MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 9dev | 2025-09-18 04:15:55+00:00
The Supreme Court has repeatedly and crassly decided in favor of the current administration; among their decisions one to elevate the president above the law, and a carte Blanche for gerrymandering with a footnote that that is against the spirit of democracy.

The congress is dominated by the republicans, who have given up on every last shred of dignity and turned themselves into yes men that will approve anything Trump says, from a justified invasion of Greenland to how unnecessary it would be to publish the Epstein files.

And the executive branch currently hunts down government employees with an unsuitable personal opinion, takes jet plane bribes from foreign leaders, and tries to eradicate slavery and the Native American genocide from museums and school books.

Tell me about those three branches again. Right now, they have been perverted into a single tool to carry out the whims of an egotistic asshole backed by a powerful group of conservative activists.
by tomhow | 2025-09-18 04:16:11+00:00
OK sure, but if you "qualified before and ... qualify today", then you have a contract that they're in breach of. Or something. I don't know. That's the point. It just seems like this post is missing some key details that would help readers to see the whole picture. I can at-once believe that they are acting in a scummy way but also that there is more information about their reasoning that would help readers to understand the whole scenario.
by hoten | 2025-09-18 04:17:22+00:00
It's an insincere argument that government censorship is equivalent to public shaming or canceling (or however you want to describe the "left"'s actions here). When the government does it, it's authoritarian. When a group of people do it, it's freedom of expression. There's a discussion to be had about how it may go too far or be extrajudicial (people being fired for non criminal activity), but it's markedly different from the force of the government.

This isn't some even handed application of the FCC's policies against hate speech (if that's how one cares to describe Kimmel's comments) or misinformation (is there even such a policy?).

You don't have to look far to see this is politically motivated: just this week a Fox host suggested that the homeless should just be exterminated. I don't believe the FCC has threatened Fox's broadcast license in an attempt to influence Fox to fire him
by vic1102 | 2025-09-18 04:17:40+00:00
Thanks a lot! I really appreciate the detailed reply and the recommendation!

I wasn’t aware of `vipsgen`, but it looks great — full coverage and auto-generated bindings are exactly what I’ll be missing in `govips` if the project grows (I hope it will). I’ll definitely give it a try and see how it works.

Also, great tip on avoiding `autorot` by flipping crop coordinates — I hadn’t thought of that! Thanks again for your help!
by xyzelement | 2025-09-18 04:17:57+00:00
I realize these arguments are very common but I think they are more than likely bullshit. Again, I think religious people today are a good proxy for how people were "back then" especially since faith was almost universal.

For example, religious people don't use birth control and have more kids - but it's because that's what they want. To believe that someone has the discipline to adhere to the tenets of religion (eg respecting the sabbath, dietary laws) but keeps having unwanted kids due to uncontrolled lust for his wife, seems bullshit on its face.

The "farm help" thing... I think most people then and now see kids primarily as another mouth to feed in perpetuity, and not some sort of revenue generating asset. Certainly people who have a lot of kids today, aren't doing it for financial reasons.

And when I think back on my grandmother who was one of 5 or my wife's grandparents who were one of 10, it wasn't because their parents were harnessing them to a plow.

People today have kids because they love them, and because they want to cast a vote of influence into the future. I think people in the past primarily had similar motivations. The "farm help/birth control thing" is cope for the childless primarily, no parent actually thinks this way.
by SigmaEpsilonChi | 2025-09-18 04:18:14+00:00
The issue isn't really with being moved to a higher tier of billing. Slack doesn't owe us their service for cheap forever. The problem is that we signed a contract with them earlier this year for our current rate, then suddenly today we were told that we have to pay $50k immediately or all of our 11 years of data will be deleted. That's an absurd demand. It's a shakedown
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2025-09-18 04:18:19+00:00
>America being the "leader of the free world" has benefited it immensely.

It doesn't make a difference. See this graph: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/01/GDP_per_...

GDP growth stayed on the same trend both before and after the US tried to "lead the free world" post-WW2.

