MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by deadbabe | 2025-09-20 15:25:50+00:00
If your boss is pressured to fire you, whether that pressure comes from the government or a mass of people who don’t like you, the damage to our liberties is still the same.

Just because a million people hate you for something you said does not mean you should be punished as they see fit. Any punishment should be limited to social status, not employment or other societal benefits. Otherwise, why not just deny healthcare to racists, sexists, or people not aligned with the ruling party’s interests?
by necovek | 2025-09-20 15:26:02+00:00
With all the mention of war, people of the USA seem to forget that it's not a given all of USA would "stand" for the same side — it is so big and so polarised (with the latest political climate), that I wouldn't be so certain of it.

If we even imagine a war between nuclear powers like Russia and China vs US, I would hope that most of the smart, liberal population of USA would realise that this is not about "winning", but rather about having fewer casualties (iow, fewer dead people). And that is best done by less war (ideally none), and if war is in progress, figuring out a way to stop it as soon as possible, even if it means making some concessions.

While war does lead to engagement of industries which might have been long forgotten, in the big scheme of things, it is always an economic loss for anyone directly being hit. US does have the benefit of not having been directly hit for centuries (if we exclude a terrorist-style attacks like Sep 11th, or single instances like Pearl Harbour), but that would be hard to avoid in a conflict between Russia/China and USA.

And that's when polarisation in a society comes out, and with such a long, lingering list of "unresolved" issues, I wouldn't allow myself to predict an outcome.

While I am not a fan of Chinese or Russian leadership, I definitely hope that there are enough smart people in there to not allow such craziness to unfold either.
by Djonckheere | 2025-09-20 15:27:31+00:00
What a sobering indictment of our screen-obsessed world. It seems all roads lead back to the introduction of the smartphone —the mid-2010s, a critical turning point:

> "Never before has there been a technology like the smartphone. Where previous entertainment technologies like cinema or television were intended to capture their audience’s attention for a period, the smartphone demands your entire life. Phones are designed to be hyper-addictive, hooking users on a diet of pointless notifications, inane short-form videos and social media rage bait."

> "The average person now spends seven hours a day staring at a screen. For Gen Z the figure is nine hours. A recent article in The Times found that on average modern students are destined to spend 25 years of their waking lives scrolling on screens."
by bArray | 2025-09-20 15:27:34+00:00
I did check this out. The shell, perl and python are likely for scripting and not used during runtime. TCL is likely some form of dynamic scripting.

I think we also have to be honest about what the project here is too, it's not to have both C and Rust together, but to replace all C with Rust. In which case, it probably makes sense to just clone to repo and work on a fork like they did with SSH.
by dash2 | 2025-09-20 15:27:58+00:00
I only wish that Substack were a good substitute for books.

I’m off social media. I don’t even have Safari on my phone usually. I consume Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, and Substack essays.

It turns out I’m just as able to mindlessly consume this media for hours a day, and although it is not as superficial, emotive or corrosive as X, it is still no substitute for the deep book-length reading I used to do and now do increasingly less.

Literate intellectuals are stuck in the shallows too.
by rayiner | 2025-09-20 15:29:28+00:00
No, democracy is supposed to be two wolves and a sheep voting on who to eat for dinner. What you’re talking about are the anti-democratic measures the founders put in place because they didn’t trust democracy.

Look, it’s hardly settled that “democracy” is a good thing. The founders didn’t think it was—they restricted the franchise to property owners, and provided for indirect election of the president and appointment of senators by stage legislatures. Just be candid about what you’re arguing, because these distinctions matter. Jacksonian Democracy has a theory of how decisions are legitimized—by the support of the masses. If you believe that the government should sometimes do something different than what the masses want, then you need to articulate a theory for who should make those decisions and what confers legitimacy on those decisions.
by notmyjob | 2025-09-20 15:29:32+00:00
This saddens me. The view, despite its negative press, has helped countless housewives broaden their scope of concern from gossipy soap opera nonsense to current events and domestic politics. While they may not be good educators, they are moving the needle. It used to be unladylike to talk politics, at least for the uneducated class. Now we have daytime tv populism.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-09-20 15:29:37+00:00
Jobs like food delivery for Deliveroo, etc. are very low productivity and consumers are not willing to pay a lot for delivery.

