MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ksherlock | 2025-12-29 18:22:00+00:00
That's very nice. I used to do http://perfectpitchpuzzle.com daily, which is similar but shorter and with wordle mechanics.

I don't know how other people do these things but I've got my keyboard next to my computer so that's where I work it out and the number of attempts (that you know about) isn't meaningful. But it's still great practice.
by hopelite | 2025-12-29 18:22:21+00:00
Ironically, technically speaking, there are seemingly more similarities between British English, i.e., Anglican German and current High German due to various perversions and "reforms" of the German language over the last many decades, in order to drive the Germanic people away from each other.

If the EU were a serious and legitimate institution, there would be an effort to implement reforms that nudge English, Dutch, and present day German all towards better mutual intelligibility, NOT diversion from each other through perversion and "simplification", or what seems to be a pollution and destruction of the current German and Dutch language through what at least Germans have a term for, "Verdenglichung", i.e., the portmanteau of German (De..) and English, prefixed with "ver...", meaning the transformation or application of.
by benoau | 2025-12-29 18:22:22+00:00
All of this is based on the assumption that the way it was done is the way it will be done.

Who will own and run Steam 30 years from now? Gabe Newell will be long-gone, his nebobaby next-CEO will be closing in on retirement if they don't check-out early to enjoy their vast wealth like Gabe has done.

What does Steam look like 60 years from now? Adults using it today are mostly dead and all of their licenses revoked forever, the games removed from circulation gone forever because nobody can ever have a license to use them again. They might be onto their 4th, 5th or 6th CEO by then, half a century removed from Gabe and any expectations we have around the ways he did things.

There's a lot of room for improvement securing some sort of legacy for Steam.
by satvikpendem | 2025-12-29 18:22:46+00:00
If you want socialism, you can make your own co-op right now. In fact, I too was in a software engineering co-op where we all made decisions together and chose an external facing CEO. It works, but only at a small scale. There's a reason co-ops are not the dominant force in the market, if socialism really worked they would be but turns out capitalist corporate structures simply perform better.

And also, the way you dress yourself or have healthcare? Do you not think co-ops like REI don't have a work uniform or give their workers healthcare? Sorry but your takes sound extremely naive, where have you worked before? As I said I have literally worked in a software co-op and it's not all it's cracked up to be based on how you're describing them.
by ssl-3 | 2025-12-29 18:22:56+00:00
Sort of. Fictional character names are just words... unless these words are used in trade, at which point they become trademarks.

And in this context: "Sauron" is a registered trademark. https://trademarks.justia.com/772/04/sauron-77204394.html

This status doesn't necessarily give the owner absolute control of the mark, but it can limit the ways in which others use it in trade.

Things would be this way whether "Sauron" was ever the name of a fictional character or not. The use as a character name by the trademark owner neither implicitly enhances nor diminishes the trademark's integrity.
by lossyalgo | 2025-12-29 18:23:11+00:00
I agree, hence "need a lot of love".

On the other hand, the lack of "love" from Unity's side (at least regarding Inspector) allows a thriving ecosystem for devs to build their own version of what an ideal Inspector drawer should look like, as well as potentially make a living from it. And to boot, who is to say what the ideal Inspector should look like? Do you trust Unity to make an Inspector that fits everyone's wants/needs? I definitely don't - so I'm glad they have a "bare-bones" version that allows us to customize it to our heart's content. Do you want them to be like Apple and "steamroll" everyone and make bad decisions for arbitrary reasons? I definitely don't and I personally HATE a ton of Apple's constant changes and lack of ability to change simple things, such as the inability to disable a lot of animations, which murders my VNC sessions, but I digress.

Regarding non-Inspector things: you already replied to my other rant about unfinished features, so yeah, also in agreement.
by publicdebates | 2025-12-29 18:23:27+00:00
> a technique known for 30+ years in the industry have been

Knowledge sharing with next generations is one of those very tricky things.

For one thing, how would I know where to find this? What book? What teacher? There are so many books, must I read all of them? What if my coworkers awaren't aware of it, how can they share it with me?

