MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by raesene9 | 2025-09-28 18:57:42+00:00
The thing is, to me, the powers of the government to require more identification for different things is orthogonal to the idea of digital ID. We already have to identify ourselves in a variety of circumstances (e.g. mortgages, bank accounts, voting, using "adult" websites etc), and the gov. can get the information from various third parties on demand already.

Implementing those requirements didn't depend on there being a digital ID system. Instead we have a hodge podge of bad requirements (like "wet" signatures on specific documents, using of non-UK based private providers etc).

Implementing a digital ID system could reduce inequalities (for example, people who don't have passports and driver's licenses have more difficulties in some circumstances) and also reduce dependencies on non-UK orgs who may not do that well with privacy.

That's not to say there aren't risks of course, but other European countries seem to have managed to implement these systems without becoming totalitarian police states :)
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-09-28 18:57:56+00:00
That already happened: James VI of Scotland inherited the English (and Irish) throne. There's a pedantic sense in which the current English king is actually the Scottish king, not the other way around (although stronger pedantry would say the Hanoverian succession is sufficient to prove that whole line of reasoning a load of tosh). What would restoring the Scottish monarchy mean to you?
by mystraline | 2025-09-28 18:58:56+00:00
You know thats not what I'm saying.

I'm making a larger comparison that most of our resource, which is labor, cannot be donated at the mean cost per hour and taken off of taxes.

However rich people, whose primary resource is money, CAN be taken off on taxes.

Rich people have ways they can donate and shed their tax burden. Whereas average working people cannot volunteer professional labor and take off the same equivalent.
by redeyedtreefrog | 2025-09-28 18:59:48+00:00
France, Germany, Sweden, Estonia and India already have government id. However, this being hackernews there will never be a link to a well researched article on the pros and cons of introducing id cards (digital or otherwise), only conspiracy theories and confident declarations that id cards are a surefire symbol of authoritarian states. I don't know what I think, I lack sufficient knowledge to have an opinion. But I still know approximately 10,000x more about UK politics, economics and immigration than 99% of the people commenting here.
by cool_cherry | 2025-09-28 18:59:58+00:00
Switzerland is transitioning to online voting, and having a digital ID for authentication is helpful for that. I hope it is used as part of the voting process.

My understanding is that the current approach for e-voting in Switzerland works with voters being sent a PIN in the mail [1]. Then the voter uses the PIN to log into the system and vote. Unfortunately that means that insecurely discarded letters from non-voters could be used to cast votes on behalf of these voters.

Some jurisdictions try to use a second factor to prevent these attacks. In Ontario, for example, many municipalities use a combination of the voter's PIN in the mail + the voter's date of birth. But a date of birth isn't really secret. Lots of people know your date of birth (especially insiders at organizations that collect this data), and it may appear in data breaches or even publicly on social media. If you're curious about this, I recently co-authored a paper which is all about security problems relating to online voting credentials in Ontario -- It's relevant to the Swiss case as well: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-032-05036-6_...

Long story short, using a digital ID to authenticate to the system (like Estonia does) goes a long way to mitigate this authentication problem. However, there are still plenty of other potential risks with online voting that are unrelated to authentication (how do you prevent ballot stuffing, clientside-vote-altering malware, falsified counts, etc). And there may be privacy risks with digital ID depending on the practical implementation.

[1] https://digital-solutions.post.ch/en/e-governmenthttps/digit...
by noirscape | 2025-09-28 19:00:18+00:00
The issue for Apple is that in the EU, they're still mainly characterized as the company that dragged their feet on using standardized chargers, leading to there being a law on the books that mandates USB-C. (As in, it's obvious to literally everyone that if Apple just used USB-C, that law wouldn't exist, since literally everyone else was willing to use microUSB and then USB-C for their regular charging devices; without Apple, there'd be no incentive to do it, but because they're a major player that refused to co-operate, it's now required.)

That law axed a lot of the second-hand grey market for cheap Apple cables of poor build quality (something Apple also worked towards because their official cables have had poor build quality since forever), and is generally seen as a positive for most people, since everyone who's ever had an Apple device is also familiar with the growing collection of cheap chargers that are varying degrees of functional that comes with it; instead a USB-C charger can often be repurposed to charge e-readers, tablets, lights and so on, while Apple chargers could only be used to charge Apple devices. It also eliminated all the problems with audio docks, where before you had to pick between buying one for Apple and one for Android/everything else.

