MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by martin-t | 2025-10-15 00:51:25+00:00
> sometimes voters are of the inclination to just elect whoever they think will mount the strongest assault on the status quo

This is absolutely a thing and it's a thing because at some point, people notice how little power they actually have.

Every person's opinion is a point in N-dimensional space.

Representative democracy is describing that point (expressing their political opinion) by picking 1 point out of a handful of pre-determined options (parties/representatives). Some countries only have 2 real choices.

That's absolutely insane, no wonder people feel like their vote doesn't matter, they often can't even find a choice remotely close to their real preferences.
by DiogenesKynikos | 2025-10-15 00:52:25+00:00
> Foreign investment was already in a down trend from 2013, investment kept somewhat stable in the 2015-2019 periode. Until a little unknown virus hit the world, resulting in a total shutdown / disrupted market. [...] I do not even know where you get the peak in 2022 when it was 2021.

You're just wrong about this, as you can see by looking at a chart of FDI into China: [0]. The story from 2013 to now is not "downward trend." 2013 was a peak year. Then FDI declined through 2017, before generally increasing until 2021, when it reached its all-time peak. You're right that I got the year wrong: the peak was in 2021, not 2022. But the story you've told of there being a steady decline since 2013, due to foreign companies not wanting to share IP, is just completely disproven by the chart. It also doesn't make sense based on how Chinese IP sharing policies have changed over time - they have been rolled back in the last decade, not increased.

There have been huge changes in the world economic outlook and in financial policy since 2022. The US ended the zero-interest-rate policy in 2022, which has huge implications for global monetary flows.

> No offense but your comments read like a propagandist. I let the readers make up their minds, as my information can be easily google on.

Yes, readers can Google it (or look at the World Bank data below) and see that the story you're telling is just plain wrong. People in the US are exposed to such a crazy level of constant fear mongering about China that any kind of moderating comments are seen as propaganda.

0. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/BX.KLT.DINV.CD.WD?locat...
by Jemaclus | 2025-10-15 00:52:47+00:00
I'm also deaf, and I took 14 years of speech therapy. I grew up in Alabama. The only way you would know I'm from the South is because of the pin-pen merger[1]. Otherwise, you'd think I grew up in the American Midwest, due to how my speech therapy went. Almost nobody picks up on it, unless they are linguists that already knew about the pin-pen merger.

[1]https://www.acelinguist.com/2020/01/the-pin-pen-merger.html
by hammock | 2025-10-15 00:53:39+00:00
Dunno where parent said anything about democracy. Democracy and voting aren’t the same thing also they rejected the idea of voting on every law (democracy).

It seems inherent in your worldview that you lack faith in people to self govern (that is, for a person to govern themselves. Which would explain why you are at odds with the parent. I suggest you read a bit of Jefferson’s ideas of self governance, education, etc. There are tradeoffs as with everything else, I do think based solely on your short commentary here that there may be an opportunity for your perspective to be enriched however
by Praytic | 2025-10-15 00:53:45+00:00
I built https://places.praytic.com/ because I was fed up with clunky map apps that have a feature-creep interface. You know that moment when you're in the car with friends trying to pick somewhere to eat? Although, you've got tons of saved places, but good luck finding them in Google My Maps or Yelp on your phone. It's a mess of menus and features nobody asked for.

You can tag your spots with or whatever emoji so scanning a map visually actually makes a difference. It still uses Google search to find places, so that part's familiar. Sharing is ridiculously easy too: long-press your map name, type in a friend's email, choose if they can edit or just view, and you're done. You can even stack multiple friends' maps together to see everyone's recommendations at once.

It's still in early stages of development, but core features are already there.
by soupy-soup | 2025-10-15 00:54:42+00:00
That's really as far as they need to go; if the userland is compatible with Linux, it can use all of the work that KDE and other organizations have put into building mobile interfaces.

These projects have stuff that works, but the lack of firmware for chips that can connect to modern cell infrastructure means that they can't really create an appealing product. The OS layer is where all previous Linux phone efforts have failed, and I hope the FSF makes it farther than everyone else has.
by walkabout | 2025-10-15 00:55:40+00:00
It's also sometimes the case that rural and suburban precincts report before cities, which obviously slants results toward Republicans in early returns.

