MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-09-11 09:18:14+00:00
What I learnt from this article: the Combat Management System of these Norwegian frigates must be hot garbage.

A modern CMS will automaticaly plot anything moving in the range of the ship sensors and warn of an approaching vessel. That doesn't excuse the human error obviously but you have to wonder how outdated the Norwegian navy equipment must be if that kind of thing can happen.
by andyjohnson0 | 2025-09-11 09:18:48+00:00
Been doing this software thing for 35 years so I guess that makes me an old timer.

Technical books, especially for practitioners, that stay relevant over a long period of time are rather rare. I wish I could say that I've had time to study TAoCP or SICP, but I haven't.

Some of what I did find useful back in the day were: Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment by Stevens, Stan Lippman's C++ book, Code Complete by Steve McConnell, the GoF Design Patterns book, Working Effectively With Legacy Code by Michael Feathers, and Introduction to Artificial Intelligence by Charniak and McDermott.

Whether, and to what extent, any of them are useful now is hard to say. Depends what you want to learn and what you're doing. The Charniak book, for example, is about classic "good old fashioned" AI, not the currently dominant connectionist approach. But it's LISP, and LISP is always relevant.

I'd also add The Systems Bible by John Gall as a book that influenced me. Its not a technology book though.
by LeonM | 2025-09-11 09:20:46+00:00
I volunteer for a historical museum about transportation (mainly steam engines/trains) I was recently approached if I could create an 'interactive video game' to use in the educational corner.

I politely refused, of course, but I did ask why we'd even want that. The reason was simple: we receive government funding to do 'educational stuff', and kids like computer games, right?

Having employees (or volunteers in our case) to educate visitors during all opening hours is a massive challenge for most museums, so an interactive screen/game sounds like the logical solution to ensure the funding is approved each year again.

I hear the same thing from other musea that we collaborate with. Reality is that these systems are broken more often than not. Typically designed on a budget by an external developer, who is no longer employed or paid to maintain it. Employees/volunteers don't understand how the system works, so the screen just stays off.
by psychoslave | 2025-09-11 09:21:20+00:00
>Feels like the painful transition when professional photographers started having to differentiate themselves from whatever people could do with their own phone.

Hmm, do we have statistics about that? Like, did the profession collapsed?

I wouldn't equal the photo I do (not much) with anything close to a pro. Not even to a good amateur level actually. But that's just me. :D

The "nature of the profession" might already be quite diverse, but that's an interesting remark.
by fennecbutt | 2025-09-11 09:21:23+00:00
Tbf they should do this in London too. They're looking to pedestrianise Oxford Street, but who knows when that will happen as we need to allow plenty of time for the government to find the right contractors to shovel money at for a project delivered overtime and underbudget.

A lot of it over here is for show, like ULEZ where huge range rovers are somehow exempt. Or where LTNs are always put on the richest streets in the nicest neighborhoods for reasons of "think of the wee children playing in the street" when there are plenty of children living outside of LTNs. Just a coincidence that all the properties inside an LTN are worth >£850k.
by rickdeckard | 2025-09-11 09:22:25+00:00
It's not just telecom, the usage data of a product is naturally an asset of every company.

It's just a matter whether this data contains PI (=Personal Information) or (!) PII (=Personally Identifiable Information --> Information that can be combined with other data to create PI).

The EU GDPR (here mostly known for consent-popups on websites it seems) allows companies to keep this kind of data but requires very strict governance and user-consent if the data contains PI or PII.

And everyone who worked in a larger company at the time of enforcement saw the wonders it did. Suddenly whole departments reviewed the amount of data they collect, and found there was a huge portion of telemetry data that was actually NOT needed to preserve this asset-value (Names, Addresses, Serial numbers, etc...)
by nobodywillobsrv | 2025-09-11 09:22:36+00:00
No the empathy comment is about it being confused with naive sympathy.

Empathy means fully simulating the other person state of mind and world. Empathy is cognitive spend.

