MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by willmarch | 2025-07-16 23:27:39+00:00
The drop in El Salvador’s official homicide rate is real, but it is the exception, not the rule—and it says little about the countries the U.S. has actually been off-loading asylum-seekers to. The Trump “safe-third-country” flights went almost entirely to Guatemala and Honduras, where the 2023 homicide rates (≈17 and 31 per 100,000, UNODC) remain among the highest in the hemisphere and where LGBT killings continue at a pace far above population share (Honduras’ observatory logged 40 LGBT murders in 2022 alone—roughly one every nine days). Even El Salvador’s new “safety” comes at the cost of mass arbitrary detentions, torture allegations, and documented abuse of LGBT detainees (Amnesty, HRW 2024). So the risk is not simply “outdated statistics”; it is the current, documented inability or unwillingness of these states to protect targeted minorities—a textbook refoulement problem.

Comparing forced removal to voluntary north-bound migration also misses the legal and moral point. People who choose to set out on a dangerous route retain agency; deportees have none. International law bars the U.S. from pushing anyone—especially those who are LGBT or otherwise vulnerable—into countries where the state cannot keep them safe, regardless of how perilous the journey to America may have been. Ending that legal protection would not “remove temptation”; it would simply trap people in danger and outsource responsibility for whatever happens next.
by bonestamp2 | 2025-07-16 23:29:33+00:00
I think it's similar to Tesla entering the automotive world. The existing automakers had some moats, but they also had a lot of legacy responsibilities and liabilities that Tesla did not have (existing warranties, lawsuits, recalls, parts stock, maintaining support for old vehicles in various internal software systems, updating software on old vehicles when age related problems arise, retiree pensions/healthcare, etc).

A newcomer in the heavy equipment space will have similar challenges and advantages. Funny enough, a lot of heavy equipment works very similar to cars with their CAN (and other) Buses for control and feedback.
by zzo38computer | 2025-07-16 23:29:53+00:00
> I personally would have preferred pure markdown and no gemtext at all

The gemtext format is much simpler than markdown, which can avoid the complexity of handling markdown files. (One thing I dislike about markdown and other text-based formats (including JSON, etc) is that escaping will then be required, which can make it messy).

(Nevertheless, you can serve files of any format like you can with HTTP and some other protocols.)

> Similarly, and although I understand the reasoning behind making encryption mandatory, I believe it should be optional in the spirit of KISS

I agree. (My own "Scorpion" protocol does make it optional, for this reason. However, the existing server implementation does not currently implement TLS, although the protocol does allow (and also recommend) it, as long as any files that do not require X.509 client authentication can also be accessed without TLS.)

(Also, if you are serving only static files with Gemini then you could also use Spartan which uses the same file format as Gemini. If you have dynamic files, then it is going to be more difficult because of the differences between the protocols, although it might still be possible.)

> Finally, the argument that it takes a new protocol to avoid a broken user experience, often exemplified by someone jumping from a simple and well behaved HTTP website into a chaotic one [...]

This might miss the point. As the FAQ mentions, there are benefits of a new protocol and file format, including a simplified implementation compared with HTML, and this does not prevent the possibility of also making and/or using well designed websites.

(If you specifically do want a subset of HTTP, HTML, and JavaScript, there is "gemiweb0", and is intended to also be compatible with common web browsers. However, this does not mean that Gemini and other protocols and file formats are worthless; they are still beneficial, in my opinion.)
by grishka | 2025-07-16 23:30:02+00:00
My first Android phone was an HTC Desire S. It had a rather sturdy metal case with some plastic inserts for the antennas. The bottom insert slid off to reveal the battery and SIM and SD slots. The only downside is that because of this construction it has the USB port on the side. I used it way beyond official support by installing custom ROMs, but eventually apps got so bloated it couldn't run them without frustrating me.

So, uh, can I please have that but with a more modern SoC and a non-potato camera?
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-07-16 23:31:17+00:00
Then you make it illegal to do business with countries that don't have an extradition treaty for slavery!

I cannot fathom this mindset. This is human slavery! This is worse than murder and rape and child endangerment, because it inherently includes all of them! It is the worst crime you can commit onto another human being for decades and decades as you drive them into the grave. I've seen a picture of a man looking at the severed hands of his daughter for bananas! But you're willing to handwaved it away like it's a minor inconvenience?

As if a country that is currently demanding OpenAI give them every chat they've ever had, including deleted, a country that has every phone call and text ever made, that has privileged access to emails and photo clouds and search engines for monitoring, that runs countless poisoned exit nodes and honey potted websites, which infiltrates domestic and foreign cults and rings and governments with spies regularly, that publishes papers on how to spy on citizens walking through their homes via wireless signals and hear audio through hard surfaces by using vibrations in leaves, that operates military cities and steers security standards and has quite literally unlimited money for their war machine, which can track individual human activity from space can't find out if millions to billions of pounds of materials going through their ports being inspected by their customs with manifest signed by domestic companies with paperwork uses slavery!?

