MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fsckboy | 2025-09-01 00:38:16+00:00
>ordinality of IQ breaks down as scores get higher

ordinality of any sample from a Gaussian process breaks down as the thin part of the population density is approached, but that will only affect those at least three sigmas above or below, so it's an edge case that doesn't matter for the fat part of the curve.

you are cherry picking pieces of arguments that might threaten your "nobody is better than anybody else" anti-merit ideology. "From those who have the ability to those who have the need" is a merit-based sickle, comrade, and IQ is its hammer, is my argument.

>I think you could have written a reasonably strong argument that the parent commenter overstated their case, but you didn't do that: you just overstated the opposite pole of the argument and then declared the discussion off limits due to politics

I don't think you really think any of that. You are disingenuous if you claim that your (collective (in more than one sense of the word)) side wants to actually discuss the science of IQ; you simply want it removed from the discussion because it does not support your politics. If the economy rewards high IQs, and people have social mobility, you will see an economic sorting from top to bottom, and you don't like that. If IQ has genetic factors (which it seems to) that's a bigger disaster because once the economic sorting takes place, social mobility goes away (the latter half of the 20th century) A true scientific socialist would not try to imagine/censor these problems away in a central committee, but would admit them and try to figure out better ways.

I talked about the science of IQ in my comment something that you did not actually engage with. the correct wording would have been for you to say "g does not exist" and provide some basis for that belief
by sgarland | 2025-09-01 00:38:32+00:00
Yep. I know people will say, “it’s just a homelab,” but hear me out: I’ve ran positively ancient Dell R620s in a Proxmox cluster for years. At least five. Other than moving them from TX to NC, the cluster has had 100% uptime. When I’ve needed to do maintenance, I drop one at a time, and it maintains quorum, as expected. I’ll reiterate that this is on circa-2012 hardware.

In all those years, I’ve had precisely one actual hardware failure: a PSU went out. They’re redundant, so nothing happened, and I replaced it.

Servers are remarkably resilient.

EDIT: 100% uptime modulo power failure. I have a rack UPS, and a generator, but once I discovered the hard way that the UPS batteries couldn’t hold a charge long enough to keep the rack up while I brought the generator online.
by martin-t | 2025-09-01 00:41:01+00:00
People are weapons.

Maybe not Apple because they don't have a social network but Google (along with Facebook/Reddit/TikTok/...) can absolutely shape public opinion by controlling which posts/videos/discussions/comments get shown to people.

YouTube has this thing where your comments appear to be part of the discussion but actually don't appear to other people until much later. This means they are not _technically_ removing your comment, they just make sure nobody sees it during the time period where 90% of the views come from.

Look at how people censor themselves with words like "unalive" or "grape" because, presumably, certain topics are not advertiser friendly. But nobody can really confirm how and which words affect the algorithm. It's all just guesswork. They could just as easily promote or censor political topics and nobody would know.

It's not hard to turn people into extremists by consistently showing them one side of the story.
by andy99 | 2025-09-01 00:41:29+00:00
I don't think government should be involved here, but what they can do is (a) always provide alternatives where interacting with government doesn't require a smartphone or apps, and (b) mandate the same for regulated or essential industries like banks and airlines etc.

I'm not convinced there is some inalienable right to load an OS onto any hardware but said hardware/OS should never be on the critical path to anything a citizen needs to do.
by awesome_dude | 2025-09-01 00:41:31+00:00
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic

The USA military, and secret services were, and still are, at the behest of "American business interests"

See also the Oil industry, and Donald Trump's remarks aimed at the Australian government that might "curtail the tech companies" [1]

1 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-21/us-tech-x-meta-facebo...
by exclipy | 2025-09-01 00:41:44+00:00
I actually think this is antithetical to the philosophy. Cyclometic complexity is very much not the same as "is this code difficult to understand".

