MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mock-possum | 2025-09-11 16:39:26+00:00
Very much disagree - in a bad faith argument, countering does nothing, because the point is not to prove their position, the point is to hurt you, or play to their base, or to tire you or distract you and generally just to waste your time.

It’s more of a “the only winning move is not to play” situation. You win by refusing to take the bait, and shutting down the attempt to coerce you into playing along with the bad faith argument game.

Or, if you like - when faced with “heads I win, tails you lose,” the strategy is not to figure out a way to get the coin to land on its edge, or to end up suspended in midair, or to propose some sort of infinite ‘best two out of three’ regress - the strategy is to recognize the rigged game and walk away.
by cryptonector | 2025-09-11 16:39:53+00:00
> People who don't agree with trying to find the best way to manage public health are obviously sociopathic

That's rich. People who want raw milk are sociopaths? Etc? Once again we have name-calling as a way to shut down debate. Might as well call for violence against people who don't agree with you, and I bet you have done just that. These false equivalences and exaggerations are in fact incitements to violence. You and all who do this should be ashamed of yourselves.
by dboreham | 2025-09-11 16:39:59+00:00
Thanks for posting that reference. I came to do the same after finding that thesis while searching for another book I remember reading. The book covered Wheeler's (I think it was Wheeler) work simulating the first thermonuclear device on borrowed IBM calculating machines in the basement of some place in NYC (I think it was a commercial organization), basically beginning the HPC industry. Anyway, the Fitzpatrick thesis begins asking why it took so long for thermonuclear devices to be developed. I haven't yet had time to read to the conclusion, but presumably "not fast enough computers" is the answer.

Update, I tracked down the book. The guy was Ford, who worked for Wheeler: https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/article/68/7/46/415213/Bui...
by ndriscoll | 2025-09-11 16:41:43+00:00
It seems to be pulling from OpenStreetMap, and doesn't explicitly say that "community contributions" make their way back upstream (or direct people to go contribute to OSM), so I suspect they are not encouraging people to update the information, but instead are trying to bootstrap their own proprietary database.

OSM can have more data like gendered/non-gendered, accessibility, fee/non-fee, availability of changing stations, etc. and is actually free and open so makes more sense to use directly.
by Atlas667 | 2025-09-11 16:41:52+00:00
When you need to specify what kind of lineage a person carries people will commonly say a person is "african-american" or "native-american", but never say "european-american".

As another comment pointed out this is in part due to racial majority being defaulted into the non-specific term "american". As in: most americans are white so "americans" is thought of as refering to the biggest group of americans.

And in part due to historical subjugation of those other "americans". As in: less than 80 years ago the term "americans" was used almost exclusively to refer to white americans due to systemic racism.

This context is still particularly prevalent in media headlines.
by dragonwriter | 2025-09-11 16:42:38+00:00
The House is neither proportional (structurally represents parties roughly in proportion to their vote share) nor, what I expect you mean, divided into districts of equal population. The size difference between the smallest and largest districts—RI district 2 and Montana’s at large district—is 1:2 in population. It’s less unequal than the Senate, but its still not equal representation.

And, despite certain bills having to originate in the House, the Senate is more powerful since all Congressional powers either require both houses in concert or the Senate alone (except for electing the President when there is an electoral tie, which the House does but with a voting rule of one-vote-per-state-delegation which gives it the same undemocratic weighting as the Senate has normally.)
by Terretta | 2025-09-11 16:42:46+00:00
You can run a Tailscale node providing LAN access on Apple TV. Just grab Tailscale's Apple TV app. Performance is higher than you'd expect, saturates a gigabit link.

This is the perfect "get to parent's network" appliance. Pairs nicely with Eero+, which one might pick for remote network mgmt for reasons such as ad/threat blocking, aside from the cloud management with co-mgmt delegation built in.

It can also serve as an exit node. This makes it a lovely "use the Internet from my usual location" appliance, for all kinds of reasons.

