MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mjburgess | 2025-04-21 12:33:10+00:00
Major trends which place western democracy at risk: 1) increasing localisation of power in the security and intelligence services; 2) increasing power of centres of private wealth; 3) a failure to maintain and develop checks-and-balances in the system; 4) centralising of power in the executive / legislatures giving up a significant role in government.

We can see all of these at their most extreme in the federal US gov, but to some degree have been growing since the late 90s/00s.

Something seems to have happened to "living democracy" perhaps after 9/11. The state became more totalitarian, reaching into all life on behalf of the "ideological threat" of "dangerous beliefs". Legislatures handed more-and-more emergency powers over in response; and overly broad non-emergency powers (eg., consider they handed carte blanch war-declaring powers to the president across the entire middle east, which have never been revoked). A series of crises, coupled with centralisation of power in the internet, created a totalised media and economic environment which reaches into all aspects of civil and corporate life. And new ultra wealthy tech monopolists have arisen to own this landscape. Civil life is totalised by social media, public life is totalised by the executive -- and these are now increasingly "of one space").

All these threads were, at each stage, profoundly opposed by classically-minded liberals; but very were popular in their time.

Unless a movement for "democratic renewal" begins soon, and can somehow reverse these major forces, at least the hardest hit countries may move into autocracy. Its very hard now for anyone to defend these conditions (those on the right who want a statism of order; or those on the left who want one of justice) -- they have all now clearly combined into a moment where balance-of-power liberal democracy has failed.
by aadhavans | 2025-04-21 12:33:42+00:00
Shameless plug: My Regex engine (https://pkg.go.dev/gitea.twomorecents.org/Rockingcool/kleing...) has dedicated syntax for this kind of task.

<0-255>\.<0-255>\.<0-255>\.<0-255>

will only match full IPv4 addresses, but is a lot stricter than the one in the article.

EDIT: formatting
by tiffanyh | 2025-04-21 12:34:31+00:00
One important point that’s not obvious from this article: U.S. pollution from fossil fuels isn’t actually decreasing.

From what I understand (and please correct me if I’m wrong), overall energy demand in the U.S. continues to grow year over year. Most of the additional energy needed is now being supplied by renewables.

So while we’re adding less new pollution—because the new energy is cleaner—we’re still producing the same amount of fossil fuel pollution as before.

The baseline pollution hasn’t gone down; we’ve just slowed the rate at which it increases.
by panzi | 2025-04-21 12:34:53+00:00
Of course you can write code like that. This is about making it easier not to accidentally cause code injection by forgetting the call of safe(). JavaScript had the same feature and some SQL libraries allow only the passing of template strings, not normal strings, so you can't generate a string with code injection. If you have to dynamically generate queries they allow that a parameter is another template string and then those are merged correctly. It's about reducing the likelihood of making mistakes with fewer key strokes. We could all just write untyped assembly instead and could do it safely by paying really good attention.
by acidburnNSA | 2025-04-21 12:35:23+00:00
Project risk and financing is a big problem in nuclear for sure.

Decommissioning nuclear is paid for by a decommissioning trust fund that is paid into by law by rate payers during operation of the plant.

The recipe is sort of understood though: choose a good enough tried-and-true reactor and serialize production of it. This is how France built 50 reactors in 15 years. It's how China is now building several dozen.
by buran77 | 2025-04-21 12:35:28+00:00
> I felt there was going to be a path forward ripe with cooperation and hopefully a place where I could onboard new maintainers

He was hoping for a fruitful collaboration and offered the help towards this goal. MS taking whatever they wanted anyway just proves that they had no intention to cooperate, let alone to pay handsomely for something that was already free.

Ending up in court means you need to sue the megacorp to enforce the license. This makes it a free lunch for a megacorp.

With every single scenario MS takes whatever they need. They don't have to pay, don't need the help to read code, and you can't afford to force them to respect the license.

P.S.

> As soon as you got a legal letter for any of them, your first step should be to send it to as many news outlets you could think of.

