MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lblume | 2025-09-28 19:36:36+00:00
I fail to see how this is a "problem"? You implemented a sorting mechanism that was useful to your application, while Nemo implemented another which as this thread demonstrates seems to be much more useful and intuitive for the average user. This is also of course not specific to Nemo, as no 'modern' file manager on Linux sorts filenames like it's 1980 and all you are able to feasibly do is step through the bytes.
by crazygringo | 2025-09-28 19:36:39+00:00
Does it matter?

There's a user expectation that photo20.jpg comes after photo3.jpg.

There's no user expectation around whether photo1.jpg or photo01.jpg comes first. Just like there's no user expectation around whether photo1.jpg or Photo1.jpg comes first. Users also don't have the slightest idea about what order punctuation gets sorted in.

Just sort the things that matter in the way users expect (natural sort order) and come up with something reasonably consistent for the rest.
by IMSAI8080 | 2025-09-28 19:36:43+00:00
Indeed. It'll be a gravy train for one of the usual big consulting companies. Billions of much needed cash will be wasted and nothing of any value will be achieved.

This ID system is touted as somehow stopping illegal boat crossings (the current political hot topic in the UK) because it will apparently somehow stop illegal work. This is obvious nonsense. Employers are already supposed to do ID checks and face heavy fines for employing illegal workers. Illegal employers obviously don't bother with such checks and pay cash in hand. They will continue not to bother doing any such checks, with or without ID cards.

A great deal of illegal work is actually caused by arm's-length employers such as food delivery apps and other similar platforms. These companies already do fairly robust ID checks. What happens though is people rent out their accounts (often for surprisingly small amounts of money) with the ID check already passed to illegals who actually do the work. The problem is nothing to do with ID checks, it's the fact that the employer never sees the employee in person and doesn't verify on a day-to-day basis who is actually completing the work.
by clickety_clack | 2025-09-28 19:37:02+00:00
I don’t know if it’s quite a trust issue. Maybe it’s more a low- v high- responsibility society. It seems more like people want responsibility removed from people and given to the government. In my experience people become more competent when they have responsibility, so the removal of responsibility seems (to me at least) like it will train people into incompetence.
by michaelt | 2025-09-28 19:37:04+00:00
But they're only a proscribed group because the cabinet decided it was politically convenient to proscribe them.

It's not like these guys are the Taliban or the IRA, though some of them did chuck some paint on some planes.

So a person who is worried about Starmer's authoritarian tendencies lay responsibility for the police action at the door of number 10.
by jama211 | 2025-09-28 19:37:05+00:00
Err you know they match the video to the audio delay on modern smart phone apps right? The only time you actually experience latency is when you attempt to pause/play the media, or you’re trying to do something in real time (like record with people around you). If you use airpods and an iphone or something the video will not be out of sync with the audio.

You can literally even see the video lag when you hit play as it ensures it syncs with the audio.
by notahacker | 2025-09-28 19:37:05+00:00
> Wait which is it. We have a "private" system where we save "the pesky" poor and regulate licensing, insurance, provide medicare/medicaid, have a quasi-public system for ER where private payers fund those who won't pay, or we don't?

You have the fully private provision you insist is more efficient. It costs more for worse outcomes than every other developed country, who also have regulations. If your original claim that the private sector is so efficient it could deliver everything for a third of the tax cost of the current system, it's remarkable that you're actually paying a large multiple the cost of the fully socialised systems for many people to have no care or crippling copays.

Sure, you can move the goalposts by claiming that true private provision requires there to be no medical regulations. But in order for that claim to be remotely credible you'd have to be able to point to all the countries that have great outcomes from having no medical regulations or public healthcare at all (the Philippines where the government is the main provider of healthcare but it doesn't have the time or inclination to enforce regulations on OTC antibiotics doesn't count, even if its health outcomes were excellent, which they're unsurprisingly not). Not gonna lie, if I'm suffering from the symptoms of a heart attack, I don't think antibiotics for half a day's pay are going to help, and literally the only efficiency argument for restrictions on ER rooms being allowed to employ extra admin staff to check insurance paperwork before deciding to administer treatment being an efficiency loss is that it's more efficient to let me die if I can't pay. As I've said, common argument but the complete opposite of your original setup where everyone gets the same outcomes for a third of the cost.
by MengerSponge | 2025-09-28 19:37:35+00:00
Is anyone in an elected or influential position talking about invading Russia?

