MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by raphman | 2025-12-13 14:14:36+00:00
Some more sources I saved recently after learning about Elliott's work:

The original paper by Catchpole et al. (2006): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1460-9592.2006...

A quite interesting lecture on the whole project, given by Elliott in a racecar driver's suit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeMGrHcfRjY

Annotated transcript of the talk available here: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/formula-1-and-its-contri...

A WSJ article from 2006: A Hospital Races To Learn Lessons Of Ferrari Pit Stop: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB116346916169622261 (archived copy: https://archive.is/xEbio)

Times article from 2024: The surgeon who used F1 pitstop techniques to save lives of babies: https://www.thetimes.com/sport/formula-one/article/professor... (archived copy: https://archive.is/1iGXK)
by windexh8er | 2025-12-13 14:15:49+00:00
But it is a solution. Apple being a poor stuard of their customers is indicative that people buying their hardware and software are not their priority. Apple support used to be stellar, they used to care about customers, they no longer do.

Apple's ToS should be readily indicative of anyone using any of their products that Apple's perspective is that you don't own anything and they can do whatever they want with anything you do with their products. As the author points out you clearly don't own free access to what you've purchased.

The last thing I'll say is that it is fantastic advice to not purchase Apple in 2025. You can only be certain that this won't happen if you avoid them. I actually own a MPB, with receipts from purchase, that I had to purchase a bypass for when the device was enrolled in MDM by a family member that Apple has MDM locked and refuses to remove from iCloud.

Avoid Apple, that's the best advice. If you can't avoid Apple, minimize your footprint and make sure you're a good boy or girl else Tim Cook will steal from you and hide behind some bullshit first line support tar pit and an army of lawyers if you do happen to decide to threaten them.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-12-13 14:16:03+00:00
>> The main thing people dont understand about Germany's train system is the scale of it. The network is physically very large, but also very densely packed, and has very frequent trains.

> A train may be late by 15 minutes, but if that means I'll miss a connecting train, that might delay my journey by an hour or more.

Speaking from experience taking the subway in Shanghai, if a train is 15 minutes late, and it still manages to arrive before the train that was scheduled to follow it, it cannot be true that the network is "very densely packed" or that it has "very frequent trains".
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-12-13 14:16:31+00:00
> You miss something critical here. For that to happen that GenAI would have had to be trained on another "Ghibli".

Eh, maybe it got trained on Nausicaä, and then a lot of prompting and manual touch up work was used to adapt the style to what we now know as Spirited Away. Or maybe that animation department wasn't completely for show and they did draw some reference frames, but the AI figured out everything in between.

I don't really want to get into a discussion about the theoretical limits of AI, because I don't know what they are and I don't think anyone does. But if "the process is important for art," what happens if the creator lies about the process? If you initially experience the art without knowing about the lie, does learning the truth retroactively erase your previous experience? How does that make sense?

It has always seemed more logical to me that the final piece ought to be all that matters when evaluating art, and any details you know about the creator or process should be ignored to the greatest extent possible. That's difficult to do in many cases, but it can be a goal. I'm also aware that lots of people disagree with me on this.
by reactordev | 2025-12-13 14:16:39+00:00
It’s way more nuanced than this.

It’s not like when you ask GPT a question, the energy grid takes a dip. No, data centers have massive power draw. They also have battery backup systems that are the primary drivers of stable power along with power inverters and all sorts of power equipment on site. The fact that we are building out more data centers means we need more power. The energy marketplace has only so much extra capacity (various forms) before it too is depleted. So, you bring on more power plants, more reactors, more solar farms, moar powah!

No, what is sad is that we have the ability to turn every roof, every window, every side wall into a power source and yet we choose not to.

(I wrote a demand response energy grid “manipulation” platform)
by foresterre | 2025-12-13 14:17:25+00:00
> Waning reliability is but one of many problems for state-owned Deutsche Bahn, which is operating at a loss and regularly subjects its passengers to poor or no Wi-Fi access, seat reservation mix-ups, missing train cars and "technical problems" — a catch-all reason commonly cited by conductors over the train intercom.

