MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-09-21 21:32:51+00:00
The low-hanging fruit is regional rail. Caltrain, LIRR, et cetera. That together with a robust metro system that links parking garages and airports is the realistic multi-modal transport we need.

Too many rail projects seem to have been prosecuted by purists who are anti-car or anti-plane. That leads to bloat, or ignoring designs that would increase real ridership (e.g. adequate parking at endpoint, or RORO stock).
by varispeed | 2025-09-21 21:35:51+00:00
The funding squeeze is real, but that’s not the whole story. Universities didn’t have to turn into diploma/visa mills - they chose to. Instead of protecting standards, they pivoted to a business model of brand-selling: recruiting overseas students at inflated rates and cutting corners on teaching.

Domestic students end up with debt for degrees that deliver little value, often taught by underqualified lecturers. Those who complain get brushed off or quietly bought out with NDA-style settlements. Foreign students mostly keep quiet because openly questioning standards would devalue their own diploma.

So yes, funding cuts mattered - but the bigger scandal is how universities responded. They saw the “golden years” were over and decided to milk the brand, not safeguard education.

They are basically a scam.
by JadeNB | 2025-09-21 21:36:24+00:00
> Fun fact: by law, Amtrak has priority. Not that it matters much, even back when laws themselves mattered.

Are you sure about that? I've never looked up the law, but my understanding is that, for most (all?) of its routes, Amtrak is running on privately owned track, and, on such track, freight has priority.

(I'm surprised at the number of downvotes. The replies indicated that I'm wrong, which is awesome in the sense that I like riding Amtrak and want it to have priority, and so I understand the frustration; but I think that I cannot be the only one who has heard from every Amtrak rider they've talked to that freight has priority, and surely it's a good thing to seek an authoritative answer? Maybe it looked like I was rhetorically saying that someone was wrong rather than honestly seeking clarification.)
by fsckboy | 2025-09-21 21:36:25+00:00
when you are fired, you are free to disparage your former employer. she was not free to do that because she signed away that right, and you can only sign away something in exchange for something, which she obviously took.

when you don't mention or acknowledge this aspect, you are not making a convincing argument. perhaps they gave her a very attractive severance package, and you don't know that they didn't, so how can you draw a conclusion?

life threatening health problems is not a free pass to "i get whatever i want", not for me, not for you, and not for her, although we know that in the world of Karens it is an entitlement.
by madaxe_again | 2025-09-21 21:36:40+00:00
I think you touch upon something sound, there - while societal and group trauma is certainly a thing, we generally call it culture.

On the individual level… for me, certainly, the hardest part of dealing with my particular flavour of living nightmare was that literally nobody could relate to it, and the others who went through it are scattered to the winds. When you explain something painful and the response is “I would have considered myself lucky to be in your situation” or words to the effect, it’s a rather lonely thing.

In the past, if you said “the baron came and murdered my child on a whim”, people would likely sympathise - in today’s society… well. We have such a buffet of lives and possibilities that comprehension of the worlds of others is increasingly challenging.

Solzhenitsyn put it well - can a man who is freezing understand one who is starving?
by moffkalast | 2025-09-21 21:36:43+00:00
What are you even on about, why would I need sympathy for an optional interest that is by all accounts pretty mainstream and well established worldwide? It's not a disability, it's not an endangered species, it's a billion dollar commercial industry. I just don't see the appeal.

In a just world LaLiga would get sued into the ground for disabling a public utility on a level equivallent to an international cyberattack. Oh but how will the poor millionaires break even with their overpriced streaming services if they can't destroy the internet to block some pirates? Jesus Christ, the audacity.
by nmstoker | 2025-09-21 21:37:08+00:00
This is the sort of idea that gets momentum just because people don't find it easy to recall counter examples on the basis the idea puts the problem: most people aren't mentally indexing tech on a weaponized or not basis. Therefore to validate the idea they need to do a scan of technologies in their memory, many give up and just accept it.

Fortunately as people here demonstrated there are a myriad of counter examples.

