MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lukan | 2025-08-14 12:40:12+00:00
"Maybe, in the end, sharing information and knowledge is a bit harder to execute than it seems?"

Or ... instead of admitting something, we can also just find a scapegoat instead. Let's say bad coorporations somehow prevented it?

On the other hand, sharing information is easy. The hard part is in trusting that information in the time and age of spam, propaganda and advertisers. And companies are quite secretive and don't want to share too much by default for other reasons.

Also it is way easier just do something to your own wiki, than coordinate with dozens of others where you share something.

I have many vague and some concrete ideas since a while about building trust right into the wiki system somehow, but never got around to actually implement something. Because ah well, I have to admit. It really ain't trivial after all, solving human trust.
by hyperbolablabla | 2025-08-14 12:41:26+00:00
I was robbed at knifepoint on Oxford Street at about 3am while drunk, and let me say, there had to have been about 100 cameras pointed in my direction at the time of the mugging. Despite all this, the police told me nothing could be done because they were unable to acquire any useful footage at the time of the robbery. I lost a lot of faith in the Met after this incident, or that mass CCTV was even really that useful in getting a prosecution.
by seabass-labrax | 2025-08-14 12:41:34+00:00
> They should prioritise violent crime.

I just want to point out that theft can be violent. In England and Wales, burglary is considered to be a more severe crime if house was occupied, due to the psychological effects on the victims.

The famous 'phone-snatching' can hardly be considered non-violent either, given that it requires physical contact and is almost guaranteed to produce fear in the victim. (I don't personally know how it has been prosecuted - if at all - in the past though.)
by mbeex | 2025-08-14 12:41:40+00:00
Google Search for an edition from Eastern Germany. Read it, when I was 10 years old (50 years ago!). It was long before all the fantasy hype, and it was magical. Klaus Ensikat was the illustrator.

https://www.google.com/search?udm=2&q=ensikat+illustration+h...
Show HN: Minarrow – Fast Rust columnar engine with Apache Arrow compatibility
by pbower | 2025-08-14 12:41:41+00:00
Minarrow is a fast, from-scratch columnar data engine written in Rust, designed for systems and workloads where Apache Arrow is a fit—but Arrow-rs is too heavy.

I built it for use cases like:

- Structured tick/quote/event ingestion in HFT - Native async streaming (Tokio, etc.) - Edge and embedded systems that need zero-copy structured memory - SIMD-native kernels (all buffers are 64-byte aligned) - polyglot apps

Minarrow gives you:

- Arrow-compatible layout and schema support - <1.5s build times - Always-typed data access (no downcasting, no Any) - Async IPC and memory-mapped file support (via a sibling crate) - .to_arrow() and .to_polars() for interop

It doesn’t try to replace the Arrow ecosystem—but for Rust-first, performance-sensitive systems, it offers Arrow compatibility without the abstraction tax.

Repo: https://github.com/pbower/minarrow Docs: https://docs.rs/minarrow/latest/minarrow/

Benchmarks (full results in repo): Minarrow sums 1k integers in 88 ns (direct), within a few ns of raw Vec (64 ns) and ~2× faster than Arrow-rs struct (162 ns). On 1B integers with SIMD + Rayon: ~114 ms.
by pjmlp | 2025-08-14 12:42:27+00:00
I advise you to educate yourself who works and owns OpenJDK copyrights.

Can start here, https://dev.java/contribute/openjdk/

"Once you have contributed several changes (usually two) you can become an Author. An author has the right to create patches but cannot push them. To push a patch, you need a Sponsor. Gaining a sponsorship is usually achieved through the discussions you had on the mailing lists.

In order to become an Author, you also need to sign the Oracle Contribution Agreement (OCA)."

The go into https://openjdk.org/bylaws

"The OpenJDK Lead is an OpenJDK Member, appointed by Oracle, who directs the major efforts of the Community, which are new implementations of the Java SE Platform known as JDK Release Projects."

