MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-10-07 19:37:27+00:00
I said it was inconsistent to fight for digital freedoms without real world freedoms. I did not say I was okay with the loss of digital freedoms.

I think people should be able to build a deck without state consent. I think people should be able to sell to their neighbors without the health department watching. I think people should be able to start a small business without needing IRS filings at first. I think a small business might need OSHA exceptions across the board for the first few employees. I even think, yes, that allowing some idiots to roll coal is worth more than tightly regulating car repairs and controlling car repair equipment. And I think, to most people, these freedoms matter more than digital sovereignty.

---

Edit, posting too fast, cannot reply directly: In that case, that's a great argument for regulating app distribution, we need to protect people from scam apps. We can't possibly neglect people who don't know better about the risks of sideloading.

I'm sure you wouldn't say, "I just want to do whatever I want with code, while stopping my neighbor from building a dangerous deck," with a straight face, right?
by theshrike79 | 2025-10-07 19:37:34+00:00
But, hear me out.

If (when) companies want their things to be present in ChatGPT replies, they need to provide an AI-compatible way to get it. Just shoving a full-ass web page at it is inefficient and error-prone.

They have to either build a version of their site that's AI-accessible or provide an API (or MCP) for it to access the data.

Now that the API is built and the cost is paid, we can use it for non-AI uses.
by array_key_first | 2025-10-07 19:37:54+00:00
It's a sad state of affairs because it's a regression.

This was trivial for websites 15 years ago, but due to increasing complexity, it's no longer feasible. We've put more and more styling type things in JS, which really undermines web as a platform.

This is why CSS exists. This isn't some weirdo use case, this is THE use case. We're all losing the plot.
by steanne | 2025-10-07 19:38:03+00:00
> The proposed detours typically result in a 1% shift (and again, this is only for a small percentage of flights). That means increasing fuel use and flight time by around 1%. So if your flight is three hours long, it’s only adding an extra two minutes. For a 10-hour flight, six minutes. This seems socially acceptable to me; most people would barely notice.
by pchristensen | 2025-10-07 19:38:55+00:00
Just that "largest manufacturing state in the USA" isn't a very helpful measure, since the largest state in basically every measure of development. This tweet shows the same problem with absolute numbers giving misleading appearances: https://x.com/xkcd/status/1339348000750104576:

There are more Trump voters in California than Texas, more Biden voters in Texas than NY, more Trump voters in NY than Ohio, more Biden voters in Ohio than Massachusetts, more Trump voters in Massachusetts than Mississippi, and more Biden voters in Mississippi than Vermont.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-10-07 19:39:24+00:00
Good. The mouse tripped the bell. These are networks where it's great that we can kind of root out and see for ourselves the the mice that scurry across the information-scape.

Ideally we could have our own histories of what we've seen. Then get to go reflect back at when we've seen them, after they become known agents of a campaign.

In most online networks, society has no way to see and monitor and look at what's going on on the social network. I think it's such a boon that here there was the data for researchers to investigate and find. we are not so far from being able to try to repair and amend meddling retroactively, retrospectively.
by Jtsummers | 2025-10-07 19:39:48+00:00
Let's be clear about what mcherm wrote, they wrote that attempted suicide is criminalized to protect the person.

That's very different from what you describe. Yes, some suicidal people do some very dangerous things that may harm (or risk harm to) others, but in general things that cause harm to others are already going to fall under some criminal statute. Consider someone parking their car on train tracks, potentially derailing it. That act itself would be criminal whether there was an attempted suicide involved or not. The attempted suicide is not the crime (or should not be), in the train/car scenario, it's parking the car on the tracks that creates a crime.

It makes no sense to criminalize attempted suicide except as a way to punish the individual, it does not help them.
by rachelradulo | 2025-10-07 19:39:56+00:00
Yep! We were working on an authentication startup (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30615352) and built it to $1.5M in ARR, but then we saw even a bigger pain point; local AI is hard. When we tried building a corporate knowledge base with RAG and local models, we hit the same wall: a painful gap between prototype and production.

Production-ready enterprise AI requires solving model management, RAG pipelines, model fine-tuning, prompt engineering, failover, cost optimization, and deployment orchestration. You can’t just be good at one or two of these, you have to be great at all of them or your project won't succeed. And so Llamafarm was born!

Monetization-wise - We’re open source and free forever, with revenue coming from enterprise support, managed deployments, and compliance packages—basically, companies pay for confidence, not code.
by babblingfish | 2025-10-07 19:40:24+00:00
When ebooks first came on the scene, self-publishing was profitable. Due to relatively low competition, new authors and new releases could get traction with minimal marketing budgets. At the time, it seemed the great equalizer we'd all been waiting for had finally arrived.

