MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by atmavatar | 2025-08-19 00:21:15+00:00
Getting an ID is not as simple as you make it out to be.

For many people, getting an ID requires taking a day off work, which for many can mean their family is going to miss one or more meals, or even worse, that they miss a car or rent payment.

Consequently, this is also a strong reason why Republicans have repeatedly blocked attempts to make voting day a national holiday, while at the same time strategically closing down polling locations -- so working poor (predominantly registered Democrats) have a harder time voting.

But it gets even worse than that. During segregation era, it wasn't uncommon for black women to be turned away from hospitals and be forced to give birth via midwives, then be unable to obtain birth certificates for their children. Because they have no official birth certificates, states deny them IDs.

Example: https://atlantablackstar.com/2025/05/07/florida-woman-real-i...

Voter ID laws are explicitly designed to disenfranchise these people, because they're virtually always proposed by individuals representing the very states that denied black people birth certificates, and in many cases, those same individuals proposing the laws lived through the very era when those birth certificates were still actively being denied.

That said: I'm mostly in agreement - the solution is to get these people proper IDs (and by extension, birth certificates). However, I think you'll find the very people proposing these ID laws are going to be the same ones stonewalling any attempts to address the problems I laid out.
by viewtransform | 2025-08-19 00:21:37+00:00
This is a solved problem in India [0] - and the system is brilliant in its simplicity[1]: Fixed function non-reprogrammable battery operated electronic units, no connectivity, randomization of voting units and a paper trail for verification.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlHJZrXrnyQ

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJReQ8ao0SU
by esperent | 2025-08-19 00:22:23+00:00
> 0.1g is rare, and these usually cost more, especially if they're actually reliable.

You can buy a coffee scale for $10-$20 that has 0.1g to 2000g or 3000g accuracy. I run a cafe and have tested these using our much more expensive scales, they are accurate. Not suitable for high volume commercial use but probably good enough at home if you're on a budget.

You should also check on the back of the scales how the accuracy changes across it's range, they'll often be accurate to 0.1g up to 1000g, and then accurate to 1g for the rest of the range. This includes expensive scales.
by torium | 2025-08-19 00:22:54+00:00
> The first sentence of the documentation already says it: "turn any set of notes into a powerful database

No, horrible job at explaining. What does it mean to turn any set of notes into a powerful database? What does it mean to "turn"? Does it mean that a file will become a database? Or does it mean that a file can be interpreted as a database? And why set of notes? If I have a single note, can I turn that into a database too? Are the records of the database files, or items in a file? What is happening when I type ![[Untitled.base]]? Is the file where I typed that a database now? Or does that text assume that the file named Untitled must be a database?

They do a horrible job at explaining it.
by ceejayoz | 2025-08-19 00:22:57+00:00
> Wouldn't that damage the right to free speech?

We already ban defamation, fraud, the f-bomb and boobs on publicly available television channels, etc.

> Dominion was libelled by Newsmax, so they was able to claim damages from them in a court of law. The law didn't allow them to get away with it.

Long, long after the damage was done, and it'll take equally long the next time they do the same thing. As the saying goes, if there's just a fine, the fine is just the cost of doing business.
by segphault | 2025-08-19 00:23:24+00:00
Yes, it relies on a Markdown note file for each row and the “columns” are YAML frontmatter and cached metadata for each file.

I am with you on this, I wish Obsidian would optionally allow you to use YAML or some other structured data directly in the fenced code block or base file.

I really, really want something that kind of takes an Obsidian-like approach to local databases, sort of like Excel/Airtable but with flat, human-editable text files that live on your filesystem with a schema driven property editor. It’s kind of a bummer that this gets so tantalizingly close but doesn’t take it to the logical conclusion. I hope they do it eventually or make it possible with plugins.
by scarface_74 | 2025-08-19 00:24:00+00:00
The red states consistently make it harder for Democratic leaning populations to get ID. Everything from closing places where ID is available to places like Texas make gun permits a legal form of ID and not student IDs.

