MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kriops | 2025-09-06 06:36:25+00:00
“More charitable than charity” is circular – nothing can be more charitable than charity.

Something can however be a lot more valuable than any action by which value is destroyed. Destroying value, by the way, can by definition not be sustainable. Alas, opportunity cost is (also by definition) not directly observable, so it gets dismissed. Hence, e.g., the broken window fallacy.

You don’t “give to capitalism”, you engage in voluntary transactions with other individuals and legal entities, such that they are a net (expected) gain in value for all parties involved.
by kelnos | 2025-09-06 06:36:42+00:00
I don't think the problem is BART employees. The problem is twofold:

1. The community doesn't care. Leaving trash and making a mess is acceptable behavior. Or at least, it isn't called out (which I can understand, as there are safety issues around calling out bad behavior in public). This is the biggest factor: the vast majority of Japanese people wouldn't even consider leaving trash or making a mess on transit.

2. I'm sure BART leadership would be happy to combat this problem by cleaning more frequently and removing sketchy people from trains. But where is the funding for this going to come from?

> they should find a cutely wrapped Hello Kitty fruit knife waiting for them so they can contemplate saving their honor.

Even in jest, it's pretty fucked up to insinuate that someone should commit ritual suicide for any reason, let alone because they work for a transit agency that can't keep its trains clean. Please don't do that here. Or anywhere.
by paperpunk | 2025-09-06 06:39:26+00:00
I was only disputing parent assertion that trust is a solved problem and that banks don't "need" a solution.

I haven't the foggiest if stablecoins solve these problems any better. In theory I think all participants having visibility into the ledger would at least answer the problem of "where actually is the money", but I'm not even sure of that though because of fiat on/off ramps, custodial arrangements, roll-ups that might happen off chain, etc.

I don't know if you could use smart contracts to encode a recall/dispute resolution process into transactions but that's very hand-wavey and possibly collapses under scrutiny!

All in I've no idea if crypto helps us here but I do think we have a long way to go either way.
by somethoughts | 2025-09-06 06:39:37+00:00
I think there could be a case for a fixed amount of annual tax credit for each US citizen that is employed by a company - since presumably that person is not on the government payroll or on benefits so the US government is saving money.

The big plus is business owners love claiming tax credits. You would not really need that much paperwork or auditing as far as I can tell since you have every US employees tax info already versus trying to monitor/regulate "outsourcing".
by mschuster91 | 2025-09-06 06:43:49+00:00
IMHO at the core, the problem more is a massive lack of mental health support. People self-medicate their issues with drugs that they need to pay for somehow, and that death spiral is what causes them to steal without impedance after they burned out all other ways to legit make money.

You have a lot of countries objectively poorer than the conditions in where cats are routinely stolen in the US that don't devolve into utter lawlessness.
by xxxtai | 2025-09-06 06:45:04+00:00
Automatically switch input method according to the position of the cursor. Displays the current language on the cursor. Avoid typos and coding errors caused by language switching. This feature is particularly beneficial for developers whose mother tongue is not English, such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Russian, etc. At the same time, it is also a necessary extension of IdeaVim.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-09-06 06:45:17+00:00
Hill country TX where 8 month out of the year are 35 C daily and way too much humidity.

Agreed, partially. There are times one has to do things when it's blazing hot.

On sunscreens, we're still missing:

- amiloxate

- bemotrizinol

- bisdisulizole disodium

- bisoctrizole

- drometrizole trisiloxane

- tris-biphenyl triazine

While continuing to allow:

- 4-MBC (enzacamene)

- avobenzone

- oxybenzone

- homosalate

- octinoxate

- octocrylene

In the US, buying a safe(r) (for humans and reefs) sunscreen requires a medical and a marine biology degree unless you're willing to slather yourself in white pastes like zinc oxide or titanium dioxide. One major barrier is the law demands animal testing prior to approval.

