MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tzs | 2026-01-18 23:09:02+00:00
The energy needed to get something up to speed is not really relevant to what happens when the thing hits a person unless the person cannot move.

Consider this thought experiment. Take a two ton car with a flat plate on front, accelerate up to say 2 mph, and hit someone.

Now try the same thing but instead of a two ton car lets use a 20 000 ton freight train.

The train takes way more energy to get up to 2 mph. At the time of collision it has 20 000 times as much kinetic energy as the car and 20 000 times as much kinetic energy.

But for the person who gets hit those collisions will be nearly the same. They get accelerated to 2 mph with pretty much the same acceleration profile in both cases. The car is slightly less than the train because the person (especially if they are American!) might be massive enough to cause a slight but noticeable decrease in the car's speed.

Anyone, the key is that the body gets accelerated over a short time to 2 mph. If the body was a rigid body that would involve a very large acceleration for a very short time.

But humans are squishy. The muscles and soft tissue compress and that spreads the time the body takes to reach 2 mph greatly reducing the acceleration, which greatly reduces the damage. The way you get injured in such low speed collisions is by getting knocked over and injured in the fall, or knocked over and run over by whatever hit you, or by being between the colliding object and some immovable object so you can't be accelerated.

Another way to look at that collision is to replace the train with something really big, such as the whole Earth, and instead of accelerating the Earth into the person we'll accelerate the person into the Earth.

That can be done by holding the person horizontally above a solid metal plate and dropping them. If we drop them from 2.69 inches above the plate they well reach 2 mph at the time of collision. You aren't getting bruised ribs from a 2.69 inch fall horizontally onto a metal plate.
by ivan_gammel | 2026-01-18 23:10:32+00:00
No, it is not apparent. Globalization has driven economic growth in a lot of countries, both developing and developed. There’s steady increase in HDI everywhere, decrease in extreme poverty, less hunger, better education etc etc. Nothing of that would be possible in postcolonial protectionist world. What you are talking about as reasonable amount isn’t protectionist, it’s just a sane set of domestic policies (welfare, education, industrial policy etc) that help countries to survive and grow in globalized world. There’s a difference between gatekeeping local markets and steering local industries for better competition and consumer protection. The latter just sets strict rules, but still allows global players to participate. Automotive sector has plenty of examples like that.
by automatic6131 | 2026-01-18 23:10:45+00:00
A similar theme to Adrian Tchaikocsky's most recent standalone work "Alien Clay". I saw on a podcast that he said that in Alien Clay, he started from the reasoning 'What if life developed not with competitive natural selection, but in a maximally cooperative fashion, where every organism is capable of cooperation with any other corporation of organisms', and here is another variant of that theme - or perhaps its opposite, 'What if life was entirely one species'. Very nice.

Also he does love his evil, totalitarian states. Here it's the Concern. In Alien Clay it's the Mandate. I think his name for the philosophy in his Tyrant Philosophers series is very clever: Perfection. The fascist ersatz-Imperial-Britain-copies pursue a doctrine they call Perfection - which is obviously what every monomaniacal totalitarian pursues, the word they'd give to their philosophy is always best translated as Perfection.
by verdverm | 2026-01-18 23:11:12+00:00
CUE works with all of those languages, so it doesn't matter what the tools or others are using. I can always apply CUE at any point to output their required format as needed.

Keep your legacy config and mess if you want, you're the one missing out

Also, I don't see TOML in the wild enough and the others have been around long enough, I must chuckle and not take seriously these claims about "inertia"
by luckylion | 2026-01-18 23:11:22+00:00
People want results. Brilliant assholes produce those, so you tolerate the annoying parts. Would be great if they were also kind, but I'll take a house built by an asshole over a tent erected by a friendly person.