Arbitrary structure rules like "do_thing_a(); do_thing_b(); do_thing_c();" also is not unless you can explain how this helps make it easier to understand compared to say, one big function with "// DO THING A" comments.
by danpalmer | 2025-09-01 00:44:16+00:00
Absolutely, came here to say this.

At a previous place we used a dreadful email marketing SaaS tool and it caused us no end of fire-fighting, even though we probably only had 500 lines of integration code. We ended up rewriting the functionality we needed and bringing it in-house and saved a ton of pain and money, and added ~3k lines.
by vinibrito | 2025-09-01 00:44:18+00:00
Well I am/was building something that looks a lot like this, a shame I never applied to YC, wondering now if I should apply to other funds now so I can continue working on it, the prototype is ready so I have the main part figured out. A question, perhaps, could you give some tips to pitch this specifically, just for incubators, based on your experience?
by macintux | 2025-09-01 00:46:51+00:00
Speaking as someone who despises Ted Cruz to the bottom of my soul, I decided in 2016 that if Trump had decided to run as a Democrat, I would have voted for Cruz. At least he has some sincerely held beliefs that do not involve his own wallet and cruelty towards the entire world outside his inner circle.

My point being: at some point the American electorate has to take responsibility for picking the worst available person. The Democrats did not compel them to vote for Trump.
by Rapzid | 2025-09-01 00:47:08+00:00
I don't know about those radio tabs specifically, but your intuition is correct. Many of the ARIA APG (component)patterns require JavaScript to update tab index and ARIA properties for full implementation. Focus management and key-control are two problem spaces that are common across many patterns and require JavaScript.

Focus management:

Focus scopes and restoring focus requires JavaScript. Complex UI components like combo box, grids, and trees require dynamically adjusting tab index and focus. Combo Box requires managing accessibility tree focus separately from DOM focus. Modals implementing focus scopes and restoring focus scopes requires JavaScript.

Key controls:

The ARIA APG patterns call for differences in tab and arrow key control from what the browser would supply. Patterns that involve list of groups use tab to navigate between groups and arrows to navigate within groups.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-09-01 00:47:22+00:00
The registrar is not equivalent to a CA in DANE.

- A CA validates requests, signs CSRs, publishes cert revocation, issues certificates and trust anchors.

- A registrar in DANE merely passes a DS record you created to the TLD, along with the promise that this record was created by the domain zone owner. It's basically the validation step. Nothing to do with establishing or securing data, key/record management, etc; they're a glorified FTP tool.

I'm in favor of registrars getting more involved (since they are the authority on who controls a domain), but only with a completely different design. I have suggested many times that CAs establish an API to communicate directly with Registrars to perform the validation step, as this would eliminate 95% of attacks on Web PKI without introducing any downsides. So far my pleas have fallen on deaf ears. And since the oligopoly of browser vendors continue their attacks on system reliability (via ridiculous expiration times) without any real pushback, I don't see it changing.
by Ferret7446 | 2025-09-01 00:49:24+00:00
I think we really need to discuss whether IP/copyright protections were a mistake. A LOT of our "modern" problems stem from IP protections. Whether that be not being able to own media, right to repair, DRM, censorship, a lot of monopolistic behavior, medicine prices, etc. And no wonder, IP protection is government sanctioned monopoly, and it is generally recognized that monopolies are bad; is it such a surprise that government enforced monopolies are bad?
by divan | 2025-09-01 00:49:42+00:00
> It should be possible to run Android on an iPhone and manufacturers should be required by law to provide enough technical support and documentation to make the development of new operating systems possible

As someone who enjoyed Linux phones like the Nokia N900/950 and would love to see those hacker-spirited devices again, statements like this sound more than naïve to me. I can acknowledge my own interests here (having control over how exactly the device I own runs), but I can also see the interests of phone manufacturers — protecting revenue streams, managing liability and regulatory risks, optimizing hardware–software integration, and so on. I don't see how my own interests here outweigh collective interests here.

I also don’t see Apple or Google as merely companies that assemble parts and selling us "hardware". The decades when hardware and software were two disconnected worlds are gone.

