MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hearsathought | 2025-08-06 16:02:58+00:00
> Speaking as someone who has heritage in a former European colony

India was a european colony for sure. One of the most accomodating, willing and slavish ones at that. But india was never a european settler colony. Settler being the key word.

> American political science is obsessed with settler colonialism.

What do you know of american political science? What do you know about being an american? If I go to india and buy citizenship today, would that make me an expert in indian politics?

> Herego, every conflict distills through that lens.

Herego, therego, uh oh.. Ergo? Every conflict doesn't distil through that lens. Who ever claimed that american war on iraq or afghanistan was settler colonialism? Nobody. Who claims the russian-ukraine war is settler colonialism? Even with israel, nobody talks of it as a genocidal settler colony. At least not here in america. Maybe in india, but you'd know more about that than me.

> Are there elements of this conflict that mirror that dynamic?

Israel literally was created for that purpose. To settle europeans in palestine.

An indian zionist apologist. One does wonder why there are so manys indian in american politics all of a sudden.
by kingkongjaffa | 2025-08-06 16:03:43+00:00
1. What do you do for work?

I'm a product manager.

2. Has AI been helpful? && 3. What tools have been the most helpful?

I use claude projects for lots of different use cases, and I use claude code to prototype simple features. It's generally helpful yes.

4. What tools have been the biggest letdown?

Writing quality.

I've tried:

- meta prompting (asking an LLM to make an LLM prompt to do the task)

- providing examples

- prompt engineering to reduce the amount of obvious LLM giveaways in writing style.

I can't get claude sonnet 4/opus 4 to write with any taste.

There are two things LLMs can't do well yet in my opinion:

- To my knowledge they haven't generated any new or novel insights in any field or topic.

- They haven't produced what I would perceive as high quality writing.

I'd love to see prompts that others feel have produced good writing.
by tracker1 | 2025-08-06 16:04:11+00:00
You can always use a private repository for it. And, yeah, it's been very useful. I pushed a relatively straight forward config for Windows and WSL a few years ago, I really need to update it. I also want to get my Linux config done as well.

I mostly backup and restore from my NAS for my dot-files, and some of my ~/.config, though I need to nail that down a bit better, as ~/.config feels excessively bloated from a few apps.
by AlexandrB | 2025-08-06 16:04:11+00:00
How so? The removed section is contiguous and includes a bunch of stuff about navies and states making deals with foreign powers. That's exactly what an accident would look like. Never mind that the online version of the constitution has nothing to do with the legal application thereof. It's not like judges and lawyers are going to look at the website and go: "ah well, that part of the constitution is no longer online so I will just ignore it".

The level of paranoia here is unreal. We should be laughing at these idiots for being unable to manage a simple website, not spinning apocalyptic nonsense about how this will materially alter the constitution as applied in the courts.
by sneak | 2025-08-06 16:04:16+00:00
It’s not fair. The AGPL violates freedom 0 and is nonfree.

https://sneak.berlin/20250720/the-agpl-is-nonfree/

Running a SaaS with in-house modifications is a protected use case for free software. The AGPL is a EULA masquerading as a license.
by Mithriil | 2025-08-06 16:04:56+00:00
> His "sad truth" conclusion is that "Python cannot be super-fast" without breaking compatibility.

A decent case of Python 4.0?

> So, maybe, "a JIT compiler can solve all of your problems"; they can go a long way toward making Python, or any dynamic language, faster, Cuni said. But that leads to "a more subtle problem". He put up a slide with a trilemma triangle: a dynamic language, speed, or a simple implementation. You can have two of those, but not all three.

This trilemma keeps getting me back towards Julia. It's less simple than Python, but much faster (mitigated by pre-compilation time), and almost as dynamic. I'm glad this language didn't die.
by leapingdog | 2025-08-06 16:05:13+00:00
I think it is fair to say that the USA rediscovered war fever after the attacks on home soil. It resulted in the land invasion of two countries.

