MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by physarum_salad | 2025-09-27 15:00:12+00:00
The common travel area + Brit_card might result in an interesting pattern where ID is by association rather than territorial location. For instance, as nationalists reject it and use only IRE/EU equivalents where possible. The passport is somewhat similar already. Would people reject services and jobs in N.I.? Completely possible and it already happens with people working "down south" aka down the road.

The civil liberties concerns, particularly in N.I. (historically speaking), are also important to consider. There is quite a high capacity for discriminatory practices in the region from all angles.

On the other side. The British government are lowering themselves to the position of "just another app on my phone". A system riddled with viruses, cyber attacks, etc. Further, what is to stop groups simply setting up and alternative ID system running on btc or something in the future...if this becomes the norm? At first it would be useless and a farce. Later a complete separate system.

Anyway, horrible idea all round. They clearly have not thought this through. Paper ids and loose associations are things I am a fan of in the anglophone world.
by gottorf | 2025-09-27 15:00:51+00:00
Fairly accurate assumption to make in this case. Incentives around government spending are structured against close scrutiny of how much gets spent on what and why.

Politicians love splashing their names on papers on how they got a bill passed to spend $X on $GOOD_SOUNDING_PROJECT, and the bigger the X, the better. Government employees are strongly incentivized against the reduction of their own employment should that spending go away. Lobbyists and service providers obviously have a direct interest in ensuring those contracts continue.

Nobody but the taxpayer has any interest at all in ensuring that money gets spent on things worth spending on and, moreover, that the spent money actually achieves the outcomes desired and intended behind those projects. And how much influence does the average taxpayer have on any of that? It rounds to zero.
by reaperducer | 2025-09-27 15:01:17+00:00
CDs just seem so much better. Yes it's technically digital, but can you tell?

I didn't think so, until a couple of weeks ago.

I was in a record store and it had a CD player on sale for $30. One of those cheap blister-pack jobs. Just for a laugh, I bought it, and a couple of CD versions of records I own. (Genesis, New Order, R.E.M.)

I thought "digital is digital" so it shouldn't matter that it was cheap.

It wasn't great.

I sounded very flat. Even with my expensive headphones, it just didn't sound right. I'm not sure if "mechanical" is the right word, but it was noticeably different, and I'm not someone who has perfect hearing. It just sounded... boring.

So I compared the CD sound with the record versions that I rip with a $20 USB dongle and Audacity. The record rips sound much better than the CDs.

Maybe someone with perfect hearing will think otherwise. But I'm not an audiophile. I'm just a guy who likes gadgets.
by mkesper | 2025-09-27 15:02:05+00:00
Docker swarm v1 is dead, v2 ("swarmkit") is usable. Although, if you want to use it in production, you're probably better of with K8s. Don't get me started on docker using "the same" (but subtly different) file format for its different offerings (compose v2, swarm v2). For smaller setups maybe look into podman with K8s config files (did not try myself yet).
by heresie-dabord | 2025-09-27 15:02:24+00:00
> The home audio market has moved on

The audio business has merged with the "home theatre" business. The pursuit of audiophile quality was always a boutique/niche market.

> listening to physical music recordings without using a screen

You don't need a screen to listen to good audio reproduction. FLAC does of course need a digital device and storage. But there are huge advantages to FLAC over "physical music recordings". You can store FLAC on a USB key and plug it into a modern amplifier to listen. If you must have a spinning wheel (get it?) you can burn FLAC to an optical disc and play that in a player without much "screen". But even optical discs are artifacts of the past.

> It's like cursive writing, or knowing how to drive a stick-shift.

Handwriting is much more profound for personal development and education. The US Constitution, for example, is a hand-written document.

For transportation and tools, technology and innovation will change how people live. Those who remember the past recall how folks lived with trolley buses, ice-boxes, adjusting "rabbit ears", and dialing rotary telephones.