And this nice contribution overview from Java 22,

https://blogs.oracle.com/java/post/the-arrival-of-java-22

"Of the 26,447 JIRA issues marked as fixed in Java 11 through Java 22 at the time of their GA, 18,842 were completed by Oracle employees while 7,605 were contributed by individual developers and developers working for other organizations. Going through the issues and collating the organization data from assignees results in the following chart of organizations sponsoring the development of contributions in Java:"

To spare you the math, 77% were done by Oracle employees.

Now please show us how Kotlin compiles for Android without using Java.

Doesn't look like Google got rid of Oracle to me, more like they didn't even considered Dart, nor Go could stand a chance against the Java ecosystem among Android developers.
by Bender | 2025-08-14 12:42:38+00:00
Who needs the vans when one has Tesla's roaming the streets and parked in random places? Those things have a myriad of cameras. What stops Telsa from providing access to (insert highest paying agencies and/or companies)? Surely by now some other modern cars have followed this pattern. There's even a camera pointed at the drivers face. It's only a matter of time before they have fast uplinks to Starlink. I have to assume the car could do some local AI to minimize uploading noise and only upload the interesting bits.

telsa> give me the location and names of everyone currently picking their nose, lol.
by arrowsmith | 2025-08-14 12:42:41+00:00
I campaigned in the recent council elections (we lost) and knocked on hundreds of doors in my area, speaking to people of all demographics about politics.

I can't exaggerate the collective despair that I witnessed. Young or old, black or white, Labour or Tory, every single person I spoke to without exception had something negative to say about the state of the country. No matter what their politics, no-one was optimistic, and why would they be?

In recent weeks we've seeing unprecedented protests against migrant hotels, but opposition to immigration is just part of the picture. Brits are giving up on normal politics in ways I wouldn't have imagined even two years ago.

Dark times are ahead.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-08-14 12:42:43+00:00
Eh, I care and I don't do it, but my wife does. I do not agree with her choices in that area and voice the concerns in a way that I hoped would speak to her, but it does not work as it is now a deeply ingrained habit.

I, too, have vices she tolerates so I don't push as hard as I otherwise would have, but I would argue it is not inconsistency. It is a question of what level of compromise is acceptable.
by Kerrick | 2025-08-14 12:42:54+00:00
The design of typefaces aren’t copyrighted in the U.S. The only thing that is protected is the software: TTFs, OTFs, etc. [1] That’s why so many clones of popular fonts (and old metal type) exist.

These days the value in a font isn’t in the letterforms, it’s in the kerning, ligatures, variability, etc. which all flows from the software. It’s also where a significant amount of the labor in creating a typeface comes from. And it’s the thing that sets apart professional-quality fonts from many (but not all!) free ones.

If AI can write new font software by cloning bitmaps of letterforms _and_ get the kerning, ligatures, variability, etc. right… it’ll change the type foundry industry in a big way.

[1]: https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ33.pdf
by _mlbt | 2025-08-14 12:43:44+00:00
> I don't follow people who post misinformation

A little off topic, but where do you get your news? I am having the hardest time finding credible news sources that aren't full of misinformation or bias to the point of being Soviet Union Pravda levels of propaganda.

The best I've been able to do is pick a few sources that are left leaning and a few that are right leaning and try to glean the truth myself using critical thinking and for particularly important topics, more in depth research independently. The problem is that this is very time consuming and exhausting.
by sevensor | 2025-08-14 12:44:45+00:00
It’s great that astral are doing what they do, but it’s important to hedge against their success. We must maintain ecosystem fragmentation, or Astral becomes a choke point where a bad actor can seize the entire Python community and extract rent from it. Like Anaconda but successful. So keep using pylint, keep using mypy, keep using PyPI. Not exclusively, but as a deterrent against this kind of capture.
by bell-cot | 2025-08-14 12:45:04+00:00
Dear Wanna-be Leakers,

Assume that every journalist and news org is complete sh*t at SIGINT and OPSEC. And that you are too. And that you'll all-too-soon outgrow whatever "leak it!" emotions are going through your head right now. And that the journalists and news orgs really don't care what happens after you've outlived your usefulness to them.
by attemptone | 2025-08-14 12:45:34+00:00
difficulties in life and genetics are more of a reason to decelop a severe addiction. Quality is probably not so much of importance - people still smoke cigarettes and drink alcohol.