Nowadays, ebooks is a huge industry with thousands of new releases every day. Word on the street is 10k-30k of marketing spend per year is required to generate any sales at all.

It's maybe the case that books as a whole is a winner-takes-all market. Is there a model could we create to bolster out the middle? If you look at sales data, you'll see the #1 bestseller sells more than 10x more copies than #2 on the list. It just makes economical sense for the big publishers to focus on their bestsellers.

There's so many high quality books being published each day. It's overwhelming! I guess all we can do is continue our patronage for the authors we like, to trust the recommendations from people we respect, and to be willing to try out new authors and new releases.

When working on a book for 2 years nets a $30k advance and it's unlikely to payout. It feels the incentives to pursue writing full-time are increasingly diminishing. Sometimes I wonder if for the majority of people who'd like to pursue authorship that doing so part-time is the only choice.
by epistasis | 2025-10-07 19:40:40+00:00
Very few people realize that for most of the US, cheaper electricity costs for the utilities means lower profits, because most are regulated utilities that take a fixed profit on costs. Models for this vary greatly, sometimes they only take fixed profit on necessary grid investments (where necessary is determined by the utility, then stamped for approval by a Public Utility Commission, which has a board that might be elected and susceptible to bribing/election malefeasance, such as in Arizona...)

So-called "natural" monopolies are quite difficult to regulate correctly. And the solution we chose as a society a century ago might not be the right one for today.
by fhd2 | 2025-10-07 19:40:47+00:00
I like that too, in theory. We used to call that "rich client". Basically UIs that had full database access.

And there begin the problems. Do you really want to expose a full CRUD API, or are there consistency/security rules you want to enforce? That's cool, but makes API design a little more challenging and frontend development a little more frustrating. SSR eliminates a lot of these problems, and for many types of software, it's quite sufficient.

For a lot of software, it doesn't make that much sense of course, e.g. if you need clients for multiple platforms.

That's the kind of conversation I wanted to have with the candidates that went for that architecture.
by ilikecakeandpie | 2025-10-07 19:40:54+00:00
Yeah I think my response was a bit harsher than I intended so sorry about that. I appreciate you responding

I'm not going to pretend like I was never a social media sleuth or checking my (at the time, currently no longer) gf's best friends on snapchat to try and figure out who she was talking to more than me or facebook posts, whatever. I had reason to be distrustful/skeptical which, unfortunately, was validated. You bring up a fair point (in reference to a normalcy) in industries around checking in on spouses to see what they're up to at all times to make sure they're being honest. I think this is going to get even worse for people as, anecdotally, it seems more so than ever that folks are leaning toward risk aversion and don't want to be vulnerable, especially when it comes to subjective things or matters of the heart.

Ultimately, I think you hit it on the head, it must come down to building that genuine trust. It can be hard to build if your previous partners cheated on you. However, I'd lean towards trusting if your current partner has shown no signs of deception and seems happy in the relationship. Otherwise it's totally possible to ruin a relationship because one hasn't dealt with the trauma or baggage of the previous one(s).
by code_runner | 2025-10-07 19:41:06+00:00
If you mean we created an environment where people could come and find success and live their lives, and we perhaps weren’t as strict as we could’ve been in some situations… I don’t think that violently kidnapping people off the streets, without showing badges, in unmarked vehicles, masked, etc is a punishment that fits the crime.

Missing a court date once multiple years ago, failing to navigate a complex process, and even intentionally over staying a tourist visa does not warrant the loss of humanity, due process, basic rights, dignity, and humanity
by godelski | 2025-10-07 19:41:27+00:00
> We just need legislators willing to serve the public and ignore the lobbyists and executive.

Which requires us, the people, to replace them if they won't.

It requires us, the people, to stop buying into their games of misdirection.

This is no easy task, but it is critical. They know they can throw a million issues at us and then we'll just argue over what's more important instead of actually solving things. So at this point I'll suggest a nonoptimal, but simple solution: stop arguing over what's more important and just concentrate on what you think is most important. If they're going to throw a million things at us we can be a million little armies. Divide and rule only works by getting those little armies to fight each other. If instead we are on, mostly, the same side then they lose power. They have to fight on a million fronts.

