MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by palmfacehn | 2025-07-29 07:46:52+00:00
Equating central planning with liberty feels like a reach. Can you think of any examples where central planning resulted in misallocated resources? If so, why is state directed research a special case?

If the state has cancelled research for 'impure' political motives, how would we know that it hasn't directed state research (and outcomes) for similarly impure political reasons?

There's an interesting contradiction in the popular discourse here at HN. The government is simultaneously characterized as unable to make the correct decisions and at the same time, characterized as the only viable mechanism to conduct scientific research. These two themes seem contradictory.

If they cannot make the "right" decisions or lack competence in leadership, it wouldn't be unreasonable to doubt the efficacy of their research leadership. How could they possibly identify the problems which are worthy of solving under these conditions?

If their leadership is competent, if they are correctly identifying the necessary research projects, then why do proponents of government directed "science" have so many gripes in regards to the direction which government science is directed?

Appeals to the status quo of state funded research as the only or best way to achieve outcomes requires a better argument. At best, I think you might offer arguments via pragmatism. It would be reasonable to expect that purely voluntarily funded research would produce different outcomes. As these pursuits would generally be directed towards creating positive economic outcomes, rather than political or ideological ones, we might also expect that these outcomes would be better along the metric of economic value. Politically funded research could reasonably be expected to better at achieving political or ideological outcomes.

However, these are arguments from principle. We would need to test it empirically for those caught in the Scientismic paradigm to accept the results. Under this model of argument, the existence of state funded research tampers with the results. We wouldn't know how a voluntarily funded research regime would function when competing state funds are polluting the pool. Researchers may find it easier to pursue state backed projects than pursue projects which would appeal to the value creation process. This is just one of the flaws in the argumentum ad antiquitatem approach.
by lan321 | 2025-07-29 07:46:52+00:00
For me, it doesn't break anything with their filters. Using it on both phone and PC and I don't manage to hit the free limit for the month. (unless I forget to close the GOG launcher, which for some reason is pinging all the time and blows through the monthly usage limit in a week)

Mullvad, however, leads to Captcha City and is straight up blocked on a couple of sites, namely McGearHub and, for a time, Runescape. Btw, if you have a friend using it, you can likely mooch off their sub. I share mine with 2 other people since the device limit is 5, and I only have my phone and PC on it.

I'm guessing the captcha city situation might be better with more "casual" VPNs but I doubt it makes much of a difference once you have a bunch of people on the same IP.
by tomhow | 2025-07-29 07:46:53+00:00
I wish you'd work with us as we try to do what we can to maximize the quality of the thread, rather than dismissing everything we've spent today doing as futile. Of course it's going to be futile when the very people who think they could make it better insist that it's pointless to even try.

Yes, there's a weight of sentiment in a certain direction about this topic. Equally, there are minority, nuanced perspectives that are important, and I've unkilled several of them today and turned off flagging powers on users who were reflexively flagging anything they disagreed with.

I'll continue to be online for most of the next 4-5 hours. I'd be very pleased if you were to contribute positively by sharing your perspective, and as long as it's within the guidelines I'll ensure it doesn't get killed by a flag pile-on.

Well-argued minority positions are often the most valuable on HN. Comments that just say the same thing everyone's been saying are by-definition uninteresting, even if they're in the overwhelming majority. Indeed, one of the most important reasons to allow topics like this to be discussed on HN is to give a voice to well-argued minority perspectives that can't be found elsewhere.
by ggillas | 2025-07-29 07:47:13+00:00
Selective plant breeding and robotics pickers are the way forward here. University of Arkansas is the holder of multiple plant patents for better blackberries. New varieties are bred for many, many traits (sweetness, transport, shelf quality, ripening window, etc.)

Prof John Clark likely has invented the berries you've ate: https://news.uark.edu/articles/63163/arkansas-fruit-breeder-...

Harvest costs for fruit are an incredibly important consideration for farms and out of the thousands of potential fruits you could eat, the commercial winners have to be profitable.