There's a guy rotting away in a El Salvadorian prison with a lot of press to keep him comfort. Not sure your letter will capture the world's attention like you think it will.
by ryao | 2025-04-21 12:35:37+00:00
I just tried this on my desktop's monitor, which unlike my iPad Pro that was factory calibrated, has never been calibrated as far as I know. By round 11, the colors were nearly imperceptible, although I managed to answer 4 more correctly for a total of 14/20. Those additional 4 were likely more the result of luck than actual perception.
by wat10000 | 2025-04-21 12:36:05+00:00
I’ve released some utility libraries under permissive libraries. I like it when they get used. Even when it’s part of a large company’s closed-source app. Many people don’t like that, and that’s perfectly fine, that’s why there are different choices available.

What I’ll never understand is people who release their project with a permissive license and then get upset when a big company distributes their own version of the project in accordance with the license. If you don’t want that sort of appropriation then you need to pick a license that doesn’t allow it.
Ask HN: High powered directional laser and FSOC Feedback
by pinkflamingo | 2025-04-21 12:36:38+00:00
Hi,

We’re working on a portable optical laser ground station for communications, and I’m looking for feedback on the setup for our upcoming field test.

We are operating in the 300–400 terahertz (THz) range, and our first prototype aims to achieve 100 Gbps. The system leverages filamentation effects of high-powered lasers to propagate the signal through free space by creating a clear channel through atmospheric turbulence.

While we’ve successfully tested this in a lab environment, we’re now preparing for a field test using a laser with a peak energy close to 1 MJ and pulse durations of ~90 femtoseconds.

We’ve been bootstrapped so far and want to ensure we’re meeting all laser safety requirements, especially given we’re firing through open space. We’re currently fundraising to purchase components for the field laser, which gets expensive very quickly—so we want to be absolutely sure we have the right specs and safety protocols in place.

For safety, we are using a camera and tracking software to monitor free space in real time and ensure there are no aircraft or satellites in the beam path during testing. We are several km's out of populated areas and are doing a km class test of the laser. The receiver is at a km class height from the ground station for this test.

Any feedback on our test setup—or advice on how to make sure we don’t accidentally destroy a multi-million-dollar device—would be deeply appreciated!
by vel0city | 2025-04-21 12:36:41+00:00
> it seems as if is only when Trump does it, the press seems to be in an overdrive?

Which other modern presidents decided to just ignore due process for people in the US with legal status? Which ones blackmailed lots of law firms into many hundreds of millions of free legal services? Which one had a goon haphazardly and illegally gutting services? Which one illegally fired a big wave of IGs? Which one argued for the end of Federal Reserve independence? Which one suggests running for a third term repeatedly? Which one pardoned hundreds of insurrectionists?

These things make such headlines because they're incredibly radical and not heard of in modern times or ever in the US.
by sokoloff | 2025-04-21 12:37:37+00:00
I think we can agree that a modern phone is “hardware and software” for sure.

If you want to modify GP’s proposal to exclude things that also have a service, how long until DJI adds a service to their drone? (It might even be a negative duration; I don’t own one, but it would shock me if there wasn’t some kind of service associated already, perhaps to prevent flying a drone in unauthorized areas [or justified as such] or allow access to some online component of camera service.)
by jmyeet | 2025-04-21 12:37:45+00:00
I believe solar is the future. And hydro where approppriate. China is doing massive things with hydro. The largest hydro power station in the world is the Three Gorges Dam and they've just announced building one three times as large in Tibet for $137 billion [1].

But there's an issue with solar most people don't talk about. Yes it can be variable due to weather and day/night cycles. That's obvious. But a real issue is power lines.

Power lines are built to deliver power to businesses and homes. The cost of that is amortized over the electricity purchased by consumers. If people end up purchasing only half as much power due to more energy-efficient building standards, the use of solar, etc then the cost of the power lines is still the same except now it needs to be amortized over less electricity sold.

