MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by helicalinsight1 | 2025-07-10 06:00:50+00:00
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by kashunstva | 2025-07-10 06:00:51+00:00
> Like when I told her that my parents' hydro had been out all day.

When I immigrated to Canada (Ontario) a decade ago, the term hydro was the most confusing to me. I assumed it meant water supply or plumbing, but it was always in the wrong context. I imagined the disaster of hooking up the plumbing to the electrical service! Now it’s completely natural to call it “hydro” but confusing at first.
by atoav | 2025-07-10 06:01:19+00:00
The footballification of everything. Most important is to score a point against "the other team", nevermind the world going to shit in the process.

And that is 90% of the issue US culture has at the moment. You are not thinking about topics and how they impact your lifes, you're thinking about whose team that topic is on and how you can show them.

Only issue is that voting politicians whose topics negatively impact your life out of office is your only agency within a democracy. Giving it up while thinking "my tribe strong" is the ultimate ideocracy.
by johncolanduoni | 2025-07-10 06:01:24+00:00
It’s worth noting that C++ standard libraries have mostly moved away from copy-on-write strings, due to their poor performance in multithreaded scenarios. And JavaScript engines have ended up adding a bunch of optimizations that simulate mutable strings in certain common scenarios. It depends on what the code in question is doing, and I think the ideal scenario is to allow both in different contexts as long as they can be kept distinct.
by cookiengineer | 2025-07-10 06:03:17+00:00
> Technically speaking, the rule of law was also abandoned to get us into the illegal immigrant situation in the first place. If rule of law was honored the entire time, we would have no problem. It does feel a bit "rules for thee, but not for me".

Abandoning the law because your counterpart did so isn't the morally correct thing to do. Our democracies are built on the principle that we have due process for people that were not upholding the law. That's literally how criminal courts work.

This is not the case in the US anymore. The people in those concentration camps did not have due process. No defense lawyer, no legal process, not even a judicative order by judges were upheld. Not by ICE, not by the people governing those camps.

If the legal process is abandoned, it's by definition an absolutist executive power.

The alien invasion excuse will only go so far. Maybe you should think about what happens when you run out of Latinos to blame, because nations that are built on fascist principles will need further demographics to blame, that's how they work. And we have a lot of historic evidence on what happens once those demographics run out.
by BrenBarn | 2025-07-10 06:03:21+00:00
Totally agree. I think another angle to look at it is not "a couple sectors" but "a certain scale", as suggested by your remark about how companies consolidate. When businesses are small and need every customer, they are motivated to do a good job at what they do, build goodwill, protect their reputation. The larger they become, the more they tend to work against their customers rather than for them. They cross multiple markets, making them less responsive to the demands of any one. They become "too big to fail". And so on.

What we see in the modern era is a system in which success is defined as becoming large enough that your customers have no other option but to deal with you. That's not a healthy system.
by rendaw | 2025-07-10 06:05:01+00:00
Ah thanks, okay, I'm not sure I'm missing anything in that case.

But if so, doesn't signal still know that alice and bob are communicating because it's transferring messages between them? Even if Bob doesn't log in IP B is still sending payloads that eventually get delivered to IP A, and if law enforcement later asks signal for logs they could be correlated.
by fsckboy | 2025-07-10 06:05:09+00:00
title? this is a full Dictionary of Canadianisms, words included according to a six facet typology. i.e. the typology is not the main story.

Type 1 – Origin: a form and its meaning were created in what is now Canada

Type 2 – Preservation: a form or meaning that was once widespread in many Englishes, but is now preserved in Canadian English in the North American context or beyond; sometimes called “retention”

Type 3 – Semantic Change: forms that have undergone semantic change in Canadian English

Type 4 – Culturally Significant: forms or meanings that have been enshrined in the Canadian psyche and are widely seen as part of Canadian identity

Type 5 – Frequency: forms or meanings that are Canadian by virtue of frequency

Type 6 – Memorial: forms or meanings now widely considered to be pejorative

Non-Canadian: forms or meanings once thought to be Canadian for which evidence is lacking
by kstenerud | 2025-07-10 06:05:51+00:00
Oh bloody hell.

It astounds me how so many people can have such strong opinions about systems they have so little experience with.

I've lived long term in 4 countries (Canada, USA, Japan, Germany) and have dealt extensively with the medical systems in all of them (plus some experiences in Portugal and France).

Every system has its warts, and this is the first thing that naysayers will latch onto, of course. People love to use tu-quoque as a defense mechanism. "See? They're just as bad as we are because you have to wait sometimes, and look at this extreme case right here! It's probably even WORSE than us!"