>military power projection

That's a cost for us, not a benefit. I don't want my tax dollars to be "projecting power". I want them helping me and my fellow citizens.

>pop culture has not only given the US clout

The internet is awash in anti-American comments. Trying to "lead the free world" has destroyed our soft power.

>Sticking to solve their own problems is how the Chinese declined into being the "sick man of Asia" hundreds of years ago.

My preferred model is Switzerland, not Qing China. I'm not anti-modernization. I'm anti-imperialism. We shouldn't involve ourselves in wars or military alliances on other continents.
by gabriel666smith | 2025-09-18 04:19:00+00:00
We already kind of have a solution for this with SLAs. Humans, being (probably) non-deterministic, also fuck up. An expectation of a level of service is, I think, reasonable. It's not "zero mistakes ever", just as it can't be "zero bugs ever".

We're firmly in the realms of 'this thing is kind of smarter / faster at a task compared to me my employees, so I am contracting it to do that task'.

That doesn't mean 'if it fails, no payment'.

But I think it's too analogous to non-tech-products to hide behind a 'no refunds' policy. It's that good - there are consequences for it, I think.
by DonHopkins | 2025-09-18 04:19:18+00:00
Alan Kay on “Should web browsers have stuck to being document viewers?” and a discussion of Smalltalk, HyperCard, NeWS, and HyperLook

https://donhopkins.medium.com/alan-kay-on-should-web-browser...

>Alan Kay answered: “Actually quite the opposite, if “document” means an imitation of old static text media (and later including pictures, and audio and video recordings).”
by throwmeaway222 | 2025-09-18 04:19:22+00:00
I think a lot of people care about shootings and murders. Almost every shooting that you turn on the tv for entertainment, at some local level, a lot of people are affected and those communities hold vigils, etc...

At least they used to. I've lived through the 80s and 90s as a kid, so when someone was murdered - even someone that no one knew - everyone in the country cried.

These days people's minds are so used to it, we're all warped. We were not meant to handle information at that level, so, effectively, we're broken.

It's why there is Tyler Robinson and Luigi and Decarlos. We used to have a country that this kind of thing was so outrageous that it was rare.

And what's even crazier is in the 80s and 90s is that everyone had guns. Even life-long democrats! There wasn't even a movement to get rid of guns. (Well of course there was but it was basically 3 people)
by maltalex | 2025-09-18 04:19:29+00:00
Cute, but is this actually needed? It's one more thing to remember, one more thing to know the subtleties of, and for what? To save writing a very readable and unambiguous line of code?

It feels like the C# designers have a hard time saying "no" to ideas coming their way. It's one of my biggest annoyances with this otherwise nice language. At this point, C# has over 120 keywords (incl. contextual ones) [0]. This is almost twice as much as Java (68) [1], and 5 times as much as Go (25) [2]. And for what? We're trading brevity for complexity.

[0]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/language-ref... keywords/

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Java_keywords

[2]: https://go.dev/ref/spec#Keywords
by kcplate | 2025-09-18 04:20:13+00:00
Carr is not “the FCC”. He’s the chairman, but he can’t act unilaterally to remove an affiliate broadcast license.

So “the FCC” did not apply pressure, the chairman did. He has a lot of influence and can set the agenda for the commission but he needs a majority of the commissioners to revoke a broadcast license. That is a super rare occurrence and would be unlikely.
by solid_fuel | 2025-09-18 04:21:18+00:00
Meta locked two games I already paid for - Blade & Sorcery VR and Beat Saber - behind account verification on the Quest 2. I already bought both of these, played them for a while, but now it won't let me use the headset without "verifying" my facebook account by sending them a photograph of my drivers license. Neither of these games are online, neither allow me to interact with other users in any way.

