MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by exe34 | 2025-09-15 18:53:59+00:00
for me it's the fact that I could theoretically end it (modulo quantum immortality, my worst nightmare). the afterlife is usually sold with "guaranteed forever". I've been in so many situations that you might think "oh I wish this could go on forever" and then regretted it, that I want to make sure there's a way to pull the plug.
by wolrah | 2025-09-15 18:54:09+00:00
A is only the host side on devices not made by total idiots.

While there are a surprising number of devices that get this wrong, and I have never understood why, they are always wrong. It seems to be mostly cheap external hard drive enclosures and scanners I've seen using a type-A port for their upstream-facing port and shipping with the cursed A to A cable.
by nickpsecurity | 2025-09-15 18:54:10+00:00
There's two reasons, one general and one here.

The general is the God of heaven and earth, Jesus Christ, commanded us to tell people about Him. He said to believe in Him alone and repent to be forgiven. Also, if we've ever done evil, we'll burn alive for our sins since they are not trivial to God. I've also seen over 100 lives transformed by faith in Christ... from fentynal addicts to people who did drive bys... while popular worldviews are doing record harm. So, we share Christ when possible because we love Him and you over all things.

Othe HN side, I currently only respond that way when it's in the article or comments. The article mentioned the sacred texts (Bible) along with Nebuchadnezzar who eventually believed in God in the book of Daniel. The article is also promoting the site while other articles there are disturbed with damage to it. Such political claims often receive counterpoints. Finally, one commenter was already discussing the Biblical aspects and I was responding to them specifically.
by echelon | 2025-09-15 18:54:51+00:00
Let's say we're both in the army and I'm your commanding officer. I order you to kill a civilian and you do it.

Did I just kill a civilian, or did I just say some words?

I think it's clearly the former.

Another case: someone takes private nude photographs of your wife and then uploads them without her consent to social media. Is that "free speech" or sexual assault?

I'm pretty close to free speech absolutism, but there are some things that go beyond just being speech or opinions. Libel and defamation (whose scope is very narrow), shouting fire and it leading to injury or death, influencing or instructing someone to kill another person, spreading non-consentual sexual imagery, etc.
by patates | 2025-09-15 18:55:04+00:00
> Some times boring, done consistently, is where the truly great things come from.

I used to tell myself the same thing. Then one day, a customer misconfigured their NetScaler, and all hell broke loose. We had half-delivered CSS files, misfiring form handlers, random blank screens of death, and a buggy front-end library that would bombard the backend with requests if it received the wrong status code with no back-off logic! There were hundreds of bug reports. You name it, we had it.

Debugging everything was just wild, especially with the constant tension of "What if it's our fault?" In the end, it wasn't! We got paid for our time, and we were able to close a massive number of tickets. It was one of the best weeks of my professional life.
by Pxtl | 2025-09-15 18:55:04+00:00
Disposal fees were a thing here in Ontario, the idea being that consumers should pay up-front for the cost of disposal, and therefore expensive-to-dispose things (like things containing batteries) should cost more.

We rewarded the government that brought this plan in by replacing them with Doug Ford, the brother of the infamous late Toronto mayor Rob Ford who was a literal crack-smoking drunk.
by zahlman | 2025-09-15 18:55:18+00:00
This is Buck Angel's personal retrospective. For context:

> Buck Angel (born June 5, 1962) is an American sex educator and former pornographic film actor and producer. He founded the media production company Buck Angel Entertainment. Angel is a transsexual man.[3][4] He currently works as an advocate and educator. Angel served on the board of directors of the Woodhull Freedom Foundation[5][6][7][8] from 2010 to 2016. The Foundation works to affirm sexual freedom as a fundamental human right through advocacy and education.[9]

Angel, per the video, appears to hold many views that seem inconsistent with standard narratives of activists for transgender rights. (Of course, I don't find them at all inconsistent with the described view of the Woodhull Freedom Foundation.) I had previously been entirely unaware of this association (although I did immediately recognize the name), and this perspective, so naturally I wanted to share it with everyone. (I'm told that "elevating marginalized voices" is a moral good, but really I just found it interesting.) I also noticed that Kirk's words, as described and documented, are inconsistent with some narratives being thrown around about his beliefs.
by webstrand | 2025-09-15 18:55:42+00:00
I thought the way React did suspense was pretty elegant?

