MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by judahmeek | 2025-09-05 14:06:05+00:00
The results of the Flesch-Kincaid readability test seem like direct evidence that politics is getting dumber.

> Do we want presidential addresses to be harder to read?

This is a very reductive question.

How would you address the dumbing down of politics?

> Especially when we're comparing to Washington, who came to power in an era when the general population didn't vote for president?

Thanks for asking this as I was not aware of how low the national turnout was for early presidential elections.

That said, a comparison of the Flesh-Kincaid readability score over time[0] compared to a chart of national turnout over time[1] shows that the trend only gets more consistent once national turnout of eligible voters surpasses 50%.

0: https://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/feb/12/st...

1: https://www.electproject.org/national-1789-present
by Ithrowprivately | 2025-09-05 14:06:10+00:00
There are several inaccuracies in the comments here.

Although in the past, simple DNS level filtering was common, Telegram's IPs are now blocked at the routing level.

Is Nepal authoritarian? This is a bit complex. If they could or had the ability to enforce all of the laws on the books, then you might be able to argue that.

Nepal is better characterized as loosely anarchic. The country couldn't function if all of the regulations were enforced. What works for them is rampant corruption. This is how things are accomplished. Aside from that, the state institutions are completely inept in almost every way. Even excluding corruption, there isn't enough competence to enforce an authoritarian vision. Nepotism and the other factors you would expect play a role here.

The regulations which are enforced usually relate to opportunities for graft for those tasked with enforcement. Otherwise nobody can be bothered, or they don't want to rock the boat, because the person they'd take action against also has a minister or bureaucrat in their pocket. Easier for them to sit in their gov office, take milk tea, enjoy their benefits and doom scroll the day away.

So while on its face, regulating who can publish a website is an authoritarian affront to free speech norms, it is better understood as a cash grab. Perhaps some high profile journalists might be targeted, that is a recurring issue in Nepal.

Finally, although their Telegram efforts seem to be paying off, this latest effort seems overly ambitious. They have bitten off more than they can chew here. Business is usually conducted with a fair amount of bluster and posturing in Nepal. If tech majors simply ignore it, politicians will lose face. In general, everyone despises them already.

Due to the aforementioned issues, unemployment is a massive factor in Nepal. Money comes into the country from remittance, because doing biz locally is a losing proposition. It is extremely common to see doom scrolling all around Nepal, from the KTM valley to the rural villages. Cutting off YT and FB will create a massive backlash against the universally reviled political classes. It might be hard for outsiders to understand how widely the political class is disliked for their blatant ineptitude and corruption.
by xyst | 2025-09-05 14:06:14+00:00
I already use podman for local development. While docker can run under rootless mode [1] and alleviate the security concern. The concern about docker being resource intensive is still quite true (which is why I avoid using it in my self hosted setup).

Rather _declaratively_ define configuration with nix. Deploy nixOS to machines (rpi4/5, x86, arm) and vms (proxmox) and manage remotely with nixos-anywhere.

One of these days, I’ll get around to doing a write up.

[1] https://docs.docker.com/engine/security/rootless/
by mafuy | 2025-09-05 14:06:42+00:00
The Right-leaning has a relevant influence on media because some of its supporters are affluent and it is in their financial interest. Ex: Bezos bought a newspaper. The same is far less often the case for the Left-leaning. There are few "land and factory owners" that are part of a pro-worker movement, simply because it would hurt them (or at least that's what they truly believe).

Accordingly, the average media experienced a shift to the right, but not to the left. To be neutral, one thus has to look left of the average of what the media report.
Show HN: Veritas – Detecting Hidden Bias in Everyday Writing
by axisai | 2025-09-05 14:06:47+00:00
We’re building Veritas, an AI model designed to uncover bias in written content — from academic papers and policies to workplace communications. The goal is to make hidden assumptions and barriers visible, so decisions can be made with more clarity and fairness.

We just launched on Kickstarter to fund the next phase as we move into BETA testing: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/axis-veritas/veritas-th...

