MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by arp242 | 2025-09-23 06:04:41+00:00
e.g. https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna24235665 (many more, just a quick search)

Whether you believe them is another issue of course. But you need to at least try and no one ever did. After many years of refusing to talk to the IRA in the end the British government did, and that was key to the lasting peace. This was hugely controversial at the time and Major government lead talks in secret which were leaked. Lots of drama. But in the end it worked. In 1988 people could have said about the IRA what you're saying about Hamas (and they did). The Good Friday accord didn't even demand immediate disarmament by the way, but rather over time. There were plenty of violent hick-ups too (e.g. Real IRA).

And sure, long-term there is no future for Hamas – certainly not the paramilitary wing – just as there wasn't for the IRA. But Sinn Féin (IRA's political wing) still exists and that's okay. It's impossible to exclude Hamas from any and all negotiations in the short term because they're doing the fighting.

A pure military solution will never be the answer (well, except via genocide, which is hardly an "answer"). Even if one could kill every single Hamas member, you will just end up with a new Hamas-ng and we're back where we started. This is why you need to address some of the underlying injustices, which is that the British government did.

And that was my entire point. Everything may seem impossible and hopeless today. But so did things in 1988 NI. There are real challenges for sure, but the outlines of a solution are actually not all that complicated.
by Schnitz | 2025-09-23 06:05:07+00:00
Sanctions work, but not in the way that is the common public perception. The expectation isn’t that Russia or whoever falls apart a few weeks after we lock them out of Visa payment rails or whatever. The reality is that the sanctions stifle economic growth and that effect is compounding. Even if sanctions only reduce growth by 1 percentage point, after ~19 years your economy is already 20% smaller than it would be without sanctions and that is measurable. From a national security perspective, it makes Russia a lot less concerning if their industrial output is 20% less. Now imagine trying to start a software business in Iran, the stifling effect is way higher than a measly percentage point. Note that I’m not making a moral judgement, I’m simply sharing my understanding of sanctions.
by hks0 | 2025-09-23 06:05:13+00:00
No country should generally decide something for people of another country, but let's say it's a exceptional case and it's a war tactic, as a response to an external threat.

Then half a decade shows that point is not relevant or, the overthrowing is not the point at all.

I too wished the wolrd was that simple. But there are dictatorships, who kill, slaughter, coerce, ... and also all the international affairs from which those people are kept an outsider with zero say by the said government. I don't think we can reduce it to "it's people's fault".
by LAC-Tech | 2025-09-23 06:05:27+00:00
I talk to a few Iranians online. All very nice people. You'd think they had horns on their heads and cloven hooves the way certain people in the US talks about them.

Even the regime itself.. look I wouldn't to live there. But comparing it to somewhere like North Korea is ridiculous. Even by Middle Eastern standards it's not at the bottom.
by reissbaker | 2025-09-23 06:06:35+00:00
Do those sanctions even work?

Well, you mentioned "North Korea still builds nuclear weapons," but didn't mention Iran having them. So, something worked. It wasn't 100% just sanctions... But the sanctions certainly hampered their ability to acquire effective air defense.

(The NK sanctions were too late — NK had already started nuclear weapons testing before the sanctions were levied.)

Off the top of my head: I don't think the USSR is still around, and it largely collapsed due to economic pressure; Libya abandoned its nuclear program due to sanctions; and apartheid in South Africa ended largely due to sanctions.

They don't always work, but I've never heard of jeans and heavy metal working either, as nice as that would be. Belarus has plenty of both, but Lukashenko's been in power since the 90s.
by don_esteban | 2025-09-23 06:08:09+00:00
"The point is to get people in those contries to overthrow their leadership."

No, that's for consumption by population of the sanctioning country. The people in the know know very well that that never works.

The point is for every other country in the world to see how much it hurts if you don't follow the wishes of USA. Classic mafia strategy.

