MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by umanwizard | 2025-09-23 11:12:34+00:00
> 'You' elect the government. Even if you didn't vote for ruling parties, majority did.

So what? Even if 99% of the population agrees with doing something, that has no bearing on whether I agree with it or am responsible for it.

And, anyway, no major candidate would have lifted sanctions on those countries, so nobody could have voted against them even if they wanted to.

> Also it seems to be a common thing in Europe to refer to other's country populace OR government as plural 'You'. From my small sample size of 3, Americans were always confused by this and thought they were personally attacked.

Perhaps Europeans, with their higher-quality parliamentary systems, are more likely to uncritically accept the idea that governments actually represent their people, whereas Americans are more likely to realize it's a sham.
by esperent | 2025-09-23 11:12:57+00:00
We're using the Nextcloud Collectives app and it's great. It's like a very simplified version of Notion but where every page is a markdown file. There's also a full permissions/user system inherited from Nextcloud itself.

The only feature I miss from Notion is the ability to publically share a page so that people outside your team can read it. But that's not a big deal.

I guess Obsidian works in a similar way (markdown files) and would have more features, but there's no user permissions system. And it's closed source.
by K0balt | 2025-09-23 11:13:15+00:00
In my understanding, Joy is the emotion of overt happiness. It elicits silly behavior, celebratory vocalisation, laughter, and hugging.

Happiness is the state of satisfied being devoid of feelings of remorse, emotional pain, grief, or anger. It is a state that accepts joy, that provokes appreciation, gratitude, and satisfaction. It is a generally open and creative state, that gravitates toward the positive.

It is possible to maintain a state of happiness amid unfavourable events and conditions if your mind and actions are guided by a moral framework, and even to maintain a sense of happiness through hardships and injustice if you have built the philosophical structure to separate your mind and sense of self from your circumstances.
by grumple | 2025-09-23 11:14:21+00:00
This is not true and is nonsensical. The Iranian regime is explicitly anti-American, and it was American inaction that allowed them to rise to power. If America had intervened during the revolution, they could have eliminated the regime in its infancy and saved half a century of headaches and many lives lost due to Iranian wars and terror proxies.

The US also did not create political Islam, which predates the US by over 1000 years. Blaming the US for the problems of this region which has always had these problems is counter-factual. The problems of this part of the world - poverty, violence, religious oppression and dictatorships - predate western civilization as a whole, and in fact the oppressive empires from the Middle East / North Africa spread earlier and wider than western empires.
by tpoacher | 2025-09-23 11:14:27+00:00
This is nice, but ... I wish the doc didn't introduce it as "a better cd command", that's very misleading.

With the exception of the fuzzy part, which can be added separately, Bash already has facilities for all of those functionalities.

The "remembering" part can be done via dirs/pushd/popd. The "using the basename only" part can be done via CDPATH. The "automated" remembering could be done via a super simple function wrapper over 'cd', adding things onto the the dirstack or the CDPATH respectively (and with a selection menu, possibly fuzzy, when clashes occur)

Putting it all together to achieve the same effect feels like a very simple 10-liner bash function at best.

Not dissing the author's work or idea, nor is there anything wrong with reinventing the wheel in another language for fun; but if you're going to claim that "z is a better cd" because it bundles all that other functionality for things that are unrelated to cd, and for which there are already pretty decent unix-philosophy-adhereing commands that you could be using effectively already, then if you fail to mention these things in your documentation, it feels a bit ignorant / disingenuous. I would have preferred examples with "without z you'd have to use CDPATH for this, and dirstack for that, and maybe this 5-line wrapper for the menu thing, etc".

Otherwise it feels a bit like saying "grep is a better ed" or something.
by numpad0 | 2025-09-23 11:15:24+00:00
The ones linked are nowhere near A4 or A5 in size. They didn't bother to even look up and suggested you realistic options. A4 sized e Ink panels at sample prices are, idk, $2k? Most engineers would be relatively price sensitive in those ranges.

