MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dontoni | 2025-07-29 14:37:43+00:00
Envy has always been a response to successful people, and that doesn’t justify it or undermine the successful.

The hyperinflation that caused turbulences in Germany as well as previous wars aren’t either of them capitalism-like.

Hyperinflation countries suffer it because the government steps in and manipulates the currency. We have the examples of Venezuela and Argentina as the most recent. Germany had the same destiny, although more caused by the constrictions placed on them by the States that won World War I.

Kids blowing glass is caused by poorness rather than capitalism. Precisely now that our capitalists societies created wealth is that we now don’t need to send our children to factories. It’s precisely poor countries the ones that gotta send their children to factories, like certain populations in China. Even before capitalism, children did still worked, yet on farms rather than factories. And their conditions weren’t greater at all either.

Marx wasn’t actually against child labour and he favoured it: he just wanted them to work under socialism and not under capitalists. He actually said that work was essential for the development of those children, but they shouldn’t do it under very poor health conditions. But again, that’s caused by poverty, not capitalism. In the Soviet Union children still worked in practice and conditions weren’t great either.

Regarding health and education, the US is weird because such a system has the absolute worse of markets (having to pay) and socialism (being hyper regulated). Nonetheless, it’s as easy as to fix one or the other. In Switzerland the system is essentially private and doesn’t suck so much. In fact, quite the opposite: it’s much better than most other systems like British or Spanish ones. Here in Spain you can wait 3-4 years for just a diagnosis for a colon cancer. 3-4 years. For the diagnosis only.

In Switzerland you don’t have such long waiting lists and costs are much manageable relative to their living costs.

Most of the US education and health system problems are outrageously caused by the State. As Mises said, every government regulation requires more government regulation, since politicians need to try and palliate the inefficiencies created by them with more regulatory patches.

Even so, how do you define a socialist healthcare system? In Spain or the UK there are private providers of healthcare and actually most of the public administration in Spain (at least the top ranks) are paying one. You could say that if the majority of spending is made by the government it’s socialist-like, and if not it’s capitalist-like. But in the US most of healthcare expenditure is government made, by a small margin. Such a system can’t be considered capitalist, and maybe trying to emulate a more friendly framework like the Swiss could be more beneficial that trying to stack more regulations on top of what the US already suffers.

So either you end hyper regulation and let markets lower prices or you go all in and go with full regulation and no market prices (think of British healthcare), at the expense of lousy quality in terms of speed and procedures.
Show HN: Alexandria, a New Way to Read the Classics
by bobbyjgeorge | 2025-07-29 14:37:49+00:00
Alexandria is the first library where you can talk to a tutor — in the book itself — as you read.

Move at a contemplative pace in Lightning Mode, then ask Virgil — your Socratic guide — for context, questions, or counter-arguments.

Virgil blends the depth of the entire classics catalog with a pedagogy crafted by Professor Zohar Atkins and tailors every conversation to your interests.

Features:

• Lightning Mode — focus by reading one sentence at a time. • Virgil — an AI tutor that explains passages, challenges your thinking, follows your curiosity, and remembers what excites you. • Build and Share your Bookshelf — curate favorites, get smart recommendations, and send highlighted quotes to friends; social bookshelves turn passive libraries into shareable conversations. • Daily Sparks — one thought-provoking excerpt every morning, plus a guided conversation with Virgil. • 4,000+ Works — all the most iconic thinkers, from Plato and Sun Tzu to Nietzsche and Jane Austen, plus hidden gems for adventurous readers.

Our Mission: to inspire learning as a way of life.

Available on the App Store and coming soon to Google Play.
by vee-kay | 2025-07-29 14:38:09+00:00
UPI & RuPay are not mandatory, they are completely optional.

Citizens and travelers in India can pay by cash, card, UPI or NetBanking to make offline or online payments. A new or existing customer or a Bank can randomly get (and can anytime request for a replacement card) to Bank to get the ATM/Debit card as RuPay, Visa or MasterCard card. So RuPay card is optional too.

But nevertheless, the technology stacks behind UPI and RuPay have been built to be so versatile, scalable and robust that they now account for 85%+ debit & payment transactions in the nation! India is rapidly heading towards a cashless economy!

