MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by DangitBobby | 2025-09-24 18:21:51+00:00
Implementation is the issue. They often forget your settings between updates. This is particularly bad on MacOS. MacOS updates and app updates both require me to re-grant permissions for the nth time! Then there's the separate issue of must-have apps requesting permissions they have no business asking for and refusing to function correctly without, and other must-have apps abusing their access for purposes not strictly limited to in-app functionality.
by benmmurphy | 2025-09-24 18:22:00+00:00
I think democracy and the market are amazing tools. We can strongly disagree with people but are able to peacefully choose how we are governed without resorting to violence and then we are able to peacefully trade and exchange with people we otherwise hate to our mutual benefit. This is an amazing piece of technology that makes the world a much better place but people seem very determined to throw it away.
by DaveZale | 2025-09-24 18:22:03+00:00
the usual suspects?

Re: Uber ... this very aggressive growth company sold out its customers to facilitate adoption in urban areas. "let us do business in your city, and we'll supply our customer data to your police" kind of deal.

With some AI companies, the amount of personal data extracted from users is even greater. The same deals involving selling out users' privacy ?

The fact that privacy is so elusive now, alarms me. We need to think twice about what we search for, which browser to use, whether it's worth a trip to the library, etc. Not because I have anything to hide, but because the targeted ads on some topics are so nasty, even borderline abusive. Some forced me to avoid Chrome browser, for sure.
by pizlonator | 2025-09-24 18:22:14+00:00
The problem with these kinds of hardened allocators is that:

- They impact performance.

- They don’t prevent the attacker from pivoting a memory safety bug to remote execution.

- They get oversold (like calling it “secure”).

That’s not to say there aren’t allocator mitigations that help. It’s just that this isn’t it. Quarantining for example just means the attacker has to do a bit more acrobatics, but it won’t stop them.

I think what Apple is doing with typed allocations is much more principled and they have data to prove it in their blog posts
by tavavex | 2025-09-24 18:22:30+00:00
1. Not all companies are publicly traded, and they don't have to be

2. The 'voting' and 'steering' in a corporation is also completely dependent on money. The value of your 'vote' is proportional to how much money you have. This isn't a democracy or some sort of equal system that will converge on serving people, it will converge on serving money. I'm genuinely baffled at how "you get one vote per person" and "your value and voting power is directly tied to your net worth" are in any way comparable. You and I have zero effective power over them, and always will.
by zamadatix | 2025-09-24 18:22:59+00:00
The one that comes to mind immediately is when you create a draggable element with text it's usually desirable for the user that click-drag moves the element rather than selects the text depending which part you click.

Removing the attribute would probably make things worse, as site operators then overlay transparent elements - making everything even worse than when it was just styled as such.
by zubiaur | 2025-09-24 18:23:00+00:00
Back when I was in oil and gas, we were thinking of using modified mirror less cameras without and IR filter for vegetation density calculations. There were a few vendors that sold the UAVs and modified cameras.

Nowadays, there is a more mature ecosystem, with specialized drone mapping cameras tailored for the purpose.

For our use case, the micasense rededge would have been perfect.
by acaloiar | 2025-09-24 18:23:00+00:00
Tokens are an implementation detail that have no business being part of product pricing.

It's deliberate obfuscation. First, there's the simple math of converting tokens to dollars. This is easy enough; people are familiar with "credits". Credits can be obfuscation, but at least they're honest. The second and more difficult obfuscation to untangle is how one converts "tokens" to "value".

When the value customers receive from tokens slips, they pay the same price for the service. But generative AI companies are under no obligation to refund anything, because the customer paid for tokens, and they got tokens in return. Customers have to trust that they're being given the highest quality tokens the provider can generate. I don't have that trust.

Additionally, they have to trust that generative AI companies aren't padding results with superfluous tokens to hit revenue targets. We've all seen how much fluff is in default LLM responses.

Pinky promises don't make for healthy business relationships.
by pphysch | 2025-09-24 18:23:11+00:00
Social graphs used to be constrained by individual human capacity, roughly parametrized by Dunbar's Number.

Nowadays, a single commodity computer server can store information and relationships for every single living human.

You can have a direct economic relationship with a factory 5,000 miles away. This used to be utterly impossible, and required many degrees of primary human interaction through a chain of relatively small organizations.
by foxfired | 2025-09-24 18:23:22+00:00
I'm going through this right now where all expectations have been reversed after an acquisition. Ex: I'm not big on metrics, I rather have direct communication with my team to understand issues we are facing and any challenge an individual is struggling with. Looking at metrics hardly tells you the full story. Well, after the acquisition, metrics are in! story points, number of comments on PR, number of PRs, etc.

I don't believe in these methods, but the company as a whole is going to align. I do not pretend I'm excited about it, but I remember that I am in a room with full grown adults. I've addressed the issue, and made sure to frame it with "we are aligning with the rest of the company" as opposed to just saying this is the way forward, deal with it.

