MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by renewiltord | 2025-12-10 03:43:37+00:00
Many things hurt the poor more, because there are many things that the poor do that have negative externalities that cannot be compensated for by the productivity of the poor. Strict enforcement against violent crime is pretty regressive in that more poor people are incarcerated when this is done. Others are that strict enforcement of traffic laws is pretty regressive; paid parking is regressive; as are fares for buses and trains. Requiring a minimum number of signatures for a ballot proposition is regressive. Allowing more expensive cars to incorporate more advanced safety features is regressive. Requiring grant applications to be carefully written is regressive. As are minimum flying requirements for pilots. DoD medical standards for soldiers are regressive. Officer ASVAB score requirements are regressive. Surgical requirements. Drug approval requirements.

In fact, anything that requires a standard of performance will be regressive. We don't have to subordinate all goals to regression avoidance. In fact, no functioning society does that.
by yieldcrv | 2025-12-10 03:44:02+00:00
> The learning is the point.

Execution is the point for the vast majority of the population, and academia has always been tone deaf to the raison d'etre of their enrollment base. people are there for jobs, academia is aware they are there for jobs, academia pretends they are the elite socioeconomic class there for knowledge and networking or on the path to be. they are not, they are an underclass in a world where it was temporarily beneficial for a broad population to be knowledge workers. A brief half century that caused all problems that academia faces today.

A half century that will be a footnote in the millenium of these institutions as a reversion to total class segregation returns, glasses clinking to laughs over this case study of folly.

Now, we're experiencing the industrialization of knowledge work, a segment that has been spared for 260 years of the industrial revolution. The nihilism is entirely warranted, and those validating the output of agents should remain specialized in their domain, trained by niche organizations on an adhoc basis via apprenticeships.
by tootie | 2025-12-10 03:44:27+00:00
It's frustrating how poorly most people understand economics and the distinction between price and cost. Everybody in the world is being asked to blithely accept the massive unpaid costs of motor vehicle usage. This is a tiny step towards recouping some of this costs. Roadways, parking, collisions, pollution, noise have all be costs born by all of us. And in NYC that's a load of non-drivers. We should be adopting all sorts of policies to pass those costs on to drivers.

People panic over the thought of free buses when we have millions of miles of free roads.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-12-10 03:44:32+00:00
Isn’t it the opposite though? The poor aren’t able to live in the most popular busiest areas, and usually have to live on the fringes of the city. They might train in though. This is mostly going to benefit the rich people who can still afford to live in the city, but with rent control there are still some non-rich people in the city.
by nomilk | 2025-12-10 03:45:05+00:00
> Bypassing the Mouse.. I use Vimium in the browser.

Vimium seems great for navigation.

Is there any way to get vim keybindings inside text boxes? (I looked at 'wasavi' chrome extension which hasn't been updated in 8 years [0] and the website's down [1])

[0] https://github.com/akahuku/wasavi

[1] http://appsweets.net/wasavi/
by stackghost | 2025-12-10 03:45:33+00:00
>This turns navigation into muscle memory. Cmd-2 is not "Switch to Terminal"; Cmd-2 is just the physical reflex of "I want to code." I don't look. I just hit the key combination, and the active workspace changes.

What happens when some app (like, say, the browser) binds Cmd+<number>? If I hit Cmd+2 right now it'd switch me to the second tab in firefox. Seems like a pain to have to rebind everything.
by sho_hn | 2025-12-10 03:45:44+00:00
Nobody is rolling these out to optimize anything.

Robotic baristas - I'm assuming the OP is referring to those 6dof robot arm deployments - are largely novelty or luxury items meant to catch attention. You either see them in touristy areas trying to attract the Instagram crowd, or (increasingly now, after the novelty is starting to wear of) in corporate lobbies trying to impress.
by JimDabell | 2025-12-10 03:45:47+00:00
> The Many Problems with Celery:

— https://steve.dignam.xyz/2023/05/20/many-problems-with-celer...

> The problems with (Python’s) Celery:

— https://docs.hatchet.run/blog/problems-with-celery

> Dramatiq motivation:

— https://dramatiq.io/motivation.html

Here are some alternatives:

Dramatiq: https://github.com/Bogdanp/dramatiq

RQ: https://github.com/rq/rq

Huey: https://github.com/coleifer/huey

Hatchet: https://github.com/hatchet-dev/hatchet
by iamnothere | 2025-12-10 03:46:05+00:00
Hmm, I have to disagree. There’s a very real threat right now that Western governments will effectively shrug off years of precedent and fully “lock down” the internet—finally killing anonymity and privacy for good, and closing the remaining escape hatches that are available. The UK wants to do it, Australia wants to do it, the EU wants to do it, and a large (though not currently dominant) segment of the US political establishment wants to do it. This is sort of an all hands on deck moment to prevent these people from succeeding. It has to be fought in every venue using any and all means necessary.
by godelski | 2025-12-10 03:47:06+00:00
It's definitely a toxic part of academia. Honestly if it weren't for that I'd take an academic job over an industry one in a heartbeat.

