MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alephnerd | 2025-12-08 08:18:12+00:00
As someone who formerly worked in this space, the issue is administration is orthogonal to legislature.

Administration and implementation is inherently technocratic in nature, but legislation is is often driven by short-term electoral needs.

This isn't to say autocracy is the answer (it isn't), but the dysfunction arises when people assume that every single administrative decision needs to be made by "elected officials" and constantly second guess administrators.

When administration from local to federal becomes politicized (as is increasingly the norm across the democratic world), implementation slows down severely because the "ideal" solution might not be political tenable.

A good example of this is welfare expansion in the US - the assumption is lower income voters who voted for Trump voted irrationally, but in action, the majority of Trump voters tended to be in the 25th-75th percentile income bracket, which in most cases put them outside of the bracket for a number of social services. Those services which were available such as the ACA/Obamacare have been protected by legislators for that very reason because they know they would lose their seats as a result.

You're in Japan so you've probably seen similar decisions being made with regards to Japanese rice protectionism [0] - unpopular with urban voters, but urban voters don't swing elections at scale.

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41367653
by Freak_NL | 2025-12-08 08:19:40+00:00
Mostly, although some text analysis would need to be done to prevent this:

(people commenting about how a bad design choice in ACorp's flagship product AProduct led to the tragic death of ten labradoodle puppies.) AD: Buy two AProduct, get one free — limited time offer! Woof! ACorp — your pup will love it!
by Bishonen88 | 2025-12-08 08:20:19+00:00
semi-related: after installing pi-hole and using it on my wifi, Netflix on the TV stopped working, ads on (some, big) polish websites were still present. Uninstalled 10 minutes later. Had similar experience last time I tried (years ago) - pihole gave me problems using work-related pages or whatnot. Is there nothing better? E.g. ublock origin but for dns?
by hexbin010 | 2025-12-08 08:20:48+00:00
I presume you mean keep running services as normal until someone inspects it in person. Perhaps, if the person receiving the report knew that services ran pretty slowly over it anyway that time of night.

But it's basically just a nice idea in theory.

The British public doesn't have that kind of apetite for risk. Take a look at responses to existing high profile incidents.

We are proud of our approach to safety and safety records (trains, road etc) and I don't see that changing any time soon. Personally, I think we are too risk averse in too many areas.

AIUI there is a mandate at Network Rail to take all reports made by the public very seriously, which came off the back of a previous incident.

Plus there is of course the huge logistical challenge - the GB rail network is not small.
by drekipus | 2025-12-08 08:21:32+00:00
I guess it really is too broad of a sector to think of any clear cut solutions. I'll tap out, but my main shtick is the poverty programming but. I think k that perpetuates.

I would agree with housing first. Definitely something that goes a long way. But it's also not clear cut (IE: too many recovering drug addicts in the same neighbourhood will bring each other down..)

While some people might only be on welfare temporarily, others are long term. And removing it drops the "floor" for everyone at once. Having seen death and evil that happens in poor.. families, societies, etc.. I don't mind the idea of letting certain elements die.

I'll keep the tactical victim hood, it's the only way I get positive responses that takes me on good faith. Otherwise I'm just a "corporate bootlicker who doesn't know anything" or "privileged male(?) with typical survivorship bias"-- I gotta get that out of the way first, this is my learned behaviour. I'm counter-programmed. Hate the game not the player.
by Someone | 2025-12-08 08:21:52+00:00
Old-time x86 sort-of has “states representable in registers but not main memory”, too.

Compilers used to use its 80-bit floating point registers for 64-bit float computations, but also might spill them to memory as 64-bit float numbers.

https://hal.science/hal-00128124v3/file/floating-point.pdf section 3 has some examples, including one where the assert can fail in:

int main (void) { double x = 0x1p-1022, y = 0x1p100, z; do_nothing(&y); z = x / y; if (z != 0) { do_nothing(&z); assert(z != 0); } }

with

void do nothing (double *x) { }

in a different compilation unit.
by seeknotfind | 2025-12-08 08:22:05+00:00
The last digit of pi doesn't exist since it's irrational. Chaitan's constant, later busy beaver numbers, or any number of functions may be uncomputable, but since they are uncomputable, I'd be assuming that their realizations don't exist. Sure, we can talk about the concept, and they have a meaning in the formal system, but that's precisely what I'm saying: they don't exist in this world. They only exist as an idea.