Love thy enemy is a short cut because human brains seem to be unable to think properly in anger. You need to simulate your enemy to understand their positions and seek deals.
by jeltz | 2025-09-11 09:22:50+00:00
Sweden and Denmark are some of the main drivers of this proposal. As a Swede I am a bit unclear why as while our politicians are quite pro-survelliance they have spent much more political capital than reasonable.

One possible reason seems to be lobbyism and shady connections to surveillance tech companies and various shady non-profits

https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the...
by lelanthran | 2025-09-11 09:22:53+00:00
> WordPerfect competed heavily with Microsoft Word back in the DOS days.

In my part of the world, on MSDOS, MS Word was not even in competition with WordPerfect.

It was only with the advent of Windows (more specifically, Win95) that MS Word started seeing non-fractional percentage of usage compared to WordPerfect 5.1
Show HN: Dbmcp – An Instant MCP Server for Your DB
by shoomkloom | 2025-09-11 09:24:14+00:00
DBMCP is an open-source instant online MCP server for your DB's. Paste in your connection string and get the MCP config for your agent of choice. Currently supports MongoDB connection strings. More DBs coming soon. Let me know how it woks for you and if you find it useful.
by kypro | 2025-09-11 09:24:27+00:00
Our ability to apply empathy selectively is the root cause of most of the evil in the world. I myself struggle to understand why some things when they happen to some people move me so deeply, but when similar things happen to others I feel much less. I obviously don't choose to behaviour in this way, but that seems to be how we are wired.

I guess the difference is that I'm aware of it and I try to fight it. The ability to empathise with those whom you disagree with or share little in common with is a skill that can be learnt, and one we should try to teach to our children. And I mean this in its most extreme sense. If you can't empathise with someone you find truly bad/evil, that's a problem because we can always view others as bad/evil if it allows us to justify our lack of empathy towards them. Typically its those who we believe instinctively deserve the least empathy which we must proactively try our hardest to understand and care about. You see this all the time in war – they're the bad guys and deserve the bad things we do.

Unfortunately I'm not sure how practical what I'm saying is at its limit. Something you quickly realise when you practise being empathetic to everyone is that people will take advantage of that. But still, as a trend the world would be much a better place if more people could see past differences and care for the suffering of people equally.
by nobodywillobsrv | 2025-09-11 09:26:06+00:00
Have we considered that the assassin, directly or indirectly, is a seditious third party actor trying to destabilize the US?

I am not claiming this is true. But merely that if I was employed to destabilize the US, I would claim to have been responsible for a number of recent events in order to please my boss.

I am hoping the possibility of a joint common enemy can perhaps unite people in America a bit.
by ManBeardPc | 2025-09-11 09:27:09+00:00
Glad we could delay it for now. It will come back again and again with that high of support though. Also the German Bundestag is already discussing a compromise: https://www.bundestag.de/presse/hib/kurzmeldungen-1108356. They are only unhappy with certain points like breaking encryption. They still want to destroy privacy and cut back our rights in the name of "safety", just a little less.
by riedel | 2025-09-11 09:28:41+00:00
I think the front lines are not that clear. Zensursula was actually a termed coined because she wanted the German equivalent of the online safety act in Germany back in the days. The 'Stasi 2.0' initiative (data retention at ISPs and online 'raids') was backed by some people in CDU and SPD (current ruling coalition). IMHO online safety (censorship) and chat control (privacy invasion) are different beasts, with different lobby groups as well.
by akk0 | 2025-09-11 09:28:51+00:00
What a shockingly vacuous article, I don't think it says much other than dressing up the idea of people watching 60 second videos in the most cartoonishly alarmist language conceivable. If there actually is a reason to believe that "attention spans" are getting "damaged" by watching silly videos, TFA doesn't show any -- I always just see this stated as fact, but a priori in the absence of evidence I find it a very extraordinary claim.

Then again, if it's effective enough at maximizing psychological grip to hold people's attention for a full hour every day, maybe we should be getting worried... /s

>Song introductions have shortened dramatically, with one study finding average intros fell from more than 20 seconds in the 1980s to just five I expect the decline of radio is the cause of this
by tomhow | 2025-09-11 09:28:55+00:00
It's clearly against the guidelines to accuse someone of telling a "deliberate lie". None of us can know what they knew or sincerely believed when they wrote that comment.