Fortunately we can all watch old films in our home theatres. (^;
by iainctduncan | 2025-09-27 15:02:49+00:00
Well, that's LLMs. I'm doing a PhD in computer science and music right now, focused on programming languages for music and algorithmic composition. There are other (IMHO) more interesting techniques that can be used in music and that used to be called AI, with which you do have control over and understanding of exactly what's happening, such as constraint satisfaction programming and dynamic search.

Ge Wang (professor in my field) wrote a great article on why LLMs are so uninteresting from a musical perspective. https://hai.stanford.edu/news/ge-wang-genai-art-is-the-least...
by maqp | 2025-09-27 15:03:14+00:00
Dali isn't as fancy on the outside as stuff like B&W but oh boy the sound. Zensor 3s sounded a lot better than CM5s, that cost quite a bit more. Still the best budget 2-way I've ever heard.

Also the Oberon 7s pack incredible sound for a price that's closer to B&W's shelf speakers than floor speakers.
by philo23 | 2025-09-27 15:05:04+00:00
I can't say I miss Launchpad all that much, but I guess its nice to have a replacement for people who do. I've always used Spotlight via Cmd + Space to launch stuff.

The two things I always wished you could do in the old Launchpad (and would have made me hate it a lot less) are:

Configuring the size of the icon grid. Just give me the option to make it denser, the defaults were silly on external displays.

and the other is being able to completely exclude the nonsense apps like the 6 different Adobe Creative Cloud icons that would end up in there. Though it'd also be nice if Adobe didn't spew them all over the place in the first place...
by zwnow | 2025-09-27 15:05:17+00:00
Yea I used to listen with Focal speakers for a while. Dali is also pretty good. In the shop I used to work at we would have vinyl play a lot, real vinyl, not the plastic that is mostly fabricated nowadays. But considering to what kinda music some people listen (autotune rap) quality doesn't matter I guess. Its mostly about vibes now.
by Nasrudith | 2025-09-27 15:05:56+00:00
That is a very strange way of looking at things. Should people not get upset at their desires being interfered with based upon some arrogant busybody's concept of the ideal? For the crime of being liked by too many people?

Frankly declaring a civilization dead over not doing what you want sounds very much like an egocentric "elite tantrum". Like all of the arrogants who think that they can know the best interests of others better than them in spite of the fact that every time that has tried it just amounts to an unaccountable autocracy. After all the nobility were supposed to 'know better' for the peasantry and represent them.
by daft_pink | 2025-09-27 15:06:28+00:00
I would really like to see a comparison of how many bots started with the cracker barrel news story vs other news stories.

Personally, I find most of the crap on the news to be utterly meaningless and I have no idea why they talk about it and just assume its because all content creators need content to fill their 24 hour news channel, huge newspaper, consistent YouTube or social media posting schedule, etc.

That’s why the original daily show was so great, because it made fun of the lengths that the media goes to to fill their schedule.
by Intermernet | 2025-09-27 15:07:01+00:00
The monitoring of block lists is much more important than people assume. I haven't looked into it in detail, but it always seemed like the reputation was based on a ratio of number of messages to known bad messages. If you have a moderately busy server, and you manage to keep off the block lists (or at least pro-actively remove yourself from them) then the reputaion gets higher and higher, and the maintenance goes down.

If you're a domain that only receives occasional messages, and you end up on Spamhaus and co, you're gonna have a problem. It seems that reputation at small scale is viral. You need actively good reputation and response time. But, honestly, it seemed that it didn't take more than about 3 months per domain I administered until they were just accepted by the net as valid, good actors.
by idle_zealot | 2025-09-27 15:07:07+00:00
It receives relatively little attention now, but in terms of sheer numbers the cuts to the USAID program have had and will continue to have the largest death toll of anything this administration does.

I'm sure the economic suicide will have its victims, and who knows how many have died in detention facilities, but it would be damn-near impossible to match up the the loss of human life seen in poor countries without access to the basic supplies and medical care that USAID delivered.
by bob1029 | 2025-09-27 15:07:32+00:00
I have a hard time with this argument when Win32 is currently the most stable ABI on linux. I just got done playing around with Elden Ring via Proton on my Steam Deck and it's very obvious what the right solution is from an end user perspective.

