MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by closewith | 2025-08-31 21:07:05+00:00
> Though empires are out of fashion , British colonies universally benefited from the British empire.

That's not at all true. There are many examples, but no need to look farther afield than Ireland, which has not yet recovered from the deliberate genocide of the Irish famine.

The island of Ireland had not yet reached the population it held pre-famine, and if Ireland had grown at the rate of its neighbours, it would now being closing in on 25 million+ instead of the ~7 million across the island.

> The ones who are thriving today owe a huge debt of gratitude, and the languishing ones are that way because they decided not to continue the British tradition.

Britain owes a debt to its colonies. The colonies owe nothing to it, except contempt.

> The 20th century decline of the British empire is one of civilization's worst failures, on par with the decline of the Roman Empire.

In a comment brimming with ignorance, this becomes absurd. The dissolution of the British empire is the great victory of the 20th century. A victory of human rights, decency, and even off the British population, who are disposable to the empire as foreign "subjects" were.
by andrewaylett | 2025-08-31 21:07:46+00:00
Yep, it's absolutely true.

Reference: https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/services/crown-ca...

""" Queen Elizabeth II was the first of Canada's sovereigns to be proclaimed separately as Queen of Canada in 1953, when a Canadian law, the Royal Style and Titles Act, formally conferred upon her the title of "Queen of Canada". The proclamation reaffirmed the monarch’s role in Canada as independent of the monarch’s role in the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth realms. """
by bpye | 2025-08-31 21:07:49+00:00
I think I’ve settled on both being the answer - Hetzner is affordable enough that I can have a full backup of my NAS (using ZFS snapshots and incremental backups), and as a bonus can host some services there instead of at home. My home network still has much lower latency and so is preferable for ie. my Lightroom library.
by butz | 2025-08-31 21:08:21+00:00
Took me a while to figure out that "example" link is just a placeholder, and not an actual link to test the service with. Clicking "Search" without any link results in "Something went wrong, please try again later." error message, although more precise error message is returned "Invalid link, please try with Spotify or Youtube links." - it should be displayed instead. Overall, why not add a sentence or two about what this website actually does?
by jonas21 | 2025-08-31 21:08:32+00:00
I think they just missed the segue from the intro (about the caning of Charles Sumner) to the body of the article (about gutta-percha).

The two are only tangentially related in that the cane happened to be made of gutta-percha, and its easy to miss the sentence where they mention this because it's sandwiched between a large image and a form to subscribe to the newsletter.
by kelnos | 2025-08-31 21:08:48+00:00
> We now provide a completely free certs for a malicious web-sites

Malicious websites never had a problem buying certs before. Sure, the bar is lower now, but I don't think it was a particularly meaningful bar before. Besides, the most common ways to get malicious websites shut down are to get their webhost to cut them off, or get a court order to seize their domain name. Getting their TLS cert revoked isn't common, and doesn't really do the job anyway.

> Degraded encryption value so much it's not even indicated anymore (remember the green bar for EV?)

No, we've degraded the identity verification afforded by EV and those former browser features. Remember that the promise of SSL/TLS was two things: 1) your traffic is private, 2) it verifies that the server you thought you were contacting is actually the one you reached.

I think (2) was always going to be difficult: either you make it hard and expensive to acquire TLS certificates, and (2) has value, or you don't, and it doesn't. I think pervasive encryption is way more important than site owner identity validation. And I don't think the value of an EV cert was even all that high back when browsers called them out in their UI. There are lots of examples of people trivially managing to get an EV cert from somewhere, with their locally-registered "Stripe, LLC" or whatever in the "validated" company name field of their cert.

> Pavlov-trained everyone to dumb-click through 'this page is not secure' warnings

Not sure what that has to do with this. That was more of a problem back when we didn't have Let's Encrypt, so lots of people were using self-signed certs, or let their certs expire and didn't fix it, or whatever. These days I expect certificate warnings are fairly rare, and so users might actually start paying attention to them again.