The fact is, none of the systems are really that bad (with the EXCEPTION of the American system). There's a reason why travel insurance companies have two tiers: All of the world EXCEPT America, and all of the world INCLUDING America.

Have I had to wait for a procedure in Canada? Sure, but they do a pretty decent job of triaging, so yeah outside of the HORROR STORIES (of which you can find anywhere if you dig enough), it's pretty damn good. In Japan I paid a percentage of costs (which are pretty damn reasonable). In France I actually didn't have insurance, so I had to pay FULL price when I came down with pneumonia: 50 euros for the doctor and the antibiotics. In Portugal, I caught COVID, and got treatment within 2 hours of arriving at the hospital in Lisbon.

If you haven't actually been in the medical system of another country, you don't know what you're talking about.
by GolDDranks | 2025-07-10 06:07:38+00:00
The situation is not that bad. The rules of unsafe code were pretty badly defined back then, but they are in process of becoming a lot clearer, and like the grandparent argues, with a well-defined aliasing model like Tree Borrows, they are easier to understand than C's.

If you look into the code you linked, the problem was about accessing undefined bytes though an aliased, differently-typed pointer – something you would have hard time doing in C to begin with. MaybeUninit was a new thing back then. I think that nowadays, a senior Rust developer would clear the hurdles better.
by zahlman | 2025-07-10 06:08:07+00:00
> Surprising one for me was "all dressed" as a term for, e.g., a pizza with all the toppings.

What on Earth. Wikipedia tells me:

> An all-dressed chip called The Whole Shabang is produced by American prison supplier Keefe Group. It became available to the general public in 2016.[4] Frito-Lay began selling all-dressed Ruffles potato chips in the United States that same year.[5]

I had assumed the entire time that everyone uses this term for potato chips (and that everyone has the flavour) and that the Quebecois were just being weird by also applying it to pizza.

--

"Renoviction" is a very recent neologism that's mainly used in the specific major cities where it's an issue (because of the housing market).

"Gong show" I think is relatively old-fashioned (as in Gen X) by comparison. I'm actually surprised Americans don't say that, given that the actual show was on NBC.

I can easily find "kerfuffle" in supposedly American online dictionaries so I think their claim is rather dubious. On the flip side, I've never in my life heard "off-sale"; and in Ontario it's only quite recently (https://www.ontario.ca/document/alcohol-master-framework-agr... https://news.ontario.ca/en/release/1003988/ontario-consumers...) that you can even legally purchase beer and wine at a grocery store.
by omnimus | 2025-07-10 06:08:54+00:00
The insurer margins can be whatever small but when the same company also owns the hospital and drug distribution it doesnt matter.

Somebody in the process makes extreme margins.

Also americans cant be at same time avoiding going to hospital because of costs and “still get far more services than most of their counterparts in other countries”

Believe it or not there are countries where there is mandatory health insurance (your employer or you or state have to pay it) and doctors dont look at costs because they dont really know them. They for sure try to not be wasteful but nobody is second guessing obviously best treatment because it costs 40% more.
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-07-10 06:08:55+00:00
X hour batteries is mostly because battery people think in MWh and grid people talk in MW (and confusingly both call that capacity.)

The hours designation is the MWh / MW i.e. how fast you can empty the battery into the grid at full throttle.

The economics comes in because batteries are expensive and you want to target the highest and lowest prices during the day, charging and discharging totally to maximize revenue via price abitrage. A 1 hour battery is going to be shaving the very peak prices of each day soaking up solar at noon and displacing expensive gas peaker plants in the evening.

As the battery MWh gets bigger, but not the ability to put it all on the grid, that implies you'll be charging and discharging for 4 or 8 hours each day which means you'll be paying and getting paid closer to the average prices in both directions.

It only works economically if the battery is itself cheaper (and/or there's more renewables pushing down prices for longer periods of the day)
by ramity | 2025-07-10 06:09:39+00:00
I'll provide a contrasting, pessimistic take.

> How do you write programs when a bug can kill their user?

You accept that you will have a hand in killing users, and you fight like hell to prove yourself wrong. Every code change, PR approval, process update, unit test, hell, even meetings all weigh heavier. You move slower, leaving no stone unturned. To touch on the pacemakers example, even buggy code that kills X% of users will keep Y% alive/improve QoL. Does the good outweigh the bad? Even small amounts of complexity can bubble up and lead to unintended behavior. In a corrected vibrator example, what if frequency becomes so large it overflows and leads to burning the user? Youch.

The best insight I have to offer is that time is often overlooked and taken for granted. I'm talking Y2K data type, time drift, time skew, special relativity, precision, and more. Some of the most interesting and disturbing bugs I've come across all occurred because of time. "This program works perfectly fine, but after 24 hours it starts infinitely logging." If time is an input, do not underestimate time.