> There's a phrase people sometimes use about a nation's collective reaction to events like Pearl Harbor -- war fever. We don't know what a true war fever feels like today, since nothing in our recent history compares with it; even a popular war like the gulf war was preceded by months of solemn debate and a narrow vote in Congress approving military action.

I was unfamiliar with the author but when I read this bit I started hunting for a publication date - 1997.
by gchamonlive | 2025-08-06 16:05:24+00:00
You just have to put some effort into separating your dotfiles into a generic layer and a customization layer. Done something like this with my dotfiles repo, which now triples as a generic archlinux customisation tutorial with hyprland and a description of the backup strategy that is tightly coupled with the configuration layout: https://github.com/gchamon/archlinux-system-config
by ta12653421 | 2025-08-06 16:05:37+00:00
The right question would be: "Would you have been able to invent the smartphone if you had made the same experiences and insights as Jobs did"?

Because, a lot of people like jobs had similar experiences in the early days, e.g. Palo Alto Research Lab around them - though, it was Jobs who came up with the idea, not any other of the SC veterans :)
by ActorNightly | 2025-08-06 16:05:50+00:00
>just rewriting stuff in C/Rust does not help.

Except it does. The key is to figure out which part you actually need to go fast, and write it in C. If most of your use case is dominated by network latency.

Overall, people seem to miss the point of Python. The best way to develop software is "make it work, make it good, make it fast" - the first part gets you to an end to end prototype that gives you a testable environment, the second part establishes the robustness and consistency, and the third part lets you focus on optimizing the performance with a robust framework that lets you ensure that your changes are not breaking anything.

Pythons focus is on the first part. The idea is that you spend less time making it work. Once you have it working, then its much easier to do the second part (adding tests, type checking, whatever else), and then the third part. Now with LLMs, its actually pretty straightforward to take a python file and translate it to .c/.h files, especially with agents that do additional "thinking" loops.

However, even given all of that, in practice you often don't need to move away from Python. For example, I have a project that datamines Strava Heatmaps (i.e I download png tiles for entire US). The amount of time that it took me to write it in Python in addition to running it (which takes about a day) is much shorter than it would have taken me to write it in C++/Rust and then run it with speedup in processing.
by edent | 2025-08-06 16:05:55+00:00
If you got food poisoning from a restaurant, would you recommend it to your friends? After all, food-borne pathogens and poor hygiene are just a fact of life.

How about if they gave you a voucher for a free drink to say sorry?

Reviewing products is like interviewing people. You have to go by what you see on the day. Your can't review (or interview) based in what could have happened; only on what did.
by strogonoff | 2025-08-06 16:05:57+00:00
I would much rather prefer AirGradient over IQAir AirVision Pro, despite WIRED’s recent evaluation favouring the latter. Source: I “own” (see below) an IQAir AirVision Pro, which I bought directly from IQAir’s website, and I have seen an AirGradient unit in someone else’s home.

One reason is, in fact, the screen. AirVision Pro’s display is bright, but it is bright all of the time; it cannot be made dim enough to make it suitable for use in the bedroom, for example: the blueish white LCD is basically a small light fixture. Furthermore, the contents of the screen are well-readable only at a narrow angle (think when you look straight at it; putting it on top of a tall fridge or down on your windowsill makes it illegible). I would much rather prefer an e-ink display.

Second, on their website IQAir states that their air monitors are made in Europe[0]. This is a false claim. In fact, AirVision Pro is made in PRC, as it declared on the box. I would not be against a good product made in PRC, and AirVision Pro is in fact known for good cheracteristics regarding accuracy, but it seems like a dark pattern at best, and they clearly want to mislead customers.

Third, the enclosure featured a charging USB port (which is an obsolete micro USB variety incredibly hard to find cables for) that was very finicky and gave up the ghost 3 months in. The device just wouldn’t charge its battery or see any power at all thereafter, so it basically became a brick of cheap plastic for all intents and purposes. I can’t be bothered to disassemble the enclosure and try to repair it since I can’t stand the bright screen anyway and I already got the hang of air quality patterns where I live.