Reading technical documentation on things like secure enclaves, UWB chips, computational photography stack, HRTF tuning, unified memory, TrueDepth cameras, AWDL, etc., it feels very wrong to support claims like the OP makes. “Hardware I own” sounds like you bought a pan and demand the right to cook any food you want. But we’re not buying pans anymore — we’re buying airplanes that also happen to serve food.
by mcswell | 2025-09-01 00:49:47+00:00
I read an article somewhere around 1960 that predicted we'd achieve travel at the speed of light in 25 years (I forget the real number, but within the lifetime of many people living then), and exceed the speed of light shortly thereafter. He based his prediction on the increases in speed of travel over decreasing spans of time, starting with people running, then tens of millennia later horseback, then a couple millennia later steam ships and trains, then a century later airplanes, then sixty years later orbital space travel.
by vidarh | 2025-09-01 00:49:54+00:00
It's underfunded, but it remains one of the top healthcare systems despite that, and provides universal care.

It's however relevant here to illustrate how insane the US healthcare situation is, in that Americans pay enough in taxes towards healthcare to provide universal healthcare if structured better, but chooses not to.

As an example of how to provide cost effective universal care, the NHS is a shining beacon. If the UK spent comparable amounts per capita to comparably wealthy countries to upgrade it, it'd be 20-30% more expensive, and a lot better, and still vastly cheaper than US healthcare overall.
by jjmarr | 2025-09-01 00:50:06+00:00
The story of the man[1] whose body was used to fool German intelligence during Operation Mincemeat is quite tragic:

> Michael was born in Aberbargoed in Monmouthshire in South Wales. Before leaving the town, he held part-time jobs as a gardener and labourer. His father Thomas, a coal miner, killed himself when Michael was 15, and his mother died when he was 31. Homeless, friendless, depressed, and with no money, Michael drifted to London where he lived on the streets.

> Michael was found in an abandoned warehouse close to King's Cross, seriously ill from ingesting rat poison that contained phosphorus. Two days later, he died at age 36 in St Pancras Hospital. His death may have been suicide, although he might have simply been hungry, as the poison he ingested was a paste smeared on bread crusts to attract rats.

> After being ingested, phosphide reacts with hydrochloric acid in the stomach, generating phosphine, a highly toxic gas. One of the symptoms of phosphine poisoning is pulmonary oedema, an accumulation of large amounts of liquid in the lungs, which would satisfy the need for a body that appeared to have died by drowning. Purchase explained, "This dose was not sufficient to kill him outright, and its only effect was to so impair the functioning of the liver that he died a little time afterwards". When Purchase obtained Michael's body, it was identified as being in suitable condition for a man who would appear to have floated ashore several days after having died at sea by hypothermia and drowning.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Martin_(Royal_Marines_...
by Spooky23 | 2025-09-01 00:50:45+00:00
I think the gp was confused with other devices. Colossus was indeed a computer by most definitions. I think the poster winced it up with the Bombe or other systems - not surprising because colossus wasn’t really known for many years. (It was secret into the 1970s iirc)

Other devices would calculate but not store instructions. The common ones you see are the fire directors on naval ships, which were analog “computers”, but single purpose.
by jasonjmcghee | 2025-09-01 00:51:10+00:00
I took the time to build an agent from scratch in rust, copying a lot of ideas from claude code, and using Qwen3 Coder 30B - 3.3B does really well with it. Replicating the str_replace / text editor tools, bash tool, and todo list and a bit of prompting engineering goes really far.

I didn't do anything fancy and found it to do much better than the experience I had with codex cli and similar quality to Claude Code if I used sonnet or opus.

Honestly the cli stuff was the hardest part but I chose not to use something like crossterm.
by saurik | 2025-09-01 00:55:24+00:00
It being difficult is different from it being possible. If a company wants to raise $50m to read all the documentation and build an alternative OS to run on this crazy piece of hardware, as the consumer I still benefit. If you'd prefer, let's stick with repair? I also need all of that information to be able to repair my phone, but again, it wouldn't necessarily be ME who repairs my own phone: I take it to a third-party expert who has built out their own expertise and tools.