This type of jobs can only be paid at the low end. Rates don't go up, they can't. What's happening s is that those jobs and services disappear. That's good if that leads to higher productivity, better paid jobs, but not if that leads to unemployment.

This has an impact on the length of the workweek, too. But in any case all self-employed must decide whether they can afford to cut their hours or if they can commercially.

The "welfare state" must be paid for somehow, too.
by pratyushnair01 | 2025-09-20 15:29:57+00:00
> How is this remotely appropriate to my reply, beyond a rather transparent attempt to taint readers?

Okay, I apologize for the snarky remark, I just found it odd that you called my nationality into question.

> Another incredibly weird comment, again wholly inappropriate. Does this tactic actually work?

This was simply mirroring what you did, I don't know if you meant it in good faith, but it was inappropriate on my part.

> "this is good for you and it's racism if you oppose it"

I would genuinely not have engaged with you if not for this comment. For my part, I'm simply concerned about racism against Indians, which I've seen increasing more and more in recent years. I don't have a problem with criticism, I'm just concerned about the slippery slope.

> Instead of hiring Americans to staff an American sales office

As I mentioned, I don't work for WITCH (consulting) companies. This is an assumption you made out of thin air. I work on a product based company that sell it to American businesses. There is a relatively handful of sales engineers/support engineers in the US, and not just H1Bs, this includes US citizens too. There is no undercutting here, it's a relative niche that American firms haven't bothered with. FWIW, I know a few companies similar to mine, where our target market is NA, though I agree it's very few. We can also afford to pay $100K fee, because of the smaller number of staff.

> Is it because you hate Canadians?

> From your minimal activity on here it seems that you're Indian. Do you think you have an objective, ground-truth position on the H1B program?

Assuming you made the original comment in good faith, I apologize for the remark. I simply lurk here and read whatever is posted, not much of a commenter!

> Almost as if it's a complex and multifaceted conversation?

Yes, but how often do you find people willing to have complex and multifaceted conversation? Purely from personal experience, the moment people find they're talking with an Indian, they tend to have many assumptions. Also note, I'm predominantly talking about conversations online.
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-09-20 15:30:40+00:00
Being the anti Rust alternative for people who has spent years/decades accumulating weird knowledge about the inner workings of C and/or C++ and maintain that being able to shoot your feet off at a distance when doing the wrong incantation is a critical feature to have.

I’m ranting but based the Rust/Zig discussions here on HN and the number of segfault issues in the Bun repo there is a core of truth.

https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/issues?q=Segfault
by hash872 | 2025-09-20 15:30:50+00:00
>the journey to modern democracies involved centuries of concessions by kings to the emerging middle classes

Eh, sort of disagree. The journey to modern democracy started with centuries of concessions by kings, first to other nobles (Magna Carta, etc.) Then, to other local power brokers like large landowners, business elites, etc. None of these parties wanted one single figure to have absolute power over their affairs & finances, mostly because they tended to make terrible decisions (random wars, taxation, and so on). Early proto-parliamentary systems in the UK, Netherlands, Scandinavia, Japan in the 19th century etc. were just a council of local, powerful elites who wanted to check the power of the king. The 'middle class' part came absolutely last
by leakycap | 2025-09-20 15:30:51+00:00
I liked this reminder:

> I wish I could say that I had taken my own advice, ignored the herd and struck out boldly on my own. In fact, I pursued topics that other people found important.

We should each follow our own guide and not wait for someone else to see what we see.

I think there's a better title for the article, though.
by walleeee | 2025-09-20 15:31:04+00:00
> the intellectual capability of a group of people is measured by the intellectual capability of the smartest person there, not the average of all the people.