Setup and use is ultra simple.
by nradov | 2025-09-11 16:43:05+00:00
If there's a UnitedHealthcare plan for Apple employees (and I don't know which company Apple currently uses) then Apple sets the policy for what is and isn't covered. UHC simply enforces the policy set by Apple so blaming UHC in that scenario is simply naive and displays a total misunderstanding of how the healthcare financing system actually works. UHC would be happy to offer a custom plan for Apple employees that pays 100% of every claim with no questions asked if Apple wanted it — it would be less work for UHC and they would merely pass the costs on to Apple (plus a very small profit margin).

The largest employers do have a financial incentive to maintain the current broken system. Despite the hassles, their economies of scale in running self-funded employee health plans give them a cost advantage over smaller competitors. I suspect that's part of the reason why they don't lobby for reforms but I'm not privy to internal Apple decisions.
by Atlas667 | 2025-09-11 16:43:41+00:00
I'll just copy part of my other comment:

As another comment pointed out this is in part due to racial majority being defaulted into the non-specific term "american". As in: most americans are white so "americans" is thought of as refering to the biggest group of americans.

And in part due to historical subjugation of those other "americans". As in: less than 80 years ago the term "americans" was used almost exclusively to refer to white americans due to systemic racism.

It is still particularly prevalent in media headlines.

I don't know why you think I would make this up, lol.
by howmayiannoyyou | 2025-09-11 16:44:26+00:00
Good. I want my tax dollars allocated to penetrating every and any system my country's adversaries may use to undermine our interests or threaten our people. And, I want maximum penalties, civil and criminal, for any person or company who misuses these systems for personal or political gain. Also, I'd like to see mandatory statutory civil damages for any vendor creating and/or selling/providing these systems who does so in a negligent or malicious manner, same as we provide for other high risk products and services.
by throwaway894345 | 2025-09-11 16:44:38+00:00
That makes sense to me, but if we don't know where that point is, how can we say that France has reached it? I'm not trying to suggest France has or has not--I don't know the French economy well enough to have an opinion. I also wonder if "economic activity" alone is worth maximizing for--like certainly more economic activity is better than less, all else equal, but I think we also want to minimize inequality (maybe we want to maximize for median household income or something?).
by soulofmischief | 2025-09-11 16:45:12+00:00
No brutality is legitimate. First of all, if police get this pass, then so do the street criminals they deal with. And then you just have a never-ending conflict since both sides get moral passes to put themselves above the greater good.

If you study game theory such as the prisoner's dilemma, you'll understand that these are perverse incentives where actors are certainly "rational" given their constraints, but the overall system is harmed. In a feedback loop such as society, this can have a runaway effect until eventual societal collapse.

> legitimising this is appropriate

For who? Who decides this?

> It is the responsibility of those in power to prevent society from degrading to a point where police are forced to be violent in order to keep their jobs.

Maybe you now understand why this is circular logic. If those in power are just doing what they "have to do" in order to keep their job and survive, and civilians do what they "have to do", and police do what they "have to do", the buck gets passed to no one. Every single culpable party gets to say it's not their fault or their responsibility to introduce structural change through personal sacrifice.
by curt15 | 2025-09-11 16:45:34+00:00
It was a relatively recent change [1]. Try the latest Gnome OS nightly ISO in a VM -- you'll see that they've (largely) implemented the partition scheme suggested in ParticleOS: root on btrfs, two partitions for /usr backed by dm-verity, new /usr images delivered using "systemd-sysupdate".

[1]https://www.osnews.com/story/139696/gnome-os-is-switching-fr...
by pron | 2025-09-11 16:45:40+00:00
Sure, using arenas is very often straightforward, but it also very often isn't. For example, say you have a server. It's very natural to have an arena for the duration of some request. But then things could get complicated. Say that in the course of handling the transaction, you need to make multiple outgoing calls to services. They have to be concurrent to keep latency reasonable. Now arenas start posing some challenges. You could use async/coroutine IO to keep everything on the same thread, but that imposes some limitations on what you can do. If you use multiple threads, then either you need to synchronise the arena (which is no longer as efficient) or use "cactus stacks" of arenas and figure out a way to communicate values from the "child" tasks to the parent one, which isn't always simple (and may not even be super efficient).

