MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-09-28 21:54:55+00:00
> "Citizens will be on their best behavior because we're watching"

Right now, I'm tentatively less concerned about them watching us. They haven't militarized the state this way yet & we'd need to slide a lot more for the boot stomping the face of mankind to get away with such total cooption of technology against thought-rights. Even if it is merely total corporate (not governmental) coersion/corruption against the population, I'm still not afraid of this bluster & abuse being gestured at the citizenry.

What does scare me is communication moving the other direction, not the bottom being read by the top but from the top being broadcast down. This scares me very very much.

Because Ellison's already control: CBS, Paramount, Tik-Tok

And might control: WB, Discovery (including HBO, CNN).

Larry's threat against democracy & the sanctity of human thought is serious stuff & perhaps things might escalate to where this becomes a real hazard. But the hazard today is that the Powell Memorandum (1971) is way underway and that the explicit plan all along has been for wealthy interests to use a political party as a vehicle to takeover and control the information that people get, to shape the media digest as the ultra-wealthy please.

The Internet has thrown somewhat of a wrench into this plan. But when more solid targets like Media Matters begin to form, it feels like the lawsuit-o-rama, of for example Musk filing existentially thermonuclear lawsuits in the US, Singapore, and Ireland, in an attempt to brutally over-the-top nuke the site from orbit (for daring to show the world the insane antisemitic and conspiracy nonsense he personally advocated engaged with and promoted, as well as for showing Nazi and very closely related content next to paid advertisements). Not just Felony Contempt of Business Model, Capital Contempt for showing what we did.

(Of course there's like none of the loud free speech advocates around, duly angry about this one.)

I am super afraid of Ellison's relationship with society, of what his incredible force of wealth gets bent to. But right now AI is far down my list, versus what's already here now, what the wealthy do to suppress other views, and when they deny the world their own chance to speak the truth & strive towards a just equitable & good planet. Ellison's media empire will one way or another be a first line player for decades. Overall Ellison's media companies seem not so far so pernicious, but it's so hard to guess whether lack of media coverage for large protests going unreported for example is reasoned choice or whether it is active suppression; it feels like already what doesn't get covered and who doesn't get airtime leaves the cutout shape of a hopeful progressive agenda behind.

Whether you agree with me politically or not, i sure hope we can agree that having very few people in charge of the media is a bad end. And imo it's more than a clear and present danger to our democracy, it's already deeply deeply underway.
by Tharre | 2025-09-28 21:55:02+00:00
> More evidence that USB-C is an insanely overengineered spec. Cables should be dumb pipes, not devices with their own active circuitry.

Why, to what end? They don't add any noticeable amount of cost to the cables and it's a whole lot better of a solution for consumers then requiring all cables to carry 5 amps and thus making them thicker.

> Did someone imagine a use-case where they wanted to detect the orientation of the cable?

They didn't imagine anything, USB3.0 5Gpbs with only 2 differential pairs, like you'd have in a usb-c to usb-a cable, requires this. And you can't just connect them together like you'd do for USB2, the resulting stubs degrade the signal too much.
by jorvi | 2025-09-28 21:55:34+00:00
> "Eigenmietwert"

It is not that absurd, we have the same in The Netherlands (eigenwoningforfait). And yes, we also have the property interest deduction, we literally call it mortgage interest deduction (hypotheekrenteaftrek, HRA).

They reason this is done is because it allows tax systems to tax main residencies differently from regular real estate tax measures, which is usually in the wealth section of tax policy.

It stems from the 1890s in The Netherlands, I assume it'll be around the same era for Switzerland and Germany.

And for other readers, yes it is as terrible a tax policy as it sounds. It is highly regressive, favoring home owners over renters, and the more expensive your house the bigger the deduction. In The Netherlands the current election cycle has it as one of the subpoints of our housing crisis, and it seems the battle won't even be about if it should be abolished, but rather if the timeline should be 30, 15, or 8 years.
by cool_cherry | 2025-09-28 21:55:56+00:00
There's a nugget of truth there, but I will say that the Swiss government has taken a very thorough/careful approach to implementing online voting. There are legislated cybersecurity standards for e-voting, individual and universal verifiability, pilot programs, meaningful observation, everything is open source, funding is set aside to incentivize researchers to find vulnerabilities [1].