In some places native Americans can’t get IDs because of their address.

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/how-...

https://journals.law.harvard.edu/crcl/voter-discrimination-t...

In Florida, voters passed a law that made it easier for people released from prison to vote. It was still blocked by the legislation.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jul/28/ron-desantis...
by cj | 2025-08-19 00:24:09+00:00
> Fox news is not, and never has been, intended as satire

Their homepage right now is featuring a pull up and push up contest between Hegseth and RFK jr.

It hardly appears as though they’re trying to be a legitimate news network. (Same goes for CNN - both are incredibly and undeniably outrageous in their reporting)

But I agree, their audiences take their reporting seriously, even if they themselves are just saying what they say for the ratings.
by _carbyau_ | 2025-08-19 00:24:10+00:00
> The rest of the car almost certainly doesn't have 200,000 more miles in it, so who cares?

This what I find curious. It used to be cars were largely limited by their main driveline components. Now those components have been simplified. In a lot of the BYD cars it is literally the exact same driveline so for them it is almost commoditised.

My part of the world sees no snow or salt. So if the body is fine and the driveline is fine....

Why can't I run a car for a million miles and simply replace coils, struts, hubs, bearings, carpets, seats, the-tiny-electric-motors-that-drive-windows-and-seats-and-mirrors etc?

IE where is the electric version of the old landcruiser series?
by bawolff | 2025-08-19 00:24:17+00:00
> In text form only (no charts, plots, etc)- yes, pretty much all published 'science' (by that I mean something that appeared in a mass publication - paper, book, etc, not simply notes in people's notebooks) in the last 400 years likely fits into 20TB or so if converted completely to ASCII text and everything else is left out. Text is tiny.

20 TB uncompresssed text is roughly 6TB compressed.

I just find it crazy that for about $100 i can buy an external hard drive that would fit in my pocket that can in theory carry around the bulk of humanity's collected knowledge.

What a time to be alive. Imagine telling someone this 100 years ago. Hell, imagine telling someone this 20 years ago.
by ameliaquining | 2025-08-19 00:24:21+00:00
IIUC in Swift 4 and earlier (which didn't have a stable ABI) people just statically linked most of their libraries. This did prevent apps from breaking on OS updates, but was bad for code size.

Swift is unique in that both the OS itself and all the apps are written in it, so a stable ABI with very tight language integration makes sense. I'm guessing that a novel Rust OS probably wouldn't work that way, at least if it were aiming to be an open platform; you would want to let people write apps targeting that OS in C or C++ or Go or whatever else. So it would make more sense to use an ABI that was designed from the ground up for cross-language compatibility, like crABI is trying to do (and then it wouldn't make sense for such an ABI to apply to code that didn't opt in).
by mapt | 2025-08-19 00:24:43+00:00
There are very likely degrees of infection which are not obviously spoiled, but which have health consequences if consumed. The locus at which the antibiotic/etc protocols are mostly but not entirely effective.

If they're actively pushing into the market, that means they're selling _something_ at maybe $30-$100/kg. Would you trust that something, knowing what you know of animal tissue bioreactors? Would you trust a restaurant serving thousands of meals of that something?

Relevant - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZGPjvFkLzUW
by yibg | 2025-08-19 00:26:02+00:00
Is there evidence that in person voting is meaningfully more secure than other forms (like mail in voting) let alone 100% fool proof?

Even assuming it is, how do we solve the other issues it causes if it's the only way to vote? e.g.:

- How do US citizens that don't live or are not at the time of voting physically in the US vote? e.g. overseas military personnel.

- People that live in remote areas of the country without easy access to in person voting stations?

- Those with limited mobility and have a hard time physically getting to a voting station?

- Those with limited transportation options? e.g. don't have reliable access to a car.

- Those that do shift work and can't or can't afford to take the time off?