The exception were the sanctions on Russia at the start of the Ukraine war. Those were unprecedented (including the freezing of the national bank assets and blocking of Swift) and it looks like the western powers really believed that those sanctions will cause economic collapse and regime change in Russia.
by bob1029 | 2025-09-23 06:08:27+00:00
XCode is so bad I spent a solid year rewriting a perfectly functional iOS application (B2B) as a PWA using raw, vanilla javascript. Simply being able to use VS and AspNetCore meant my iteration time went from "what the fuck I'm done with computers" to about 3 seconds per. It was one of the best payoffs I've experienced with regard to vendor risk and complexity management. Being able to ignore the consequences of WWDC every year was such a relief. We weren't even trying to add any new features. We just wanted to keep it alive across major os versions.

iOS Safari was a landmine environment to navigate when attempting to shim the native features, but we eventually got 100% coverage. The worst part was 2D barcode scanning and getting the appropriate camera and resolution. After a few hundred hours we had something that was indistinguishable from native.

If you're a B2B vendor working with Apple tech, I would seriously consider the power of the open web. Breaking out of Apple tooling prison is like a 100x+ uplift in productivity if you have expert level familiarity in any other ecosystem.
by jeroenhd | 2025-09-23 06:08:27+00:00
This crap is why everyone should fear the Apple-like centralisation for software distribution options that other companies like Google and Microsoft are inching towards.

Now it's just Iran/Cuba/North Korea, but you're essentially letting the increasingly aggressive American government decide who can or cannot publish software. The Americans are not afraid of adding their political enemies from allied countries to the sanction list, as can be seen when they decided to go after the judge in the Israel genocide case. Who knows who will be next now that they're blatantly cracking down on free speech.

The Apple app store/Google Play/Microsoft Store are great conveniences, but they must never be the only way to access software on your device. Apple's EU exception falls short for still requiring an Apple account to pay fees that no judge will accept when the first lawsuit hits. Sure, Epic Games has offered to pay those fees just to spite Apple, but Epic can only pay those fees to people they're allowed to pay.
by kennywinker | 2025-09-23 06:08:28+00:00
So, we should just do business as usual with countries committing war crimes or genocide? Aggressors in war, users of chemical weapons on their own people?

I’m aware there are consequences to sanctions, and the way they are implemented is often half-assed or hypocritical (e.g. the way that russian oil still flows) but to drop all sanctions…

Is that not like saying boycotts hurt employees who had nothing to do with the decisions so we should never boycott?
by zovirl | 2025-09-23 06:08:56+00:00
I think the parent was complaining about mentions of CRDTs which don’t acknowledge that the problem domain CRDTs work in is very low level, and don’t mention how much additional effort is needed to make merging work in a way that’s useful for users.

This article is a perfect example: it says syncing is a challenge for local-first apps, logical clocks and CRDTs are the solution, and then just ends. It ignores the elephant in the room: CRDTs get you consistency, but consistency isn’t enough.

Take a local-first text editor, for example: a CRDT ensures all nodes eventually converge on the same text, but doesn’t guarantee the meaning or structure is preserved. Maybe the text was valid English, or JSON, or alphabetized, but after the merge, it may not be.

My suspicion, and I might be going out on a limb here, is that articles don’t talk about this because there is no good solution to merging for offline or local-first apps. My reasoning is that if there was a good solution, git would adopt it. The fact that git stills makes me resolve merge conflicts manually makes me think no one has found a better way.
by elzbardico | 2025-09-23 06:09:32+00:00
UK prisons are almost as bad as American or Brazilian prisons because UK is almost as unequal as the US or Brazil.

You can rehabilitate folks as much as you wish, most of them will leave and find no job in a society that cares more destroying jobs and disruption, so VCs can make another billion with another stupid SaaS exit than we care about have industry and a healthy lower middle class with social mobility.
by taneliv | 2025-09-23 06:10:59+00:00
I would imagine to lesser extent government policy changes and news articles, and to larger extent online discussions on topics relevant to these instruments. Models then attempt to extract signals with predictive value from all the noise. Probably contains non-trivial amount of history to correlate words to market performance in the past, say 20 years or more.