Basically it's made less e-waste people directly have to engage with, and is generally seen as a good thing... but Apple kept whining about it, so their reputation as a customer-friendly company is in the gutter as a result; even most Apple users I know of still don't even bother trying to defend the company on how bad they are at interoperability/standardization.
by commongeek | 2025-09-28 19:00:43+00:00
I'm not optimistic. A simple loop summing numbers in a list is at least 30 times slower than PyPy, GraalPy, and Node.js, regardless of whether the JIT is enabled or not. I've watched and read everything there is to know about Python performance, and I'm afraid that without Python 4 (which won't be coming), there won't be much to gain. PyPy is great, but I'm afraid it won't be supported for long, and I wouldn't bet on it for a serious project. I migrated my own project to JS and I am rather satisfied (certainly with the performance).
by UncleMeat | 2025-09-28 19:01:00+00:00
I actually don't think that this is super meaningful. The qanon-esque conspiracies are free floating. The actual conspiracy does not matter and it will happily move to some completely different topic over time. The conspiracy could instead be that Hillary Clinton is using the Ring of Power to turn people's kids trans and it would serve the same function.

So I don't think that pointing out the ways that the Trump administration is materially harming people's health does anything. The point of the medbed conspiracy isn't to solve healthcare. The point is to define "them" as the source of general suffering faced by people.

Same as the adrenochrome conspiracies aren't actually about rooting out child abduction but instead let people define some external cause to why they lost their kids in a custody battle after losing their minds online and having their kids bathe in bleach.
by AJRF | 2025-09-28 19:01:02+00:00
The labour government can not be challenged in any serious way until the next election in 4 years. Petitions don't really do anything, they will just say "no" to what the people ask for and move on with their agenda.

It is disheartening to see this country follow the same path the US took, it seems as our politics become more polarised, the team sports aspect means we start seeing parties push through agendas while putting their fingers in their ears. It's so easy for a politician to point score by shooting down dissent as "the other side thinks this is bad, so it means it's good".

The stated goal of Digital ID is to reduce illegal migrants from working, getting housing and using services. The obvious issue here is that they don't use traditional means to do this today, and it won't change with the introduction of this. They already hide from the state.

If we had decent opposition they'd try to kill this by mandating it HAD to be used for voting, which Labour will absolutely not want.

I would say 95% of my friend group were not born in this country, and the changes this government are making are pushing them to want to leave, and they are here legally, they have high paying jobs and skills and they feel unwanted.

For the first time in my life it seems like it makes sense to join them.
by mulle_nat | 2025-09-28 19:02:22+00:00
Can anyone comment on the "You can exceed the amperage specs" ? I made myself a little case study using 4x1W panels and using them in series and parallel. I got the distinct impression that running panels in parallel is better in not so bright conditions compared to a single panel. Whereas a serial configuration made it worse. Since the sun doesn't shine here that much. Running in parallel seems to be preferable, but it would slightly exceed the amperage spec of a few converter i sampled.
by m3047 | 2025-09-28 19:02:32+00:00
I've been consulting since 1984, and before there was a notion of "open source" I (and others) had a notion of "tools of the trade" that we wrote into contracts. These had to be finished enough in a conceptual and artifactual sense sufficiently so as to be distinguishable from what was delivered to the customer as the customer's property. How public these tools would be was negotiable. There wasn't necessarily support, but there was often an expectation that bug fixes or functional enhancements would be shared with prior recipients / licensees.

So that's kind of my grounded understanding of "finished": that something is "finished" given the context it operates in. Meets some contractual specifications.

I give away the core components of an (mildly SIEM-like) observability platform on GitHub. I publish demo clients, but I don't publish the actual clients which I utilize in production. I will give them to you if you make friends, demonstrate that you can steer the core components, and demonstrate that you're capable of providing useful, cogent feedback.

This is a support issue. I don't have the time, patience, or interest to provide support theater. I'm not that interested in the clients, per se; I'm more interested in what they accomplish for me. Let me put it plainly: I'm interested in what they do for you if you pay me money to be interested, or I find your particular application of personal interest. I don't want to hear that the clients are crap because they don't solve your personal problem pretzel. I don't want to hear that the client doesn't work when the server components aren't set up properly.

I'm pretty comfortable with stuff being finished for a given context. That functionality in that context is a kind of oasis or petri dish, and if stuff manages to transplant to a different context or different inhabitants come to the oasis then I'm generally interested in looking at that and reexamining "finished"; and that's why I put it out there, in public.
by lqet | 2025-09-28 19:02:44+00:00
For those unfamiliar with this "rental tax": If you own a house in Switzerland, the tax office assumes that you are your own landlord and rent your house to yourself. It estimates the fictitious rent you charge yourself, and you have to pay income tax on it. The Swiss German name for this estimated rent is "Eigenmietwert" ("self-rental value") and this is what will now be abolished.