The component render function is pure, meaning you can re-render component without unwanted side-effects. So on encountering an unresolved promise, halt and throw the promise, then have the runtime catch the promise and re-execute the render when it resolves. I thought this was really an elegant way to introduce an asynchronous dependencies.
by 1718627440 | 2025-09-15 18:56:17+00:00
> just refer to it as a mythical state that spontaneously occurs after all of the revolution

I think you have switched the terms here. Communism is what the mythical state is called. The political agenda leading to, during and after the revolution until that mythical state, is called socialism.

It's true, that socialism used to describe also a liberal way to curing poverty, but that split occurred over 150 years ago. Since then the parties that intend to keep democracy call themselves socialdemocratic and socialism is used exclusively for those calling for councils and revolution.

I'm a bit tired of hearing times and times again, that actually maybe socialdemocrats are also socialists. Socialdemocrats are not against private ownership, they just want it distributed differently. That's not socialist.
by BizarroLand | 2025-09-15 18:56:56+00:00
Landfills are likely chock full of Aluminum, Nickel-Cadmium, Lithium, copper, brass, and all sorts of useful metals and chemicals.

Sure, the grand majority is going to be food waste, but if you threw it all into an incinerator and melted down the ashes there is probably a decent blend of valuable material mixed in with the waste.
by themafia | 2025-09-15 18:57:00+00:00
We have several large scale full building generators. Our exercise cycles are 15 minutes once a week. Our diesel mechanics fully service the engines every 3 to 6 months depending on size and importance.

Fuel is easy because we have an external tank with a visual gauge that you can read from several feet away. When they added DEF they neglected to add a DEF gauge that's as easy to read. Thank goodness they sell DEF at any old truck stop.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-09-15 18:57:18+00:00
If programmers had any self respect we would refuse to be slop janitors and instead just build competing tools and eat the lunches of AI "coders"

But time and time again programmers continue to demonstrate we have no self respect and we're happy to dance to the tune of capital for money. That means we're definitely going to be downgraded to "slop janitors" in the near future
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-09-15 18:57:33+00:00
They didn't whitewash anything, read their comment(s) again.

They said to punish the company, but not put hundreds of employees who were told their papers were in order - half of which whose papers were - in literal shackles like they're violent criminals. What the everyday person sees in their news feeds is important and shapes how the US is viewed culturally and as an economic partner.

I'll throw in that we should actually talk about fixing our VISA rules?
by FabHK | 2025-09-15 18:57:42+00:00
No. The Chinese perpetrators might have targeted predominantly Chinese victims originally, but not for quite some time.

First, China has vigorously cracked down on crypto, and secondly, it has engaged in large scale information campaigns and PSA warning about these scams.

The people trapped in the scam centres are often English speakers, such as from the Philippines, India, Hong Kong, anglophone African countries, etc., targeting Western countries, or nationals of the target countries, e.g. Thailand or Vietnam.

The Chinese gangsters, like Russian hackers, now prefer to target foreigners.

If you want to know more, I can recommend the usual books about crypto, the podcast and article series on Scam Inc by The Economist, and Martin Purbrink’s substack.

https://asiacrimecentury.substack.com/

https://asiacrimecentury.substack.com/p/scam-inc-explaining-...

https://asiacrimecentury.substack.com/p/betting-on-chaos-the...
by dabockster | 2025-09-15 18:57:46+00:00
I’ve been playing around with Fedora KDE more lately and it’s made me realize how vertically integrated Windows is. Like there’s all these edge cases (too many to list) that Windows has taken care of years ago, whereas on Linux you’re usually downloading some 3rd party app that feels rough when installed. Or it’s something the kernel expects a driver to implement, but Windows handles it natively in Microsoft’s code.