Say for instance that you could arrange quarks in some way, and out pops, from the fabric of the universe, a way to find the next busy beaver numbers. Well, we'd be really feeling sorry then, not least because "computable" would turn out to be a misnomer in the formalism, and we'd have to call this clever party trick "mega"-computable. We'd have discovered something that exists beyond turing machines, we'd have discovered, say, a "Turing Oracle". Then, we'd be able to "mega"-compute these constants. Another reason we'd really feel sorry is because it would break all our crypto.

However, that's different than the "idea of Chaitan's constant" existing. That is, the idea exists, but we can't compute the actual constant itself, we only have a metaphor for it.
by lawn | 2025-12-08 08:22:38+00:00
> If you're a good person engineer, why does sending money in seconds need blockchain? There's parts of the world where this is commonplace and free as well.

The promise was to make this available for everyone, to send money everywhere.

For example for me in Sweden it's really, really hard to send money directly to people in Ukraine since the Swedish banks simply refuse to send money there.
by Letstalk123 | 2025-12-08 08:23:05+00:00
It’s interesting how we now have incredibly efficient tools for messaging, broadcasting, and sharing information, yet the basic experience of talking to another human being online hasn’t improved much. Most platforms optimize for engagement, not presence, and the result is a constant stream of interaction without much actual connection. I’m curious if others feel that we’ve overbuilt the infrastructure but underbuilt the part that makes communication meaningful.
by inesranzo | 2025-12-08 08:23:20+00:00
> Daring Fireball has been doing the one ad a week in RSS with no tracking for over a decade. The sponsors must think they work.

I have no interest for anything sold in ads in their RSS and I assume they are tracking in the links that you click too (otherwise why spend all $11K for no results?)

> He claims to never look at his server logs and got rid of Google Analytics ages ago.

That is a good start, hopefully he should consider switching to a community supported model rather than rely on advertisers.
by ErroneousBosh | 2025-12-08 08:23:22+00:00
Sadly, much as I love Forth, it's kind of the same thing. It's an awesome language and it's a great way to bring up bare metal to a functional state, but who does that these days?

I could probably include Forth as a scripting language in a bigger app, but that app is probably going to want more complex variables than machine word size ints, and fixed-length strings. So, oh dear, Forth's not a great fit for that, and everyone just uses Lua anyway, so Lua it is.

Which is a pity, because I like Forth, and I used to to create possibly the nerdiest project on Github. I like Forth a lot, and I'd encourage anyone curious about how you get from "chunk of thinking sand and copper" to "thing I can type commands in" to have a crack at it - it's easy enough to implement your own, just to see how it's done.

But I don't expect anyone else to jump up and like it too, just because I said it's cool.

Well, maybe one or two of you will?
by roncesvalles | 2025-12-08 08:24:18+00:00
To understand why crypto became popular requires understanding that there was a massive anti-America (and by extension, anti-USD) sentiment in the 00s and 10s, mostly on the heels of America's various wars in the Middle East. For some brief period of time, America was the evil imperialist global enemy number one, even in the eyes of many American people. There was practically a patriotism crisis in America around when Trump first came to power.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine completely hard-flipped this overnight. America once again became the good guys of the world, and with it died any serious movements to disrupt the USD and greater financial status quo. More critically it also started the narrative that China might do to Taiwan what Russia is doing to Ukraine. It basically brought the world back into the late-20th-century good guys in the West versus bad guys in the East bipolarity.
by IshKebab | 2025-12-08 08:24:49+00:00
I agree. First of all I don't think Ada is a difficult language to learn. Hire C++ programmers and let them learn Ada.

Secondly, when companies say "we can't hire enough X" what they really mean is "X are too expensive". They probably have some strict salary bands and nobody had the power to change them.

