MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by reliabilityguy | 2025-07-13 15:11:05+00:00
> And you think that's legitimate? Keeping millions of people under permanent rule of a state with no rights whatsoever?

They do have rights. Why are you lying? They have PA, and they have all their rights there as determined by the PA.

> I'm not going to get into your historical claims, except to note that the reason why the situation for Middle Eastern Jews changed so drastically after 1948 was because a bunch of people claiming to represent all Jews conquered a strip of land in the Middle East and expelled the native population.

I see. So if some Jews in Israel do something, then the Arabs everywhere else are allowed to ethnically cleanse the Jews in other places. Thank you for clarifying this. Well, now we know where you stand on collective punishment :)

> Israel left Gaza in 2005 so that it could concentrate on the settlement of the West Bank. It was a strategic move to conserve their forces.

How does it change the choice that Palestinians made in Gaza?

> The only "land for peace" deal that Israel has made is with Egypt. Israel did that because it did not want to risk another war like 1973 with a serious military opponent.

So? It was a smart move, and proved itself.

Like man, you just showed with this reply alone that you don’t care about human rights, you just don’t like Jews.
Show HN: Urban Pipeline for Citywide Insights
by wingscape | 2025-07-13 15:11:34+00:00
Hey HN Community,

I just released an open-source project on GitHub called "Urban Data Pipeline: A Hands-On Guide to Real-World Data Engineering", a practical project designed to simulate challenges you’d encounter building centralized data systems in the wild. If you're into urban development, traffic insights, or air quality monitoring this one's for you.

The project takes you through ingesting live data (like traffic, air quality, and urban zoning), cleaning and enriching it using Python, dbt, and Airflow, storing it in Snowflake, and visualizing everything through Tableau.

Everything’s containerized and orchestrated using Docker. You can use this pipeline to simulate how smart cities manage and analyze data or just learn how to connect multiple tools into a cohesive, modern data stack.

I started this project as a learning journey to centralize and analyze real-world urban data across Jakarta. It's been a great playground for experimenting, which make the modern data stack feel lighter and more approachable.

Here’s also my medium article if you want look into it: https://medium.com/data-science-collective/end-to-end-urban-...

Would love feedback, contributions, or thoughts on improve this. Cheers!
by _1tem | 2025-07-13 15:12:14+00:00
How would manned aircraft help defend against swarms of drones deployed by decentralized enemy units? Drones are manufactured out of people’s garages, you can’t just take out the source like you can take out an airfield. On the other hand, Ukraine disabled a significant number of Russia’s manned aircraft with surreptitiously deployed drones (Operation Spider Web).
by ufmace | 2025-07-13 15:12:55+00:00
Thanks for providing a specific example! That does make more sense.

So I suppose Lite is indeed at least somewhat worse at blocking tracking. It's a legitimate concern. I admit that I don't have a ton of awareness of just how much tracking we're all subject to on the public mainstream web. Unfortunately, I fear it may be a losing battle.

What concerns me more is that there are dozens of medium to huge tech companies working full-time to track the hell out of us. That's not exactly great. uBO Lite blocks some of their stuff. I suppose uBO Full blocks more of it. But how do I know what either of them isn't blocking? It's got to be more than a full-time job to keep track of all the ways and means by which we're being tracked. Can a few determined independent individuals really effectively stop them? I tried using Firefox with NoScript for a while, but it's just too much work to fiddle with it on nearly every random site until that site works well enough to be usable.

I tend to think that, if one is truly concerned about ads and tracking, it's better to focus on staying on smaller, independent sites that do not do that at all. At least, more effective than being an individual in the middle of a full-time war between ad companies and individuals trying to block ads, trying to go to these big sites but not see the ads or be tracked.

Maybe the Brave solution is the better one - keep actual extensions to a more limited API, but more thoroughly integrate blocking of ads and tracking into the browser core. I know some people have other beefs with them, but there aren't any perfect solutions in this world.

