MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pron | 2025-09-25 19:23:20+00:00
There are quite a few inaccuracies here.

Palestine is not in Arabia but in the Levant, which was conquered by Arabs from the Byzantine Empire in the 7th c. as part of the Arab-Byzantine wars, and came under the Rashidun Caliphate, the first incarnation of the Arab Empire (which also conquered parts of Europe, BTW, not to mention that people in Morocco or Tunisia speak Arabic for pretty much the same reason people in Peru or Mexico speak Spanish). Warfare in the Levant obviously preceded the crusades by centuries and millenia, and included not only European conquests such as Greek and Roman, but also Persian and Arab conquests.

While it is true that modern Zionism originated in Europe, most Jews living in Israel have no European ancestry whatsoever. Most Jews in Israel have a recent ancestry in the Middle East and North Africa.

Even Ashkenazi Jews of a recent European ancestry (who are a minority in Israel) have genetics pointing to Middle Eastern ancestry. While it is hard to tie any group to ancient Jews, it isn't unlikely that Jews of all origins as well as Palestinian Arabs have ancient Jewish ancestry.

Just as European nationalism excluded Jews as Europeans, Arab nationalism excluded Jews as Arabs, and if there's any group that identifies as Jewish-Arab today, it is vanishingly small.

What Zionism is has not only changed considerably over time, but now, as in the past, there's great disagreement among those considering themselves Zionist on what it means. For example, as recently as a decade ago you could find a small but not negligible group of Israelis who identified as Zionsists yet were in favour of a single multi-national (or non-national) Jewish/Arab state, i.e. the same position was regarded as both Zionist and anti-Zionist by different people simultaneously. Today, many (perhaps even most) of those identifying as Zionists favour a two-state solution.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-09-25 19:23:59+00:00
You can make the best flying car in the world, but why should anyone care if they have no use for one?

The Metaverse idea was DOA, and not because of lack of VR headset quality, but just for the obvious reason that no-one wants to work that way. RTO or WFH with Zoom calls is enough.

The only use case for VR that seems to have taken off, to whatever extent it has, is gaming. If a new headset is a bit better, or cheaper, than another then it might be expected to do well, but it's not going to be headline news.
by fragmede | 2025-09-25 19:24:18+00:00
> In my experience they do work exactly that way, you take a vaccine and then you are far less likely to get the disease. It’s true that you cannot reach herd imunity or reduce the spread until you get a large enough population

The problem is there are some people who have real actual reasons they can't take the vaccine. They need the population to reach herd immunity for them to be protected. If other people opt out and there's no herd immunity, they die.
by NetOpWibby | 2025-09-25 19:24:26+00:00
Poor performance, UX, and reliability issues. WELP, seems like XMPP is much simpler to use.

For anyone who doesn't know the difference between XMPP and Matrix (like me): https://claude.ai/share/a2624334-d21e-455a-a1b3-9025c69a921a
by Arathorn | 2025-09-25 19:24:33+00:00
We're actively trying to fix that - we're finally launching an official Web admin interface as FOSS (AGPL) for Synapse in the next day or two (it was meant to ship today in fact, but got blocked on a debate on how to distribute the containers).

Meanwhile you can see me trying to improve diskspace for Synapse by ~100x here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5zAgVYBuGk&t=1851s - admittedly motivated by matrix.org, but it would improve disk storage immeasurably for everyone.

Then, https://element.io/server-suite/community is built to be a really simple FOSS distro (albeit for k8s) which provides Matrix Auth Service, Synapse, Element Web, Element Call and (in a few days) Element Admin all in one package for self-hosters.

And if you hate k8s, then there's always the trivial docker-compose thing I did for the same stack at https://github.com/element-hq/element-docker-demo.