In other words there are plenty of expensive good Ada and C++ programmers, but there are only cheap crap C++ programmers.
by ErroneousBosh | 2025-12-08 08:25:14+00:00
> Keep in mind that a lot of our current agriculture is growing feed for livestock as well, so we could cut back on plant farming by a huge amount as well, if we greatly reduced livestock.

Yes and no.

We'd also cut down massively on the amount of food we have available for humans.

What would be better is if people stopped eating soya.
by cestith | 2025-12-08 08:26:00+00:00
TinyCore’s “Core" is still just 17 MB and is text-based. It includes the tools to install everything else. It only supports wired networks for the most part.

“TinyCore” is 23MB. It includes a minimal GUI desktop.

“CorePlus” at 243 MB is internationalized, has a half dozen more window managers to choose, has wireless networking tools, and a remastering tool to spin your own.

http://tinycorelinux.net/downloads.html
by mxfh | 2025-12-08 08:26:01+00:00
Still not quite convinced that the adjective should be applied to the website itself in a quite loose use of the word.

Warner Bros anachronistically keeps this website online would be a simple fix; here used to reference and to point out that maintaining an untouched 1996 promotional site at it's original location is not typical for the lifecycle of a website, usually the publisher would rather redirect clicks to some current offer.

Othwerwise there is no anachronism here with the website itself, just it's location under the original URL and not in some archive only.

The website itself fulfilled its purpose for promoting the movie when it was released and simply continues to exist.

You wouldn’t call posters, magazines, or other artifacts from the ’90s anachronistic just for still existing. Being retrievable doesn’t make something outdated by itself.

“Anachronistic” would apply only if a new promotional site were created today to look like this—though that would more likely be called “retro.”

Or if the movie industry insisted on using CSS-free table layouts for all its promotional websites, similar to other norms or laws that feel anachronistic because they no longer match current needs.

Sadly the whole piece reads like it was written 80%+ by an LLM too, seriously why all the emojis? But apparently this is where content is heading in general.
by seeknotfind | 2025-12-08 08:26:03+00:00
I suspect that once quantum computers actually scale up so that you can play with them, we'll find all sorts of interesting things to do with them.

However, even now, you can imagine that if quantum computers were small enough, it would be worth it to have it just for the asymptotically fast prime generation with Shor's algorithm. I don't think that's that far fetched. Of course, people wouldn't necessarily need to know they have a quantum computer, but they don't necessarily know the workings of their computers today anyway.
by skepti | 2025-12-08 08:26:24+00:00
For many types of projects and approaches, avoiding UB is necessary but not at all sufficient. It's perfectly possible to have critical bugs that can cause loss of health or life or loss of millions of dollars, without any undefined behavior being involved.

Funnily enough, Rust's pattern matching, an innovation among systems languages without GCs (a small space inhabited by languages like C, C++ and Ada), may matter more regarding correctness and reliability than its famous borrow checker.
by goku12 | 2025-12-08 08:27:03+00:00
Don't you think that a lot more improvement in variability and integration can be achieved with better optics? (for the photolithography, of course. I don't remember what they used for plasma etching and ion implantation.) I don't believe that they have explored a lot on that front yet.

> So if you want a paradigmatic shift, you need low cost patterning, and the best way I can see is to use clever chemistry and a much different design style.

Is that a speculation, or do you have a more concrete idea about what needs improvement and how? I'm especially curious about the 'much different design style' part. Could you elaborate that?
by omnicognate | 2025-12-08 08:27:10+00:00
It's a dubious comparison but not because of "per year". The comparison is implicitly to one year's worth of GDP, which is a currency amount.

It's dubious because whereas a year's worth of GDP has some claim to actually being the value of something (with many caveats but it's engineered to behave like that as much as possible), market cap isn't. It's the amount all the shares would cost if someone bought them all in one go for the price some shares were most recently purchased for, which would never happen.
by cycomanic | 2025-12-08 08:27:28+00:00
> Those are single-member LLC revenue numbers. You can get $10M in revenue just by being in a low-margin business. For industries with a 1% margin that's $100k a year in net income, i.e. wages and benefits for one person.

