MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mschuster91 | 2025-04-15 16:24:36+00:00
> It's not particularly constructive to talk about "extermination camps" when there is no particular evidence of that.

Yet. That's the thing. Remember the "Hang Mike Pence" chants, the gallows they brought Jan 6th? The administration and its fanbase are not shy of calling for terminal violence.

I'm German, we all learn in school how the 1933-1945 regime started. And it didn't start with extermination campaigns directly back then as well - it started with confiscating and burning books, with one of the first targets being the Hirschfeld Institute that was researching LGBT questions. And over time, pressure ratcheted up, and target lists increased. People were snatched from the streets, secret police rounded up houses, and eventually they ended up corralling off entire neighborhoods, swiftly disposing of the people in the extermination camps.
by TonyTrapp | 2025-04-15 16:24:42+00:00
Again, the premise was that phpMyAdmin is secured behind basic auth. It doesn't matter how secure or insecure phpMyAdmin is, it only matters how secure whatever webserver is that it is served through. phpMyAdmin code isn't even touched before the basic auth login was successful. Only after that, it becomes relevant, in that you either find a hole in phpMyAdmin itself, or you have to break another (hopefully strong) password for the MySQL login itself.
by PaulRobinson | 2025-04-15 16:25:06+00:00
Thanks for supporting a business that was pretty cool, once. I bailed as it got into the consumer livestream space, but sometimes think about resurrecting it as a higher-quality OTT app that isn't rammed with absolute junk and ads. The work that platform did during the Arab spring was significant, and I can't honestly point to a good modern alternative today.
by spencerflem | 2025-04-15 16:25:13+00:00
Yeah exactly. It correctly comes off as insincere when people say things like "you must feel upset". If anything that's the opposite of validation because the implication is that the speaker and any other rational human would not feel upset here but you must be so emotional that you need kid gloves.

Vs. actual validation which looks and feels more like an earnest attempt to understand where you're coming from
by Nevermark | 2025-04-15 16:25:23+00:00
I expect every serious/successful researcher, artist, or other creative problem solver would agree that even within the ultimate centralization of work, all in one person, a low bar for exploration of ideas and potential solutions is helpful.

The problem terrain insights generated by many "failures" are what make resolving interesting trivial, silly and unlikely questions so helpful. They generate novel knowledge and new ways of thinking about things. They often point the way to useful but previously not envisioned work.

Edison and the long line of "failed" lightbulbs is a cliche, but still rich wisdom.

But 1000 Edisons working on 1000 highly different "light bulb" problems, sharing the seemingly random insights they each learn along the way, are going to make even faster progress -- often not in anticipated directions.
by ang_cire | 2025-04-15 16:25:59+00:00
> The game theoretic optimal solution for a service provider is to always validate

Which can be a mistake when the person you are dealing with has or may have an ulterior motive for your interaction (i.e. said "toddlers").

This is why in actual customer service, validating someone's feelings ("I understand you did not like the cook on the steak") is good, while validating their concerns ("I understand that the steak was undercooked") is bad.

You don't want to "find common ground" or "shared viewpoints" just to fulfill the validation matrix plot, because it may very well be based on a false premise, or even a blatant fabrication. In real world terms, validating concerns can often be an admission of liability or fault, or a soundbite that will be weaponized against you.
by onli | 2025-04-15 16:26:05+00:00
There is not really a big disadvantage, is there? It keeps the .exe around in all possible versions without additional effort, even if external build dependencies were to fall away etc. Sure, nothing proper releases can't mostly achieve as well. But also not something bad.

It's a little bit like when projects include their dependencies instead of just listing them in a gemfile etc. Some hate that, but it can make things easier.
by ciconia | 2025-04-15 16:26:05+00:00
Being a bit of an asperger’s case, I have developed over the years a practice of listening to people talk and at the same time try to process in my head the mood of the speaker, because sometimes I'm not able to do it instinctively. I am getting better with practice though.

Sometimes I respond to my interlocutor by naming the emotion they're expressing, not necessarily directly ("oh you're angry!?") but rather stuff like "oh it must be infuriating what happened!"

I find people do respond positively to that, and that it opens a deeper connection.

There's the practice of Non Violent Communication [1], which has inspired me, though I'm not a zealous follower of the technique. It can seem condescending at the hands of the wrong person.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication

Edit: to me this is not about validation. It's about being more attuned to what the other person's going through. It's about empathy and compassion.
by potato3732842 | 2025-04-15 16:26:42+00:00
>The slow and steady way that post-WW2 Korea and Japan did needs a unanimously agreed 10-20 year long game plan between industry and government, which is incompatible with democracies who change colors and strategies every 4 years where the new administration begins to tear down everything the previous administration did because they serve different voter bases and corporate lobby groups.