There are some awesome opportunities for robotics, computer vision, and ML in agriculture. And if you can reduce harvest costs by 75% like this approach for blueberries, farmers have more market options to select better flavor qualities because the harvest quality goes up: https://extension.oregonstate.edu/impact/innovative-harvest-...
by defrost | 2025-07-29 07:47:16+00:00
Only in so far as it relates to Gaza and the Ukraine .. which tracks for a US based IT forum given the US political ties to all parties concerned and the cyber capabilities of almost all the parties (including the use of phone bombs wrt Hamas members, etc).

Sudan doesn't have a substantial US sub community nor much in the way of a cyber footprint (on a globally relative scale).
by bayindirh | 2025-07-29 07:47:17+00:00
Vanishing Points are nice pens. I have an all matte black one. Also, pens tipping gets polished according to your handwriting over time, making it completely yours.

I also like Lamys. Most of their pens look simple but they’re work horses. Esp. Safari Umber.

I’m a bit too deep in that rabbit hole. :)
by grues-dinner | 2025-07-29 07:47:45+00:00
The comet probably doesn't have a great amount of fuel. Even if it's all ice, how are you going to split the water? Only if you have a fusion reactor that can do H-H fusion, or you can scrape enough dueterium out of it, can you use that. You will find no tritium as it has a short half life, and He-3 (probably) won't have been implanted by solar wind in interstellar space, so if you need that, you have to bring it or breed it somehow.

It does have a great amount of mass, so you could rendezvous, construct a mass driver or ion drive and start taking it apart and using chunks of it as extra reaction mass. That would allow you to essentially get a free reaction mass "refill". You will still need a lot (a lot) of power, and solar will be near zero.
by 5Qn8mNbc2FNCiVV | 2025-07-29 07:48:15+00:00
The trick is to not worry about useMemo and useCallback because it's rarely an issue unless you have 800 line components or don't compose but rather treat everything as if it was inheritance.

I've got pretty sizeable codebases, less than 5 useEffects ever (nowadays I only have one for a single location where I need to manually poll, the rest is useSyncExternalStore) and I only do useMemo for tables.

Compiler is just an additional performance improvement that's "free" and at least the compiler doesn't make it harder to understand how your code executes because it just works
by knuckleheads | 2025-07-29 07:48:27+00:00
Ask me in a few months about subscriptions, I'm only a few weeks into having this thing be something even remotely playable. It's more or less the nytimes model and they seem to make it work. Right now, my girlfriend is very helpfully finding very obvious bugs in it most nights that I am fixing, and then after that I hope to get English in there.

I have also read that thread previously and disagree with ads being the only way to go. I think if the game is good enough and, for three emojis in particular, people learn more about their target language, that they will happily pay for it. I know I would at least, and I personally don't think I'm so weird. Friends have surprised me by signing up as soon as I sent it to them, specifically on the language learning value proposition, so I think there's something there. But, if it was just a puzzle game for fun only, then I might agree that the model doesn't work. We will just have to see!
by Arathorn | 2025-07-29 07:49:15+00:00
Okay - as I said in the parent, this should not happen. Most people report UTDs as having gone away; i haven’t seen any myself in months, let alone any this bad.

The only scenario i can think of here is either you logged out of all devices on your account (so nobody could encrypt for you as you didn’t exist any more) or the room is impressively corrupt (state resets) or the server is impressively buggy (eg a beta) or the servers can’t actually talk to each other (eg messages are being replicated transitively but keys aren’t).

Please can you report with details so we can actually investigate?