> SNI exists and even without it anything not on CDN is blocked very easily

ESNI also exists, and while not being available everywhere, it'll get there. But this is a bizarre complaint, as it's entirely trivial to block traffic when there's no TLS at all.
by alwa | 2025-08-31 21:08:56+00:00
What on earth would lead you to conclude that unbanked households don’t use online services? I can’t imagine any possible set of starting assumptions that would lead there, short of fairly cartoonish assumptions about the demographics the FDIC pointed out at that link.

Even within the unbanked households, the FDIC link points out that 1/3 use online non-bank services instead. And independently of that, it makes sense that even cash households might interface with online commercial activity: pick up gig work through DoorDash or UberEats or whatever; get paid out through a neighborhood informal-cash-service operator (multiservicio, hawala, guy who informally cashes out undocumented drivers). Or through opening a Venmo or CashApp account instead of a bank account.

That leads to a slightly stronger form of the claim: that those 5.6 million are likely to have undergone KYC/AML through other, non-bank financial providers…

But even then, why should a bank account be connected to whether or not you’re an adult in society’s eyes?
by fijiaarone | 2025-08-31 21:09:01+00:00
100 units isn’t 100% of available cash and equity. It’s the minimum number of units that founder (investors) think they can get employees to work for. Most of the time in well funded startups they can afford to pay 200 units of cash and 500 units of equity. But the founders (investors) would rather take 50000 units of cash and 50 million units of equity for themselves and only pay employees 90 units of cash and offload their risk onto the employees so that they have greater reward and lesser risk.
by justahuman74 | 2025-08-31 21:09:16+00:00
Inference will get much much cheaper. We're paying $30000 for a top of the line gpu right now, but that's only because everyone insists on buying nvidia, so nvidia has full incentive to charge the absolute maximum.

Long term that vendor lock in will go away and prices will go down to something reasonable.

Long ago CPUs were super expensive too, now they're so cheap we put them in toothbrushes
by KronisLV | 2025-08-31 21:09:39+00:00
> All other things being equal, less code is better. Put another way code is a form of debt. If you use an AI to generate code, you are effectively getting a debt – a debt of code.

This does have the implication baked in that AI will generate more code than people to do the same thing. Seeing as it had language features that not everyone knows about, alongside a bunch of algorithms and programming paradigms in the training data, sometimes the opposite will be true - the human code will be longer and therefore have more debt.

Of course, others also pointed out how you'd probably want to look at how complex or simple the code is, not just how long it is, but that's besides the point I'm making.
by BuildTheRobots | 2025-08-31 21:09:53+00:00
> I always thought these workarounds were odd - does God have no objection to using proxies to get around the rules? Then again, my friend is not Jewish, so perhaps he can freely break the Sabbath because he’s outside the scope of the rule? Or is damned anyway?

There's a lot of crossover between Judaism and DnD player mentality. You're very much encouraged to learn the source material, the commentary and to discuss and debate it. Workarounds don't actually break the rules; and you need to put a lot of study into doing them properly.

Sometimes you need to take a sensible decision and choose to just flat out break the rules. In those situations one is encouraged to do so in an uncommon or abnormal way so it doesn't become habitual. This makes sense to me - I didn't smoke inside for the first 3 years of moving into my house, but the first time I did break that rule it made breaking it much easier the second, third, or subsequent times.

In your example given I can see a situation that isn't actually a risk to life (which comes under different rulings), but is still serious enough you need to take some action before waiting for Shabbat to end. A burst pipe would be a good example; it's not going to kill anyone but it could cause extremely serious damage if left. Asking for help rather than just picking the phone up and treating it like a regular day sorta makes logical sense in that context, though it's probably not what I'd choose to do.