The message of "we're gonna find some way to undo some of the damage of off shoring and find some way to put heavy industry back to work" has been included in one way or another in every presidential candidates platform at least as far back as Obama's first term.

The specifics change from party to party and candidate to candidate but this isn't a new thing. The common man has been clamoring for some sort of change from the status quo for the better part of a generation now. It's only recently that the situation has become such a priority that elections are won or lost on it.

I fully expect that whatever administration comes next will continue on the path of on-shoring, if perhaps in a more reasonable way.

>It is also incompatible with the US since a lot of corporations made bank due to offshoring and will fight it every way they can since they don't want to deal with costly US labor who can unionize or sue you for millions if they break a finger at work

The people who actually run manufacturing and heavy industry really resent the current off-shoring status quo. They only do it because the sum total of other policy pushed by short sighted wall street financiers and/or environmental/labor advocates makes it the only viable option. I think they'd be happy to come back if doing so was financially viable, they just want it to be predictable (something current policy making surely isn't, lol) so they can plan around it because investments in those industries are made on decades long timelines.

I think we're at the point now where there's the political will to let the punch press eat some fingers to keep the factory open.
by Retric | 2025-04-15 16:27:26+00:00
US government funding of science isn’t a net cost due to taxes on the long term economic productivity that results. This is unlike say corn subsidies which not only reduce economic efficiency but also have direct negative heath impacts furthering the harm.

Medicare spending is problematic because it’s consumptive, but there’s ways to minimize the expense without massively reducing care. The VA for example dramatically reduces their costs by operating independent medical facilities. That’s unlikely to fly, but assuming nothing changes is equally unlikely.
by vorpalhex | 2025-04-15 16:27:28+00:00
Hamas, who the gentleman being returned to his home country gave material support to, including distributing their produced materials at Columbia.

I am happy to send you the footage from October 7th if you'd like to see it. I recommend you keep a trash can nearby. It is the most horrific footage I have seen and beats out even the massacre at Bucha.
by ocdtrekkie | 2025-04-15 16:27:30+00:00
I mean to give you an example of how far we are from this: IIS does not have built-in ACME support, and in the enterprise world it is basically "most web servers". Sure, you can add some third party thing off the Internet to do it, but... how many banks will trust that?

Unfortunately the problem is likely too removed from understanding for employers to care. Google and Microsoft do not realize how damaging the CA/B is, and probably take the word of their CA/B representatives that the choices that they are making are necessary and good.

I doubt Satya Nadella even knows what the CA/B is, much less that he pays an employee full-time to directly #### over his entire customer base and that this employee has nearly god-level control over the Internet. I have yet to see an announcement from the CA/B that represented a competent decision that reflected the reality of the security industry and business needs, and yet... nobody can get in trouble for it!
by xyzzy123 | 2025-04-15 16:27:36+00:00
True.

OK I will fess up. The truth is that I don't spend a lot of time in coffee shops but I do have a ton of crap on my LAN that demands high amounts of fiddle faddle so that the other regular people in my house can access stuff without dire certificate warnings, the severity of which seems to escalate every year.

Like, yes, I eat vegetables and brush my teeth and I understand why browsers do the things they do. It's just that neither I nor my users care in this particular case, our threat model does not really include the mossad doing mossad things to our movie server.
by codingmoh | 2025-04-15 16:27:43+00:00
Thanks for sharing that perspective. I do think jq is great for slicing up JSON before handing it off to Python—especially if your transformations are primarily stateless and can be expressed as simple map/filters. And yes, a lot of frameworks can turn into "magic black boxes" that complicate what should be simple.

That said, my gripe is that when you move beyond "transform this data" and step into "transform and then push to some API, handle partial success, retries, etc.," the line-by-line or chunk-by-chunk side-effects logic in Python can get gnarly fast. That’s the part I wish there was a standard, declarative approach for—something that doesn’t require a big workflow orchestrator (like Dagster) but also doesn’t devolve into tons of imperative glue code.

I agree no tool is a silver bullet. In many cases, plain, well-structured Python is enough. But once you need concurrency, chunk-based error handling, or incremental streaming with side effects, you end up coding your own partial solution anyway—and that’s where I start wishing for a more composable pattern in the standard Python ecosystem. Until then, jq + Python is definitely a solid approach for the simpler jobs!
by helle253 | 2025-04-15 16:27:46+00:00
Not explicitly planning on it currently, but it is something that's in the back of my head. If denaturalizations do start happening, we would have a frank conversation about what to do. I don't know that we would stay in America. The tail risks would simply be too high.