As per the linked conference talks, we went on a gigantic mission to fix this, which based on our telemetry was successful.
by matsemann | 2025-07-29 07:49:38+00:00
Yes, but then you have to do as the author says: wrap every single function in a use callback and declare it dependencies. Otherwise it's unsafe to use for others. Which to me is a broken design. And y in my case may not be my function, either from a library or somewhere else in the application I don't want to modify just because my usage needs it. It should be a compiler thing, not up to the devs, the abstraction feels off.
by jononor | 2025-07-29 07:49:51+00:00
One of the ways it can work is that people may reject the most extreme case (say end of humans beings in control), but accept some milder version (most jobs will be done by AI, or most jobs will be AI assisted). The fear of an extreme can cause people to rationalize the "milder" outcome - independently of whether there are good arguments for that outcome, or even whether the outcome is desirable, or better than status quo.

The investor class are not dependent on wages, so their livelihoods are not at stake. Same with big corporate partners, they are hoping to improve competitiveness by having fewer employees and CEO take a bonus for that. Regular users in fear of their jobs may act on that, in hope that they can reskill and transition by being AI savvy.

I do not agree with the argument they make, but I understand what they are are playing at, and that unfortunately it can be effective.
by bell-cot | 2025-07-29 07:50:02+00:00
> YouTube has been such ... over the last six months ... still talk about violence ... gather people into anti-government groups?

Sounds like YouTube wants to avoid "official disfavor".

I'd assume there are still plenty of such spaces, though without YouTube's scale and open registration. Perhaps some of your old acquaintances from YouTube would extend invitations to you?

I'd also assume that the NSA was keeping detailed records of your interests. And that the "action threshold" for official disfavor could change in ways that you don't expect. Especially if you live in the US.
by socalgal2 | 2025-07-29 07:50:37+00:00
I have a personal web app that I wrote in react 16 with babel set up by createReactApp directly from the react docs. it’s been stuck with a list of features I want to add in my spare time but all 3 of those have bitrotted out so that in my minor spare time over the last 2 years or so, instead of being able to add some feature, I spend 2 to 3 hours trying to update it to the latest, fail, and no progress is made.

my latest attempt was to see if one of the LLMs could do it. nope.

I’ve thought about starting from scratch but don’t have the time
by IlikeKitties | 2025-07-29 07:51:00+00:00
Due to the design of the protocol and to a degree the audience. Here's a bit more info in form of a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8KEuAEYjQ4

> but nowhere seems to have such a CSAM problem as Matrix

Well Tor, i2p, freenet etc. are mostly csam anyway
by jahewson | 2025-07-29 07:51:09+00:00
Had we never received foreign investments to begin with we would certainly be worse off, as indeed we were in the 50s, 60s, and 70s.

> There's been consensus among pretty much every party in my lifetime around supporting "growth", "investment", number go up.

Yes most U.K. governments have talked about fine talk but other than Thatcher, failed to actually deliver on securing enough investment. It’s not that the investments are bad, it’s that they have been decreasing for 25 years:

https://www.economicsobservatory.com/boosting-productivity-w...

It’s funny that you mention ARM because it was created under Thatcher back when the U.K. was willing to start businesses. Yes it should never have been sold.
by anonfordays | 2025-07-29 07:51:34+00:00
>is a risky thing to say in public. I wouldn't say it not behind a pseudonymous account without some level of plausible deniability. Even peak cancel culture wasn't quite so chilling.

Peak cancel culture was much more chilling than this. People were fired for cracking their knuckles[0], businesses were targeted for selling tacos while White, not constantly virtue signaling at work would cast you as a racist since "silence is complicetness," etc. A moral panic not seen for decades.

Leftists made their bed, and now they get to lie in it. Live by the sword, die by the sword. Those who pointed out the peak woke cancel culture lunacy were told they were racists supporting the status quo. Now you're being told you're antisemitic.

It was truly dystopian.

[0] https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/502975-cal...
by vermarish | 2025-07-29 07:52:21+00:00
I interpret it a different way than that. I see application code and testing code as both a part of blue team. It's the code reviews and architectural critiques that are part of red team.

Personally, I've found GitHub's feature of AI PR reviewers exceptionally helpful. I think that's the type of red team LLM app Tao is describing here.
by theshrike79 | 2025-07-29 07:52:25+00:00
It used to be so that the Village Crazy got called crazy and either they figured out "shit, I'm crazy" and toned it down or they just lived alone being crazy.