I will never buy a Meta product again, the brand reputation is lower than dirt to me. Even ignoring all the other awful things Meta does, they have no reason to require a verified account to play two local-only games that I already paid for. No matter how cool glasses like these may look, I have no trust that the brand will not suddenly demand more money or information from me to continue using a product I have already purchased.
by alexjplant | 2025-09-18 04:22:02+00:00
QBasic was my first programming language. I wrote an "operating system" called QWIN using it when I was 7 years old. It had a fake POST with a rising tone and some atonal beeps followed by a series of unnecessary pauses and prompts before getting to a text-based shell (you read that right - QWIN had no windows) which was a pile of spaghetti driven by IFs and GOTOs with arbitrary labels. I was afraid of GOSUB and loops of all types so the embedded unlicensed Pokemon text adventure was nothing more than a series of fleshed-out decision trees until you reached the end. My screensaver that drew random lines used a static seed for the RNG so it was the same every run. Fun times.

My best good friend still has a copy of it someplace on a floppy disk because we would run it on the computer that he put together out of spare parts on a piece of plywood. Thankfully he has a family and is too busy to dig it up and send it to me so I'm spared the embarrassment that would come with seeing it.

I'm always happy to see projects like this and OHRRPGCE where people did something useful with the language.
by brandall10 | 2025-09-18 04:22:19+00:00
They also tend to put the 'other' in them.

My argument is that New Deal policies paved the way - culturally, institutionally, legislatively - for the United States to quickly mobilize for war, which also significantly reduced the friction for something like this to occur.

So yes, it could have happened under more centrist regimes entering the war, but the scale and timing would likely have been minimized in comparison.
by kashunstva | 2025-09-18 04:22:48+00:00
> neither would look at 2016 or 2020 or 2024 and decide "never mind" on their life-long commitment to family. And neither would anyone else.

My wife and I are not conservative; but I would agree that no one is tracking the election results as a go/no-go indicator for child-rearing. My wife and I have 3 children, two of whom are adults so our decisions were made in a different era. Instead of bipolar political outcomes, I think many are affected by a sense of unchanging disinterest in the wellbeing of the great mass of people that populate the country. As long as the GDP rises, it’s good times, right? Few on either side of the political divide want to talk about the distribution of U.S. national income. Want more kids? Make life less difficult for families. Both major parties have completely failed to do this.
by tsimionescu | 2025-09-18 04:23:07+00:00
> for example imagine playing a Magic the Gathering (or similar) card game, and watching your cards come to life on the board in hologram-esque 3D

This is the kind of thing that buries VR ideas. It's very cute in a demo, but as an actual product, the cost of coming up with 3D models and animations for all MTG cards currently being played is many orders of magnitude more than the total number of people who would pay for this. Ultimately this is completely unnecessary fluff for the game, like chess games where the pieces actually fight: irrelevant, and it actually detracts from the game because it interrupts the flow of what you're actually doing.
Show HN: Made NZ's member of parliament financial disclosure data searchable
by sudojosh | 2025-09-18 04:23:09+00:00
New Zealand Members of Parliament are required to annually disclose their financial interests (shareholdings, directorships, consultancies, etc.) but this gets published annually as an unwieldy 80+ page PDF that's hard to search effectively.

I processed structured data out of the PDF and built a searchable interface: https://open-register-of-pecuniary-interests.joshmcarthur.co....

You can search across all MPs' disclosed interests by name, company, or interest type. For example, you can quickly find which MPs have interests in specific sectors or companies, filter by category or political party.

The data extraction was interesting - I found that a two-pass approach worked well with Gemini 2.5 Flash - one to pull out MP names and referenced page numbers, then I extracted the specific pages each MP appeared on and extracted structured data just from these pages.

The approach could work for similar transparency registers in other countries - most seem to publish open data as PDF, which technically ticks the box, but isn't the most accessible format to work with. Even within NZ, I'm planning to expand the data I process to previous years, as well as processing data for local and regional councils (who have the same legal requirement to publish financial interests of council members).

Open sourced at https://github.com/joshmcarthur/open-register-of-pecuniary-i....

Tech stack: Ruby on Rails, SQLite (FTS5), Tailwind/DaisyUI - keeping it lightweight since this is just a side project to make public data more accessible.
by jmb99 | 2025-09-18 04:24:09+00:00
> Why? If your app is used by billions of people, surely you can afford a few additional testers and engineers?