I don't know, its frightening to think about. I don't think its LIKELY, yet. but i cant say its UNTHINKABLE anymore.
by nashashmi | 2025-04-15 16:28:18+00:00
I really hate when someone screams AI to promote a product. The word is like a catch-all to mean “does cool things”. And that never helps me trust the product or infomercial.

Now AI is hard to describe… BUT DESCRIBE WE MUST. maybe “summarize emails with AI” or “fetch relevant emails to this one with AI” or “get possible responses with AI”. At some point, do you think we can remove *with-AI™?
by lukebuehler | 2025-04-15 16:28:36+00:00
I just started to look into multi-modal embedding models recently, and I was surprised how few options there are.

For example, Google's model only supports 30 text tokens [1]!!

This is definitely a welcome addition.

Any pointers to similarly powerful embedding models? I'm looking specifically for text and images? I wish there'd be also one that could do audio and video, but I don't think that exists.

[1] https://cloud.google.com/vertex-ai/generative-ai/docs/embedd...
by oldprogrammer2 | 2025-04-15 16:28:50+00:00
Systems don’t remain constant, though, and every system gets “gamed” once the incentives are well understood. I’m 100% for investment in scientific research, but I’m skeptical that the current system is efficient at allocating the funds. We’ve seen so many reports of celebrity scientists committing fraud at our most elite institutions, and a publish or perish model that encourages that bad behavior as well as junk science that will have minimal impact on their fields. We pay taxes to fund science so that universities or corporations can claim ownership and make us pay for the results.
by 9dev | 2025-04-15 16:28:59+00:00
I never understood that line of reasoning. Plants do not have a central nervous system and, as of the current scientific consensus, are not aware of their subjective experience like animals are. Humans are omnivores, capable of thriving on a plant-based diet. The logical consequence, if you try to minimise suffering, is to eat plants instead of animals.

Life is a game of shifting carbon. To stay alive, you need to kill. But you can try to limit that to the least amount of killing required, and to killing those life forms without sentience as we understand it. This is the foundation of any ethical reasoning.

Having said all that, I also reject the vertical ordering of life on the tree of evolution. Plants are just very different from us, not necessarily higher or lower. Considering we have to make a choice as to what we are ready to sacrifice to survive, we can still choose those life forms that likely are not capable of suffering like we do, before turning to those more similar to us.
by lesbolasinc | 2025-04-15 16:29:15+00:00
Let me make it clear because I don't want to come across as biased - Reddit, Facebook and platforms like it are 1000% worse and or just as bad, no contest from me on that part; the dialogue just skews a different way depending on the platform.

To the first point though, I guess I just don't understand how such niche and useful discussion ended up on twitter and remains there out of all places. It seems strange to find someone pushing moon-landing-is-fake conspiracies on the same site nuanced discussion occurs on some hyperfocused topic
by za3faran | 2025-04-15 16:29:21+00:00
Yes please send them to me. Not only has the story of the "40 beheaded babies" been declared a hoax, there is zero proof of rape, let alone gang raping of corpses, let alone burning babies alive. This is the first I've heard of what you are claiming, and I seriously wondering where you are getting your news from.

What we do see is horrific footage day in and day out for the past 75+ years at the hands of israel, from brutal murdering, to starvation, to burning people alive, to sexual crimes, and countless war crimes. It is also confirmed that they employed the hannibal directive.
by constantcrying | 2025-04-15 16:30:04+00:00
?ing Errors and never actually handling them is just a terrible practice. In fact it is just as bad as not doing error checking at all. Misusing a mechanism is not a point against the language.

What makes this error checking good is that you can use it correctly and it is less cumbersome than the try/catch from C++.

>Come on, let's be a bit more honest with ourselves about Result<T, E> and '?' - it's not a full solution to error handling. After two years I'm sure you've hit this.

Nothing is ever a full solution. But it is meaningless to talk about this without doing comparisons. Do you think try/catch was the superior solution all along?
by jdgoesmarching | 2025-04-15 16:30:11+00:00
Google Docs is the clunky mess here and gets away with it because they nailed collaboration early and competed with an even bigger clunkier mess in Microsoft Word. Word at least is a full featured word processor, whereas Google Docs is a struggles with anything more than basic layout or formatting needs.

Notion isn’t a word processor, but unless you’re specifically trying to craft documents it doesn’t need to be. It also isn’t a spreadsheet, and you’re going to have a bad time if you try to make it act as such.