It's not a dichotomy, obviously. There are plenty of very smart people who are also pleasant to be around. But if they're either strong in soft skills _or_ in hard skills, I prefer them being asshole over them not contributing but being nice.
by Foreignborn | 2026-01-18 23:11:34+00:00
I want to shoutout Nial Ashley (aka Llainwire) for doing this in 2023 as a solo act and doing the visuals himself as well - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1ZXg5wVoUU

A shame that kid was slept on. Allegedly (according to discord) he abandoned this because so many artists reached out to have him do this style of mv, instead of wanting to collaborate on music.
by gtowey | 2026-01-18 23:11:52+00:00
In my 20+ years in the tech industry, the most important thing I have learned is that writing code is the least significant part of being a software engineer.

You write code once, but then it's modified endlessly. Supporting and using and improving the code is the majority of the work. LLMs are terrible for that. They tend to write code that isnt easy to read and modify. They don't plan for future use cases. They often paint themselves into a corner with successive modifications, and lose context as the project grows.

Don't worry about your job just yet. We are a long long way from replacing people.
by DoctorOetker | 2026-01-18 23:11:54+00:00
his comment was not specific to Western nations, it would apply equally well to asian, african, south american, russian,northern, southern, ... nations, but you are right, he wouldn't treat Western nations with an exception, and that always makes the relevant population feel addressed, and this subjectively feels different, or being picked on with precision, but its just when a population feels addressed.
by BLKNSLVR | 2026-01-18 23:12:04+00:00
> Fool and his money are quickly separated…

Example: I had a flutter on the US Election. The odds were well in favour of Trump winning and I figured that was never going to happen, so I thought I was putting 'smart money' on Kamala.

I stand by it being 'smart' money ;)

I underestimated 'dumb' (which, I guess, isn't 'smart').
by radarroark | 2026-01-18 23:12:04+00:00
Anyone have experience with distributing win32 programs for Linux and/or MacOS by bundling wine? I take it that statically linking is out of the question, but I am guessing you could make an AppImage binary for linux that includes wine, and for MacOS you could include wine in the app bundle. I haven't tried either though. I'm interested in this so I can use win32 as a cross-platform desktop GUI library.
by chongli | 2026-01-18 23:12:09+00:00
I prefer a Dark Forest theory [1] of the internet. Rather than being completely dead and saturated with bots, the internet has little pockets of human activity like bits of flotsam in a stream of slop. And that's how it is going to be from here on out. Occasionally the bots will find those communities and they'll either find a way to ban them or the community will be abandoned for another safe harbour.

To that end, I think people will work on increasingly elaborate methods of blocking AI scrapers and perhaps even search engine crawlers. To find these sites, people will have to resort to human curation and word-of-mouth rather than search.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis
by skippyboxedhero | 2026-01-18 23:13:07+00:00
No, completely wrong. Deep markets are not more accurate.

People who are unfamiliar with how regulated gamblings works assume that the "market" is just lots of informed people rationally trading with each other. This is not how it works. Bookmakers post lines to a small group of syndicates up to a limit, they will often do this non-publicly, and this is how prices are set. They are not set by the "wisdom of crowds", they are set by people who have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in predicting the outcome because bookmakers have an economic need for accurate lines.

When lines open to the public, there is often no significant movement after opening prices set by syndicates. That is because the public has no idea what the actual price should be, they are just uninformed noise traders clicking buttons randomly...that is the product too, the purpose of the product is entertainment not economic efficiency.

It is true that some lines are set incorrectly but the public is not able to benefit from this, because they do not have the information. I would guess that 95% of money made from gambling has been made by under 50 people. And, perhaps counter-intuitively, most of the time these people trading does not have an impact on price because they deliberately trade in a way that does not impact price. Again, the purpose is the same: they trade to make money, not produce economic efficiency.