(Hell: I'd personally be OK without "documentation"... it should simply be illegal to actively go out of your way to prevent people from doing this. This way you also aren't mandating anyone go to extra effort they otherwise wouldn't bother with: the status quo is that, because they can, they thrown down an incredible amount of effort trying to prevent people from figuring things out themselves, and that really sucks.)
by micromacrofoot | 2025-09-01 00:55:49+00:00
tbh I don't even care about support, just give me the keys

but ultimately it doesn't matter, if the market could bear the additional cost a competitor could emerge... but they barely do anywhere

honestly at this point in life I think it would be easier to change society to be structured in a way to make the people running these companies want to give it to you
by BobaFloutist | 2025-09-01 00:56:48+00:00
Also the longer you're in an underperforming hedge, the worse the crash has to be and the better your hedge has to perform to be worth it. You could be completely right about a recession/crash, but if you miss it by 5 years, your net outcome could still be worse than if you just sat and rode it out start to finish.
by drdeca | 2025-09-01 00:59:31+00:00
> The offset of the spin is likely to be caused by the fact that for particles of non-null spin their movement is not a simple spinning, but one affected by some kind of precession, and the "spin" is actually the ratio between the frequencies of the 2 rotation movements, which is why it is quantized.

I don’t expect this to work. For one thing, we already know the conditions under which the spin precesses. That’s how they measure g-2 .

Also, orbital angular momentum is already quantized. So, I don’t know why you say that the “precession” is responsible for the quantized values for the spin.

the representations of SU(2) for composite particles, combine in understood ways, where for a combination of an even number of fermions, the possible total spin values match up with the possible values for orbital angular momentum.

Could you give an explanation for how you think precession could cause this difference? Because without a mathematical explanation showing otherwise, or at least suggesting otherwise, my expectation is going to be that that doesn’t work.
by marcus_holmes | 2025-09-01 01:00:09+00:00
I know I'm going to get downvoted to hell for this, but I genuinely think it's OK for a device manufacturer to say: "we are building this device to run this software. If you don't want to run this software, then don't buy this device. There are plenty of other devices out there that will run other software, you can buy one of those if you want to run other software - our devices are designed to only run our software, and we're only going to support that".

I think that's a huge difference from the sideloading issue, though. Which is effectively saying "you must purchase all your software for this device from us, even if it's not our software, and even if it's available elsewhere for less".

I get how one statement creates the monopoly that allows the other statement, but I think they are still two separate statements.
by blooalien | 2025-09-01 01:00:39+00:00
> "Making hardware friendly to multiple implementations is good for everyone."

Yeah, it's called "competition", which time and again throughout history has proven to force all involved parties to improve or perish (good for everyone; at least the "improve" part). Lack of any has proven to foster "enshittification" to the most extreme levels (absolutely bad for everyone).
by mullingitover | 2025-09-01 01:01:20+00:00
Command+F 'drivers'

0 results

These things are never thought through. Sure, Apple could unlock the whole thing, tell everyone to go nuts. Who's writing the damn drivers? Apple's certainly not obligated to open source theirs, I also can't imagine them signing someone else's. So we end up with a bunch of homebrew drivers, devices crashing, getting pwned, and the dozens of people who install a third party OS on their iPhone write furious articles that get voted up to the front page of HN.
by klodolph | 2025-09-01 01:01:44+00:00
An index fund is a fund that owns a basket of stocks which are weighted by their weight in index. Like, if you have an S&P500 index fund, then for every $1,000 you put in the index, you own, say, $13.30 of WMT, because WMT has a weight of 1.33%.