Also, an old saying goes, if you're good at something, never do it for free. This isn't exactly a trade secret, but how many people blog about every advanced technique and trick they know? I blogged about how to create real C function pointers from Lua closures, as a way to advertise for my product, but that could very well have been kept a trade secret (and probably should have, as I got 0 sales from that blog post still). Why would anyone want to share this "tiger style" knowledge with newer generations with no personal benefit? Aren't they incentivized to use it secretly, or maybe write it in a book, or blog about it for advertising?
by reactordev | 2025-12-29 18:23:28+00:00
The alternative is the mouse wheel and keybinds. Flight Simulators got this right. Roll up on the wheel to increase the value, roll back on the wheel to decrease the value. Left click to push, right click to pop (or context menu, left click to push it again to turn off).

In fact, if it was all MIDI controlled, it's just a matter of mapping the mouse scroll wheel to a midi channel.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-12-29 18:23:46+00:00
That is certainly a contributing factor, which Matt Stoller has documented robustly in his newsletter "Big" [1] [2], as well as the More Perfect Union org [3] [4].

[1] https://www.thebignewsletter.com/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=thebignewsletter.com

[3] https://perfectunion.us/

[4] https://substack.perfectunion.us/
by piglet_bear | 2025-12-29 18:23:56+00:00
Ha, I can only wish. Maybe true if you live in NYC, SF, Berlin or London.

But most of these don't exist or help with socializing and making new connections where I live (medium sized European university city).

Everyone here only hangs out with their family and school/university mates and that's it. Any other available events are either for college students or lonely retirees but nothing in between.
by himinlomax | 2025-12-29 18:24:05+00:00
The promise of self driving is what's driving Tesla stock.

Two things can happen:

The dream is a bust, and Tesla is worthless.

Or the dream pans out, and almost all other car companies are worth a lot less.

Unless you absolutely want to believe that either self driving is impossible, or Tesla is uniquely unable to achieve it, the valuation is not entirely unwarranted.

Put shortly, Tesla is not a car company, it's a bet on self-driving cars.
by FuckButtons | 2025-12-29 18:24:20+00:00
The usn has consistently failed to procure any new surface ships other than upgrades to existing designs at scale this century.

In the early 2000’s, that didn't matter so much, but the loss of institutional knowledge, capability and manufacturing capacity is now at the point that it seems unlikely to be fixed without a significant amount of public interest and a huge amount of investment, neither of which seem likely without some crisis, at which point it will likely be too late.
by pixl97 | 2025-12-29 18:24:27+00:00
>and too slow for most businesses.

A lot of this is because while a 'good' business is waiting for the 'good' software to be written, some crappy business has already written the crappy software and sold it to all the customers you were depending on. In general customers are very bad at knowing the difference between good and bad software and typically buy what looks flashy or the sales people bribe them the most for.
by its-summertime | 2025-12-29 18:24:32+00:00
There is only 1 Steam client for Linux, and there will only ever be one client, and that client has had basic issues (context menus being a completely new window that steals focus, comes to mind instantly) that have been unresolved year after year.

For GOG, there are plenty of clients for Linux [1][2][3][4], And they are open source, I can go and talk to the people making these clients directly, I can give feedback, I can make changes to make these clients better (and to a small degree, I already have).

[1]: https://sharkwouter.github.io/minigalaxy/

[2]: https://sites.google.com/site/gogdownloader/

[3]: https://heroicgameslauncher.com/

[4]: https://www.hyperplay.xyz/
by stuffn | 2025-12-29 18:24:34+00:00
Ah yes, the quintessential noble savage fallacy.

Before the evil Europeans set their greedy eyes on the new world there was peace, love, and ecstasy every single day. Once the evil Europeans did evil European things the Americas were corrupted for profit and greed. Now the Venezuelans who live in peace and love will be colonized by European descendents, just like natives before.
by VLM | 2025-12-29 18:24:44+00:00
1) He had a HUGE amount of personal charisma. Some lecturers are watched because they know a lot or are famous, despite a lack of public speaking skills. Feynman could have gone into acting or politics the guy is genuinely entertaining and a VERY skilled presenter. Feynman's on camera personality is the professor from Gilligan's island but funnier and friendlier.