> How do we get to a point to `trust` it?

You traverse the entire input space to validate the output space. This is not always possible. In these cases, audit compliance can take the form of traversing a subset of the input space deemed "typical/expected" and moving forward with the knowledge that edge cases can exist. Even with a fully audited software, oddities like a cosmic bit flip can occur. What then? At some point, in this beautifully imperfect world, one must settle for good enough over perfection.

The astute reading above might be furiously pounding their keyboards mentioning the halting problem. We can't even verifiably prove a particular input will provide an output - moreover an entire space.

> I am convinced that open code, specs and (processes) must be requirement going forward.

I completely agree, but I don't believe this will outright prevent user deaths. Having open code, specs, etc aids towards accountability, transparency, and external verification. I must express I feel there are pressures against this, as there is monumental power in being the only party able to ascertain the facts.
by 0x3444ac53 | 2025-07-10 06:11:16+00:00
I think that access to disinformation within a context such as a library is actually quite a good thing. You can read it, and then research it, and think critically about it. In an open ecosystem of information, with a little critical thought and media literacy, most people are able to spot bullshit when they need to.

Most University Libraries carry those text. I'm not sure if it would be particularly useful in the context of a public library (as the goal is to serve a local community with a wide range of needs). However, if there was interest then it would likely be put into circulation.

I would speculate that there was likely a time when each of those were on shelves, but they were likely weeded out due to lack of interest.
by slau | 2025-07-10 06:11:54+00:00
The whole “systemd wars” has made me fall out of love with Linux. I used to run it everywhere. My phone, my computers, my router.

I used to be so, so very passionate. Now, not so much. I still have a few raspberry pis. But, overall, I’m done.

It’s not so much that I can’t be bothered to fight systemd anymore (I was one of those weirdos running void, and trying to keep thing going). It’s that I can’t be bothered to fight for Linux anymore.
by BrenBarn | 2025-07-10 06:12:35+00:00
I increasingly think that our society isn't sustainable without some recalibration of the notion of responsibility, liability, justice and due process. The problem we face is that it is very easy for unscrupulous operators to exploit loopholes and cause lots of damage, but the process for holding them accountable faces a heavy burden of proof and itself can be exploited (e.g., by dragging out lawsuits for years).

We need some kind of sliding scale where certain actions by people who either "should have known better" (i.e., are exploiting insider knowledge) or "had no basis for acting" (i.e., are rich enough to not need to make any more money) can be quickly curtailed without a need to specifically prove everything that they did. Something loosely akin to "if you had a billion dollars, you'd better be able to affirmatively prove you did everything squeaky clean or we're just going to take $500 million".
by scottjg | 2025-07-10 06:12:40+00:00
i have no doubt that other countries have some problems in their healthcare systems too, but i think you are downplaying a few key points:

1) united healthcare made 90 billion dollars gross profit in the last 12mo, and that's only one health insurance company. claiming that it's not a great business at a 2-3% profit margin ignores the scale of money involved, and ignores that the customer for health insurance is truly captive.

2) you're right that america has very high prices in healthcare. doesn't it seem bad that private insurance companies are incentivized to make things cost as much as possible so they can skim that 2-3% off the top? insurance companies negotiate and set prices for services and pharmaceuticals. they now own the pharmacy benefit management companies that would normally be incentivized to negotiate for lower prices.

i would expect in a public health care system that rejects procedures, they would follow consistent guidelines and rules. american health insurance companies will arbitrarily reject a percentage of procedures that they know they should be accepting in order to keep their profit margin in the right range.

i think it's hard for me to see the argument that health insurance companies are a net-positive or even net-neutral party in the united states. i don't think it's a coincidence that we have some of the highest prices and some of the worst outcomes.
by realusername | 2025-07-10 06:13:00+00:00
> The question is: is it better for a country to experience a geopolitical risk with a solar-panel-producing nation or with an oil-producing nation?

If that's your only question, the answer is straightforward then, there's more oil producing nations than solar panels producing nations making the risk with oil lower.

China is so big in this sector that I don't think that you could even create a real strategy where they get <25% market share in the country solar imports.

You could somewhat mitigate this risk by buying a stock worth 5 years of panel installation of the country but as far as I know, nobody is doing that.
by simonask | 2025-07-10 06:13:15+00:00
You can't really do anything useful with a `&mut str`. For example, you can't change the length of the string or any characters in the string (without unsafe code). The latter is perhaps surprising, but it's because strings in Rust are always UTF-8, so changing a logical character could imply changing the length of the string, and changing a byte could result in invalid UTF-8.
by zahlman | 2025-07-10 06:13:34+00:00
> I'm not sure why we both ended up with "dressed" given the French is literally "all garnishes / toppings" or "wholly garnished / topped".

