MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by seec | 2025-09-22 11:34:34+00:00
That's my experience as well. I think vegetarianism is too much of an ideal and ideals can be very dangerous.

Also, we can't be sure yet since nutrition "science" is almost indistinguishable from quackery but I have the strong feeling that eating only plants has some dysgenic effect. When you look at nature, the smartest animals are predators because it allows them to "delegate" the hard work of converting low quality food to something packed with energy and other necessary nutrients.

Then there is the issue of food security and virtuous cycle, much of large agriculture depends on fossil fuels and it's questionnable if we should let go of animals provided inputs.

Perfect is the enemy of good as we say and vegetarianism/veganism might be one of those cases I think.
by palata | 2025-09-22 11:34:39+00:00
> I'd argue nuclear physics is far more complex than cryptography

We're not talking about "being able to do it" but "being able to understand what it can do". Nuclear weapons are a lot easier to grasp than cryptography in that sense: it is a thing that explodes. It is absolutely obvious to everybody that a bomb destroys whatever is in the vicinity.

> Let's not attribute blatant malice to stupidity. People in these positions [...]

It's not people in these positions: the vast majority of the population doesn't understand the limits of cryptography.

> have the resources and advisors to know exactly what the consequences will be.

Seems to me like you haven't been in contact with lobbies and expert advisors. Many times, politicians will have to ask experts from the industry. They would not contact an average engineer for advice, but rather the company itself. If there is money to be made, the CEO or some executive will give their advice. This advice is systematically beneficial for the company. It's not necessarily malice: a CEO has to believe in what they are doing, even if it is objectively bad for society.

It is very hard to find unbiased experts to help you forge policies.
by cambaceres | 2025-09-22 11:35:12+00:00
It's the responsibility of senior developers and stakeholders to allow junior developers the time they need to solve tasks at a pace that enables them to understand everything they're doing and learn from it.

These days, AI can generate solutions to problems 10 times faster than a junior developer can. This naturally puts pressure on developers who want to impress their employers, especially when their colleagues are also using AI.
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-09-22 11:35:21+00:00
You don't need metamaterials. There are various patents on "invisibility cloak" systems, and most of them use screens and cameras to project what's behind the wearer onto the front-facing screen, e.g.: https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2016160588A1

Some others, mostly intended for military vehicles, aim to match surface IR emissions to the background.

Using metamaterials -- which need to be printed or, even worse, made with lithography techniques -- adds unnecessary cost and vastly increases complexity.
by eunos | 2025-09-22 11:35:39+00:00
That aside, US electorates has decided to award another term for Trump. FYI at that point Trump is not an unknown dark horse candidate anymore and he even won the popular vote. Last time a GOP president won popular vote was 20 years ago.

So it's very fair to attribute the so called erraticness to what American want in general instead of attributing it to Putin or other non American.
by wonger_ | 2025-09-22 11:35:53+00:00
FWIW, I submitted it as "non-developer" but a moderator seems to have changed it to "beginner developer."

The author is a non-technical blogger, and she probably has to navigate lots of technical guides in order to fiddle with her website or CSS. I think a more relevant discussion would be about making website publishing easier for everyday people, or about the lack of documentation written for that particular demographic. But HN took it in a different direction, which is fine.
by achenet | 2025-09-22 11:36:00+00:00
indeed, I'm personally fond of using it to disparage things I don't like.

It's a most excellent insult.

You get the implied snobbery of an upper-class person looking down on their inferiors, whilst also maintaining some street cred via not insulting the painfully poor.

examples: "stupid middle class French boys" "god-awful, self-indulgent prose that only the most basic of middle-class housewives could appreciate" "a speech reeking of vapid middle-class cliches" ...
by potato3732842 | 2025-09-22 11:36:32+00:00
>What is their buoyancy-management system?

Some of y'all have never seen a marina with floating docks and it shows. More of the same.

This entire problem is basically ye-olde spaceX barge only with different factors in the equation and running in both directions (instead of just landing).