Unfortunately, in the real world, # of bugs solved per unit time does not scale linearly with # of developers - and, you eventually reach enough people that you can't effectively coordinate changes without wasting more time on processes than you're gaining by adding another person.

I've never worked at Apple and I don't know anyone on the Photos team, but I imagine a company at that scale probably has a good idea as to the optimal number of developers working on one application. Optimal to Apple probably involves optimal money spent:money earned ratio, not most bugs fixed per unit time, but I would wager those numbers are pretty similar anyways.
by vjjsejj | 2025-09-18 04:24:13+00:00
> next to someone who thinks that it's ok to commit acts of violence against others just because we don't share the same views.

But that still only includes a subset of views?

I mean what you are saying is right. But these people were perfectly fine with ignoring or sometimes outright endorsing political violence until one of their own was the target. That does not seem extremely hypocritical?
by mrandish | 2025-09-18 04:24:20+00:00
> Either way it suggests some troubling early implications about how well Meta's AI work is going

I fully expect the AI to suck initially and then over many months of updates evolve to mostly annoying and only occasionally mildly useful.

However, the live stage demo failing isn't necessarily supporting evidence. Live stage demos involving Wifi are just hard because in addition to the normal device functionality they're demoing, they need to simultaneously compress and transmit a screen share of the final output back over wifi so the audience can see it. And they have to do all that in a highly challenging RF environment that's basically impossible to simulate in advance. Frankly, I'd be okay with them using a special headset that has a hard-wired data link for the stage demo.
by lkjdsklf | 2025-09-18 04:24:45+00:00
My A1 has lots of annoying issues. It did print great out of the box, but requires a fair bit of maintenance to keep that up.

My prusa has be far more reliable so far. admittedly it’s newer than the a1 so it’s too early to be super conclusive on that, but so far it’s been quite a bit better

Of course, it’s quite a bit more money too
by whatevertrevor | 2025-09-18 04:26:02+00:00
> > but that doesn't mean we should just delete everything.

> Where did this come from? This has nothing to do with anything.

Poor wording on my part, because I was typing on my phone. "Everything" refers to everything related to copyright law. Your original comment implied that we should just burn it all down (going "as far as possible to the other side"), and I don't agree with that.

Copyright has been weaponized of course, but there are considerations worth keeping in mind about why it exists in the first place. The intent is to create mechanisms that incentivize creation of art, and allow creatives to distribute said art without other people getting automatic ownership of the fruits of their labor, just by virtue of having the file.

In a world where distribution of media is (relatively) cheap and easy, we need to think more about how we incentivize the creative process, instead of making it a wild west where anyone is allowed to distribute if they have the bits on them. In a world where everyone pirates, very little worth pirating remains.

EDIT: Forgot to respond to the rest.

I agree about patreon, but also:

> Youtube's paying any significant amount to any content creator other than maybe the top 0.01%.

That's not accurate. Of course if you have a couple hundred subscribers you get nothing from youtube, but neither does a random busker on the subway. Arts are just brutally competitive, and there's way more art being produced than people want to consume.

Youtube's partner programs are quite generous as other people have pointed out in sister comments. In addition, a good chunk of your premium subscription goes directly to the creators you're subscribed to.

> I fail to see what else I would derive value from. I just want the damn file in most cases, with minimal interference., but Youtube seems to always want plop their schlong inbetween the content creator and their audience, to everyone's displeasure.

This misses my point, but illustrates the weird thought process people go through when assigning value to digital media. When trying to value a desk we're willing to go through the whole shebang: cost of materials, quality of materials, quality of the craftsmanship and how much labour it would have required, the estimated cost of all the manufacturing processes involved, finishing labor costs etc.

But when the conversation is about paying for digital content we only focus on the direct value it provides to us, the consumer. The entire conversation about input value just gets lost.