I look forward to someone challenging Brown regarding the weaponization of the dishwasher! And the zipper, velcro, food processors, air-conditioning, elevators, escalators, weighing scales, thermometers and wind turbines!
by tguvot | 2025-09-21 21:37:20+00:00
actually, hamas took over gaza because of USA. Netanyahu had nothing to do with it. Small refresher on palestinian politics:

- 2006 Elections were general elections in Palestinian Autonomy

- Both Israel and PA were against elections because they were afraid that Hamas will win but USA forced it because "democracy shall prevail and will resolve everything"

- Hamas won general elections in Palestinian Autonomy in 2006 and assembled government chaired by ismail haniyeh as prime minister

- USA is shocked as "nobody saw it coming"

- USA trained Fatah to coup against legitimate Palestinian government

- Coup succeeded in west bank and failed in gaza in 2007

- During coup, Hamas killed, dragged behind bikes or threw from rooftops those that opposed it

- After coup, Hamas tortured into obedience or killed all remaining opposition
by JadeNB | 2025-09-21 21:38:14+00:00
> I recently saw that Canadian passenger railways have security checks and bag check-in just like airlines :-))

It's probably harder to drive a train into something than it is to fly a plane into something, but a bomb on a train could do a lot of damage even if it wasn't as cinematic as a bomb on a plane. And, having traveled on Amtrak and seen what people try to cram in to the limited space available, it's not clear to me that some sort of baggage control is automatically a bad thing.

(Don't get me wrong, I like not having to go through those airport-style controls, but it's a tragedy of the commons sort of thing, where abuse of it by a few renders it unpleasant for everyone.)
by ants_everywhere | 2025-09-21 21:38:34+00:00
Acute in the sense that it's delivered all at once, not that its effects are short-lived. For example, the DSM defines PTSD, which is post-traumatic stess disorder. I.e. a trauma occurred (acute stess) and the lingering disorder is a stess disorder rather than a trauma disorder. You might colloquially say you have been living with the trauma of PTSD, but that doesn't make sense; you're really living with the stress of PTSD after having experienced the initial trauma.

They don't use the words "acute" or "chronic", that was my attempt to explain it to a lay audience. The first paragraph of Wikipedia describes it as "caused by severe distressing events, such as bodily injury, sexual violence, or other threats to the life of the subject or their loved ones." The DSM-V diagnosis requires "exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence." I.e. a traumatic event.

You can experience multiple traumatic events. But, medically, the distinction seems to be that delivering stress chemicals to your body all at once produces a different response than delivering them consistently over time.

> the trauma of child abuse or sexual abuse, which is often not acute.

People talk this way. Dictionary.com also mentions the "trauma of divorce." The trauma of divorce is clearly metaphorical rather than actual trauma. Sexual violence does count as a traumatic event. Violence toward children would also count as a traumatic event. Whether a child (or even adult) that has been abused has PTSD depends on the facts of the case.

One should not assume that trauma is better or more severe than stress delivered over a longer period. Imprisonment, child abuse, and working in a military hospital are all things that come to mind as experiences that would leave a lasting impression. But those symptoms would generally not be the same as trauma symptoms.

You do have to be careful on Wikipedia with this topic because they mention unconscious suppression of child abuse, which is not a thing that happens. It also says awareness of climate change causes trauma, which it does not. The article needs a pass from someone with a professional background.
by mschuster91 | 2025-09-21 21:38:34+00:00
> A subway line should be buildable within one political term.

That used to be the case maybe 50 years ago, when we had the first network built in Munich.

The problem is, since then a loooooot of stuff was built underground. Not just more and more tunnels, but also so many subterranean lines for power, POTS, internet... and a lot of what was built 50 years ago was built by literally ripping open a street, excavating tunnel space, building a roof of concrete and backfilling everything with soil. You simply can do this exactly once and you need a wide enough street to do this. Once all these "cheap and easy" routes are built over, it becomes a multi-billion-dollar project as you have to make sure you don't endanger the buildings on top - in Cologne, that cost the lives of two people and destroyed a good portion of the City Archives [1].