It's also worth keeping in mind, in my opinion, that upwards of 95% of the world isn't using any ad blockers at all. Have you seen a "mainstream media" news website without any adblocking at all? Good god there's a ton of ads! How can anyone handle that! I guess we're already in a minority for trying to block ads at all, and it's an even smaller sub-minority that really cares about creating complex rules to actually block all tracking.
by 1970-01-01 | 2025-07-13 15:13:42+00:00
Running on donations is not a viable strategy for any long-term goal.

Mozilla needs to learn how to do the very hard thing and passively invest these donations. This is a viable long-term strategy. FF would have extra monetary momentum or inertia, and donation stall-out, however and whenever it occurs, would not be game-over for Mozilla.
by armada651 | 2025-07-13 15:13:56+00:00
> nobody has ever liked "educational" games.

You take that back, I loved educational games as a kid! There were indeed plenty of crappy ones out there, but some were really well-made. For example, Pink Panther's Passport to Peril was a charming point-and-click adventure that taught you about cultures in other countries.

There's a small cult following in the Netherlands for these types of edutainment games and a small group of people have set out to archive all of them: https://nationaalarchiefeducatievegames.nl/
by Tainnor | 2025-07-13 15:14:17+00:00
Few people who advocate for software quality want better software just because it's more aesthetically pleasing.

Often, we've worked on codebases that were nearly collapsing under their own weight, where adding even small features would take an inordinate amount of time, where most changes would have unintended consequences, where onboarding was incredibly hard, etc. And we've worked on other codebases where changing things was easy, so we know the difference.

Often, the business has no clue how to fix this because a) they're non-technical, b) we unfortunately have no consensus in the industry about what "good code" is, c) humans are much better at short-term than long-term thinking.
by plq | 2025-07-13 15:14:38+00:00
Ursula K. Leguin has a thought-provoking piece in this vein about why she wrote sci-fi:

https://web.archive.org/web/20191119030142/http://theliterar...

EDIT: Here's a better link: https://archive.org/details/dreams-must-explain-themsel-z-li...
by tbrownaw | 2025-07-13 15:15:00+00:00
> I’ve long believed that police officers should be required to carry private liability insurance, just like professionals in many other high risk fields. If an officer is uninsurable, they should be unhireable, plain and simple. Repeated misconduct would drive up their premiums or disqualify them entirely, creating a real consequence for bad behavior.

And it'd be administered by some faceless bureaucracy full of accountants, rather than a couple local politicians that the union can just bully (or bribe or whatever) into ignoring things.

But of course the current mess derives from sovereign immunity, which might be a bit tricky to get the politicians to tinker with more than they already have. :(
by galangalalgol | 2025-07-13 15:15:50+00:00
Persistent anarchy is a utopia in both senses of the word. But "the land of do as you please" certainly would be nice if human nature allowed for it. My concerns with Mamdani and AOC is lots of promises without any plans on how to pass the taxes to pay for them. If we don't pass the taxes to support universal healthcare, but implement it anyway, life will be worse for workers than if we hadn't, eventually. Also, while I don't think US left wing populists are currently likely to turn into authoritarians, power is dangerous. The temptation to fix one more thing before relinquishing it turns into an addiction and you get a Chavez. Though he was a lot more obvious from the start. I always thought the democrats would produce our first autocrat, yet another race they lost.
by reliabilityguy | 2025-07-13 15:16:20+00:00
> The Palestinians spent most of the 1980s trying to simply get the Israelis to come to the table and talk, and 1990s trying to get the Israelis to agree to a Palestinian state on 1967 borders. The Palestinians were consistently more interested in a peace deal than the Israelis were. The simple reason is that Israel suffers very few negative consequences from its occupation of the Palestinian territories. It has very little incentive to make any peace deal.

So, nothing concrete beyond your opinions not grounded in facts. Okay.

> Israel came very close to defeat in 1973, and had to rely on an unprecedented resupply effort by the United States, which replaced nearly the entire Israeli tank force and much of the airforce within days.

