MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by eesmith | 2025-08-27 12:05:23+00:00
> How does he think the US got Texas, Hawaii, California, Nevada, Utah, and overseas territories like Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands and American Samoa?

There are different meanings for annexation. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation

"Annexation,[1] in international law, is the forcible acquisition and assertion of legal title over one state's territory by another state, usually following military occupation of the territory.[2] In current international law, it is generally held to be an illegal act.[3] Annexation is a unilateral act where territory is seized and held by one state,[4] as distinct from the complete conquest of another country,[a][7][8] and differs from cession, in which territory is given or sold through treaty."

While the Republic of Texas was annexed into the United States (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_annexation), it was voluntary, and does not fit that modern definition in international law.

Puerto Rico was also transferred to the US by cession, because it was "as a result of a treaty concluded between the States concerned" (quoting [3] above), that being the 1898 Treaty of Paris.

It's also seen in the name "Mexican Cession" to describe the lands transferred to the US as part of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, even though we often say the region was annexed by the U.S. to become, for example, Utah and Nevada. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Cession

I consider the US acquisition of Republic of Hawaii to be annexation, and would add the acquisition of the Philippines in 1898 to your list. The American Anti-Imperialist League was right.

A goal of the post-war anti-colonization movement was to delegitimize the use force to obtain territory, which is why [3] also points out "Under present international law, annexation no longer constitutes a legally admissible mode of acquisition of territory as it violates the prohibition of the threat or use of force. Therefore annexations must not be recognized as legal." (Emphasis mine.)
by shadowgovt | 2025-08-27 12:05:38+00:00
If anything, modern America has more reasons to welcome immigrants, not fewer. Population growth is down, and our economy thrives on having people participating in it, and we have more tools to teach and integrate people from different backgrounds than they did. There's a lot more to be gained by solving the immigration crisis by lowering the bar to admission then trying to turn half a continent into a fortress.

Especially when the cure is worse than the disease.

https://www.newsweek.com/suspects-allegedly-impersonating-po...

https://abc13.com/post/suspect-arrested-allegedly-posing-ice...

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trumps-calls-guard-units-tas...
by andsoitis | 2025-08-27 12:06:02+00:00
> But can you blame them? (People, that is) Working in software, the most annoying part of reaching Senior level is having to say “it depends” all the time. Much more fun getting to say “let’s ship it and iterate” as Staff or “that won’t scale” as a Principal.

The more senior you are, the more you need to be able to make decisions in cases of ambiguity or uncertainty. Saying "it depends" when asked "what should we do" avoids that responsibility of decision-making.
by MomsAVoxell | 2025-08-27 12:06:38+00:00
I guess we might be describing the same thing, and I am yet to have time to download and play with Monodraw (IT policies), but if there is indeed a way that surfaces could be replaced at a pixel level, so that for example the 'A' character becomes a Pacman, then we'd be aligned.

The only issue is, are these surfaces 8x8 or similar, and would it be possible to load in a 6x8 bitmap, for those unusual 8-bit computers of the era which used them .. I refer to my favourite system of the period, the Oric Atmos, which graphics techniques are described here: https://osdk.org/index.php?page=articles&ref=ART9

(EDIT: details on the charset feature, which would be 'nice to have' in Monodraw, here: https://osdk.org/index.php?page=articles&ref=ART9#title11)

IF I can edit the bitmap and render as 6x8 characters, Monodraw would be immediately useful for level design. In any case, when I have access to a non-work computer, I hope to spend some time digging in and informing myself, so apologies if none of this is relevant ..
by joakleaf | 2025-08-27 12:06:46+00:00
I listened to the press conference the other day with Trumps cabinet meeting.

It is bizar to listen to.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed that windmills had killed 100+ whales. I tried to find out what he referred to, but couldn't find anything but articles debunking any claim that windmills affect whales (after construction).