> The property tax rate should rise or fall within a time frame that would incentivize people to vote with their feet.

People should not be forced to move, at all. Incentivizing movement, okay, but forcing people around like we do now (mostly, by not having any kind of modern jobs in rural areas) has a lot of nasty side effects - not everyone can move, so you get resentment building up against those that did move (eventually culminating in the "these librul cities turn our kids gay!!!" bullshit and, subsequently, the massive urban-rural political disconnect), and a lot of old people in rural areas end up having no one to take care of them in old(er) age, and young people in urban areas don't have kids because they don't have family to support them in raising said children.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historisches_Archiv_der_Stadt_...
by AshamedCaptain | 2025-09-21 21:39:32+00:00
> I see an article from 2001 describing how compiled software was not copyrightable in Spain at that time

Compiled software is not copyrightable in any country that I know of. Compilation is not an original creative process. The original software is copyrightable, and compiling it creates a (protected) derived work of it.

> I see that individual file sharing, except for software, is allowed there.

The Pirate Bay is censored in Spain as much as it is on France.
by JadeNB | 2025-09-21 21:39:56+00:00
Why would this be an issue with the driver? I don't mean that combatively; I really don't see it. It seems to me that any form of transit, autonomous or not, either runs on some sort of centrally controlled schedule subject to optimization, or can be summoned on demand, in which case it only works as long as not too many people use it (usually because of cost), or else it will lead to traffic congestion and worsen rather than improve traffic.
by pseudalopex | 2025-09-21 21:41:04+00:00
> I did not say that you did say that.

I did not say you said I said that. My point was it was irrelevant.

> And I explained why history is not the same as out of date information. Thus, you have not explained why someone would submit an article with out of date information.

There is nothing to explain. Some history is on topic. History includes articles with out of date information. Consider the 1st Linux announcement.[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6276961
by myvoiceismypass | 2025-09-21 21:41:12+00:00
It always floored me when I moved to the Bay Area that Caltrain from SJ to SF took about as long as Amtrak from Philly to NYC (twice the distance). I know they are different systems and electric Caltrain is faster, but still, it felt like a step back rail wise. Also, Amtrak out here stops running so ridiculously early, which is very frustrating.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-09-21 21:41:36+00:00
Gaza is getting 3,004 calories of energy per day per person.

Official rations in Germany varied from 800–1550 calories per day. 800 airdropped, 1550 the amount post occupation. Are you arguing Israel should fully occupy and partition Gaza, like the allies did in Germany, and cut from the 3004 current calorie target to the 1550 one used by the USA in occupied Germany?

What is different here? Germans in occupied Germany received LESS food than Gazan do today. Are you saying you want less food to go into Gaza because Gaza is getting twice the calorie targets of what the USA targeted for occupied Germany? Germany was fire bombed (much much worse than the bombing in Gaza) and given 1/3 to 1/2 as much food going on years after the conflict ended. I'm really confused what you are pushing for? I thought people wanted more food into Gaza, not severely less like how the USA treated occupied Germany.

It sounds like you are saying Israel would be more just if they firebombed Gaza then partitioned it into smaller pieces isolating residents to those areas, and cut food in half from what Gaza is getting fed today? And that's ignoring the mass mass rapes that occured in Germany. What you are arguing for would be very, very bad.

https://ijhpr.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13584-025-...

https://hhr-atlas.ieg-mainz.de/articles/oconnell-washington-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_in_occupied_Germany
by scyzoryk_xyz | 2025-09-21 21:41:39+00:00
I don't think these two are exclusive. The Terry Pratchett quote there at the end of that reads like it's a tounge-in-cheek reduction, with a sense of humor. Obviously we're more complex than that, but sometimes we really are that simple and that's ok too.