As someone who fairly often travels by German ICE (not their regional trains), I've only ever experienced the timetable unreliability.

WiFi is fairly reliable and much much better than for example the Dutch railway (NS) WiFi which never seems to work, and I can't remember the last time it didn't work on an ICE. I've never had any seat reservation mix ups or (knowingly) missing train cars; the last two I've experienced only once in Europe, on a cross border train from Slovenia to Austria, with the seat booked via the ÖBB on a Slovenian train.

When these ICE's are on time and show up, I like them a lot. The seats are very comfortable, there's food service in the train, the seat reservations aren't thát high, and are optional (unlike say high speed rail in Italy, where there's a 15 euro required seat reservation on top of the ticket price), the staff is consistently friendly and so far (I think) they haven't joined the annoying recent trend to put digital ads on the same monitor as the in train timetable.

More so, I really really like the Deutsche Bahn app and use it for trains all over Europe.

Reading this article makes me ask myself if the route and type of train matters, but also that the article didn't really add anything new from what wasn't already known. With their ongoing frequent delays DB made them an easy target for anything under the sun, but comparatively to other trains in Europe, at least for DB ICE's, delays aside, I feel they're doing quite alright.
by soulofmischief | 2025-12-13 14:17:51+00:00
Game developers are subject to much more abuse than the average software engineering job, for less pay. It's a different environment.

I'm open to the idea of guilds, but personally I do not want others negotiating for me with the type of work I do, I'd prefer it to be a contract between me, my employer and nothing else. Unions aren't always a net benefit for every industry.

Of course, with AI going the way it is, collective bargaining might become more attractive in our field. But institutions can be slow to catch up and not everyone always agrees with the outcome. Personally, if I worked in Hollywood, I'd be upset about the kind of anti-AI scaremongering and regulation taking place in the WGA and SAG-AFTRA.
by cxr | 2025-12-13 14:17:59+00:00
> I get the impression lots of folks would really like it if the actual C code making up linux stayed in place forever. Like it would be a good thing if humans exploring the cosmos in the year 3025 were still logging in using pam, written in C. And not just C, but the current lines of code we have right now.

What does that even mean? The kernel codebase isn't append-only. Things are constantly getting refactored and improved.

> lets never try and iterate and improve?

Isn't that what the linked project, Fil-C is doing? Iterating and delivering an (extremely overdue) improvement to the language infrastructure—one of the most fundamental parts of the systems we use?

> C is the best at things[…] C is fast and efficient. Oh, never mind fast and efficient - lets compile it with Fil-C even though it makes it really slow

It sounds like you would be fine with people who go off and rewrite a system in C# or Smalltalk or whatever, even if it's at the expense of the system being slow. But if someone does the same thing with Fil-C, you're no longer for it.

> I think gnu/linux could be way better than it is now, in lots of ways. I get the impression that we - as a species - have barely scratched the surface of the design space for operating systems. The UNIX model is a really early design attempt. Is it the best design that will ever exist? Of course not.[…]¶ I want proper capabilities. I want a microkernel. I want faster syscalls. I want storage that's relational, not just file based. I want[…]¶ But the idea of just making a bug for bug compatible, drop in replacement of a single tool like sudo is met with so much hostility and distrust from the community.

In what way is the latter (a bug-for-bug compatible sudo reimplementation written in a different language) moving the needle on the former (the UNIX problem)?

You also act as if work on alternatives don't exist. They exist. You're allowed to like them and even run them. Lucent went so far as to relicense from the LPL to the GPL to MIT, so you're even allowed to build on them with virtually no restrictions.
by wpietri | 2025-12-13 14:18:10+00:00
Look, software estimates are a whole studied field and have been for decades. Barry Boehm comes to mind here, as well as McConnell. When I talk about estimation, I'm talking about that. And I'm also talking about the bullshit-production process which yields similarly-shape artifacts that also gets called estimation. Something also discussed extensively in the literature.

