MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JumpinJack_Cash | 2025-09-14 13:48:59+00:00
> > The "Democratic"/"left wing" platform is not as popular as you believe; not in the US, not in England, not in Canada, not in Germany...

At least the Democratic platform is a platform as opposed to the other party who is being held hostage for 13 years by a single individual who cannot complete a coherent sentence without rambling and weaving (and he couldn't do it in 2015 either)
by notmyjob | 2025-09-14 13:49:13+00:00
Similarly, highly skilled semi-conductor researchers are not h1b. Semi-conductor workers of various sorts might be, though I note they are trying to make a visa specific the semiconductor industry, but high level researchers who design new chips are not restrained to h1b. I was downvoted for noting this fact recently.

People don’t want honest discussion on immigration. It’s not a good faith debate, rather lies and disinformation., and the populace knows that by now.
by DiabloD3 | 2025-09-14 13:49:23+00:00
10 was probably the last truly inefficient, but you shouldn't be having problems with a 40.

Shame you don't have it around anymore, because I'd say set your desktop to like, native res, 60hz, only have one monitor installed, 8 bit SDR not 10 bit SDR, and see if the power usage goes away.

Like, on a 9800x3D /w 7900XTX with my 4th monitor unplugged (to get under the maximum super-idle load for the GPU), I'm sub-50W idle.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-09-14 13:49:28+00:00
It’s highly likely that Russia already has detailed models of every stations in Ukraine. If they didn’t before the war, they do now. Mapping public infrastructure doesn’t require a lot of spying.

But you have to understand that information control during war requires a shift of mindset. It’s better to start controlling everything which could be used by the enemy even if they probably already have it than try to establish complex rules. It gives good habits to people.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-09-14 13:50:06+00:00
> those are the worst the media has been able to drag up, and all taken completely out of context

In what context is it okay to say this?

> Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor. You’re not in charge.

----

> you probably think the "If you’re a WNBA, pot-smoking, Black lesbian, do you get treated better than a United States marine?" is an edgelord hypothetical

This is a strawman. They think pointing out that someone is a "WNBA, pot-smoking, black lesbian" is hateful and unnecessary. The statement is otherwise implying that a pot smoker should be denigrated, and a WNBA player should be denigrated, and a black person should be denigrated, and a lesbian should be denigrated in a way that a United States Marine should not be denigrated.
by api | 2025-09-14 13:50:22+00:00
Primordial black holes seem likely since many models predict them. They’re not a fringe idea.

They are also a dark matter candidate, though this is more controversial. The ones we are seeing here would be huge ones but their masses could range the spectrum. Smaller ones would have evaporated already but there could be tons of asteroid, moon, and planetary mass ones around.

At least some dark matter may be black holes the size of a hydrogen atom with the mass of an asteroid, and similar objects. These would be incredibly hard to detect. The only way would be their gravitational effects on other bodies or weak anomalous radiation bursts when they rarely encounter matter.

They’re also awesome and weird. One could, for example, shoot right through the Earth. If it was small nothing might happen. Larger ones might cause seismic events or perhaps Tunguska type events due to induced fusion in the atmosphere. What was Tunguska anyway?

The most exciting thing is that if small mass PBHs exist and are common enough, we could find one someday in our solar system, maybe captured as a moon or in an asteroid belt. That would be close enough to send a probe to go look at it and do experiments with it. Being able to directly examine a black hole could be the thing that lets us “finish” physics. It would let us see conditions far beyond anything any imaginable terrestrial accelerator could ever produce.
by esafak | 2025-09-14 13:50:22+00:00
Education, and the fostering of independent civil society, which is something you don't see in authoritarian societies. The virtues you want to instill in a democratic society, contrasted with authoritarian ones, are truth vs. propaganda, accountability vs. loyalty, and courage vs. obedience.

I think you are leaning too hard into moral relativism. The differences between free- and authoritarian societies are plain to see.
by grues-dinner | 2025-09-14 13:50:26+00:00
> AI is used by students, teachers, researchers, software developers, marketers and other categories and the adoption rates are close to 90%. Even if it does not make us more productive we still like using it daily.

Nearly everyone uses pens daily but almost no one really cares about them or says their company runs using pens. You might grumble when the pens that work keeps in the stationary cupboard are shit, perhaps.

I imagine eventually "AI" services will be commoditised in the same way that pens are now. Loads of functional but faily low-quality stuff, some fairly nice but affordable stuff and some stratospheric gold plated bricks for the military and enthusiasts.

In the middle is a large ecosystem of ink manufacturers, lathe makers, laser engravers, packaging companies and logistics and so on and on that are involved.