Some irony is my PhD was in machine learning. Every intro course I now (including mine) discusses reward hacking (aka Goodhart's Law). The irony being that the ML community had dialed this problem up to 11. My peers that optimized this push out 10-20 papers a year. I think that's too many and means most of the papers are low impact. I have similar citation counts to them but lower h-index and they definitely get more prestige for that even though it's harder to publish more frequently in my domain (my experiments take a lot longer). I'm with Higgs though, it's a lazy metric and imo does more harm than good.
by ffsm8 | 2025-12-10 03:47:14+00:00
> your side effects (e.g. database writes) aren't idempotent

What does idempotent mean in this context, or did you mean atomic/rollback on error?

I'm confused because how could a database write be idempotent in Django? Maybe if it introduced a version on each entity and used that for crdt on writes? But that'd be a significant performance impact, as it couldn't just be a single write anymore, instead they'd have to do it via multiple round trips
by Hammershaft | 2025-12-10 03:47:31+00:00
I don't need aerospace but I find Mac windowing to have a lot of cumbersome design shortcomings.

Long animations between spaces, fullscreen creating a new window at the end of the list (??), slow processes to tile windows and efficiently use space, a lot of shortcomings with multi monitor setups, lots of dragging via touchpad to move and size windows across spaces.
by itissid | 2025-12-10 03:47:39+00:00
This is also quantitatively correct because for two people coming in from afar you might change two trains or a bus and train and each ticket is at least 3.00$(bus/path from NJ) which is 24$ minimum both ways, with more than two it would make even more sense to take the car.

Congestion pricing brings in a toll above the 16$ you pay throu the tunnel. I think it's 18, So 34$ total?

So you are incentivized to get more than 2 people by car. Less traffic.
by VerifiedReports | 2025-12-10 03:47:46+00:00
And I think we're all weary of the whining about Apple being "behind on AI."

Consumers of Apple's core businesses do not stand to gain much, if anything, from so-called "AI." The failure of pundits and "analysts" to recognize and call that out just testifies to their laziness. They can never say exactly WHY or HOW this "behindness" is hindering Apple or its user base.

It's sad that Apple has capitulated to them at all by even talking about "AI."
by gcr | 2025-12-10 03:48:35+00:00
actually, here's a broader thought. since this approach only works for classification, why not make that the whole story and spin it as a positive? Call your approach a "classification foundation model" (for example) and say it's a special-purpose model distilled from a larger world model. Abstract's gestalt could read like "If you don't need to be generative, then you can compress the representation way down" or "discriminative understanding takes far fewer parameters than language production" This would then set the stage for the reader to understand the limitations and why the benchmarks are set up the way they are.

then the kitschy paper titles could follow from that, e.g. "extreme llama compression: when classification is all you need", or "Encoder-only models: a lightweight alternative to decoder-only GPT world models" or etc.

just spitballing
by silcoon | 2025-12-10 03:49:06+00:00
She's vividly awaken with an active mind at 101 yo, it's not a thing for everyone. We try to fix the body decadence problem with technology while ancient seems already discovered it. You can see it in her words and her lifestyle; a simple life, a helpful work, a community that makes you feel appreciated for what you do. All the rest doesn't really matter for longevity.

Btw, the woman is addressing the interviewer using "her", which is a common form of respect, for a person probably half her age.
by tomhow | 2025-12-10 03:49:10+00:00
Please don't fulminate or engage in ideological battle here. The topic is fine to discuss and disagree about, but HN is for curious conversation not indignation, and the guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. You've posted several ragey comments in a short space of time, and that's not the way HN is meant to be used. Please have a read of the guidelines and make an effort to observe them when participating here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by 8note | 2025-12-10 03:49:37+00:00
its not a tariff because tariffs are taxes on imports. you arent paying a tax related to the value of the goods being brought over, and to the extent that new car buyers are importing cars, its neglible compared to what youre trying to draw equivalence to, trump's 30% or so tariffs.

instead, its a toll or a usage tax.

but also, you want the economic activity of having people in the city, not the cost of supporting their light trucks. people coming from outside of new york are very costly in terms of pollution, road maintenance, and losing real estate to parking spaces.
by spoaceman7777 | 2025-12-10 03:52:41+00:00
This is nonsense. School work is important. It isn't just teaching kids things, it's making them _practice thinking_.

I hate the classic question that often comes up in regard to math education, "When will I ever use this??"

The answer is simply that it makes them practice thinking. Human knowledge is transferable across domains. And practicing concentration and persistence is critical. Without these things, people can have all of the information in the world at their fingertips, but be completely unable to make reasoned decisions or continue to continue building new things upon the foundation that all of mankind has been building up diligently for millennia.