- The estimated millions of Americans that don't have a valid form of ID?

End of the day, even if in person voting with a valid ID is the only reliable way to vote, we also need to evaluate the marginal reduction in voting fraud against disenfranchising voters.
by foobazgt | 2025-08-19 00:26:50+00:00
> first off that's not the case

It's objectively the case. They literally have the data to back it up, regardless of what anecdata you might have seen on some forums.

> And the context above

Their fleet data says 85% battery average capacity at 200K mi and that battery degradation slows down over time. That's a far cry from 70% at 9 years.
by noosphr | 2025-08-19 00:27:44+00:00
Because everything that tries to fix it is just as painful in different ways.

I've had the displeasure of working in codebases using the style of programming op says is great. It's pretty neat. Until you get a chain 40 deep and you have to debug it. You either have to use language features, like show in pyspark, which don't scale when you need to trace a dozen transformations, or you get back to imperative style loops so you can log what's happening where.
by eurleif | 2025-08-19 00:28:15+00:00
>The seller sets the price. Not the buyer. You should ask why the seller is willing to let the vehicle go for a lower than expected price for a given number of miles.

The seller sets the asking price; the buyer sets the bid price; and mutual agreement between the buyer and the seller sets the selling price. When sellers set an asking price, they tend to refer to information about previous selling prices, creating a dynamic where buyers influence asking prices.

>Do those often persist through private party sales?

Yes: "Your New Vehicle Limited Warranty will follow your vehicle and be transferred to the new owner when a vehicle ownership transfer is performed through Tesla." (https://www.tesla.com/support/vehicle-warranty) You opened your comment with "Why guess?", so I wonder why you posed this as a question (in such a way as to hint that the answer is "no") when the correct answer was a Google search away.
by alisonatwork | 2025-08-19 00:28:42+00:00
There is an ASCII chart in https://phrack.org/issues/72/18_md#article which references https://arxiv.org/pdf/2008.07753 [PDF], a 2020 article showing that open source peaked in 2013. In some qualitative sense that feels intuitively correct, but I am skeptical that in the modern world filled with a zillion NPM dependencies and the cloud YAML explosion and now vibe-coded everything that we are actually producing less lines of open source than we did in 2013. Is anyone aware of newer studies that investigate this?
by glenstein | 2025-08-19 00:28:57+00:00
>It’s important to note that people were dismissive of Paris because validating her playbook would mean admitting that they were playing an inferior game. Everyone else had invested years into optimizing for the most legible version of the rules. They’d look silly if they were to admit she had found a better way of doing things.

I had a co-worker who was addicted to verbally correcting everyone around him, which was super irritating but he seemed just quick enough and just technically correct enough that his formula kind of worked, for him. I would come into work and he would be in a middle of an argument where he insisted some distinction that everyone else that was asinine, he felt was important, and he always got the last word. Everything from pronunciation to definitions of ordinary concepts, and it was visibly important to his self esteem how right he was about all of these things.

At one point he claimed I "didn't understand comedy" because I enjoyed Tim and Eric. If you don't know them, think adult swim style surrealist meta-humor but in lo-fi live action. And my theory for this particular co-worker is that something about what Tim and Eric make fun of must have hit too close to home, too close to his sense of normalcy, which in this case meant seeing them not as comedic personas but as familiar targets to "correct", only to realize they were part of a comedic persona satirizing a certain idea of normalcy, to his initial bafflement and then resentment. Because for a moment he could make a home in that world, and it was a world they were making fun of.

These are all my assumptions of course, but I think they map on to this Paris Hilton analysis, which is that for some reason he needed to see their entire way of doing comedy as not real or not legitimate, because doing so would mean something fundamental about his psychology was something that could be turned into a joke.
Show HN: Sample Sensor Data Generator for Your Testing
by TheIronYuppie | 2025-08-19 00:29:04+00:00
Hey!