Oh, come on. When it's about SpaceX taking humans to Mars we're all "we do these things because they are hard" but when it comes to ending the most abhorrent crimes against humanity of our times you throw up your hands and declare "the billionaires told me it was hard"!?
by const_cast | 2025-07-16 23:31:34+00:00
.. and about a thousand less privacy violations. Plus significantly less ties to Google.

Even chromium-based web browsers are tightly coupled to Google. They rely on them for 99.99% of their source code. Mozilla just uses Google as the default search engine.

If I had to estimate, the developer time required for Mozilla to change the default search engine is ~.5 hours. In order for, say, Brave to not be dependent on Google, they'd have to spend ~100,000 dev hours. Because, you know, they'd have to completely develop a new web browser.
by jasonthorsness | 2025-07-16 23:32:20+00:00
@waEMD (Washington State Emergency Management) tweeted this a couple of hours ago:

We have now been told there is NO DANGER for Washington state from this earthquake in Alaska. Scientists had to wait to examine the wave heights arriving at DART tsunami buoys -- and those sensors now indicate there is NO DANGER for our coastline. #wawx
by munificent | 2025-07-16 23:32:30+00:00
My understanding is that forefoot striking is common in any culture where going barefoot is typical. It doesn't feel good to slam your bare heel onto the ground all the time. It's only tolerable if you're wearing shoes.

We should really consider heel striking to be the unusual non-default behavior here, the same as how prevalence of chairs means many Westerners have shortened Achilles tendons and lost the ability to do a comfortable deep squat which has been a fundamental human posture for longer than we've been a species.
by willmarch | 2025-07-16 23:33:00+00:00
However vile a person’s crimes, he doesn’t lose the basic rights that belong to every human being. Government can lock him up if the law allows, but it can’t knowingly dump him in a place where he’s almost certain to be tortured, starved, or killed. That crosses the Eighth-Amendment line against cruel and unusual punishment, ignores the court’s authority, and shifts our problems onto another country instead of taking responsibility for them ourselves. A republic built on natural rights and the rule of law simply doesn’t get to outsource suffering.
by bruce511 | 2025-07-16 23:33:08+00:00
This reply will likely sound disrespectful, but I post it not to be so, but rather to perhaps spark an alternate path.

As the world changes, education can be slowest to adapt. My father did his math on a slide rule. I was in high school as we transitioned to using calculators.

My personal take on your approach is that you're seeing this from the wrong side. Creating an artificial environment for testing suggests to me you're testing the wrong thing.

Of course most school, and college, classes devolve to testing memory. "Here's the stuff to learn, remember it enough to pass the exam." And I get it, this is the way it's always been, regardless of the uselessness of the information. Who can remember when Charles 1st was beheaded? Who can't Google it in an instant?

Programing on paper without online reference tools isn't a measure of anything, because in the real world those tools exist.

Indeed, the very notion that we should even be testing "ability to write code" is outdated. That the student can create code should be a given.

Rather an exam should test understanding, not facts. Here's 2 blocks of code, which is better and why? Here's some code, what are the things about it that concern you?

Instead of treating the use of AI (or Google, or online help, or that giant C reference book I had) as "cheating", perhaps teach and assess in a world where AI exists.

I truly do get it. Testing comprehension is hard. Testing understanding is hard. Testing to sift wheat from chaff is hard. But, and I'm being harsh here i know, testing memory as a proxy for intelligence or testing hand-code-output as a proxy for understanding code is borderline meaningless.

Perhaps in the age of AI the focus switches from 'writing code' to 'reading code'. From the ability to write to the ability to prompt, review, evaluate and so on.

Perhaps the skill that needs to be taught (to the degree that community college seeks to teach skills) needs to be programing with AI, not against it.

I say all this with respect for how hard your job is, and with my thanks that you do it at all. I also say it understanding that it's a huge burden on you that you didn't necessarily sign up for.
by bigfatkitten | 2025-07-16 23:33:50+00:00
> The good managers I work with (and in my role I work with many) are definitely leaders in the traditional sense.

Good managers are leaders, but this is far from universal.

Most orgs have no shortage of managers who used be good individual contributors, and who were pushed into the management track due to seniority when the previous manager left, or who wanted the pay bump, but have no real leadership ability and have no business being there.
by rtpg | 2025-07-16 23:34:00+00:00
I think photos are a big deal, but IMO it's more about the photo quality. And if you put a nice fancy camera on the phone, suddenly the device gets pretty expensive.