It feels like we forgot about the opiod epidemic, meth, crack..

Anyhow, I think this derailed enough. I just wanted to point out the weird protestant views of op.
by pavlov | 2025-08-14 12:45:45+00:00
A "rogue employee" [1] at xAI recently tweaked the prompts to make Grok talk about "white genocide" in South Africa in response to completely unrelated queries:

https://apnews.com/article/grok-ai-south-africa-64ce5f240061...

These modifications didn't seem to get reflected in the published xAI prompts.

- -

[1] Musk himself, obviously
by throwanem | 2025-08-14 12:45:54+00:00
I could see hybrids having a moment.

We're obviously well into an Apple watch fashion backlash, to a point where "not obviously a smartwatch" in itself can help sell, and most of the really useful complications can present enough UI on a dot-addressable partial-face display. (By the standards of early digitals, this is luxury!) And with something like a momentarily backlit transflective LCD costing microampere-hours to run, weeks to months of battery should be achievable with careful programming.

Strictly, I don't suppose there's a reason why a hypothetical top-end model couldn't present a full-face display as at present, but with physical hands via a central holepunch, and a touchscreen integrated into the crystal as well as the usual physical controls. It seems like the best of both worlds, and I'd easily pay half a grand or more to find out, but now I'm just dreaming out loud.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-08-14 12:46:58+00:00
Sure, because the United States wanted a truly powerful long-range bomber that could fly at extreme altitude with a pressurized, climate-controlled cabin such as its liberators and B-17s didn't have. They wanted this for initially bombing Japan, since the B-29 was developed before the US navy had conquered islands close enough for easy access with older bombers to the home islands.

But, none of this as necessary for delivery of the bomb, especially if we're talking about Nazi Germany, which could have (had it developed the bomb) used any one of its Dornier, Heinkel or Messershcmitt bombers to do the same. Given the size and weight of the two American atomic bombs, the Germans probably could have even used their medium bombers like a modified Heinkel 111, had they already developed their own atomic bomb with a size similar to Little Boy.

You're perhaps confusing useful co-developments with need.

Also worth noting, had Germany invested resources well -instead of frittering them away under Hitler's often incoherent leadership penchant for forcing through personal whimsies and irrational strategic desires- it could have redirected the whopping 160 billion in 2024 dollars that it spent on the largely worthless Atlantic Wall into all kinds of powerful projects.

There's a figure that dwarfs both the Manhattan Project and the B-29 combined. The Nazis could have invested in atomic development while still developing their strategically inert but technically marvellous V Weapons with that kind of money, which they spent anyhow on concrete nonsense.

It's sort of ironic too, since Hitler directly benefitted from the Maginot Line being useless, then went ahead and built his own colossal version of the same foolishness against invasion.

Also, the Germans developed a very useful surface-to-air missile during the war. It was called the wasserfall, and genuinely had promise for severely damaging the allied bombing effort, but no, Hitler was fixated on his giant, immediately worthless V rocket, and wasserfall was neglected then cancelled, the technology applied to the much more difficult V2.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-08-14 12:47:02+00:00
Woah, all the replies are misreading me in the same way.

Yes, Trump seems to lie even more than a normal politician. In that sense, sure, you shouldn't expect that he's going to do anything about the deficit. You knew (or should have known) that when you voted.

But what I meant was, because he ran on the issue, we have grounds to judge him for not doing what he said, in a way that we would not have been able to judge Harris had she won.
by vdupras | 2025-08-14 12:47:07+00:00
News outlets have been feeding us with annualized rates, which is making this 0.9 figure sound pale, but it's pretty big because it's for July only. Times 12, it means inflation over 10%. The 3.3% annualized figure in the article is because they've been averaging the past 12 months.