When critical vulnerabilities were found with the previous implementation done by a private vendor, they dropped their vendor and restarted from scratch, doing everything in-house [2,3].

Not all jurisdictions are so careful. Over 200 municipalities in Ontario do voting online, despite no legislated standards (though a voluntary standard was recently developed). The voting systems are offered by private vendors, no organization is responsible for certifying these systems, and many systems do not offer any cryptographic verification of the results. It's quite interesting [4].

[1] https://digital-solutions.post.ch/en/e-government/blog/volls...

[2] https://openprivacy.ca/assets/knightsandknaves.pdf

[3] https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/politics/swiss-post-set-to-rela...

[4] https://whisperlab.org/ontario-online.pdf
by oncallthrow | 2025-09-28 21:56:24+00:00
> “Grossly offensive” is absolutely not the same thing as “any message online that anyone could find insulting or offensive”.

There is no statutory definition of “grossly”, so in effect it is the same. There is prior art for it being interpreted incredibly widely.

Not to mention the other incredibly vague adjectives in the law.

> Correct

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html “Don’t be snarky”.
by sagyam | 2025-09-28 21:56:56+00:00
Most cloud pricing calculators online are built by a cloud provider or storage server seller. As a result, they are too simplistic and always show their option as the cheapest. I have built an actual pricing calculator that takes into account every single variable to give you a detailed yearly breakdown for both scenarios.

You will be surprised to learn that once you start accounting for different variables, on-premises may not always be the cheapest option.

Features: • Comprehensive cost analysis over 1-30 years • Hardware, software, power, bandwidth breakdowns • Real-time cost projections with growth factors • Interactive charts & detailed comparisons • Export-ready financial models
by teamonkey | 2025-09-28 21:57:01+00:00
You cannot be arrested for sending “any message online that anyone could find insulting or offensive”. That’s not what the law says. You can be arrested for spreading hate speech, inciting violence, sending illegal media or harassment online.

All of the arrests mentioned in this thread in relation to these acts have been campaigns of intimidation, harassment and calls to violence, not simply saying something “insulting or offensive”.

In the UK political expression of free speech is protected by the ECHR, which overrides both those acts (look carefully who wishes to abolish the ECHR).
by ocdtrekkie | 2025-09-28 21:57:38+00:00
In my senior year (age 18), a kid jumped on me and tried to beat me up. I pushed him off me and reported it to the school. I got a mandatory suspension for "being in a fight" under the school's zero tolerance policy.

The funny outcome of this is that I realized I should've just beat him back, I would've faced no penalty because he wouldn't have reported it and he would've realized I wasn't a target.

I do feel like SROs (police officers in schools) are much more common today than they were when I was in high school, but I am not sure treating school kids like adults always works out great either.
by jen729w | 2025-09-28 21:57:41+00:00
I don't trust the UK government either. But I'm both British and Australian and I see the need for a centralised identity service.

Because the alternative is that we provide our passport to every online service that 'needs' to verify our identity. Then – lo, would you believe it! – they get hacked, and now all of our data is in the wild again.

I'd much rather the government, who already know everything about me because may I remind you they issued the documents, had some way of that company querying my 'verified identity'. They might do it by me providing, say, an ID number string which is looked up. That's all they get: my ID number. In return, they get confirmation that I am who I say I am.

Oh by the way I already have at least 2 of these ID numbers as an Australian citizen. My aforementioned passport, and my driver licence. Both of which I know I should keep 'private', lol, but if I want to interact with the world in any meaningful way the reality is that I spray these digits – along with my date of birth and address and whatever else they ask for – all over the goddamned place.