Would love the HN community’s perspective: Do you see a need for this kind of model? Where do you think it could be most useful, and what pitfalls should we be careful to avoid?
by dreamcompiler | 2025-09-05 14:06:50+00:00
CHAdeMO is Betamax all over again. It's the best standard because it supports bidirectional power flow, which theoretically allows EVs to support the grid during demand spikes.

But if course CHAdeMO is dying. NACS is second best because it's less bulky than CCS, and NACS is winning in the US so the situation is less bad than it might have been.
by guenthert | 2025-09-05 14:06:59+00:00
Yes, Turbo Pascal was awesome and quite possibly the best programming environment for the Z80. The register-starved 6502 however relies on zero-page addressing for efficient code, that's difficult to exploit in compilers for high level languages (and hence why you don't see that in general purpose CPUs anymore). One way around that is to compile to a byte code which is then interpreted (e.g. BCPL, UCSD Pascal).
by titzer | 2025-09-05 14:07:22+00:00
It reads like the author never debugged a program. Development speed is not just the time to write code, but also test, stabilize and debug it, with most of the latter being a risk that might cost you a lot much later. If your engineers have to take a two hour or two day or two week timeout to debug issues from weeks, months, or years back, then that really costs as development time.

Vibe coding is going to make this so much worse; the tech debt of load-bearing code that no one really understands is going to be immense.
by ejoso | 2025-09-05 14:07:28+00:00
This math sounds really simple until you work for a company that is “profitable” yet constantly turning over every sofa cushion for spare change. Whuch describes most publicly traded companies.

It can be quite difficult to get this kind of money for such a nominal tool that has a lot of free competition. Docker was very critical a few years ago, but “why not use podman or containerd or…” makes it harder to stand up for.
by SJMG | 2025-09-05 14:07:52+00:00
> pay-per-use LLM APIs are basically incentivized to be verbose There's competing incentives. Being verbose, let's them charge for more tokens, but it's also not prized by text-consumers in the most common contexts. As there's competition for marketshare, I think we see this later aspect dominate. Claude web even ships with a "concise" mode. Could be an issue long term though, we'll have to wait and see!

> In an optimistic sci-fi line of thinking, I would imagine APIs using old-school telegraph abbreviations and inventing their own shortened domain languages.

In the AI world this efficient language is called "neuralese". It's a fun rabbit hole to go down.
by naravara | 2025-09-05 14:08:11+00:00
This tends to happen a lot with news of regulatory policies in the global south where Western commentators will hold them to standards of libertinism that don’t even really apply in their own countries. It’s some combination of ignorance about what the regulatory environment actually is at home and a certain condescending assumption that OUR regulators are fair minded and competent but THEIR regulators must all be corrupt incompetents with an authoritarian streak.
by jajko | 2025-09-05 14:08:24+00:00
Yeah but what we are all whining here about (apart from folks working on llms and/or holding bigger stocks of such, a non-trivial and a vocal group here) has hit many other jobs already in the past. Very often thanks to our own work.

It is funny, in worst way possible of course, that even our chairs are not as stable as we thought they are. Even automation can be somehow automated away.

Remember all those posts stating how software engineering is harder, more unique, somehow more special than other engineering, or generally types of jobs? Seems like its time for some re-evaluation of that big ego statements... but maybe its just me.
by mensetmanusman | 2025-09-05 14:08:41+00:00
It turns out you can’t have a thriving economy if everyone is just working at service jobs as floor stockers and barista’s.

If we are lucky, AI provides a huge accelerant to being able to insource manufacturing with advanced automation. This is an energy saving play to reduce the total distance that objects are shipped which wastes a lot of energy especially as the objects are of lower value.
by zahlman | 2025-09-05 14:08:54+00:00
archive.today at least allows people to preserve snapshots of selected websites, which is often important for being able to demonstrate that mainstream sources have edited or deleted content without proper acknowledgment.