In lots of common cases, arenas work great; in lots of common cases they don't.

There are also other advantages unrelated to memory management. In this talk by Andrew Kelley (https://youtu.be/f30PceqQWko) he shows how Zig, despite its truly spectacular partial evaluation, still runs into an abstraction/performance tradeoff (when he talks about what should go "above" or "below" the vtable). When you have a really good JIT, as Java does, this tradeoff is gone (instead, you trade off warmup time) as the "runtime knowns" are known at compile time (since compilation is done at runtime).
by nradov | 2025-09-11 16:46:23+00:00
Sure, that's part of it and the minimum medical loss ratio does create some perverse incentives. But in most markets there are intense competitive pressures between health plans which motivates them to negotiate lower rates with network providers. Your employer would be happy to switch from Aetna to Humana (or whatever) next year if it cuts their employee healthcare costs by 3%.
by ch4s3 | 2025-09-11 16:46:28+00:00
> Most cancer can be prevented

This is a highly questionable statement. There are myriad reasons for the kinds of DNA copying errors that cause cancer(s), and few are mono-causal. Type-II diabetes is mainly a lifestyle disease and barely existed 50 years ago. That said any treatment or effort to cure Type-II diabetes is laudable, and it's clear that broad societal factors create the conditions for so many people to develop diabetes.
by gus_massa | 2025-09-11 16:47:16+00:00
> Hash tables win the interview O(n) vs O(n log n),

If the original table has n entries, the hash must have at least log(n) bits to get most of the time a different hash. I don't know the current state of the art, but I think the recommendation was to have at most a 95% filled array, so the are not too many collision. So both methods are O(n log n), one under the hood and the other explicitly.
by taxedo | 2025-09-11 16:47:22+00:00
I got tired of manually copying numbers from Form 16 PDFs into India’s tax filing portal every year. So I built *Form16x*, a Python CLI + library that turns these semi-structured PDFs into structured JSON.

Beyond extraction, it can: - Consolidate multiple Form 16s (useful if you switched jobs in a year) - Calculate taxes under both regimes and recommend the better option - Show detailed salary and deduction breakdowns in the terminal (tree view, colored output) - Suggest tax optimizations (80C, 80D, NPS, etc.) with potential savings - Expose a Python API (`TaxCalculationAPI`) with multi-year tax rules (AY 2020–2025)

*Repo:* https://github.com/ri-sh/Form16x

### Why I built it Form 16 is similar to a W-2 in the US or a T4 in Canada: a PDF tax certificate with inconsistent layouts across employers. Filing returns often means manually re-entering data, which is error-prone and time-consuming.

Form16x tries to solve this with: - PDF parsing using camelot/pdfplumber with fallback logic - Structured output aligned with the form fields - Local-only processing (no data leaves your machine) - CLI polish (progress bars, colored display, breakdown trees)

Would love feedback from HN on both the technical side (PDF parsing + structured extraction) and whether this approach could extend to other countries’ tax forms.
by imiric | 2025-09-11 16:48:16+00:00
Hhmm that seems like a hassle, TBH.

One of the things I like the most about GOS is the web installer, and how easy it is to use. If I need a custom build, to run my own server, and sacrifice performance for it, it doesn't seem worth it. It would also be good to know what a debug build entails, how exactly it is "less secure", and so on. Since this is unlikely to be documented by the GOS team, a 3rd party guide would still be helpful.
by sevensor | 2025-09-11 16:48:44+00:00
What the article describes is:

1. Learn how to describe what you want in an unambiguous dialect of natural language.

2. Submit it to a program that takes a long time to transform that input into a computer language.

3. Review the output for errors.

Sounds like we’ve reinvented compilers. Except they’re really bad and they take forever. Most people don’t have to review the assembly language / bytecode output of their compilers, because we expect them to actually work.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-09-11 16:49:25+00:00
Russia's invasion of Ukraine, mass kidnappings of children, etc have had much more impact on me. So many people defending Russia, trying to justify Russia's position, or wave it away. If we can't take care of people in the heart of Europe we definitely can't begin to touch things in the middle east.