I do wholeheartedly agree - personal anegdote: regular live improv comedy has done wonders for my well-being. And one could say this format of spending time with other humans has opened new very personal techniques for self-soothing to me. But it's also assumed this rather consumerist form, almost drug-like, repetitive, formatted, scheduled. It's not, like, a real tribe or anything serious like that. And as it turns out a lot of wonderful human interactions really can be reduced.

Having had earlier personal experiences with substance abuse, and seeing good people go down a lethal path, it's been a discovery to me that adults do this whole self-soothing thing and that it is a skill that they pick up from family and society. All these folks I meet doing improv seem to be getting something similar out of it.
by oblio | 2025-09-21 21:41:41+00:00
> but a bomb on a train could do a lot of damage even if it wasn't as cinematic as a bomb on a plane

Same for a bus, tram, funicular, metro, ferry. At what point does the insanity stop?

A crowded bus in Bucharest probably has 200 passengers and at peak times it could drive near stops and streets where hundreds, if not thousands of other people, are in a 100m radius.
by returningfory2 | 2025-09-21 21:41:43+00:00
To the downvoters: this comment is correct. E.g. [1] for an example of this being enforced.

Apparently the problem is the law is not enforced that much? And that there are loopholes around it.

[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/norfolk-southern-agrees-give-...
by UncleMeat | 2025-09-21 21:42:23+00:00
I'm starting to see this everywhere. "There was no due process when illegal immigrants hopped the border" and "Laken Riley didn't get any due process" are widespread talking points at this point. Kavanaugh talks about how the goal of the criminal is to evade the law when considering the balance of equities in his concurrence on racial profiling in ICE stops.

I've even seen comments here and on reddit of people saying that the exclusionary rule should be eliminated, since if somebody is a criminal they shouldn't get constitutional protections.

It is worth remembering that the idea that the constitution seriously protects even those who really did crimes is pretty radical. Things that we consider to be baked into our judicial system (the exclusionary rule, miranda warnings) are not terribly old and were extremely controversial when first established. Congress passed a whole law saying that Miranda v Arizona was invalid (which they don't have the power to do). This means that we need active work to protect it.
by jackcosgrove | 2025-09-21 21:42:31+00:00
I have investigated taking Amtrak for a family trip to do something different. "The journey is the destination" or something like that. I was branding it "slow travel" to the family so we could use it as a sort of modern life/digital detox. I also looked into a trans-Atlantic passage on the QM2.

I'm sad to report that renting a family bedroom or two joined bedrooms on Amtrak to take a journey on say the California Zephyr didn't pencil out. It is costlier than flying (about $2000 vs $1600 at the low end for both options, resp.) Even if you account for the cost of staying two extra nights at the destination it about breaks even.

With children I don't want to risk the days of travel becoming an ordeal as opposed to hours of flight time. The "digital detox" might quickly go sideways and require hours of screentime pacifiers. Maybe when they are older.

Happily the QM2 actually made financial sense and there would be more room to move about and explore the ship.

I think rail travel makes the most sense in the Acela context the article opened with - routes between cities that take less than a day. For cross-continent travel the time savings of air travel make rail travel a harder case to argue.
by leakycap | 2025-09-21 21:42:41+00:00
I enjoyed reading this perspective, but I don't think I agree with the idea that the Air is a precursor to glasses/AR product

All the thinnest Apple products use distribution rather than a lump with battery counterweight - I think the design comes from a need to make the battery as large as possible inside a thin phone. Just like the 12" MacBook and most prior iPhones have put the battery in one huge area and the logicboard off to one tiny corner where the port or camera is.

I don't think we are just a year or two out from a an Apple foldable or eyewear product, either, though.
by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF | 2025-09-21 21:43:45+00:00
Oh yeah, I used their Lume library back when I did games in LOVE2D. I actually ran into them a couple times in the IRC chat (and told them one of their ideas was bad, sorry about that rxi, I checked and it's actually a good idea lol)

https://github.com/rxi/lume
by gav | 2025-09-21 21:43:47+00:00
For those that want to travel light the Panasonic MultiShape[1] is great as you can share one rechargeable base with multiple tools. It is annoying as it's not USB, but inexpensive cables are available[2] and work great.