Now the Village Crazy can find others with their exact flavour of crazy online and think that it's cool and everyone is doing it. Then they get deeper and deeper into their crazy, maybe transitioning into other flavours of crazy.
by IncreasePosts | 2025-07-29 07:52:50+00:00
Maybe it's because Israel is viewed as a "modern"/"western" nation, and shouldn't be doing these kinds of things, whereas Sudan and Congo are not.

Hamas had it coming, but I'm not sure much can explain the starvation random children are experiencing, that they weren't before, except Israel trying to extract some toll on the Palestinian people.

I think anti semitism is more common than it appears on the surface level, even when people say "criticizing Israel isn't criticizing Jews in general", but a lot of it actually is. But that doesn't explain all criticism.

This sounds weird to say, but I'm actually okay with kids getting blown up in bombings if there were legitimate military targets there and no other choice. But starvation takes a long, concerted effort to effect.
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2025-07-29 07:53:41+00:00
If your research is funded by taxpayer dollars, you're a public servant and you should welcome public accountability. You should accept that explaining the public benefit of what you do is part of your job, and accept the possibility that the public won't see eye-to-eye with regard to that benefit.

The fundamental problem is that scientists stopped thinking of themselves as public servants, and started thinking of themselves as lecturers whose job it is to scold the public. They stopped working to follow the evidence wherever it lead, and switched to promoting trendy ideologies. Remember during COVID how we were all supposed to isolate, until the Floyd protests started and suddenly the need for isolation disappeared?

"Three-in-four liberal faculty support mandatory diversity statements while 90% of conservative faculty and 56% of moderate faculty see them as political litmus tests."

...

"For decades, college and university faculty have identified as predominantly left-leaning (e.g., affiliating with the Democratic party, self-identifying as liberal), a skew that has become more pronounced over the past three decades.[40] For instance, in the Higher Education Research Institute’s 1990 faculty survey, 6% identified as “far left,” 16% identified as “conservative,” and 0.4% identified as “far right.” In 2020 these percentages were 12%, 10%, and 0.2%, respectively.[41] College students are also predominantly left-leaning, though the rate is closer to 2:1 left vs. right, compared to 6:1 among faculty.[42]"

..."significant portions of faculty say that they would discriminate against colleagues with different ideological views in professional settings (e.g., during anonymous peer-review) or during day-to-day social interactions.[43]"

https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/academic-mind-2022-wh...

Now consider that self-described "conservatives" significantly outnumber self-described "liberals" in the US electorate: https://news.gallup.com/poll/388988/political-ideology-stead...

Academics successfully hacked away the branch that they themselves were standing on. Large fractions of the US electorate no longer believe that the research these academics do is a good-faith attempt to advance their interests as voters and taxpayers. And so they're not interested in funding it. Fair play if you ask me. If academia wants funding, it should do deep reforms in order to re-earn the trust of voters.
by dinfinity | 2025-07-29 07:54:03+00:00
I am ambivalent about news like this.

On one hand it is a terrible proposal that deserves exposure to generate pushback.

On the other hand it is still just a proposal, of which there are many (stupid ones) which never see the light of day. This still needs to pass the European Parliament (which is generally opposed to this, not in the least because it is very unpopular under EU citizens). Even then the chances of it surviving a challenge in the courts (of which there will be many) are tiny.
by jrflowers | 2025-07-29 07:54:04+00:00
This makes sense so long as you define “entrepreneurship” as the act of making a legal entity with the goal of using venture capital to hit a billion dollar valuation as quickly as possible.

In fact since the number of billion dollar valuations goes up by an order of magnitude every few years we are on track for every person on earth to start a billion dollar corporation in a few short decades. This is proof that you could see on Wikipedia that entrepreneurship is doing great
by BlarfMcFlarf | 2025-07-29 07:54:15+00:00
Imagine you are a 19 year old in charge of some Hamas survivors. Let’s say you want to surrender.