I don't understand why so many in the west get upset by the Gaza war but are so indifferent/don't care about Ukraine or actively hand waive away concerns and/or loudly say 'I don't care about Ukraine'.
by afavour | 2025-09-11 16:49:41+00:00
I don't think this is a remotely controversial viewpoint. The vast, vast majority of people (among those who even know who he is) think his murder is an awful act.

But because clicks and outrage rule supreme we end up with screenshots of a couple of dozen nobodies saying controversial things used to paint the "other side" as unhinged and violent. I wish we could all move beyond it but we seem unable.
by nozzlegear | 2025-09-11 16:50:00+00:00
> Having a big house and more money doesn't mean you have a better life; this seems to be the main point of the article you linked, but your comment seems to imply that you missed that point (though I could be misreading). Case in point, this quote from the blog: [...]

No, I didn't miss the point; there's excellent data in that article for people who think the US is a great place to live, and people who think Europe is a great place to live. That's the beauty of the article, and the crux of my point: both of those groups can be correct – there's no single "this is the greatest place to live for all human beings, periodt" out there. The article concludes:

> But as one final thought, I’d like to offer the hypothesis that life is just about equally as good in all developed countries. There’s personal preference, of course — if you want a big house and a lawn, you might prefer America or Canada, whereas if you want national health insurance and lower crime rates, you might prefer Japan or France. But in terms of where the average person would want to live given the choice, I think all these rich countries are in the same ballpark.
by jppope | 2025-09-11 16:50:54+00:00
I think some of the crypto companies tried to get cute and leapfrog 3.0 going straight to 4.0, so that would put us at either 5.0, 4.0, 3.1, 2.2, or 2.1 depending on how you feel about the crypto space, and which groups you were validating
by joz1-k | 2025-09-11 16:51:55+00:00
From the article: The alpha and beta calutron buildings eventually occupied an area greater than 20 football fields, and the entire electromagnetic separation facility grew to 268 buildings, requiring 20,000 workers to build.

This was an enormous undertaking in a relatively short amount of time, even during wartime. I can hardly fathom the scale and urgency of these operations. I suppose the Russians invested similarly massive resources to build their own A-bomb after the war.

Interestingly, it was believed at the time that German scientists were also very close to producing a nuclear weapon. As was later discovered after the war, they were not.
by mrguyorama | 2025-09-11 16:52:14+00:00
Sure.

80 years ago, in the context of the war economy of WW2

How is that relevant? Democrats have been pushing for Medicare for all or some other fully socialized system since the Kennedys, while republicans have shown zero ability to do anything but ban you from buying cheaper drugs

Pretending this is "gubermint bad" is just ignorant. It also just, wasn't the government's explicit doing. The government froze wages during a literally existential war. Look at Russia right now for why that's generally a good idea. Companies responded by offering non-wage payments of various sorts.

The US built a significant fraction of ALL war material for the allies in WW2. They did this through significant amounts of command economy. Building a Liberty transport ship every other day was done by centralized planning, NOT the free market. See the US's current difficulties buying 155mm howitzer rounds for examples of how the "free market" is worthless at dealing with real wartime production concerns. We didn't build 50k tanks by waiting for the free market to collect a payday. We didn't build more aircraft carriers than the rest of the world combined by relying on the free market.

So why haven't republicans fixed this in the near 70 years of political dominance they've had in the US? Democrats have consistently pushed for solving this shitty situation for decades, but have never gotten the votes needed to even get into government.
by OkayPhysicist | 2025-09-11 16:52:19+00:00
That stance would make every police station, military base, and legislature madhouses. Heck, we could expand that a step further, and declare everyone who voted for those politicians mad.