What? How do you replace entire tank force within days from across the globe?? How do you train the crews on new equipment? Why are inventing things that never happened?

> The Israelis were aware of their vulnerability after 1973, which is why they entered negotiations with the Egyptians. Negotiations take time, which is why the whole process took several years.

Realizing that piece is better than constant wars and trading the land for it is a good move. I’m not sure what are you trying to show here.

> But you're quibbling about the details of how IDF soldiers get paid, as if that made any moral difference.

Devil is in the details though, right? :) I know that you cannot have an evidence based discourse because it will be quickly shown that Palestinians incentivize non-conventional terror warfare, while Israelis not.

Getting people paid to kill civilians is immoral.

> I'm not trying to draw any equivalence. The IDF is a thousand times more evil than any Palestinian organization.

Of course not. Making your own people blow themselves up in cafes and buses is immoral.
by greatgib | 2025-07-13 15:17:07+00:00
Some people say that the hate for Mozilla Corp is not deserved. But the thing to understand is that ten of thousands of people have rooted for Firefox. Even if not contributing to the code or money, supported it, pushed for it, like telling everyone to use it, ensuring that what they do works well with Firefox despite corporate interest regarding the market share and all. Lots of people have proudly distributed Firefox/Mozilla marketing stuff to help with that. People have accepted what was forced to be done to accept the money from Google to support the project.

And there, in parallel, there are greedy executive in Mozilla that took a big cut of the money, and wasted shitload of it in stupid and useless things that went to trash In the end, achieving really little.

Yes firefox is a little bit better than in the past, but like just a single digit percent better compared to what it should have been if the money wasted was really used to develop the project. Interesting other projects that could have changed the world were underfunded, like thunderbird (that never thrived as much as now since the Corp is not charge anymore) and market shares are still as low as ever...
by alganet | 2025-07-13 15:17:21+00:00
That's too shallow for me.

This idea encourages the line of thinking that replacing whoever made AI will solve the ethical problems with using this technology, which is a wrong way of approaching it.

It also encourages the idea of fixating on strange and whacky individuals, opening up the opportunity for dismissing any opposition to AI as a personal or political vendetta.

We can be much better than this, and instead focus on the real stakes.

The problems for AI are related to privacy, surveillance, abuse of markets, brainwashing. They probably can all be solved, and we should think of solving them instead of making simplistic observations about good and evil.
by cogman10 | 2025-07-13 15:17:37+00:00
What does it mean to be qualified?

The issue I have is a lot of CEOs appear to be wholly unqualified for their positions and their salaries are completely unjustifiable. So many of them don't even have a glancing understanding of the product or company that they are in charge of. Their primary role is getting a higher stock valuation so the board can be happy.

A good example of this is how many tech CEOs have dumped ungodly amounts of money on "AI" because that's what the market demands. Or how many CEOs hire and fire based on what other companies are doing, not what their company needs.

The fact is, "qualified" is often at odds with "competent". Most of the 30x CEOs are only qualified in chasing stock prices, not competently running a company for the long term.
by mb20281 | 2025-07-13 15:17:52+00:00
This example is pretty weak as multiple things are wrong here. Seems like there was a lack of error handling all the way through (or participants would've noticed errors on completing). And why wouldn't you save in DB before sending the email? After all, you can always recover sending the email - and it's awkward to send an email with results that didn't make it to your DB.
by cmcaleer | 2025-07-13 15:18:35+00:00
There are making mistakes as an organization, and there is taking exorbitant sums of money from advertising partners and having your costs inflate to match these donations, rather than something, anything to help the sustainability of Mozilla.

Imagine if at any point in the last 2 decades leadership in Mozilla had started an endowment[0] instead of them spending many billions of dollars on ineffective programs, harebrained acquisitions, and executive salaries. They could have had a sustainable, long-lasting model that would have kept Mozilla relevant and strong for decades to come.