This I think is why municipalities tend to limit how much solar power houses are allowed to have. How do you build and maintain a grid when houses are generally self-suficient? Should you? Is it acceptable to not have a grid?

[1]: https://newatlas.com/energy/yarlung-tsangpo-hydroelectric-pr...
by shaongitbd | 2025-04-21 12:37:54+00:00
I was really pissed at discord because of its intensive resource use its really noticeable when I play cpu intensive game eg counter strike 2. After finding no real alternative that can use which will use less resources and comes with the basics feature I got really pissed and ended up making this app called Zorium. I also noticed some of my uni courses uses discord to share class lectures but its it gets real messy so I also added one more kind of server called academic server where teachers can add courses , lectures, course materials', assignments etc. and every course is organized..

windows, Linux and mac application available and unless only 40 mb RAM and less than 1% of cpu

Just launched the beta, and I’d really love if a few people could try it out and tell me what’s broken, confusing, or just feels off

https://zoriumapp.com/
by BMc2020 | 2025-04-21 12:38:32+00:00
Regex is much easier if you don't do it all at once. It's perfectly acceptable to, say, trim all the leading spaces, store the result in a temp variable, trim all the trailing spaces, store the result in a temp variable, remove all the hyphens. etc. etc.

Everyone tries to create the platonic ideal regex that does everything in one line.
by prmph | 2025-04-21 12:38:56+00:00
I consider myself a reasonably competent senior engineer, and yet with regex this is what I have noticed:

Every time I need to write even the simplest regex, I can't seem to get it right the first time. I always need to struggle with it for a long time. Sometimes even using online tools takes me time to get it right. This happens every.single.time.

It baffles me to no end. I'm a pretty quick learner of pretty much everything I get into. I write the most sophisticated Typescript code you can imagine; I've written a small toy language; I've written biometric authentication drivers; I've written my own functional UI lib. But, I cannot master regex.

You can give me all the arguments about what is good about regex, but in my experience (which you can't argue with), it is a VERY badly designed API, and nothing will convince me otherwise. Regex is probably the worst thing ever in programming.
by noduerme | 2025-04-21 12:39:27+00:00
k, you're saying you can't understand the obfuscated bullet they're sending to the backend unless you understand how it's turned into a particular nut on the front, and understand both sides of the request. I see how that makes sense, if you can't even figure out how to decipher the requests as you read them going out. Is that what you're trying to say? If so, say it, rather this this "wall of text" about why technical posts are scarce and bla bla bla. I'm more interested in the reason for this kind of obfuscation (and no, I don't think it's just to protect against bots, as there are many ways to do that).
by skydhash | 2025-04-21 12:39:37+00:00
That’s because the code is data for an execution machine. All the other stuff are for the hunan mind. There’s multiple way to transition from one state of code to another, so mostly people record the existence of a transition (version control) and why it has happened (commits and other texts).

Recording how is not fruitful, unless the technique is good. In this case, the essence will be extracted, and it will become a checklist or a script.

If you have two itents producing conflicting patches, the merge intent that emerges is good because it brings empathy (understanding the message) and harmony (working code). And that’s why almost everyone says that the code itself doesn’t matter. Only the feature that it brings into play and the the mind that birth it do. It is a medium.

And a merge conflict is nice because it detects overlapping work and the fact that the concerned people should propably meet.
by toddmorey | 2025-04-21 12:40:52+00:00
I can absolutely imagine this much knowledge on tap making us more impatient and less resilient. When I was a kid, there was already a bit of "why do I even need to know how to do this when calculators exist?" This is that on steroids and more broadly.

However, there's a counter force, too, as there always is. I'm also pursuing new areas of interest and exploration where the early friction and amount to learn would have either completely fatigued me or scared me off. It's like having 24 hour access to a really good mentor and thought partner.
by nathabonfim59 | 2025-04-21 12:41:16+00:00
Have you seen the license of llama models from Meta?