I'm not sure I understand your argument? Wages come out of revenue not income? So the $100k would go to the owners, but as captical gains not wages.
by kstrauser | 2025-12-08 08:28:00+00:00
> In the 2000's, politics interfered and browser vendors removed plug-in support, instead preferring their own walled gardens and restricted sandboxes

That's one way to say it. The more common way was that users got tired of crappy plugins crashing their browsers, and browser devs got tired of endless complaints from their users.

It wasn't "politics" of any sort that made browsers sandbox everything. It was the insane number of crashes, out-of-memories, pegged CPUs, and security vulnerabilities that pushed things over the edge. You can only sit through so many dozens of Adobe 0-days before it starts to grate.
by lmm | 2025-12-08 08:28:14+00:00
> Software engineering can’t be the only engineering where you ask the engineers how much something will cost or how much time it will take and the answer is “it’s impossible to know”.

Because it's not engineering at all. But even if it was, plenty of engineering projects are impossible to estimate - the ones that are doing something novel - and disliking that fact doesn't make it go away.

> Even very inaccurate estimates can be helpful for decision making if they are on the right order of magnitude

If what the business wants is an order-of-magnitude, they should ask for that; often (not always!) that's a lot easier.
by finaard | 2025-12-08 08:28:42+00:00
Nowadays there's eat as excellent terminal emulator for emacs, which should replace the need to run external terminals.

I've been using it for a w while, and recently finally got fed up about terminals on my macbook not behaving as nicely as the ones on my linux box with proper tiling window managers, so spent some effort to make SSH into a terminal with completion easy from emacs, and now mostly handle terminals in emacs.
by KaiserPro | 2025-12-08 08:28:45+00:00
> cryptography to the electoral system can be rooted in the pragmatic AND be abstracted to a layman

what you're arguing for is a system that you understand and can verify, but not other people.

You're also missing the bigger issue which is that voting systems vary by state, which means to do what you need to do would require federal/constitutional change.

Plus how do you verify and guarantee the terminals are not tampered with (especially as they are all going to be digital, and securing hardware in remote locations is fucking hard. )

Much as its not fun, paper votes with local counting stations are harder to corrupt universally (unless you have government collusion)
by VBprogrammer | 2025-12-08 08:29:01+00:00
> Transformers don't 'trip'. Circuit breakers do.

I'm not sure what this pedantry adds. It's pretty common to say that a piece of equipment tripped for example whole power stations, a generator, a pump etc. When of course it's the circuit breaker protecting that equipment or even occasionally something like a physical over speed trip.

The pod drive architecture, and diesel electric more generally, only makes sense when the other benefits outweigh the efficiency losses of converting from mechanical to electrical and back again. It's very difficult to beat a shaft connected directly from the flywheel to the propeller.
by general1465 | 2025-12-08 08:29:22+00:00
It will be 2008 all over again. Nobody will be jailed, but the excuses are going to be juicy. I can already come with these, will see, time will tell how well I guessed:

- Too big to fail

- We can't jail those people, we need them to push our innovation forward

- They had no idea what they are doing

- Blaming China for pushing USA into the AI race
by cookiengineer | 2025-12-08 08:30:26+00:00
Check out "Europe as a Software Colony" [1], it's an excellent documentary including about the Munich case specifically.

Then watch the Scale 22x talk of the former Mexican CTO, because those stories are so close to industrial espionage it's absurd what kind of influence Microsoft has over diplomats and ambassadors. [2]

[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=duaYLW7LQvg

[2] https://youtube.com/watch?v=kLSHtx3Wi_M
by mike_hearn | 2025-12-08 08:31:02+00:00
What field are you in?

In many fields it's gross professional misconduct only in theory. This sort of thing is very common and there's never any consequence. LLM-generated citations specifically are a new problem but citations of documents that don't support the claim, contradict it, have nothing to do with it or were retracted years ago have been an issue for a long time.