The explosive, exponential winner-takes-all scenario where OpenAI and it's investors literally ascend to godhood and the rest of humanity lives forever under their divine bootheels doesn't seem to be the trajectory we're on.
by adamwong246 | 2025-09-14 13:51:28+00:00
It's common for old fogies to claim that the future is bad and the past was best. But I don't remember a time in my life that was this stressful. I really do think the world is getting crazier, dumber, and just all around worse, this past decade most specifically. It seems the world has decided to just go nuts, shift into overdrive and metaphorically drive off a cliff. Everybody wants to escape the real world and live through their screens. Nothing is real and everything is a meme. And the fact that we allowed DJT to even approach the White House is such a damning indictment of America and it's vaunted democracy. The bad guys won, and there's no clear way to change that.
Ask HN: What prevents you from switching to a dumbphone?
by Divisibly3 | 2025-09-14 13:52:11+00:00
I’m doing research for a potential project (maybe even a startup) around making dumbphones viable again in 2025.

I’ve personally been living with a flip phone for a while. It works surprisingly well: fewer distractions, better sleep, better focus. The smartphone only comes out for banking or government apps.

Most discussions I’ve found online end up pessimistic: “you simply can’t live without a smartphone.” I found some partial solutions (see blog: https://tim.kicker.dev/2025/09/14/flip-phone/ )

So I’d like to ask HN for input:

- What are the real blockers that keep you tied to a smartphone?

- Which apps or services are absolute dealbreakers (banking, navigation, 2FA, messaging…)?

- Would you consider paying for workarounds/companion tools if they solved those blockers?

- Do you see this as just a niche lifestyle choice, or as an underserved market with startup potential?

I’m especially interested in hearing pain points from people who wanted to switch but couldn’t, those might highlight the most valuable problems to solve.

Thanks in advance for your insights!
by paulajohnson | 2025-09-14 13:53:24+00:00
This reads like a case study from "The Innovator's Dilemma" by Clayton Christensen.

TL;DR: big incumbents (e.g. IBM) get out-innovated and replaced by scrappy startups even when the incumbent sees it coming and tries to react. The incumbent's business processes, sales metrics (NPII in this story), internal culture and established customer base make it impossible for an innovative product to succeed within the company.

The incumbent produces an innovative gadget. It may even be good, but its Sales Dept earn their quarterly bonus from the existing product line sold to the existing customers. They haven't got time to go chasing small orders of the new gadget from new customers who they don't have a relationship with, and the existing customers don't see the point of the new gadget. So orders for the gadget stagnate.

Across town is the small scrappy start-up making a similar gadget. It lives on those small orders and has a highly motivated sales person who chases those orders full time. So their orders grow, their product improves from the market feedback, and one day the new gadget is actually better than the incumbent's main product. At that point the incumbent goes out of business.
by ednite | 2025-09-14 13:55:04+00:00
Author here. I didn’t expect this to hit the front page. Thanks to the OP for sharing, and to everyone for reading and commenting.

The mix of encouragement and critique is motivating, and it came at the right time since I’d been wondering whether to keep going.

I’ve spent decades in IT, mostly software dev and consulting, but writing and storytelling are new to me. The blog’s a work in progress, rough edges, a few nuggets, but I’m learning by doing. If one post helps someone else, that’s a win.

Thanks again for the thoughtful feedback. It really is a gift.

Glad to answer questions if anyone has them.
by ModernMech | 2025-09-14 13:55:15+00:00
I engaged with your post in several ways, the primary way being 1) I agreed with the substance of your post and 2) I extended your list of "people held in positions of high trust who should be more careful with their words" to include the president and the world's richest man, who are in fact engaged in divisive rhetoric at the moment, far worse and more impactful than any teacher or doctor. That's very related.

If you didn't want to engage with me that's fine, but saying people are engaging in political ideological battles and therefore out of bounds, when the discussion is about politicis and ideologies, is lame. Saying you didn't summarily dismiss my opinion as political is straight up false when your last reply was a one line quote from the rule page
by mdasen | 2025-09-14 13:55:18+00:00
It's not just about paying for certification. You also have to replace a lot of things like ed, awk, grep, etc. with versions that are compatible with the UNIX specification. GNU utilities didn't target 100% UNIX compatibility and they have differences that mean that a command that works on UNIX might not work (or might not work the same) on a Linux distro using GNU utilities. glibc has slight differences from the spec too.

In order to get a Linux distro certified, you'd have to make changes which would make it less compatible with all the other Linux distros out there.

The reason why RedHat doesn't pay for UNIX certification is that their distros wouldn't be compliant. The reason why they don't make their distros compliant is that their customers would vastly prefer that RedHat use "standard Linux" tools than replace them with UNIX-compliant ones. Customers don't want a Linux distro that's subtly different/incompatible compared to what everyone expects in a Linux system. They'd rather it be not-UNIX.