We have very much not forgotten the self-hosters - not least because Element tries to make money by selling the enterprise distro for enterprisey self-hosters at https://element.io/server-suite/pro. The rule of thumb is that stuff which privileges the end-user goes FOSS, and the stuff which privileges the enterprise over the end-user goes Pro{prietary,fessional}.
by kamranjon | 2025-09-25 19:25:02+00:00
If you think that inference at OpenAI is nearly free, then I got a bridge to sell you. Seriously though this is not speculation, if you look at the recent interview with Altman he pretty explicitly states that they underestimated that inference costs would dwarf training costs - and he also stated that the one thing that could bring this house of cards down is if users decide they don’t actually want to pay for these services, and so far, they certainly have not covered costs.

I admit that I didn’t understand the Pro plan feature (I mostly use the API and assumed a similar model) but I think if you assume that this feature will remain free or that its costs won’t be incurred elsewhere, you’re likely ignoring the massive buildouts of data centers to support inference that is happening across the US right now.
by pavel_lishin | 2025-09-25 19:25:08+00:00
> Meta is dead in the water with most gamers after they locked people out of their purchases and tried to shove a mandatory facebook login down everyone's throat.

They're literally going to have to wait until the next generation comes of age and has disposable money to spend on a VR headset. And even then, they'd better hope that generation didn't listen to their parents' warnings.
by EGreg | 2025-09-25 19:25:12+00:00
No, you don’t get it. Hosting or possessing CSAM has criminal penalties even if no children were involved. For example AI generated imagery.

In fact, even if zero children are ever trafficked or abused going forward, and pedophiles only use old photos of children from 30 years ago, merely having these images is still an issue.

Conversely, the vast majority of sexual abuse of minors doesn’t involve images and goes unreported. "Considerable evidence exists to show that at least 20% of American women and 5% to 10% of American men experienced some form of sexual abuse as children" (Finkelhor, 1994). "Most sexual abuse is committed by men (90%) and by persons known to the child (70% to 90%), with family members constituting one-third to one-half of the perpetrators against girls and 10% to 20% of the perpetrators against boys" (Finkelhor, 1994).

In short - if they wanted to reduce child abuse, scanning everyone’s communications for CSAM would not be the most straightforward way to go about it.
by palata | 2025-09-25 19:25:52+00:00
Disclaimer: I am against ChatControl.

> Does anyone believe that predators commit those heinous offenses because of the availability of encrypted channels to distribute those products of their crimes?

Who says that? I don't think they say that.

> The authorities really think every predator will just give up and stop abusing just because of that?

Nope, they think they will be able to arrest more predators.

> More likely of course, those criminals will just use [...]

You'd be surprised how many criminals are technically illiterate and just use whatever is the default.
by throwaway314155 | 2025-09-25 19:26:07+00:00
This is off-topic, but I'd like to hijack your comment to remind everyone that your comment is _technically_ against the rules. I hope this particular example reveals that the rule against "RTFA" is misguided and should be changed or removed because it creates a culture where people are deliberately misinformed seeking only a summary in the comment section (if that) and some kind of hot take to fume about.
by colpabar | 2025-09-25 19:26:22+00:00
That's fair. For the record, I recently dumped windows for linux and won't ever buy/use a microsoft product again if I can help it, and I will encourage others to do the same, but that decision had nothing to do with politics.

I don't think I actually disagree with anything you've said. I am just very cynical, and while I want to believe like you do, I find it very difficult.

edit: "Can they not make principled moves either?" - Yeah, they _could_, but does that _ever_ happen at companies as big as microsoft?
by the_af | 2025-09-25 19:26:24+00:00
> Reducing everything you don't understand to "must be a bot" seems uncharitable.

That seems a non sequitur.

I didn't say I didn't understand this person, I said their comments are word salad and full of logical disconnects. You'll see, for example, the first reply bears almost no relation to TFA nor to the comment they were replying to. Then, when pressed, they responded with obfuscation. They reply with variations of "language refutes itself" and links to google docs with a salad of links that bear no relevance to the topic at hand. They claim to be researchers in a startup but when pressed, they backpedal into anonymity. That's... not a good sign.

There's plenty I read that I don't understand, and I don't assume it was written by an LLM. Most of it predates LLMs!

But surely you sometimes read stuff you suspect was written by an LLM?