If we’re being dismissive, Google Sheets is also a poor tool for “actual data.” Modern spreadsheet usage is just a pile of inefficient hacks to operate them as pseduo-DBs. Unless you’re in the finance or accounting world, in which case you’re probably using Excel, anything else would be better served by using more powerful open-source data analysis formats and tools.

I have a million complaints about Notion, but holding up Google Workspace as the paradigm of elite enterprise product design is a joke. Get back to me when I can take the markdown produced by Gemini Canvas and paste it into Docs without issues.
by PaulHoule | 2025-04-15 16:30:42+00:00
Thanks for pointing out the typo, I fixed it.

Yes, but they're culturally related. Anywhere where people write with Chinese characters or used to write with Chinese characters has legends about nine-tailed foxes, for instance. The intelligentsia had access to Chinese literature and this diffused into the public imagination. [1]

For me it started out with being willing to enjoy media in an unfamiliar language (first Japanese) that gradually became familiar. Then playing the Japanese game Dynasty Warriors that got me thinking about the Romance of the Three Kingdoms and about the characters and the place names and other old Chinese stories like Journey to the West and pretty soon I am enjoying Chinese pop culture about old stories and new stories of the fantastic and even learning some Chinese, getting curious about Chinese mobile games that aren't known at all in the west because Chinese people cosplay as characters from them, etc. (At the university where I work I overhear conversations in Chinese almost every day)

Yes, Japan is a different culture which I still enjoy and appreciate, but for me it was also a gateway to China. [2] I was an anime fan for 30 years but in the last 3 years I've had the same kind of giddy feelings for Chinese pop culture that I had about anime at the beginning and of course that means I'm going to buy a whole fish and eat it with my family because my son's Chinese friend suggests it.

Lately I've been playing the Japanese game Dynasty Warriors Origins which has both Chinese and English voices and find it strange on one hand to hear legendary Chinese heroes speaking Japanese which I mostly understand and then listen intently to the Chinese which to me is still a wall of unfamiliar syllables where I struggle to pick out proper names and an occasional word or phrase -- but I have a great time trying!

[1] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinosphere

[2] ... and it goes the other way, China's pop culture is inspired by Japan (I think it's funny that many Chinese games like Azur Lane use Japanese voices in the west because they know the kind of person likely to play that kind of game knows phrases like suki da! and has an emotional feel for Japanese even if they aren't fluent in it)
by erichocean | 2025-04-15 16:30:46+00:00
Jonathan Haidt's finding from The Righteous Mind that conservatives tend to understand liberal moral foundations better than liberals understand conservative ones is an important example.

His research shows conservatives operate across a broader range of moral foundations—care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity, and liberty—while liberals lean heavily on care and fairness

This gives conservatives an easier time modeling liberal views, as they already incorporate those priorities. Liberals, however, often struggle to grasp the weight conservatives place on loyalty, authority, or sanctity, seeing them as less "rational."

The author is an example of this: he views his opponents as less rational—literal "toddlers"—and thus their arguments can be dismissed.
by nluken | 2025-04-15 16:30:57+00:00
> divorce your identity from your beliefs about the world

I understand not totally subjugating your personal identity to ideology, but I'm struggling to see how someone could practically completely separate these two things. To use a somewhat trite but personal example, I'm gay, so that aspect of my identity will necessarily affect my perspective on certain issues. Conversely if someone were to convince me rationally that homosexuality was wrong, it would necessitate a pretty dramatic change of my identity no?

Not every issue exists on that clear a spectrum, but you can imagine the views necessitated by different pieces of personal identity adding up over a lifetime.
by simonw | 2025-04-15 16:31:06+00:00
I have huge respect for Cohere and this embedding model looks like it could be best-in-class, but I find it hard to commit to a proprietary embedding model that's only available via an API when there are such good open weight models available.

I really like the approach Nomic take: their most recent models are available via their API or as open weights for non-commercial use only (unless you buy a license). They later relicense their older models under Apache 2.0 licenses.

This gives me confidence that I can continue to use my calculated vectors in the future even if Nomic's model is no longer available because I can run the local one instead.

Nomic Embed Vision 1.5 for example started out as CC-BY-NC-4.0 but was later relicensed to Apache 2.0: https://www.nomic.ai/blog/posts/nomic-embed-vision
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-04-15 16:31:08+00:00
Protection rackets are pretty big in central america. Look at the publicity about the avocado industry. Protection rackets only work when you go after those people that escape your 'protection' payments. So yes, it's reasonable to assume every person that said no to the racket and fled to the US becomes a pretty big target, it's part of the founding principles/business model of running a protection racket.