And so while there are people who want "small screen + nice camera". There are people who want "small screen + small price". There are many people who _don't want the small screen_. So you have this phone that can cost a lot of money (in a pretty messy market where most phone models seem to not make money anyways), and you're going to cut off chunks of the market?

So we end up with small screen + shitty camera and specs etc. And people here who want a small phone (but really want a small phone that isn't miserable to use) still are unsatisfied.
by pj_mukh | 2025-07-16 23:34:32+00:00
It's not just carrying cost, it could be the full A&D cost, so you're paying the loan on the mortgage without being able to build anything. That's huge and has sunk major projects around me. This happens, literally all the time [1][2][3], all around the country.

What's more, the fear of doing this has basically staved off all but the most brave companies, or giant conglomerates that can buy land cash, which is the most predictable byproduct of excessive regulation at a local level like this.

[1]: https://jerseydigs.com/american-dream-owners-default-on-1-2-...

[2]: https://www.axios.com/local/phoenix/2023/11/08/one-camelback...

[3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/y2ein5

"The issue is that extended timelines drive down the IRR and add risk which is not the same as being expensive to carry."

Confusing statement, the IRR is low and the risk is high because the carrying cost is unknown (and unbounded).
by nullc | 2025-07-16 23:35:26+00:00
No, it's worse because the costs are diffuse and so harder to predict and manage.

The delay induced costs are not the only negative impact. During permitting the muni will often make varrious cost adding demands that they have no basis in law or good engineering to make, but unless you're willing and able to take on more years of delay (and potential litigation costs) you have to go along with them to appease them.

And, of course, every opportunity for a subjective call allowing a disruption is a opportunity for corruption.
by _carbyau_ | 2025-07-16 23:35:49+00:00
The issue is "bigger numbers" marketing. The story for much of smartphone history was the flagship had a bigger screen.

But then it hit the practicable limits of what people can pocket/hold-comfortably.

If you make a phone with a smaller screen but want to call it "flagship" then you'd better have some good marketing to reverse the perception.
by kstrauser | 2025-07-16 23:36:33+00:00
Yep, that’s right. And I guarantee, like would bet my retirement savings on it, that someone today has counted on security through obscurity and not realized their new website was compromised a few seconds after they launched it for the first time ever. “I just registered example.com. No one’s ever even heard of it! I’ll just have to clean it up before announcing it”, not realizing they announced it when they turned the server on.

3 seconds.
by cperciva | 2025-07-16 23:36:42+00:00
Unrelated apart from the words "rock" and "construction": I wouldn't be surprised if we see dry stone construction becoming very practical thanks to advances in computer vision and robotics.

Dry stone construction is incredibly durable -- it doesn't rely on mortar which can weather away -- but it is limited by needing to reshape stones to fit together tightly (often by making flat surfaces). A human stonesmith can look at a handful of stones and find one which is close to fitting in the necessary spot; but a computerized system could scan thousands of stones and build tightly-fitting stonework with minimal need for reshaping.
by const_cast | 2025-07-16 23:36:48+00:00
One man's "useless UI redesigns" is another man's feature.

Every person I talk to has a completely different idea of what Mozilla should be doing. Keep pocket, or pocket is stupid, or pocket is the second coming of Christ, or the VPN is stupid, or the VPN is a revenue stream not dependent on Google, or whatever fucking bullshit.

Firefox does not "suck" - this is a legitimate psyop. It has all the features of Chrome minus the horrendous privacy violations. It has all the performance of Chrome, too.

I mean, what are we missing? Web USB? Give me a fucking break.

If you really, really need Web USB then fine - use Google Chrome. You win. 99.99% of people I've ever talked to don't even know what Web USB is, let alone do they rely on it.
by gnabgib | 2025-07-16 23:36:48+00:00
Yep:

All Trains in the USA are vulnerable to wireless RF command injection (2 points, 5 days ago, 2 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44534886 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44542016

Turns out you can just hack any train in the USA (19 points, 4 days ago, 11 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44548116

Security vulnerability on U.S. trains – known for 13 years (9 points, 3 days ago, 6 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44556373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44567395

A vulnerability that can be exploited to tamper with a train’s brakes (20 points, 2 days ago, 10 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44568819 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44563178
by closeparen | 2025-07-16 23:36:58+00:00
When I was in high school, there was some quasi-curricular programming around "leadership" which I thought might teach me something about being in charge of a group of people or responsible for a collective outcome. Unfortunately it turned out to be a weird mishmash of personal virtue and volunteerism/activism. What I learned about delivering an outcome with a team, I learned stage-managing musicals.
by crystal_revenge | 2025-07-16 23:37:01+00:00
I find "engineer to manager" guides are fundamentally not possible to write. I've been a manager of a team 3-4 times now and each experience was entirely different from the previous.