But with some exceptions, you will mostly own stocks in integer amounts. You own one share or zero. That doesn’t give you $13.30 of WMT, that gives you $96.98 of WMT or $0.00 of WMT. Index funds work because the funds are large enough—a fund with $10 million in assets can buy 1,371 shares of WMT at $96.98 for $132,959.58 which is close enough. And then the index fund has to periodically rebalance—the share price of WMT changes, the weighting of WMT in the S&P500 changes, and the fund then has to buy or sell shares of WMT.

You could come up with a way to do something like having your own index fund, but it would involve partial ownership of shares, and pooling your assets with people who disagree with you about the way to allocate assets, which makes things more complicated and probably more expensive.

My personal take on this is that these more complicated schemes can often end with retail traders getting the short end of the stick. That’s why low-fee ETFs have been so successful.

I think if you want a weighting other than what the index fund gives you, then there are ways to do that—maybe these involve some fees, but c’est la vie. You can buy “tilted” ETFs, you can buy exposure to specific stocks or funds, you can hedge exposure to specific stocks or funds. But you are probably going to have a hard time making your own basket with a lot of stocks in it. Retail trading just does not get access to the same strategies that wall street has.
by daft_pink | 2025-09-01 01:01:49+00:00
There’s something weird about it. My phone needs to be hyper secure, and a lot of companies went to monetize that and introduce insecurities with their software.

That’s why I love my iPhone, but I’m not super happy about what happens with my Mac.

There’s something in the reality that it’s the app developers not the user that are being restricted by Apple. Apple keeps the app developers from doing things I don’t like for the most part. I don’t feel very restricted.

But I don’t want my computer to become a walled garden. It’s only OK for my phone.
by serf | 2025-09-01 01:01:52+00:00
>There are plenty of other devices out there that will run other software, you can buy one of those if you want to run other software - our devices are designed to only run our software, and we're only going to support tha

except in about a hundred million examples where the niche software that is running on the niche hardware has no viable alternative.

In The Real World when you have a component that breaks somewhere, and the manufacturer of the thing either fails to help or no longer exists you contract a third party to retrofit a repair module of some sort, or you do the work yourself to get the thing working.

How does this principle apply when the producer of the thing booby traps it with encryption and circuit breakers?

Software is special, comparing it to other industries never works well.
by hibikir | 2025-09-01 01:02:05+00:00
When the hardware is complicated enough that the software required to run it al all would take many millions of dollars to replicate, hardware freedom alone doesn't cut it. Just like a modern processor needs mountains of microcode to do anything you'd actually want. And that's without companies needing to obfuscate their hardware to avoid interoperability they don't want.

In practice, a whole lot software would have to be open source too so that the hardware is reasonably usable. The layers you'd need to let an iPhone run android well, or a Pixel phone to run iOS are not small.
by betaby | 2025-09-01 01:02:17+00:00
EU is dropping the ball here. Instead of mandating open hardware they trying to force companies to comply with random stuff, mostly censorship and spying. In theory EU can mandate open bootloaders like EU mandates USB-C charging, but they won't. Open hardware is the enemy of the EU, since that means everyone would be able to bypass the chatcontrol of the day.
by Spooky23 | 2025-09-01 01:02:17+00:00
That’s not how it works today. See: https://aamva.org/topics/facial-recognition

Drivers licenses mostly use solutions from off the shelf prefers like Idemia with pretty limited capability. Basically they aim to detect duplicate faces and flag for audit and investigation. The photos aren’t a particularly high standard.

Passport and visa photos are better pictures with more strict standards wrt lighting snd size.
by ldoughty | 2025-09-01 01:02:35+00:00
I agree that AWS EC2 is probably too expensive on the whole. It also doesn't really provide any of the greater benefits of the cloud that come from "someone else's server".

However, to the point of microservices as the article mentions, you probably should look at lambda (or fargate, or a mix) unless you can really saturate the capacity of multiple servers.

When we swapped to ECS+EC2 running microservices over to lambda our costs dropped sharply. Even serving millions of requests a day we spend a lot of time in between idle, especially spread across the services.

Additionally, we have 0 outages now from hardware in the last 5 years. As an engineer, this has made my QoL significantly better.