It's far from an optimal solution but it's far better than what we've been doing for the last half century. Because for during that time they've only grown and divided us even more. People are concerned that a small forward isn't enough. They're wrong. It isn't that by not making enough progress we're standing still, we're losing ground. We can't even take a small step forward, we need to first stop losing ground. Once we do that I think we can build momentum moving forward. But it's insane to constantly give up ground in order to maybe make small steps forward. That's certainly a losing battle
by rachelradulo | 2025-10-07 19:41:48+00:00
Fair question. The core will always stay open source and free. We’ll monetize around it with things like managed hosting, enterprise support, and compliance options (HIPAA, SOC2, etc). Basically, we make money when teams want someone to stand behind it in production, not for using the software itself. But let us know if you have other ideas! We're still new to open source
by nulbyte | 2025-10-07 19:41:50+00:00
I don't know why this was flagged. It may be wrong, but I think it worth discussing to correct.

Not all of Federal law supersedes state law. The Tenth Amendment clarifies:

> The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.

If it's not given to the federal government to regulate, the federal government can't regulate it.
by monooso | 2025-10-07 19:41:52+00:00
> That would probably end up cheaper in the long run. But nobody wants to sign up to be the one driving the switch.

If memory serves, the French government (and various French municipalities) have been actively moving to Linux since the early 2000s. The French police even have their own Linux distribution, GendBuntu [1].

And yes, the reported cost savings are around 40% [2].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu

[2]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/french-police-move-from-window...
by cosmicgadget | 2025-10-07 19:41:52+00:00
Huh? They're either chasing down people with an administrative warrant (which as far as I can tell are largely valid) or they're using reasonable suspicion which SCOTUS just decided can be determined by a combination of ethnic, economic, and geographic factors. The latter seems wrongly-decided but it is lawful by definition.

What actions are you referring to and what is the treasonous intent? They seem to just be self-selected xenophobes trying to chase bonus money.
by lithocarpus | 2025-10-07 19:41:58+00:00
I don't want to claim that it's always just cosmetic or that no one should ever get it, but my point is sometimes there are alternatives that don't carry the risks.

Another related anecdote from my own life, I had sleep apnea from when I was a teenager. Another doctor also proposed surgery to fix my nose for that, but somehow I'd become skeptical of doctors wanting to do surgery (probably I'd heard too many stories of something going wrong.) Anyway, a year ago I fixed my sleep apnea using a nose dilator and mouth tape at night for a month. I still have overbite but mostly breathe through my nose now.

Again, not saying that surgery or intervention is always bad, but this was an even more extreme case where they wanted to do surgery to fix something that could be fixed in a much more natural and much easier and extremely cheap way, but the natural way was never mentioned by a doctor, I only heard about it from a friend 15+ years later. And it just worked, and for the past year I've not had sleep apnea - I sleep better, don't snore anymore, and can breathe enough through my nose now while exercising etc. i.e. the nose must have been able to reshape itself with the help of the dilator and necessity (because the mouth was taped). I still have overbite but I'm not sure it's really a problem especially compared with the risks of surgery.
by pcaharrier | 2025-10-07 19:42:05+00:00
This one is particularly interesting because the court held that there was no "rational basis" for the law's classification of people who were barred from holding a direct care position in a state-licensed addiction treatment facility. In constitutional cases that's the lowest standard of review that usually guarantees that the state will win.

The full opinion is here: https://ij.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/ECF-63-Opinion-re-...
by karolusrex | 2025-10-07 19:42:12+00:00
Production-grade web app without advanced build tools? Depends.

CSS classes not scoped and starting to leak? You hire more frontend developers and because there is no type system we get critical exceptions? And no automated testing to discover them?

Correctly handling hyphenation of user-generated content? Safari decided to handle audio differently in the latest version and you have no polyfills? iPhone decided to kill the tab because of memory pressure, because someone uploaded an image with exotic properties, and you have no cdn service like fastly image optimiser to handle that? Support for right to left languages such as Arabic? The backend returned a super cryptic response that actually originates from the users private firewall?

a11y requires you to use resizable browser text, and someone is using google translate chrome extension at the same time, and you can’t possibly know how the layout of the page will look like?

Some Samsung devices bypass browser detection completely and you don’t know if the user is on mobile or not? localStorage.setItem will throw an error when the device is low on memory, etc etc…

Once you get to a certain scale of users, even the simplest of tasks become littered with corner cases and odd situations. For smaller scale applications, it is not necessary to have a very wide tool arsenal. But if you are facing a large user-base, you need quite some heavy caliber tools to keep things in check.
by kace91 | 2025-10-07 19:42:28+00:00
As someone who’s kind of a newbie in rails, but with 10 years of experience in other languages…

It sounds ok to adapt tools if needed (won’t get into whether tools are actually needed, let’s assume they are).

But Rails is supposed to be a giant, everything and the kitchen sink framework bringing everything from an ORM through its own console to scaffolding code generation.