But sure, centralised identity is bad.
by hchdifnfbgbf | 2025-09-28 21:58:37+00:00
“Real alphabetical ordering” is incredibly nonspecific. It’s underspecified even for ASCII-US, but essentially meaningless for those of us in 2025 who need to handle Unicode.

How do capital letters sort relative to lowercase letters? How do letters sort relative to digits? How do you consider code points that can correspond to different letters in different lettering systems with different ordering? How do you handle diacritics? Do you want the behaviour to be stable through Unicode normalization? Should it differ based on the character encoding? Should different representations of the same character, such as blackboard lettering or circled numbers, be sorted with other representations of the same character or grouped separately?

You can come up answers for these questions, but there’s no unambiguously correct option. The least subjective option is sorting based on encoded byte representation (if that is even specified), but that is not “alphabetical” and would not be intuitive to most users.
by shepherdjerred | 2025-09-28 21:59:06+00:00
> If I run a 15A appliance on a 10A breaker, a normal person without training would expect the breaker to trip.

Would the breaker trip in this case? I thought in this case it'd be more likely to start a fire.

Edit: thinking about this more, I think I'm wrong. A fire would start if your wires were too thin for a given amperage. Breakers detect current flowing.
by sneak | 2025-09-28 21:59:37+00:00
> Should feminists be prevented from joining a company?

Depends on the views of those doing the hiring.

Should you be allowed to not hire racists?

You are literally arguing against freedom of association. We get to choose with whom we do business! That is our right, as well as the status quo today.

I don’t hire smokers or ex cops, as I think they are unintelligent and assholes, respectively.

If it were legal I would never hire a practicing theist or anyone ex-military, as they are signs to me of low intelligence and poor moral character.

You have the right as a free person to discriminate against any non-protected group in service of your company and business.

Someone’s opinions are fair game for evaluation. Think Windows is better than Linux on servers? Keep moving. Think being a culture warrior in the US is a prudent move? Same deal.

All other things being equal, I prioritize people who have lived in multiple countries over people who haven’t. This necessarily means I am discriminating against those who have not.

There are a million attributes we can use to make hiring decisions. It’s not only legal, it’s prudent.
by ecshafer | 2025-09-28 22:00:12+00:00
Not to be an anglophile but you are seriously giving that generation of british rulers a lack of credit. They stood up for the international order and joined two wars that destroyed them financially. Britain could have sat both of those world wars out. They could have said its not a big deal that germany invsde belgium or poland. But they willingly and knowingly undertook an expensive endeavor for a greater good.

When their empire was then faltering aftet world war ii, they then let them go. They set them up to be independent and had peaceful transfers of power instead of bloody civil wars like France and Portugal did. They didnt do it perfect. But they gave them independence, in democracies, with books of laws, and set them up in international organizations.

Britain took the losing hand and tried to set up a situation that a rules based world order could thrive in, and churchill was amongst the men in charge for that.
by elevation | 2025-09-28 22:00:17+00:00
The public educators I’ve spoken with are trained that any initiating any physical contact with a student even in self defense is strictly a liability and grounds for dismissal. The only permissible response to an assault from a student is for a teacher to use their elbows to cover their own abdomen (limiting damage to their internal organs) until the attack subsides.

While that instruction is to educators, I can’t imagine that school policy would allow student victims to respond any differently, because the parents of a bully with a broken nose could sue the school.
by oscar-calvo | 2025-09-28 22:01:09+00:00
I asked @copilot to build a terminal graphics engine—and it delivered. In just a few hours, without a single line of code from me, it created PwrSvg, a PowerShell module that renders SVG content directly in Windows Terminal using Sixel.

