MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rootusrootus | 2025-08-25 02:46:41+00:00
I'll take one last shot at clarifying my viewpoint, but then we'll just have to let this one rest ;-).

I think people who joined the military, or the FBI, or some other federal agency, expected to be serving their country, not the whims of the sitting president. They went in to catch criminals, or defend the nation in combat, etc. Of course they know that orders are orders, but it's perfectly reasonable, before 2025, to assume that the commander-in-chief is generally working in the best interests of the country, and what you will be ordered to do will therefore be serving that interest.

I don't get how knowing that they could be ordered to do something legal-but-blatantly-political means that they should have expected that eventuality. That has not been broadly true in the recent history of this country; the military I was in considered itself a professional organization and we hated politics.
by nativeit | 2025-08-25 02:46:59+00:00
Since most of the comments seem to just restate the conclusion of the article, I'll go ahead and post it:

> What on earth is going on? > > Well, my board is based around an ESP32-S3. This has native USB support - and the serial connection is running over the USB connection. > > We don’t have a USB-to-serial converter on the board. > > There is no UART. > > Which means there’s no actual baud rate (this is not strictly true, it is possible to find out what the baud rate was set to - but that’s for another day).
by binary132 | 2025-08-25 02:47:25+00:00
Maybe it’s a relic of my time as a kid visiting Egghead Software and Blockbuster and the like with my dad, but I’ve always felt like the big-boxification of everything and the destruction of the small and local economy is a real crime, and has demolished local employment opportunities, local towns, local everything, leaving us only a more and more hyper-centralized society. The data supports this premise as well. Not sure where it goes from here, but if we don’t get a handle on it, nowhere good, I guess.
by themafia | 2025-08-25 02:48:54+00:00
> the federal government intervened to stabilize a critical industry

They intervened to maintain the status quo. Industries are neither stable or unstable for a long period of time without external influences forcing that outcome. Short term turbulence is to be expected and is beneficial for the market as a whole.

They destroy markets and then lie to your face about it.

> industries remained solvent.

How does an _industry_ become insolvent? Only when it's nearly fully monopolized and when there is no difference between an industry and a single entity. This is where we are currently.

> more shares at their current market price to the government in exchange for cash to continue business operations.

Couldn't they just offer those shares to _any investor at all_? Why is the government special here?

> https://chicagopolicyreview.org/2022/08/23/piece-of-the-acti...

Of course. Chicago school thinking. It's infected our country for decades now. Certainly not to the benefit of it's citizens.
by gnabgib | 2025-08-25 02:49:30+00:00
Popular in:

2024 (141 points, 43 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40422997

2019 (73 points, 33 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20310669

2018 (78 points, 20 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16341519

2009 (95 points, 17 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=466845
by cyberax | 2025-08-25 02:49:34+00:00
No, I'm just saying that an OAuth layer isn't really adding much benefit when you either use an API key to obtain the refresh token or the refresh token itself becomes a long-term secret, not much better than an API key.

Some way to break out of the "shared secret" model is needed. Mutual TLS is one way that is at least getting some traction.
by cyberax | 2025-08-25 02:49:38+00:00
> In your perfect world, are you primarily the producer or consumer of the API?

Both, really. mTLS deployment is the sticking point, but it's slowly getting better. AWS load balancers now support it, they terminate the TLS connection, validate the certificate, and stick it into an HTTP header. Google Cloud Platform and CloudFlare also support it.
by rootusrootus | 2025-08-25 02:50:46+00:00
If there was more than a duopoly in smartphones, I'd say Apple should be able to have whatever horrible app policy they want, so long as it is clearly communicated to everyone including customers. Let the market decide.

But that's not where we are. I think it makes sense to treat both Apple and Google as de facto monopolies with respect to the smartphone market, and impose some regulation on what they have to allow and how much they can charge for it.
by bongodongobob | 2025-08-25 02:50:47+00:00
Oh this is easy.