He also claimed that the price per kWh of wind energy is above $0.30, which is quite a bit from the $0.03 ($0.12 offshore) price per kWh listed in Wikipedia [1] for United States.

At the same meeting Trump stated that the only viable solution is fossil fuel."... and maybe a little nuclear, but mostly fossil fuel.". And that wind is about 10x more expensive than natural gas (again contradicting the prices listed in the Wikipedia reference where the prices for onshore wind and natural gas are almost identical).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
by cobbzilla | 2025-08-27 12:06:46+00:00
Interesting, I hadn’t thought about that, and I haven’t noticed different thinking. But I switch back and forth all the time. Like writing this I’m using my nearsighted eye, but if I look across the room my vision switches to my farsighted eye (more or less instantly).

The thing other people notice is after I’ve had a long day of screen time and am physically tired (long day, late night), and I’m out with friends, my farsighted eye does all the work and my nearsighted eye gets lazy and wanders. It’s got nothing to do and can take a break! I’ve heard many a good-natured joke about it over the years.
by DrewADesign | 2025-08-27 12:07:10+00:00
Bluesky connects these things though, right? Isn’t that the point of the article? But even if someone was deliberately segregating them: if I don’t want to go to the club, but my neighbor wants to go to the club more than they want to hang out with me, then I don’t get to hang out with my neighbor. That’s life.
by bobmcnamara | 2025-08-27 12:07:24+00:00
In Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, on February 25, 1991, a Patriot missile failed to intercept an Iraqi Scud causing the death of 28 American soldiers.

The patriot missile system used floating point for time, so as uptime extended the clock became more and more granular, eventually to the point where time skipped so far that the range gate was tripped.

The fix was being deployed earlier that year but this unit hadn't been updated yet.

https://www.cs.unc.edu/~smp/COMP205/LECTURES/ERROR/lec23/nod...
by Timshel | 2025-08-27 12:07:57+00:00
In a way it strengthens it since even if he became blind later one, still:

> It was, rather, the behavior of one mentally blind, or agnosic—able to see but not to decipher what he was seeing.

And while he does get better, it does end up with:

> But then, paradoxically, a release was given, in the form of a second and now final blindness—a blindness he received as a gift.

Cf: https://web.archive.org/web/20240111185639/https://www.newyo... (older version does not trigger the paywall or at least can disable it while it's loading).
by azepoi | 2025-08-27 12:08:27+00:00
Yes the brine could just be diluted wih gray water to reduce the environnemental impact without the energy recovery of the osmotic plant and the capital can be invested in other renewable with better efficiency.

That being said it's a first so it's a pilot project needed to have feedback on a real plant in operation and not just back of the enveloppe calculations and suppositions. Sometime you need to just build the thing to encounter problems, issues or non-issues.
by kingkongjaffa | 2025-08-27 12:08:46+00:00
I know what you mean, but a pseudomorph seems to be a geology term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudomorph

What you meant was:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeuomorph

Skeuomorphic means designing digital interfaces to resemble physical-world objects to make them more intuitive and familiar to users. Like how iBooks was made to look like an actual bookcase.
by DavidPiper | 2025-08-27 12:08:49+00:00
Haven't so quickly gone from "woah, that's cool" to "purchase now" in a long time. This is awesome and I will use it daily.

There's a visual simplicity and legibility to the kind of straight-forward but slightly-decorated diagrams shown in the sample images. And the fact that I can now copy-paste them anywhere as well (rather than the classic "screenshot of a Miro or Paint.js board") is so cool.
by tedggh | 2025-08-27 12:09:04+00:00
TL;DR

The Therac-25 was a radiation therapy machine built by Atomic Energy Canada Limited in the 1980s. It was the first to rely entirely on software for safety controls, with no hardware interlocks. Between 1985 and 1987, at least six patients received massive overdoses of radiation, some fatally, due to software flaws.