What makes this strange tax even more absurd: as you are your own landlord, your property interest rate becomes a business expense of your hypothetical rental company. So you can deduct your property interest from this income tax on the fictitious rent you pay yourself.

In effect, it is unattractive to fully repay your mortgage (you just leave enough debt to avoid the income tax), and Switzerland has the highest household debt in the world. By a large margin [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household...
by articulatepang | 2025-09-28 19:03:02+00:00
I'd love to learn more about this. What resources/books/articles/code can I look at to understand this more? Or, if you have some time, would you mind expanding on it?

The parts I'm specifically interested in: 1. What the 300 line pool and allocator look like 2. What this means: "BTW the for-case can simply be supported by setting a pool/global boolean and using that to decide how to wait for a new task (during the paralle for the boolean will be true, otherwise do sleeps with mutexes in the worst case for energy saving)"

Thank you!
by jacquesm | 2025-09-28 19:03:24+00:00
It would help at noon, when usually inverters make so much power they push the local grid to saturation which causes them to disconnect from the grid for a while. There are different rules for this for different localities, typically the installer will pick the regime appropriate for the local grid. Where I live (NL) the voltage is allowed to hit 253V for up to a minute, if it takes longer than that my inverters will switch off. That's a requirement to pass inspection, if your inverter can not do this then that's an automatic fail.

There are 'home batteries' that store power for practical reasons up to a day, maybe two. They are useful for sunny/cloudy conditions to maximize the amount of power locally consumed. But battery storage and retrieval isn't free and so far - at least, for my installation - this does not make economic sense. But another factor of two in price drop for my preferred chemistry and it definitely would make sense and then I would probably install about 20KWh worth of capacity. The trick then becomes to balance power sent to the grid and sent to the battery so that you maximize the utility of the grid in order not to wear out the battery prematurely. That means cycling the battery between 70 and 90% state-of-charge for Lithium-Ion. I'd much rather have Lithium Titanate so that is what I'll be holding out for, they are already available, but still too expensive. But they're much safer and have far better charge/discharge curves and life-span.
by crazygringo | 2025-09-28 19:03:26+00:00
> The surround sound part, though? Eh, not quite yet.

I dunno -- I find it much better than actual speakers.

With Atmos on the AirPods Pro, I can pinpoint the location of an instrument within about 5°. It's astonishing.

Whereas with the traditional 5.1 speaker setup... you definitely get the sense of center vs. side, and kind of a couple of "zones" in between, but I can never place the location of an instrument or sound as accurately as I can with the AirPods Pro. It's a much more diffuse directionality, rather than "it's coming from exactly there".

Plus, of course, I get to take my surround-sound music and audio everywhere. Not just my living room. So I don't know what "extremely limited usage scenarios" you're talking about? I mean, yes it needs to come through an Apple device, but that's all my media anyways.
by popalchemist | 2025-09-28 19:03:27+00:00
Depth psychology would suggest that mythology is an emergent phenomenon of the psyche; there is no removing it.

Better to understand that it is there and how it works. It is precisely due to this myth-making faculty that in the absence of a legit mythos (i.e. that of Christianity, which was the dominant cosmo-conception / worldview in the west for most of our history) the vacuum of power that is left by the absence of a God figure will be replaced by the nearest approximate/surrogate the psyche can find. This is how we elevate celebrities like Trump to the status of a God-king who can do no wrong.
by agentcoops | 2025-09-28 19:04:05+00:00
Completely agreed. Whether it be AI or otherwise, I consider anything that gives me more time to focus on figuring out the right problem to solve or iterating on possible solutions to be good.

Yet every time that someone here earnestly testifies to whatever slight but real use they’ve found of AI, an army of commentators appears ready to gaslight them into doubting themselves, always citing that study meant to have proven that any apparent usefulness of AI is an illusion.

At this point, even just considering the domain of programming, there’s more than enough testimony to the contrary. This doesn’t say anything about whether there’s an AI bubble or overhype or anything about its social function or future. But, as you note, it means these cardboard cutout critiques of AI need to at least start from where we are.
by kiitos | 2025-09-28 19:04:08+00:00
> https://srid.ca/unwoke

i mean, this is a set of opinions and positions that are far beyond anything that could be called "moderate opinion[s] on gender representation" and are pretty uncontroversially terrible, particularly in the context of any non-homogeneous community of people

if you post something like this to the public internet and stand behind it, then man i'm not sure what you expect, you're self-identifying as an asshole, and it can't be surprising when you're banned from places as a consequence

edit: good lord, i clicked around a bit more on that website, dude is obviously a psychopath, and i feel duped even responding to this kind of nonsense
by ZephyrBlu | 2025-09-28 19:04:57+00:00
> No it isn't. There's literally nothing about the process that forces you to skip understanding. Any such skips are purely due to the lack of will on the developer's side

This is the whole point. The marginal dev will go to the path of least resistance, which is to skip the understanding and churn out a bunch of code. That is why it's a problem.