The people who think prediction markets are useful in any way are people who never traded any markets and couldn't predict if the sun is going to come up tomorrow. If gamblers are noise traders, these people are noise speakers. These markets are completely pointless, gambling is economically pointless outside of the pleasure that people get from entertainment.
by wizzwizz4 | 2026-01-18 23:13:54+00:00
Skimming appendix H of https://courses.grainger.illinois.edu/cs423/sp2011/lectures/..., I can't see any special treatment of the zero page, but https://stackoverflow.com/a/22847758/5223757 contains an anecdote about SPARCs not placing a page of zeroes at that address. I expect that's probably an OS restriction, and they considered it safer to modify the in-house software they understood, rather than tinker with the externally-sourced OS's memory management routines, but the anecdote is weak evidence that it might have been a hardware distinction at one point.
by LevGoldstein | 2026-01-18 23:14:23+00:00
I recall stuff like the Intel icc compiler being expensive and desirable, and things like client access licenses, hardware licenses (to allow using non-trivial amounts of RAM and multi-processing) and support plans for proprietary OSes being rather expensive. Consulting a SCO Unix price sheet from that era, a license that allowed 150 users and up to 32GB of RAM was $10k.

Prices also varied around OS features used. Vendors loved to nickel-and-dime you (separate *-user client licenses for file services, print services, remote access, etc), generally to drive you towards bigger packages that seemed like a better deal.
by rpiguy | 2026-01-18 23:14:31+00:00
Yes the US has the same rich people in charge but the President is willing to defy them. He defied them on tariffs and secure arctic access and mineral rights probably align with their interests.

The US is unified with one military, one economy, one budget, one State Department, etc. Europe is not. Internal division here is not the same as internal division in Europe.

UK, Germany, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, etc. will not substantively move away from the US even if they are hopping mad about Greenland.

Russia wouldn’t try because we are too strong. If the EU were strong we wouldn’t be trying to take Greenland.

That’s the whole point - if there is a race for control of the arctic with China and Russia the EU couldn’t do anything. You’d depend on the US to police the arctic for you and to enforce whatever treaties are signed with China and Russia. Better deal for us to do it ourselves.
by ben_w | 2026-01-18 23:14:41+00:00
> The US could take Greenland by force tomorrow and the EU response would be a poetry recital.

If that's the best the EU can manage, the EU ends the same day, and all of the EU knows that. Ergo, they won't let that happen.

Likewise, all of NATO except apparently part of the US, knows that the US taking Greenland by force means the end of NATO.
by topspin | 2026-01-18 23:15:08+00:00
> Why are they comfortable saying this?

They receive recognition for the results. Phone data was used in a large fraction of the cases against rioters in the 2021 capital attack. The Powers That Be were grateful that law enforcement were able to use phone data to either initially identify attackers or corroborate other evidence, and ultimately put people in prison. The justice system makes cases with this every day, and the victims of criminals are thankful for these results.
by alex_young | 2026-01-18 23:15:33+00:00
The interesting part here is that they are apparently no longer even trying to use parallel construction [0] to cover this stuff up. They somehow feel confident that just saying we have this technology, we don’t say how we use it, but we wind up on the right trail and then gather some evidence down the road we wound up on somehow.

Seems shaky at best. Smells of hubris.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
by tzs | 2026-01-18 23:16:16+00:00
The point is not to trick anyone.

The point is that center right Republicans (the kind that used to win most Republican districts before 2012) could still win if they could make it to the general election. They often can't because most Republican voters, like most Democrat voters, aren't into party politics enough to bother voting in the primaries.

It is the voters who are most likely to be to be farthest from the center who vote in the primaries, and these are the ones who don't want a normal center right representative.

If Democrats switched parties and voted in the primaries they might be able to counter the usual extreme primary voters so a center right Republican could win.
by bawolff | 2026-01-18 23:16:22+00:00
I guess it depends on what you think the goal of the essay was. I always felt like the primary goal was to inspire people and a lot of the software engineering parts were more framing. To me it reads as a manifesto disguised as a software engineering essay.