But it's really just a guess, I haven't worked in this domain.
by mmcnl | 2025-09-23 06:11:54+00:00
It's everything else where MacBooks excel too. The build quality is insane, I've never seen a laptop with as little flex as a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro. The keyboards are now finally great, and the display is amazing as well. Trackpad is best in class too.

Another thing: the displays are glossy, but still not very reflective. The Windows laptops glossy displays are so much more reflective, they are unusable outside. Also something worth mentioning, the MacBook displays get really bright. A high-end OLED display hardly goes above 400 nits. A MacBook Pro can go to 600 nits and outside it goes to 1600 nits. This is the difference between being able to use a laptop outside, and not.

Durability: if you're not doing anything crazy the MacBook will look brand new even after years of usage. Notable exception is the cheap plastic key caps which degrade very quickly, a bummer.

So the MacBooks beat the competition easily from a hardware quality perspective, and we haven't even talked about the elephant in the room yet: CPU performance, battery life and fan noise, obviously Apple is even further ahead in this area.

And then price, as strange as it sounds, both the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro are cheaper than the competition.

Disclaimer: I don't own a MacBook personally because I think macOS is not great, but that's probably the only reason why I'm not buying a MacBook. I would happily pay same the price of a MacBook Pro for a similar Windows laptop if it existed. It does not. There are always compromises.
by mikemcquaid | 2025-09-23 06:12:12+00:00
I’m the Homebrew Project leader and care a lot about Ruby so met with both sides to attempt to mediate and posted two threads on Bluesky about what went down:

https://bsky.app/profile/mikemcquaid.com/post/3lz7klsyue22f

https://bsky.app/profile/mikemcquaid.com/post/3lzfxctubbk2y

TL;DR: Regardless of what you think of RubyCentral’s actions, it’s very clear they absolutely screwed up the execution and communication here. In general the transparency is far below what you’d expect from an open source organisation.
by b112 | 2025-09-23 06:12:33+00:00
The true problem is money in politics. No, this has nothing to do with Musk. Musk is just visible, but it's been going on in the US for a long, long time.

Other countries have limits on campaign donations, for example at the federal level in Canada:

* no donations are allowed by corporations

* individuals may only donate $1750 to the party, and $1750 to the local candidate

* people running for office can donate to their own campaign, to the tune of $5000

* leadership candidates (eg, for Prime Minister) can donate $25k to their own campaign

That's it.

https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=pol&dir=lim&do...

All of these donations are heavily regulated, amounts of $100 I think require disclosure.

Another example, lobbyists must be registered. If you have lunch with a lobbyist, they can't pay for your lunch, you can't pay for theirs.

All of this takes corporate influence and most importantly the need for "big money" out of the equation.

Things such as third party advertising are covered too:

https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=pol&dir=thi/ec...

With overall limits at the federal level from all third party contributions at $600k, and $5k per district:

https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=pol&document=i...

You want the "working class" to have more of a say? Make candidates beholden to normal people to get elected. Destroy the machinery of big-business donations for campaign, and campaign management funding.

That's it. That's the biggest, most significant fix, right there.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-09-23 06:13:07+00:00
> point is for every other country in the world to see how much it hurts if you don't follow the wishes of USA

This is the symbolic value of sanctions. It’s a part of coalition building and domestic messaging. (Though if you constantly do it this becomes less effective.)

It’s a classic team-building strategy: costly signalling [1]. You see it in mafias, but like, also when a softball team buys matching jerseys.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costly_signaling_theory_in_e...
by slg | 2025-09-23 06:13:08+00:00
>Iranian IPs are blocked here, due to your decision to arm Russia with drones so that they can indiscriminately massacre civilians.

The "your decision" in that response is really off-putting. I know the law is what it is with sanctions like this. However, it is a failing of basic human empathy to blame other common citizens of a country for the actions of their government while we almost certainly do not endorse all the actions of our own government and would probably be a little upset if a foreigner assumed we did.
by Animats | 2025-09-23 06:13:11+00:00
Rungis is the successor to Les Halles, which was in Paris proper.[1] Like most of the big urban food markets worldwide, the serious wholesale business was moved out to somewhere that semitrailers could get in and park. The London and New York markets have been previously mentioned on HN.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Halles
by aaronmdjones | 2025-09-23 06:13:24+00:00
Industrial electricity consumers pay lower unit rates per kWh, but they also pay for any reactive power that they consume and then return -- residential consumers do not. As in, what industrial consumers actually pay is a unit cost per kVAh, not kWh.