If not, it's not manufacturing consent. It's just sparkling self-defense.

Putin's Russia has shown herself to be incredibly antagonistic against the western world. See {polonium poisoning Litvinenko, defenestration (multiple), Syrian actions, Ukraine invasion, etc}

Military resources are expensive and inefficient, so it takes some degree of political capital to develop and maintain them. I'd so much rather see that capital (human and otherwise) go into research and art and human flourishing, but that's not the world we live in.

) Driving refugees into liberal western democracies is a deliberate outcome of this strategy.
by mjr00 | 2025-09-28 19:38:40+00:00
> I don't see why. Addition is a very commonly used operation, and being able to have a type system that can express "this function takes two arguments that can be added using the addition operator" seems like something any type system that delivers the goods it claims to deliver ought to have.

If your comparison is Rust, sure, but you can't even express this in Java. No, Java's type system is not great, but it's a type system that's been used for approximately 500 trillion lines of production code powering critical systems and nobody has ever said "Java sucks because I can't express 'supports the + operator' as a generic type". (It sucks for many other reasons.)

Again, it is factually and objectively an esoteric and unusual case. Nobody in the real world is writing generics like this, only academics or people writing programming blogs about esoterica.

If your argument is that all type systems are bad or deficient, fine, but calling out Python for this when it has the exact same deficiency as basically every other mainstream language is asinine.

> The article never says that either. You are attacking straw men.

The article says "Turning even the simplest function that relied on Duck Typing into a Type Hinted function that is useful can be painfully difficult." The subterfuge is that this is not even remotely close to a simple function because the type being expressed, "supports the + operator", is not even remotely close to a simple type.
by impossiblefork | 2025-09-28 19:38:43+00:00
As someone who has been arguing for a war with Russia, I don't think there's been many attempts to manufacture consent for it.

In fact, I've noticed a lot of opposition to my view that I think is state organized, but probably by Russia. I've seen zero people like me online. I've seen zero repeated pro-war, zero capability-emphasizing arguments. Complete silence except for me.
by popalchemist | 2025-09-28 19:39:25+00:00
I absolutely adore Sagan -- I have a first edition of both this book and Cosmos in a prize position on my book shelf -- and yet I agree. He had a disdain for all things irrational, yet man himself and his psyche is irrational. He would have done well to assimilate Carl Jung et al into his academic diet. But he didn't because he had the classic atheist's arrogance to him. Still, he was a treasure. You just have to know which domains he had authority to speak about and which he didn't.
by tialaramex | 2025-09-28 19:39:26+00:00
Unlike the ludicrous US system with a "written constitution" that basically means a handful of unelected people get to overide all laws and say they're just "interpreting" as they ignore the plain words, the clear intent or any other obstacle to their Imperial Decree, the Parliament is literally Sovereign.

So, if Parliament passes a Law tomorrow, miraculously by unanimous consent saying "The UK shall never have Digital ID" and insisting it denies itself any ability to make a law introducing such a thing - at any point it can also, despite that, pass law making a Digital ID by the narrowest majority, for example the day after.

In fact not so very long ago this exact farce played out. The Liberal Democrats were in a situation where they could either join a coalition with the larger Conservative party and form a government or they could say "No" and likely the populace has to do another election. Popular understanding was that British people hate elections, and so if you insist on another one they will punish you, the Lib Dems did not want that. But, they were concerned that the Tories would betray them (predictably)

So hence the 2011 "Fixed Term Parliaments Act". But although the Act says you can't just end parliament without a term ending, obviously Parliament can just pass a new law saying nah, changed our mind, which is what the 2019 "Early Parliamentary General Election Act" does and then the 2022 "Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Act" undid the whole pointless mess.

