MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mapontosevenths | 2025-09-25 20:50:48+00:00
> it's logistically impossible for a government to seize absolute power when a significant proportion of the citizens are armed.

This is literally, and provably, untrue. For example:

The Soviet Union: The Bolsheviks initially proclaimed that "the arming of the working people" was essential to prevent "restoration of the power of the exploiters". It was only later that they restricted private gun ownership.

The Nazis: Contrary to popular gun rights narratives, Nazi gun laws actually relaxed restrictions for most Germans while targeting specific groups. Sometimes authoritarianism is the same as populism.

Rwanda: Prior to the genocide, the government systematically distributed weapons to local administrators and militia groups while ensuring targeted populations remained defenseless.

Myanmar: Armed civilian resistance groups formed, but the were essentially wiped out by the overwhelming advantages in air power and heavy weaponry that an actual organized military had. The firearms were useless. Arguably, worse than useless as those who fought back died in large numbers.

Venezuela: The regime armed its supporters while systematically removing weapons from the general population. The population was well armed, they just couldn't fight back against an organized government response.
by schiffern | 2025-09-25 20:51:18+00:00
Objects are not to scale for unavoidable reasons, but time is also not to scale. These two effects tend to cancel out.

People look at this visualization for what, 60 seconds? But the issue is that objects are zooming around up there for years-to-centuries.[0] The total volume of space swept out is massive.

Invariably the "not to scale" comments always get pointed out every time this is posted, but the temporal distortion (which makes people underestimate collisions) is never mentioned. Unless I mention it[1] of course... ;)

There's a much much better educational ESA video[2] which addresses some of the misconceptions in this thread, found via (of all places) Don Kessler's personal website.

---

If you want an expert perspective on orbital debris (vs..... whatever these HN threads always turn into :D ) I highly recommend you check out NASA Johnson's Orbital Debris Quarterly.[3]

Sources:

[0] What really matters is altitude as this graph shows: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Orbital_Debris_Lifet...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33210261

[2] As this video points out, collisions scale as density squared, which is why all major collisions have happened near 80 degrees latitude: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvZ3Lr-Tj6A

[3] https://www.orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/quarterly-news/
by python273 | 2025-09-25 20:51:53+00:00
It's really not that hard to run a mailserver with https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver

The problem is that Gmail will bounce any emails from DigitalOcean IP, even if you sit on this IP for years (so no recent spam), even if replying to someone, even if you registered as 'Postmaster' on Google.

So if you want to selfhost, you'll first need to find an IP that's not blocked to begin with.
by aw1621107 | 2025-09-25 20:52:15+00:00
> I'd expect it to work with _any_ type, primitive or not, newtype or not, with a sufficiently simple memory layout, the rough equivalent of what C++ calls a "standard-layout type" or (formerly) a "POD".

This might be related in part to the fact that Rust chose to create specific AtomicU8/AtomicU16/etc. types instead of going for Atomic<T> like in C++. The reasoning for forgoing the latter is [0]:

> However the consensus was that having unsupported atomic types either fail at monomorphization time or fall back to lock-based implementations was undesirable.

That doesn't mean that one couldn't hypothetically try to write from_mut_slice<T> where T is a transparent newtype over one of the supported atomics, but I'm not sure whether that function signature is expressible at the moment. Maybe if/when safe transmutes land, since from_mut_slice is basically just doing a transmute?

> Shouldn't it work when T and U are the same size and T has stricter alignment requirements than U but not exactly the same alignment? In this situation, any U would be properly aligned because T is even more aligned.

I think this optimization does what you say? A quick skim of the source code [1] seems to show that the alignments don't have to exactly match:

//! # Layout constraints //! <snip> //! Alignments of `T` must be the same or larger than `U`. Since alignments are always a power //! of two _larger_ implies _is a multiple of_.

And later:

const fn in_place_collectible<DEST, SRC>( step_merge: Option<NonZeroUsize>, step_expand: Option<NonZeroUsize>, ) -> bool { if const { SRC::IS_ZST || DEST::IS_ZST || mem::align_of::<SRC>() < mem::align_of::<DEST>() } { return false; } // Other code that deals with non-alignment conditions }

[0]: https://github.com/Amanieu/rfcs/blob/more_atomic_types/text/...

