MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zkmon | 2025-05-25 14:41:32+00:00
Maturity of a voter is over-estimated. If they are like kids, giving them candy is all that is required to get votes. If they hate the other community, hitting hard at the other community is all that is needed. Sharing of power? Coalition governments can't agree on almost anything. Heck, they take months to even form a government, after the elections are over.

Sometimes a move to democracy only resulted in the same aristocratic families grabbing the power quite easily and keeping it for decades.

Getting votes is entirely a different skill from running a country to its prosperity. Unfortunately it is seen as qualification to become a leader.
by CivBase | 2025-05-25 14:42:43+00:00
This is simply wrong. Obscure and commercially unsuccessful games still work today, although it might be difficult to find the hardware needed to run them.

Even the successful games of today are likely to die eventually. Ubisoft's The Crew was relatively successful, but they shut down the servers and made the game unplayable. Now they're talking about at least adding an "offline mode" but core features of the game would still be unavailable to the customers who bought it.

The difference with games today is that many are designed to require a connection to company servers - and those servers cannot be self-hosted. Eventually it won't be profitable for the company to continue running those servers and they'll shut them down. Unless companies are forced to provide an EOL plan that allows customers to continue playing the games they bought (could be self-hosted servers, open source, patching out the server requirement, etc), modern games will continue to die at an increasing rate.
by dingnuts | 2025-05-25 14:43:01+00:00
in free countries you're free to point out the corrupting influences of those you feel are corrupting research, and to do your own, and then disprove incorrect things

in Iran you don't say anything the Ayatollah disagrees with, or they kill you. Glory be to God.

It's a false equivocance to say there is no difference simply because free countries aren't perfect, and because all people have biases
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-05-25 14:43:10+00:00
The middle east knows oil money won't last forever so it's investing into industries of the future, giving the US insanely good deal to move their datacenters there so they become another Taiwan, a valuable investment the US will be forced to protect militarily and economically once their oil runs out. Brilliant move on their side.

And not just datacenters. The middle east are investing in bring up a lot of other industries to ensure their long term post-oil prosperity: tourism, corporate tax heavens, sports & e-sports, expos & events, maybe aerospace and military manufacturing etc.
by catigula | 2025-05-25 14:44:15+00:00
I respect your thoughts here because I think they come from a good place and that you want to help people.

I just don't know how to express to you how philosophically naive I think the kind of utilitarian assertion you've made is.

We can easily construct a thought experiment world that you and I would both agree is a living hellscape where all human needs were simultaneously being met. Most horror science fiction is predicated on those premises.
by natosaichek | 2025-05-25 14:44:15+00:00
This thing will not kill babies. That's like saying seatbelts kill people because they don't save everyone in a car accident. It is precisely this attitude that prevents good things from flourishing - the idea that if something is involved however tangentially in a safety important subsystem it must have perfect results. No, we should not have this view. If something is net positive, we should promote it.
by sokoloff | 2025-05-25 14:45:52+00:00
It shows it increasing after a notably low period. It’s increased back to a level similar to 1950, which are both dramatically lower than 1900-1940. What’s the “right” reference point? Was 2000 an anomaly while today’s rate is a mere reversion to the mean? Or a reversion to a measure which is still better than the 100-year mean?
by jackdoe | 2025-05-25 14:46:07+00:00
For me its not how fast I can type, my brain(ADHD or whatever this is) needs certain flow of speed; I think of something and want to type it, if I am delayed (e.g. imagine I change from qwerty to dvorak and am still learning) for whatever reason, e.g. key is stuck, my mind goes somewhere else, and then I have to "bring it back".

Also as I am typing one thing I am thinking of another, or even third, so if something goes wrong with the mechanics of the first thing, then whole set of dominoes fall and I have to go back.

Sometimes for a given thought I even type 3rd of 4th word instead of the first if for some reason my keys are not pressed. And then I type a word from the next thought and etc. It even gives me anxiety.

As I am typing the code, I am thinking about the code that is going to use the it, and then the code one layer up, I also think of the machine itself, its wires, cache lines, or I think of how the variable I am typing now is related to its surroundings, I imagine a ladder to the moon each step with its address, and I think how far are things from "me", and so on.

I cant speak of others, but for me keyboard layout and even key feeling/rythm is important just because it allows me to think uninterrupted.
by mmooss | 2025-05-25 14:46:49+00:00
> I am deeply skeptical ...

Perhaps you mean, you don't understand or you wonder how it reconciles with the scientific method? It's an interesting question about theory.

To be 'deeply skeptical' is not meaningful, imho. All these people - including Newton, Darwin, Einstein, and so many more, including the entire scientific community - believe it. All these experiments replicate it. You are deeply skeptical about all of that and of all of them? What does it mean, even to you?