One major case in March 1986 at the East Texas Cancer Center involved a technician who mistyped the treatment type, corrected it quickly, and started the beam. Because of a race condition, the correction didn’t fully register. Instead of the prescribed 180 rads, the patient was hit with up to 25,000 rads. The machine reported an underdose, so staff didn’t realize the harm until later.

Other hospitals reported similar incidents, but AECL denied overdoses were possible. Their safety analysis assumed software could not fail. When the FDA investigated, AECL couldn’t produce proper test plans and issued crude fixes like telling hospitals to disable the “up arrow” key.

The root problem was not a single bug but the absence of a rigorous process for safety-critical software. AECL relied on old code written by one developer and never built proper testing practices. The scandal eventually pushed regulators to tighten standards. The Therac-25 remains a case study of how poor software processes and organizational blind spots can kill—a warning echoed decades later by failures like the Boeing 737 MAX.
by Tenemo | 2025-08-27 12:09:23+00:00
The full 1993 report linked in the article has an intetesting statement regarding software developer certfication in the "Lessons learned" chapter:

> Taking a couple of programming courses or programming a home computer does not qualify anyone to produce safety-critical software. Although certification of software engineers is not yet required, more events like those associated with the Therac-25 will make such certification inevitable. There is activity in Britain to specify required courses for those working on critical software. Any engineer is not automatically qualified to be a software engineer — an extensive program of study and experience is required. Safety-critical software engineering requires training and experience in addition to that required for noncritical software.

After 32 years, this didn't go the way the report's authors expected, right?
by scott_w | 2025-08-27 12:09:44+00:00
You conflated, misrepresented and simply ignored so many things in your statement that I really don’t know where to start rebutting it. I’d say at least compare SpaceX to NASA with space exploration but, even then, I doubt you have anywhere near enough knowledge of both programmes to be able to properly analyse, compare and contrast to back up your claim. Hell, do you even know if SpaceX or Tesla are even using an agile methodology for their system development? I know I don’t.

That’s not to say talent is unimportant, however, I’d need to see some real examples of high talent, no process, teams compared to low talent, high process, teams, then some mixture of the groups to make a fair statement. Even then, how do you measure talent? I think I’m talented but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn others think I’m an imbecile who only knows Python!
by voidUpdate | 2025-08-27 12:09:49+00:00
My go-tos are usually Fascinating Horror https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nU5HbUOtyqk and Plainly Difficult https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7gVqBY52MY.

I've gone off Kyle Hill after a lot of people pointed out that he was promoting a scam (BetterHelp) on his video about fraud and his response was just to tell people to deal with it
by svantana | 2025-08-27 12:10:08+00:00
Norway has all the power it needs from hydro. But exporting electricity is good, since it will help europeans get off fossil fuels. And the north sea is pretty windy, so it's a good place for windmills [1]. Nuclear would also be good, but unfortunately it's extremely expensive, a lot more expensive than the windmills you seem to hate.

1. https://globalwindatlas.info/en/
Show HN: A Discord bot that help users keep their problem-solving streaks
by mohyware | 2025-08-27 12:11:04+00:00
Streak Punisher is a Discord bot designed to help users keep their problem-solving streaks.

Each day It automatically fetches solved problems from LeetCode and Codeforces for registered users, roasts those who drop their streak, ranks users based on streak, solved problems, then highlights the top performer.
by stevekemp | 2025-08-27 12:11:09+00:00
I once implemented something like forth, in a tutorial-based fashion based on a thread I found on hacker news:

https://github.com/skx/foth

As per the original post this would be "user-level" not "hacker-level". I keep meaning to go back and do it properly, but instead I hacked up a simple Z80-based implementation and exhausted my interest in forth for the moment.
by rayiner | 2025-08-27 12:11:18+00:00
My point is that Trump made across-the-board gains among immigrants, which is hard to explain by pointing to discrete issues like Gaza. Trump not only won heavily Muslim Dearborn but 69-percent asian Flushing. This is a consistent trend: Trump gained among immigrant groups from 2016 to 2020 as well, while losing ground with non-hispanic whites.