Jewish laws only ever apply to Jews [1]; they have no expectation, want or desire for it to apply to anyone else, through conversion or otherwise. If your friend isn't Jewish then he's welcome to do what he wants. There is no damnation in the Christian sense for anyone, Jewish or otherwise. It's also possible to get into Jewish heaven without being Jewish, but you do have to obey a small subset [1] of the laws.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Laws_of_Noah
by biosboiii | 2025-08-31 21:10:21+00:00
What is a cocaine-fueled "amusement park" to Silicon Valley techbros is another humans hell. I look forward to you guys joining it.

>I no longer love blue skies. In fact, I now prefer grey skies. The drones do not fly when the skies are grey.

>When the skies brighten, though, the drones return, and so too does the fear.

Zubair, 13 yrs old https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2013/10/saddest-words-c...
by api | 2025-08-31 21:10:56+00:00
I’m convinced that cloud companies have been intentionally shaping dev culture. Microservices in particular seem like a pattern designed to push managed cloud lock in. It’s not that you have to have cloud to use them, but it creates a lot of opportunities to reach for managed services like event queues to replace what used to be a simple function call or queue.

Dev culture is totally fad driven and devs are sheep, so this works.
by UncleMeat | 2025-08-31 21:11:19+00:00
If the key output of a political figure is to promote policies with conservative valence, what's the difference? Maybe at home he thinks to himself "progressive taxation systems are great" and "subsidizing solar energy is good." Good for him if true. But the thing I care about is how people like him impact society and his impact is to promote weird antivax shit that has completely smitten the reactionary right.
by kelnos | 2025-08-31 21:12:05+00:00
EV certs didn't actually afford the guarantees people hoped and expected. I could simply spend a few hundred dollars to register "Stripe, LLC" or "Microsoft, Inc." in my local jurisdiction, and then get an EV cert with that name on it.

Browser vendors removed the extra UI around EV certs not because certs in general are easier to get, but because the identity "guarantee" afforded to EV certs was fairly easy to spoof. EV certs still exist, and you can foolishly pay for one if you want. Free ACME-provided certs has nothing to do with this.
by tremon | 2025-08-31 21:12:16+00:00
> If you're on a traditional home internet connection, who exactly can tamper with your traffic? Your ISP can, and that's not great, but it doesn't strike me as blaring siren levels of terrible, either.

This characterization in on the same level of sophistication as "the Internet is just a series of pipes". Every transit station has the opportunity to read or even tamper with the bytes on an unencrypted http connection. That's not just your ISP, it also includes the ISP's backbone provider, the backbone peering provider, your country's Internet Exchange, the Internet Exchange in the country of the website, the website's peering partner, and the website's hosting partner.

Some of those parties may be the same, and some parties I have not mentioned for brevity. To take just one example: there is only one direct link between Europe and South America. Most traffic between those continents goes via Amsterdam (NL) and New Jersey (US) to Barranquilla (CO), or via Sines (PT) to Fortaleza (BR). Or if the packets are feeling adventurous today, they might go through Italy, Singapore, California and Chile, with optional transit layovers in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Thailand or China.

Main point being: as a user, you have no control over the routing of your Internet traffic. The traffic also doesn't follow geographic rules, they follow peering cost. You can't even be sure that traffic between you and a website in your country stays inside that country.
by BugsJustFindMe | 2025-08-31 21:13:34+00:00
> project on how to sustainably desalinate Ocean Water would...

...be an engineering challenge that the world has not solved yet. We use a lot of water. I don't think you understand the scale of what you're talking about.

All 16000 desalination plants in the entire world combined produce[0] only about 8% of the amount of fresh water the US uses[1].

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00489...

[1] https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/cir1441

But don't worry. We're working on improving desalination too.
by tzs | 2025-08-31 21:14:14+00:00
> Additionally, GPLv2 does not prevent shipping ZFS combined with GPL code, because CDDL code is not derivative work of GPLv2 code. So it's legal to ship.