[1]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/blob/c58a5da7d48ff3887afe4...
by lockranore2 | 2025-09-25 20:52:32+00:00
I was around for the leap from BBS systems to Fidonet; the bad old days when there were no such thing as graphics. I can absolutely sympathize with what's being said here, and for me, there are two primary reasons why I pine for the elder days. The systems then required some effort to gain access to which kept some of the signal to noise loss down (if you know the difference between CB radio and Ham radio, you know what I'm saying), and while commercialism's always been a part of these systems, more value was placed on content than advertising.
by alwillis | 2025-09-25 20:52:34+00:00
> Safari is lagging on HTML5 features for decade far behind Firefox.

Really?

Safari was first to ship :has() in March 2022; Firefox couldn't ship until December 2023.

I listed a bunch of web platform features Safari shipped before Chrome and Firefox [1][2].

Even now, Firefox hasn't shipped Anchor Positioning, Scroll-driven animation, text-wrap: pretty, Web GPU, Cross-document view transitions, etc. but Safari and Chrome have.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44074789

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44067706
by kashunstva | 2025-09-25 20:52:43+00:00
> they were disregarded.

As were the Partitas and Sonatas for unaccompanied violin. It wasn’t until the great 19th century violinist Joachim began playing them in recitals that they came to light again. Even then it was not widely accepted. I believe it may have been George Bernard Shaw who had pretty harsh words to say about the very idea of treating these works seriously. My daughter is preparing for her conservatory auditions; and these works are now compulsory literally everywhere!
by palata | 2025-09-25 20:52:46+00:00
> I’m sure it’s not even deliberately dismantling privacy.

But it is not even dismantling privacy. ChatControl would run client-side and only report what's deemed illegal. Almost all communications are legal, and almost all of the legal communications wouldn't be reported to anyone at all. They would stay private.

The problem I see is that the "client-side scanner" has to be opaque to some extent: it's fundamentally impossible to have an open source list of illegal material without sharing the illegal material itself. Meaning that whoever controls that list can abuse it. E.g. by making the scanner report political opponents.

This is a real risk, and the reason I am against ChatControl.

But it isn't dismantling privacy per se.

EDIT: I find it amazing how much I can be downvoted for saying that I am against ChatControl, but that argument X or Y against it is invalid. Do we want an echo chamber to complain about the principle, or do we want to talk about what is actually wrong with ChatControl?

It's nice to say "those politicians are morons who don't understand how it works", but one should be careful to understand it themselves.
by ben_w | 2025-09-25 20:52:52+00:00
> Why would they exclude themselves from the rule if they werent worry about it?

They don't even understand that they haven't. Sure, they've written the words to exclude themselves (e.g. UK's Investigatory Powers Act), but that's just not how computers work.

The people who write these laws, live in a world where a human can personally review if evidence was gathered unlawfully, and just throw out unlawful evidence.

A hacked computer can imitate a police officer a million times a second, the hacker controlling that computer can be untraceable, and they can do it for blackmail on 98% of literally everyone with any skeleton in the closet at the same time for less than any of these people earn in a week.

The people proposing these laws just haven't internalised that yet.
by nitwit005 | 2025-09-25 20:53:02+00:00
I suspect Musk didn't know what his own goals were. The whole thing seemed more about emotion than logic.

I believe you're correct that he viewed the bureaucracy as a sort of foe, but that idea is somewhat paradoxical. You need employees to do anything. Fire everyone and Trump ends up nearly powerless.

He sort of figured out the basics of how the government worked as he went along, but a little late at that point: https://www.reddit.com/r/mmt_economics/comments/1jdkz81/elon...
by dijit | 2025-09-25 20:53:11+00:00
$2.5B.

I genuinely can't fathom these numbers. As in: it could be $25B or $250M and it would mean the same to me.

Does this materially impact Amazon?