Gwern wrote about this here:

https://gwern.net/leprechaun

"A major source of [false claim] transmission is the frequency with which researchers do not read the papers they cite: because they do not read them, they repeat misstatements or add their own errors, further transforming the leprechaun and adding another link in the chain to anyone seeking the original source. This can be quantified by checking statements against the original paper, and examining the spread of typos in citations: someone reading the original will fix a typo in the usual citation, or is unlikely to make the same typo, and so will not repeat it. Both methods indicate high rates of non-reading"

I first noticed this during COVID and did some blogging about it. In public health it is quite common to do things like present a number with a citation, and then the paper doesn't contain that number anywhere in it, or it does but the number was an arbitrary assumption pulled out of thin air rather than the empirical fact it was being presented as.

It was also very common for papers to open by saying something like, "Epidemiological models are a powerful tool for predicting the spread of disease" with eight different citations, and every single citation would be an unvalidated model - zero evidence that any of the cited models were actually good at prediction.

Bad citations are hardly the worst problem with these fields, but when you see how widespread it is and that nobody within the institutions cares it does lead to the reaction you're having where you just throw your hands up and declare whole fields to be writeoffs.
by jimnotgym | 2025-12-08 08:31:07+00:00
Time for direct action. Record the prices of a trolley full of goods. When a price rings up incorrectly, state loudly that you are not agreeing to that higher price scam and walk out, abandoning your goods at the checkout.

It would be best if a dozen of you went together and so closing all the checkout lanes.

Call a local journalist to come with you.
by kaon_2 | 2025-12-08 08:31:09+00:00
Is Atlas Shrugged really that bad? Heh, I started reading the fountainhead in my mid 30ies. The natural way you get introduced to new characters is great, but man I got so angry with the unrealistic robotic personalities I kept putting the book away and after 200 pages I really just could not continue. So Atlas Shrugged is similar? What a disappointment!

Anybody here that loved the books and would care to elaborate it speak to them so much?
by epistasis | 2025-12-08 08:31:38+00:00
The only thing worse than launching the JVM from the command line, with it's looooooooooooong and inexplicable load time, was hitting a web page and having it lock the browser for that amount of load time.

I remember a few decades ago somebody saying the JVM was incredible technology, and as a user and programmer I still have zero clue what the hell they could have been thinking was good about the JVM.

I hear that now, decades into Java, they have figured out how to launch a program without slowing a computer down for 10+ seconds, but I'll be damned if I find out. There are still so many rough edges that they never even bothered to try to fix about launching a .jar with classpath dependencies. What a mess!
by wisty | 2025-12-08 08:31:40+00:00
The issue isn't that it solves the wrong problem.

The issue is that crypto boosters (including a few already here) claim it solves a whole host of other problems without thinking things through, kind of like some communists. Then if you argue enough they'll point out that things can be fixed ... but bitcoin is now indistinguishable from any other currency, other than its payment system that will no longer be widely used.

Like, you can make it easy to use if there are banks. And those banks will be subject to regulations. Boom, now you have banks and regulations.

You can get a loan from those banks. Now there's fractional reserve banking, with something like a virtual gold standard.

If it ever gets big enough, the fed can write bitcoin denominated bonds, and it's now prerty much a fiat currency, not even virtual gold.

Yes you still have a shadow sector where you can use bitcoin to buy drugs or dodge the taxman. But all the other supposed benefits have gone.
by Nevermark | 2025-12-08 08:31:54+00:00
Well, based on that last share purchase, we have incontrovertible proof that there was indeed one person in history who thought it was worth 3x GPD.

And the fact that in the entire BSSTC shareholder universe, there wasn't any noticeable volume for a sell, or a registered sell limit, at a lower value leading up to the last peak.

That must have been a rough trade, but someone got something out at the last moment.
by jakozaur | 2025-12-08 08:32:10+00:00
Not sure if I get this: WASM lets you use any language in the browser, though it still works way better with languages without GC, such as Rust or a transpiling C engine. Java is unlikely to be the best choice.

In the era of LLM assistants like Claude Code, any engineer can write frontend code using popular stacks like React and TypeScript. This use case is when those tools shine.