It's not rare these days for people outside Asia to have completely broken mental math of engineering man-hours required for a product or how extremely subsidized the products in their hands are. iPhones can be bought for $499 not because they've figured out AI design and robotic mass production over in China, it's because they're leaving $2k-4k per unit on the table to be blown away in wind. And ultimately it's because that money is only nicety to them, not vital.

Which means, if you do the labor on your soil, your local economy will demand that amount to be on table plus some, counted, bound, and placed under a weight.
by robmccoll | 2025-09-23 11:15:28+00:00
Because they each result in round-trips and individual queries to the database rather than a more efficient single round-trip with a join. Note: I don't know the details of GraphQL, but I'm assuming it does the smarter thing.

In this paradigm, the places where you are calling map() could probably be replaced with explicit getComments() or getCommentsWithAuthors() or two methods that do just one query each.
by dajtxx | 2025-09-23 11:16:14+00:00
Such a weird and absurd conversation to be having from the PoV of someone who started using computers a long time ago.

Offline first apps 'sound like the future'? I agree they're far better than the trash we have now, but it's not like we can't build them now.

We should be building them now. The web was never meant to be an app delivery platform :(
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-09-23 11:17:02+00:00
> they are making it harder for OP to work as a software developer, which makes it harder for the Iranian regime to benefit (directly or indirectly) from the efforts of software developers in Iran.

A shower thought:

Wouldn't it make more sense if country A that considers sanctions against country B provided very "cushy" immigration laws for highly educated people from country B so that country A profits from these people's efforts while country B will suffer from a brain drain?
by vasco | 2025-09-23 11:17:05+00:00
I mean when I was a kid nobody did it, when I was in highschool all the classes had at least 3 girls doing it and nowadays nobody does it anymore at those rates (I have 2 friends who now teach at the highschool we went to). Thats what it means to me. And there's plenty of papers documenting this rise and fall which happened to line up with my generation. Regarding papers I read some when this topic came up in a podcast and was convinced and there were a lot of results for a query like "social contagion bulimia papers".
by theshrike79 | 2025-09-23 11:17:15+00:00
One time cost per major version is sustainable, you won't get Silicon Valley rich on it, but you can make a living.

Lifetime licenses only work in the beginning when you have people buying them at regular intervals, at some point the market is saturated and you need to have a subscription model.

Case in point: Unraid. I have two grandfathered "forever" licenses and I'll never need a third.
by muzani | 2025-09-23 11:17:16+00:00
Yup, that's exactly what parent comment is saying.

Let's say your beverage LLM is there to recommend drinks. You once said "I hate espresso" or even something like "I don't take caffeine" at one point to the LLM.

Before recommending coffee, Beverage LLM might do a vector search for "coffee" and it would match up to these phrases. Then the LLM processes the message history to figure out whether this person likes or dislikes coffee.

But searching SQL for `LIKE '%coffee%'` won't match with any of these.
by mahrain | 2025-09-23 11:17:39+00:00
There really are too few business models available to build sustainable IoT solutions, apart from subscriptions (and only Security companies seem to have figured this out), pyramid schemes (letting your new users pay for maintaining the whole solution), or plain old planned obsolescence (with forced upgrades, like with Smartphones).

I'm not sure what models would work, apart from regulators stepping in and mandating x years of updates, like with the European regulations. Which basically comes down to #3.
by h4ch1 | 2025-09-23 11:18:40+00:00
I'd recommend everyone who buys IoT devices first search if the device is jailbreak-able and/or guides exist that enable you to load homebrew software/control it with open source alternatives.

I have yet to have a single issue with any of my IoT devices because I always make sure I have an escape hatch when the manufacturer decides to pull the plug.
by kruador | 2025-09-23 11:19:00+00:00
It's a pain in the backside to run on Windows, for two reasons. Firstly, Windows doesn't have (by default) a lot of the tools that are preinstalled in most nix environments. Git for Windows ships half a Cygwin distribution (MSYS2) including Bash, Perl, and Tcl.