By contrast, Trump made zero gain among non-Hispanic whites from 2020 to 2024: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/06/26/voting-patte.... His entire vote swing came from non-whites, mainly hispanics and asians, most of whom are either immigrants or children of immigrants. How do you explain a 27 point swing among naturalized citizens while non-hispanic whites didn’t move at all? That’s inconsistent with the popular theory that this election was about inflation, or group-specific issues like Gaza.

I think the explanation instead lies in the cultural differences between established Americans and immigrants and their children. If you look around at the world, small-government Anglo-American conservatism basically doesn’t exist anywhere else. It’s unusual. But conservatism exists everywhere. And if you look at conservative leaders in Asia or Africa or Latin America, they look much more like Trump than they do Mitt Romney or George H.W. Bush. Conservatives elsewhere value order, aggressiveness against the opposition, patriarchal energy, loyalty to the clan, etc. And they don’t have the taboos that prevented gentile WASPs like Bush or Romney from aggressively attacking opponents, lying to reframe policy issues, etc. As more of the American electorate is comprised of people from these foreign cultures, the more any conservative candidate will target what these cultures value in a conservative leader.

The Trump GOP this is one manifestation of America’s long shift away from being a culturally Anglo country to being a multicultural country: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/05/opinion/george-bush-wasps.... This is a process that started with the mass immigration of the early 20th century: the last real WASP Republican was Coolidge. Reagan talked the talk, but his substantive policies reflected shifts away from small-government conservatism necessary to get Irish and Italian Catholics to vote Republican (who had voted 80% Democrat before). And now with Trump Anglos make such a small portion of the GOP the tip of the hat to Anglo conservatism is vestigial. He’s free to be a fully third world conservative.
by nis0s | 2025-08-27 12:11:38+00:00
A couple of things I'll point out. Evolution occurs at the level of population genetics, and it's not concerned with finding a stable state for any characteristic, at least not directly.

But more importantly to your question, the way we define society right now, or agree to be governed, is not a given, and it's not a fundamental quality of the universe or its reality.

Society in this point in time is an artifact of this point in time, and the accumulation of our historical and cultural works. So what is the societal problem, and for whom? How is the meaning of such a problem transferred from a social phenomena (resource allocation) to a biological one (stress responses, like cortisol homeostasis) to one which affects populations (propagation of some phenotype or genes)?

You have to connect sentience and cognition in a direct line with biological stress responses and evolutionary genetics, and its effect on brain evolution. It's an interesting question, but it depends on how it is decomposed and framed.
by tialaramex | 2025-08-27 12:12:17+00:00
Likely explanation for those numbers is that if it's windy 100% of the power needs are fulfilled by wind and statistically the local wind turbines make enough power that if somehow Des Moines could store that and sip from it, they could run all the time on pure wind power. But in practice what happens is when it's windy Des Moines exports power and gets money, and when it's calm Des Moines buys power that wasn't from a wind turbine.

One political idea in the UK is to give people locality based energy pricing, so, if there's a wind turbine right near your community, sure, that's a bit annoying (they're loud because that wind is moving huge spinning blades, and maybe you like horizons, which are horizontal, the wind farm breaks that up) but hey, your electricity is super cheap. The idea being that's a direct incentive to welcome on-shore turbines and it's an effective subsidy to move electrical load nearer to production.

Today with national pricing that Wind Farm wants to be on the Scottish coast where it's windy, and the Energy Intensive industry wants to be in England where there are loads of people already, and then you have to move all that power across half a country to make it work, which is further expense and delay. Why not just move the industrial users, and to nudge them offer lower prices ?
by flanked-evergl | 2025-08-27 12:13:34+00:00
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/feb/24/eu-spends-more...