Now input value is not always perfectly correlated with the output value (it's shaped differently for each customer), but the fact that the conversation simply shifts away as if creators and people building the platforms don't exist outside of the stream of bytes feels disingenuous.
by rolph | 2025-09-18 04:26:30+00:00
guess what im an off grid bush retreat alaskan, and i hunt and hit and cull, all the time, but i dont brag about it, or posture that willingness to kill contributed to entry to a government organization.

what many people call a useless dog, is actually the case of a useless person, with no skills at all regarding husbandry or behavior management.

gloating, feeling powerful as a result of causing death or discomfort, yes those actually are the making of serial killers.
by kelnos | 2025-09-18 04:26:46+00:00
Kimmel didn't endorse the shooting. At "worst", he sorta-but-not-directly suggested that the shooter was a member of the MAGA crowd. Which he might have been; it's still quite unclear what his politics were. (And plenty of right-wing personalities on the internet had criticized Kirk in the past, so it's not like Kirk was universally beloved on the right.)
by MangoToupe | 2025-09-18 04:26:52+00:00
Sure. It also helps to accurately characterize the place we are at today if you want people to take the estimation of trajectory seriously.

Part of the problem is that some part of the country has been calling (perhaps accurately) people fascist for years—hell, just last week people were hysterically chanting that Trump is Hitler at a dinner, which is ridiculous in the particulars (even if there are obvious similarities in mass dehumanization and use of indiscriminate state violence) while simultaneously making it harder for the rest of us to convince others to see those real similarities—while other parts look around and just see the same old country they always did, just with more insane people. If we cannot overcome the massive cultural differences that characterize our broad society and communicate well with each other, we have little hope to fix the underlying problems enabling these people to perpetrate evil.

But, I don't have much hope for this coming decade, frankly. We are all too addicted to finding comfort in our little cultural bubbles to collectively find the will to pull our heads out of the media machines that surround us and reassemble around some sense of the very real shared values that should bind us together: feeding ourselves and our families and finding healthy lives pursuing happiness.
by throwmeaway222 | 2025-09-18 04:27:45+00:00
> Murderers walk freely among you, and _we're_ not all bad people

what? This is nuts. Are you saying you murder people?

> A healthy society would encourage any speech which could reduce divisiveness (e.g. comments on Mr. Kirk, without retribution)

Yes I agree with this. There are a lot of people that do vigils and prayers and eulogies when people die. Then there are people that go: he deserved it and XXX is next. The former does not drive division. The latter does - and that's what needs to stop.
by gsf_emergency_2 | 2025-09-18 04:28:19+00:00
"Cancel culture" gets piled on by conservatives sometimes because it's such an obvious own goal that used to be a prerogative of the right

I might be off my rocker on this, but!

>prove me wrong

Is such a right-wing to say.

Because it signals that a conservative believes that

*self-improvement is possible*.

(Their actions tend to suggest otherwise-- Thiel and Wolfram are my go-to not even mala (fide) examples. Lack of faith in learning happens in liberals or self-styled moderates, but we'd call that pessimism ("depression" in the empathetic or clinical). With thinking right wingers it's normally narcissism..Ezra is a pessimist but he carelessly assists the own goals)

Calling out cancel culture today: the youngest kid signals that they give up on self-improvement in favor of acting out, so the elder sibling, who used to be punished for a very similar thing, jumps (gleefully) on it . "Mama look at what she just did!" knowing the parents gonna wring their hands
by DistractionRect | 2025-09-18 04:28:22+00:00
Grapheneos is, to my understanding, a dedicated development effort that specifically targets pixels.

Lineageos on the otherhand, provides scaffolding that volunteers can use to support phones of their choosing. It's very best effort and ymmv between phones. A universal upgrade option is just asking for trouble as it's not guaranteed all phones will behave the same/well.
by MangoToupe | 2025-09-18 04:28:55+00:00
We may never go that direction. I'd guess our flavor of evil will be uniquely american—performative cruelty, benign neglect, feigned helplessness, sporadic senseless violence, and everyone for themselves. Trump (nor, I suspect, Vance, or Thiel behind him) strike me as very much like Mao or Stalin at all.