2) He got his Nobel price in peak boomer years 1965 and then didn't die until the end of the 80s. For boomers he is "their" generation's physicist just like the WWII gen had Einstein as "their" physicist. Who is "the" popular science fad physicist for the X-ers and younger? Hawking, maybe Susskind, possibly even Sabine, I guess?

3) IMHO he was an autodidact who wrote for fellow autodidacts. That is my learning style. His style REALLY STRONGLY resonates with me and my learning style. If you're capable of self-teaching you get a feel for who's your type of author and who is not. Feynman definitely writes books for people like me. His books and notes are all old, of course, which is sad. As for "moderns" who emit similar intense autodidact vibes, I'd suggest Schroeder and his famous "Introduction to Thermal Physics" from the turn of the century. I subjectively like that book. I don't care if there's a better way to learn bachelors thermodynamics by taking a course in a classroom or watching video lecture, I just like the book's style. Not the superficial style like typography but the organization and connectivity of the topics is very autodidactical, just like Feynman's books. To some extent, he's post-education in that once you are done officially learning, the rest of your life you're an autodidact, like it or not, and Feynman's style leans into that. I still remember as a kid in high school, where I took two years of public high school physics, paging thru a copy of Feynman's lectures in the library and it was so clear and so fascinating compared to my experience in "official classes with new textbooks".
by bolangi | 2025-12-29 18:25:40+00:00
Good morning. An expanding plethora of buttons, tabs, menus requires geometrical memory that may have nothing directly to do with the function in question. The first GUIs were designed that functions be "discoverable," however the size of haystacks in which these discoverable functions hide has grown exponentially, adding cognitive overhead, and increasing the length of apprenticeship needed to master the application.

A slick-looking GUI is a kind of ad for the app. As author of an accessible, terminal-based DAW app, I contrast remembering an incantation like 'add-track' or 'list-buses' with hunting around. These incantations can have shorter abbreviations, such 'lb' for list buses, and 'help bus' or 'h bus' to be sufficiently discoverable, easier for both implementer and user. And then to have hotkeys to bump plugin parameters +/- 1/10/100 etc. Probably I'm pissing into the wind to think the majority of users will ever choose this -- and GUIs do provide amazing facilities for many purposes -- but we do have a huge array of choices on linux, including this plethora of music creation and production apps. That is a big success, IMO.
by Sankozi | 2025-12-29 18:25:42+00:00
"In large codebases, consistency is more important than “good design”" - this is completely opposite from my experience. There is some value in consistency within single module but consistency in a large codebase is a big mistake (unless in extremely rare case that code base consists entirely of very similar modules).

Modules with different requirements should not have single consistent codebase. Testing strategy, application architecture, even naming should be different across different modules.
by mystraline | 2025-12-29 18:25:44+00:00
First, 1 PET scan is around 25mSv. 50mSv is yearly limit for radiation workers. And those are being overly safe to allow accidental overage. 100mSv is start of detectable cancer risk. So the risk for 1 scan is basically 0.

Secondly, someone has medical power of attorney over the non-functional autistics. And in reality, they are the ones at most need of (almost passive) study to help them. Us high functioning autistics dont need anywhere near the help.. And we have no way to know an Aspergers and traditional autism are even similar, other than the spectrum brigade keeps adding more and more under 'autism'.

Simply put, guardian says yes to do a single scan a year, and I see no problem with it. More than 1 a year, and we start getting into potential damage. Maybe with some pie-in-the-sky-IRB whatif situation, sure. But 1 scan/yr has no demonstrable damage.
by satvikpendem | 2025-12-29 18:25:49+00:00
> because dictatorships have never been good systems of government.