Nonsense. The capacities of an organized group of people are very different from the capacities of any individual in it or the averaged capacities of its members. Even an absolute dictatorship where the dictator is resident genius.

Your claim is only correct if it's a dictator with an army of automatons. The claim you want to refute is just as wrong, unless the people follow a strict algorithmic decision procedure, which even the stodgiest bureaucracy only loosely approximates.

Agents and groups have fundamentally different dynamics. An anthill does things no ant can conceive of. Many human organizations filled with smart, well-intentioned people do incredibly stupid things. Etc.
by aewens | 2025-09-20 15:31:25+00:00
Lossy compression vs lossless compression is the difference of whether you can get a 1:1 copy of the original data if you compress and then decompress it.

A simple example of this is if you have 4 bits of data and have a compression algorithm that turns it into 2 bits of data. If your dataset only contains 0000, 0011, 1100, and 1111; then this can technically be considered lossless compression because we can always reconstruct the exact original data (e.g. 0011 compresses to 01 and can decompress back to 0011, 1100 compresses to 10 and can decompress back to 1100, etc). However, if our dataset later included 1101 and got compressed to 10, this is now “lossy” because it would decompress to 1100, that last bit was “lost”.

An LLM is lossy compression because it lacks the capacity to 1:1 replicate all its input data 100% of the time. It can get quite close in some cases, sure, but it is not perfect every time. So it is considered “lossy”.
by zahlman | 2025-09-20 15:31:54+00:00
> is that MAGA is playing politics by arguing about attribution.

Arguing about attribution would only be wrong, or worth pointing out, if they had a "MAGA" dead to rights about it. The context is a show that frequently bashes "MAGA", Trump and that entire political alignment, and only gets significant viewership when doing so.

> in the early hours it did look like the shooter might have been a groyper

This was a strained interpretation essentially based on the idea that groypers immerse themselves in 4chan political memes, as if it were exclusive to them. They have an /lgbt/ board.

But even if that had panned out, groypers are a separate, barely-comprehensible "far group". Rounding them off to "MAGA" would still be wrong.

> The "offensive" content needs to be deliberately inferred

No, it doesn't. It's an ordinary reading of a common idiom on these sorts of political punditry shows. If you're accusing someone of "trying to characterize X as anything other than Y", this accusation has force because you allege that X is Y, that the truth of this is plain, and that the person you accuse is trying to hide an inconvenient truth. And we know that this was intended as an accusation of doing something harmful because he described the "MAGA gang" as "hitting a new low" in doing so.

Kimmel's statement projected an unjustified and irresponsible confidence in something that now appears to have been clearly wrong.

> and the appropriate response is to clarify and apologize.

I see no reason to suppose that this would have happened. It also would have to be a retraction, not a clarification, because pointing out that the argument about attribution was justified cannot be a "clarification" of describing that act of attribution as "hitting a new low".

> We all know what actually happened isn't about what Kimmel actually said.

I agree that other reasons existed to fire him, mainly, declining ratings.

The guy also just isn't funny. He doesn't demonstrate any wit. He was just providing a space where people who wanted to mock Trump (or hear such mockery) could feel validated. There isn't exactly a dearth of such spaces.
by MontyCarloHall | 2025-09-20 15:32:16+00:00
>With books, some small amount of people read difficult works while most people read beach lit. With phones, some small amount of people are learning at rates never possible before, while most people consume Tik Tok.

Same with gen-AI. A small amount of people have become autodidacts like never before, while others just use it to replace their own reasoning capabilities, which atrophy as a result. I know someone who self-taught graduate-level math courses using ChatGPT as a personal tutor, and I can confirm they actually learned the material well. I also know college students for whom gen-AI wrote every single word of every assignment.