As I've kept saying I agree that theirs was a bad comment and agree that it should be flagged and killed, but we need you to try harder to avoid personal attacks and escalatory rhetoric like this. You've been here a long time, we value your contributions and tolerate some boundary-pushing from you because we want a broad spectrum of views to be represented, but sometimes we have to say "enough". Please just do your part to make things better here not worse.
by tialaramex | 2025-09-11 09:29:07+00:00
Though big enough to be worthwhile at scale, it's notable how small, relatively, the difference is from the out-of-box Rust unstable sort to the tuned radix sort.

Lukas Bergdoll and Orson Peters did some really important heavy lifting to get this stuff from "If you're an expert you could probably tune a general purpose sort to have these nice properties" to "Rust's general purpose sort has these properties out of the box" and that's going to make a real difference to a lot of software that would never get hand tuned.
by andrepd | 2025-09-11 09:29:16+00:00
> It was surreal to break news on something THAT important (and blatantly unconstitutional in Czechia), while all the bigger media just slept ... and slept ... and slept ...

Unfortunately it's the pyramid of Maslow. It's hard to make people care about something that seems academic when there are much more pressing political problems crushing people and making sure they don't have space to think about anything else.

It's hard to make people care about privacy principles when they can't afford a house anymore.
by wraptile | 2025-09-11 09:30:33+00:00
I just bought a 2nd hand Fold 6 for 800$ and I'm not going back to slab phones ever. Primarily because I've never done as much reading as I've done in the past month with this phone. Removal of friction here has been such a game changer when it comes to productive use of my phone - now when I would doom scroll otherwise I just unfold my phone and do a bit of reading.

The only drawback is the camera but turns out it's much easier to carry a dedicated camera (Canon g7xm3 in my case) than a dedicated reading device / tablet.
by dcaustin33592 | 2025-09-11 09:30:36+00:00
I love NotebookLM but I find its breakdown of AI research papers a bit surface level. So I built one optimized for AI engineers and researchers called The AI Research Deep Dive on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. I spend a lot of time commuting and walking. I wanted to be able to use that time to learn about new work in AI so now I just hit play and dive into a paper. Hoping you all find it as useful as I have!
by ManBeardPc | 2025-09-11 09:31:22+00:00
It would probably be toppled by courts, yes. Anyway, meanwhile they already start implementing it, developing the technology and infrastructure they can base on the next time where they basically reintroduce the same illegal laws in a new name. So companies and governments already have to spent huge sums of resources to introduce it and may fall into the sunken-cost fallacy. "If we now already have it we can also use it (for something else)"?
by liendolucas | 2025-09-11 09:31:36+00:00
Apparently Italy will support it. This is absolutely infuriating and it will fail miserably. Encryption can't he stopped no matter what law gets out there and any politician voting in favor shows how ignorants they are.

Instead of discussing WHY "owned" mobile phones have a short lifespan and we can't truly do whatever we want with them (be at the hardware/software level) and forced to choose between the apple and google duopoly, we get into these lousy law debates about privacy.

Why doesn't the EU put effort in paving the way for a more open and free tech world when we rely 100% on propietary technology that comes from the other side of the Atlantic?
by closewith | 2025-09-11 09:33:09+00:00
It's not so much a matter of relying on AIS (which is never sufficient by itself), but the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea (IRPCS or Colregs) require every vessel maintain a proper lookout (Rule 5) and it must be done using all available means, including sight, hearing, radar, GPS, and other electronic aids like AIS.

This is the most fundamental requirement for safe navigation and it is table stakes for everyone on the bridge, OOW or not.

So AIS is not enough, and sure enough the tanker identified the frigate even though it was not broadcasting AIS and even communicated the need for the frigate to manoeuvrer, as the tanker was constrained in its ability to do so.