Something in July made the prices jack up in a really serious way.
by lametti | 2025-08-14 12:47:12+00:00
The ultimate question raised by this (very nice) study is really by how much would improving walkability improve exercise target attainment (of course, leaving aside all the other important reasons to improve walkability, both health-related and not).

Based on the extended data figure[0] and raw figure data[1], the authors' simulation suggests that an increase of 60 to 80, or 80 to 100 walkability would each lead to about 6% more of the population reaching the target 150 minutes of activity.

[0]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09321-3/figures/4

[1]: https://github.com/behavioral-data/movers-public/blob/main/d...
by DrScientist | 2025-08-14 12:48:43+00:00
Perhaps - though the UK punches above it's weight in UK English language cultural output - I'm sure you have come across some of it.

By the way, once the UK ruled large part of the world - including the US - but that empire wasn't sustainable for a small country as the other countries caught up in terms of development.

The US is currently facing that issue, and I have to say, not dealing with it very well. The US is going to need friends on the way down and right now all it's doing is making enemies.
by liampulles | 2025-08-14 12:48:45+00:00
Is there a public conversation in European countries about the value of liberty? I don't mean arguments about how liberty can lead to more economic prosperity, I mean how liberty is valuable on its own terms.

Without this value, the state can continue to erect legislation in the name of "safety", or any other perceived inequity in society, until you can no longer move.

How perverse that English law used to be a bastion of civil liberty protections. Here's a great scene from A Man For All Seasons that shows what I mean: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDBiLT3LASk
by ksherlock | 2025-08-14 12:48:46+00:00
And for those who do know ASCII off the top of their head, it's actually PETSCII. 205 (0xcd) is a right diagonal and 206 (0xce) is a left diagonal.

ASCII / (0x2f) and \ (0x5c) has three problems:

1. They're not as conveniently located (chr$(47+(rnd(1)*45) isn't quite as pretty)

2. They don't fill up character cell so there are gaps in the "maze"

3. PETSCII doesn't have a \ (0x5c is £)
by VHRanger | 2025-08-14 12:48:51+00:00
> China is strict with people rioting or complaining a little too much about the government, but they don't lock people up for saying general no no words or being too patriotic/nationalistic online.

How absurd is this statement. China jails and disappears people for online statements at a rate several orders of magnitude larger than any western country.

It's borderline ridiculous to even make a comparison. Some quick examples:

1. https://thediplomat.com/2025/03/chinas-system-of-mass-arbitr...

2. https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/28/china/hong-kong-security-arre...

You can get arrested for "picking quarrels" online:

3. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3146188/pic...
by zahlman | 2025-08-14 12:49:27+00:00
> They have a prioritization problem

This is what forks are for. Alternately, money would probably help. Otherwise it's a bit rude to impose your priorities on others.

Perhaps some larger projects lose track of what they intended to prioritize. This is also a resources problem. There's nobody available to do management (and probably also not a social structure internally that would allow for it).

> because of how "impure" the fix is despite being entirely cosmetic, also being reversible and having no long term impact on maintenance.

The developers will always be in a better position than end users to assess the long-term maintenance impact.
by michaelcampbell | 2025-08-14 12:49:53+00:00
> While at it: what was / is holding Ada back?

I have a pet theory that it shares the same thing as any heavily typed language; it's difficult. And people aren't willing to accept that when you get it to compile at all, it'll probably work fine.

So many developers (and many more middle management) are not willing to trade the longer term stability/lack of runtime errors for the quick-to-production ability of other languages.
by arrowsmith | 2025-08-14 12:50:05+00:00
This was the Brexiteers' biggest folly, I think. They blamed the EU for the fact that power had become completely unaccountable to the public. But the call was coming from inside the house: in theory we reclaimed our sovereignty, in practice your vote still doesn't matter and your opinion still isn't wanted.

Now the same crowd is turning their attention to the ECHR. It won't help.
by mark-r | 2025-08-14 12:50:45+00:00
To be honest, I thought they were already completely gone. The article mentions them filing for bankruptcy in 2012.