Due to the interoperability, scalability and resilience in the technology stacks for UPI & RuPay, these brilliant solutions are now being sought after by other nations, who are eager to buy and leverage these tech stocks to implement their own branded payments systems that will replace Visa, MasterCard, Amex, etc. in those nations.

e.g., UAE has tied up with NCPI (Indian government organisation that implemented and manages UPI & RuPay) as a tech license deal and UAE has already started its own implementation of RuPay, which it has branded as Jaywan. So the Jaywan Debit cards are alternatives to debit cards from Visa, MasterCard, Amex, etc. in the UAE.
by crinkly | 2025-07-29 14:38:30+00:00
They are good until they aren't.

In the case of my 15 Pro, the limits are that you have to stick to the default zoom on all three lenses, accept oversharpening all the time which leads to flaring, accept terrible white balance and tone control, some horrifically bad attempts to compensate for zero DOF control with AI and computational photography, borderline useless night shots due to the noise, have to scrub the dirt of the lens every time you use it or get blurry photos, horrible distortion on the wide lens. It's basically three crap cameras attached to a computer to undo as much of the crapness as possible.

It's bad enough that my over 20 year old Nikon D3100 is considerably better.
by wongarsu | 2025-07-29 14:39:00+00:00
Yes, in a perfect world the downsides are limited. But in the world we live in I predict a lot more leaks similar to the Tea app hack (which contained a lot of passports, linked to some quite private data from chats like medical documents)

The biggest hope I see is that the EU also wants to implement age restrictions, but with a lot more effort to get it right and make it compatible with a strong desire for privacy. Maybe that will make "proper" implementations easy and common enough that many of the downsides will be mitigated
by matwood | 2025-07-29 14:39:18+00:00
Bingo. You also need to know your camera. I have a d7100, a Z5, and the latest iPhone pro. For quick snapshots it's really hard to beat the iPhone. If I can get very close to something, the iPhone can also do some cool things.

My d7100 might be one of my favorite cameras of all time. I've taken very nice picks of birds mid-flight that would be very hard to do on a phone (impossible?). But, it's not a camera you pull out your pocket and start shooting snapshots. It takes time to learn and post-process.

They are all just tools, pick the right one for what you're doing. And sometimes the right one is the one you have with you :)
by elendee | 2025-07-29 14:39:43+00:00
Computers / the web are a fast route to information, but they are also a storehouse of information; a ledger. This is the old "information wants to be free, and also very expensive." I don't want all the info on my PC, or the bank database, to be 'alive', I want it to be frozen in kryptonite, so it's right where I left it when I come back.

I think we're slowly allowing AI access to the interface layer, but not to the information layer, and hopefully we'll figure out how to keep it that way.
by bediger4000 | 2025-07-29 14:39:50+00:00
I'm not sure that line of reasoning works. If the consumer pays, the patented or patent-using product costs more, and the consumer gets to choose. As it stands, all we citizens and taxpayers pay the cost of patent enforcement. I don't get to choose to pay or not for a particular patent enforcement. I would if the cost of enforcement showed up in product price. Let the market decide.
by crinkly | 2025-07-29 14:40:15+00:00
100% agree. I went on holiday at the start of this year and took my iPhone 15 Pro with me. I bought a mirrorless camera and went back because I was that disappointed with it. No joke. I regret using a phone for most of my family photos for the last 10-15 years and should have just used my old D3100 instead.
by FollowingTheDao | 2025-07-29 14:40:50+00:00
This would have went through under either an R or D administration. Union Pacific gave 2x more to all politicians than CSX.

https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/union-pacific-corp/summary?...

https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/csx-corp/summary?id=D000000...
by hshshshshsh | 2025-07-29 14:40:50+00:00
Wait, does this kind of mean , the work I do support random Norwegian who is Slacking off all day even though I don't even live in same country?

Someone has to still make the food they eat and clothes they wear.

I assume the poor people in Asian countries do it for them and still remain poor their entire lives even though they work probably 100x more.