Yes, without a hard cut in buoyancy like you get with something that's way denser than air floating in something way denser than it all the math gets a little wonky but it's all still fundamentally the same. When you load a few million pounds of shit you sink a few thousand feet instead of a few inches like a barge in water would, and when that weight turns out to be a rocket that yeets itself you move around thousands of feet or miles instead of feet like a barge, but when you're floating in the air with nothing to crash into who cares.
by free652 | 2025-09-22 11:37:14+00:00
Well you found one, and I can tell you about time when in EU that a place took a hard print of my card in the last 5 years! Didn't even know that card imprinters still exists.

Zelle is not just person to person, it's just a transfer. You can pay businesses, people and even transfer to yourself. Zero fees.

Europe is a big continent and I can easily find a place that is way more backwards ;)

Also 2 letters from EMV stands for 2 American companies :).
by palata | 2025-09-22 11:37:30+00:00
This is an interesting comment, because you are making exactly the same mistake as those politicians:

- They think it's easy to just ask engineers to magically make safe backdoors.

- You think it's always easy to know what is right and what is wrong. "We should just punish those who harm society". Sure, we should! And we should have safe backdoors!
by m12k | 2025-09-22 11:37:31+00:00
I like to compare this to mandating surveillance cameras in every home. It would certainly make detecting and investigating many crimes easier. And the government might pinky swear to never watch without a warrant. They may even keep that promise. But that slippery slope is far from the only issue. Even more damning is that as long as this exists, whether used in official capacity or not, it will be the most sought after thing by hackers from crime organizations and hostile nations. Espionage, blackmail, you name - no person or organization would ever be safe, everybody's privacy and security is undermined.
by triceratops | 2025-09-22 11:37:37+00:00
> As a non-white British person i have no problem with native meaning certain ethnicities

It's not actually ethnicity he's talking about, it's skin color. Ethnicity is cultural.

Why exactly aren't people of any skin color who live in the UK, speak English, and believe in the full package of "Western values" (equality, freedom of speech, religion, rule of law etc) and "English behaviors" (queueing, tea, whatever) considered English? How many generations is enough to become "native"?

He thinks calling his views "far-right" and "racist" and "nazi"-adjacent is going too far because the Social Democrat Prime Minister of his country said the same thing (I actually don't know because the linked interview with Mette Fredriksen was in Danish). But that's how this stuff always begins. It's extremely worrisome.
by nickslaughter02 | 2025-09-22 11:37:44+00:00
It's about to get worse:

New Pact on Migration and Asylum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Pact_on_Migration_and_Asyl...)

'Women Are No Longer Safe': Critics Blame Surge in Migrant Crime Across Europe (https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/women-are-no-longer-safe-critics-b...)
by numpad0 | 2025-09-22 11:38:27+00:00
Well, the list of exempts is the list of defense contractor employees, and the negative list of non-exempts subtracted from the list of everyone is list of high-value targets.

The locations where exempts are gathered, locations where there are high commerce traffic and/or verified sent-in data, but no sent-out data, or abnormally low traffic altogether, those are all high-value targets as well.

No matter how you slice it, they're creating a list of airstrike targets and means to aid literal foreign spies. If the affected locations and people are as obvious and well guarded as the US DoD headquarters and uniformed guys there, fine, otherwise, they're just creating doors in the wall exclusively open for "enemy" uses.
by tim333 | 2025-09-22 11:38:51+00:00
I've heard of if but am put off by the flaws as suggested in the wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis#Criticism_in_t...

I liked the nyt microbes in the crust article https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/24/magazine/earth-geomicrobi... along those lines.
by RegW | 2025-09-22 11:39:04+00:00
I'm not in the EU but I am in Europe. It was on for me.