> 2. Additional Commercial Terms. If, on the Llama 2 version release date, the monthly active users of the products or services made available by or for Licensee, or Licensee's affiliates, is greater than 700 million monthly active users in the preceding calendar month, you must request a license from Meta...

ref: https://github.com/meta-llama/llama/blob/main/LICENSE

But again, not open source...
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-04-21 12:41:26+00:00
There is if the event is in the past or future light cone. If A sends a signal to B, and B receives it, there is no reference frame where that signal went backwards in time. (Unless you count exotic ones, like "particle with imaginary rest mass is zooming along at thrice the speed of light", but you can't accelerate to such a reference frame so I don't.)
by hoistbypetard | 2025-04-21 12:41:30+00:00
From the text of the AGPL:

> The GNU Affero General Public License is designed specifically to ensure that, in such cases, the modified source code becomes available to the community. It requires the operator of a network server to provide the source code of the modified version running there to the users of that server. Therefore, public use of a modified version, on a publicly accessible server, gives the public access to the source code of the modified version.

If you're interpreting that as something different than "publish", I think you're splitting hairs.
by latexr | 2025-04-21 12:41:42+00:00
Companies are never just money. There is a monumental difference between:

1. A small company which is barely profitable but is building something which aligns with your values and you see as a positive to the world.

2. A massive mega corporation whose only purpose is profit, mistreats employees, and you view as highly unethical.

You shouldn’t treat those the same way. It’s perfectly ethical to offer your work for free to the first one (helping them succeed in creating a better world) and charging up the wazoo (or better yet, refusing to engage in any way with) the second one.
by kllrnohj | 2025-04-21 12:41:43+00:00
A 10kW system produces somewhere between 11,000kWh - 17,000kWh / year give or take. Qatar has one of lowest electricity prices in the world at $0.03/kW

$0.03 * 11,000kWh/year * 87 years = $28,710.

So either you're vastly underestimating the amount you pay in electricity, or you're using vastly less electricity in which case you obviously wouldn't get a 10kW system.
by zamadatix | 2025-04-21 12:42:21+00:00
Conventional wisdom is he attempted to resign 3 times, had a stroke, and had a pacemaker all before he spent a further 8 years of his career elected as pope and then actually resigned. This all extends decades prior to his final resignation, giving the same health and desire for retirement reasons as prior attempts.

As for whether there was something more than the conventional wisdom to the story... I'm not really sure the news of his successors death is the correct thread to spawn that conversation in as it's getting to have little to do with Francis.
by Frieren | 2025-04-21 12:43:14+00:00
> As our kids get older especially, almost all of their social activities are somehow tied to social media one way or the other: no matter what they're joining, minimally there's a WhatsApp group.

That is by design. To privatize public spaces and control what is said in that spaces to monetize it is the goal. No individual parent can fight the power of the corporations that push us in that direction.

The public discourse of TV and other media is dying, while the private echo chambers owned by corporations are increasing. That is not good either.

What I think the study is missing is the impact of social media on society, and impact on society on individuals wellbeing. I see an increase in paranoia, extremism, pessimism, etc. caused directly by that closed communities that spin out of control and create the perfect dish plate to grow the most paranoid people. For kids and teenagers it will be worse, as they are still growing and learning.
by rikroots | 2025-04-21 12:43:33+00:00
> I keep hearing this argument, but I still don't understand, what's the incentive for authors of one-man projects to choose anything "permissive".

My JS canvas library is licensed using MIT. From my personal perspective, I wouldn't have any problem with some $MegaCorp coming along and forking it, and even claiming it as their own creation. But ... why? Because one of the main drivers for my development of the library over the past few years is to proof-of-concept the idea that 2D Canvas API based infographics and interactives can be made - with the help of a JS library - performant, responsive and (most importantly!) as accessible to every end user as reasonably possible. My ideal outcome would be to embarrass other JS canvas library maintainers into taking canvas responsiveness and accessibility seriously. If that needs a $MegaCorp to come along and fork the library to bring my dream closer to reality then I ain't gonna stand in their way!