What a shit show economic system we have made.
by HardCodedBias | 2025-07-29 14:41:21+00:00
I think it's sovereign wealth fund is about 2T in assets, and Norway's population is about 5M so that's about 400k per person.

That hardly seems like a "trust fund kid" that seems a very good head start for the people, assuming it is well distributed (and mostly evenly).

I do agree with this sentence: "implementing stricter rules around how much the government can withdraw from the sovereign wealth fund." Politicians being what they are the incentives are poor here. The rules must be strong for it to have survived for so long, but making them stronger seems prudent.
by menaerus | 2025-07-29 14:42:44+00:00
> if I remove this assert(), then Clang does something stupid and 30% of CPU time is spent stalling on this single instruction, so meh, leave it in

Classic compiler games and similar happened to me just recently when I wrote a micro-optimized SIMD code for some monotonically increasing integer sequence utility that achieved like 80% of the theoretical IPC (for skylake-x) in ubenchmarks, however, once I moved the code from ubenchmark to the production code what I saw was surprising (or not really) - compiler merged my carefully optimized SIMD code with the surrounding code and largely nullified the optimizations I've done.
by Almondsetat | 2025-07-29 14:42:46+00:00
Framing is different because of bad lens choice on the photo part (why always shoot wide angle??) and this skews the results immensely and unfairly (composition is the most important thing in a photo).

Colors are fine on anything that isn't skin tones. But even then, smartphone manufacturers actually focus a lot on skin tones, so if these are the results it's because they have determined this is the look most people like.
by qualeed | 2025-07-29 14:42:56+00:00
Sure. However, the effort spent vs. what is gained has to be considered. Not all games of whack-a-mole are created equal.

VPNs are incredibly easy to spin up, gambling groups are not. Within a week I could probably spin up a dozen or more semi-legitimate VPN companies. Multiply that by however many hundreds of people are willing to do the same. Add a few thousand more people willing to spin up completely shady 'free' VPNs.

The scale quickly exceeds what you can possibly block, unless you firewall the nation.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2025-07-29 14:43:08+00:00
And my prediction is that in the UK EV market, MG and Volvo are the thin edge of the wedge of Chinese cars.

BYD are on the roads now, and Omoda, soon to be followed by Zeekr, XPeng, Nio and Xiaomi. How well MG does specifically is irrelevant to all that, but your suggestion seems wishful - they have several new models out this year.

Tesla's brand reputation is in a ditch, and the big EU brands are struggling to keep up.
by vFunct | 2025-07-29 14:43:26+00:00
They're still over saturated. Skin tones always have a cosmetic/tanned look compared to real life. Mirrorless camera photos have a lot better output. You can see that even in the first sample comparison. If you look at the photo on the iPhone right when you took it, it doesn't look like the subject you just took a photo of. It's always over saturated compared to real life.

But really, the biggest advantage that mirrorless/dSLRs have over iPhones is the ability to connect a huge, powerful flash that you can directly fire at the subject. That's an absolute game changer for the typical use case of people photos - indoor parties, events, etc... Typically low or medium light situations. The Xenon light on a flash is basically close to a perfect natural light source with a CRI of 100, like the sun, so colors are always perfect. It's why red carpet photographers always use a huge powerful flash directly pointed at the subject.

But iPhones generally have to rely on environmental lighting (the iPhone lamp isn't bright enough to overcome environmental lighting effects).

Environmental lighting is a muddy mess. The subject is lit not only by various mismatching lamp colors with low CRI, but also by lighting reflected off a slightly beige wall or a bright red carpet on the ground.

BTW this is why I hate it when wedding photographers use bounce flash. They're lighting the subject by reflecting light off a beige wall or ceiling, muddying colors up completely. You never see professional red carpet photographers use bounce flash... (yes, I spent years doing red carpet and fashion week runway photography)
by nordsieck | 2025-07-29 14:43:32+00:00
> What's the problem? Only poor people care about test scores as they imagine high test scores is how one can pull themselves out of being poor. When you are rich you can also do pointless things just for the fun of it like build bridges to nowhere. None of these are problems unless you try and look at it through a poor man's lens.