PS: the commenter directly used AI (Gemini) in this response, with no semblance of relevance to the comment they were replying to (except responding to keywords, exactly what an LLM would do): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45374270
by gregorymichael | 2025-09-25 19:26:33+00:00
I love this so much, as someone who tends to listen to a single piece of music on repeat (especially while coding) and has spent a lot of time with Yo-Yo Ma's "Six Evolutions".

Loved learning about the deep diversity of recordings from other artists, the ambiguous history of the music, and that there's a question if the music was even originally written for a cello!

Also loved that the site recommends different recordings based on the mood of interpretation.

This all reminds me of the HN favorite, "Reality has a lot of detail." Feel like I just discovered fractal complexity in a piece of music I naively thought I knew well.
by threecheese | 2025-09-25 19:26:44+00:00
I follow a few Australian folks on social media, and it was really surprising to see how much of an Asian/Chinese influence there is. Asian flavors, signage, brands, even slang. It’s a departure from American cultural hegemony that I (as an American) just did not expect.

After wrongly thinking for my entire life that Aussies were basically American cowboys plus crocodiles, I now see news like this as just part of a feedback loop of accelerating loss of global influence - or more accurate, transfer of influence. Coca Cola —> Lychee.
by William_BB | 2025-09-25 19:26:52+00:00
PR is the atomic level of work. I'd argue PR-level history (i.e. squash) is often enough and is way cleaner. Why would I care about "commit A", "change parts of A because I misunderstood a requirement", "improve A based on code review" etc.?

If I want that granularity, I'd go read the original PR and the discussion that took place.
by sjsdaiuasgdia | 2025-09-25 19:27:05+00:00
But the text of the Constitution only changes through amendments.

That said, the effective meaning of the Constitution is "whatever a majority of the Supreme Court agrees it is."

And to a degree, given the power to impeach Supreme Court justices, "whatever a majority of the Supreme Court agrees it is, and with Congress sufficiently on board to not impeach sufficient justices to force a shift in the balance of the Court."
by sequoia | 2025-09-25 19:27:26+00:00
Here's a free product enhancement for OpenAI if they're not already doing this:

A todo app that reminds you of stuff. say "here's the stuff I need to do, dishes, clean cat litter fold laundry and put it away, move stuff to dryer then fold that when it's done etc." then it asks about how long these things take or gives you estimates. Then (here's the feature) it checks in with you at intervals: "hey it's been 30 minutes, how's it going with the dishes?"

This is basically "executive function coach." Or you could call it NagBot. Either way this would be extremely useful, and it's mostly just timers & push notifications.
by hawflakes | 2025-09-25 19:27:28+00:00
I lost track of it but HP, as co-architects, had its own compiler team working on it. I think SGI also had efforts to target ia64 as well. But the EPIC (Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing) didn't really catch on. VLIW would need recompilation on each new chip but EPIC promised it would still run.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explicitly_parallel_instructio...
by iamnothere | 2025-09-25 19:27:35+00:00
Even mass deanonymization—which is unlikely to be sustainable long-term in such an adversarial ecosystem—does nothing for you unless you (a) know specifically what you are looking for and (b) are able to either compromise the end server or identify frequent or very large transfers that correspond exactly with known events or data of interest (like specific uploads). There are some countries where the authorities might be allowed to round up anyone who has connected to a server without further information about what they were doing, but despite our declining civil liberties situation, these countries aren’t currently in the West.

There just aren’t that many people who are both legitimate and likely targets of such an attack. And since the most likely actor to be able to afford such an attack (USG) also has practical uses for Tor, IMHO it would be unlikely to do anything that actually threatens the network. I could be misremembering, but I believe the one big successful deanonymization attack was in Europe, not the US, and the approach used there would not have worked to locate an occasional end user of a busy server.