Meanwhile, there are still millions of Americans (mostly men) who routinely venture outdoors for work and projects without sufficient protection and accumulate enough exposure that leads to preventable skin cancer. And I had my fair share of sunburns as an active kid.
by spicybright | 2025-09-06 06:45:56+00:00
If you see the video, the initial iteration just looks like specs of mud on the plate with the letters+numbers still fully readable. His ultimate goal is a custom plate frame that looks normal to the human eye but can block camera readings.

I can see this as being legal because it's still human readable.

Plate readers aren't expected to be 100% reliable as is (angles, lighting, network goes down, etc.) Plates get dirty, sometimes rusty. Also you can't test your own plate for machine readability against all the different types of systems cops use, so how could you reasonably know the issue is on your end and how to fix it?
by Jtsummers | 2025-09-06 06:46:37+00:00
Waterfall is suboptimal because it's optimistic and lacks feedback loops. Waterfall as codified was not the improved process Royce described, but the flawed process early in his paper.

It's optimistic because it carries an assumption that you can delineate your development into clear phases with a distinct start and finish. That doesn't work on large projects. You don't spend years designing your new system and then years building it and then years testing it. You commingle each of those, and once you do that, you're not doing Waterfall. You're doing something better, you're using your brain.

Iterative & Incremental, Spiral development, or most ideas out of the Agile movement are better. They incorporate feedback into the project and don't have strongly delineated phases. They don't make 10 year project commitments before they've even written a single requirement. Because these are methods that are realistic.

We didn't get to the moon by Waterfall. The Wright brothers didn't succeed in flight with Waterfall. Linux wasn't developed with Waterfall. Waterfall is a failure for large scale systems.
by procaryote | 2025-09-06 06:47:28+00:00
Queries like these

select primaryTitle, person.primaryName from title, principal, person where title.tconst = 'tt3890160' and title.tconst = principal.tconst and principal.nconst = person.nconst and principal.category = 'director';

are much nicer to write as

select primaryTitle, person.primaryName from title join principal on principal.tconst = title.tconst join person on person.nconst = principal.nconst where title.tconst = 'tt3890160' and principal.category = 'director';

Because you separate the filter from the joining, and you're much less likely to forget a join condition

If ambiguity of column names are low enough you could also use `join person using(nconst)`
by cdavid | 2025-09-06 06:47:51+00:00
I agree ability to use python to "script HPC" was key factor, but by itself would not have been enough. What really made it dominate is numpy/scipy/matplotlib becoming good enough to replace matlab 20 years ago, and enabled an explosion of tools on top of it: pandas, scikit learn, and the DL stuff ofc.

This is what differentiates python from other "morally equivalent" scripting languages.
by cookiengineer | 2025-09-06 06:47:54+00:00
I really understand the author's point of view, because it really reflects my perception of the ever-degrading internet.

What were interesting ways to share interests, hobbies, projects and free knowledge degraded post-social media into a cesspool of engagement, with the exception being the AI generated jesus or cat pictures.

Pretty much everything else went to shit and is created to make you mad, because that's when you talk or click the most.

A couple years ago when I was targeted by APT28 the first time, I decided that the only healthy internet time is around twice a day for a couple minutes and that should be it. So I introduced the toilet rule: I only use social media on the toilet, and I don't even have the passwords on another device.

This way I guarantee the same level of content quality that social media expects me to have, without the emotional aftermath when the bots try to reinforce you in their absolutist beliefs of why killing someone is actually okay.

It's great, I can fully recommend it. I've never been more productive.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-09-06 06:50:03+00:00
The bill: https://www.moreno.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/The...

An "outsourcing payment" is defined as "any premium, fee, royalty, service charge, or other payment made...to a foreign person...to labor or services the benefit of which is directed, directly or indirectly, to consumers located in the United States."

That exempts B2B. It doesn't have a border-adjustment charge, so any country tariffed less than 25% can undercut American businesses. And it weirdly doesn't use the words wage, employee or employer, which would mean a lot of consumer purchases would be covered, from airline tickets to Spotify charges.
by swores | 2025-09-06 06:50:04+00:00
I can't speak for Australia, but in general you definitely don't need to burn for increased cancer risk - a clear example of that is the fact that artificial UV tanning beds lead to significantly increased rates of cancer despite the fact that they're used in such a way that you tan without going far enough to burn.