Just the latest version of my sensor log generator - I kept having problems where i needed to demo building many thousands of sensors with anomalies and variations, and so i built a really simple way to create one.

Have fun! (Completely Apache2/MIT)

https://github.com/bacalhau-project/sensor-log-generator/pkg...
by borroka | 2025-08-19 00:29:30+00:00
One problem is considering a solution effective only if it, at launch, completely solves the problem, for example, in the case of AI and LLMs, by coding an entire application without any human intervention, retiring radiologists, or driving autonomously in the five boroughs of New York City.

If we expect a technology to completely solve a problem as soon as it is launched, only a few in history could be considered a success. Can you imagine what it would be like if the first radios were considered a failure because you couldn't listen to music?
by taeric | 2025-08-19 00:29:33+00:00
I'd assume they would ask for "aggregate sales by month to zip codes," or some such. Which, you'd probably get from a reporting table, and not bother trying to do the manual aggregate over transactional data. (That is, OLAP versus OLTP is a very real divide that you can't wave away.)

Realistically, I strongly suspect you could take this argument either direction. If you have someone making a query where they are having to ask "what all tables could I start from?" you are in for some pain. Often the same data is reachable from many tables, and you almost certainly have reasons for taking certain paths to get to it. Similarly, if they should want "person_name", heaven help them.

Such that, can you contrive scenarios where it makes sense to start the query from the from clause? Sure. My point is more that you almost certainly have the entire query conceptualized in your mind as you start. You might not remember all of the details on how some things are named, but the overall picture is there. Question then comes down to if one way is more efficient than the other? I have some caveats that this is really a thing hindered by the order of the query. We don't have data, of course, and are arguing based on some ideas that we have brought with us.

So, would I be upset if the order was reversed? Not at all. I just don't expect that would actually help much. My memory is using query builders in the past where I would search for "all tables that have customer_id and order_id in them" and then, "which table has customer_id and customer_address" and then... It was rarely (ever?) the name of the table that helped me know which one to use. Rather, I needed the ones with the columns I was interested in.
by lukevp | 2025-08-19 00:30:41+00:00
The cost of the processes for these alternative meats astronomically outweighs the cost of ingredients, especially the cell culturing. It is unlikely that any of these companies are even making profit at this point. This is a long play to get the public to buy into this alternative food source, and only then will the scaling be enough to reasonably profit from any of this. There’s a baseline cost that they have to hit (farm raised salmon) and it’s incredibly cheap. Swapping out ingredients won’t make it cost competitive. Scaling up bioreactors might.
by h2zizzle | 2025-08-19 00:31:13+00:00
Yeah. Much of that money is going to physically building data centers, in the middle of an affordable housing crisis. "Look, I just need a few billion, to build a server farm, to build the machine god, who will tell us how to solve the homelessness and housing insecurity." If it works? That'd be neat. Right now, it sounds like crackhead logic.
by chaboud | 2025-08-19 00:31:20+00:00
I've been quite happy with thinking of agentic IDE operation as being akin to a highly energetic intern. It's prone to spiraling off into the weeds, makes silly mistakes, occasionally mangles whole repos (commit early, and often), and needs very crisp instruction and guidance. That said, I get my answers back in minutes/hours rather than days/weeks. For the cost, for things that would otherwise be delivered by an intern or college-hire SDE, it's a pretty solid value vs. paying a salary and keeping a desk available.

What it isn't, at present, is an investment in the future. I'm not making these virtual interns better coders, more thoughtful about architecture, or more autonomous in the future. Those aspects of development of new hires are vastly more valuable than the code output I'm getting in my IDE. So I'm hoping that we land in a place where we're fostering both rather than hoping that someone else is going to do the hard work of closing the agentic coding gap and growing maturity. Pulling an Indiana Jones style swap could be a really destructive move if we try to pull the human pipeline out of the system too early.