Interestingly enough, Wikipedia once (I haven't checked if it's still in effect) blacklisted links to there, with compelling evidence (if you read any of the discussion behind the scenes) that it was actually about certain admins and power users trying to maintain control over the bias in main-space article content.
by thenanyu | 2025-09-05 14:08:59+00:00
It's completely absurd how wrong this article is. Development speed is 100% the bottleneck.

Just to quote one little bit from the piece regarding Google: "In other words, there have been numerous dead ends that they explored, invalidated, and moved on from. There's no knowing up front."

Every time you change your mind or learn something new and you have to make a course correction, there's latency. That latency is just development velocity. The way to find the right answer isn't to think very hard and miraculously come up with the perfect answer. It's to try every goddamn thing that shows promise. The bottleneck for that is 100% development speed.

If you can shrink your iteration time, then there are fewer meetings trying to determine prioritization. There are fewer discussions and bargaining sessions you need to do. Because just developing the variations would be faster than all of the debate. So the amount of time you waste in meetings and deliberation goes down as well.

If you can shrink your iteration time between versions 2 and 3, between versions 3 and 4, etc. The advantage compounds over your competitors. You find promising solutions earlier, which lead to new promising solutions earlier. Over an extended period of time, this is how you build a moat.
by loumf | 2025-09-05 14:09:41+00:00
I started writing the book in Obsidian, but realized I needed something a little better. So, I took it to Scrivener, which is where the first draft was completely developed (it can maintain references and a TOC somewhat).

But once I needed editors, it had to be in Word and all of the references needed to be rebuilt when that was completed. It's now in a contractor's hands, using some book making software (not even sure which, I think an Adobe product).

So, yeah.
by zozbot234 | 2025-09-05 14:09:43+00:00
> ... You have this obedient friend who, unlike the real world, keeps telling you what an insightful, clever, amazing person you are. It even apologizes when it has to contradict you on something. None of my friends do!

You're absolutely right! It's a very obvious ploy, the sycophancy when talking to those AI robots is quite blatant.
by growingkittens | 2025-09-05 14:10:13+00:00
I monitor kitten health while fostering. Continuous monitoring can be done to establish a baseline. It requires the right mindset, though. I look at the overall picture of a kitten's health while considering changes in status. The "overall health" is the part doctors are missing, because science is systematic (step-by-step) and not systemic (whole system), therefore medicine is systematic too.

(100% of my foster kittens have survived (out of 25) and I specialize in fostering the worst cases.)
by akerl_ | 2025-09-05 14:10:32+00:00
On a Mac or Windows machine, you generally need something to get you a Linux environment on which to run the containers.

You can run your own VM via any number of tools, or you can use WSL now on Windows, etc etc. But Docker Desktop was one of the first push-button ways to say "I have a Mac and I want to run Docker containers and I don't want to have to moonlight as a VM gardener to do it.
by hvenev | 2025-09-05 14:10:49+00:00
What I personally do is

User=per-service-user ExecStart=!podman-wrapper ...

where podman-wrapper passes `--user=1000:1000 --userns=auto:uidmapping=1000:$SERVICE_UID:1,gidmapping=1000:$SERVICE_GID:1` (where the UID/GID are set based on the $USER environment variable). Each container runs as 1000:1000 inside the container, which is mapped to the correct user on the host.
by clueless | 2025-09-05 14:10:49+00:00
>They found no guns or uniforms. Evidence suggested that the crew, which people briefed on the mission said numbered two or three people, had been civilians diving for shellfish. All were dead, including the man in the water. Officials familiar with the mission said the SEALs pulled the bodies into the water to hide them from the North Korean authorities. One added that the SEALs punctured the boat crew’s lungs with knives to make sure their bodies would sink.

Nothing to see here but a bunch of psychopaths killing innocent people as they screw up their own mission
by JohnFen | 2025-09-05 14:11:37+00:00
> Why wouldn't you leave your home?

Because I don't want to have to live my life under constant surveillance. That means I can no longer really live a free life. Even if you never do anything illegal or unethical, if you're always being watched, you're always having to second-guess everything you do. That effect is the entire point of a panopticon.