They were pretty much doomed from the start. They had built their business by taking a cut from every picture you took, from the rolls of film to the developing to the printing. There was absolutely nothing in the digital camera realm that could duplicate that; their revenue dropped like a rock. If they had sold every single digital camera ever bought, it wouldn't have made up for it.

The contrast between Kodak and Fujifilm is fascinating. Fujifilm survived by pivoting to manufacturing critical components for LCD panels, which were exploding in popularity at the time. https://web.archive.org/web/20250704224940/https://petapixel...
by _mlbt | 2025-08-14 12:51:16+00:00
After using FreeBSD and OpenBSD, it is frankly shocking how bad Linux documentation is in comparison. On the BSDs every command, every program, every system call, and every configuration file are thoroughly documented in man pages and other guides. The FreeBSD Handbook in particular is a treasure. It more than makes up for some of the more difficult aspects of the OS by providing thorough and approachable documentation.
by octopoc | 2025-08-14 12:51:23+00:00
Democracy is like Communism. Every time you point out a problem with Democracy, someone else can point out how it isn't True Democracy(R). For example, in the West there are massive support for applying pressure to Israel to stop the genocide. But very little actually happens because, at least in my country, Israel has literally bought off the key politicians[1]. This isn't True Democracy(R) because the people's representatives have been paid to represent a foreign nation.

[1] https://www.commondreams.org/news/aipac-100-million
by bayindirh | 2025-08-14 12:51:37+00:00
The title of the linked HN story is "Microsoft offered FFmpeg small one-time payment instead of support contract".

So FFmpeg said that they need a contract for that, and they have given a couple thousand dollars as a one-time contribution.

I mean, "a few thousand dollars" for something underpinning Teams, is unacceptable. They probably charge 10x much for a small client for their yearly license.

C'mon now. This is not even satire.
by gruez | 2025-08-14 12:52:03+00:00
If you read the court documents, "eavesdropped on and/or recorded" basically meant "flo used facebook's SDK to sent analytics events to facebook". It's not like they were MITMing connections to flo's servers.

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/55370837/1/frasco-v-flo...
by Shorel | 2025-08-14 12:53:58+00:00
I like that we talk about practice, and we need to add this to our learning. Even more now, when apprenticeships are a dying practice and everyone is vibe-working.

But dismissing theories, and just saying “most theories are wrong, anyway” smells too strongly of anti-intellectualism, and it just rubs me in the wrong way. I don't like this trend at all.

Theory is as important as practice. The two depend on each other.
by slightwinder | 2025-08-14 12:54:04+00:00
> I think the sharing is easy

The hard part about sharing is the different syntax of wikis, which could be slightly different even in the same wiki-software. Then there is the organization-part, and the sync-process itself.

Of course, today, 25 years later, we do have better solutions and much more experience for those problems.

> The maintaining is hard when there isn't clear ownership. How do the teams divide maintenance duties? How are vandalism and moderation dealt with across teams?

I would think those are pretty simply, as they all follow the same rules. I mean, handling vandalism isn't much different between Arch or Debian, it's always the same. And moderation really depends on the chosen sharing-mechanism. Which brings up again the hard part, just on a different level.
by pkasting | 2025-08-14 12:55:18+00:00
The resource constraints had nothing to do with intentionally not funding "support a competing browser properly", though, and everything to do with just not funding engineering and test work at all except to build Shiny Idea That Got A Promo.

Despite its size, Google does shoestring engineering of most things, which is why so much is deprecated over time -- there's never budget for maintenance.

So I mean in some sense yes, there's valid criticism of Google's "will" here, but that will was largely unaware of Firefox, and the consequences burned Google products and customers just as much or more in the long run. Nightingale looked past individual instances to see a pattern, but didn't continue to scale the pattern up to first-party products as well.
by datadrivenangel | 2025-08-14 12:55:21+00:00
"The poverty line has increased in real terms. And with it, so have the World Bank’s estimates of extreme poverty. 125 million people who would not have been counted as extremely poor before June are now included."

I think this is a good change, but maybe would be better to leave the old standard alone in real terms and then make a new category? "the poor will always be with you"

"the poor will always be with you"