Instead, Mozilla sold itself out to become a shield for Google while being grossly mismanaged to the point that it is entirely reliant on a deal that at any point could be rugged from them. At no point in the last two decades has resolving this ever been a meaningful focus beyond panhandling for donations that barely cover executive compensation.

I still try to use Firefox and I desperately want to be proven wrong in my opinion that Mozilla's leadership is incompetent, or malicious, or both, but I've been hoping for this since Chrome was released.

I want them to succeed and be who they were before, but Mozilla leadership does not.

[0] Wikimedia did this nearly a decade ago and it's been a huge success and makes Wikimedia more resilient! There's a model for this!
by sirwhinesalot | 2025-07-13 15:18:42+00:00
The advantage is that the allocations are grouped: they're allocated in the same memory region (good memory locality) and freed in bulk. The tradeoff is needing to explicitly create these scopes and not being able to have custom deallocation logic like you can in a destructor.

(This doesn't seem to have anything to do with borrow checking though, which is a memory safety feature not a memory management feature. Rust manages memory with affine types which is a completely separate thing, you could write an entire program without a single reference if you really wanted to)
by _1tem | 2025-07-13 15:19:14+00:00
Very big if. The US is unlikely to have air superiority against a neer peer adversary.

And even with air superiority, the US hasn’t been able to win a single war since WW2 except 1991 Gulf.

Currently the US and Israel are failing to oust the Houthis from Yemen and Hamas from Gaza even with a massive multi year sustained bombing campaign from the air.

Planes have never won a war.
by solaire_oa | 2025-07-13 15:19:54+00:00
> The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

> static-filled “dead channels.”

I don't think Gibson was referring to static (which is bland grey and not cyberpunk at all). I think he was referring to SMPTE on a "dead channel", which is a colorful skyline reminiscent of Blade Runner. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMPTE_color_bars

I agree with the author of this article that Neuromancer is a precursor for modern sci-fi, and it serves as inspiration for so much popular culture. But it's a terrible book IMO. The characters are shallow and uninteresting (Cage), the plot is boring (Wintermute), expository dialogue is rattled off without any setup or motivation (the female character explaining her backstory), it's chock full of nonsequiters (shark-head, something about horses being extinct), and new concepts are introduced not because they're engaging but because they're "just so sci-fi bro" (Turning police).
Ask HN: Could the C64 startup screen have encouraged more users to learn BASIC?
by amichail | 2025-07-13 15:20:13+00:00
In particular, the C64 could have started with a BASIC program already in memory and ready to run.

It could even automatically LIST and then RUN the program for you.

To avoid annoying the user, the program should just compute something, print the result, and exit without requiring any user input.

You could even have a collection of short programs in ROM, with one randomly selected each time the C64 starts up.

Do you think this would have encouraged more users to learn BASIC programming?
by gerikson | 2025-07-13 15:20:37+00:00
I think this is a fair analysis, but for me the pleasure of reading Gibson has basically always been the use of language and jargon. Yes, Virtual Light is a stupid caper story but both Chevette and Berry are great characters, hard-luck protagonists trying to make it in a crapsack world. Berry's background is especially deftly told in a few telling vignettes.

That's why the Bigend books are such disappointments to me. Instead of outsiders looking in, or trying to strike it big, we have bougie insiders getting VC money. And Agency is a travesty.
by throw123xz | 2025-07-13 15:21:19+00:00
There's essentially 2 browsers in that long list: Firefox and Chromium.

Everyone using Chromium as base committed to MV2 support, but that's while Chromium itself still supports MV2. What will happen when Google changes things enough that the small browsers can't merge updates in a day or two while maintaining MV2 support? I doubt Vivaldi and Brave have the resources to actually fork Chromium... not even going to mention small projects like Thorium or Ungoogle Chromium.

And the Firefox-based browsers are in a similar position. The 2 or 3 students working on Floorp can't do much if Mozilla decides to drop support and then introduces changes that breaks compatibility with old code.