You are effectively saying "just be a good dev, there's literally nothing about AI which is stopping you from being a good dev" which is completely correct and also missing the point.

The marginal developer is not going to put in the effort to wield AI in a skillful way. They're going to slop their way through. It is a concern for widespread AI coding, even if it's not a concern for you or your skill peers in particular.
by mrtesthah | 2025-09-28 19:05:07+00:00
What if Apple, et. al. decided to require an unaffordable subscription to use those assistive features you have become dependent on, or they stop supporting or even outright remove those features? Your devices become useless, and the ability to run free software becomes the only way to salvage them.

And sure, you could go looking elsewhere in the market, but the same thing could happen with any vendor, and there's no guarantee that the specific set of features you desire is going to be available at a price point that makes sense (especially if your income changes due to further disability).

What if the current US federal administration continues its fascist descent and decides that supporting disabled people is "woke DEI shit" and puts incredible pressure on companies to discontinue features for, or even surveil and report, its disabled users? Eugenics is part and parcel of their ideology after all. Or more likely, the US govt requires a ChatControl-like feature in all commercial software.

Free software is a matter of personal self-reliance -- not just some hobby.
by jacquesm | 2025-09-28 19:06:11+00:00
The problem is usually shading, not so much the capacity of the wiring, though, if you try hard enough you can exceed the rating of the final stretch of wiring to the inverter (or the little pigtail in the inverter if you connect all of the strings at max voltage/amperage). Shading can really upset the current flow in a set of parallel/series connected panels and can cause local hotspots due to overcurrent. Usually inverters are pretty smart about this and they'll detect that you are pushing it further than is responsible and they will just switch off. I've purposefully triggered such conditions to ensure my installation is safe and I was pretty impressed with how utterly painless fault detection, isolation and recovery are in modern inverters. I also had an older one and there it definitely wasn't all that friendly, to the point that the whole thing had to be hard disconnected from the grid before it would work again.
by prostheticrazor | 2025-09-28 19:06:13+00:00
The article is pretty interesting, perhaps some marmite takes, but the bit that chimed with me is the vibe coding vs AI-driven engineering. Senior management at my work is obsessed with vibe-coding and are constantly pushing engineers to promote vibe code to PROD. It’s dispiriting to see parts of our code base begin to fill with manager+LLM slop …
by crazygringo | 2025-09-28 19:06:39+00:00
> but I wouldn't use them for bass-heavy stuff

I mean, it's whatever you enjoy, but it's definitely got nothing to do with the frequency response or clarity.

If you want to "fill the room" for bass-heavy stuff that's more of a psychological thing.

I personally like the bass-heavy stuff way more on the AirPods Pro precisely because it's so much clearer, without the muddiness. Because there's nowhere near the level or distortion, reflection, etc. you get with room speakers.
by rolph | 2025-09-28 19:07:12+00:00
eventually someone will figure out how to stop adolescent cliques from driving people into mental infirmity, then truly stop a shooting before it even begins to happen. not only that, a large portion of suicides, self harm, and academic disadvantage would be stopped, before it even begins to happen.

this should be just as elementary as storing weapons properly, and modeling responsible usage.

it should be pathetically obvious when an individual is being systematicly ostracised, schcool year after school year.
by kyledrake | 2025-09-28 19:07:19+00:00
Having spent a decade in Portland and a few years in the Bay Area, all I can say here is that I've met these people in droves in both places, and the rural-urban political divide is just as strong in the coastal states as it is in the Midwest. I don't think content people living simpler lives are a thing that is unique to any state or region in the country.

If your experience is different, it may simply be the product of cost pressures. It's easier to have a simple life that consists of smoking weed and playing video games with your friends if you don't have to figure out how to afford an expensive house. And something tells me people in Indiana, even their dullards, could figure out how to ride a bus if they really needed to.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-09-28 19:07:44+00:00
Regarding tackling illegal immigration the issue is that there are already ample and sufficients checks mandated by law so this would not change anything. Indeed the main issue is that there are dodgy employers and landlords who simply flunk the law and would oviously continue to do so and ignore Digital IDs all the same.

Digital IDs would also be de facto mandatory for the majority of adult residents based on what they would be required for despite the government very clumsily saying otherwise.

The government is simply being dishonest here so that should arouse suspicion...