This means loads with pretty abysmal power factors (like induction motors) actually end up costing the business more money than if they ran them at home (assuming the home had a sufficient supply of power).

Further, they get these lower rates in exchange for being deprioritised -- in grid instability (e.g. an ongoing frequency decline because demand outstrips available supply), they will be the first consumers to be disconnected from the grid. Rolling blackouts affecting residential consumers are the last resort.

There are two sides to this coin.

Note that I am in no way siding with this whole AI electricity consumption disaster. I can't wait for this bubble to pop so we can get back to normality. 10GW is a third of the entire daily peak demand of my country (the United Kingdom). It's ridiculous.

Edit: Practical Engineering (YouTube channel) has a pretty decent video on the subject. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwkNTwWJP5k
by Devasta | 2025-09-23 06:14:24+00:00
If anything I'd say it has the opposite of the intended effect sometimes.

Like, during WW2 the UK was being bombed and ration books and supply shortages were the order of the day. They look back on their endurance of the conditions inflicted upon them as a source of national pride, have to imagine that is the case for many in the sanctioned countries too.
by tgma | 2025-09-23 06:15:13+00:00
> Sanctions don’t apply to Iranians in the US

There is some nuance here. While some "sanctions" may not be applicable, the United States has a concept called deemed export, where exposing a non-US Person (~non-citizen with no green card) to technologies in the US, for example during the course of regular employment, can be problematic. Depending on the foreign citizen's nationality, the level of exposure that is deemed problematic can vary. For Iranian citizens, it is basically almost everything unless open-source. This is why all FANGs regularly apply for a deemed export license before commencing employment of foreign individuals with problematic nationalities.
by sorushn | 2025-09-23 06:15:27+00:00
> Sanctions don't apply to Iranians in the US

Sanctions absolutely do apply to Iranians (even dual citizens) anywhere in the world, albeit less intensively.

> not everyone in Iran is Iranian

Swing and a miss. Sanctions are primarily against Iranian nationals, and extend to any non-Iranian who violated the sanctions. If you visit Iran as an American/Chinese/Antractican you don't automatically end up sanctioned.

> The idea is to get the population to put pressure on the leaders

And that makes it okay? Nuking civilians can also be a tactic to pressure the leaders into surrender. And nukes may take fewer lives than decades of intense sanctions.
by elzbardico | 2025-09-23 06:15:47+00:00
Sanctions don't work. Period.

The only thing they can do is to make dictators more popular and provide them with an excuse for their economic and political failures.

When someone in Cuba is denied something because of Sanctions, they are not going to blame the Castro family, they are going to think, "Hey, Fidel was always right! those Americans are just a bunch of sadist psychopaths that are trying to destroy my country.

In general, a good rule of thumb in life, is that whatever policy people like John McCain or Lindsey Graham defend, the right position is the exact opposite of theirs.
by CraigJPerry | 2025-09-23 06:16:26+00:00
if it's just for detection would audio not be cheaper to process?

I'm imagining a cluster of directional microphones, and then i don't know if it's better to perform some sort of band pass filtering first since it's so computationally cheap or whether it's better to just feed everything into the model directly. No idea.

I guess my first thought was just sounds from a drone likely is detectable reliably at a greater distance than visual, they're so small and a 180 degree by 180 degree hemisphere of pixels is a lot to process.

Fun problem either wayway.
by mahrain | 2025-09-23 06:16:50+00:00
I have worked on such systems at Signify: There are numerous barriers to wider adoption except for very high risk situations. For instance: there have yet to be lawsuits to determine the risk of exposing people to UV. As you see in the comments below, any "UV" is considered dangerous by people not aware of the biological effects of various wavelenghts.