Although we often think of burning as bad and tanning as good, tanning is nonetheless still actually a symptom of your skin being damaged by the sun - it's just a symptom that looks better than burned skin, to the point that many people think it looks nice enough to be worth the cancer risk (and/or don't understand the risk when they decide to tan).
by derbOac | 2025-09-06 06:50:45+00:00
My guess is it's due to two things.

The first is persona-centric rather than topic-centric spaces. The former emphasizes individual posters and attention to them; the latter, topics.

The second is upvoting and downvoting. As I've returned to traditional forums a bit, it's been refreshing to have the content of the posts be at the forefront, rather than the popularity. Reaction emoji usually suffice to me to fill the role of upvoting and downvoting.

Anonymity helps too, although I suspect it's mostly those other two things.
by jmward01 | 2025-09-06 06:51:33+00:00
The core questions are: Why does a company want to be a US company and why would companies want to hire US employees? With those two lenses in place does this help? The first one is a clear 'no', this makes companies not want to be US companies. For the second one it does give some reason but as others have pointed out, giving incentives and not penalties is generally a better way to do things since that doesn't remove a company's incentive to be a US company and gives them a reason to want to hire local. Similarly, ensuring the workforce is capable and competitive would be a better response because those give clear 'yes' answers to the two questions. Maybe invest in education instead of driving companies away with penalties? Nah. That's crazy.
by Telemakhos | 2025-09-06 06:52:05+00:00
If the problem were wealth inequality, that would imply that poor people steal because they are poor. That isn’t the case: most poor people are honest, decent folks. Studies of shoplifters have shown that higher-income people are slightly more likely to steal than lower-income people, and that shoplifting is correlated with other impulsive, anti-social behaviors [0]. That suggests that theft is not an economic problem but a psychological one. Theft isn’t a rational choice that “makes sense” for economic reasons but another manifestation of poor impulse control.

[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4104590/
by didibus | 2025-09-06 06:52:13+00:00
I would say that's fine. The law can do two things, incentivizes you to try to hire locally, and if you can't, prop up the tax payer coffins with a 25% tax, then maybe use that to generate other jobs, provide services, etc.

The more important question is if it will hurt the economy in the area. So your mentions of bypassing it, companies leaving to go elsewhere, and so on.

Personally, I think it would make more sense to tax companies that want to sell in Ohio, and offer tax credit to those who also employ in it. Though it's hard to predict how any such idea would play out. Otherwise it seems to hurt local companies the most as their cost to compete goes higher.
by balamatom | 2025-09-06 06:53:17+00:00
>Without a way of getting those things in front of people, nothing new could come to light.

If my environment was not inundated with advertisement, I'd only be seeing more things that I'd be willing to pay for, not less.

>I agree that some sites make advertisements a massive eyesore, but that's a problem that can be solved in other ways.

Ads are not simply a way of getting your product in front of people. Ever wonder why ads are the fig leaf for mass surveillance? It's because they constitute some primitive, mild, poorly understood, but completely socially acceptable form of *non-consensual behavior modification*.

That this has been tolerated up to now is a historical contigency. Much like other civilizational essentials like tobacco products and leaded gas, as soon as someone prices in the externalities - whether through regulation or through disruption - the societal attitudes to them will quickly change from "unavoidable" towards "inexcusable".
by kelnos | 2025-09-06 06:53:27+00:00
This post is weird to me, because it sorta feels like it's attacking a straw man.

The idea the author seems to be advocating for is is that, while maybe you sometimes/often shouldn't deploy on a Friday (or even not at the very end of any workday), there should never be a stated policy in place that freezes deployments.

And yeah, I've been at places where they have freezes on weekends, holidays, right around the company's conference, etc. But they're never 100% freezes: if something goes wrong or is necessary, you just get a manager to approve it, and off you go.