Windows, despite the irrefutable enshittification, is still orders of magnitude more productive in a UI/UX/human/team setting. Anything linux that has to touch a non technical human needs a billion dollar effort to smooth over the rough edges. Even in the case of Steam Deck, I had trouble getting the machine going for the first hour.
by cogman10 | 2025-09-27 15:07:40+00:00
> A human neuron is a thousand times bigger than a transistor.

Correct, it works on principles currently completely unapplied in ASIC design. We don't, for example, have many mechanisms that allow for new pathways to be formed in hardware. At least, not outside of highly controlled fashion. It's not clear that it would even be helpful if we did.

> There are directions hardware and algorithms have been going in - parallel processing - that are not limited by fabrication?

They are limited by the power budget. Yes we can increase the amount of parallel compute 100x but not without also increasing the power budget by 100x.

But further, not all problems can be made parallel. Data dependencies exist and those always slow things down. Further, coordination isn't free for parallel algorithms.

I'm not saying there's not some new way to do computation which hasn't been explored. I'm saying we've traveled down a multi-decade path to today's compute capabilities and we may be at the end of this road. Building a new model that's ultimately adopted will (likely) take more decades. I mean, consider how hard it's been to purge x86 from society. We are looking at a problem a million times more difficult than just getting rid of x86.
by oidar | 2025-09-27 15:07:49+00:00
Swiping between pages is hit or miss. Its like it doesn't hook on the swipe. The search is really, really slow. I do have hundreds of "apps" on my machine, but it's still much slower than the native app navigator. Moving around apps to group them or rearrange them is probably the slowest part. I turned on dev fps monitor and it's showing 50fps.
by larrry | 2025-09-27 15:07:53+00:00
I have had bad cubital tunnel in the past, enough so that I was learning to become ambidextrous to stop using my left hand. A surgery helped tremendously in my case, but I’m still prone to flare ups if I overuse my pinky.

An Ergodox EZ has been a lifesaver, I’ve reprogrammed it so I don’t need to use my left pinky anything other than letter keys (goodbye left shift, you’ve pained me for too long). I fully agree with the articles advice; pair a good programmable keyboard with physical activity to keep the hands working long term.

Be warned though: the more customized your keyboard the harder it is type when using a laptop or friends keyboard.
by SAI_Peregrinus | 2025-09-27 15:08:01+00:00
I don't particularly care about Cracker Barrel (the logo wasn't great to begin with) but I do dislike the steady loss of decoration in mainstream design. It's not just generic, it's also uglier. I blame the French Union of Modern Artists & the rest of the Modernist movement in the late 1930s for starting the decline.
by techblueberry | 2025-09-27 15:08:54+00:00
I mean, it’s real in the sense that any culture war point is real, in that it’s probably more salient on the extremes than in the middle.

But if you were talking about about gay rights or trans rights or abortion you’d have a loud and vocal group on the left saying the right was absolutely morally wrong. In this case though. Where’s the attack? The attack is coming from capitalism, not from the left, so maybe I get what you’re trying to say, but this is the first culture war issue where I would say the reality, even if not the perception is that most people are either in the center(don’t care) or affected (don’t like it), I don’t think there are many serious people on the other side of it (the Cracker Barrel rebrand is good, and you’re wrong for being against it.). But ironically, you could even argue the “attack” came from the right! No longer protecting its own institutions(this is overstated for effect but I think the point still stands)

I don’t know that I’m saying I disagree with you- there’s the very real observation that about Americana that say the right brings American flags to protest and too many on the left don’t, but still, it’s funny.
by rixed | 2025-09-27 15:08:55+00:00
> I don't believe deep down you actually think this. > you've just got a funny idea about what's offensive or prejudiced that's blocking you from looking at this rationally > I think you believe that it's nicer and less prejudiced, less harsh, to not "blame" people for the actions of their culture, and you're artificially constructing arguments to support that emotional conclusion.