Any social collapse will be caused by technology further accentuating this bifurcation. The exponential increase of information readily available to us, whether gold or slop, means that the motivated will get exponentially smarter and knowledgeable while the less-motivated get exponentially more distracted, which will lead to unprecedented levels of social inequality.
by Muromec | 2025-09-20 15:32:34+00:00
When 51% of the eligible voters voters cast their votes to genocide the remaining 49% percent of eligible voters (which is not what happened of course), it doesn't matter whether genocide actually happens or not to determine that it's not in fact a functioning democracy.

It sounds like a contradiction, but it's not, because the critique of a democratic society doesn't have to be limited to a decision process that leads to certain behavior, but both to the problem that triggered it and the solution that the system had produced.
by maxbond | 2025-09-20 15:32:44+00:00
Thank you for the lesson. If I could return the favor, you may be interested in linguistic descriptivism. You probably won't agree with it but it may be educational nonetheless.

I'm always happy to put a smile on someone's face, but I think if you reflect on it you'll find that you have evidence to support the impossibility of goals you believe impossible (in other words, they have been "proven otherwise" in the past). If you've made up your mind without any evidence, well, you do you but that may be a belief that hinders you rather than helps.
by thisisit | 2025-09-20 15:33:02+00:00
As I posted in another thread people seem to be stuck on this point.

Lets agree - some H1B was exploited by sweat shop consultancies who pay less than Americans. And this might be incredible for Americans looking for work.

But in what world does this kind of policy implementation is justified? How is this a functioning bureaucracy in a functioning democracy where people can suffer like this?
by dragontamer | 2025-09-20 15:33:02+00:00
I've been told that reverse shot noise from a PN junction is quantum in nature.

It is possible for an electron to spontaneously gather enough voltage to break through a PN junction backwards. This shows up as a very noisy current measured in microamps.

--------

A forward bias PN junction might not be quantomly random. I'll have to research more. But a reverse bias PN junction is almost certainly quantum in nature.

---------

IMO, this is all just PN junction noise. Maybe LEDs are better than Zener diodes for noise. I'm pretty sure that noise characteristics are a guess and check methodology, it's all PN junctions of slightly different shapes after all.
by Wistar | 2025-09-20 15:33:05+00:00
Last night I encountered a 3 min+ ad on YT about the construction of the iPhone 17 Pro. A few seconds were devoted to the cooling system. I watched the whole thing. It was better than the video it interrupted.

https://youtu.be/_-AS5DtDeqs?si=rTfubRDArVupqREt
by tommypalm | 2025-09-20 15:33:05+00:00
This is a great idea. I'd like to make a few suggestions though:

- Allow filtering by companies and libraries. I'm interested in both, but I wanted to look at just the list of companies to see if there were any I didn't recognise.

- Adding a company seems to be just adding _your_ app. It would be good to suggest companies to be listed as long as you have some evidence that they use Elixir. I know that Apple has Elixir in their Environmental team, but I'm not sure how I would go about adding that.

- Move the category filtering to the directory page. It would be more interesting to see the whole list at once and filter by category.
by mallowfram | 2025-09-20 15:33:23+00:00
He didn't grasp that speech and text were the same in terms of arbitrariness, and he couldn't see that narratives are basically illusions in terms of their meaning-load. We know from neurosci any event has two dimensions of meaning, where it carries in past memories already formed, and how it creates local memory in formation. Both are probably limitless, yet narratives ascribe intent and cause and effect to essentially turn us into meaning zombies, forever revisiting the same unidimensional intents and meanings as if they are applicable to real events. They simply aren't. Literacy is dead for reasons McLuhan could not have imagined. He never reached the leading edge of demythologization, which is where we are, and how literacy dies.
by xYLS63 | 2025-09-20 15:33:25+00:00
I want to like kde, I really do. I've tried running it on my main beefy PC for a few years now and it's always so much slower (like UX of random things like opening windows and moving things around). On vm's it's just horrible and has known issues

I recently gave up on kde and went back to Ubuntu/gnome and damn it's nice

Just to stress how much I want to like kde, I've contributed quite a bit to kde open source apps.