Don't let the kids cheat. Make them do their homework after hours in the library. Or the auditorium. Or the gym. Anywhere. Homework is supposed to be a couple of hours of "on your own" study after all, isn't it?
by sho_hn | 2025-12-10 03:53:03+00:00
Not having a replacable battery - a part that wears predictably and is critical to operation - makes this device disposable.

There's more important things than "entrepreneurial creativity". Not everything that can make sense as a business plan makes sense for the world.

We can survive without rings that allow us to mutter voice notes into our fists while walking around.
by josh2600 | 2025-12-10 03:53:39+00:00
I was 7 when Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness dropped.

You cannot imagine the lengths we had to go to play this game in our home. We were lucky enough to have two apple computers and so my brother and I would play each other using the battle net technology over appletalk. The thing was, the only appletalk cable in our house was barely long enough to make it between the two bedrooms, so when we wanted to play the cable would hang in the air stretched across the hallway where the slightest tug would rip it out of the port killing the match.

The number of times that cable got unplugged mid-game and the inter-household rancor that would ensue is the stuff of legends. I honestly remember the fits we had about whose fault it was that the cord got unplugged more than I remember any specific aspect of those Warcraft games.

It just goes to show, networking topography matters.

WCII ToD is absolutely one of the most insane games to ever be birthed unto the world. It was so brain breaking compared to everything else we were playing at the. time. Just a real quantum leap in terms of dopeness.

Blizzard really hit it out of the park with Warcraft and Diablo.
by csomar | 2025-12-10 03:53:52+00:00
No it’s not. NYC transit is already one of the most expensive in the world and quality is suspect. Pushing money into a dysfunctional structure doesn’t make it functional and might make it worse. A money grab from the public that goes through a maze of expenses.

The solution was to re-structure the MTA. But that’s hard work. Politicians would rather blame the other side and just raise taxes. The people like it because they are grabbing money from what they consider it to be their oppressors.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-12-10 03:56:21+00:00
This is not accurate. The WHO (which recommends lower levels than US authorities) recommends an annual PM 2.5 level below 5 µg/m³: https://www.c40knowledgehub.org/s/article/WHO-Air-Quality-Gu...

But more importantly, when it comes to PM 2.5 levels, there are really no safe levels, the risks are just dose dependent, so lower is always better. In a city the size of NYC, lowering air pollution by 20% means a significant decrease in effects.

To give a good analogy, driving a car on the US is still quite safe, most of us take that risk, but still, thousands die annually from car accidents. A one fifth reduction in deaths from car accidents, even from its current low level, would be a major deal. In NYC, around 1 in 20 deaths is linked to air pollution.
by ack_complete | 2025-12-10 03:56:44+00:00
Nah. As others have said, translating infix to RPN is pretty easy to do. The nasty part was keeping values within registers on the stack, especially within loops. The 8087 couldn't do binary ops between two arbitrary locations on the stack, one had to be the top of stack. This meant that if you need to add two non-top locations, for example, you had to exchange (FXCH) one of them to the top of the stack first. This meant that optimized x87 code tended to be a mess of FXCH instructions.

Complicating this further, doing this in a loop requires that the stack state match between the start and end of the loop. This can be challenging to do with minimal FXCH instructions. I've seen compilers emit 3+ FXCH instructions in a row at the end of a loop to match the stack state, where with some hairy rearrangement it was possible to get it down to 2 or 1.

Finally, the performance characteristics of different x87 implementations varied in annoying ways. The Intel Pentium, for instance, required very heavy use of FXCH to keep the add and multiply pipelines busy. Other x87 FPUs at the time, however, were non-pipelined, some taking 4 cycles for an FADD and another 4 cycles for FXCH. This meant that rearranging x87 code for Pentium could _halve_ the speed on other CPUs.
by thomasm6m6 | 2025-12-10 03:56:46+00:00
oh, didn't realize it required login. it's an implementation of the "llm simulates a world as you go" idea. screenshots and twitter for context:

https://sw.vtom.net/tmp/worldsim1.png

https://sw.vtom.net/tmp/worldsim2.png

https://x.com/NousResearch/status/1788283681511035011

https://x.com/karan4d/status/1768836844207378463
by antonvs | 2025-12-10 03:56:59+00:00
You're alluding to the network effects that make that takeover difficult now, after decades of doubling down on a technically weak and systemically insecure solution.

Languages that are technically capable of replacing C in all those applications include Ada, (and in certain applications, SPARK Ada), D, Zig, Rust, and the Pascal/Modula-2/Oberon family. None of those language use a purely textual preprocessor like C's. They all fix many of C's other design weaknesses that were excusable in the 1970s, but really aren't today.