Highlights:

SVG-to-PNG conversion via SkiaSharp

Sixel encoding for terminal display

Full CI/CD pipeline, unit tests, and public publishing—all authored by @copilot

Cross-platform support: Windows, macOS, Linux

No file I/O—everything runs in-memory

This isn’t just a graphics demo—it’s a glimpse of what autonomous development can do. Try it out: https://github.com/calvo-software/PwrSvg

Would love feedback from anyone working on terminal tooling, graphics protocols, or AI-assisted workflows.
by ironhaven | 2025-09-28 22:01:18+00:00
The reason for detecting the orientation of the connector is for higher speed communication. USB-C 20gbps uses both sets of pins on the connector to shotgun two usb3.2 10gbps to get 20gbps. That is why the technical spec name for 20gbps is "USB 3.2 gen 2x2". That is what the "x2" means.

Knowing that USB has this feature is follows that USB-C needs to be self orienting in case both ends of the connector plugged in different orientations.

You say Ethernet got this part right, well it got this part right by not having a reversible connector. Ethernet has 4 tx/rx pair and USB-C has 2 rx/tx pairs per usb 3 connection with 4 in total for 20gbps. The difference is reversibility. Is it worth the tradeoff?
by mindslight | 2025-09-28 22:01:40+00:00
Seriously. This whole article reads like people congratulating themselves for pathologizing this kid's behavior, while not actually doing much about the obvious cause of that condition. They say the kid was suspended, for making a hand gesture in response to bullying. Why weren't the bullies suspended, especially when the pattern of abuse became clear? Perhaps twice as long to send a clear message and let the victim reacclimate to the school when they're not getting bullied. Ultimately it seems like the school administration is still mainly concerned about things that might cause some problem for them, and so is quite content to let such situations fester until the victim reacts in a way for which they too can pile on.
by phil21 | 2025-09-28 22:02:35+00:00
All this does is keep people alive. Certainly important and might solve the final "acute" symptom but doesn't address a single other thing in the parent comment. All which is very much true if you are paying attention to the way society has gone just in the past 50 years.

Civil engagement is down across the board. Standards are slipping at best for nearly everything, and societal enforcement of the rules has become more and more nonexistent if not outright punished. And I don't mean policing.

It's like a workplace. If you are dealing with problems in your workplace by telling everyone to go to HR you've already lost. You cannot have mommy and daddy solve everything and remain functional. If society as a whole cannot react daily to maintain order for mundane social interactions and everything needs to escalate to a legal or policing situation you've already lost and the "guns" part is almost irrelevant.
by Animats | 2025-09-28 22:03:27+00:00
This is way behind where HikVision is now.

- School attendance and parent pickup coordination. With a combination of face recognition, transit-station like gates, and license plate readers, parent pickup of kids is enforced.[1] Because they're watching.

- Campus-wide monitoring.[2] "Detects abnormal behavior ... such as people gathering"

- Detect climbing on fence [3]

Those are just samples. They offer everything from parking lot gates to millimeter microwave weapon detection. And with the newer control systems, it's all integrated into one comprehensive Big Brother system.

"See clearer. Go further."

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULsEFDwVKIs

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sthBo4kYVY

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nbch_TQEA0
by xorcist | 2025-09-28 22:04:09+00:00
The answer is more often than not alternative c) all of the above.

Development may be a random walk, but there are plenty of people with interest in a certain outcome, and when they get the opportunity they will take it and try escalate the process. That's true in most things.

I also tend to believe that it is not a coincidence that so many societies right now flirt with authoritarianism, for example. We influence each other, even more so now that information is global and electronic.
by redbar0n | 2025-09-28 22:04:15+00:00
Why would you even need to say «call for violence» if speech were violence in itself?

No one is opposing the fact that speech can be used to call for violence, but that doesn’t make the speech itself violence. The speech part of it is the «call for» or «incitement to» or even «lead to». But we must not mix up cause and effect.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-09-28 22:04:18+00:00
> It’s been about two thousand years since the number of months in a year has been increased.

What? What are you thinking of? The number of months in a year is always 12 or 13 in any calendar system because they start by reflecting the moon. If you mean the Christian calendar, it was fixed at 12 months to the year well over 2000 years ago. If you mean any calendar, it's probably been more like one year since the number of months in a year has been increased. 12 lunar months falls short of a solar year by about 11 days, so any given lunar calendar will generate an extra month about every three years, and there are lots of different lunar calendars.