When you think of it in a supply chain sense, Linux is one giant outsourcing operation and a whole bunch of “not my problem” project management styles.
by wk_end | 2025-09-15 18:57:48+00:00
OCaml (also SML) has a really powerful module system; it's so powerful that to call it a "module" system is maybe misleading to the average developer. You might think of a "module" system as a way of dividing your program into different files, and the ML module system certainly subsumes that case, but it goes beyond that.

The key to this is that modules in ML are actually kind of a separate programming language. Not only can you define modules, you can define "functor modules" - modules that are kind of like functions; you can pass modules as arguments to functors to produce new modules. And there's a (structural!) type system here, too: the modules a functor can accept are specified to have a specific structure, and if you try to pass an incompatible module to a functor you get a type error.

(Incidentally: the naming of functors in the module system is really unfortunate here, because it overlaps with the name of functors in category theory/Haskell.)

This sounds extremely abstract and kind of insane; it's easier to understand it in practice. A typical example might be that you want to define a hash table, which requires some kind of hash operation for a key. What you'd do idiomatically in ML is define a HashTable functor which takes, as an argument, a module X consisting of a type t and and a hash function. This would generate a HashTable(X) module specialized to that particular key type.

What's interesting here is that there's an overlap here with things like interfaces in Java or typeclasses in Haskell, where your HashTable type would demand that the key type adheres to a Hashable interface. It turns out they're kind of (kind of!) just different takes on the same thing. There's even some interest in the OCaml world in trying to "close the gap" with a feature called "modular implicits" [0].

The other thing to know is that there's an esoteric feature of Haskell called "Backpack", which is an attempt to bring the ML module system to Haskell. It's not exactly widely used or anything like that, but it's there and been in GHC for several years now.

This article is basically just demonstrating how Backpack lets you use modules in much the same way as you'd traditionally use typeclasses in Haskell.

[0] https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~jdy22/papers/modular-implicits.pdf
by parasti | 2025-09-15 18:58:13+00:00
What's Microsoft thinking here? We got Windows on our kids' laptops and it's a pain to do anything with every time, just an amalgamation of decades worth of UIs held together with duct tape, looks terrible and performs even worse than it looks. When I'm thinking of the next big upgrade, Windows isn't even on the list of options anymore, and that's not even an ideological statement in any way.
by GMoromisato | 2025-09-15 18:58:16+00:00
That makes sense, but Doctorow fails to go any deeper than "I don't think reverse-centaurs should exist."

Why, for example, is the listicle author a reverse-centaur instead of a centaur like Doctorow? IMHO it's because of power-law rewards to good writing. Doctorow can make a living writing a few books because his books are popular. But the listicle writer can't charge that much per page so has to resort to increasing his page output with AI.

This is not the fault of AI!

My friend is an author, and she works very hard to write her books, at least as hard as, say, Steven King. You would not be surprised to hear that she does not make the same amount of money per hour worked as Steven King.

If Doctorow wants to get rid of reverse-centaurs, maybe he should face the actual problem instead of blaming the usual suspects.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-09-15 18:58:50+00:00
> What I want to do is find out what the maximum size battery I would need in order to store all of summer's electricity for use in winter.

This is ridiculous. It's like asking how much propane do I need to store in summer to go the whole winter? You would need a tank so big it could fill up propane tankers. Thus why we get regular deliveries of propane throughout the year on an as-needed basis... and why you should only have enough battery to store the peak energy use for a couple days at most. If you have an extended period of no sun, first you reduce your energy use, and then you top up with a generator. This is far cheaper and more flexible than having a gigantic battery array for an edge case.

22kWh in battery (self-contained units, BMS, heating element, etc) costs <$4400 in the US, shipped from China, for a reputable (but not pricey-brand) battery provider. More than enough to power most homes (in Northeast US, cold winters without much sun) for a couple days. Add in everything else you need (wiring, solar panels, power inverter(s), MPPT(s), generator, etc) and you get to $6.5k-$9k
by harimau777 | 2025-09-15 18:59:12+00:00
What advice would you all have for programmers who aren't compatable with AI augmented programming?