Edit: Coincidentally one of my blog posts is on the front page right now and addresses similar issues -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45359604
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-09-24 18:23:37+00:00
I think when we think about our social fabric and the empowerment that individuals feel, that this is more of a theoretical rather than practical argument. All of the disenfranchisement, the feeling that your individual participation doesn't matter, the inability to steer the goals of the organization around your individual opinions, these are all just as present in a large state.

Sure a democratic government derives its legitimacy from the people's will but not from your will, and that is the role of the small community organization.
by paleolimbot | 2025-09-24 18:24:09+00:00
Currently, lazier GeoParquet reads, a K-nearest neigbours join, Coordinate Reference System tracking, and built-in GeoPandas IO. These aren't things that DuckDB spatial can't or won't do, but they are things that DuckDB hasn't prioritized over the last year that are essential to a lot of spatial pipelines.
by mikkelam | 2025-09-24 18:24:11+00:00
I've been thinking a lot about building an open source dating app as a non-profit offering.

I have a sense that succesful dating contributes highly to overall human happiness. It should be a public service similar to wikipedia or libraries.

Free forever, fair and safe, and responsibly managed. It's probably not that expensive to run. But idunno, i'm kinda frightened to "compete" in this market
by yesfitz | 2025-09-24 18:24:36+00:00
I've been thinking about this due to a renewed local interest in Bowling Alone[1].

Besides the main identified contributors of personalized media, suburbanization, real estate prices, and the increase of dual-income households, I've started to suspect that government-funding of organizations has also had a significant impact.

In the past, organizations had to raise funds from their communities. As government grants for organizations increased, the cost floor was raised on all organizations (i.e. fundraising, rents, salaries, etc.), and led to the professionalization of what was previously handled by volunteers.

In the same way that the 30-year mortgage and zero-interest-rate policy made it harder for individuals to raise the initial funds to buy a home (by enabling an increase in home prices, making it easier to buy a home if you already own one), I suspect access to government capital has made it harder for small organizations to remain small while they compete with more professional (read "larger") organizations for their members' time and money.

And this is a problem because as Terence Tao points out, "...[Small Groups] also fill social and emotional needs, and the average participant in such groups can feel connected to such groups and able to have real influence on their direction."

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone
by TehCorwiz | 2025-09-24 18:24:53+00:00
If you had said that 30 years ago I might have agreed with you. But I don't because in the last 30 years I've watched both parties drift farther right until one decided to team up with actual nationalists (project 2025, they wrote a book about it and several of the authors work for this administration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025 ) that intend to undermine the foundation of the government in order to enforce a white christian nationalist order.

I don't remember Democrats ever conducting a legal (fake elector scheme) or extralegal attempt (insurrection) to overthrow an election. I don't remember any leader ever saying the kinds of hateful things Trump does. Even Reagan and Bush 1 who peddled the whole "welfare queen" bullshit. I don't remember any admin prior to this one that removed research and published number wholesale from government website.

This is not normal and hasn't been for some time. I don't have a comprehensive list right now of all the ways this is batshit crazy because keeping track would be a full time job.

But sure, let's bookmark this thread and come back to it.
by reaperducer | 2025-09-24 18:24:58+00:00
The irony is that they didn't force people to give their DNA (except if you were arrested) but instead people willingly gave it and even paid for it.

You and I must have read different articles. The one being discussed here is about American citizens, who are not under arrest, being compelled to give cheek swabs as a condition of re-entering their own country.
by loudmax | 2025-09-24 18:25:12+00:00
A GMKtec or a Framework desktop with a Strix Halo/AI Max CPU is about the cheapest way to run a model that needs to fit into about 120GB of memory. Macs have twice the memory bandwidth of these units, so will run significantly faster, but they're also much more expensive. Technically, you could run these models on any desktop PC with 128GB of RAM, but that's a whole different level of "dog slow." It really depends on how much you're prepared to pay to run these bigger models locally.
by chaseadam17 | 2025-09-24 18:25:14+00:00
Great post. One lesser known factor that's contributing to this problem is bank consolidation in the US.

* Big banks prefer to lend to big companies because it's more profitable to make one $100M loan than 1,000 $100k loans.

* Banks also prefer to lend for non-productive consumption like mortgages because loans backed by hard assets are less risky than productive loans to small businesses, despite those loans not contributing to growing the economy (but creating money out of thin air to flood the market with mortgages does increase housing prices...).

One way to solve this problem is to break up the big banks and incentivize small regional banks to lend to productive small businesses. Worse for the bankers but better for the economy. Incidentally, this is exactly China's strategy, but as long as big banks are paying politicians millions for luncheon talks, it's unlikely to happen here.
by neilfrndes | 2025-09-24 18:25:21+00:00
While DuckDB is excellent, I've found the spatial extension still has some rough edges compared to more mature solutions like PostGIS.