Second, Windows doesn't really have a 'fork' API. Creating a new process on Windows is a heavyweight operation compared to nix. As such, scripts that repeatedly invoke other commands are sluggish. Converting them to C and calling plumbing commands in-process has a radical effect on performance.

Git for Windows is more of a maintained fork than a real first-class platform.

Also, I believe it's a goal to make it possible to use Git as a library rather than as an executable. That's hard to do if half the logic is in a random scripting language. Library implementations exist - notably libgit2 - but it can never be fully up to date with the original. Search for 'git libification'.

Many IDEs started their Git integration with libgit2, but subsequently fell foul of things that libgit2 can't do or does inconsistently. Therefore they fall back on executing `git` with some fixed-format output.
by gnfargbl | 2025-09-23 11:19:10+00:00
There was also a more general worry that depriving Germany would push the country towards communism. General Clay is reported as having said that "there is no choice between being a communist on 1,500 calories a day and a believer in democracy on a thousand."

The Morgenthau plan was also unpopular in Britain. Churchill only really considered it because he knew he had to keep the Americans happy to win, and Eden hated it. Remember that humiliating the defeated enemy had been tried before in 1918, and it didn't end well.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-09-23 11:19:16+00:00
> simply a case of the classic efficiency vs resilience tradeoff

Absolutely. The point is when pursuing a proven technological forefront, there are benefits to being able to focus on efficiency. Moreover, scale expands solution space.

Not always. But high-throughput manufacturing allows SpaceX to pursue both efficiency and resilience in e.g. engine design in a way not possible if you're building engines one at a time. (You always have multiple engines in process, which enables a higher risk tolerance, which enables a higher feedback rate, which allows for faster and more-meaningful iteration.)
by throw0101c | 2025-09-23 11:19:20+00:00
> This speaks to me. So much of our life circumstances are beyond our control (parents, genetics, geography, society, wider economy, etc.)

Philosopher John Rawls made this a key point for this thinking:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luck_egalitarianism

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rawls#A_Theory_of_Justice
by jiggawatts | 2025-09-23 11:19:49+00:00
Computer Science is incredibly immature. Many of its "founding fathers" are still alive!

Something akin to this that blew my mind recently was an IDE for a functional language that used typed holes, the programming equivalent of a semiconductor electron "vacancy", a quasi-particle with real properties that is actually just the lack of a particle. The concept was that if you delete (or haven't yet typed) some small segment out of an otherwise well-typed program, the compiler can figure out the type that the missing part must have. This can be used for rapid development because many such "holes" can only have one possible type.

This kind of mechanistic development with tool assistance is woefully under-developed.
by ghm2199 | 2025-09-23 11:21:08+00:00
Lived-experiences, this is what is important to understand #3-5.

Being able to experience this through practicnng vipassana, after spending a long time being self-centered for a long time, I can speak to the fact that there are a few things to truly come to this level of metaphysical realization

1. A bit of Luck(in finding/stumbling upon these) and psychological safety to try something that can change your mind on abandoning the ego and embracing these values.

2. One cannot be convinced of abandoning the ego(I, me, mine, ours) by merely intellectual explanation of these things(Psychology and Neroscience have yet to be able to explain with evidence why even after experiencing profound things the ego centric view sticks on).
by smcl | 2025-09-23 11:24:17+00:00
To be honest the argument works even if Iran was a democracy. Both governments doing evil stuff but only the citizens of one of those countries is absolved of blame. That alone should cause someone reasonable to pause and ask themselves if they're not being a bit ridiculous.

The fact that Iran is pretty authoritarian and undemocratic just makes the position even more absurd and drives the point home further.
by djoldman | 2025-09-23 11:24:54+00:00
> There’s this very real sense that I don’t… I don’t want to solve this problem. There is no intellectual reward at the end of this journey. It’s not interesting to me. This isn’t something that needs to be fixed, because it’s not a situation that ever should’ve been permitted to happen in the first place. This is just a bunch of contrived nonsense that I must work through because the broader situation dictates it. It doesn’t matter if the solution is good or elegant. It doesn’t matter if it barely works. It doesn’t matter if it causes another problem that I stub my toe on in three weeks. It’s just… what I have to do.