I think the author's exhortation that developers should all be able to exercise their judgment to make these calls is a nice idea in theory, but falls flat in practice. Every developer will not always have all the necessary context in order to exercise that judgment. Even those who do, and generally have good judgment, will screw up sometimes because they are tired or are working under some sort of time pressure, or something.

Having a policy -- with some flexibility and exceptions allowed -- makes it easier to avoid those sorts of lapses in judgment. And that's a good thing.

But the whole article is just all over the place to me. The author starts by implying that people should be "ashamed" about identifying with a no-Friday-deploy policy, but then softens to the point of saying it's fine to have a personal policy of no late-afternoon deploys, no shipping big changes right before the weekend, etc. But that somehow if that's instead company policy, that's a bad thing. Nope, I don't buy it.
by davidatbu | 2025-09-06 06:53:36+00:00
So I think a demonstrative example of your claim would be if you knew someone who is as accomplished with regards to compilers, language design, tackling really hard long term projects, but not as good at self promotion, and elaborate on what the lack of that skill-set caused.

The only other person I know of who has started and lead to maturity multiple massive and infrastructural software projects is Fabrice Bellard. I've never ran into him self promoting (podcasts, HN, etc), and yet his projects are widely used and foundational.

It seems to me like the evidence points to "if you tackle really hard, long term, and foundational software projects successfully, people will use it, regardless of your ability to self promote."
by treetalker | 2025-09-06 06:54:02+00:00
This might appear to be the case to a layperson but it is in fact more nuanced.

Scratching the surface:

Democratically, the public enjoys participation in policy development through notice and comment rule-making, but not through this accession/acquiescence (which is politically motivated).

And legally, the public can (or can more-easily) challenge and seek invalidation of rule-making, but cannot (or cannot as easily) challenge effective policy choices made through litigation strategy in cases in which the agency is adverse to a single party, to the exclusion of non-parties and the public generally.

Of course it goes much deeper than this and there are many other differences and considerations.

In this instance, your view of the capital/labor outcomes is probably roughly true, and I agree in principle; but the same procedure could happen with opposite effects in a different administration and with contrary rules, for example.
by nicholasbraker | 2025-09-06 06:55:33+00:00
You probbaly need a specialised crew to do this and as such such fiber won't be installed in your own neighbourhood for your Fiber-to-the-Home connection anytime soon I guess. But, maybe in a few decades it will.

When such technology becomes practical for the large telco's it will be implemented soon as this saves on attenuation equipment.
by adrian_b | 2025-09-06 06:57:03+00:00
Off topic, but the utility of the Hamiltonian is debatable.

You can solve any problem by using only the Lagrangian, there is really no need for the Hamiltonian, which also has the disadvantage of not being relativistically invariant, like the Lagrangian.

Also the name of "Hamiltonian" is somewhat misused. The most important contribution of Hamilton has been the definition of Hamilton's integral, i.e. the integral over time of the Lagrangian. That is an extremely important function and it would have deserved better the name of "Hamiltonian", than the less important Hamiltonian, which also was not introduced for the first time by Hamilton.

How to transform the system of equations of Lagrange to the "Hamiltonian" form had already been described by Poisson, and then by Cauchy, the latter using a form exactly equivalent to that presented later by Hamilton.

The notation H for the Hamiltonian has nothing to do with the name of Hamilton. Lagrange had used H for this quantity in 1811, without giving any meaning to the letter, then Hamilton in 1834 has reused the notations of Lagrange, adding "function S" for Hamilton's integral, also without giving any meanings to the letters.
by anovikov | 2025-09-06 06:58:50+00:00
Funny! Here in Cyprus in spite of totally car-centric culture, parking is free almost everywhere or at the very worst, 4 EUR per DAY in a few spots, but even there it's usually possible to find a spot for free.