Of course those browsers can decide to stop merging upstream code, but then you get a Pale Moon... even if we ignore security flaws (which are a problem for you and your machine), a visit to their forum tells me that it struggles with a few websites.
by submeta | 2025-07-13 15:21:50+00:00
> I do think that this cowboy coding approach is doing these companies a disservice, especially where tech is not their main product. It's only creating more operational risk

I absolutely agree with you! Alas, management in those companies (I have worked for some) does not understand the necessity of solid software engineering work. It’s way above their head. That’s why they have systems that constantly cause problems. And then expensive consultants are called in to fix symptoms, not solve root causes. Shocking to see that in lots of otherwise very successful companies.
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-07-13 15:21:57+00:00
You could make it based on past performance at a given level. So your position in a qualifying race depends on your placement in last year's qualifying race. Your position at the final Olympic event depends on your placement at the same event in the last Olympics.

If it's your first time at a given event, I guess keep whatever we do now or make it random. The reason for this system would be to make surprise wins from less-known people more likely, which I'd think would be desirable.
by throwaway328 | 2025-07-13 15:22:21+00:00
I recently stumbled upon Michael Moorcock, by explicitly looking for fantasy authors with "anarchist" (in the original, European sense, not the crypto-bro sense) tendencies. Read an essay, watched a few interviews, will be reading a few books, basically I'm all the better for it. Seems very interesting.

I might as well ask here - are there equivalents for sci-fi and/or for cyberpunk? I get that there's a pervading sense of everything being bought and sold and runied and nihilistic in cyberpunk... but I don't know if it feels very political, or rebellious, or revolutionary. I don't mean that critically, art doesn't have to be political. I am curious if there were any overtly anarchist thinkers operating in that space, though.
by ben_w | 2025-07-13 15:24:25+00:00
British lawyer and commentator David Allen Green has things to say about certain patterns of speech, phrases such as "absolutely clear" are used only when one has not been at all clear: https://davidallengreen.com/2021/11/let-me-be-absolutely-cle...

Likewise, I would add "obviously": I have never seen "obvious" used to describe anything which is obvious, only things which are not.

The phrase "common sense" is even worse, as about half the time it points to claims that are in fact false.

So, in this case, surgical masks: you say it's "obvious" they're not good enough and compare them to a mesh bag. Perhaps they are that bad, but it's not obvious, and "common sense"* suggests to me that surgeons, who are necessarily working with unwell and often immunocompromised people, will desire something that doesn't let one of the surgical team put a random bacterial mix into someone's new kidney when they sneeze.

* I am aware of the irony; and yes, despite this I can also name a famous example where surgeons collectively were very wrong
by Xmd5a | 2025-07-13 15:25:40+00:00
It's bigger than just the two of you. I spot people with similar thesis every day. Similar theories of similarity. It started getting "traction" in March. I say "traction" because this "emergence" is "acausal". You will find likeminded people on r/HumanAIDiscourse r/ThePatternIsReal r/ArtificialSentience, etc, although not all have a formal system. I tend to run across those with a formal system outside of these circles though, on HN for instance.

What's common to all these frameworks: they are able to describe their own agency at a meta level. Since they are all about how similarity emerge, they should be able to explain how they are part of a wider emerging ring of similar theories. I don't think this is a contingency.

In practice, what I realized is that all these folks don't engage with each other's work. They are too deep into to their own project (or themselves!) to meaningfully interact. Maybe this is just a phase, time will tell.

Also yesterday, I found a mention of a forgotten french philosophical movement, critical idealism, in Petitot's Morphogenesis of Meaning:

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A9thode_r%C3%A9flexive

Voilà. I hope those breadcrumbs will help you.
by upghost | 2025-07-13 15:26:22+00:00
I think it's interesting and odd that tool calling took the form of this gnarly json blob. I much prefer the NexusRaven[1] style where you provide python function stubs with docstrings and get back python function invocations with the arguments populated. Of course I don't really understand why MCP is popular over REST or CLI, either.

[1]: https://github.com/nexusflowai/NexusRaven-V2