1. Would it even mean anything? It’s not like you or anyone else has the control to stop everyone else. And Israel will use any attack as a sign of bad faith and ignore the surrender.

2. Would it improve anything for your people? If Israelis are intentionally starving babies, there is no reason to think they will stop the genocide just because the militarized part has given up. Have you even heard any news of Hamas even fighting back recently or has it all just been killing civilians?

All a surrender would do is get you tortured for information and executed for no gain.
by noufalibrahim | 2025-07-29 07:54:24+00:00
I disagree. I used a Waterman Expert for a long time. It conked out when someone I loaned it to dropped it. I switched to a Noodlers Ahab (which has a flexible nib) so you can do a little bit of flourishing for headings etc. I've used it for a long time and still do. Recently, I switched to a broad tipped Lamy Safari (which was a birthday gift).

My main problem is that most papers can't really handle the inkflow from fountain pens anymore and since the place I come from is somewhat humid, the papers quickly start to bleed ink. So, my more common instrument is a Pentel graphgear mechanical pencil.

I do calligraphy as a hobby so I have separate arsenal of dip pens and nibs but those are not for daily use.
by exodust | 2025-07-29 07:54:38+00:00
> "They are responsible for the current situation."

Pretty sure the people responsible are the ones hijacking aid trucks and causing security problems in distribution areas. Hamas has a long history of misdirecting aid from the Gazan population; stealing, oppressing, punishing, exploiting, and that's from before the war as commonly reported by UN sources and humanitarian groups over the years.
by littlestymaar | 2025-07-29 07:55:01+00:00
> If it is, then I exercise my freedom of speech to place bumper stickers on YOUR car that say things that you find distateful. "But that's my property!"

And in fact, you cannot stop me from putting leaflets on your car, no matter how distasteful you find the content, just because it's your property. In fact, in many jurisdictions, putting stickers is allowed too, the line being drawn at damaging the property of someone else. (I can write stuff on your car with easy to wash water paint, but I can't carve a message on it).

> If you ran a bookstore, and I could force you to carry a bunch of books that glorified Nazism

Welcome to the life of every bookstore clerks in the world. And it turns out they aren't allowed to remove books they disagree with, nor add their own favorite book in the store. If the owner of the store can force that on its clerks I see no reason why the legislator couldn't do the same on the owner. In fact, in countries that aren't hypocritical about freedom of speech, you cannot get fired by your boss if they dislike what you say, but you can definitely be fired if you refuse a customer, which shows doing business has nothing to do with freedom of speech.

So at the end of the day, having refuted your two arguments, my point still stand: Doing business isn't akin to speech, and corporations aren't human beings in the first place so they shouldn't be entitled human rights anyway.

Also, property right isn't some special kind of right that trumps everything else, it's one basic right like any other and have no precedence/superiority over the others.
by closewith | 2025-07-29 07:55:08+00:00
When real encryption is illegal, it will be easier to roll them up.

> Why are some of these people so obsessed with reading everyone's chats?

Having worked with some of the people in law enforcement heavily pushing this, it generally does come from child safety concerns and the overwhelming amount of CSAM sent via encrypted means.

Personally, I don't believe that it will ever be restricted to serious crimes and the potential for abuse is infinite, so I don't believe it is justifiable, but child sexual abuse is a real and enormous problem that causes untold harm and suffering, so we have to find a balance.
Show HN: Hookdns (for Python devs)- Because /etc./hosts is not always an option
by cle-b | 2025-07-29 07:55:11+00:00
Hi,

The aim of this Python library is to let you define (or override) DNS resolution directly in your code. No need to modify the hosts file or use an external DNS resolver.

I created this library as a toy project a few years ago, mainly to learn how to use GitHub Actions (not really for what the library itself does).

I never really shared it before because I don't use it myself, but since a few people have used it, I thought: why not share it with more people if it might be useful to someone, probably for testing purposes?

I'd be happy if it can be helpful to any of you.

cle.