Sometimes i wonder how our nation works. Low taxes, effectively no poverty among locals (and a foreigner can only be poor if they are an illegal immigrant, otherwise they lose their rights of residence and kicked out), almost no crime, and a budget surplus! And nothing seems to be a ridiculous overcharge: even healthcare is dirt cheap, funded by a really low tax of 2.4-4% if income.

All issues we have seem to be a product of culture/poor education, rather than economical - such as some trash in the streets or very poor quality of building and car maintenance. Also no Schengen but again, only foreigners care about it.
by Voultapher | 2025-09-06 07:00:44+00:00
I think you are severely underestimating the mental gymnastics these people routinely go through to never be wrong about anything.

When you go to the doctor because you child is on the spectrum. "Fill out this form Mam", on it is the question "Did you take Tylenol during the pregnancy?"

- You check "Yes" -> Your fault, should have known better. No help for you.

- You check "No" -> Well then it can't be autism, that's "scientifically" proven. No help for you.
by FrostKiwi | 2025-09-06 07:01:01+00:00
Author here, Thank you very much for linking! Masaki Kawase is a bit of a graphics programming idol of mine. Living in Japan, I got to interview him on a zoom call about what it was like being a graphics programmer in those adventurous times 1999~2005 of the Japanese video game scene.

This kick-started by desire to write about the Dual-Kawase Blur, a technique I stumbled upon when ricing my linux distro.
by procaryote | 2025-09-06 07:03:56+00:00
Having built a few high load things with underlying SQL, I've found that in practice, big joins don't scale well, and caching becomes pretty important.

It often becomes more interesting to find what bits are reused in several places and can get broken out into a useful cache (like person id → person name, thumbnail url, person url, …) than making a custom query for each view

That completely changes how you do queries as you can cut a bunch of joins. Instead you get a partial data set from the query that you then throw on a function or service that populates all the referenced ids from a cache, and backfills (and caches) any missing ones (preferably with a single query for a list of people in the example).
by finaard | 2025-09-06 07:04:27+00:00
Why not a subdomain under one of the public domains he already has?

For interactive use you'd typically only use part of the domain anyway, with correctly set up search list. Also has the advantage of easily making some hosts available via IPv6 to the outside - or with split horizon DNS and a gateway host expose specific services, where inside connection directly goes to the specific host, and outside via a reverse proxy.

Overall he's just describing a typical simple internal DNS setup - from the title was expecting him to talk about how he got a stable authoritative DNS server for his public domain running at home (and how he got around the "two nameservers" requirement).

On the plus side, that made me realize that my current home connection _is_ stable enough to host one of my three authoritative DNS servers, which should save me about 7 EUR per month.
by kelnos | 2025-09-06 07:04:50+00:00
> you still hear "The Bayshore Freeway" or "The Nimitz Freeway" sometimes.

Oh huh. I certainly see these tiles on maps, but in 21 years in the bay area, I have only ever heard of one highway where people sometimes call it by the name (Skyline) rather than the number (35). And even then, I think that's pretty rare. I wonder what's different about the people you and I interact with that makes it different for you.
by dureuill | 2025-09-06 07:05:01+00:00
> The commons are still as available as they ever were,

That is false. As a direct consequence of LLMs:

1. The web is increasingly closed to automated scraping, and more marginally to people as well. Owners of websites like reddit now have a stronger incentive to close off their APIs and sell access.

2. The web is being inundated with unverified LLM output which poisons the well

3. More profoundly, increasingly basing our production on LLM outputs and making the human merely "in the loop" rather than the driver, and sometimes eschewing even the human in the loop, leads to new commons that are less adapted to the evolutions of our world, less original and of lesser quality
by didibus | 2025-09-06 07:05:27+00:00
Oh wow, the argument was not expected but also very compelling, I'd been wanting to quit commenting as it's a big waste of time and often leaves me sour, as you almost always comment in disagreement or engage in tough debates and so on. It rarely feels good.

But seeing it as a bad ROI in terms of social interactions that don't create any social bond, that's quite true. You spend all this time "socializing", and yet gain no social connection from it.