I'm (really) not a fan of Amazon, but to me that's an existential amount of money. I don't think I've ever worked anywhere where that kind of money wouldn't be a "ok, I guess we're closing down, turn off the lights when you leave" situation, and I've worked at some large companies.

I'm not usually exposed to financials I guess but my burn rate for my last (very small) company was about $4-5M/y roughly. This amount of money would keep us all gainfully employed for about 500 years.
by epistasis | 2025-09-25 20:53:45+00:00
Privatization of those functions results in the government paying consultants more than they would pay staff, with less institutional knowledge, and far less efficiency than if the functions were directly in the government.

Generally, the government doesn't do things that private industry could do on their own. There are specific times where this isn't true. For example, there were small commuter buses in San Francisco for a while that the existing MUNI service could not accomplish. But these are quite rare!

For example, private industry is never going to fund basic research that is the foundation of the US's wealth and strength, except through taxation. The idea is ludicrous.

We could have private highways, private roads, perhaps, but we would be handing off public decisions to a private company that is almost certainly a monopoly. There are only rare cases where roads and highways are not inherently monopolistic.

SV venture capital is not one type of person, there are both liberal and libertarians among them. The libertarian variety got suckered in by the Dark Enlightenment propaganda and thought they could be the puppetmasters controlling the world with propaganda. They should have looked to what happens to their ilk in places like Russia before backing someone who wants to turn the US into an autocracy like Russia:

https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/02/business/russian-oligarchs-de...
by bsder | 2025-09-25 20:53:47+00:00
> Waymos still suffer from erratic behavior at pickup/dropoff, around pedestrians, badly marked roads and generally jam on the brakes at the first sign of any ambiguity.

As do most of the ridesharing drivers I interact with nowadays, sadly.

The difference is that Waymo has a trajectory that is getting better while human rideshare drivers have a trajectory that is getting worse.
by azemetre | 2025-09-25 20:54:07+00:00
My position is that if something becomes critical it should be under democratic constraints in a democratic society and not private enterprises that have no forms of control by the populace.

Maybe if Cloudflare had workplace democracy my concerns would be different, but they don't and wield too much power.

If it also helps I also think 99.99% of big tech should be broken up into separate, probably a few 100, different companies.

So yes, anything vital for the internet should be controlled by the people through democratic norms, institutions, and values rather than dictatorships by those with money over those with none.
by crazygringo | 2025-09-25 20:54:39+00:00
> I don’t know why any non-Prime customer would want to sign up

At least for me, it's easy -- the Prime credit card, which has no extra fee beyond Prime itself. I get 5-7% back, instead of the 1-2% with my other credit cards. It literally pays for itself and more over the course of a year. The faster shipping is just a bonus.

And I'm not buying junk I don't need either. It's literally just regular toiletries, my normal grocery shopping at Whole Foods (also 5% off), and then just replacing all the things in my home when they wear out or break -- kitchen things, bedding, electronics, and so forth. All things that are usually cheaper on Amazon than anywhere else anyways. (I still use Target.com for things that are cheaper there.)
by pron | 2025-09-25 20:54:56+00:00
Even political Zionism is minimally defined as supporting "a home for Jews in Palestine"[1] Not only does it not require any ethnic exclusivity nor even for a national identity, it doesn't even require an independent state in the contemporary sense. Some of those who identify as Zionist take it to mean only that Jews should be able to live with some form of self-determination in Palestine, and so when they hear "anti Zionist" they take it to mean supporting the expulsion of Jews, which, of course is not what many of those who identify as anti-Zionist want. When some anti-Zionist hear the term Zionist, they take it to mean support of an exclusive ethno-national Jewish state, which, of course, is not what many of those who identify as Zionist want. The term could mean something very different to different people, to the point that the same political position can be called Zionist by some and anti-Zionist by others, which makes the term mostly useless.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Types_of_Zionism#Political_Zio...
by joe_the_user | 2025-09-25 20:55:15+00:00
I disagree with your analysis. I think you are wrong.