If you take the goal as inspiring people, i think it achieved its goals and then some. I'm pretty sure that CATB brought more people into FOSS than the GNU manifesto ever did.
by 9rx | 2026-01-18 23:16:27+00:00
> so is C garbage collected as developers often add refcounting to their structs.

Absolutely, C also can use a garbage collector. Obviously you can make any programming language do whatever you want if you are willing to implement the necessary pieces. That isn't any kind of revelation. It is all just 1s and 0s in the end. C, however, does not come with an expectation of it being provided. For all practical purposes you are going to have to implement it yourself or use some kind of third-party solution.

The difference with Limbo and Rust is that they include reference counting GCs out of the box. It is not just something you have the option of bolting onto the side if you are willing to put in the effort. It is something that is already there to use from day one.
by Sesse__ | 2026-01-18 23:16:45+00:00
> Many queries run an order of magnitude faster.

Given how primitive SQLite's optimizer is and how similar the storage and execution engines between the two are in terms of architecture, this seems unlikely to be the norm unless you did something wrong on the Postgres side. (Of course, no RDBMS optimizer will always give the best answer, so there's bound to be such cases.)
by vidarh | 2026-01-18 23:17:05+00:00
Indeed, but it might be many decades - once this lesson is first learned, it will take a long time to unlearn because it tends to become self-reinforcing.

To give an illustration of how long institutional memory over things like this can be:

As of when I went to primary school in Norway in the 1980's, we were still taught at length about the British blockade of Norway during the Napoleonic wars due to Denmark-Norway's entry into the war on Napoleons side and its impact on Norway (an enduring memory for many Norwegian school-children is having to learn the Norwegian epic poem "Terje Vigen" about a man evading the blockade).

Norwegian agricultural policy to this day has had a costly cross-party support for subsidies intended to provide at least a minimum of food idependence as a consequence of learning the hard way first during the Napoleonic wars with a reinforcement (though less serious) during WW2 of how important it can be.

A large part of the Norwegian negotiations for EEA entry, and Norways rejection of EU membership was centered around agricultural policy in part because of this history.

The importance of regional development and keeping agriculture alive even in regions that are really not suited to it is "baked in" to Norwegian politics in part because the subsidies means that on top of those who are about the food idependence a lot of people are financially benefiting from the continuation of those policies, or have lived shaped by it (e.g. local communities that would likely not exist if the farms had not been financially viable thanks to subsidies), so structures have been created around it that have a life of their own.

Conversely, a lot of support for the US in Europe rests on institutional memory of the Marshall Plan, with most of the generations with first hand experience of the impact now dead.

Create a replacement memory of the US becoming a hostile force, and that can easily embed itself for the same 3+ generations after the situation itself has been resolved.
by fragmede | 2026-01-18 23:18:10+00:00
> we won't know if LLM's might save a life

I had friend who was in crisis while the rest of us were asleep. Talking with ChatGPT kept her alive. So we know the number is at least one. If you go to the Dr ChatGPT thread, you'll find multiple reports of people who figured out debilitating medical conditions via ChatGPT in conjunction with a licensed human doctor, so we can be sure the numbers greater than zero. It doesn't make headlines the same way Adam's suicide does, and not just because OpenAI can't be the ones to say it.
by abecedarius | 2026-01-18 23:19:18+00:00
Bookies determine the odds and typically refuse to take bets from skilled bettors.

A market is open to all, with the odds influenced by all participants. In established betting markets such as for stocks, pros dedicate their careers and their organizations to improving the public estimates emerging from the market (though not for the sake of that improvement).

General prediction markets might turn out bad, but the above isn't an argument why, it's namecalling.
by ben_w | 2026-01-18 23:19:26+00:00
> The US is unified with one military, one economy, one budget, one State Department, etc. Europe is not. Internal division here is not the same as internal division in Europe.

I give 50-50 you'd have a military coup if they were given the order to invade an ally.

More than half of your own government knows that invading an ally is not OK.