From my reading of the article, this is Linkedin (an American company) that has decided to collect data about Europeans - the EU is not involved. Linkedin has decided that making it opt-out is covered by "legitimate interests". So I guess the real issue here is that the rest of you just don't get the option - you are included anyway.
by HighGoldstein | 2025-09-22 11:39:16+00:00
The caveat with the Unlicense is that it doesn't work in some jurisdictions, and the work may be considered literally unlicensed, as in nobody except the copyright owner can use it. In practical terms, of course, I doubt anyone using the Unlicense plans to come after you for copyright infringement, but it's something to keep in mind. This is why many organizations recommend instead using something like CC0, MIT etc.
by hopelite | 2025-09-22 11:39:29+00:00
Odd that you say “nearly all languages have”, which would include that other languages you yourself can think of, do not have “more sounds[…]symbols…”

The problem I have with “experts” when it comes to this kind of dogma challenging thing is that they are usually extremely biased and limited by that dogma.

Let me put it this way, if you saw those symbols on Mars, would you not consider them a form of communication or language. Ironically, to me at least, the limited ands relatively consistent nature of the symbols itself actually qualifies it as language, not disqualifies it.
by BugsJustFindMe | 2025-09-22 11:40:25+00:00
> Show me the law that says

Ignoring your obvious straw man about criminal allegation details, surely you are aware that the law and morally correct or societally important behavior patterns are not the same thing. Indeed, there's no law saying that the law need align with what's actually good for the electorate. Waving your hands at "the law" when discussing ethics, justice, fundamental rights, societal good, and the prevention of falling directly into a boots-on-necks martial state is a stupid game that leads nowhere. Laws change.
by throw_a_grenade | 2025-09-22 11:41:39+00:00
They probably have internal chat systems (cough matrix cough) that don't go above 50 M MAU which afaik is the threshold of applicability of this law. So this particular is a non-issue, unfortunately.

But then it begs the question, why politicians feel the need to use public (>50MMAU) chat systems to conduct the protected (official) business?
by heresie-dabord | 2025-09-22 11:41:49+00:00
> interesting to see how people misremember the post-war years.

The observations about the ineffectiveness of US propaganda in post-war Germany are interesting.

But for all the flaws of Meyer's work, the book is about how people thought they were free during the sordid, infamous Nazi period. Above all, the people who saw themselves as the honest folks supporting the good principles of the dictatorship.

It is also interesting to read how people — the very same who were supporters of the dictatorship and who helped persecute the target groups — are comfortable in all their justifications.

"Sure, we knew these people who were taken away. But what could we do?"

"I didn't do anything terrible. If something terrible happened, it happened later, elsewhere."

"The Great Leader failed only because he had some bad people in his circle."
by rwmj | 2025-09-22 11:41:57+00:00
The trouble is that with unemployment it only affects a small percentage of the population and those people blame themselves (as long as it's not a 1930s-style depression), but with inflation everyone feels it every time they go to the shops. So in a democracy any policy that prefers inflation over unemployment is going to be deeply unpopular. (See also: Biden)

Currency depreciation is an interesting one though. It's like inflation on steroids, but very few people really feel it day to day.
by econ | 2025-09-22 11:42:37+00:00
What it should look like:

Have a bunch of checkboxes at the top, one for each buzzword, each technology and all other things a 12 year old wouldn't be familiar with.

You check which you think to be familiar with and all other things unfold a short description with links to similar interactive documents.

Each section comes with 1-5 star rating for how well the reader understood your explanation.

Then you gather the data as the subjects suffer though the tutorial.

If people come from specific backgrounds further tailor the explanation for them.(Like babazoofoo for C++ developers.)

Let there be a browser extension or an API that checks (and hides) the familiar boxes for you.

I didn't say it was possible to make. It would be glorious to have. If you know all the tech involved the whole thing implodes into a one line code example.
by privatelypublic | 2025-09-22 11:43:04+00:00
I'm thinking eval's and prototype overloading would make this a permanent cat and mouse game.

Frankly, I don't see how the node ecosystem can ever be secure. It's random-libraries all the way down. With half of them being useless frippery.

Imho, WASM compiled from languages that have strong standard libraries are the way forward for security. And, maybe node will get fixed in 5-10 years.