I'm somewhat neurodivergent and got into tech precisely because it was a career where hyperfocus, compulsive systems building, passion for finding difficult solutions, etc. where valued. However, now it feels like those skills are no longer values; or even liabilities. As the article points out, companies now want me to "embrace commodity" and focus on plumbing code. However, those are precisely the areas that I'm not good at.
by mtlynch | 2025-09-15 18:59:29+00:00
I agree that would be nice, but it also doesn't sound all that practical for a small vendor.

I used to sell a home networking device,[0] and I wouldn't do what you're describing. If there were an issue where the labels calculate the wrong password or the manufacturer screws up which device gets which label, you don't find out until months later when they're in customer hands and they start complaining, and now you have to unwind your manufacturing and fulfillment pipeline to get back all the devices you've shipped.

All that to protect against what attack? One where there's malicious software on the user's network that changes the device password before the user can? In that case, the user would just not use the camera because they can't access the feed.

[0] https://mtlynch.io/i-sold-tinypilot/
by asim | 2025-09-15 18:59:30+00:00
Just to echo other sentiments. Don't use PayPal to hold your crypto. Yes it will open the gateway to existing PayPal users and enable them to transact in these currencies. But the reality is that these centralised entities do not operate under an ethical code the way you would expect them to. They make unilateral decisions about what happens to your account and funds without asking you a single question. Be very careful. I was not a banking skeptic before. I have quite happily used my bank account, credit cards, PayPal and everything else. But now. I am not so sure. The level of control they have over your finances and ability to transact is unnerving. What they do with your money you can't control. When they decide you are no longer a favourable actor you can't control. Minimise exposure to these entities please.
by hopelite | 2025-09-15 18:59:48+00:00
That is clearly not correct, hence why it is not called a Verfassung, but rather a Grundgesetz. You can rationalize it all you want, but not, it is not the same as in the USA, where not only do you need a constitutional amendment proposed and agreed on by not only the House but also 2/3 of the Senate. Then it still does not pass until 3/4ths of all the states also ratify the amendment all across the USA.

Did you catch how that might be different than when the last German government quickly removed the debt brake from this fake constitution with a single vote and after new elections had already been had and lost by the current government.
by marcosdumay | 2025-09-15 18:59:48+00:00
The most important properties of real audit trails are that they are side effects of the actual work, created during or after the fact without interfering with how the work is done.

The thing about work tickets is that they have none of those properties. Besides almost every developer insists on working with a complete audit trail that is just ignored because people don't want to look at it.

Compliance guarantee is a different beast, that isn't improved in any way by work tickets, but may need more work than the audit trail.
by hackingonempty | 2025-09-15 18:59:58+00:00
It is very good that the New Yorker is bringing this phenomenon to attention. However I am puzzled by the reporters styling of Professor Dave Explains as an "anti-skeptic." I always thought it was the skeptics that rejected claims not backed by good evidence, like religion and so called alternative medicines, while accepting the consensus of scientists working in the relevant field because it is.
by DyslexicAtheist | 2025-09-15 19:01:12+00:00
TL;DR: Melvyn Bragg is retiring. I guess this is interesting for some fans here. Shout-out to @astroalex who's partner[1] made their own archive https://shelby.cool/melvyn/ - it allows you to search the list of episodes by interest (which isn't easy on the BBC site). <3

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35074386
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-09-15 19:01:16+00:00
There was the Concorde, for some time. There may be newer, smaller ones, doing Mach 1.5 to 1.8, while being more silent. Flying cars? Aren't the prototypical electrical air-taxis that, in a way? Space programs? By whom? Do SpaceX and other commercial entities inspired by them not count? What about https://www.astroforge.com or similar?

edit: https://abovespace.com , https://www.vastspace.com , https://www.axiomspace.com/axiom-station , https://www.blueorigin.com/destinations

Less likely, but still: https://gatewayspaceport.com/the-gateway/

Finally, regarding space programs in the classical sense:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiangong_space_station and its planned companion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xuntian

Is the mention of chinese stuff taboo, because NIH!1!! DAMMIT! YELLOW PERIL!1!! ?
by MisterTea | 2025-09-15 19:01:22+00:00
> He still hacks Tesla computers for fun on the side, but notes that the method he used to extract the data for this case will not work on newer models. In mid-2023, Tesla introduced stricter security protocols, which delete the copy of the data in the circuit board.