> However, what it did show that it was surrounded by three tugs - which I hadn't noticed at first. I concluded that it was being towed by the tugs and wasn't powered up (or whatever the nautical term is) and therefore didn't show in AIS? No idea if that is correct or not.

AIS is a broadcast system using VHF transceivers, and services like MarineTraffic rely on shore stations or satellites (S-AIS) which receive AIS signals and forward them via the internet where the central server then pushes them out to the app/web users.

This means that depending on local VHF conditions, you may not see all vessels broadcasting AIS via online services, even though any vessel close enough to be a collision risk would have no issue receiving the signal.

In this specific case, had the OOW consulted either their eyes and compass (ie taken repeated bearings to the lights which would have shown they weren't static/ashore) or radar (which did clearly show the tanker on a collision course - constant bearing, decreasing range), the collision would have been avoided. AIS should have been used only to augment radar and visual data only (ie to identify the vessel, class, draught, etc). Even without broadcasting on AIS, they were receiving this data from other vessels like the tanker.

In addition, had the warship been broadcasting on AIS, VTS (maritime analogue to air traffic control) would most likely have identified the collision risk and also directed the frigate to manoeuvre to avoid the collision. As it was, without broadcasting AIS, the frigate was invisible to VTS (in particular as the VTS had failed to manually plot the warship's route when the warship called in to enter their area of responsibility).
by Lio | 2025-09-11 09:34:12+00:00
If Samsung had a better reputation for privacy they’re the brand I’d switch to for one of their folders.

I’m put off by how Samsung monetise every data source they’re trusted with though. E.g. TV viewing, phone data, Samsung Pay, forced analytics, etc.

As a brand they don't seem to have any restraint when it comes to user privacy.
by alias_neo | 2025-09-11 09:34:26+00:00
It's news to me that the sun is blue!

Jokes aside, I suppose it's novel in the sense that it can be achieved with artificial _blue_ light.

My understanding was that it was various forms of UV from the sun that caused "bleaching", whereas the paper points out that it is not UV in this case, and in fact, the UV can cause additional staining.

EDIT: Edited for grammar.
by adrian_b | 2025-09-11 09:35:04+00:00
A general strike did not work in the past against most communist governments and it is much less likely to ever work in the future, anywhere.

In all the countries of the Eastern Europe where the communist governments were removed, this was possible only due to traitors inside the communist top layer, who had reached the conclusion that their chiefs are too incompetent, so it will be more profitable for themselves to remove all the figures well known to the public and to convert themselves into capitalist businessmen, ensuring the surviving of their power in another form.

For a general strike to exist, it must be coordinated. There must exist someone who must say "Let's do this" and everybody else must start the strike.

This is impossible under a competent tyrannical government. A half of century ago it was impossible because every company, institution or school was infiltrated with informants, who would report immediately any kind of criticism against the government, then the reported person would disappear, e.g. by being interned in a mental health institution. If somehow a strike succeeded to start in a single place, that place would be instantly isolated, with no communications, then nobody outside would learn what has happened, except perhaps many years later, and the strikers would disappear.

Nowadays, this has become much simpler, because the government no longer needs a huge number of loyal human snitches (which had to be redundant, as none of them could be trusted), it can use electronic surveillance monitored by AI.
by vrighter | 2025-09-11 09:35:06+00:00
You can shuffle a deck of 52 cards, and be reasonably confident that nobody has ever gotten that exact shuffle (or probably ever will, until the universe dies). But at least in this case, we are sure that a deck of 52 cards can be arranged in any permutation of 52 cards. We know we can reach any state from any other state.

This is not the case for LLMs. We don't know what the full state space looks like. Just because the state space that LLMs (lossily) compress, is unimaginably huge, doesn't mean that you can assume that the state you want is one of them. So yeah, you might get a string of symbols that nobody has seen before, but you still have no way of knowing whether A) it's the string of symbols you wanted, and B) if it isn't, whether the string of symbols you wanted can ever be generated by the network at all.
by slightwinder | 2025-09-11 09:35:45+00:00
> "Wilder times" is an interesting description of the early days of the country.