If Russia isn't enough of a threat to take advantage of this, they're absolutely not enough of a threat to take Greenland either.

> UK, Germany, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, etc. will not substantively move away from the US even if they are hopping mad about Greenland.

Which guns do we need to show you before you back down?

Do we need to fire a missile at Mar-a-Lago before you take us seriously?

If this were civ, I'd be saying "Back off, we have nukes."

Because we do, in fact, have nukes. Pretty much the only substantial military thing the UK has at this point, but it has them.

> You’d depend on the US to police the arctic for you and to enforce whatever treaties are signed with China and Russia. Better deal for us to do it ourselves.

Not for you, not for us.

For us: As a nation, by the election of Trump, you have proven yourself as untrustworthy as Russia. Which is really really bad.

For you: you now have twice as many hostile nuclear powers with the means to hit you, combining to more than twice your GDP backing up those nukes.

You could've built bases in Greenland for free at any time without threatening us. You chose the threat. You're now going to face the counter-threats. We'll see how far those escalate. This is a game you never needed to play. You call it theatrics, we're not laughing, we're arming.

China is much more trusted right now than you are. Like, sure, we know they see Taiwan as their own, but we also know they're not going to screw us over. Even when it was the British Empire handing over Hong Kong, China understood that while they could take it at any time, it was bad to be seen as one who would do so dishonourably.
by username223 | 2026-01-18 23:19:39+00:00
> For years now, proponents have insisted that AI would improve at an exponential rate.

Did they? The scaling "laws" seem at best logarithmic: double the training data or model size for each additional unit of... "intelligence?"

We're well past the point of believing in creating a Machine God and asking Him for money. LLMs are good at some easily verifiable tasks like coding to a test suite, and can also be used as a sort-of search engine. The former is a useful new product; the latter is just another surface for ads.
by cryzinger | 2026-01-18 23:20:04+00:00
I wonder if that's just a quirk of Las Vegas lawyers, because they're super competitive and advertise aggressively here. Personal injury lawyers in particular. If you drive on the 15 or 215, you'll see dozens of billboards, often for the same few guys/firms... plus the ones who put their face on buses... and the ads that run on TV... and the geo-targeted ads on streaming services...
by zvr | 2026-01-18 23:20:39+00:00
Nice work!

Your documentation should definitely list the Unicode code points / glyphs covered, for people to get an idea which scripts are supported.

Also, the repository has a LICENSE file with the MIT license text, but the actual font file (.ttf) embeds the information that it's licensed under SIL Open Font License 1.1. One of these two pieces of information needs to be corrected.
by sbinnee | 2026-01-18 23:21:55+00:00
I didn't know about WoW64 mode. I remember when trying to install an old windows program I had to install a bunch of 32-bit translation library for audio and stuff. This WoW64 means that I can just simply use 64-bit arch. This is fabulous.

WoW64: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WoW64
by cmxch | 2026-01-18 23:22:03+00:00
Depending on the use case, you might be able to get away with PowerShell with Pinvoke bindings if your code is more script-like than compiled code.

Instead of making your own GUI library, you could just make a shim that translates to whatever framework you want to support.

See:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/native-int...
by verdverm | 2026-01-18 23:22:18+00:00
2. The point of the PLC is to avoid tying identity to keys, specifically for the point that if you lose your keys, you lose your identity. In reality, no body wants that as part of the system

3. The soup means you need to index everything. There is no Bluesky server to send things to, only your PDS. Your DID is how I know what PDS to talk to to get your records
by Marsymars | 2026-01-18 23:22:29+00:00
> Every dollar you spend on advertising provides additional customers.

If you’re just taking these customers from competitors, the marginal utility can be pretty low.

e.g. If you consider a world where there are no ads for cars, people aren’t going to meaningfully lose out of the utility they get from cars, carmakers simply avoid the prisoner’s dilemma of having to advertise as much as the next manufacturer.