This is literally historically wrong, there are many examples to the contrary. If you think any form of government is "always" wrong, I can point you to failed democracies that then prospered in a dictatorial rule too, such as Singapore or South Korea or even China if you want to count that, which have all been basically one party rule to great effect.
by ThrowawayR2 | 2025-12-29 18:26:04+00:00
As an aside, the first unexpected twist was actually Tivoization.

But, anyway, I do not think your analysis captures the situation in the right way. The free-rider problem, where users contribute no/negligible code or money back to FOSS, is the heart of the exploitation; Tivoization or cloud SaaS-ification are merely forms of free-riding. Other forms of the free-rider problem would have eventually become a thorn in the side of FOSS even if those two things had never happened and there is no way to plug that hole in the concept of copyleft.

And I maintain that was entirely predictable (and it was predicted by many a few decades ago!): there is no reason for a business owner to contribute back to FOSS when not contractually obligated to do so. Like the fable of the scorpion and the frog, it's kind of pointless to blame capitalists for doing what everyone knew what they were going to do all along.
by makeitdouble | 2025-12-29 18:26:15+00:00
> 2 years

I've been thinking about this a lot. 2~3 years is a long time, long enough to have a pretty good grasp on what a code maintained by 50~100 does in pretty concrete terms, come up with decent improvement ideas, and see at least one or two structural ideas hit production.

If the person then stays 1 or 2 more years they get a chance to further refine, but usually will be moved up the ladder Peter Principle style. If they get a chance to lead these architecture changes that company has a chance to be on a decent path technally speaking.

I'm totally with you on the gist of it: architects will usually be a central switch arranging these ideas coming from more knowledgeable places. In the best terms I see their role as guaranteeing consistency and making sure teams don't impede each other's designs.
by Yizahi | 2025-12-29 18:26:20+00:00
My data is based on the internationally recognized fact that Hamas is terrorist organization by USA, Commonwealth, EU, Japan and others. Which means they (Hamas) are liars.

Journalist's data is based on the empty words of the said terrorist org.

I don't know about you, but I feel very confident in my opinion based of this data.

PS: also you don't know what ad hominem means and confuse it with regular criticism. I've never attacked journalist's personal life or inividual traits or even his unrelated articles.
by nirv | 2025-12-29 18:26:31+00:00
> he believes GOG’s approach is more relevant than ever: no lock-in, no forced platforms, sense of ownership

I really hope that we'll be freed from the forced Windows platform. Sure, you can download and install GOG games today using a third-party client, but it'll never be as good as official support. There's also the issue of syncing saved games and achievements, not to mention the additional friction for less tech-savvy users.
by alexgieg | 2025-12-29 18:26:57+00:00
OP here.

True, if you prove they're in fact a completely underperforming employee. Notice this is not only for the position they're in at the moment, but for every other conceivable position they might be reassigned to before the conclusion becoming it's impossible to keep them and the company positively, absolutely, needs to hire someone else for their place.

For absolute unfireability, there are countries where government employees cannot be fired no matter what, but that's not private employment so it doesn't count for your question.

The closest to that for private employers, that I know about, was Japan before the 1990's economic crisis, in which the culture (not the laws, but the culture was strong enough for it to be the same in practice) prevented companies from firing employees. If an employee became useless, the company assigned them a desk and nothing to do. After a few weeks of this the not-fired employee felt so ashamed of being paid for doing nothing 8 hours a day, they themselves asked to be let go (which was also the expected cultural thing for them to do, so they did it).

Regardless, the point is that at-will employment vs not-at-will employment doesn't affect things as much as it seems to do. And if you look at statistic comparing US States that don't have at-will employment vs those that have it, there's no practical difference either.
by cyberax | 2025-12-29 18:27:17+00:00
Why?

Planes are faster, and there is actual competition keeping prices down. There is no competition on railroads, no accountability, no nothing. More importantly, railroads have to be managed centrally to work. And this makes them overwhelmingly complex, resulting in an ever-growing bureaucracy.