As a tech person, this is the essence. All we want to do is make an amazing fast/efficient/performant/cheap/insightful/optimized/smart/something-else thing.

But then we have to deal with organizations like governments, businesses, customers, and people like managers, co-workers, and clients. And ultimately, human irrationality of preferences.

It's why RMS and Edsger are so appealing to so many. The above makes one want to say screw this, I'm gonna do it my way and damn the consequences.
by flanked-evergl | 2025-09-23 11:25:34+00:00
> Being married or not is just signing a paper.

If we ignore almost all of human history save for the past 50 years, then yes. If we redefine marriage to not mean what most humans that have ever used the word meant by it, then yes.

But why would we do these things? If you call all relations between two human beings marriage, you gain nothing, you just lose a word.

Marriage is a covenant between two people, a man and a woman, with God, and incidentally, this covenant, not a piece of paper, it's also a precondition for two people to live together and in harmony. It's a commitment by both people to focus not on themselves, but on the family unit and the wellbeing of that family unit.

> You can do so without being married and having children, and it's everyday more common.

Children of married parents still have better outcomes, and the lower income people are, the bigger the advantage of having married parents are.
Show HN: Banker – Lovable for Spreadsheets
by warthog | 2025-09-23 11:25:44+00:00
Hey HN! I built Banker.so, an AI agent that actually understands and writes Excel files.

I upload spreadsheets to ChatGPT/Claude all the time. CSV files work okay. But .xlsx files with formulas, multiple sheets, and pivot tables? They break constantly.

The problem: LLMs process data sequentially (1D), but spreadsheets are 2D structures. Cell B5 has meaning because it's in column B, row 5. Formulas reference ranges like A1:C10. Current AI tools miss these spatial relationships because they are designed for humans’ visual understanding.

What fails today:

- Complex Excel files with multiple linked sheets - Formulas and named ranges get corrupted or ignored - Pivot tables and conditional formatting disappear - Table structures with merged cells break completely

I implemented algorithms from the SpreadsheetLLM paper to parse spreadsheets properly. The agent understands:

- Table boundaries and headers - Cell relationships and formulas - Multiple sheets and references between them - Data types and formatting

You can find a video demo over here: https://youtu.be/hCTijOa3H9k?si=-GbX0ibmtXMVabAm

Also added OCR to convert PDFs and images directly into working spreadsheets.

Example use case: Upload your monthly financial report with 10 sheets, formulas, and pivot tables. Ask "which department exceeded budget?" Get the right answer because the agent understands your spreadsheet structure.

https://banker.so/

Try uploading a complex Excel file. The one that breaks other tools.

Give it a try and push it hard - I am sure there will be places I can improve it further. Looking forward to your feedback!
by rkomorn | 2025-09-23 11:26:03+00:00
For me it's just a question of where I would want to invest my org's time.

For example: how much time do I want us to spend looking after a task/ticketing system? About zero. How much time do I want my org to invest in DR planning for our self-hosted wiki? About zero.

So unless there's a convincing difference (cost, features, etc), cloud-hosted SaaS would be my choice there.

The answers also probably change a lot based on how the company operates. Would I have been comfortable with a self-hosted wiki when I worked at Facebook and we had a pretty damn good team providing DBs as a service? Yes. Would I have wanted to do the same when I was the sole infra person in my group at another job? No.
by muzani | 2025-09-23 11:27:15+00:00
Any reason I should pick it over Supabase? https://supabase.com/docs/guides/ai

They have pgvector, which has practically all the benefits of postgres (ACID, etc, which may not be in many other vector DBs). If I wanted a keyword search, it works well. If I wanted vector search, that's there too.

I'm not keen on having another layer on top especially when it takes about 15 mins to vibe code a database query - there's all kinds of problems with abstracted layers and it's not a particularly complex bit of code.
by integralid | 2025-09-23 11:27:15+00:00
That's an insane take, to the point I thought you're being sarcastic.