In the world you seem to be advocating for, the only time we'd actually be free and able to relax and be ourselves is when we pretty much completely disconnect from society.

It's like how when people know that their use of something is being tracked (think the old "Nielsen families", the tracking that streaming services do, or software telemetry) they use that thing very differently than they otherwise would because they are considering the impact their data will have.

> The Flock is a private company does not entitle them to fewer powers than the state. The state has a lot of power and is severely constrained; many of those constraints simply do not apply to private entities and individuals.

Yes, this is my point exactly. It's why exposure to the state is, in many ways, a lesser risk than private companies.

> Those are illegal already, regardless of the method used to obtain the data.

Not always, and even when they are, that often doesn't matter in practice.
by stanski | 2025-09-05 14:11:43+00:00
I thought about this too - own a small electric vehicle for 90% of the family needs and rent a bigger SUV when the need arises.

Until you do the math and realize that the 3-4 annual trips of multiple days would end up costing thousands of dollars in rental fees per year. Plus the usual inconveniences around renting.

Suddenly the math does not look so appealing.
by elliottr1234 | 2025-09-05 14:11:53+00:00
Take a look at https://docs.orbstack.dev/

It's much more than a gui for it supports running k8s locally, managing custom vm instances, resource monitoring of containers, built in local domain name support with ssl mycontainer.orb, a debug shell that gives you ability to install packages that are not available in the image by default, much better and automated volume mounting and view every container in finder, ability to query logs, an amazing ui, plus it is much, much faster and more resource efficient.

I am normally with you that terminal is usually enough, but the above features really do make it worth it especially when using existing services that have complicated failure logs or are resource intensive like redis, postgres, livekit, etc or you have a lot of ports running and want to call your service without having to worry about remembering port numbers or complicated docker network configuration.
by nickpsecurity | 2025-09-05 14:12:36+00:00
Here's some benefits it might try to offer as differentiators:

1. Easy packaging into one executable. Then, making sure that can be reproducible across versions. Getting code from prior, AI papers to rub can be hard.

2. Predictability vs Python runtime. Think concurrent, low-latency GC's or low/zero-overhead abstractions.

3. Metaprogramming. There have been macro proposals for Python. Mojo could borrow from D or Rust here.

4. Extensibility in a way where extensions don't get too tied into the internal state of Mojo like they do Python. I've considered Python to C++, Rust, or parallelized Python schemes many times. The extension interplay is harder to deal with than either Python or C++ itself.

5. Write once, run anywhere, to effortlessly move code across different accelerators. Several frameworks are doing this.

6. Heterogenous, hot-swappable, vendor-neutral acceleration. That's what I'm calling it when you can use the same code in a cluster with a combination of Nvidia GPU', AMD GPU's, Gaudi3's, NPU's, SIMD chips, etc.
by 1970-01-01 | 2025-09-05 14:12:38+00:00
Doesn't pass the Grandma Test. I could not simplify this enough to explain what this is to anyone non-technical and neither can you:

Tempo is a purpose-built, layer 1 blockchain for payments, developed in partnership with leading fintechs and Fortune 500s. With support for all major stablecoins, Tempo enables high-throughput, low-cost global transactions for any business use case.
by the_af | 2025-09-05 14:13:04+00:00
KPop Demon Hunters (which I like!) is such an oddball. It has a primarily Korean main cast (both voice actors and singers), and one of the directors/creators is Canadian (Korean-Canadian, but she lived in Canada since she was five). The show is a Neflix "Western" production, not a Korean production.

It has a lot of insight into K-Pop (idealized/distorted at times, but still with an occasional biting critique), but as a phenomenon K-Pop itself has become distorted in its "Korean-ness", right? Many bands now sing in English, and its intended audience lies outside of Korea as much as within.

The movie's take on "demon hunting" seems influenced by international expectations rather than by traditional Korean folklore. In Korean folklore, as far as I know, priestesses appease spirits/demons, they do not destroy them. And there is no such thing as a "demon king", nor is there a "soul" that "demons" seek to steal... that's such a Western concept!