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dress

> 4. (also figuratively) To adorn or ornament (something). [from 15th c.]

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/garnish

> 1. To decorate with ornaments; to adorn; to embellish.

(Bonus: "garnish" is etymologically related to "warn". There are many such other pairs in English, e.g. "guarantee" / "warranty" and "guard" / "ward". (As I understand it: the Gauls could pronounce the "g", but the Franks couldn't.)
by rendaw | 2025-07-10 06:15:07+00:00
How does gift wrapping address what GP brought up? I read through and AFAICT it obscures explicit metadata in the message, but not external stuff such as source/dest ip that logging any shared relay could give you.

AFAIK the only real ways to get metadata privacy are onion routing (increase the chance of a non-compromised node) and N-anonymity (decrease the value of a discovered connection).
by o11c | 2025-07-10 06:15:30+00:00
Ah yes, critical thinking, like taking an advertising article on the internet at face value and ignoring that there might be more to the story. Who needs Knoll's Law? Also, awards are always given to the party that deserves them and have absolutely no politicking or signaling involved.

I don't claim what I saw locally is exactly what's happening there, but ... my point is, there's probably a lot happening at the local level, and only the locals can really know more. And even then, until the dust settles, you may need to be careful which faction of local politics (which often is completely unrelated to the factions in national politics) you're talking to.
by PicassoCTs | 2025-07-10 06:16:07+00:00
People though have studied other people. So, vote-forwarding to those who studied, convinced by life-style or example would allow for the votes to propagate to local experts, who then could make the decision as outlined above.

If the expert is wrong, the local personality-cult reveals a fraud, that propagation web of votes would with draw and propagate towards new experts.
by tossandthrow | 2025-07-10 06:16:14+00:00
> the eu would have to push its own social network alternative

Why?

A thing it seems like a lot of people are missing is that European companies are taken to the same (if not a higher) standard for compliance with EU law.

The EU regulates to ensure that market participants work fairly - these rules are generally not about trading barriers (if they were, they'd do it poorly)
by audunw | 2025-07-10 06:16:21+00:00
I only skimmed the article but there didn’t seem to be much written about how much of that non-electric fossil fuel is waste heat. I know there are versions of the energy source-sink graph which shows wasted energy. Why didn’t the author use it? Weird.

There are studies on how much energy is required to decarbonise everything, not just local electricity production. The energy required is far less than what you’d think if you look at the primary energy of all the energy we use today.

One aspect of this is what you see with the transition to EV or from gas to induction cook tops. It comes with a huge reduction in wasted energy.

The other aspect is the transition to heat pumps, which is over 100% efficient, so you need a lot less energy to provide the same amount of heat. There are now commercial industrial heat pumps that has reached 200°C, which enables the use in more industrial applications.

The third is the transition to recycling. At some point we will have enough materials for all that we need to do. The green energy transition requires a big temporary jump in the amount of lithium and copper we need. But once all vehicles have been transitioned to EVs, most of those material will come from recycled materials, cutting the energy required to acquire those materials to a tiny fraction of what we need now.
by jxjnskkzxxhx | 2025-07-10 06:16:44+00:00
You guys remember how 5+ years ago, an headline like this on HN would invariably prompt cries from the Americans that this was just the Europeans finding excuses to take advantage and steal from poor innocent American companies. How the mood has changed on this huh. I'm glad to see the European approach vindicated, even if at times not strong enough.
by jhanschoo | 2025-07-10 06:16:51+00:00
I really don't think there is a definition of terrorism that is sufficiently satisfying and also faithful to its etymology.

The definition that most people have in mind is probably what just mentioned earlier: how similar is it to the examples of irregulars "setting bombs in public infrastructure", "suicide trucks", and "suicide bombers".

But as the dictionary definition betrays, the ambiguity due to etymology exists, and is frequently exploited as a rhetorical technique by people using the word.
by 0x3444ac53 | 2025-07-10 06:18:03+00:00
Does it really matter? If a parent is so intent on restricting their child's access to certain text, then maybe they should accompany their child to the library.

This feels less and less like you're interested in discussing this and more like you're grasping for some kind of "gotcha" argument. I'm probably not going to respond again unless it feels productive.
by NeutralForest | 2025-07-10 06:18:16+00:00
Maybe I'm just too used to Python (and I only know some Clojure) but I don't have the same experience. Usually using generators and itertools will really help you shorten your code. I'm working in a data science adjacent field so a lot of code is just frameworks anyways but I don't feel limited in pure Python either.

If you come across a post or an example that shows those differences, I would be very interested!