Health Care is a natural monopoly like an electrical system. Basically, a large portion of health care the creation of infrastructure that everyone benefits from. An MRI machine or whatever is benefit to everyone since everyone might need it even if only some people actually use it, etc.

For that reason, the cost of procedures, infrastructure, etc, etc. are infinitely debatable and there is no true way to way to assign costs. And sure, the actual assignments are irrational but framing this "things are subsidized" has things exactly backwards.

Here's scenario - suppose electrical companies weren't responsible for maintaining their own grids and homeowners had to individually maintain insurance in the event of a pylon going down. Suppose if you didn't have insurance and could be tagged as the last user of a substation, you could in-hoc for the entire cost of repairing a pylon or whatever. This would only approach the irrationality of private medicine but I think it illustrates the situation. (and the finance system might manage to put that in place too if we're not careful).
by LightBug1 | 2025-09-25 20:55:15+00:00
That's a Dec-23 article and doesn't take account of later independent investigations.

Regardless. I accept it's reasonable that sexualised violence took place. I accept the what happened on 7th Oct was a horrible terrorist act.

But, and apologies if this hurts, none of that, absolutely none of that, justifies what has taken place since.

There is no place in this world for genocide. Particularly from a country that preaches "never again".

Nothing you can say will change my opinion on that.

Israel has really fucked up. It destroyed Gaza, yes. But in so doing destroyed it's reputation and standing for at least a generation.
by troupo | 2025-09-25 20:55:43+00:00
> Start a revolution? You have no weapons. You can't even organize a resistance because all channels of communication are monitored.

Unlike which country? The US I presume? I see very much a lack of any revolutions in the US, and the most resistance done in the past few decades was done by people with no weapons.

I'd say most revolution-like movements of any kind in the US since the Civil War happened without weapons.
by Gormo | 2025-09-25 20:55:51+00:00
I can't imagine what a court case about whether the US president has the power to unilaterally dismiss officials in executive-branch agencies could possibly have to do with this.

At least you're referencing the United States in 1934, though. Things were very dysfunctional politically in the US at that time, but not nearly as bad as what was going on in some other parts of the world.
by LightBug1 | 2025-09-25 20:56:01+00:00
I accept it's reasonable that sexualised violence took place. I accept the what happened on 7th Oct was a horrible terrorist act.

But, and apologies if this hurts, none of that, absolutely none of that, justifies what has taken place since.

There is no place in this world for genocide. Particularly from a country that preaches "never again".

Nothing you can say will change my opinion on that.

Israel has really fucked up. It destroyed Gaza, yes. But in so doing destroyed it's reputation and standing for at least a generation.
by ibfreeekout | 2025-09-25 20:56:11+00:00
Honestly, go for it! I started my own blog up and write everything myself, all the way down to the basic HTML and CSS. I don't use any frameworks or anything, whatever is there is just mine. Benefit is I'm not locked in to any one platform and migration is a piece of cake. Obviously won't work for everyone but I don't need much to put some words out there, but at least I can say it's all mine.
by JohnLocke4 | 2025-09-25 20:56:18+00:00
Interview from DR (Danish public news broadcast) with the Danish judicial minister Peter Hummelgaard, the politician who conceived the proposal:

https://www-dr-dk.translate.goog/nyheder/viden/teknologi/ana...

It is very obvious that he doesn't understand e2e, yet he will not listen. Bro couldn't even read the Wikipedia page
by burnt-resistor | 2025-09-25 20:56:41+00:00
NASDAQ composite P/E was ~10 in the beginning of 1995. Between March 2000 and part of 2002, it was 150+. It took much time and pain until 2005 to stabilize at a new equilibrium of around 30 where it's bounced around between 15 - 50 where large, sudden increases tend to portend a market contraction of unknowable depth.

I also wonder about the impact of the growing fraction of the economy no longer subject to gamified speculation held by private equity which is now around $3.5T AUM, but comes with other downsides because they do not seem to care about the longevity or goodwill of businesses they own and seek unsustainable maximum resource extraction rather than predictable steadiness.
by txrx0000 | 2025-09-25 20:56:53+00:00
If murder is common in the populace, then that means the social norms of that society have already drifted to the point where murder is acceptable. In that society, the murderers are probably running the government.