Yes, you can modify a Linux distro to be UNIX. However, most Linux systems are not real UNIX - and you wouldn't want it to be real UNIX.
by lifeformed | 2025-09-14 13:56:20+00:00
I'd argue a game developer should make their own art assets, even if they "aren't an artist". You don't have to settle for it looking bad, just use your lack of art experience as a constraint. It usually means going with something very stylized or very simple. It might not be amazing but after you do it for a few games you will have pretty decent stuff, and most importantly, your own style.

Even amateurish art can be tasteful, and it can be its own intentional vibe. A lot of indie games go with a style that doesn't take much work to pull off decently. Sure, it may look amateurish, but it will have character and humanity behind it. Whereas AI art will look amateurish in a soul-deadening way.

Look at the game Baba Is You. It's a dead simple style that anyone can pull off, and it looks good. To be fair, even though it looks easy, it still takes a good artist/designer to come up with a seemingly simple style like that. But you can at least emulate their styles instead of coming up with something totally new, and in the process you'll better develop your aesthetic senses, which honestly will improve your journey as a game developer so much more than not having to "worry" about art.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-09-14 13:56:48+00:00
I think it's partly because we recognize letters, and whole words, by glyph shape more than specific identity. Obviously a 2x2 grid can only depict 16 different patterns, but we're trying to recognize whole words, not arbitrary letter sequences, and the sequence of shapes (hence letter possibilities) is evidentially enough, a bit like reading crappy handwriting.

It's interesting how we can do this with this 2x2 font immediately without any training, but I suppose reading in general has provided enough training, and ability to read this 2x2 font just provides some insight as to how word perception works.
by akoboldfrying | 2025-09-14 13:57:53+00:00
Your "Branchless" approach could indeed be implemented very efficiently in a CPU with AVX2 (256-bit-wide vectors). With the current element in rax, the 4 valid values in ymm2, and the 4 running totals in ymm3 (initially zero), the inner loop would be just:

VPBROADCASTQ rax,ymm1 VPCMPEQQ ymm1,ymm2,ymm1 VPADDQ ymm1,ymm3,ymm3

VPBROADCASTQ copies rax into each of the 4 lanes in ymm1. The VPCMPEQQ sets each qword there to all-0 ( = 0) or all-1 ( = -1) depending on the comparison result, so the VPADDQ will accumulate 4 running negative totals into ymm3, which can be negated afterwards.

I would still expect the perfect hash function approach to be faster, though -- a similar number of operations, but 25% of the memory movement.
by branko_d | 2025-09-14 13:58:08+00:00
> when a particular build of your app executes a query that calls out to a user-defined function, it uses the SQL function code from the same commit that the app itself was built from

I don't really see a "problem" here. Having everything in the same repo is probably the easiest way to ensure that the client cannot go out of sync with the database. When making a release, create a Git tag and deploy both client and database from there.

But you must make sure you know which tag is deployed at each customer. We use naming conventions for that (the name of the customer is part of the Git tag name), or you could hold that mapping externally if necessary.

Once you have that, making a client-level hotfix for a specific customer is (relatively) easy - just branch from the customer's release tag, do the changes you need, run the tests, and there is high probability everything will work properly. Once you release the hotfix, you create another tag and remember that this tag is now installed at the customer, and so on...

If you make changes to the database, then of course you still need to have an upgrade procedure from one version of the database to another, but you can be confident that the client will never query the "wrong" database version. And since both old and new database structure are just SQL files under different Git tags, you can discover exactly what changed by just by diffing.

> What does Visual Studio do?

Visual Studio has a special SQL project type, where you can keep you base table definitions, as well as all the SQL code (stored procedures, functions, views, user-defined types, indexes etc.). You can group the SQL project together with client projects, tools, automated tests and benchmarks in the same "solution" (kind of a project-of-projects). When working on the product, you load that solution, and you have all dependencies in one place, right in the Solution Explorer. This eases navigation and minimizes dependencies whose source code you cannot (easily) see.

After you make your changes, you deploy to the local database (we use the free SQL Server Developer Edition, other databases have their own free editions), run/debug tests, run/debug clients as needed. You can even start debugging a C# test or client application and step into T-SQL stored procedure seamlessly, which can be a very powerful tool for ferreting-out difficult bugs. When you are done with your changes, commit to Git, let the CI double-check the tests and make the build for the the last-row-of-defense manual QA testing. Then deploy, associate the new Git tag to the customer, rinse-and-repeat...

Basically, we treat SQL like every other code, and manage SQL dependencies not fundamentally unlike any other dependencies.
by mopsi | 2025-09-14 13:58:31+00:00
> ... which obviously will include large scale territorial concessions.