That may be a reasonable take at the level of an individual. But it's nonsense at the level of a country.

Wealth is the ability to get other people to do things. But if everyone is becoming less capable, then that's not a problem that wealth can fix.

Outsourcing may be a temporary solution to his problem, but I don't see it working well long term.
by wongarsu | 2025-07-29 14:43:48+00:00
If wifi meshnets were actually popular and not just some enthusiast thing that's mostly used for better free wifi you could reasonable route around network-side blocks. Most of the content might move through some kind of high-capacity backbone, but anything blocked on the backbone could still find its way through the mesh. At least in places with high enough population density that linking across cities and villages with just wifi or other low-cost methods is viable (Germany and surroundings come to mind as the obvious example)
by daemonologist | 2025-07-29 14:44:02+00:00
It would be extremely beneficial, but nearly impossible to integrate. Motors used for cheating in cycling are usually in the seat tube or down tube, where they can invisibly interface with the bottom bracket (between the pedals) and connect to batteries elsewhere in the frame. Because bicycles have a freewheel in the rear hub (chain doesn't move while coasting/braking)*, a KERS would have to be located in the tiny rear wheel hub.

*You can of course get a non-race bike with a fixed chain, but UCI rules require use of a freewheel.
by polivier | 2025-07-29 14:44:03+00:00
> would just be a very heavy bike for the rest of the stage

Bikes in the Tour de France have a minimum weight of 6.8kg imposed by the UCI. So if you manage to build a normal bike that weights 5kg, you still have 1.8kg of weight available to try to add some more hidden power "without adding more weight to the bike" (small battery+engine, small compressed air tank, whatever).
by germandiago | 2025-07-29 14:44:31+00:00
> Incorrectness is simply not allowed. It’s pointless to try to get stuff done if you can’t guarantee the result is correct.

This is more nuanced actually. And it could have implications and contradictions with "get stuff done". IfI can have a non-provable piece of code that serves me well 99% of the time I could save coding time at the expense of correctness and could fit the bill for my use case.
by JohnFen | 2025-07-29 14:44:47+00:00
> If he suspects a student of having generated their essay with AI, he will call them up to his desk and ask them to produce an em-dash on the computer.

I'm someone who normally uses a lot of em-dashes in my writing, but I'd be hard-pressed to generate one at a keyboard. I normally write them as "--", which the word processor automatically converts to an em-dash. I hope the author is aware of this and allows the student to demonstrate using the word processor that the student normally uses.
by chizhik-pyzhik | 2025-07-29 14:44:48+00:00
Unfortunately and ironically this has all the marks of AI writing.

> The problem isn’t the intention—it’s the architecture. You can’t optimize one part of a child and expect the rest to unfold naturally. Learning isn’t modular. Once efficiency takes hold, it doesn’t stay in its lane. It reshapes what matters.

use of "not this — that", em dash, staccato sentences to make a point, unnecessary metaphor, etc

I stopped reading at this point.
by throw101010 | 2025-07-29 14:44:48+00:00
> That laser inscribed metal fob with you keys on it

Unless you manually inscribe it with a laser (good luck), that wouldn't really be a great idea unless the computer assisting you in the inscriptions is completely air-gapped.

Stamping/manually engraving your seed on fire resistant stainless steel (308 is my preference) is still one of the most "air-gapped" way to do this.

> at some point they connect to the internet for transactions,

Some don't, for example ColdCard. It is possible to use it without ever connecting it to a computer. Using a power source and a USB cable, they even offer a way to avoid using power adapters (using common batteries) as these tend to become "smarter" these days and could one day be the source of an exploit.
by subpixel | 2025-07-29 14:44:53+00:00
I need to share a doc with family that is basically the agenda for our reunion.

There is no service (Google, iCloud) that we all have access to, and I do not want the doc I share to be full of prompts for the people I share it with to join any service (this disqualifies Dropbox paper).

I need to be able to update this doc on my phone.