> we can't directly test or falsify historical claims. Instead, researchers infer conclusions based on indirect evidence like documents, artifacts, or statistical patterns—often without being able to isolate variables or rule out alternatives.

We can directly test the claims through many methods, for example that the stone tool was made 2.58 million years old, but we can't see 2.58 million years ago (except something that is 2.58 million light years away, of course). We can indirectly test claims, e.g., that tool use existed 2.58 million years ago, through many different methods.

You're right that it's not the same. What else can we do? Just quit and live in ignorance?

> If something is not falsifiable, it is not science in my book. Research that is falsifiable uncovers deep truths of nature that will benefit humanity's progress, which this kind of research will not.

You can call it what you want, but that doesn't change its value. Is this just a question of terminology?

By this proposed theory, we can't know anything that happened before now. We can't know what happened in ancient China - did the Han dynasty even exist? We can't know who won the Olympic marathon in 1928 without witnesses to tell us. We can't know what happened yesterday - human memory is certainly fallible, and otherwise you have only indirect evidence. That applies to every scientific paper, providing indirect evidence to us of what has happened, and mostly based on human memory. Did I write what you are reading? Where is your falsifiable direct observation?

We also can't know much of what is happening now. Most science data is based on indirect observation by devices and machines. Human sensory ability is limited and unreliable in many ways. What color is the light in the experiment? We measure that with a machine that gives us indirect information.

I think a key challenge to your theory is, how do we know anything at all?
by kbolino | 2025-05-25 14:47:53+00:00
I don't think this is correct.

I distinctly remember some scroll-enabled UI elements on Windows displaying a completely greyed out scrollbar when the content wasn't actually scrollable.

Indeed, I can verify this today with PUTTYGEN.EXE even on Windows 11, where if I generate an RSA-2048 key there is an active scrollbar, while if I generate an Ed25519 key which is 1/8 the size, there is a greyed out scrollbar.

That having been said, I think this is the right way to do things. The greyed out scrollbar tells me that control is meant to be scrollable. So if I do something that changes the content, I can expect to be able to scroll it.
by Aachen | 2025-05-25 14:48:01+00:00
> challenging for anyone who didn’t know the language.

Interviewees don't get to pick the language?

If you're hiring based on proficiency in a particular tech stack, I'm curious why. Are there that many candidates that you can be this selective? Is the language so dissimilar that the uninitiated would need a long time to get up to speed? Does the job involve working on the language itself and so a specifically deep understanding is required?
by dingnuts | 2025-05-25 14:48:24+00:00
In a free country there are a lot of "theys" with different views who might give you money, and you are also free to start a business and create your own wealth since private property is part of what makes a free country free.

In a country like Iran "they" must, by law, be aligned with the Ayatollah. That's the difference.

Free countries aren't perfect but at least the law gives these rights; in Iran they are explicitly given to the Church instead.

You're making a patently absurd argument based on completely overblown cynicism
by maeil | 2025-05-25 14:48:38+00:00
That this gets downvoted shows that people have still not learned a single thing. You're spot on, it's tragic that so very few people understand this, based on how incredibly little I see it voiced online. In fact, you're the first I've seen voice it in ages.

E.g. if Harris (another, at best, incredibly mediocre candidate) would've won, the post-Harris Rep presidency would've been even worse than the current one. Until there's a competent non-Rep president, every single subsequent Rep government will be worse, until there will be no more fairish elections - and likely we're already there. Someone like AOC - not policywise, people don't vote on policy, it doesn't matter. Attitude-wise. It's abundantly clear the DNC hasn't learned (or more likely, doesn't want to learn), so the next president will be another Hillary/Biden/Harris candidate who will either lose or make the next Rep win even more decisive.
by xivzgrev | 2025-05-25 14:48:40+00:00
Weeeell let’s see what that translates to today. Assuming 30k houses for 100,000 people this effort would have budgeted… $77k per house in today’s dollars.

record stops

The median home today is $350k-ish. Whoops, Congress better be prepared to allocate more or lower housing costs before this article’s advice can be implemented

waiting for Godot
by pvg | 2025-05-25 14:49:28+00:00
It seems to me there is no difference in kind between an email arguing for or examining an important decision or idea, and an "essay" on an important decision or idea.

Why are there people who make a living as, say, newspaper opinion columnists or magazine staff writers? Or hell, why aren't we all rich substackers given that writing a substack is literally email?
by voidhorse | 2025-05-25 14:49:45+00:00
Totally, it's not a weird take though. It's actually a pretty standard fare account of the purpose of fiction in literary theory that's been with us for a long time.