But this post makes the biggest mistake, something I have struggled with in every management role: focusing on managing down.

Managing down isn't actually that hard to get the hang of if you have strong technical skills and reasonable communications skills. But managing down is very similar to being a good teaching professor: absolutely worthless and largely done at your own peril.

Managing up is, in practice, 100% of a manager's job. I've been on teams where this was so easy I didn't even realize it was something I had to do. Leadership liked me, I could do whatever I wanted and they were happy. I've been at places where this was an impossible task (and I saw multiple other managers/leadership hires get let go very fast if they didn't "fit in", despite being hired to "shake things up"). I've been at places where I started on the ground floor, management loved me, loved my work, my team consistently outperformed... but never in a billion years were going to allow me "into the fold" so to speak.

I used to admire strong technical managers that had a great vision for how to solve problems, but I also have admiration for great teaching professors. In practice the best managers care primarily about politics and growing their personal stake in the organization. I've found that the more clueless they are the better (just don't point that out).
by codedokode | 2025-07-16 23:37:33+00:00
Mail.ru is more than real, there is just a trend to move away from passwords because they are not secure when used by ordinary people and can be stolen with a keylogger. So Russian services move to SMS codes, mobile apps or government services for authorization. Also it is a legal requirement to implement a system that doesn't allow anonymous registration, not linked to real identity.
by int_19h | 2025-07-16 23:37:45+00:00
There's no "almost" about it. It's a very self-conscious parody of a cyberpunk dystopia (among other things) and it makes that very blunt. Far as I can tell, the point of that whole pizza delivery scene at the beginning is to firmly establish in the reader's mind that this is not "serious business". I mean, cmon:

"The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed sub-category. He's got esprit up to here. Right now he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachno-fiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest. Where his body has bony extremities, the suit has sintered armorgel: feels like gritty jello, protects like a stack of telephone books.

The Deliverator's car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator's car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens. You want to talk contact patches? Your car's tires have tiny contact patches, talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. The Deliverator's car has big sticky tires with contact patches the size of a fat lady's thighs. The Deliverator is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a peseta.

Why is the Deliverator so equipped? Because people rely on him. He is a role model. This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world. When it gets down to it–we're talking trade balances here–once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwaves in Tadzhikistan and selling them here–once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel–once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani bricklayer would consider to be prosperity–y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else

- music

- movies

- microcode (software)

- high-speed pizza delivery"
by deepsun | 2025-07-16 23:37:47+00:00
> I prefer to use a monorepo structure

Worked at a company where that approach lead to huge unwieldy structure that no one dared to touch to not break anything other teams are working on. The problem was not so much the repo, but dependencies structure (like single requirements.txt for the whole repo) and build scripts.

In theory it should've worked great -- you only need to update a dependency once and be sure all the code has the most recent security patches. In reality everyone was afraid to touch it, because it will break someone's else code. Monorepos work great only if you have serious NIH syndrome (Google).

I actually started appreciating damned micro-services there, as long as each service just reflects organization team structure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law
by mercutio2 | 2025-07-16 23:37:53+00:00
Intel did not do a good job with its (sizable) investments for the last decade. There's little reason (at least for me, a casual observer of their failure to deliver good chips) to think they would have done a better job by just throwing (more) money at the problems they were trying to solve.

The existence of markets Intel didn't dominate does not, to me, imply that it would have been a good use of resources to throw (more) money at the markets they didn't dominate. Not every company is good at every business, even if they dominate some seemingly related market.
by Jap2-0 | 2025-07-16 23:38:17+00:00
On Firefox 142 (nightly):

Cropout: After being stuck at 0% for a long while and 1200 network requests, it loads to a menu with a black background and will start a game but only UI elements show up. Seems to have a lot of errors parsing shaders, as well as a few other miscellaneous errors.

Car configurator: Several errors while at 0% (never loads), the first among them being `[223402304]: MessageBox type 0 Caption Message Text Game files required to initialize the global shader and cooked content are most likely missing. Refer to Engine log for details.`

I would concur with others that you should at least test this in Firefox before advertising it here.
by pelagicAustral | 2025-07-16 23:38:24+00:00
I recently got a Samsung S25 and it's the best phone I've ever had. I went for the base model and the size is just perfect. It's a small enough phone that I barely feel I carry around all day. It's light and slim and has premium tier hardware so I don't miss out. Never paid more than £300 for a phone before, but I am more than happy with this one.