Besides this, excimer lamps have a low expected lifetime, of both the light source as well as the filter due to the high energy in the UV photons. This makes replacement (and maintenance cost) a real risk. This could be remedied by similar wavelength LEDs from companies like CrystalIS but these are expensive and very low power (only work germicidal on a short distance).

Prof. Brenner at Columbia University has first foreseen applications of 222nm in operating rooms, to prevent infection during surgery.

On the whole, it would need significant investment in both research, certification and risk analysis for this to become commercially viable, so while some of the technology is there, the market demand so far just is not -- post-pandemic.
by Al-Khwarizmi | 2025-09-23 06:17:18+00:00
That's interesting, but (at least from a quick look and a few text searches) they don't seem to explain what their "sanction contribution score" is. How are they sure that the cases where they "worked" are not regression to the mean (some authoritarian regimes just fall from time to time)? And how are they sure that there is not an equal number of cases where they do the opposite of what they intend? (maybe the Castrist regime would have fallen already if the country had been allowed to develop without sanctions).
by XorNot | 2025-09-23 06:17:30+00:00
No it's also just to deny those countries resources to come after the rest of us.

We don't sell them weapons, and we try to limit dual-use technology from being freely available.

Defense tech uses a lot of open source software and commercially available software - letting a regime simply buy technological advantage it can't cultivate is a good way to lose that advantage and then also lose the culture which can create it.
by crote | 2025-09-23 06:17:31+00:00
Golang doesn't fill quite the same niche, though: it's garbage collected, for example. I'd personally question whether we need the main pros of C for basic command line tools (that's a topic for another time), but it does explain why we're seeing far fewer "rewrite it in Go" sentiment. If memory safety was the only relevant metric, we would've rewritten everything in Java decades ago.

Language simplicity also isn't that important. Usage-wise you're missing out on a lot of potential features and benefits, and implementation-wise you're not gaining a lot as everyone just writes LLVM frontends these days. If language simplicity was that important, we'd all be writing Lisp these days.
by soraminazuki | 2025-09-23 06:17:48+00:00
A JSON-like language with functions is the answer here. When it comes to describing large, complex, and sometimes repetitive data, having a declarative language with proper tools for abstraction helps so much with readability, writability, and maintainability.

I've seen few thousands-line YAML files with anchors riddled all over the place. It was impossible to deal with. Rewriting it in Jsonnet paid off immediately.

Another example is Nixpkgs. It's quite pleasant to deal with despite the size of its codebase.
by jeroenhd | 2025-09-23 06:18:31+00:00
This kind of assumes Microsoft has not already tried to get an exception, or that its legal team considers it likely that an exception will be granted.

Various tools hosted on Github can be considered dual-use (i.e. AES/TLS libraries). Furthermore, Microsoft was made to apply sanctions against Karim Khan of the ICC for his involvement in investigating the genocide of Palestinians; I doubt Microsoft would be granted an exception so they can serve Hamas' greatest supporter after that.

I don't know if Microsoft has applied for any exceptions, but even if they did, I doubt they'd be able to get them. That's on top of the probability of bad publicity ("Microsoft wants to cut deal with Iran") and the lack of incentive you mentioned.
by ManBeardPc | 2025-09-23 06:18:52+00:00
Huge barrier of entry. It requires a lot of integration and investment. Getting another supplier to move usually involves handing over big bills. Even then it is not guaranteed that the change is (fast) enough. I see it all the time, nobody gets their ass up unless it’s on fire. Still some companies will claim „at least it’s warm now“. „This is fine“-meme is real. Resist change at all costs.

I’ve seen companies losing their by far biggest customer because they refuse to hire real engineers instead of juniors to fix their software. The customer tried YEARS of complaining before.

Another customer: different suppliers use different barcode patterns for deliveries, some including nasty stuff like NULL as separators (but only sometimes, can be space, tab, whatever) or non-unique IDs. They rather spent the effort to fix everything else with workarounds than change the contract and demand proper barcodes/delivery data.