You know what? I value polite discussions, but I value sincerity even more, and your scornful language, even if it were accompanied by brilliant ideas, which it is not, is just unbearable.

It is so easy to picture oneself on top of an argument, and look down on others, when you put words in their mouth and ideas in their heads and refuse to listen to what they say.

So, yes of course everything is the result of people actions which is the result of their mind. Great discovery! But the discussion was about <blink>national</blink> character, not just culture/personality.

As to who is fantasizing a pleasurable theory for himself, I don't think we are going to agrree either, and we both have better things to do than discuss century old game-theory, about which everything have been written already.

I'm confident than we could have had a nicer face-to-face conversation about it, and maybe get to some mutual understanding, but this is not doable over the internet.
by the__alchemist | 2025-09-27 15:08:57+00:00
I'm working through the tutorial on the WSIWYG official webapp now. The syntax for equations is remarkably intuitive! I tried a few things from guessing after skimming the tutorial, and they mostly worked in the most intuitive way. Here is what I gather this is. A mix of:

- Markdown general formatting (images, lists etc) - LaTeX or MathJax-like equation syntax - A rendering engine and software that turns these into pixels

Is this right?
by Retr0id | 2025-09-27 15:09:38+00:00
I used to use LaTeX pretty frequently and although I was reasonably productive I also never felt that I "knew" it. It was a whole lot of googling "how to do x in latex" and pasting in something that was too arcane for me to remember for next time (and/or copy pasting from my own prior documents)

In all honesty, I only ever did it to achieve the "LaTeX look". These days I write in markdown or (gasp) wysiwyg editors like google docs.
by stego-tech | 2025-09-27 15:09:50+00:00
Because too many HN folk see that word and recoil as they're only casually "familiar" with human attempts at it during the era of scarcity as told by mass media, with no understanding as to the reality of why said systems failed or succeeded.

In a post-scarcity society (which we're technically in now, if we took this seriously), Communism is a more appropriate model of governance than Capitalism. It would ensure a more equitable distribution of resources, incentivize stronger environmental policies to minimize waste, and drive technological innovation towards preservation (of truly scarce resources - rare elements, for instance) over extraction.

The problem is that humans desire power for themselves and the humiliation of others, which results in every method of governance becoming corrupted over time, especially if it doesn't see regular change to address its weaknesses (as we see now with neoliberal societies resisting populism on both extremes of the political scale). Combined with centuries of nationstates lumbering onwards and fighting for their own survival in an increasingly nebulous and ever-shifting digital landscape, and no wonder things are a tinderbox.

All that being said, Communism is an (maybe not the, but an) appropriate choice for a post-scarcity, post-AGI society. It's something we need to discuss in earnest now, and start dismantling Capitalism where feasible to lay the foundation for what comes next. As others (myself included) have pointed out repeatedly, this is likely the last warning we'll get before AGI arrives. It's highly unlikely LLMs and current technology will give rise to AGI, but it's almost a certainty that we'll see actual glimmers of AGI within the next fifty years - and once that genie is out of the bottle, we'll be "locked in" to whatever society we've created for ourselves, until and unless we leave our planet behind and can experiment with our own alternatives at scale.

Good craftsmen know when they've reached the limits of their current tooling. We need to recognize that Capitalism is the wrong tool for an AGI era if we value our humanity.
by gottorf | 2025-09-27 15:10:13+00:00
Perhaps the American taxpayer could be incentivized to continue financially supporting the DR Congo in other ways? Maybe they could apply to become a protectorate or somesuch. You can't have your sovereign cake and eat it, too.

In other words: if a country cannot actually exist without being propped up by another, at some point it may be better for everyone to just break the illusion. Like someone complaining that they can't afford to live in a nice apartment in Brooklyn anymore because their trust fund got cut off; in the long run, it's better to base expectations around reality.
by phatskat | 2025-09-27 15:10:15+00:00
Conversations around this administration and the people related or in support of them always bring me back to the Alt-Right Playbook.[1]

Usually I have a specific video in mind that is relevant, but this feels like a good time to link the whole series. It’s a good, informative, and (depressingly) humorous look at the alt-right - and while it doesn’t offer much in solid solutions, I think being able to understand how they operate and where they’re coming from allows us all to have a better chance in mitigating them and stopping the tide of fascism.