If your point is that making things has a temporal reality to it, sure. But when people ask me for estimates, I give them two options: we start a formal estimation practice, where we do activities that produce what actual engineers would recognize as reliable numbers, or we do it kanban-style, which does not involve an estimation practice, but gives product stakeholders direct control over time/cost tradeoffs.

Some people, here and elsewhere, argue for a third option, which is going through various levels of rigamarole that gives horseshit numbers so that the more mendacious managers and executives can put on a performance of rigor while telling people with power what they want to hear. I refuse.

And I think it's that bucking the primate dominance hierarchy that makes people absolutely freak out when people talk about no-estimates approaches. Per POSIWID, the purpose of standard corporate "estimation" is not to produce reliable numbers. It's to avoid conflict. I get why people would rather freak out at me than make their bosses unhappy. But I would suggest that's a short-term gain for long-term pain. For organizations that want to actually get things done, hallucinatory project "plans" are bad for everybody. I think ultimately software engineering should be an actual profession. It's not looking great, but I live in hope.
by ETH_start | 2025-12-13 14:18:39+00:00
If we use BEA/FRED "compensation of employees" (wages + benefits), the payroll picture is:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A4076C0A144NBEA

All US government employees (federal + state + local): $2.409T in 2023.

US nominal GDP in 2023: $27.812T.

So government compensation = ~8.7% of GDP (2.409 / 27.812).

Breakdown (2023):

Federal government compensation: $634.9B (~2.3% of GDP).

State + local compensation: $1.7846T (~6.4% of GDP).

State/local education: $863.1B

State/local other: $783.2B

For cross-country median disposable income comparisons, OECD has a direct chart:

https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/society-at-a-glance-202...

Your $400 stat is about liquidity and balance-sheet fragility; it doesn't tell you the cross-country level of median PPP-adjusted disposable income. OECD Figure 4.1 is the relevant comparison.

Generally, countries with more government social spending have lower savings rates, because people irresponsibly rely on the taxpayer as their backstop, so I'm not surprised at all. The U.S. actually has very high levels of social spending, despite the stereotype of it being a very free-market-oriented economy. That leads to those who qualify for many social programs, i.e. low-income earners, to put aside a relatively small portion of their income for savings.
by krapp | 2025-12-13 14:19:05+00:00
>Kent State was a very different America, a long time ago, and the reaction was immense and swift.

Was it? An American political culture dominated by Christians and war hawks paranoid about the influence of "cultural marxism" in academia and whipped up into a moral panic about the "degeneracy" of feminism and homosexuality, with pervasive censorship of criticism of American foreign policy and the deployment of militarized police in the streets doesn't seem very different than what we have now.

>If a new Kent State happens, I depend on Americans to respond immensely and swiftly again.

I think you deeply misunderstand which side of the fence American gun owners and militias tend to be on and just how normalized the rhetoric and expectation of violence has already gotten. If a new Kent State happens they'll say "that was for Charlie Kirk" and dance in the streets.
by kzrdude | 2025-12-13 14:19:35+00:00
> The main thing people dont understand about Germany's train system is the scale of it. The network is physically very large, but also very densely packed, and has very frequent trains.

And that's a wonderful thing, you can reach "everywhere" with a train in Germany. That's something I wanted to say that we need to keep in mind when we see a headline like this. It's a sense in which Germany's train service is one of the best in the world.
by mft_ | 2025-12-13 14:20:08+00:00
> Also, personal experience: My own ISP (in Germany) experimented with some similar stuff a few years ago: They mandated use of their own home routers where only they had root access. At some point, they pushed an OTA update that made the router announce a second Wifi network in addition to the customer's. This was meant as a public hotspot that people walking down the street could connect to after installing an app from the ISP and buying a ticket.

Not sure if you're referring to Vodafone, but Vodafone Germany definitely does this. You can opt out of allowing public access via your personal router, but this opts you out of being able to use other people's routers in the same manner.
by resters | 2025-12-13 14:20:09+00:00
Like most of what Trump does it's 1000% emo and also very stupid. It's proudly anti-democratic and fundamentally disrespectful of American values.