Amazing how they can implement evidence tampering as a feature and get away with it.
by ruds | 2025-09-15 19:02:12+00:00
In most of the world, "liberal" doesn't mean the left half of the political spectrum. In many places it's the centerish part and in a few places it's the rightish part. In the US, until recently, almost all mainstream politicians were liberal in this sense (even while many of the Republican liberals used "liberal" as an epithet in campaign ads).

From wikipedia:

> Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, the right to private property, and equality before the law.[1][2] Liberals espouse various and sometimes conflicting views depending on their understanding of these principles but generally support private property, market economies, individual rights (including civil rights and human rights), liberal democracy, secularism, rule of law, economic and political freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion.[3] Liberalism is frequently cited as the dominant ideology of modern history
by notapenny | 2025-09-15 19:02:13+00:00
For sure it isn't the perfect solution for everything, and I say that as someone who spends most of their time in either React or Angular now. For application-like development or just sites with tons of interaction it's become as standard as reaching for Spring or PSQL though.

I can't speak to the complexity you've encountered, but for me it's pretty much zero. A button component is just a function. React-Router is good enough and code splitting is pretty much just changing how to import something. Component state is dead-easy to write by just adding a useState hook. Bundlers pretty much handle everything these days so not to much concern about size.

Your view on front-end developers having been mediocre in the past isn't far off though, at least in my experience. I noticed a big difference between the people who wanted to build nice looking pages and the ones that wanted to build applications myself. Even today it amazes me how many people have never unit tested their code, have no idea about layering an application and have poor JS/TS fundamentals. It's gotten a lot better though.

Ultimately it isn't perfect for everything, but for a lot of people it's an easy choice. And for me personally, the tons of other JS frameworks do very little in that area that I'd pick them. I'd rather spend my time working on the product. Lol, maybe its just the default because its the default at this point.
by LeifCarrotson | 2025-09-15 19:02:20+00:00
In case "bases with optional newlines" wasn't obvious to anyone else, a specific example (from Wikipedia) is:

;LCBO - Prolactin precursor - Bovine MDSKGSSQKGSRLLLLLVVSNLLLCQGVVSTPVCPNGPGNCQVSLRDLFDRAVMVSHYIHDLSS EMFNEFDKRYAQGKGFITMALNSCHTSSLPTPEDKEQAQQTHHEVLMSLILGLLRSWNDPLYHL VTEVRGMKGAPDAILSRAIEIEEENKRLLEGMEMIFGQVIPGAKETEPYPVWSGLPSLQTKDED ARYSAFYNLLHCLRRDSSKIDTYLKLLNCRIIYNNNC*

where "SS...EM", HL..VT", or "ED..AR" may be common subsequences, but the plaintext file arbitrarily wraps at column 65 so it renders on a DEC VT100 terminal from the 70s nicely.

Or, for an even simpler example:

; plaintext GATTAC AGATTA CAGATT ACCAGA TTACAG ATTACA

becomes, on disk, something like

; plaintext\r\nGATTAC\r\nAGATTA\r\nCAGATT\r\nACCAGA\r\nTTACAG\r\nATTACA\r\n

which is hard to compress, while

; plaintext\r\nGATTACAGATTACAGATTACCAGATTACAGATTACA

is just

"; plaintext\r\n" + "GATTACA" * 7

and then, if you want, you can reflow the text when it's time to render to the screen.
by vkou | 2025-09-15 19:02:21+00:00
You've watered down the concept of predictable consequences to the point of uselessness. If wearing a seatbelt while driving, not climbing up on the roof during a thunderstorm, not plunging your country into a war, or getting vaccinated to protect yourself from a dangerous disease are not mitigating 'predictable consequences', the term is just empty air.

Why are you choosing this semantic hill to fortify? What value does it bring?