On your tangent about China, the people there are feeling so absolutely safe that they have the urge to install metal bars on every window of almost every home.
by shagie | 2025-09-25 20:57:03+00:00
They keep expanding in places where it doesn't snow.

They've got testing facilities in Detroit ( https://mcity.umich.edu/what-we-do/mcity-test-facility/ ) ... but I want to see it work while it is snowing or after it has snowed in the upper midwest.

https://youtu.be/YvcfpO1k1fc?si=hONzbMEv22jvTLFS - has suggestions that they're starting testing.

If AI driving only works in California, New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas... that's not terribly useful for the rest of the country.
by ineedasername | 2025-09-25 20:57:07+00:00
You can use solr, very good full text search and it has an mcp integration. That’s sufficient on its own and straightforward to setup:

https://github.com/mjochum64/mcp-solr-search

A slightly heavier lift, but only slightly, would be to also use solr to also store a vectorized version of your docs and simultaneously do vector similarity search, solr has built in knn support fort it. Pretty good combo to get good quality with both semantic and full-text search.

Though I’m not sure if it would be relatively similar work to do solr w/ chromadb, for the vector portion, and marry the result stewards via llm pixie dust (“you are the helpful officiator of a semantic full-text matrimonial ceremony” etc). Also not sure the relative strengths of chromadb vs solr on that- maybe scales better for larger vector stores?
by reaperducer | 2025-09-25 20:57:18+00:00
It's almost end of 2025 and either nothing out of it or just a small part of it panned out.

The truck part seems closer than the car part.

There are several driverless semis running between Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio every day. Fully driverless. No human in the cab at all.

Though, trucking is an easier to solve problem since the routes are known, the roads are wide, and in the event of a closure, someone can navigate the detour remotely.
by thenaturalist | 2025-09-25 20:57:27+00:00
This is such a stereotypical SF / US based perspective.

Easy to forget the rest of the world does not and never has ticked this way.

Don't get me wrong, optimism and thinking of the future are great qualities we direly need in this world on the one hand.

On the other, you can't outsmart physics.

We've conquered the purely digital realm in the past 20 years.

We're already in the early years of the next phase were the digital will become ever more multi-modal and make more inroads into the physical world.

So many people bring an old mindset to a new context, where maring of errors, cost of mistakes or optimizing the last 20% of a process is just so vastly different than a bit of HTML, JS and backend infra.
by kibwen | 2025-09-25 20:57:32+00:00
...Except that Rust is thread-safe, so expressing your algorithm in terms that the borrow checker accepts makes safe parallelism possible, as shown in the example using Rayon to trivially parallelize an operation. This is the whole point of Rust, and to say that C and C++ fail at thread-safety would be the understatement of the century.
by bsder | 2025-09-25 20:57:34+00:00
> I realized long ago that full unattended self driving requires AGI.

Not even close.

The vast majority of people have a small number of local routes completely memorized and do station keeping in between on the big freeways.

You can see this when signage changes on some local route and absolute chaos ensues until all the locals re-memorize the route.

Once Waymo has memorized all those local routes (admittedly a big task), it's done.
by vunderba | 2025-09-25 20:57:35+00:00
Now just imagine you lived during the romantic period of music where the virtuoso's highly personal interpretation of the piece was not only encouraged - it was downright expected.

Even today where the printed note is considered sacrosanct - you'll still find that artists are able to inject quite a bit of their own personality into a piece.

Great example is the Well-Tempered Clavier as performed by Glenn Gould versus Sviatoslav Richter.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-09-25 20:57:38+00:00
> I've not seen any of these actions make a measurable difference in the last 10 years

I've literally gotten language I drafted written into state and, twice now, federal law.

If you pick a hot-button issue, no, you probably won't move your elected. But on issues they didn't even consider to be on their plate? You can get attention. (Better yet if you can convince them you have other motivated voters beside you.)