People decide to kill people all the time. People order others to kill people all the time. People advocate for others to order yet others to kill people all the time. Some violence is legitimate. Some violence is justified. Plenty of violence is neither. But to ignore the violence of the state as sanctified, while condemning all violence against it as madness results in an alarming ethical framework with abhorrent conclusions.
by nunobrito | 2025-09-11 16:52:44+00:00
Nice try. First you call names, then you complain about phones with dictatorial origins while both of them come from exactly the same origin, that point is moot.

Even worse security practice to use the software and hardware from exactly the same OEM in terms of security. There is a reason why open implementations are important on the cybersec field, precisely to avoid "trust" but move into the side of "verify" since they need to inter-operate.
by ricksunny | 2025-09-11 16:53:17+00:00
>Question: are there any other known "Manhattan projects" and if not, why not?

Answering this question is necessarily an exercise in tautology. If there were any other extant Manhattan Projects, we would not citably known about it because, being a ‘Manhattan Project’, it would be replete with secrecy, including disinformation to keep the public from giving leaks about it any credibility. (case example, the Alamogordo Trinity test was called an ammunition explosion accident, by way of an Army Air Forces colonel, for the benefit of the good people of nearby Albuquerque).

Many today suspect the UAP study subject as being an ongoing decades-long Manhattan Project, from the late 1940s onward. As Congressional hearings leading to just this past Tuesday’s, Sep 9th have amply demonstrated, there increasingly appears to be some veracity to these claims. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LBKRr5OvF6E&t=1056
by rasengan | 2025-09-11 16:53:27+00:00
> But I recognize that violence can sometimes become a necessity—which is why I say that people should forgo the use of violence unless all non-violent paths to resolve a conflict have either been exhausted or taken off the table.

> Lethal violence is the line that should only be crossed when it, too, is the last available option.

No, violence is never necessary. Once you use violence, you start the downward spiral of perpetual hatred; after all, if someone harms one that you love, forgiveness becomes difficult.

The only solution to perpetual hatred is peace, understanding and love.

As long as you think violence is a solution, you'll gravitate toward the short term gratification that may or may not come therewith.

Get that out of your head.

Violence is never the answer.
by Rendello | 2025-09-11 16:53:35+00:00
I'm always interested in seeing how logographic writing systems solve issues with input, encoding, indexing, and the like.

When I text my Japanese friends, we tend to use a lot of emoji and (in-app) stickers. I think emoji have such a hold in Japan because 1. there's a big "cute" culture there, and 2. Japanese language is largely icon-based (logographic) already.

When I see emoji all over Reddit comments, Github READMEs, and code docs, I feel a frustrating culture mismatch. I'm glad HN strips them. But, there are situations where I use emoji and like them a lot.
by skeezyboy | 2025-09-11 16:54:07+00:00
1. Of course its possible, youd just get back encrypted data. This doesnt make it impossible

2. You mean "Reliable classification of client-side scanned images is impossible", although you dont actually define reliable. This is besides the point, Im not talking about the actually feasibility of this on a political level, Im asserting a specific technical point that client-side scanning is 100% possible for e2e apps
by franktankbank | 2025-09-11 16:54:29+00:00
If you had 20k extra in your pocket to cover regular shit and 10k to pay for a private health insurance covering catastrophic shit all the while regular hospital expenses went down (cough diagnosis, broken bones, etc etc) I think that would be a good thing. Right now you can see the effects of taking insurance out of the system by going to private practice that doesn't accept insurance. These fuckers way overstepped, not only are you paying several 10K for insurance you pay more when you go for minor issues.
by numpad0 | 2025-09-11 16:54:48+00:00
Were there any breakthrough for this feature anyway? Or is it more likely that Apple just did what was readily possible?

You could always put environmental audio through Whisper, attain audio trance crypt at 51010 per cent Word error rate, put that transcript through machine translation, and finally TTS. Or you can put audio directly through multimodal LLM for marginal improvements, I guess, but ASR error rate as well as automatic cleanup performance don't seem to have improved significantly after OpenAI Whisper was released.