There's actually deeper arguments to be made that storytelling was the first form of human abstraction (we only get the essential details pertinent to the story, all else is abstracted away) and much of what's core to all our practices of representation stems from an originary impetus for storytelling as a means of sharing and replicating knowledge. The prosaic, scientific, nonfictional, non hyperbolic writing we have all gotten used to is kind of a late development.
Show HN: Wall Go – browser remake of a Devil's Plan 2 mini-game
by sychu | 2025-05-25 14:49:46+00:00
Source code: https://github.com/schaoss/wall-go

I binge-watched Netflix’s “Devil’s Plan 2” and got hooked on the “Wall Go” round. A few nights of vibe-coding later, here’s a fully playable browser version:

• 7×7 board, staggered placement (1-2-2-1), 0-to-2-step moves, mandatory wall each turn. • Light / dark mode, mobile-friendly hit boxes • Simple AI (ΔReach + liberty heuristic) – beats random, not a grandmaster yet • Tech stack: Bun + Vite + React + Tailwind v4 + Zustand, deployed on GitHub Pages

Looking for feedback: * is the AI too weak / unfair? * any UI quirks on touch devices? * rule misinterpretations I missed?

Bug reports, feature requests, or PRs very welcome. Hope you enjoy boxing your friends into tiny corners as much as I did while coding this :)
by dragontamer | 2025-05-25 14:49:53+00:00
I think the Starseige Tribes community is still active. They have DOZENS of people, dozens!!

Not to hate on those who love old games but yeah, it's a much smaller community.

It's not all bad, smaller communities mean people know each other better. And there is no eSports money hanging over anyone, it's just a community meeting up to have fun once a week.

---------

The only reason Starseige Tribes is alive today is because of a large amount of hacking effort to port the game up from Windows 2000 to modern Windows. As well as hack the server software to run you own servers.

Other live games truly die. No one will ever play Concord ever again. Tribes loses support, but hackers can fix bugs and forcibly patch to modern systems

If there is a will, there is a way.
Show HN: Screenless SMS for Kids
by alibova | 2025-05-25 14:49:58+00:00
I wanted to share a project I’ve been working on that allows my daughter to text message me without a phone or screen. She handwrites me a note and then it OCRs and sends it to me as an SMS (along with a picture of the note because 5 year old handwriting can be tricky). I text back and my response is printed for her via a thermal printer. It’s been surprisingly fun.

Some features I've added:

- texting multiple people - I'm the default but she can write "to: dada" or "to: phonenumber" and it'll text the recipient. I made a simple UI for editing the phone number/device id to name mapping.

- A bit of extra paper is printed with "to: sender" at the top to make it easy to chat back and forth.

- GPT support - she can write "to: GPT" and it'll call GPT API and then print out the response. I prompted GPT to make it easy to read for an elementary school child so she can read it herself.

- GPT support for me - I can text to: GPT and it'll text me back rather than printing a message. This has been great for my space-obsessed 3 year old.

- texting other devices - I have another device set up and they can text message each other.

- read outloud - there's a second button that reads whatever text is under the scanner. This is helpful for my 3 year old who can't read.

GPT has been fantastic all around. It's way better at OCR-ing kid handwriting than Tesseract or Google OCR and being able to ask questions and get answers at an age (and reading) appropriate level has been great.

https://imgur.com/6qm6JmK

https://imgur.com/xRPkRwu

https://imgur.com/EZEHBEK
by catigula | 2025-05-25 14:50:15+00:00
Putting aside my concerns about the integrity of the data, the clearly "correct" reference point is the one it takes to falsify the parent comment's claim: that this extremely brief period of gizmos, gadgets, economic plenty and mass immigration is somehow an unparalleled land of milk and honey. You could directly correlate our literal exact debate as negative evidence of his assertion.
by bsenftner | 2025-05-25 14:50:24+00:00
I think the blog simply does not explain well. Consider the example of a text editor, the "tool calls" are text fragments generated by the LLM then embedded into text editor tool calls that place the generated text fragment into the text editor, performing cuts, pastes, and so on.

FWIW, I've done this and it works incredibly well. It's essentially integrating the LLM into the text editor, and requests of the LLM are more like requests of the text editor directly. The mental model I use is the editor has become an AI Agent itself. I've also done with with spreadsheets, web page editors, various tools in project management software. It's an incredible perspective that works.
by gryn | 2025-05-25 14:50:49+00:00
I started using (programming and everything else) with a 34key keyboard with miryoku layout with inverted T arrow keys & native mouse emulation layer enabled around 2years ago and I haven't looked back. it's more comfortable, it fixed my pathological touch typing too.

for those a want to give it a try, here are my the problems I encountered so far:

- stuff like Figma where you need to keep holding the space bar to change editing modes, won't work you need to make you custom (single purpose) space button if you want it.

- you can't play video games, unless you make you own custom layer or give each game a custom key bindings. I don't game much and when I do I use a gamepad so this haven't been much of a bother for much of bother for me but if you do It's something to keep in mind.