[1] https://shop.panasonic.com/pages/multishape [2] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CMGQWM1B
by cauch | 2025-09-21 21:43:48+00:00
It misses the point: if you split the universe in two identical parallel universe, but then take the same individual and in one universe train them 2h per week, and in the other universe, train them 8h per week, do you really think, whatever the test is, the second one will not perform better?

This is the point of training: the more training you have access to, the better you do. If it was not the case, then the notion of school itself as a way of training people to be able to think by themselves will not have any sense.

And that is just training. Even with the same amount of class hour, kids who don't have to worry about take care of their siblings, of the house chores, or of even having access to decent relaxing conditions will get higher score even if they are in fact less smart.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-09-21 21:44:36+00:00
> Why would this be an issue with the driver?

Drivers are the dominant operating cost of a bus system, and they’re typically paid regardless of ridership. That means you have a minimum ridership per driver required to offset their cost.

Bus systems thus size the bus and route to ensure that minimum ridership. That, in turn, requires aggregating demand, i.e. forcing people to change the places and times of their transit to line up with the bus’s. Analogous to lift and drag, the more you force people to change their schedules, the more you lose potential demand to alternatives.

If you don’t have a driver, you can make your transports as big or small as you’d like. In rare cases, they’ll be bus sized. But most busses either aren’t consistently full or lose a lot of potential riders because their schedules and stops are inconvenient. A fleet of smaller vehicles sops up that demand without hauling around a bunch of dead mass off rush hour.
by mixmastamyk | 2025-09-21 21:45:43+00:00
I currently use 0 Android apps, so honestly believe one could survive without them.

I'm glad Waydroid is a thing for folks that are, and sorry attestation prevents full compatibility. But neither issue should get in the way of investment in modern Linux phones, which I've been desperately waiting for, for years.

Web apps are still a thing as well, believe it or not.
by qcnguy | 2025-09-21 21:45:44+00:00
The Guardian is misleading you. Vance was referring to story in the news sense, not "admitting" that he makes things up. The original video of what he said is here:

https://x.com/HunnyBplus3/status/1835326924597366869

JD Vance: "Dana, [stories about Haitians in Springfield] come from first hand accounts of my constituents. I say that we're creating a story meaning we're creating the American media focusing on it. I didn't create 20,000 illegal migrants coming into Springfield, Kamala Harris' policies did that, but yes, we created the actual focus that allowed the American media to talk about this story."

> The central problem is epistemological

Yes!
by crockeo | 2025-09-21 21:46:31+00:00
My understanding is that as part of the Amtrak Improvement Act[1] Amtrak is given preference over freight rail, even on private track. However only the Department of Justice may enforce this, which it has done only once.

Fair warning I haven't read the text of the law in full, only heard this second hand.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/93rd-congress/house-bill/15427
by blendergeek | 2025-09-21 21:47:31+00:00
Due to the history of Amtrak this is actually true. The railroads in America (while privately owned and operated) were built with much government subsidy. The railroad companies originally provided passenger service. Eventually, to ensure this service continued a law was passed that prohibited railroads from dropping passe nger service. After the rise of personal cars coinciding with the massive federal investment in car infrastructure in the 1950s with the interstate hughway system, passenger rail travel was in free fall in the late 60s and the railroad companies begged to be allowed to end passenger service. Congress stepped in and nationalized the passenger service exempting the railroad companies from their mandate to provide passenger service while requiring them to give passenger trains priority in scheduling. So, TL;DR passenger trains have legally mandated priority over the freight trains of the host railroad.
by 20after4 | 2025-09-21 21:48:17+00:00
While I agree with what you're saying here, the concern doesn't seem like it is worse when the model is running locally as compared to storing your data in the cloud and running all of the ai models remotely. It's ultimately the same outcome, perhaps local models offer a bit more privacy even if there are other concerns as you've mentioned.

It doesn't seem like there is any hope of stopping this, the cat is out of the bag.