No. That's the part you're making up. The mood has simply shifted from fighting all the way to the Russian-Ukrainian border, to forcing Russia to leave Ukraine alone through other means, such as destroying the oil and gas infrastructure that powers the Russian economy. Everyone, even Russian officials, admit that Russia is in deep-deep trouble if the attacks continue.
by natmaka | 2025-09-14 13:58:48+00:00
> Not shutting down the existing nuclear plants is a pure positive

Ask Japan, and especially Fukushima's residents, about this.

> building out renewables and/or nuclear plants in the east.

Germany chose renewables and cannot quickly phase out its huge coal industry.

> For the money we wasted on intermittent renewables so far

Source (with investments' perimeters and maturities)?

> Nuclear power is well-suited for district heating and industrial heat applications

If, and only if, it is designed for it, and with the appropriate networks. France nuclear does nearly 0 district heating and 0 industrial heat.

> Germany shut down its reactors for idiotic reasons:

Reason: "Fukushima"

> All West German reactors would have survived the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake

In Japan until 2011, officially "all reactors will survive..."

> we don't have Tsunamis in Germany

Tsunamis are not the sole cause potentially triggering a nuclear accident.

> How does shutting down those plants make sense again?

Refusing nuclear-induced challenges (risk of major accident, waste, dependency towards uranium, difficult decommissioning, risk of weapon proliferation...) while another approach (renewables) is now technically adequate makes sense.

> Japan is reactivating its nuclear plants.

Some sing this song since 2015. In the real world Japan, just like China, massively invests on... renewables! Surprise! And very few reactors were reactivated: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-fossil-renewa...

>> or that only a minority of environmentalists decided to do so is misleading as,

> Again, such a good thing that that claim wasn't made in this thread

It is nearly always made, in a form or another, in each and every thread about nuclear energy. In this very post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45230099 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45227286 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45227025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45228112 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45228712

> Who "closed" reactors

Read on: https://x.com/HannoKlausmeier/status/1784158942823690561

> The law that required nuclear reactors to be closed was passed by the Red/Green coalition in 2002.

Don't omit anything: "The phase-out plan was initially delayed in late 2010, when during the chancellorship of centre-right Angela Merkel, the coalition conservative-liberal government decreed a 12-year delay of the schedule."

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Germany#Chang...

Then the Fukushima accident changed it all. Exactly what I described.

>> Furthermore, this nuclear potential would result in higher costs and dependency

> That is also not true.

Germany burns its own coal, and by doing so maintains a huge sector. By letting reactors run it would have had to phase coal our more quickly, leading to massive unemployment and dependency towards uranium. This is sad but true.
by pessimizer | 2025-09-14 14:00:41+00:00
Of course. It would be bizarre if there weren't a relationship between Lewy Body dementia, Alzheimer's, or vascular dementia (which in old people, means you've gone into heart failure) and repetitive negative thoughts. For one, you know you've got an incurable disease that will inevitably destroy your mind, and you've become one of the rare class of people for which assisted suicide has almost no controversy, it's something you're putting down payments on. For two, you can't finish thoughts.

My father was just diagnosed with Parkinson's a few months ago, and he already has trouble following any conversation, and knows it. If that didn't lead to depression, that's what would be notable. And any insight that he reaches that gives him comfort might be gone an hour later.

It just seems like a silly study.
by zitterbewegung | 2025-09-14 14:01:05+00:00
While macOS only really gets Unix certified they design of the flavor of unix from FreeBSD. Homebrew is also the best port system and package manager I have ever used because it requires no thinking. I actually dislike using Linux because now I have to learn the replacement from ifconfig, the creation of launchd IMHO is way better than init.d and systemd, and the command line diskutil and other additions still feel like its more Unix like while Linux feels like its moving toward its own thing. Before I was using macOS I was using OpenBSD as my daily driver since high school. I still don't understand though why Ubuntu has the ability to break /boot because there isn't enough space to add another kernel to there...
by nailer | 2025-09-14 14:02:18+00:00
> It is a cherry picked example and has nothing to contribute to the overall argument that gun ownership makes the US safe.

It obviously makes the argument that Texas isn’t New York or London and has little street crime, as a result of gun ownership. You wanted to understand the mentality? That’s the mentality. No road men in Austin.

> Otherwise I can point to the many mass shootings in the US and say that would never have happened in the UK.

Yes you can. That’s a fine argument, I agree with it. I’ve made comments about not wanting to die because someone had a bad day earlier in this thread supporting exactly this argument. You’re arguing with someone else rather than reading my responses.
by ModernMech | 2025-09-14 14:04:15+00:00
I feel this is just a cat being a cat. Cats are hardwired to chase any small thing moving quickly. Their eyes are great at detecting contrast, and a bright light has a lot of contrast to interest a cat. They chase it because they don't really understand it's not prey and just a reflection. That the cat lost interest as it got older is perhaps it just being old and less exuberant.