[1] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJA_jUddXvY7v0VkYRbANnTnz...
by steveklabnik | 2025-09-27 15:11:11+00:00
I personally believe that the chance of Bluesky PBC suddenly swapping all of their software to no longer be built on atproto to be a very low chance, yes.

There’s middle grounds here; for example, due to some recent moderation decisions, some users have decided to move away from Bluesky PBC-run PDSes and to self hosting. Those users did not need to proactively backup to move. The proactive backup cases are things like “Bluesky PBC’s servers disappear suddenly” or “they ban your account.”

I don’t think you can run multiple PDSes, but since it’s quick to move the canonical version, I don’t see that as a huge drawback personally. In the same way you’d fallback to the secondary if the primary turns out badly, you’d set up a new PDS and point your identity at it.
by zelias | 2025-09-27 15:11:41+00:00
I got a similar vibe from the “controversy” over that Sydney Sweeney American Eagle ad. Not a single human I talked to about it, left or right, gave anything approaching two craps about it.

It’s almost as if there are companies out there now selling outrage-as-a-service because outrage drives engagement and thus, attention market share, ideally translating into sales. Who knows if that last assumption has any merit though.
by AfterHIA | 2025-09-27 15:12:27+00:00
Illiteracy is a weapon. Get a critical mass of the populace to have no interest in Shakespeare, Goethe, Socrates, or Cervantes and these people will find other ways to amuse themselves. Eventually they will amuse themselves to death.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death

https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/why-life-expectancy-in-t...
by Nasrudith | 2025-09-27 15:13:04+00:00
We keep on hearing those nationalism-protectionist rackets proposed as if that will produce something better than an also-ran reinventing the wheel. And expecting to sell internationally after denying the world the same chance? You aren't that special.

Saying that they need first for there to be no alternatives and then they will produce something better should raise some major red flags. You wouldn't accept an exclusivity contract of that nature with your grocery store but accepting it for your communications? Not to mention the real reason for such protectionism goes unspoken: more government spying and backdoors and more censorship and control. That was why China rolled their own.
by pessimizer | 2025-09-27 15:13:05+00:00
https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats

Yes, down in every measure over the last 6 months. I think it's primarily used by a lot of people to organize sockpuppet-aided raids on twitter towards people who are instantly banned by mass-reporting the second they create an account on bluesky. It's basically old 4chan for unfunny people who think they're better than everybody else.

I'd be positive about any distributed social protocol, though, no matter who delivered it. The problem is that this was a Dorsey project that he already abandoned and denounced because it took a bunch of VC and is just waiting for the rugpull. Now you're supposed to trust a bunch of people you never heard of and a few famous paid evangelists.
by maqp | 2025-09-27 15:13:17+00:00
Yeah sure, but this guy was talking about luxury cars. I've seen B&W bundled in Maseratis, Aston Martins and McLarens. BMWs and Volvos too but that's a more recent market expansion.

Personally I think think the soundbars are a waste given that they'll never beat the stereo imaging you get from the second hand entry-level Hi-Fi. Soundbar is more convenient and I totally get many people don't always use it for intensive listening sessions, they just need a bit more tear free volume than the TV can output and maybe some background music.
by roversx | 2025-09-27 15:13:20+00:00
Yes, I understand how you feels. I did use AI for documentation and the project. I know that's not ideal and probably comes across as low-effort.

But honestly, I was genuinely frustrated with macOS 26's launchpad changes and wanted to build something to fix it. Yeah, the project has the problem but I'm trying to improving it. I just simply want there are more solutions, more alternative there. For the technology side, I am still a student, and my technical skills are not good, far from good. I just want the problem to be fixed, and for us to have better tools.