I am not really interested in debating this further. Feel free to respond of course, but it’s obvious to me (and hopefully everyone else) that you have an axe to grind against Tor.
by overfeed | 2025-09-25 19:28:13+00:00
No, because you're insinuating that since we're all responsible for some micromorts[1], somehow our culpability is the same as those who are some responsible for hundreds or thousands of morts[0], which is equating across 10 orders of magnitude in risk to human lives.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort

2. Is that what you call 10^6 micromorts?
by gloosx | 2025-09-25 19:28:13+00:00
No one is saying you should be banned from digging holes. The point is: if too much capital keeps flowing into holes instead of hospitals, bridges, or innovation, the economy produces less long-term value. That imbalance is what we call a misallocation of capital.

In other words: criticising waste != demanding central planning. It just means recognising that not all spending contributes equally to future prosperity.
by trhway | 2025-09-25 19:28:19+00:00
>Unit 8200, the military’s elite spy agency, had violated the company’s terms of service by storing the vast trove of surveillance data in its Azure cloud platform

reliance of everything/everybody on cloud platforms already mind-boggling.

One can extrapolate it further - in a near future conflicts both sides may have their data, weapons control systems, etc. running inside the same Big Cloud Provider ... in this case would they need actual physical weapons systems? or may be it would be easier to just let those weapons control systems duke each other out in the virtual battle space provided as a service by the same Big Cloud Provider.
by singron | 2025-09-25 19:28:55+00:00
I don't think there is anything factually wrong with this criticism, but it largely rehashes caveats that are already well explored in the original paper, which goes through unusual lengths to clearly explain many ways the study is flawed.

The study gets so much attention since it's one of the few studies on the topic with this level of rigor on real-world scenarios, and it explains why previous studies or anecdotes may have claimed perceived increases in productivity even if there wasn't any actual increases. It clearly sets a standard that we can't just ask people if they felt more productive (or they need to feel massively more productive to clearly overcome this bias).
by acdha | 2025-09-25 19:29:00+00:00
It’s true that they’ve made some progress but my work laptop running Windows 11 still has UI elements from Windows 95/NT 4. The file system hasn’t improved since then and the keyboard responsiveness is actually worse. BeOS on 90s hardware absolutely torches Windows 11 on things like UI responsiveness, ability to multitask without degrading UI performance, and the file system (not networking, of course, it wasn’t perfect).

I think it’s fair to question whether the decisions around backwards compatibility have been worth the cost but I’d imagine they’re already doing that. Enterprise IT departments love Windows but nobody else does, and the generation of people who grew up using iOS/Android and macOS/ChromeOS for school aren’t going to jump at the chance to bring that enterprise IT experience into their personal lives.
by btown | 2025-09-25 19:29:39+00:00
There's also the good old use case of "am I dealing with a subclass that overrode the superclass's implementation of the method."

How do you distinguish between a superclass that always returns null/noop, vs. a subclass that happened to return null in this specific case?

Sometimes this is useful/vital for setting expectations to the user what functionality the instance is likely to have.

Now, you could refactor everything to have the superclass's implementation either throw a NotImplementedError, or return a sentinel value... but changing every call site might be a gargantuan task. Similarly, adding static metadata to every subclass might not be feasible. But checking whether the function's (pre-bound) identity is different is a very easy hack!

Ironically, this might indeed be exactly what Apple is doing here, and they're doing it in a tight loop.
by mlinsey | 2025-09-25 19:30:16+00:00
I agree with you in most contexts, but "illegal activity (in the country of service)" is a tough one in the context of an invasion, a territorial dispute, or international espionage.

Before the current war, Hamas was the governing authority in Gaza, despite the Palestinian Authority being the internationally recognized one. Regardless, whether the surveillance was legal under Israeli law doesn't seem like the correct standard.
by tptacek | 2025-09-25 19:30:30+00:00
Even if they were full professors, 25 seems like a literal drop in the bucket. There are 187 R1 universities in the US. Competition for professorships is so intense that a lot of people look at grad school as a sucker's bet. I'm happy for these people and for Austria, but I don't see a real news story here.
by lamontcg | 2025-09-25 19:30:32+00:00
Sometimes you're overhauling something which you can't do in chunks less than something 2,000 line long PR. There's no intermediate working system. The problem is, "take this very large bit of code and throw it entirely away and rebuild it completely differently". Trying to craft some evolutionary step between A and B is just going to take 10x longer and won't help any code reviewers.
by magicalist | 2025-09-25 19:31:00+00:00
You claimed:

> Usually when a company sells to private equity, it is because the business is suffering from financial hardship or the current owner is unable to continue to run the business and cannot find a successor, so selling to private equity would be the least bad option.

private equity being able to offer more money for your practice when you retire than a dentist who would have continued the small practice is not financial hardship or being unable to find a successor, so please don't pretend your two comments are equivalent.