If adding tools to the setup is needed, isn’t then rails the thing to reconsider? Something more modular could probably work better.

Just reading “vanilla Rails” sounds like a red flag. How can that behemoth be considered vanilla?
by wat10000 | 2025-10-07 19:42:46+00:00
Getting a full-fledged PC is an anti-feature for a small project. I don't want to fart around with a Linux install just to set the thing up. I don't want to worry about SD card longevity or power supply compatibility. And I definitely don't want to spend $50+. I'll buy a cheap Arduino-compatible board that will immediately run whatever code I load it with. I've built several Arduino projects and RPi would have been more annoying and much more expensive.

The RPi Pico looks great for this, but that's pretty much an Arduino equivalent. You can even used the Arduino IDE with it.
by gglon | 2025-10-07 19:42:52+00:00
The claim hinges entirely on the narrow definition of "large-scale energy generation." For the UK, with its high seasonal energy demand and low winter solar output, the cost of generation is almost irrelevant next to the cost of firming that power for 24/7/365 availability. While the paper[1] shows solar PV and daily-cycle batteries are getting cheaper, it also shows seasonal storage solutions like hydrogen are still an order of magnitude too expensive and inefficient (huge capex for electrolyzers/storage + poor round-trip efficiency). So providing reliable, 24/7/365 baseload power from PV + storage in the UK is demonstrably not cheaper than gas or nuclear today.

[1] https://www.authorea.com/users/960972/articles/1329770/maste...
by array_key_first | 2025-10-07 19:44:00+00:00
Those are equivalent. You can just open your settings and change the font to whatever you like.

Also, if were really going off the argument of design - your font choice is almost certainly worse than whatever the OS does by default.

The OS, most likely developed by a multi trillion dollar corporation, probably chose a font that's highly legible and simple in a broad array of contexts.

Your font might be cooler, but is it better? Fat chance.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-10-07 19:44:13+00:00
Mechanics don't have to work for the dealership. If the dealership isn't paying them well, they can go work for an independent shop, which is exactly what's happening.

Getting paid the book rate is an advantage to the mechanic because then they still get the full rate if they're more efficient at their job, which is an advantage to everybody. As long as the book rate is reasonable. And if it isn't then they don't take the job, which isn't a problem for the mechanics, it's a problem for Ford.
by tstrimple | 2025-10-07 19:44:45+00:00
Getting a 5090 and 5k2k monitor is what forced me back off of Linux last time I switched. I'm used to crappy "cutting edge" hardware support in Linux and routinely bounce back and forth between Windows and Linux as the different annoyances build up. Yes, I know Linux has issues with NVidia. But AMD doesn't make a comparable card period.
by Syntonicles | 2025-10-07 19:44:50+00:00
Loved the article, and also the shoutout to Strang's lectures.

I agree with the order, the Gaussian should come later I almost closed the article - glad I kept scrolling out of curiosity.

Also I felt like I had been primed to think about nickles and pennies as variables rather than coefficients due to the color scheme, so when I got to the food section I naturally expected to see the column picture first.

When I encountered the carb/protein matrix instead, I perceived it in the form:

[A][x], where the x is [milk bread].T

so I naturally perceived the matrix as a transformation and saw the food items as variables about to be "passed through" the matrix.

But another part of my brain immediately recognized the matrix as a dataset of feature vectors, [[milk].T [bread].T], yearning for y = f(W @ x).

I was never able to resolve this tension in my mind...
by epistasis | 2025-10-07 19:44:56+00:00
The problem with the idea of "base power" is that in the past, the cheapest electricity was from the big thermal generators that take a day to warm up, and operate most cheaply by pumping out at maximum efficiency 24 hours a day. You could then layer on the more expensive electricity sources that could spin up in 15 minutes or a few hours, and match the demand curve, as long as you matched baseload generators to the minimum of the demand curve, and have a cost-optimal electricity mix.

Now that we have cheaper sources of energy for parts of the day, "base" power is a much less desirable concept. It's gone from a simple and straightforward optimization problem that a middle-schooler could solve to a cost optimization problem that markets and linear solvers can solve.

Now that we have cheap storage, and solar-plus-storage is cheaper than coal in the UK, the cost optimization is getting simpler: get rid of all the base load coal!
by hollowturtle | 2025-10-07 19:45:09+00:00
As much as I like posts like this I can't feel anything other than hate for the substack platform, it just sucks I'm sorry but I can't understand how people can rely on that bloated web app. I just click around and it's so slow and buggy, recently I canceled a subscription because it kepts signin me out and the signup signin experience just suck