It did the job, sure, but if AirGradient’s PM2.5 and carbon dioxide detectors do nearly as good of a job[1] it makes it a much more compelling option for me.

Unfortunately, as of the time I last checked, AirGradient shipped to a small set of countries which did not include my area; by comparison, IQAir has a much wider coverage.

[0] You can still see the proud large “Swiss made” in the relevant section of their website (https://www.iqair.com/products/air-quality-monitors). Furthermore, if you Google the question, the LLM-generated answer suggests that

> The IQAir AirVisual Pro air quality monitor is Swiss-designed and manufactured. While IQAir is headquartered in Switzerland, their manufacturing facilities for air purifiers, including the AirVisual Pro, are located in both Switzerland and Southern Germany

which is not true.

[1] Perhaps someone can comment on that; I don’t see SenseAir sensors listed on https://www.aqmd.gov/aq-spec/evaluations/summary-table.
by takigon | 2025-08-06 16:06:12+00:00
Thank you for sharing the information/comments. The extensions you have presented are indeed great, but they seem to lack features such as full text search, page count progress tracking, text highlighting, notes, etc. Also, regarding RAG, I find it a bit cumbersome as I have to import the epub every time I open the book. I am not familiar with this tool, so sorry if I am wrong.
by duxup | 2025-08-06 16:06:17+00:00
I used windows for so long, I can't stand it now. It feels like it is actively fighting / pointed AT ME and not for me.

In many ways windows was a core part of my life with "computers". The old windows 95 start me up commercial still makes me nostalgic / gets me excited: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0AJM6HMYjM

For a long time Windows allowed me enough customization to get it out of my way and to work FOR my use case. Changes might be good or bad with windows over the years, but it felt like someone was thinking about the user respectfully as a person who wanted to get things done. But no longer, I don't know who that start menu is for, not me, anyone?, the settings never sticking ... Windows feels like crappy adware pointed AT me now, they don't care about me doing what I want ... I ran to Apple and haven't looked back.
by brotchie | 2025-08-06 16:06:26+00:00
100%, other than selling RSUs to diversify, every single other investment I have is now buy and hold.

Even did a ~7 year career detour through quant finance "if I like Software Engineering and Mathematics so much, why don't I combine the two?"

Finally realized that the best use of my time was to just to work hard at a career I deeply enjoy (Software Engineering), working on products I actually care about (not valuing arcane derivatives products), and just invest the excess in diversified index funds (with some single stock selections here and there, thanks TSLA and NVDA).

Just as engineers can get "nerd sniped", I feel like "trading" is a somewhat malevolent strong attractor for a lot of folks. Folks do need general financial literacy, but an extra hour spent per day working harder to progress day job / long term career likely has a higher net present value than trading options or crypto.
by chimprich | 2025-08-06 16:06:27+00:00
> Is Omicron equally as deadly as Delta? No.

It depends how you look at it. Omicron had a lower CFR, but higher transmissibility, so arguably worse.

There is no inherent selection pressure on viruses to mutate towards being less aggressive. Omicron had a transmission advantage that coincided with being a bit less lethal, but often being more transmissible correlates with being more lethal (e.g. delta variant).

We could have easily had a more lethal omicron variant emerge if it wasn't for vaccination effectively halting the pandemic.

Far more people were saved by vaccination than any luck on random mutation in the virus.

> With time, treatments improved

They did. Like the use of dextramethasone. Still a small improvement compared to the dramatic success of the vaccines.

> and so did the outcomes, regardless of vaccination status.