The CDDL code is not a derivative work of GPLv2 code, but the combined work as a whole is a derivative work of GPLv2 code (assuming by "combined" we are talking about shipping an executable made by compiling and linking GPLv2 and CDDL code together). Shipping that work does require permission from both the GPLv2 code copyright owners and the CDDL code copyright owners unless the code from on or the other can be justified under fair use or if it was a part of the GPLv2 or CDDL code that is not subject to copyright.

What Canonical does is ship ZFS as a kernel module. That contains minimal GPLv2 code from the kernel that should be justifiable as fair use (which seems like a decent bet after the Oracle vs Google case).
by n2d4 | 2025-08-31 21:14:33+00:00
Now the question remains, are there stableish equilibria that are 50/50? Splitting it into two half-circles sounds like an equilibrium at first glance, but I'm not convinced it is, as only a tiny bit of random luck seems to make it become a "horseshoe" pattern instead.

(That assumes that the simulation is randomized of course, which doesn't seem to be the case for the one in the link posted here.)
by egypturnash | 2025-08-31 21:14:40+00:00
Let's try the least obscure thing I can think of: Taylor Swift's last album, The Tortured Poets Department.

IDHS: https://idonthavespotify.sjdonado.com/?id=b3Blbi5zcG90aWZ5Lm... - on Apple Music and SoundCloud.

odesli: https://album.link/i/1736268193 - 14 streaming links, 3 purchase. Including working links to Deezer and Soundcloud that IDHS didn't turn up despite saying those are the places you can start from.
by badsectoracula | 2025-08-31 21:14:40+00:00
I worked on engine and tools, not gameplay, though obviously i also did interact with gameplay programmers too, though most of my work was on engine side. Yes, relatively speaking, gameplay devs did think about performance less but that is on a relative scale - engine programmers also didn't think of it as much as implied.

Sure people did use profilers and the engine did have various profiling views and i personally wrote some of them myself - both for profiling performance as well as I/O since for some time i also worked on loading/streaming too - but as i wrote, those were when things became visibly bad. Most of the time people were either busy trying to fix bugs or busy trying to implement new features - and optimizing them became something to care about later, if needed (and there was enough time). And TBH usually that was fine - at some point i found some big inefficiency in one of the engine's core data structures, but that same engine was already used for a well received game at the past and the inefficiency only became obvious because the current (at the time) game was several times larger. So the thing performed fine for the original requirements and, at the time, trying to do more would be a waste (after all, it wasn't until long after the original game the engine was made for was released that the decision to make a much larger one was made).
by jmclnx | 2025-08-31 21:15:14+00:00
>Limits new models to 5 gallons per cycle, with proposals dropping that to 3.2 gallons by 2027

This is why. Where I live, I and everyone can leave showers on 24/7 and there would still not be an impact in the amount of water in our area.

The only impact would be due to water treatment throughput. The various water departments refuse to increase throughput because they do not want to spend. Even with the current throughput, there is absolutely need for these water limits here.

We are being forced to live in a desert because of the Western part of the US.
by konmok | 2025-08-31 21:15:22+00:00
Thank you for providing sources. I do find it interesting that the Washington Institute report concludes by saying that the Gaza Health Ministry's list of deaths is generally considered accurate, and that list currently includes more than 60,000 names.

But maybe you're right! Maybe the very sources you're relying on are wrong, and only 50,000 or so Gazans have died. That still doesn't mean this isn't a genocide.

The argument is that Gaza is currently undergoing a genocide, not that the genocide is already complete. If we were to have this argument about the Holocaust in 1942 or so, you could similarly say that only a small percentage of European Jews have died so far, therefore it can't be a genocide. In the case of Palestine, give Israel another decade of unchecked brutality and I'm sure they can attain your high standards for human extermination.
by jeroenhd | 2025-08-31 21:15:57+00:00
The source behind that comment doesn't verify the claim that your browsing history is being shared. Only that the app currently being developed is a temporary app for use until the full app has been finished.

In fact, the linked article links to the EU website where it is specifically stated that the final protocol will be compatible with the temporary app (the anonymous age verification protocol).