But Rust in the Linux kernel is no longer experimental, so perhaps things are starting to improve.
by ModernMech | 2025-12-10 03:57:03+00:00
Might as well just post it:

The topic of the Rust experiment was just discussed at the annual Maintainers Summit. The consensus among the assembled developers is that Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental — it is now a core part of the kernel and is here to stay. So the "experimental" tag will be coming off. Congratulations are in order for all of the Rust-for-Linux team.
by magicalhippo | 2025-12-10 03:57:30+00:00
Some of these are really great too, and some really fun stories and comments. A couple that really made me chuckle.

Blockchain Finally Finds Use Case: Proving You Attended a Meeting You Didn't Want to Attend

blockchain_survivor 9 hours ago

I've worked in blockchain since 2017. I've seen "the use case" change every 6 months. First it was payments, then smart contracts, then NFTs, then DAOs, now this.

Honestly? Meeting attendance verification makes more sense than most of what I've worked on.

JavaScript 2025: We added types but called them "hints" to avoid admitting TypeScript was right

After 10 years of debate, 47 abandoned proposals, and what committee members describe as "the most passive-aggressive RFC process in programming language history," TC39 is proud to announce that JavaScript now has types.

Well, not "types" exactly. We're calling them "Type Hints" or, in the specification, "Optional Structured Commentary Regarding Value Expectations (OSCRVE)."

(Interesting that it goofed up the title)
Show HN: Numbered Headings Chrome Extension
by bluedskim | 2025-12-10 03:58:33+00:00
Add clean, automatic numbering to all headings on any webpage.

Numbered Headings enhances readability by injecting hierarchical numbering (e.g., 1, 1.1, 1.1.1) into all <h1>–<h6> elements. Instantly understand the structure of long articles, documentation, tutorials, and technical content — without modifying the original page.

Features

Automatic hierarchical numbering for H1–H6. Works on all websites. Preserves original styling and layout. Helps with scanning long pages and tracking sections. Ideal for developers, students, researchers, and writers.

Why it’s useful

Clear numbering makes complex pages easier to navigate, improves readability, and helps with note-taking, documentation review, and outline verification.

Simple, lightweight, and privacy-friendly — no data collection, no configuration needed.
by sho_hn | 2025-12-10 03:59:46+00:00
Some sources say so, e.g. "Declining Replacement Cycles Among Consumers" on https://www.marketdataforecast.com/market-reports/europe-sma...

And https://www.unibocconi.it/en/news/disposable-smartphones-tri... has replacement cycles in Italy going up.

Anecdotally, 2023/24 all media in Germany was full of ads for shops trading refurb phones. Most of those talked lower prices, but some mentioned sustainability.
by arjie | 2025-12-10 04:01:19+00:00
This writing an essay / writing a paper obsession doesn't make any sense to me. All American kids are always "writing a paper" on something. I never wrote a paper on anything of significance. If this constant writing of papers had a great effect, you'd expect me to perform at the 50th percentile or lower of people. But my income has always been much higher than that, I'd say I write more blog posts than the 50th percentile (the quality of which might suffer from the lack of paper-writing, one might claim), and I'd rate my life at much higher than the 50th percentile.

My parents took a different tack, and insisted that I spend my time reading, playing, or doing something. I spent very little time on homework because my parents negotiated this with the school. My school scored us entirely on exams, which I performed well on - just as I did well on the GRE to come here.

By the pedagogical standards of America, this must mean that I was atrociously educated. Why then am I happy and successful here? I suspect it is because paper-writing is a waste of time. I suspect that almost all education comes from solving the unknown related to the known (exercises), repeating the known (revision), and introduction of model-breaking notions (for which I don't have a short word). Even literary criticism would probably benefit from this structure.

This, along with the religion of note-taking[0], has made me suspect that US pedagogy is not particularly well-informed. The higher-education system is obviously superlative, but the teaching of children seems pretty haphazardly determined.

0: I've always hated note-taking. I'm glad to have found at least some others on HN like me https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45640454
by gorgoiler | 2025-12-10 04:01:25+00:00
Possibly, but I suspect mobile turbines (aircraft) are unquietened (noisy) by design because they don’t really need to be quiet at 35000ft.

Presumably a static turbine is minimizing noisy thrust in exchange for torque while also exhausting through an expansion chamber surrounded by deflective earthworks or some other shielding. (Although the one in the article is indeed all outside in the open.)
by daemonologist | 2025-12-10 04:01:33+00:00
Speaking personally, I've never broken/damaged a phone. Since the Pixel 1 started requiring removal of the screen in order to swap the battery, 100% of my phone replacements have been because the battery isn't good anymore. (Granted, I would've gotten a new phone eventually regardless, when the old one stopped receiving security updates.)

Currently trying to stretch a Pixel 7 until 2027.