Parliamentary sovereignty might be able to take on limits via some sort of tradition over a long period. For example perhaps if Parliament had stuck with that Fixed Term rule for a few hundred years - it'd settle as "Just how it is" and there'd be a serious argument that you can't just pass a law saying just this once as an exception we'll hold elections early. But "It was a few years ago" clearly doesn't cut it and that's what you would need for such a "counter bill".

The best you can hope for is a pledge by politicians, which is worth slightly less than a piece of paper you wrote it on.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-09-28 19:40:01+00:00
> It should be the case that even administrator access should not be abusable to implant permanent backdoors.

It's really the "permanently" which is the design flaw. Boards should have a mechanism to recover from bad firmware, and the same mechanism is useful to recover from a bad flash.

Make the flash chip removable, or leave a JTAG. Or have a bit of actual ROM with the write lines not even connected and just enough of a firmware to be able to reflash the main one.
by wk_end | 2025-09-28 19:40:16+00:00
Just eyeballing it really quickly, it doesn’t look like it’s got the built-ins you’d want to quickly built a REPL (i.e. read or eval). It’s not really Scheme, yet.

It’s written in C, so you could compile that to wasm and then compile & run all inside the browser (I guess, assuming wasm is cool with that sort of thing, not a wasm guy here).
by BrenBarn | 2025-09-28 19:40:53+00:00
This is tangential to the main point of the article, but the anecdote about the dongle is interesting to me. The author's point seems to be that it was disturbing that Andre joked that being reimbursed for a new dongle (and/or meals) was no big deal. It seems to me there are three potential aspects to this:

1. Being reimbursed for a new dongle (and/or meals) 2. Joking about how that is no big deal 3. Not being transparent about whether your nonprofit blithely funds stuff like a new dongle (and/or meals)

From my perspective #3 is definitely an issue, and I can see how #2 could be annoying, but #1 is not really an issue at all, and it's not clear to me whether it's an issue for the author of this article.

It's not much of a stretch from "programmers working on open source tools deserve to earn an income that's commensurate with what salaried engineers earn at the companies who benefit from those tools" to "programmers working on open source tools deserve a level of overall employment benefits commensurate with etc.". For-profit companies routinely pay for dongles like it ain't no thang, toss money around left and right on meals (even with questionable justification), and so on and so forth. And in fact the people who benefit from this reimbursement do joke about how it's "free" to them, etc. In this context, being reimbursed for dongles and meals seems only another form of leveling the playing field.

Now of course, if people think they're donating only to pay a salary, and it turns out they're paying for meals, that's a problem (#3 in my list above). But if a person is up-front about saying "you're paying to equalize the overall compensation situation between the people who write open-source software and the people who use it", I don't think anyone should be surprised that that person expects to be reimbursed for dongles and meals. I'm not sure whether that was the case here, but, well, it's just something that stood out to me in the article.
by amatecha | 2025-09-28 19:40:55+00:00
Yeah, a family member and I had to basically throw studies at a doctor to get him to agree to prescribe a medicine he insisted "doesn't work" (even despite studies clearly showing it does, like indisputably). Even after that he still said something like "sure, whatever, if you want to try it you can", all dismissively as if we're stupid and wasting our time. Oh, and then he prescribed an amount that would never work. We still wonder if he sabotaged it on purpose. Had to go back and get it re-prescribed at the actually-correct amount. The medication worked, and we avoided a completely unnecessary surgery. I have so, so many stories like this.
by AJRF | 2025-09-28 19:41:11+00:00
It's becoming increasingly confusing to me who any of the parties actually represent.

The more left leaning people I know are foaming at the mouth over how Labour have operated since being elected, all moderates (outside London) I know tend to lean Conservative (though that party seems to be AWOL since the election) and the only party I hear that is gaining any popularity is Reform, and they are doing so at an alarming pace.

