 2025-12-05 08:16:35+00:00
And there is Reinforcement Learning, which is essential to make models act "conversational" and coherent, right?

But I wanted to stay abstract and not go into to much detail outside my knowledge and experience.

With the GPT-2 and GPT-3 base models, you were easily able to produce "conversations" by writing fitting preludes (e.g. Interview style), but these went off the rails quickly, in often comedic ways.

Part of that surely is also due to model size.

But RILHF seems more important.

I enjoyed the rambling and even that was impressive at the time.

I guess the "anthropic principle" you are referring to works in a similar direction, although in a different way (selection, not training).

The only context in which I've heard details about selection processes post-training so far was this article about OpenAIs model updates from GPT-4o onwards, discussed earlier here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46030799

(there's a gift link in the comments)

The parts about A/B-Testing are pretty interesting.

The focus is ChatGPT as an enticing consumer product and maximizing engagement, not so much the benchmarks and usefulness of models. It briefly addresses the friction between usefulness and sycophancy though.

Anyway, it's pretty clever to use the wording "anthropic principle" here, I only knew the metaphysical usage (why do humans exist).
by MaxL93 | 2025-12-05 08:17:13+00:00
I'd love to watch Netflix AV1 streams but they just straight up don't serve it to my smart TV or my Windows computers despite hardware acceleration support.

The only way I can get them to serve me an AV1 stream is if I block "protected content IDs" through browser site settings. Otherwise they're giving me an H.264 stream... It's really silly, to say the least
by gusgus01 | 2025-12-05 08:17:43+00:00
Yeah, it's been 5 years (almost 6) since python 2.7 stopped receiving security updates, but it does still run on modern OS's.

Looking at the list, I'm actually kind of surprised there aren't more CVEs for python 2.7, but if you're only running it locally or on an intranet I could see letting it ride.
by Tade0 | 2025-12-05 08:17:45+00:00
In terms of (unnecessary) complexity of modern ICE cars the Car Wizard has a few words that might interest you:

Title of the clip: Why does it cost over $4K to replace a simple $50 gasket?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJMWvyDP3j8

It's not an EV issue. It's a modern car issue.
by yetihehe | 2025-12-05 08:18:03+00:00
> Or I'd use it all day to do the work of 3 people and be on the fast track to promotions.

Or, like execs want, you do work of 3 people, so we can fire two and get the bonus, plus maybe a 5% pay increase for you. "If someone is good at digging, give him a bigger shovel".
by BrenBarn | 2025-12-05 08:19:00+00:00
A charitable way of interpreting "best effort" is that it's similar to what I said: we need standards. But the problems with our notion of "best effort" are:

1. The standards aren't clearly defined (i.e., you must specifically do this).

2. They are defined in terms of efforts rather than effects. It is like saying "every car sold must be made of steel" rather than "every car sold must be capable of withstanding an impact against a concrete wall at 60mph with X amount of deformation, etc." We want the rules to determine what level of threat is protected against, not just what motions the company went through. In the case in the article, it wasn't because hackers bypassed a bunch of safeguards; the company didn't protect against even basic threats.

3. It's not enough to have "liability". That puts the onus on individuals to sue the company for their specific damages. We need criminal penalties that are designed to punish companies (and the individuals who direct them) for the harm they do to society by the overall process of rushing ahead selling things instead of slowing down and being careful. We need large-scale enforcement so that companies actually stop doing these things because the cost of doing them becomes too enormous.

4. Our laws do not adequately take account of the differential power of those who cut corners, and the differential gains reaped. We frequently find small operators on the wrong end of painful lawsuits and onerous criminal penalties, while the biggest companies and wealthiest individuals use their position to avoid consequences. Laws need to explicitly take this into account, lowering the standard of proof for penalties against larger, wealthier, and more powerful companies and individuals, and also making those penalties exponentially higher.
by mrweasel | 2025-12-05 08:19:46+00:00
> it's not like Netflix hasn't had ample time and infinite money to do the same if they wanted to.

Yet they've failed, I think it's a culture problem. Buy HBO and hopefully carry over the culture and skills to Netflix that way is pretty much they only hope. Netflix created a few good series, but it's also clear that they don't have the writing talent to produce the volume they want.

Netflix can produce absolutely beautify shows, but they're not well written. They also can't buy content, because a large number of the license holders have their own streaming platform. Buying HBO could get them access to the content they need, if the contracts and licensing carry over.
by MaxL93 | 2025-12-05 08:20:14+00:00
AV1 is the king of ultra-low bitrates, but as you go higher — and not even that much higher — HEVC becomes just as good, if not more. Publicly-available AV1 encoders (still) have a tendency to over-flatten anything that is low-contrast enough, while x265 is much better at preserving visual energy.

This problem is only just now starting to get solved in SVT-AV1 with the addition of community-created psychovisual optimizations... features that x264 had over 15 years ago!