He's not asking Americans to overthrow their government. He's not even asking Americans to lift the sanctions (as he said explicitly). In fact, he's not asking for anything, just recollecting his experiences.

More importantly, you're comparing asking a (poor) country citizens to overthrow their own government with a (rich, western) country... lifting an economic policy that doesn't even work?
by DannyBee | 2025-09-23 11:27:30+00:00
Lawyer here. I'm not sure why you think AI will fix the first part. What AI does is not a significant part of the cost or labor in the vast majority of kinds of cases. If you have a specific area in mind, happy to go into it with you. The area where this kind of AI seems most likely to reduce cost is probably personal injury.

As for the last sentence, those systems already exist and roughly all sane lawyers use them. They are required to. You aren't allowed to cite overturned cases or bad law to courts, and haven't been allowed for eons. This was true even before the process was automated complety. But now completely automated systems have been around for decades, and one is so popular it caused creation of the word "shepardize" to be used for the task. So this is a double fault on the lawyers part. These systems are integrated well too. Even back in 2006 when I was in law school the system I used published an extension for Microsoft Word that would automatically verify every quote and cite, make sure they were good law and also reformat them into the proper style (there were two major citation styles back then). It has only improved since then. The last sentence is simply a solved problem. The lawyer just didn't do it because they were lazy and committed malpractice.
by zerof1l | 2025-09-23 11:27:47+00:00
I personally know a woman from Iran. She has a PhD in Data Science. She works and lives in the EU. Her mindset is that of an educated European person.

She does not support the current Iranian government, and neither do most of the people in Iran, according to her. But publicly expressing disagreement in Iran could have you disappear. That's why people are afraid to protest and speak out.

Regarding sanctions, it's not that hard to find and buy products from Iran. At least in the EU. What happens is neighboring countries import raw material from Iran, then put a label "Made in Pakistan", for example, and sell it. But those who know, can easily find and buy things like Iranian rice and spices.
by lelanthran | 2025-09-23 11:27:58+00:00
> I've seen this sentiment so many times from westerners. You all say this, and yet at the same time you levy economic sanctions on countries like Iran, Cuba, and North Korea, with the justification that by making their citizens lives horrific, you encourage them to rise against their government

That's a total non-sequitor.

GP stated that he will personally face prison time for going against the laws of his country.

Why would anyone risk jail time for you? For your countrymen? Why don't you risk jail time for some other country?
by heavyset_go | 2025-09-23 11:28:05+00:00
Why would grandma do that when there's been an update manager service GUI for two decades?

Either set it to do upgrades in the background automatically or tell her to hit "Install updates" when she sees a notification about it. Ideally you'd click the checkmark that enables the former.

The great thing about Debian and Ubuntu LTS releases is that they're rock solid and nothing changes for like a decade or however long they're kept on life support.
by flanked-evergl | 2025-09-23 11:28:27+00:00
These things I named correlate to better outcomes, we have nothing that indicates that not doing these things generate similar favourable outcomes … but we should continue to tell people that it's not necessary for them to do these things to have good outcomes as we have not done enough qualitative research to know what almost all of our forefathers have known, and it's best that people experiment more and see if maybe the right combination of unemployment, promiscuity and lack of education could not create equally good outcomes for them.

I have unfortunately not spent enough time at a university to follow this line of reasoning. Must be wild to be able to follow it. I'm of the yokel type that thinks if all data and tradition we have shows something works, then it's probably best to do the thing that works instead of trying things that we have no reason to think would work.

But in line with tradition, the underclasses in the west has always been the favourite laboratory for the cultural elites in the west.
by omnicognate | 2025-09-23 11:29:14+00:00
I have a steel honing rod but it's never seemed to have much effect. Perhaps my technique isn't right.

I also have a ceramic sharpening rod, which I use to sharpen my breadknife. That's very effective, but different as it actually removes steel. I give my straight-edged knives a few strokes on each side on a 3000 grit whetstone every weekend, which seems to keep them nicely sharp. That will slowly wear them down but it hasn't done so noticeably yet so I expect the knives to last many years.