1. The latitude/longitude ordering for points differs from PostGIS and most standard geospatial libraries, which creates friction due to muscle memory.

2. Anecdotal: spatial joins haven't matched PostGIS performance for similar operations, though this may vary by use case and data size.

3. The spatial extension has a backlog of long-standing GitHub issues.
by latexr | 2025-09-24 18:25:28+00:00
> nobody wants to talk about the root cause: capitalism.

If you both believe capitalism is evil and that no one wants to talk about it (while you do), you should definitely rethink the circles you frequent. And we’re discussing a Mastodon post, of all platforms, just search for #capitalism and you’ll find no end of critiques.

See also Wikipedia if you want more sources.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_capitalism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-capitalism
by laweijfmvo | 2025-09-24 18:25:31+00:00
Similar experience: I added a folder to my zed project that was too big, causing zed to lock up and eventually crash. But because the default setting was to re-open projects on launch, I was stuck in a loop where I couldn’t remove the folder either. Eventually found a way to clear the recent projects, load an empty editor, and change the setting to avoid it in the future.
by 9rx | 2025-09-24 18:25:34+00:00
> But to use git as a database instead of postgres is ... misleading? Clickbait? Trolling?

Contextual.

You are right that the article is a bit hard to follow where it goes down roads that it also says you shouldn't actually do, but that is there just to explain that git is a database, which isn't as obvious as it should be to some people. There are no doubt better ways to get that idea across, but someone in the business of providing managed Postgres hosting isn't apt to have writing long-form text as a core competency. Nor should one need to have it as their core competency. Writing is for everyone — even those who aren't particularly good at it.
by j1elo | 2025-09-24 18:26:14+00:00
Add this as a favorite/bookmark:

javascript:(function(){document.styleSheets[0].insertRule("* { user-select:text !important }", 1);})();

Extra treat: this other one allows to copy text and open the context menu in pages that are written by rats who disable it:

javascript:['copy','cut','paste','contextmenu','selectstart'].forEach(e=>document.addEventListener(e,e=>e.stopImmediatePropagation(),true));
by Daishiman | 2025-09-24 18:26:17+00:00
> The current system selects people that have allocated resources effectively in the past by providing them more resources to allocate.

The current system selected people that have maximized shareholder value and financially engineered it into other financial assets that provide power under the capitalist system. This includes private equity services that have simply squeezed money out of consumers for no increase in quality of life, or companies that managed to avoid the consequences of the externalities of their economic activity.

> And what is stopping countries from doing this today? This isn't an either or thing, public projects can still exist, there is no law of nature saying that massive companies are the sole source of innovations but for some reason people treat it like they are mutually exclusive. You bring up projects from decades ago but are there any modern examples?

Regulatory capture and lobbying that attempts to force a profit motive behind every large government initiative when the profit motive substracts value away from society at large.
by tonymet | 2025-09-24 18:26:18+00:00
It's another signal of growing internet balkanization trend as online communities pivot to being more exclusive to mirror real-world communities. Once the A.I. farms take over, people flee.

Public forums → group chats, Yelp → Beli , Twitter → X / Bluesky / Gab / Rumble , IG Posts → DMs + Stories, FB Newsfeed → Groups

Product Hunt → Discord, AI-rugpull bots, TBD?
by nadalishhh | 2025-09-24 18:26:28+00:00
Excellent point about the fundamental limitation of classical Markov chains' linearity. Your 2D bitmap example perfectly illustrates the key insight: traditional Markov chains are inherently constrained by their sequential, memoryless transitions.

However, I'd argue that the distinction between classical n-gram Markov chains and modern transformers isn't as binary as it might appear. When we consider that transformers with context windows are mathematically equivalent to very high-order Markov chains (where the "state" encompasses the entire context), we see that the breakthrough wasn't abandoning the Markov property, but rather expanding the state representation exponentially.

Your observation about inevitably trending toward attention-like mechanisms is particularly insightful. The exponential state explosion you encountered (needing 2^32 states for your example) is precisely why parameterized approaches like transformers became necessary - they provide a tractable way to approximate these massive state spaces through learned representations rather than explicit enumeration.

The key innovation wasn't escaping Markov chains, but rather finding an efficient way to represent and compute over astronomically large state spaces that would be intractable for classical approaches.
by nathan_compton | 2025-09-24 18:26:42+00:00
I guess we should both read the SEP page on measurement.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/measurement-science/

Note that Bertrand Russel is on "team Nathan" in the sense that he thinks measurements relate to (at most) the reals.