> Brutalizing a man with harsh conditions, treating him like a wild animal for months/years on end, and then releasing him is just going to make him 5x more angry and dangerous upon release and less likely to assimilate, but now here he comes walking down the same street as you and your loved ones

"Maybe he should have made better choices" they say, as they smugly reference an eye for an eye in their text sent from God.
by willtemperley | 2025-08-25 02:50:50+00:00
The reference implementation for Parquet is a gigantic Java library. I'm unconvinced this is a good idea.

Take the RLE encoding which switches between run-length encoding and bit-packing. The way bit-packing has been implemented is to generate 74,000 lines of Java to read/write every combination of bitwidth, endianness and value-length.

I just can't believe this is optimal except in maybe very specific CPU-only cases (e.g. Parquet-Java running on a giant cluster somewhere).

If it were just bit-packing I could easily offload a whole data page to a GPU and not care about having per-bitwidth optimised implementations, but having to switch encodings at random intervals just makes this a headache.

It would be really nice if actual design documents exist that specify why this is a good idea based on real-world data patterns.
by icedchai | 2025-08-25 02:51:21+00:00
You still had pick the right CPU, memory, and expansion cards. Early ATX motherboards had ISA, PCI, AGP. It did nothing to fix most of the parts issues. I build PCs both with older AT and ATX standards. ATX did fix the "IO card" problem, but it wasn't a panacea for all PC building.
by ggerules | 2025-08-25 02:52:28+00:00
The huge problem that I have with this post is that they are trying to use math to disprove math, but badly. Also, they are using a programming language, python or any language for that matter, to prove their point, which is ALSO math. When you program you are working in an axiomatic system to achieve some goal. This goes all the way back to Haskell Curry and Alonzo Church which WAS also math. Working with math is a way of thinking and working on problems, even in probabilistic realms that errant post suggests.
by aspenmayer | 2025-08-25 02:52:29+00:00
I agree with your post, but this part is kind of wishy-washy.

> I don't get how knowing that they could be ordered to do something legal-but-blatantly-political means that they should have expected that eventuality.

Most folks who are in the military or are considering it have heard of the honor guard. This is the most obviously political post one can have, but it is arguably one of the most important, due to the virtues such a post embodies, and the highly visible, public nature of the post.

Many folks would leap out of their seat to have such a post, though I can see how some would rather decline if given the option, due to the importance of the job and perhaps their own feelings of unsuitability, or desire to not interact with the public, or whatever.

I think it's an inherently political job, and everyone should know that going in. What you do in uniform reflects directly on the nation whose flag your uniform is emblazoned with.
by nashashmi | 2025-08-25 02:55:10+00:00
A few HN posts ago I commented this

> I want to see XSL import an XML. I want to see the reverse. XSL will be the view. XML will be the model. And the browser will be the controller. MVC paradigm.

It then dawned on me that the MVC framework for XML is where XML is the model (or data or database table). And XSLT is the viewer in the rear. Meaning the web browser can browse database information.

I never appreciated this very much before. The web has this incredible format to see database information in raw form or a styled form.

I still want to see development of it in reverse, and I hope to find better use cases now that I understand this paradigm.
by evanmoran | 2025-08-25 02:58:11+00:00
Very seriously, try not to read about it. Delete the apps that make you most anxious. Then eat better, exercise three times a week, and together those will help you feel better and sleep better. Finally search for people or activities that give you energy and focus on those. Maybe it’s jamming on a guitar. Maybe it’s reading. Just embrace the moment you’re in for a bit and I think you will be better prepared for anything.
Show HN: Fast, private command-line history search with instant documentation
by nyell | 2025-08-25 02:58:42+00:00
Hi, HN community,

I have built a CLI tool called Recaller to fuzzy-search your command history based on recency and frequency. Recaller can magically curate your history and hands over most useful commands to you. Think it like a second brain while recalling history.

Please check it out and let me know your feedback.
by nlawalker | 2025-08-25 02:59:56+00:00
Chiming in here just because I happen to have taken a handful of online-proctored certification exams through Pearson OnVUE recently.