This comment is much more honest: there was room for financialization, so people did it. They were unable to find a successor who would pay more than a group of people that wanted to wring money out of their company. Gives the lie to the "selling to private equity would be the least bad option" conclusion, though.
by Arathorn | 2025-09-25 19:31:02+00:00
> Meanwhile, the company appears to have begun quietly phasing out the classic Element app

I'm not sure we've been quiet about it - c.f. https://element.io/blog/element-x-ignition/ :P

> it still misses crucial features like threads and spaces

fwiw, threads & spaces are in beta right now on Element X iOS and Android, aiming to launch in the coming weeks. If you are unafraid of bugs, and bearing in mind that it's very still WIP and none of the perf work has happened yet, you can enable dev mode by 7-tapping the version number in settings and enabling them on.

> Matrix was never good.

I'd be first to admit that Matrix clients like Element have had their usability challenges over the years. However, we have spent the last 2-3 years doing nothing but trying to fix this, and we believe the Element X generation finally punches its weight against the proprietary/centralised alts.

Live location share is next on the list after Thread/Spaces; "Low priority" is already an option in dev settings, and then Widgets are pretty much the last thing left.

You can see a full parity comparison between Element Classic & Element X at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17_j_HAPZEopqDAbKKsaw... fwiw - which hopefully puts the "EX is missing crucial features" complaint more in context.
by palata | 2025-09-25 19:31:15+00:00
This is nonsense. Anyone who has the smallest clue would use Signal for anything sensitive. Of course people would use Signal to talk about illegal stuff.

I am against ChatControl. But I am amazed by all the bullshit arguments that people find to criticise ChatControl.

If you have more control, obviously it's easier to track criminals. That's not the question at all. The question is: what is the cost to society? A few decades ago, all communications were unencrypted and people were fine. Why would it be different now? That's the question you need to answer.
by Vespasian | 2025-09-25 19:31:47+00:00
Microsoft as well and even OpenAI.

They do it quietly offer clear benefits to decision makers (e.g. Palantir with it's promise to reduce crime) and give up control where it doesn't disturb their core business model.

Apple on the other hand is pretty much absolute in its desire control the Hardware and the software. They act like they themselves are beyond any doubt and publicly denounce politicians with their contrarian attitude.

There is some strategy to this madness I'm sure but I don't see it.
by saghm | 2025-09-25 19:32:12+00:00
> Logging does seem like a very similar case to debugging, only that you expect to leave it on in production

In a lot of logging systems, debug is one of the common levels of logging. I'm not even convinced that the term "debug" is unambiguous to clearly refer to something that's not a subset logging. Presumably the difference is intended to mean things printed that are unconditionally going to stdout rather than into some system that might change the output location and filter/annotate things, but I have to imagine that it might just make more sense not to have separate models for them at all
by Daniel15568 | 2025-09-25 19:32:16+00:00
I built Data-Cent because I often need to explore CSVs quickly without firing up pandas or writing custom code.

It’s a Streamlit-based web app where you can: • Upload CSV files (no setup) • Auto-filter and explore the data • Create interactive charts (line, bar, scatter, etc.) • Run quick stats (mean, median, std) • Download a PDF/HTML report of your analysis

Live demo: https://data-cent.streamlit.app/ Source: https://github.com/data-centt/Data-Analytics

Would love feedback on performance and UI/UX — especially from folks who explore data often or build Streamlit apps.

If you find it interesting please help me star the repo. TY