Air travel is decentralized, and while individual airports (cue: BER) can get screwed up, it doesn't cascade through the whole system.

We just need to add a bit of carbon pricing to reflect the true price of flights.
by spwa4 | 2025-12-29 18:27:34+00:00
Given that this is a flag that the carrier has to explicitly set on the eSIM, you should blame the carriers that do this.

To be completely honest, if a hard reset removes the profile it should get reinstalled, it is actually not okay that a hard reset works.

Why is it like this? This is the way subsidized phones without physical sim work.
by fauigerzigerk | 2025-12-29 18:28:07+00:00
>I usually don't try to imagine how someone should handle the error.

But that's exactly what you do when you...

>... try to indicate the different types of errors that could occur and what type of information needs to be included to be useful to the caller.

Modelling the error domain means to decide which possible distinctions matter and which don't. This is not self evident. It's you imagining what users may want to do with your errors.

Is it enough for the caller to know that some string you're parsing is invalid or do they need to know what it is exactly that makes it invalid?

If you decide to just pass on everything you happen to know based on your current implementation then you are putting restrictions on future changes to that implementation, potentially including the use of third party libraries.

What if you find a shortcut or a library that makes your parser 10 times faster but doesn't provide this detailed information?

What I see a lot in Rust is that massive amounts of implementation details are leaked via errors. thiserror actually encourages this sort of implementation leak:

#[derive(Error, Debug)]
pub enum MyError {
Io(#[from] io::Error),
Glob(#[from] globset::Error),
}

https://docs.rs/thiserror/latest/thiserror/
by caconym_ | 2025-12-29 18:28:09+00:00
It is more useful to think about it in terms of what that effort actually entails.

If you haven't ever written a novel, or even a short story, you cannot possibly imagine how much of your own weird self ends up in it, and that is a huge part of what will make it interesting for people to read. You can also express ideas as subtext, through the application of technique and structure. I have never reached this level with any form of visual art but I imagine it's largely the same.

A prompt, or even a series of prompts, simply cannot encode such a rich payload. Another thing artists understand is that ideas are cheap and execution is everything; in practice, everything people are getting out of these AI tools is founded on a cheap idea and built from an averaging of everything the AI was trained on. There is nothing interesting in there, nothing unique, nothing more than superficially personal; just more of the most generic version of what you think you want. And I think a lot of people are finding that that isn't, in fact, what they want.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-12-29 18:28:21+00:00
Can't win against irrational exuberance and fraud that isn't prosecuted in the capital markets ("voting machine vs weighing machine"). Just have to wait for failure of the enterprise, equity wipeout, and recapitalization under better human management (if you're optimizing for a company that actually manufacturers and sells a product vs a shell to pump a stock and enrich the board members who enable him with a lack of corporate governance). The factories and Supercharger network will remain intact under a reorganization.

Musk can move money around SpaceX/Tesla/XAI/whatever the next story to investors is to prop up valuations and share prices, but can he win against China's clean tech export machine? Long term, I think not (China is a third of global manufacturing capacity as of this comment, and the world is their TAM). So he'll do the tech bro thing, giving talks, going to demo days, spending his wealth on pet projects, etc, while innovators innovate and point the firehose of these products at the world. Are you going to talk people out of his religion? Unlikely. The faithful will remain so, because that's how the human brain sometimes operates.

Ember Energy: China Cleantech Exports Data Explorer - https://ember-energy.org/data/china-cleantech-exports-data-e... (updated monthly) ("In 2024, China produced around 80% of the world’s solar PV modules and battery cells, and 70% of electric vehicles.")

US warns China overproducing EVs, batteries, semiconductors for global dominance - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41909869 - October 2024

China's Batteries Are Now Cheap Enough to Power Huge Shifts - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40954508 - July 2024

China Already Makes as Many Batteries as the Entire World Wants - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40933773 - July 2024

(as of this comment, ~50% of light vehicle sales in China are NEVs [battery electric of plug in hybrid] while exporting ~6M units/year, more than total annual US light vehicle sales)