People fall for it because fear of foreign rivals, frustration with a regulatory patchwork, and anti‑“ideological” backlash make a centralized, tough‑sounding fix emotionally satisfying. Big Tech and national‑security rhetoric also create an illusion that “dominance” equals safety and prosperity, short‑circuiting careful federalism and due process.
Ask HN: Build it yourself SWE blogs?
by bawis | 2025-12-13 14:20:32+00:00
This [1] blog post is particularly educational for various reasons:

1. Organized neatly, each building block's steps are explained concisely.

2. The toy example can broadly be used to one's use case.

3. Straight to the point, this is rare nowadays with the LLM generated posts of "content creators"

Are there other nice blogs posts creating tech tools from scratch with the clarity and smoothness showed by Karboosx ?

[1] https://karboosx.net/post/4eZxhBon/building-a-simple-search-engine-that-actually-works
by derbOac | 2025-12-13 14:21:10+00:00
The study is here (the doi was broken for me): https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article/292/2060/202...

I thought the approach to the question was informative and clever and sort of puts things on a continuous scale as it probably is. The most interesting thing to me probably is that within-human, across-site variation was about the same as across-species variation was, at least when looking at species with some amount of pair bonding. So I'm not sure you can really can characterize humans as being one thing or another uniformly.

I don't think this paper will end the endless arguments about the nature of human monogamy for a couple of other reasons though:

First, the focus on genetic relatedness solves some problems but creates others. For one thing, it doesn't really address behavior, which is what's actually of interest. Even if each human pair mated for life, if, say, males were dying at high rates compared to females, before females were out of reproductive age, you'd still end up with serial monogamy probably and higher rates of half-siblings. My guess is within-pair mortality affects his results to a nonnegligible extent.

Second, looking at the figure, it seems an entirely different perspective on it is that full-sibling rates were about 66% or so, which is still much less than 100%. My guess is how much we look like other species is an entirely different question than how close or far we are to some ideal, for whatever reason.

I guess the paper seemed interesting to me but the spin was kind of odd. But maybe that's inevitable.
by juujian | 2025-12-13 14:21:13+00:00
On that note, I'm happy to let my daughter play switch, because it has the best system for limiting screentime that I've see to date. I can set a limit, and then I can increase that limit for the day or lock it down again, remotely from the app. Very streamlined experience, clearly made by someone with user experience. In comparison, on iOS the system is janky and the Chromecast it's close to broken (and feels like abandonware).
by iambateman | 2025-12-13 14:21:18+00:00
My grandfather’s Apple account was blacklisted too but I was less sympathetic to him because he genuinely sends spam email from his personal account (it’s politically motivated).

One day he was bricked from his accounts because he ran afoul of Apple’s ToS. The problem then was I couldn’t feel sure that he hadn’t actually done something which a reasonable person would say should result in account closure.

Paris’s case is much more strange, because it feels more likely to be a false-positive.

There is no legal right to have an account with Apple or Google, and I’m not sure I want there to be. But so much of our lives are built on these services and these stories erode our trust that the services themselves can handle the responsibility of adjudicating acceptable use. We need our digital accounts to be robust in the very long-term, even when there are bad actors who want to do all manner of bad things. And we need to feel confident that a properly empowered human reviewed the case and can articulate the reasons for a ban. When we charge a person with a crime, we tell them what the crime was and give them due process to fight it. I’m not sure I want the courts to decide these questions but we need some more due process when it comes to account termination.
by t0mas88 | 2025-12-13 14:21:28+00:00
Exactly, it's that overwhelmed state with resulting tunnel vision or chasing the wrong thing that is so common in aviation incidents. If you have a big issue, the ECAM screen lights up light a Christmas tree. There is logic in the system to ensure messages are prioritised, but in the end the humans still have to systematically figure out what's going on.

What causes more issues in flight is that you have to maintain control of the aircraft while determining the issue and making a plan. Which in zero visibility doing manual flight has a significant mental load by itself, so if the automation is affected by whatever issues you have, one crew member can't sit back and 100% think.