No. Vaccinated individuals were better off in pretty much every measurable statistic. By any reasonable measurement vaccination saved millions of lives.
by mmastrac | 2025-08-06 16:06:29+00:00
It's an interesting chunk to remove. Some highlights:

The President could command the armed forces without statutory limits. The Writ of Habeas Corpus could be suspended at any time, even without rebellion or invasion. Congress would no longer have exclusive legislative control over Washington, D.C. or military installations.

The executive could spend from the Treasury without congressional approval. The executive branch could favour certain ports or states in commerce, allowing economic favouritism, punishing or rewarding states.

The federal government might override state-level agreements without needing to respect boundaries. Congress would lose its broad enabling clause to legislate on powers not explicitly listed elsewhere.

The funny part: this means that states could create their own militaries, treaties, or currencies. So in theory that would grant the power for a far-more-independent California state that would have an easier time seceding.
by zokier | 2025-08-06 16:06:36+00:00
umm wat

> “But Niki, you can regenerate the lockfile and pull in all the new dependencies!”

> Sure. In exactly the same way you can update your top-level dependencies.

how does updating top-level deps help with updating leaf packages? Is the author assuming that whenever a leaf package is updated, every other package in the dep chain gets immediately new release? That is fundamentally impossible considering that the releases would need to happen serially.
by nine_k | 2025-08-06 16:07:04+00:00
The author seems to miss the point of version ranges. Yes, specific versions of dependencies get frozen in the lock file at the moment of building. But the only way to determine these specific versions is to run version resolution across the whole tree. The process finds out which specific versions within the ranges can be chosen to satisfy all the version constraints.

This works with minimal coordination between authors of the dependencies. It becomes a big deal when you have several unrelated dependencies, each transitively requiring that libpupa. The chance they converge on the same exact version is slim. The chance a satisfying version can be found within specified ranges is much higher.

Physical things that are built from many parts have the very same limitation: they need to specify tolerances to account for the differences in production, and would be unable to be assembled otherwise.
by dschuma | 2025-08-06 16:07:07+00:00
Okay, folks, it's time to stop freaking out.

First, this is a link to the Constitution Annotated, a legal treatise that explains the Constitution and its written by the Congressional Research Service, a division inside the Library of Congress. They are NOT subject to Trump administration orders because they are a Legislative branch agency. There is a very live issue about the independence of the Library (that I've previously [written about](https://firstbranchforecast.substack.com/p/a-constitutional-...)), but at the moment the acting Library of Congress is independent and is not a Trump appointee.

Second, the addition or removal of information on the CONAN website has no legal effect and it's not an effort to conceal anything. More likely than not, it's an error on the part of the folks administering the website. You can find the print version of the document on the Government Publishing Office's website.

How do I know about this? Well, I used to work at CRS as a legislative attorney and sat next to the guy who edited the treatise. And then starting in 2009, when I was working at a non-profit, I began advocating for the CONAN to be published online, only to be rebuffed by the Library for more than a decade. Here are my [letters](https://github.com/DanielSchuman/Policy/wiki/Constitution-An...) on the topic.

It is entirely appropriate to be freaking out about the White House's efforts to take over the Legislative branch. I've written about that [here](https://firstbranchforecast.substack.com/p/submission-accomp...). But the CONAN website is not the thing to freak out about.

If you have concerns with the Congress dot gov website, and I have more than a view, use the LC's [feedback website](https://www.research.net/r/congress-gov-feedback) to let them know there's an issue.

(Apparently markdown doesn't work for formatting. Sorry.)
by jchw | 2025-08-06 16:07:17+00:00
Your customers, potential competitors, and even hyperscalers are all possibly the same people at different points. AGPL works because corporate lawyers are horrified by it, not because it actually discriminates against hyperscalers. If you find something that even sane lawyers wouldn't tolerate, then you have greatly limited the benefits of being open source in the first place. If you make a license that actually discriminates on user or use case, then it's not open source.

If you want to protect your project from being resold by potential competitors, do not release it as open source.