A good example of a language going "this shouldn't be a library."- Net used to only have a third party json parser (newtonsoft) but microsoft created a first party json parser and deprecated newtonsoft from their examples and templates
by bpt3 | 2025-09-22 11:44:22+00:00
> That's a bit too far in the other direction.

I don't think so, but partially because the person I responded to is off the charts in the anti-car direction.

> I know plenty of people who choose transit even though they own a car.

Most people choose what makes sense for them, myself included. I drive most of the time, but have no problem taking public transit when it makes sense.

> People will use transit if it is pleasant, fast, and affordable. When I lived in Vancouver, you would be nuts to commute by car if there was a train line near you. It was cheaper and faster to take transit, especially during the working hours.

The issue is that there are very few places where it's cheaper and faster to take public transit.

The solutions most transit advocates come up with involve kneecapping car usage so public transit can compete or insisting people live at density levels most find unacceptable, neither of which are practically feasible.
by pravj | 2025-09-22 11:44:57+00:00
This resonates a lot with some observations I drafted last week about "AI Slop" at the workplace.

Overall, people are making a net-negative contribution by not having a sense of when to review/filter the responses generated by AI tools, because either (i) someone else is required to make that additional effort, or (ii) the problem is not solved properly.

This sounds similar to a few patterns I noted

- The average length of documents and emails has increased.

- Not alarmingly so, but people have started writing Slack/Teams responses with LLMs. (and it’s not just to fix the grammar.)

- Many discussions and brainstorms now start with a meeting summary or transcript, which often goes through multiple rounds of information loss as it’s summarized and re-expanded by different stakeholders. [arXiv:2509.04438, arXiv:2401.16475]
by piltdownman | 2025-09-22 11:46:20+00:00
Under previous administrations? Not entirely https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supremacy_Clause https://biotech.law.lsu.edu/map/LiabilityofaFederalOfficerun...

Under the current administration? Not at all https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/18/ice-nyc-protest-005...
by ajsnigrutin | 2025-09-22 11:46:48+00:00
Also, it really depends on what the tutorial is about.

There's a difference between a tutorial on how to set up a wordpress on a shared hosting or how to add aditional debugging capability to kernel application core switching routines by patching the linux kernel.

In the first example, "unzip it" might need an additional explanation on how to do it in the command line... in the second,.. well... if you can't even unzip a file without the tutorial, you won't be able to use the software anyway.
Show HN: We built our own technology radar
by leo_researchly | 2025-09-22 11:46:55+00:00
A technology radar helps you monitor and assess emerging trends systematically. Depending on the context a “trend” can be technical, business-related or social.

While such as a technology radar is traditionally reserved for big companies, we’ve found it’s just as valuable for us as a small startup, especially since AI is evolving rapidly (AI is one of our main technologies). The radar helps us track fringe-innovation (like the latest agentic framework form Github) and assess tech beyond the hype.

We built it with our platform (Researchly), but in the post I have also included an N8N workflow and data schema for a do-it-yourself version.

The front-end was inspired by: https://github.com/zalando/tech-radar
by sfn42 | 2025-09-22 11:47:14+00:00
Some notes:

.NET can serve the same use cases as Java, it's not just for windows programming. It's actually getting really good.

NodeJS does nothing better than anyone. The only things I can think of that make node worth using is electron and react native, maybe Next but I'd much rather do SSR in a real programming language personally. I would never use node as a pure backend, there's just no reason to and JS is an F tier language. TS brings it up to like C but it's still just not good enough to compete.

I can't see any reason to choose node for typical backend programming and such unless your devs only know JS. Any other language is probably better suited.
by whatarethembits | 2025-09-22 11:47:14+00:00
This is disappointing from DHH. He tends to carry a lot of criticism online, and based on my exposure to his ideas in long form media, I tend to agree with him more than not. However, in his linked post on this issue, it strikes me as being written by someone whose understanding is largely based emotions evoked by provocative news headlines. But, I'm going to refrain from attempting to psychoanalyse an individual who I know very little about (further than the previous sentence).