The gist of it is that I think someone willing to put a lot of work in could probably cheat using the strategies you suggest, but it would be a pain. During your checkin you have to send a selfie, photos of the front and back of your photo ID, and four photos of the space you've prepared. You can't have any writing tools, written materials, or anything else that looks like a computer or screen in the area, and the machine you're on has to be single-screen. If the pre-test greeter or the proctor aren't satisfied with what they see they can ask you (via text and voice chat) to show them the room in real time via your webcam and may ask you to make changes or move things around to provide evidence that something in the room is not hiding mechanisms used to cheat. From that point on, your webcam and mic are on and live streaming to the proctor for the duration of the test; they don't say anything about assistive technologies on their end but I assume they are using eye tracking to look for instances of eyes wandering offscreen for a protracted period of time. The test environment software effectively "takes over your PC" during the test and I would imagine is pretty effective at detecting alternate/multiple display outputs etc.

There are probably scalability issues, but privacy is not an issue from the perspective of the proctor - you are effectively surrendering it by agreeing to take the test online, you could have gone to a test center instead.
by nsagent | 2025-08-25 03:00:04+00:00
Then those people deserve what they get as a result. People should have autonomy to make less than optimal decisions if they want.

And to provide a counterpoint, my dad can barely navigate his iPhone. I literally spent an hour on the phone with him when he was lost and needed directions; it took 20 minutes to guide him to open the messages app so he could read the address I sent. Someone that clueless isn't searching the internet to figure out workarounds for installing anything.
by AndrewKemendo | 2025-08-25 03:01:25+00:00
My interpretation of the paper:

Astronomers processed a bunch of data from a fairly new antenna array (CHIME) and saw a giant burst of energy in radio range (above 20khz), localized to a 10 light year “bubble” of space, that is relatively close to us, as a novel measurement precision

James Webb then also correlated an IR signal near this radio signal

So it seems to me that we’re finally just seeing for the first time the actual data that is coming into earth, a lot of the analysis seems to think this is a new thing but in fact it’s simply just new for us to be able to measure

CHIME nor these methods existed previously to the last 5 years so we’re likely going to see a lot of what we just haven’t been seeing.

It doesn’t mean it’s new it just means astronomers are getting better tools to continue to refine the granularity of measurements
by rayiner | 2025-08-25 03:01:35+00:00
> The first thing that jumps out is that it is impossible to avoid the absurd juxtaposition of a republican led major national corporate stake

The GOP overthrew its leadership in 2016 and a different faction took control of the party. The GOP started out as an economically interventionist party: https://www.journalofthecivilwarera.org/2017/04/gops-civil-w.... Then it went through a libertarian phase in the mid 20th century. Now its back to an economically interventionist party.
by Barbing | 2025-08-25 03:01:40+00:00
It was very rude, and wasn’t punching up. Rude can be fine especially with a delineated purpose.

It was like “look behind you - the [racist trope] is the fault of the [ethnic group]”, and nothing political.

Racism is permitted there it sounds like, then? Wouldn’t have reported it if I’d known. Assumed taking swipes at minorities wouldn’t be tolerable outside of 4chan. I can always not visit when I don’t want to. But maybe I got the wrong impression, that someone decent was running the place and wouldn’t want garbage strewn about their halls. Course they might aim towards a different concept if so!
by gcanyon | 2025-08-25 03:01:44+00:00
I'm not sure what to make of the fact that for the abstract matrix problem in the original post, I thought about it for a moment without making any progress, but then for the knights on the phone pad problem it took me just two moments (about twenty seconds) to come up with the third solution -- and for context, I'm a product manager with a history as a developer. It would take me less than five minutes to code it up.

I wish I hadn't read the fourth solution description -- the language used wasn't clear at all to me, but it was enough to point me in the right direction, or maybe I'm just that clever?