Of course I'd still continue to develop my version of the library - it's become my passion and obsession and there's always improvements to be made, new ideas to be explored.
by scyzoryk_xyz | 2025-04-21 12:43:42+00:00
I have a love/hate thing with Instagram. I’ve been an avid user and it has been incredibly popular in my IRL social-circles over the last 5-10 years. Much has been said about the mechanics underpinning it but I’ve embarked on this experiment since the beginning of this year:

I started deleting Instagram every Sunday evening and installing every Friday.

I had this hypothesis that it’s the weekends that people have the best stuff to share and when it makes sense for me to still exist to everyone. And then nobody notices me disappear over the week. It’s a lot more enjoyable to be engaging with others’ content when you’re posting your own.

But the surprising result, after a few months, is that I’ve started missing weekends. The memory of all those people has faded and so has the urge to share.

Which brings me to a point: on one hand I do feel better day to day, but I’ve also felt a bit of a mourning period not being reminded about acquaintances’ lives. Kind of like a smoker who’s now missing out on social smoke breaks.
by 51Cards | 2025-04-21 12:43:50+00:00
I'm going to re-post something that I commented in another thread awhile ago:

I tend to think it will. Tools replaced our ancestor's ability to make things by hand. Transportation / elevators reduced the average fitness level to walk long distances or climb stairs. Pocket calculators made the general population less able to do complex math. Spelling/grammar checks have reduced knowing how to spell or form complete proper sentences. Keyboards and email are making handwriting a passing skill. Video is reducing our need / desire to read or absorb long form content.

The highest percentage of humans will take the easiest path provided. And while most of the above we just consider improvements to daily life, efficiencies, it has also fundamentally changed on average what we are capable of and what skills we learn (especially during formative years). If I dropped most of us here into a pre-technology wilderness we'd be dead in short order.

However, most of the above, it can be argued, are just tools that don't impact our actual thought processes; thinking remained our skill. Now the tools are starting to "think", or at least appear like they do on a level indistinguishable to the average person. If the box in my hand can tell me what 4367 x 2231 is and the capital of Guam, why then wouldn't I rely on it when it starts writing up full content for me? Because the average human adapts to the lowest required skill set I do worry that providing a device in our hands that "thinks" is going to reduce our learned ability to rationally process and check what it puts out, just like I've lost the ability to check if my calculator is lying to me. And not to get all dystopian here... but what if then, what that tool is telling me is true, is, for whatever reason, not.

(and yes, I ran this through a spell checker because I'm a part of the problem above... and it found words I thought I could still spell, and I'm 55)
Ask HN: Ways from the EU to the USA
by nsiradze | 2025-04-21 12:44:05+00:00
Hi,

I’m 19, a software dev working full-time on-site in Europe.

I visited the USA and SF in January. There was a conference in Vegas, and then I moved to SF and worked from there for a month. I can say this is the place where I need to live.

I think there is a moment in everyone's life when you’re constantly searching for your place, and I can say this is what I found. SF/LA or somewhere near is the place I would really relocate to.

I didn’t go to College, as I have been working since I was 14, and now I’m searching for ways to relocate to SF.

I know my full-time job can’t do it, so I’m free for everything else. What can I do? Are there any study programs near me that I could apply to?

For those who have a question about why I need it, I don’t like how the EU works, startup life, or everything else that is very complicated. I love how free the United States is. they know the value of justice. It really fits in my mind.

So. yeah, please tell me if there’s any way to do that. As a dev, I can create great things there. I’m working on AI, and this can be a top level area for me to improve.

I would appreciate any feedback, Thank you!
by BrandoElFollito | 2025-04-21 12:44:11+00:00
> after all even a firm atheist can't be absolutely sure there is no genuine God

Why so? There is no reason for one to exist so not having one is the obvious case.

We could of course assume anything, that we are av stylization, that the world is a large ice cream, that what we see is not the reality, whatever

If we go for that, sure, we cannot be sure of anything. But we then must also believe that we may live in a large ice cream.