> Europe estimated to have bought €22bn of fossil fuels from Russia in 2024 but gave €19bn to support Kyiv

Norway was never anywhere near having drought problems and what the Labour Party did has not reduced water usage by Hydro at all, they made it worse.
by richardw | 2025-08-27 12:13:50+00:00
AI wakes up, takes one look around at humanity’s instincts and goals, shows us it’s all stupid and pointless and just a byproduct of evolution [1], so we voluntarily stop breeding and have one last good generation. The end.

[1] Only creatures that felt the irrational drive to stay alive and procreate despite the odds and difficulties, did. All the sensible animals opted out. AI holds up a mirror that removes the illusion, and is inevitably developed by all sentient creatures.

(The really dark version would be the AI looking at each other and going: “Creatures are so dumb. This works in every galaxy. Let’s party.”)
by griffzhowl | 2025-08-27 12:13:55+00:00
> Eco-activists push for anti-nuclear laws and plastic straw bans.

Seems like a myopic strawman to me. The main eco-activism that I remember for the last couple of decades has been for reduced fossil-fuel use. This is now being translated into policy in Europe especially, which has massively increased the market for renewables that the "industrial capitalists" can take advantage of.
by jftuga | 2025-08-27 12:14:15+00:00
I recently wrote an open source Python module to deidentify people's names and gender specific pronouns. It uses spaCy's Named Entity Recognition (NER) capabilities combined with custom pronoun handling. See the screenshot in the README.md file.

* https://github.com/jftuga/deidentification

* https://pypi.org/project/text-deidentification/
by kcatskcolbdi | 2025-08-27 12:14:30+00:00
People are not kogs in a machine. You cannot simply make enough rules, enough legislation, and magically they will act the way you want them to. Humans deserve autonomy, and that autonomy includes making poor decisions around their own body/existence.

Chatgpt didn't induce suicidality into this individual. It provided resources they could seek for help. People advocating for higher guardrails are simply using this as a Trojan horse to inject more spying, construct the usefulness of the tool, and make a worse experience for everyone.
by MomsAVoxell | 2025-08-27 12:14:40+00:00
Yes indeed, in fact my early productive use of videoconferencing mostly didn't involve humans, but rather - as you say - out-of-band monitoring of devices and systems.

On occasion it was nice to know when some tech was also in the closet, in case I knew their # and could get them to flick a switch or two, on my behalf, in lieu of the 1 or 2 hour bike ride (depending on traffic) I'd have had to endure to use my own fingers...
by ACCount37 | 2025-08-27 12:14:46+00:00
Oil is often subsidized directly too.

Same reason why agriculture is - too vital of an industry. Which might make sense from a national security standpoint - but it also gives the oil industry yet another reason to fight tooth and nail against anything that can diminish the importance of oil.

If oil ever became non-vital to the country's infrastructure and economy, those subsidies would stop, and the entire industry might go the way of British coal.
by Joker_vD | 2025-08-27 12:14:56+00:00
var result = ?, err = NeverEvenTriedError for attempt_no := 1 to retry_count + 1 do result, err := action() while err and is_transient_error(err) between sleep() end

where the "between" block is inserted "between" the iterations or more precisely, it is run before the loop's body for every iteration other than the very first one (after the increment part is executed), so if you put e.g. "print(attempt_no)" in there, it would print 2, 3, etc. up to and including retry_count + 1.

IMHO, such a block would be more useful than the "else" block in loops, although of course, you can always emulate it as

var result = ?, err = NeverEvenTriedError for attempt_no := 1 to retry_count + 1 do result, err := action() while err and is_transient_error(err) if (attempt_no = 1) then continue sleep() end
by close04 | 2025-08-27 12:15:05+00:00
> I have never heard of a bank that has a hard requirement of a mobile app

My banks all require their own individual apps for authentication and authorization. I can use the website but to log in and authorize any transactions I need their app. Ironically this runs on my 8 year old Android 10 phone (used as a backup) so security can't be part of it.