That said, I don't like interview questions like that -- there's very much a component of you either get it or you don't. The interviewer says they talk people through it, and if they're good at that, great. But if not, a question like that is (in my book) unfair.
by kemotep | 2025-08-25 03:01:49+00:00
This is the 4th launch where they are effectively attempting the same thing they were going to do 8 months ago.

Musk himself has a deadline of December 2026 for Mars, ignoring Artemis. How many more launches do they need to work out orbital refueling to make that deadline if they don’t test actually sending a real payload into space?
by cmeacham98 | 2025-08-25 03:03:15+00:00
Rape is just a useful litmus test, because it triggers the "prisoners are irredeemable and deserve to be treated less than human" emotions in most people who don't support rehabilitative justice.

It's easy to say someone who stole a loaf of bread should be rehabilitated, but when asked about a one-off rapist people will show their true beliefs.
by maximus_01 | 2025-08-25 03:03:57+00:00
There is a limit to this sort of logic though. Don't get me wrong, I'm generally pro free markets. But: A) Apple's policies make some products completely unviable (anything with a gross margin less than 30%). Even for products at say 40% gross margin, Apple as a storefront is taking 75% of the gross margin pool (ie 30% to Apple, 10% to developer). This in my view is direct consumer harm. B) Apple acts egregiously and restricts what should be basic free speech. For instance, app developers not being able to even mention they have to pay Apple (let alone being able to direct customers to their own website etc). To me this is the biggest one - I could probably live with everything else more if developers at least could show customers where their fees were going etc. C) Apple has changed the rules over time, or at least how they enforce the rules (by trying to force more and more apps to pay the 30% - eg what they did to Patreon)
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-08-25 03:04:49+00:00
Why would everyone do a victory lap if they are losing time and money

Software developers commenting on HN and elsewhere routinely focus on majorities, e.g., "80/20" memes, references to Zipf's Law, etc., and conclude without hesitation that if a small minority, say 5%, of software users do not follow a pattern that a large majority, say 95%, follow, the minority can be safely disregarded

Is it really suprising that people reading the MIT report might focus on the 95% instead of the 5%

IMO, the report is mostly about the 5% but as it happens people care about majorities like 95%
by Bratmon | 2025-08-25 03:04:54+00:00
I think you're confused on your terms there. The key feature of the communist mode of production is that the profits of the firm go to the workers or the people. Communists aren't particularly concerned about the source of investment.

What we're seeing here is a situation in which favored firms are subsidized by the government in exchange for personal loyalty to the leader, but profits are still privatized. This is called the "fascist mode of production"
by lukev | 2025-08-25 03:05:05+00:00
Ok but I have to point out something important here. Presumably, the model you're talking about was trained on chemical/drug inputs. So it models a space of chemical interactions, which means insights could be plausible.

GPT-5 (and other LLMs) are by definition language models and though they will happily spew tokens about whatever you ask, they don't necessarily have the training data to properly encode the latent space of (e.g) drug interactions.

Confusing these two concepts could be deadly.
by deathanatos | 2025-08-25 03:06:05+00:00
Or just don't use Bash. Python is a great scripting language, and won't blow your foot off if you try to iterate through an array.

Other than that, yeah, if you must use bash, set -eu -o pipefail; the IFS is new and mildly interesting idea to me.

> The idea is that if a reference is made at runtime to an undefined variable, bash has a syntax for declaring a default value, using the ":-" operator:

Just note that defaulting an undefined variable to a value (let's use a default value of "fallback") for these examples is,

${foo-fallback}

The syntax,

${foo:-fallback}

means "use 'fallback' if foo is unset or is equal to "". (The :, specifically triggers this; there's a bunch of others, like +, which is "use alternate value", or, you'll get the value if the parameter is defined, nothing otherwise.

if [[ "${foo+set}" == "set" ]]; then # foo is not undefined. fi

And similarly,

${foo:+triggered}

will emit triggered if foo is set and not empty.)