Just paying attention to near term savings runs a real risk falling into that trap.
by mrangle | 2025-08-19 00:32:09+00:00
I hear you, but it's still not analogous. I admit to being less than precise in my prior response, specifically.

A degree isn't a car, nor is it a computer. Nor is it something that you buy. You pay for the privilege to earn it.

The problem is that, during that earning process, an institution has the power to stop you from proceeding with no representation. The only failsafes in place are there to protect the institution.

Specifics as to how this can occur are another deep discussion. The takeaway is that a 50k or 100k USD degree is fraught with inherent risk that, even if unusually realized, merits easier loan terms. Due to the core nature of what a degree is and how it is obtained.

The day that they federally neuter the power of colleges to determine student progress outside of the grading system, or better yet they give students an easy way to gain advocacy, is the day that I will more or less agree with you.
by dimal | 2025-08-19 00:32:38+00:00
I had been worried about what would happen as the American republic goes down, whether other countries would follow suit. So those two examples are cause for hope.

As for the second term, we can’t forget that the Democrats basically threw the election. This election was a layup. An easy win. And they did absolutely everything wrong. I almost blame them as much as Trump for this mess.
by yibg | 2025-08-19 00:32:51+00:00
There has been no evidence of wide spread fraud and there is every evidence that elections have been legitimate and fair. A non trivial portion of the population still thinks the 202 elections was rigged. End of the day, somme people will consider whatever doesn't go their way rigged.

Right now the complaint for voter fraud are things like no ID requirements, mail in ballots etc. If those go away it'll be something else.
by mindslight | 2025-08-19 00:33:01+00:00
> Universal PKI-backed national ID would be a program everyone should be behind

I for one am not behind this until we have actual privacy laws with teeth, and those laws have put a stop to the ongoing widespread abuses of the identification system we already have. As it stands, people's nebulous fear of handing out their DL/SSN numbers is the main thing holding back a deluge of every other business (including websites) demanding your ID for one purported reason or another, but really to augment their surveillance databases.
by DoctorOetker | 2025-08-19 00:33:20+00:00
Today You Learn that the same Shun'ichi Amari who founded information geometry also made early advances to autodifferentiation.

Iterating gradient descent is much, much older, and immediately recognized upon defining what a gradient is (regardless of how one computes this gradient).

AD vs { symbolic differentiation, numeric finite "differentiation" } is about the insight how to compute a numeric gradient efficiently both in terms of (space) memory and time (compute) requirements.
by ThunderSizzle | 2025-08-19 00:33:21+00:00
Nearly everything you said is solved with the roll out of early voting for nearly a whole month or more prior to the actual election say.

Also, all rights come with responsibilities, and part of the responsibility of voting is registering to vote, getting your ID, and showing up to vote. We shouldn't bend society to let people who don't want bare minimum responsibility to participate in their right.

We have no problem putting serious restrictions on rights of people in other areas coinciding with responsibility.
by mapt | 2025-08-19 00:33:48+00:00
Surimi is not mostly fish, it is mostly soy, wheat, various starches. Fish (blended Alaskan pollock usually) is a minority of material in most packagings.

This came as a shock to me. The macronutrients don't lie, though. Fish is protein and a little fat, carb content is fractions of a gram, and these labels are telling me that there's more carbohydrate than protein.

The ingredient labels that the FDA allows, do find a way to lie. If you read a ten-ingredient label that says "Ingredients: Beef, wheat flour, corn flour, oats, textured vegetable protein, canola oil, vegetable oil, xanthan gum, carageenan, salt", and tell people that this is the highest-percentage ingredient to the lowest-percentage ingredient ordering, most people will assume it's >75% beef, but all the label is saying numerically is that it's >10% beef; If every other ingredient was in the 9.0 to 9.9% range then the beef input would be around 1/6th of the material. Add more ingredients and this can be manipulated even more.

I also don't think this is comparable. Blended Alaskan pollock had an immune system before it hit the cold chain.