4 years is a long time, but it seems inevitable its a two horse race between Reform (given polls I have to presume not everyone who votes for them is a racist twit) and Labour, and Labour seem hell bent on alienating any one who isn't centre-right, and they have to contend with Reform for those votes. Maybe it's politicking to a degree I don't understand, but it seems like a very odd strategy.

For those outside the UK look at this chart to see how fast Reform are rising:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_U...
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-09-28 19:41:20+00:00
"I can't read the linked FT article ..."

No archive.ph CAPTCHA:

curl -K/dev/stdin <<eof > 1.htm url https://www.ft.com/content/4c8d6420-d088-4660-8973-c4996cd990fb user-agent "Mozilla/5.0 (Java) outbrain" header accept: eof firefox ./1.htm
by AlecSchueler | 2025-09-28 19:42:14+00:00
> Is anyone in an elected or influential position talking about invading Russia?

> If not, it's not manufacturing consent.

Is it not? Maybe we have a different understanding of what manufacturing consent means. For me the consent could be manufactured long before the question is raised. I'm not sure why it needs to be called for immediately, why do you believe so?

> Putin's Russia has shown herself to be incredibly antagonistic against the western world.

Yes it has, consistently, but I feel a significant seachange in the landscape of various media channels, both mainstream media and social media, as well as in the rhetoric of politicians. And yes, they have been talking about increased cooperation, taking heavier action against stray drones etc.

And it all seems to have happened in the past 2 months, like a sudden spike.
by lblume | 2025-09-28 19:42:20+00:00
What do you mean by "Unfortunately"? This appears to be the only correct conclusion from the algorithm you selected, you can't eat the cake and have it too.

Regarding your second point, that's not really what a graphical file manager is for, I think. At this point (likely even earlier) you would be better off just writing a simple script in the scripting language of your choice. (If going for something fancy, you could also implement a FUSE based on symlinks for the original files, where the filename is prepended by a sort key. This would work for every major file manager and you could manipulate the files in mostly the same way as before.)
by vdupras | 2025-09-28 19:44:31+00:00
In the part about "abs", there's an assembly breakdown:

mov eax, edi

sar eax, 31

mov ecx, eax

add edi, ecx

xor eax, edi

Has this been generated by a C compiler? If yes, it's a bit puzzling, because can't you remove "mov ecx, eax", replace "add edi, ecx" by "add edi, eax" and have the exact same result?
by jowea | 2025-09-28 19:44:53+00:00
Yeah, it's time spent by the users. Maybe it's an inneficiency of the market because the software company doesn't feel the negative effect enough, maybe it really is cheaper in aggregate that doing 3 different native apps in C++. But if CPU time is so valuable, why aren't we arguing for hand written C or even assembly code instead of the layers upon layers of abstraction in even native modern software?

Also, why
by froggy | 2025-09-28 19:44:55+00:00
My theory is consistent repetition of messaging (Cialdini principles). The people aren’t stupid, they’ve been gradually brainwashed over years by propaganda like Fox News and “conservative” talk shows, or they have family/friends that repeat that messaging. It is at the point of groupthink where they all now openly celebrate bigots and extremists.

They probably don’t understand or care why tuna and others parts of our food chain are contaminated by mercury.

Maybe they just want to join a team and beat up on the other team. The fossil-funded GOP tells them each liberal position is evil, so the MAGAs reflexively go against it all, even if it means mutual destruction.

When I was a kid, it was common knowledge (IIRC) that you couldn’t trust lawyers or politicians. It’s crazy to me how people nowadays are putting so much trust in politicians.
by godelski | 2025-09-28 19:45:42+00:00
> We _already_ live in a world where most of us spend much of our time reading and trying to comprehend code written by others from the past.

We also live in a world where people argue endlessly about how we don't need to write documentation or how it's possible to write self documenting code. This is where we spend so much of our time and yet so few actually invest in the efforts to decrease that time.

I bring this up because it's a solution to what you're pointing out as a problem and yet the status quo is to write even messier and harder to understand code (even before AI code). So I'm just saying, humans are really good at shooting themselves in the foot and blaming it on someone else or acting like the bullet came out of nowhere.