Again, I think KPop Demon Hunters is a good movie! My daughter and I enjoyed it immensely. But it's a mish-mash of Korean and Western expectations, I wouldn't call it "authentically" Korean even though a large part of the cast is.
by BiteCode_dev | 2025-09-05 14:14:11+00:00
Even if it were not a bottleneck, speed allow use cases you wouldn't consider before.

I use Python differently because uv made many things faster, less costly. Stuff I used to do in bash are now in Python. Stuff I wouldn't do at all because 3rd party modules were an incompressible expense, now I do because the cost is low.

Same with AI.

Every week, there was a small tool I actively chose to not develop because I know that it would save less time by automating the thing than it would take coding it.

E.G: I send regularly documents from my hard drive or forward mails to a specific email for accounting. It would be nice to be able to do those in one click. But dev a nautilus script or thunderbird extension to save max a minute a day doesn't make sense.

Except now with claude code, it does. In a week, they paid off. And now I'm racking the minutes.

Now each week, I'm getting a new tool that is not only saving me minutes, but also reducing context switching. Those turn into hours, which turn into days. These compounds.

And of course, getting out a MVP, or a new feature demo out of the door quickly allows you to get feedback faster.

In general, AI lets you get a shorter feedback loop. Trash bad concept sooner. Get crucial info faster.

Those do speed up a project.
by masklinn | 2025-09-05 14:14:56+00:00
It might be that the average euro is less aware of continuous draw limitations since there’s so much more power normally (compared to US residential power).

Could also be that for historical reasons you could have a house wired for 10 or 13 A and not be aware if it.

‘Course you can manage that by having the chargers limit themselves to 8A default (or even always), at 1800W that’s a very slow trickle but it’s something, and even if it does not fully cover your commute it spaces out carger stops or helps condition the battery on cold mornings.
by utyop22 | 2025-09-05 14:15:10+00:00
"For instance, asking it to rephrase a sentence doesn’t really save me time, but it does give me some alternative phrasing that I might not have thought of."

But the real question is - does it matter? What benefit did you get from using the non-alternate phrasing vs the alternate phrasing?

It's not the same trade off as performing computation via a calculator to do more high value work vs doing it by hand without it.
by pizlonator | 2025-09-05 14:15:12+00:00
30x? Oof

I know that I regressed quickjs recently when I fixed handling of unions. It’s a fixable issue, I just haven’t gone back and fixed it yet.

I definitely don’t see 30x overhead on anything else I run.

But thanks for pointing that out, I should probably actually fix the union handling the right way.

(What’s happening is every time quickjs bit casts doubles to pointers, that’s currently doing a heap allocation. And it’s obviously not needed. The simplest compiler analysis would kill it. I just turned off the previous instance of that analysis because it had a soundness issue)
by CraigJPerry | 2025-09-05 14:15:15+00:00
Docker is failing in that trap where they feel the need to try (and mostly fail so far) to add net-new value streams (e.g. mcp catalogue, a bunch of other stuff i immediately turned off that last time i installed it) rather than focus on the core value.

It's not the case that they've maximised the utility of the core build / publish container nor the acquire / run container workflows and but they're prioritising fluff around the edges of the core problem.

Podman for its various issues is a whole lot more focussed.
by JoshTriplett | 2025-09-05 14:15:19+00:00
The most obvious pitfall: people are very very quick to equate "bias" with "factually correct thing I don't like". You need to train your model to distinguish "correct information people don't like" from "bias", and you'll need to educate people about the difference.

Effectively, if you're going to attempt to detect bias, you have to handle the Paradox of Tolerance. Otherwise, for instance, efforts to detect intolerance will be accused of being biased against intolerance, and people who wish to remain intolerant will push you to "fix" it.

Another test case: test to ensure your detector does not detect factual information on evolution or climate change as being "biased" because there's a "side" that denies their existence. Not all "sides" are valid.