I think this problem might solve itself, though. Slowly but surely, companies and power users have become very wary of VC funded companies making big promises and big open source releases, with the knowledge that there is rarely a plan for sustainability and that there is a good chance if they stand on that rug it could be pulled later. Soon, if trends continue, the advantages that you once got from announcing something as open source will start to evaporate and turn into a liability as people start seeing ahead to the eventual "but of course we have to be able to monetize this eventually" stage.

The way I see it, a project can always be open sourced later on once there's a way to do it and ensure the company can remain sustainable. For the flagship product of a company, especially a VC-funded company, not starting open source is the ethical thing to do.
by addaon | 2025-08-06 16:07:38+00:00
> Piloting an aircraft with an autopilot requires a MINIMUM of 1500 hours of instruction and experience as well as multiple levels of certification (VFR, IFR, multi-engine, and specific type certification).

What? A full private pilot license only requires 35 or 40 hours of flight time (depending on school type); a sport license only requires 20 hours. Airplanes flyable by new pilots of either type very often have autopilots today.
by potato-peeler | 2025-08-06 16:07:47+00:00
I specifically mentioned Misra standards for writing safe C. And ensuring thread safety is not just a C Lang pitfall.

I was not looking for language reference rather how current software written in C ensure memory safety. How do their development paradigm look like?

Teaching both the software pitfalls in C and how to mitigate them, maybe by giving examples from modern software or standards like Misra, will really help someone to understand how to write better C. Just linking a language reference does not help.
by sneak | 2025-08-06 16:07:53+00:00
This also shifts a tremendous amount of the burden for preventing system-level malware onto the app sandbox, which today is only one component of a multi-layered defense-in-depth system of notarization, entitlements, app review, etc.

To be clear I support letting people run whatever apps they want, but let’s not pretend that this won’t make the median iPhone more prone to have a malware infection (like Android). There are reasons other than anticompetitive greed that Apple does things this way (although I am sure greed is the primary motivator).
by bko | 2025-08-06 16:07:57+00:00
There's nothing wrong w/ turning a profit. It's subsidized now but there's really not much network effects. Nothing leads me to believe that one company who can blow the most amount of money early on will have a moat. There is no moat, especially for something like this.

In fact it's a lot easier to compete since you see the frontier w/ these new models and you can use distillation to help train yours. I see new "frontier" models coming out every week.

Sure there will be some LLMs with ads, but there will be plenty without. And if there aren't there would be a huge market opportunity to create on. I just don't get this doom and gloom.
by shkkmo | 2025-08-06 16:07:59+00:00
> Ultimately, you shipped a broken product.

They shipped a working product that failed after several months, was covered under warranty and also repairavle at home (which the review doesn't even mention.)

> It is perfectly fair for a reviewer to point out their personal preferences on something like this.

But that isn't what happened. The product was included as "not recommended" not just "this wasn't my favorite due to X but would be good for this type of person".

They make up a category to list every other unit as "best for" but decided that nobody should want to buy this one because the Author got annoyed.

The review is poorly written and doesn't do a good job of actually comparing units. It is the kind of review article that mostly fluff with very few details about actual differences revealed during testing that I have learned to ignore when looking for information about what to buy.
by scotty79 | 2025-08-06 16:08:07+00:00
> > PISA score is a form of grading, is it not? > No, it's an independent test.

I'm sorry. I'm not a native speaker. Does the word "grading" pertain to only tests that are a part of school curriculum? I thought it could mean assigning a score to any test, even independent, even not related to education at all.

> Correct. Students take the PISA in their native language.

Right. So assuming that scores of the students are averaged out together across all test takers in the country and some of them learned to read French rather than English they might skew the average. So comparing scores of Canada and UK for the purposes of comparing how well English learning goes in those two countries might not be valid approach.

We should be comparing UK with sub-population of Canadian students that took the test in English. Not sure if PISA provides such data.

I probably can't object to comparing UK and Ireland on that grounds. Or do some students take PISA tests in Irish there?