> What's the difference between

More so, I must get misreading because it sounds like you're asking what's the difference between "messy" and "messier"?

If it's the same level of messiness, then sure, it's equal. But in a real world setting there's a continuous transition of people. One doesn't work on code in isolation, quit, and then a new person works on that code also in isolation. So maybe it's not the original authors but rather the original authors are a Ship of Theseus. Your premise isn't entirely accurate and I think the difference matters
by bayesnet | 2025-09-28 19:45:53+00:00
While it’s interesting that Dom0 avoids Spectre-style branch prediction attacks it’s not clear from TFA exactly why that is so. How does the architecture of the hypervisor avoid an attack that seems to be at the hardware level? From my limited understanding of Spectre and Meltdown, swapping from a monolithic to a microkernel wouldn’t mitigate an attack. The mitigations discussed in the VMscape paper [0] are hardware mitigations in my reading. And I don’t see Xen mentioned anywhere in the paper for that matter.

I guess it’s sort of off topic, but I was enjoying reading this until I got to the “That’s not just elegant — it’s a big deal for security” line that smelled like LLM-generated content.

Maybe that reaction is hypocritical. I like LLMs; I use them every day for coding and writing. I just can’t shake the feeling that I’ve somehow been swindled if the author didn’t care enough to edit out the “obvious” LLM tells.

[0]: https://comsec-files.ethz.ch/papers/vmscape_sp26.pdf
by palata | 2025-09-28 19:45:59+00:00
I'm not convinced. What makes an app like Uber efficient is that it connects you to the closest driver when you need it. If you have the number of a driver, they may not be working at that time, or they may be far away.

Same for food delivery.

Very different for a cleaner: you never need a cleaner "right now", you can schedule it.
by wtallis | 2025-09-28 19:46:05+00:00
I think the advertising industry has a very long tradition of relying on and trusting bad data if it's the only data they have. As long as everyone plays along and believes that Nielsen ratings or circulation numbers or click counts are accurate, you can have a more or less functional market for advertising spots. And there's obviously demand for more detailed data, as long as advertisers can believe that it is accurate and can make their ads more effective.

When the analytics produce an obviously wrong conclusion (such as saying you should be shown more car ads immediately after completing the purchase of a car), everyone involved has a vested interest in believing that the analytics must be right in some fashion. Doing otherwise would mean taking on a big risk, straying from the herd with a different advertising strategy that's guaranteed to take the blame for any drop in sales in the near future.
by startupsfail | 2025-09-28 19:46:31+00:00
> There's a simple fact: humans prefer lies that they don't know are lies over lies that they do know are lies.

As an engineer and researcher, I prefer lies (models, simplifications), that are known to me, rather than unknown unknowns.

I don't need to know exact implementation details, knowledge of aggregate benchmarks, fault rates and tolerances is enough. A model is a nice to have.

This approach works, in science (physics, chemistry, biology, ...) and in engineering (including engineering agentic and social sustems- social engineering).
by derriz | 2025-09-28 19:47:11+00:00
> The sort rules are simple

In considering the simplicity of the rule, I think you're using a developers perspective here where we automatically classify numbers and have a clear mental model of the separation between value and representation.

But I'm not sure how simple it would be to explain to a non-technical user why size_5, size_10 and size_15 are in order but size_0.25, size_0.5 and size_0.75 are out-of-order.

> with no major outcry

I'm regularly amazed at how little non-developer/technical users complain about strange and confusing behavior.
by nnf | 2025-09-28 19:48:07+00:00
Privacy Badger has three modes for each host (other than the origin) from which content is loaded on a page: Allow, Block Cookies, and Block Entirely. This lets you load things like Google fonts without allowing tracking cookies to be set. Yes, Google still sees your IP and user agent and can do some tracking that way, but they can't add a tracking cookie (at least once Privacy Badger sees them trying to), and you have the option to block Google Fonts (and whatever else) entirely if you want.