The polish of kde vs gnome is noticeably missing but the performance is what kills me the most. I've tried it on multiple devices and I was determined to make it work but after years I'm going away for it for a few years
by myvoiceismypass | 2025-09-20 15:35:01+00:00
Your god-president lies every single time he opens his mouth. Huge lies. The biggest lies. He also ridicules everyone he dislikes. With hurtful language. All the time.

He has never apologized for jack shit.

> Anyone hearing this would take away that Tyler was maga, would they not? It heavily implies that he is maga, and that’s why the maga gang is trying to deflect.

No one is tuning into Jimmy Kimmell for "news", though I am quite sure that his show is more truthful on a daily basis than your Fox News & Newsmax liars.

> If the ultimate joke was to laugh at Trump talking about his ballroom, I don’t see what his maga comments added to that. He stepped into a hornets nest and added nothing to the joke in the process.

The joke is that Trump probably does not give a flying fuck about Kirk. He cares about himself. That's it. He pivoted right to bragging about his dumb fucking ballroom.
by tappaseater | 2025-09-20 15:35:04+00:00
You’re right — H-1B is dual intent. But my main point still stands: conflating H-1Bs with “immigrants hollowing out the middle class” is misleading. H-1B was designed to address shortfalls in skilled labor by granting temporary work authorization to foreign workers. On paper, it’s a fine idea.

In practice, the program has been abused, by body shops for instance, that we ended up with a new word: insourcing. That’s the real issue, and not immigration per se, but the way a temporary labor program reshaped whole categories of employment. And while politicians sometimes talk about fixing it, I wouldn’t expect much. If anything, it wouldn’t be surprising to see the “dual intent” aspect pared back in the future under the current guy.
by billyjmc | 2025-09-20 15:35:04+00:00
Energy is how much work you can do. Power is how fast you can do it. When you express these in terms of densities, it’s how much energy a certain quantity of material can store, and how quickly that energy can be released from a certain quantity of material.

If you short out a AA battery, it will get warm for a little while. If you short out a 14500 Li-ion battery (which is the same size and comparable energy density), you might get a small explosion as it dumps its energy very quickly.
by fluidcruft | 2025-09-20 15:35:27+00:00
Honestly just asking what good is Android certification on a device that has no network access?

Turn certification off and your... banking apps... and wireless pay... and play store... and online game cheat detectors... stop working? That you... already weren't using apparently because you have no network?

Sorry, I'm having a really the hard time following the use case behind the outrage here.

Everyone is mad because they won't have Android certification on devices that can't benefit from Android certification?
by westurner | 2025-09-20 15:35:34+00:00
Pathfinding is based on (lowest) path costs.

Solvers could be implemented as ILP Senders.

ILP has trust lines: how much [money] each party trusts each other party [with] is up to them.

Whether parties obey KYC/AML in pathfinding might be the higher risk part; mustn't the system disallow lower cost but higher risk paths
by ManBeardPc | 2025-09-20 15:36:20+00:00
Like a modern C with lessons learned. Instead of macros it uses Zig itself to execute code at runtime (comptime). Custom allocators are the norm. No hidden control flow, everything is very explicit and easy to follow.

But it’s not only the language itself, it is also the tooling around it. Single unit of compilation has some nice properties, allowing to support colorless async. Fast compile times. Being able to use existing C code easily and having optimization across language boundaries. Cross compilation out of the box. Generally caring for performance in all aspects.

So for me it is a better C, low-level but still approachable and not having so much cruft.
by deadbabe | 2025-09-20 15:36:38+00:00
I think the most optimistic future we could hope for now is some kind of Star Wars like future where incredible technology could be all around us but the vast majority of people do not participate much in its creation or maintenance, so the technology just becomes part of nature and we see people use it in illogical or anachronistic ways, because they don’t know any better. Life becomes something like the Middle Ages but with shiny tech instead of iron and stone. People can’t read because they just talk to their interfaces or communication devices. Most people have menial subsistence type jobs. And ruling over everything is some vast empire that is cartoonishly evil, because the people running it are as simple minded as the people they govern.