The final app will also serve as a method to identify oneself (i.e. to a police officer) but that's separate functionality from the token based authentication.

The current lack of zero knowledge proofs does pose a potential privacy issue when websites and governments work together to track you across a length of time and re-authentications, but it's not like you're inherently sharing your browser history with the government. As far as I know, the temporary app intents to implement ZKPs but ran into standardization issues, so it's not like this is an intentional shortcoming either.
by ekzy | 2025-08-31 21:16:46+00:00
I’ve implemented OTEL for background jobs, so async jobs that get picked up from the DB where I store the trace context in the DB and pass it along to multiple async jobs. For some jobs that fail and retry with a backoff strategy, they can take many hours and we can see the traces fine in grafana. Each job create its own span but they are all within the same trace.

Works well for us, I’m not sure I understand the issue you’re facing?
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-08-31 21:16:50+00:00
It's not an eternity because QC is a low-headroom tech which is already pushing its limits.

What made computing-at-scale possible wasn't the transistor, it was the precursor technologies that made transistor manufacturing possible - precise control of semiconductor doping, and precision optical lithography.

Without those the transistor would have remained a lab curiosity.

QC has no hint of any equivalent breakthrough tech waiting to kick start a revolution. There are plenty of maybe-perhaps technologies like Diamond Defects and Photonics, but packing density and connectivity are always going to be huge problems, in addition to noise and error rate issues.

Basically you need high densities to do anything truly useful, but error rates have to go down as packing densities go up - which is stretching optimism a little.

Silicon is a very forgiving technology in comparison. As long as your logic levels have a decent headroom over the noise floor, and you allow for switching transients (...the hard part) your circuit will be deterministic and you can keep packing more and more circuitry into smaller and smaller spaces. (Subject to lithography precision.)

Of course it's not that simple, but it is basically just extremely complex and sophisticated plumbing of electron flows.

Current takes on QC are the opposite. There's a lot more noise than signal, and adding more complexity makes the problem worse in non-linear ways.
by dedup-com | 2025-08-31 21:17:16+00:00
Knowledge of C (XROS was written in C and during the interviews the candidate rather uncommonly wasn't given a choice of programming language) and general understanding of how a computer works at a low level. Knowing the purpose of "volatile", understanding cache lines, mapping virtual memory to physical memory, DMA, this kind of thing.

I think everyone had a degree but looking at my degree (applied math) in particular nothing that I had learned at the uni was immediately useful and I think there isn't really anything that would prevent a smart person with a GED and some history of, say, Linux kernel contributions from succeeding on a team like this. Except may be a degree is needed for H1B visa for those who need it.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-08-31 21:17:53+00:00
If you think taxes are stealing, versus financial contribution for being allowed to capture value or maintain ownership of wealth (whether inherited or aggregated), middle ground is unlikely to be found. I like taxes, with them I buy civilization. Vienna is a public housing model shown to work [1].

[1] HN Search: vienna housing - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
by smusamashah | 2025-08-31 21:18:48+00:00
Article did not say what kind languages/applications thosd 791 developers were working on. I work on a legacy Java code base (which looks more like C than Java, thankfully) and I cant imagine AI doing any of it. It can do small isolated, well formulated chunks (functions that do a very specific task) but even that will require very verbose explanation.

I just can't fathom shipping a big percentage of work using LLMs.
by const_cast | 2025-08-31 21:18:59+00:00
I work a salary job as a software engineer, I fill timesheets.

Companies love timesheets because, even though you're salary, they want to know what you're doing at all times.

They want all the control of an hourly paid employee, with all the money stealing of a salary position.

Also you're already being tracked, they already know exactly how long you're online. I don't know what to tell you.
by FollowingTheDao | 2025-08-31 21:19:57+00:00
It is far from a certain that we are apex predators since we can survive on a largely herbivore diet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apex_predator#Human_trophic_le...

And "our shit contains the condensed toxins from all of the lower rungs on the food chain." lacks any credibility unless you can provide a link I have never seen.