OP's post, I think, correctly points out that DHH appears to believe that British == White. Wish he'd be clear on this point, as he's often claimed and indeed has been in the past regarding other issues. Dancing around it shows a lack of respect for the audience and/or a sign of weak conviction.

If you believe in something strongly enough to want to have an impact on its discourse, why not be clear about it? Here's an example of a clear statement regarding this particular issue: "I believe that our country ought to aim for demographics where 80% of the people on our streets look like us [whatever that happens to be]". What's so difficult about that? A clear demand/objective easier to vote on/measure/debate....everyone knows that, then why do the proponents of such ideas always dance around being specific?
by potato3732842 | 2025-09-22 11:47:43+00:00
>That's a loss of 2/3 of production to non-scrap effluvia

Considering that the amount of stuff in our world made from steel at any one time is steadily increasing this makes sense.

>The most heavily recycled metal in the US is lead, per USGS data and prior comments of mine, with recovery rates of about 75%, accounting for 40% of net production.

There's little to no "post consumer pre-recycler" use for lead whereas every tom dick and harry can find a use for some old pipes or beams or whatever.
by casey2 | 2025-09-22 11:47:48+00:00
I feel that massive effort is being misdirected because of some fundamental misunderstandings

Programming languages, like all languages, exist for communication between humans. A better programming language for a particular task is one that lowers friction needed to communicate ideas about particular programs.

The power of modern languages come from us quickly being able to understand programs. All languages rely on convention and assumption. The vast majority of bugs don't come from under-specification, but rather poor/miscommunication. Under-specification might explain why you wasted an hour reading source code to fix a minor problem, poor communication explains why we haven't yet automated every conceivably meaningful task computers are physically capable of already.
Show HN: Space Deck – Space and Satellite Dashboard in the Style of TweetDeck
by huedaya | 2025-09-22 11:48:16+00:00
I just vibe-code SpaceDeck.

Basically, a dashboard showing real-time information about Space, Rocket, and Satellite in the style of Tweet Deck/X Pro.

Currently we have: - Mars Perseverance images - Mars + Antarctica real-time weather - Satellite Constellation

Any public data suggestions are welcome! Thx
by chickensong | 2025-09-22 11:49:32+00:00
Good pay, ownership/responsibility/autonomy in work, and a willingness to fire people who aren't a good fit.

In my experience, if you can hire competent, well-rounded people, and give them ownership of their work, a decent culture will emerge which can then be fostered/guided. You won't hire/retain those people without good pay.

Conversely, if you hire scrubs, or unbalanced people, and then are reluctant to fire them, you're screwed. That sycophant that shows up but doesn't follow instructions and does the bare minimum? The 10x dev with no empathy or social skills? They're poisoning the well day after day.

Have an annual company off-site that doesn't suck, is about all that's needed to develop/maintain bonds IMO.

Also, remote work isn't for everyone. Some people just have no self-control, and will watch youtube all day instead of working. Basic management and tools should expose people who just aren't contributing much. They might be great people otherwise, but still need to be fired.
by close04 | 2025-09-22 11:50:06+00:00
This puts the cart before the horse. At least one important question to answer before. Does something absolutely needs to be done? Then we start looking into the best alternative.

What's the concrete threat scenario you avoid by moving to the Venusian clouds? Global warming? Fix it on Earth and if you can't convince people to agree on a solution here, how will you convince them that a Venusian balloon is the best way forward? Nuclear annihilation? Probably digging deep underground is better. Total planetary annihilation? Maybe stations in Earth orbit, or Moon's poles, or L point, etc.

Are we looking for options for which we have the technology and capabilities today, or a few centuries from now? That changes your options from "balloon on Venus" to "terraforming Venus".

The engineering and other practical considerations needed to get such a "station" a realistic chance at long term survival are about as sci-fi for us today as the starship Enterprise. We aren't even at the point where we can sustain an isolated Earth based colony indefinitely in an inhospitable environment. They all need constant maintenance and resupply from the the hospitable environment just a stone's throw away.