I have this need a couple times a yeat, so this app appeals to me (haven't tried it yet!)
by jjkaczor | 2025-07-29 14:45:14+00:00
True - I mean, one could try and block based on file-extension/MIME-types, but... nothing stopping a malicious user from renaming a file to an allowed extension, with some sort of malicious/secret payload. (Or... spreading some sort of malware/virus/exploit via media file formats, I have never looked into the possibility of that until just now, apparently it can be a thing - https://cyberpress.org/cybercriminals-exploiting-media-files...)

So yeah - this is probably one of those half-baked ideas that just wouldn't be a good one to actually implement "in-the-wild".
by jfengel | 2025-07-29 14:45:21+00:00
Aren't you allowed to say pretty much anything you want, if it's an opinion?

If I'm reading it correctly, you're not talking about the legal standard of evidence, but rather about the article's characterization of the article as "accurate". If so, though, I would have to interpret any court decisions as matters of legal procedure, rather than any comment on the truth of the statement one way or the other.
by cogman10 | 2025-07-29 14:46:03+00:00
The bikes have a weight regulation that was set in the 90s, 6.8kg.

Ultra light bikes can be as light weight as 2.7kg. That gives 4kg to hide a battery and motor and still hit weight. A really good lithium battery offers 350 Wh/kg. 1kWh can grant 100 miles of range by itself.
by louthy | 2025-07-29 14:46:36+00:00
> The UK is an increasingly authoritarian nightmare. The US should start a refugee program for UK

Hilarious, you literally have a president shutting down free speech by getting a talkshow taken off the air so that the owning media company can pass its merger regulations; he’s also threatening to sue or actually suing other media organisations, universities, newspapers,... And on top of all that has built a private militia to grab people off the street and deport them.

All while major corporations have so much money and control over the government and its representatives that individuals have little to no say in how things are done.

And let’s not even start on the electoral system that encourages only the issues of a few states to ever be ‘heard’.

The whole country is indoctrinated to pledge allegiance to the flag and is taught that the constitution is of equivalent standing as the stone tablets brought down from Mount Sinai, leaving you all more vulnerable in a world where anybody can say anything and have it broadcast to billions of people at once. Or, you know, to being shot. You're indoctrinated to believe that the founding fathers were infallible geniuses, when they were just men, with opinions.

Often in these discussions we get quotes like:

"Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."

That was said by a man, a regular man. He said a thing. It is entirely devoid of nuance, but you will all recite like it's the word of god. It's a form of self-oppression in its own right.

The vast majority of so-called oppressive laws introduced in the UK were well meaning, not done for power (like with your current president). The anti-hate speech laws were brought about because preachers were openly indoctrinating people who went on to commit atrocities like 7/7. I have never fallen fowl of those laws because I don't preach hate and foment violence. But to Ben Franklin that's the thin end of the wedge.

This latest law is for sure misguided, but it came from a desire to reduce online harm for children -- more opposition was needed when it was going through parliament. I get it, they messed up, it's bad law, but we also have a parliamentary system that functions, so it will almost certainly be refined over time.

The goals are right, the implementation is wrong, but that doesn't mean the UK is falling into authoritarianism. We're not trying to overturn elections, or you know, stop them altogether.

The idea that the US is some paragon of freedom and liberty is utter, utter nonsense. It’s more fucked than the UK will ever be.
by registeredcorn | 2025-07-29 14:46:48+00:00
> I'd rather believe they're doping.

Funnily enough, you're correct in your belief, even if by accident and in defiance of your own preconception. Mechanical doping is the topic your speaking about! :)

Here's some of the more obvious examples out there:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSfLbALqUgM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZerARsCqAE

https://youtu.be/1CnyvcAFTlA?t=36

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fbg4BjZna4Y

This video covers a bit of the history of mechanical doping. https://youtu.be/JMZbU6on43k?t=610
by FeepingCreature | 2025-07-29 14:47:32+00:00
True where trivial; where nontrivial, false.

Trivially, humans don't emit something they don't know either. You don't spontaneously figure out Javascript from first principles, you put together your existing knowledge into new shapes.

Nontrivially, LLMs can absolutely produce code for entirely new requirements. I've seen them do it many times. Will it be put together from smaller fragments? Yes, this is called "experience" or if the fragments are small enough, "understanding".