Wilder, in the sense of less Organization, less infrastructure, slower transportation and communication. People had to protect themselves, because there was nobody around who could do it. But today, the majority of people can be reached in a matter of minutes.

> When I look around at the violence the last several years (mass rioting, looting, uptick in murder pretty much everywhere,

You don't understand that guns are the major reason for this?
by potatoz2 | 2025-09-11 09:36:11+00:00
It’s false that cyclists routinely ride on the sidewalk in Paris, let alone at full speed. They ride on the road (car and bus lanes) and in bike lanes. It’s true, however, that on some very popular bike routes (rue de Rivoli, boulevard Saint-Michel/Sébastopol), there are enough cyclists that don’t stop at lights that pedestrians can’t easily safely cross. This is a solvable issue that’s independent from the modal share or infrastructure.
by soraminazuki | 2025-09-11 09:36:37+00:00
I know, but there would've been opposition to a state funeral regardless. The Japanese public perceived the state funeral and the decision-making process behind it as corrupt.

Here's a Japanese article from when the decision was made. Note that the scandal leading to his assassination, which was a significant issue in its own right, isn't even mentioned. That's because the decision to hold a state funeral was itself very scandalous.

https://www.nhk.or.jp/politics/articles/feature/89302.html
by lukan | 2025-09-11 09:38:06+00:00
"Es sei klar, dass privater, vertraulicher Austausch auch weiterhin privat sein müsse."

"Private communication needs to stay private"

I interprete this as not having a dumb police bot installed on my devices checking all my communication. That sometimes by misstake sends very private pictures away, because it missclassified.

This is what chat control means and I believe if most people would understand it, they would not be in support of it. It is no coincidence, that the outcry mainly happens in tech affine groups.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-09-11 09:38:20+00:00
I don't follow what you're trying to say here.

If you think that encouraging empathy is a bad thing and discouraging empathy is good, then there's little hope for you. The lack of empathy can easily be shown to lead to the evils of Nazism and the desire to be cruel to people who are not "in our group" (e.g. their skin colour is different or were born elsewhere)
by MandieD | 2025-09-11 09:39:36+00:00
About two years ago - it is possible that the policy has been loosened since then, but I'm not in human resources.

The really strong protections are the first three years after a child is born - you have to be allowed to work anywhere from 15 to 30 hours/week, and be allowed to change it with a few weeks' notice ("Elternzeit" - covers both parental leave and this part time working arrangement).

I had to give a reason for wanting to do the next five years part-time, but "child" resulted in no further questions. I had to commit to only being allowed to work part time, and for the weekly hours I requested for those five years; my employer could choose to accept a request to change them or to go back to full time before the five years is up, but they're not legally obligated to.
by potatoz2 | 2025-09-11 09:40:12+00:00
I live in the 19th district of Paris—probably the cheapest district within city bounds, with the 20th, and not in the center—and I have no issue living with an under 2-year-old. Hell I even decide to go all the way to the 14th for his pediatrician appointments, on the subway. I can walk to something like 5 supermarkets and bodega-like markets, take the subway to a bunch more including specialized, I can walk to see a generalist, we walk to his daycare, etc. all < 10 minutes. I can’t imagine what you can’t do honestly.
by crossroadsguy | 2025-09-11 09:40:47+00:00
> murdering this man was not just wrong, it was stupid.

We heard what happened on July 13th, and even from this far, culturally and physically, we could see (and this is not to play down an attempt on someone's life) – ah, there goes that election.

How the impulsive acts of violence have changed the course of history too many times, how people in power, people looking to take power twist and use such events. We don't learn from all that history, do we?
by amelius | 2025-09-11 09:41:18+00:00
Am I the only one who thinks that DBus and XDG are causing a lot of problems?

I would love to see a complete overhaul of those.

In my opinion, if I type "xeyes" and it works (the app shows on my screen), then I should be able to start any other X11 application. However, gnome-terminal behaves differently. I don't know why precisely, but using dbus-launch sometimes works. It is a very annoying issue. A modern Linux desktop system feels like it's microservices connected by duct-tape, and sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't.