It's probably hard to simulate that extra load/stress for cyber incidents. For MCC training it's done in a flight simulator so all the noise, alarms, and having to maintain control is there.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-12-13 14:22:32+00:00
So wild. The wire-wrap boards are truly frightening to look at.

And the photos in the article of the old "instamatic" Kodak film cameras (especially that 110 pocket camera) suddenly brought back to my mind that formaldehyde-like smell of developer chemicals when I worked at a One-Hour-Photo lab when in high school.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-12-13 14:23:21+00:00
France isn't reliant on Rosatom at all for Uranium. Russia is one possible part of the supply chain mostly used for retreatment.

Most of the French uranium is produced by Orano which is quite close to being a public company (95% owned by France). It comes from Canada, Kazakhstan and Niger.

Greenpeace is not a reliable source when it comes to anything having to do with the nuclear industry by the way.
by jmclnx | 2025-12-13 14:23:41+00:00
>In 2025, it’s pretty much the same. In some respects, it’s worse:

Well not quite, if you use mutt, it is easy to encrypt emails with gpg. The setup could be a bit hard for new people, but if they have good reading comprehension it is easy.

Thunderbird has its own gpg-like based internal encryption. I really do not like it, I wish they built it on gnupg like the old plugin did.

All you need to do is get your key to the people you want to send encrypted email to and you need to get theirs. There are key servers or you can mail the public key to them.

To me, if on Cell Phones, all bets are off. I would never use email on Cell Phones.
by SenHeng | 2025-12-13 14:23:44+00:00
Can someone explain why the Ghibli films are so popular?

I’ve been on a Ghibli binge this week because my wife can’t believe that I’ve never watched any of their films so we’ve watched 1 a day. I wasn’t intentionally avoiding them, they just didn’t seem interesting based on the few clips I’ve seen. Having watched a few, my opinion is unchanged. I enjoyed them, I just don’t ‘get’ the craze.

While the films are generally beautifully animated, I simply couldn’t get into the stories nor understand why they’re so highly acclaimed. I say this as an anime fan and a fairly typical otaku.

The stories don’t really have a proper conclusion, it’s often a pattern of a thing happened, let’s undo the thing, life goes on.

The Japanese voice acting is often quite bad as Miyazaki seems to have a very thing against using professional voice actors.

The music’s cool though.

- Nausica

- Raputa

- Totoro

- Mononoke

- Spirited away

- Howl
by nulbyte | 2025-12-13 14:24:03+00:00
> ...nor do they provide a way to send encrypted mail to their users' accounts without using their official apps.

I'm confused by this complaint. Sending encrypted mail is the job of the sender. You can PGP encrypt your mail and send it to a Proton user just like any other recipient. I've done this at work when I need to send myself paystubs.
by raphman | 2025-12-13 14:24:14+00:00
I found this quote from the paper by Catchpole et al. quite important:

"Whilst it is encouraging that analogies from other industries with longstanding cultures of safety and reliability may be extrapolated, it is also important to recognize the unique demands of health care. One crucial difference that emerged was that Formula 1 and aviation both have a relatively stable workforce, with minimal staff turnover. For example, out of about 20 members of a pit team, only one or two members change annually. In contrast, turnover of staff in health care is far higher, with six residents rotating every 3 months in the study unit, and a nurse turnover of approximately 10%."
by crazygringo | 2025-12-13 14:24:40+00:00
> Theres nothing difficult about formalizing a proof you understand.

What are you basing that on? It's completely false.

If that were true, we would have machine proofs of basically everything we have published proofs for. Every published mathematical paper would be accompanied by with its machine-provable version.

But it's not, because the kind of proof suitable for academic publication can easily take multiple years to formalize to the degree it can be verified by computer.

Yes of course a large part depends on formalizing prior authors' work, but both are hard -- the prior stuff and your new stuff.

Your assertion that there's "nothing difficult" is contradicted by all the mathematicians I know.