- the MCU boards that are available are very finicky, the nice!nano breaks easily I bought multiple replacements, they are very heat senstive. I had pins die, the charging circuit die on multiple ocasions in different boards. also I think using the mill-max pin was a mistake on my part even if it was the recommendation, they more expensive, annoying and you can't just plug them in a breadboard to test & debug them. on the web there's also an alternative commendation to use the leftover metal parts of the resistances/diodes. I would also recommend against it, with time the connections to the board start disconnecting since you probably won't cut all of them to the same exact length and that they wiggle inside the mill-max pin sockets. just use the standard ones that are used in most PCBs even if they are bigger.

- avoid using jack connectors to connect the sleeves, they can fry your MCUs and when they don't with time they give out and they start to disconnect and need time to reconnect and it makes for a bad user experience.

- if you make a wireless keyboard don't add LED backlights or individual per key LEDs they significantly drain your battery life even when you're not using them.

- Bluetooth connection is still somewhat unreliable, having something with wireless 2,4ghz would be better but I don't think there's an open source solution for that which is off the shelf, so if you want it you'll probably to make your own or tweak something from somewhere else.

I want to make a keyboard like the one that was submitted here a few weeks or months ago that takes these notes into account but I haven't found the time or the motivation. EDIT: this one https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43255529

I've also seen some people sell some open-source versions in ali express recently for around 60eur pre-assembled. I haven't ordered one so I'm not recommending it, just curious if anyone here ever did.
by magicalhippo | 2025-05-25 14:51:50+00:00
I would be very surprised. Typically LPDDR is soldered, as it takes too much power to run the traditional sockets, as well as being much slower.

Though there has been a modular option called LPCAMM[1]. However AFAIK it doesn't support the speed the specs of this box states.

Recently a newer connector, SOCAMM has been launched[2], which does support the high memory speeds, but it's just on the market and going into servers first AFAIK.

[1]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/21069/modular-lpddr-becomes-a...

[2]: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ram/micron-and-sk...
by p_ing | 2025-05-25 14:52:00+00:00
> The average corporate drone mistrusts and disregards small companies.

"Garageware" is what we called that type of software. Because it truly was, often built using old protocols, outmoded security mindset, etc.

It did the job our staff required (and may have been the only piece of software to do so) but it wasn't our favorite to deal with from a technology perspective.
by mmooss | 2025-05-25 14:52:06+00:00
> If the majority can simply erase the rights of a minority with a vote then nothing stops them from doing so. The Bill of Rights is worthless unless the courts enforce it. And judges are appointed experts in the law with absolute power within their jurisdiction. They’re as far from democracy as you can get.

Only if you define democracy as mob rule and not in the modern sense of self-determination, which includes self-determination by people in the minority.

Everything always depends on politics, but universal human rights has held up for centuries now. The people who instituted them had very little to work with - universal human rights as institutions were new in significant ways - we've been handed everything. We can certainly uphold it if we like.

(Also, judges are appointed democratically.)
by mystified5016 | 2025-05-25 14:52:52+00:00
Irreducible complexity is a good term. I think that's the problem with modern IDEs. Writing code is a complex task that can take infinitely many different forms. Sometimes all I need is just notepad or nano. Other days I need to look at four files, debug output, and an SSH session at the same time.

In order to solve this irreducible complexity, all modern IDEs are simply trending toward the simplest, """cleanest""", bare minimum of functionality.

It might look great to your UX design artists that want that promotion you promised, but where the rubber meets the professional with thousands of hours of experience, it falls apart. By removing complexity from your tools, you remove the ability to do complex tasks.

When my work involves processing huge amounts of information as fast as I can and my tools doggedly remove as much information as possible from my screen... Do these 'designers' actually know any programmers? Does anyone involved here actually write complex programs where you actually need the hidden 90% of functionality?

I've given up at this point. I canceled my JetBrains subscription and I'll be using the 2024.1 versions of all tools until someone comes out with a more modern IDE that's designed to be used by professionals and not children or c-suite types.
by TheNewsIsHere | 2025-05-25 14:53:28+00:00
I was at risk of falling into that trap. When we purchased our current home we did so within a few months of $major_national_shitty_homebuilder having closed the real estate transaction and submitting plans to raze a huge forested natural area directly behind our home and develop almost 100 new townhomes.

It was easy to miss that in the due diligence.

And it was really frustrating to experience. The development company cut so many corners that our own neighborhood had to engage several times with the city council and development bodies because their water management was threatening our properties. During construction of the water infrastructure they backflowed a toxic concentration of chemicals into the water supply. Their retention pond design is absolute garbage and while it was inspected and approval has already caused problems. They forgot to account for water going downhill while making assumptions about water volume that a week of heavy rain already invalidated.

We need the housing though, so it’s good we have that. I’m not sure we need more housing in the form of townhomes that cost $700,000+ each but at least it’s higher density than single family residences, which are killing the housing market in their own way.

Would just be nice if home building firms weren’t such a menace.