(For example, the Chinese calendar occasionally repeats full months in order to keep the month of the year lined up with the season. Whenever this happens, there will be 13 months in the year, of which two share the same name.)
by crnkofe | 2025-09-28 22:04:44+00:00
Looks like another BS article that tries to compare a junior dev. to an AI. And its not even close. Anyone that actually tried to use AI tooling should know better. Feels like the CEOs that got sold this ideas are force-feeding this idea to senior devs and sadly senior devs are trying to gulp it down instead of rejecting the entire idea.

LLMs are more like a lightning fast pseudo-random text generator at this point. To see that though you'd need to run it a few times, test it and understand the output. Something that's a bit beyond the casual amateur ability. Maybe what we need is the AI bubble to burst first.

Its sad that we've gotten here though. Every tried having a coffee with your preferred AI as opposed to doing it with a highly motivate junior? Maybe you're not even going to get a chance to experience this.
by wgjordan | 2025-09-28 22:04:52+00:00
As a non-profit, the exact amount that Ruby Together paid Andre was publicly disclosed in its annual tax filings [1]:

2015: $29,250

2016: $43,988

2017: $48,143

2018: $51,058

2019: $60,000

2020: $32,693

2021: $21,420

The filings also note that "The entire board of directors reviews and approves (by vote) compensation for the CEO."

[1] https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/473...
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-09-28 22:05:20+00:00
He’s 55, and still learning new stuff, every day.

Looks like he learns, pretty much the same way I do. It seems to be common.

One of the nice things about being retired, is that I don’t have to retire. I just direct my own work, instead of having knuckleheads trying to steer the boat. Since I like learning, I look to do stuff I don’t already know how to do[0].

I don’t think he’s retired, but he seems to be in a place, where he’s free to follow his own muse.

[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/thats-not-what-ships...
by privatelypublic | 2025-09-28 22:05:20+00:00
That's humanity in general. But yea- general guide says "add up your open circuit voltage and don't exceed that." If something fails because of the panel manages to get more than 1000W of solar flux, and is cold... it's the mfgr's problem.

I need to actually look up why the extra flux increases voltage. Maybe it really doesn't but just moves the MPP to a higher voltage by having more current.
by HPMOR | 2025-09-28 22:06:24+00:00
Scott Aaronson worked on watermarking text from GPT to catch plagiarizing. This is the most commercially naïve project ever, given, at the time, most of ChatGPT's paid usage was from students using ChatGPT's output to cheat on assignments. If anything this should serve to disprove his impure motives in reporting these results.

I think you are missing the forest in the trees. This is one of the world's leading experts in Quantum Computing, receiving ground breaking technical help, in his field of expertise from a commercially available AI.
by nradov | 2025-09-28 22:06:44+00:00
Instead of spending taxpayer money it would be better to seize all assets held by Russian entities (including private citizens) in NATO and other allied countries. Just steal it all. Killing Russian soldiers is expensive so we might as well let the Russians themselves pay for it.

I actually do understand why Russia is attempting to seize Ukraine, and from a strategic geopolitical perspective it was sort of logical. But so what, that doesn't mean we should have any sympathy for them or let them gain any advantage. Better so utterly crush, humiliate, and impoverish them so that they cease to be a threat for a couple generations to come. This will also serve as a useful object lesson to anyone else who might want to try a similar stunt: FAFO.
by Tharre | 2025-09-28 22:07:03+00:00
It's not resistance per se that you care about, it's how much the cable is heating up which is mostly dependent on resistance per meter.

Imagine 2 cables with the same resistance, one 0.5m long and the other 2m. At a set amount of amps, the 0.5m long cable would need to safely dissipate 4 times as much heat than the 2m cable over the same distance. And you don't know how long the cable actually is (and they make 10cm usb cables after all) so you can't make any decision based on resistance that doesn't risk some cables going up in flames.