I don't think anyone ever really measures the elecromagnetic field. We might, for example, measure the displacement of a charged object attached to a spring in an electromagnetic field. Or, if the field is changing in time we measure that displacement as a function of the position of the hands on a clock. But it is very hard for me to think of a situation where we measure something other than a distance at its most basic level. Even in a DAC we measure voltage relative to some calibrated voltage which we measured using a voltmeter which shows us our answer as a deflection in a meter.

This is particularly relevant in QM because in fact all the values we might measure are the eigenvalues of hermitian operators and they are, in fact, restricted to the real numbers.
by ppeetteerr | 2025-09-24 18:26:46+00:00
I've always felt it was verbose and the need for classes for everything was a bit of a overkill in 90% of circumstances (we're even seeing a pushback against OOP these days).

Here are some actual improvements:

- Record classes

public record Point(int x, int y) { }

- Record patterns

record Person(String name, int age) { }

if (obj instanceof Person(String name, int age)) { System.out.println(name + " is " + age); }

- No longer needing to import base Java types - Automatic casting

if (obj instanceof String s) { // use s directly }

Don't get me wrong, I still find some aspects of the language frustrating:

- all pointers are nullable with support from annotation to lessen the pain

- the use of builder class functions (instead of named parameters like in other languages)

- having to define a type for everything (probably the best part of TS is inlining type declarations!)

But these are minor gripes
by roughly | 2025-09-24 18:26:48+00:00
> While a democratic state is different than a private organization in that it derives legitimacy from its voters

This is exactly the key core distinction. The purpose of the state is to be the most powerful organization in the room - to constrain other actors. It’s imperative, therefore, that it be democratic and representative. Notably, part of the instinct to break up other large organizations is to prevent them from assembling enough resources to have a supersized impact on the state - the problem with monopoly is that monopolies buy out their competition and neuter regulations, the problem with wealth disparity is the ultra wealthy are sufficiently powerful to move the state in the direction they want it to go.

I agree with you generally regarding reducing the overall size of governing bodies and I agree with Terrence about the benefits of small organizations and the drawbacks of large specifically around the investment and perceived ownership of members of those organizations, but having a small state fundamentally requires having small organizations everywhere - and anti-monopoly, antitrust, and anti-wealth concentration - because for the state to be democratic and representative, it must be the most powerful organization in the area it covers, otherwise it’s just a tool for the more powerful to use.
by nradov | 2025-09-24 18:27:01+00:00
Major weapons development (or dual use) programs — especially for weapons of mass destruction — probably have to be government run due to national security concerns. But the notion that governments can effectively manage technology R&D projects is ludicrous. Look at what happened when Japan's MITI tried to run a Fifth Generation Computer Systems (FGCS) project: total failure and waste of tax money.

In general, economic central planning is a dead end. People keep trying to claim that it would be more efficient or benefit society but it just doesn't work. Bureaucrats and politicians can't be trusted with resource allocation decisions.
by lurking_swe | 2025-09-24 18:27:12+00:00
imo people asking those questions have no empathy, or they are just dumb. :)

You don’t _want_ a sleep deprived new parent on-call. A sleep deprived person is not who you want responding to an emergency, so of course others should pick up the slack temporarily. That’s what being a TEAM is all about. Kind of like playing a sport?

Now if the team is tiny the on-call impact will be a much bigger deal, and i sympathize, but in that case i’d blame management for having poor redundancy / contingency plans, NOT my colleague.

And for some reason there’s always some snarky person who chimes in with a comment like “but they chose to become parents!” A tale as old as time… so did our own parents! They chose. But i’m a human being that has empathy and i’m grateful to those who helped pick up the slack during their stressful newborn phase.
by Eddonarth | 2025-09-24 18:27:17+00:00
I think it might be part of the test/joke. A logical robot will either classify everything except Mr. Potato head as a vegetable (because fruits are technically vegetables), or only non-fruit edible parts of plants as vegetables (e.g. no tomato, avocado or eggplant). However, only a human will dare to classify eggplants as vegetables but not avocados.
by glenstein | 2025-09-24 18:28:06+00:00
I also would appreciate an answer to this. It's one thing to say anonymous sources like to offer quotes when they can push a preferred narrative. It's another to say they straight up make things up, and this lazy attitude of reflexively accusing NYT of fabrication like it's the apex of wisdom seems to come from a place of not understanding their processes or history.

There's bias in the sense of selecting stories and editorial judgment, and narrative emphasis. But people have gotten way too comfortable just reflexively claiming stories are fabrications, which I think in truth is extremely rare.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-09-24 18:28:12+00:00
> You have to buy your way into voting as a shareholder. In a democracy, it's just your given right as a citizen.

In a democratic country, only the people who have citizenship are allowed to vote. In a shareholders meeting, only the shareholders are allowed to vote.

You sometimes cam buy your way into citizenship. As a shareholder, it is your given right to vote in a shareholders meeting.