See "Parameter Expansion" in the manual. I hate this syntax, but it is the syntax one must use to check for undefined-ness.
by giggyhack | 2025-08-25 03:06:39+00:00
I absolutely understand the sentiment and the goals that citizens should, by default, not be tracked. However, how do you square that with the proof, time and again, that truly secure and encrypted networks are primarily use by criminals (drug/human traffickers, and plenty of other people) who, through their trade, make the world a shittier place for the rest of us?
by adastra22 | 2025-08-25 03:06:50+00:00
There are working quantum computers that are not only feasible, but exist, can be rented on the cloud, and are people pay money to use.

Whether these are a commercial success at this point in time is missing the forest for the trees. A LOT of money has been put into getting as far as we have, and the limited market for using these machines at the moment means that getting a return on investment right now is difficult. But this is/has been true of every new technology.

And quantum computers are getting better & more energy efficient year-by-year.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-08-25 03:07:36+00:00
This honestly should be the default for all scripts. There are so many little annoyances in bash that would make it great if they were changed and improved. Sadly there's just no changing certain things.

My number one wishlist feature was a simple library system. Essentially just let me source files by name by searching in some standard user location. I actually wrote and submitted patches for this but it just didn't work out. Maintained my own version for a while and it was nice but not enough to justify the maintenance burden. Bash's number one feature is being the historical default shell on virtually every Linux distribution, without that there's no point.

At least we've got shellcheck.
by andyferris | 2025-08-25 03:08:27+00:00
People keep saying that Gemini 2.5 Pro can solve some problem that Sonnet 4 cannot, or that GPT5 can solve a problem that Gemini 2.5 Pro cannot, or that Sonnet 4 can solve some problem that GPT5 cannot.

There was a blog article about mixing together different agents into the same conversation, taking turns at responses and improving results/correctness. But it takes a lot of effort to make your own claude-code-clone with correct API for each provider and prompts tuned for those models and tool use integrated etc. And there's no incentive for Anthropic/OpenAI/Google to write this tool for us.

OTOH it would be relatively easy for the bash loop to call claude code, codex CLI, etc in a loop to get the same benefit. If one iteration of one tool gets stuck, perhaps another LLM will take a different approach and everything can get back on track.

Just a thought.
by jchw | 2025-08-25 03:08:33+00:00
This whole situation is frustrating. Even if there were eight or twelve companies all competing fairly, I'm not sure it would matter: if Apple's approach makes hand-over-fist more money, even though it is much worse for consumers in many regards, it has the chance to unfairly win and for vendors that follow Apple's lead to out-compete vendors that don't. (Don't imagine this world, try to find the parallels you've personally experienced; you know they're out there.)

Of course today, we're getting to the point where governments are going to probably start softly relying on citizens having smartphones that are either Android or iOS. This is terrible and completely the wrong way to go; it would be much better to depend on standards that anyone could implement. Even progressive web apps would be a better outcome than Android/iOS apps. Getting to this point definitely puts both Apple and Google in privileged positions wherein they pretty much do have to be treated like defacto monopolies, but I'm also pretty sure this isn't the outcome we want either.
by awesome_dude | 2025-08-25 03:08:45+00:00
Because wikipedia is editable by _anyone_ it's probably not the best for prisons - it would provide a means for communication that wasn't able to be monitored.

I mean, if you were in prison and had access to Wikipedia, I could edit, or put something on the talk page, that was a message to you.

You would look up the specific page, and get the message.
by ATiredGoat | 2025-08-25 03:09:22+00:00
I’ve been building a massive text adventure called The Labyrinth of Time’s Edge, a handcrafted world written room by room, free forever, with no microtransactions or corporate bloat. I argue that text adventures aren’t relics of the past, but acts of rebellion: proof that imagination is the most powerful graphics engine we’ve ever had. While AAA studios charge $70+ for unfinished games buried in patches and battle passes, text adventures ask only for curiosity and reward you with worlds that live in your mind. I’d love to hear your thoughts, do text adventures have a place in gaming’s future, or will they remain hidden in the margins?