But in the end you're dealing with people who point at a bunch of large but near-empty counties being red and only a few (very high-population) being blue as proof of a "landslide" in a race where their guy won with less than 50% of the votes cast going for him. They don't understand really basic shit. There's not much sense in going out of your way to get through skulls that dense. Whatever you do, if their leaders say "jump" they'll say "how high?" If their leaders say "fraud!" they'll say "yeah! Hang the Democrats and their collaborators!" Bend over backwards with even more safeguards, and they'll just keep being upset over the same stuff if the right people tell them to.
by stockresearcher | 2025-10-15 00:55:40+00:00
The business model of most higher-end makes has evolved: the first customer leases the car for 3-4 years and then returns it to the dealer, who turns around and sells it to a customer with a full warranty for another 3-4 years.

So modern lux cars are actually pretty well-made and pretty reliable these days. The only catch is that they’re designed with the assumption that all maintenance will be done at the dealer and that the driver never sees a bill.

Once you exit that - do maintenance elsewhere or not under warranty, the costs become ridiculous and people start skipping necessary items. So the car breaks down and the repairs are even more ridiculous. So off to the junkyard it goes.

Stay inside the dealer+warranty bubble and you have a pretty good time, although many people will question your sanity buying an expensive extended warranty for a 12-year old car ;)
by turtletontine | 2025-10-15 00:55:57+00:00
Thanks for this, I fully agree. One frustration I have with the modern moment is the tendency to view anything more than five years old with disdain, as utterly irrelevant and obsolete. Maybe I’m just going old, but I like my technology dependable and boring, especially software. Glad to see someone express respect for the decades of expertise that have gone into things we take for granted.
by frumplestlatz | 2025-10-15 00:56:29+00:00
You’ve reframed this as a discussion about open versus closed development. That wasn’t the point I raised.

My concern is about presentation, ethics, respect, and about the co-option of a gift to the commons — particularly how your public messaging gives readers the impression of lineage and endorsement that doesn’t exist.

Regardless of your intent, that’s the effect of calling Turso “the next evolution of SQLite.” You’re welcome to disagree; it would be very strange if you didn’t.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-10-15 00:56:43+00:00
and even assumptions about them being hunter gatherers at all are based on centuries of bias and assumptions, with a whole lot of cultural chauvinism and religious nuttery baked in for good measure.

It's based on the fact that we don't observe the morphological changes in plant matter we call "domestication" until the PPNB, after the earliest layers of Gobekli Tepe. Moreover, they have a lot of similarities with other ANE foragers, and there's a distinct lack of both water sources and residential structures suitable for sedentary agriculturalists. Plus, pollen samples from the Harran plain indicate widespread mixed deciduous grasslands during that period, with very low levels of the plants that would later become dominant during the agricultural revolution.

Archaeologists are much better about recognizing the complexity of forager lifeways than they were 50 years ago.
by replwoacause | 2025-10-15 00:56:49+00:00
This is just peak HN. The irony is that your argument for valuing “sane, grounded management” rests on a dogmatic personal dislike of Electron. You’re equating “things I wouldn’t do” with “management gone off the rails”. Of all the things an email provider could do to seem unreasonable, building an Electron app isn’t exactly high on the list.
by altairprime | 2025-10-15 00:57:51+00:00
Isn’t the new fold the one that appears when the stock fold hinge seizes mid-fold due to dust intrusion? If so, that would be a logical outcome to plan for, what with dust being the mortal enemy of hinged displays and all, especially if the case design is well understood to respond to the eventually-certain hinge seizure event by introducing new folds into itself in one of those two locations. I wonder what one of the various battery X-ray people will find when they scan an unbroken one. Does it have cell safety dividers at the known auto-hinge points?
by danans | 2025-10-15 00:59:09+00:00
> I remember how everyone raved about cheap EV charging a decade ago, how it would save costs etc. And today a commercial fast DC changing is more expensive (per km of range) than an ICE car of the same class and size.

The raving was over the cost of home charging vs gasoline, and that advantage still holds today, even in very expensive electricity markets like MA or CA.

The way most people will feel the hit is air conditioning costs, since their usage can't cheaply be moved off peak rate hours, and an array of home batteries isn't cheap enough for households that have high energy burden.
by zeroq | 2025-10-15 01:00:25+00:00
I'll give you an example of what I'm doing with SQLite.

I have an app that organizes my movie collection. I use IMDB public datasets as data source. Because versioning is hard, data changes over time (remember who directed Matrix?) it's just easier to rebuild the database every time.

A naive import of datasets is ~131M inserts. It takes 10 minutes (of which 100M takes exactly 6 minutes). Another 10 minutes to further clean up the data, set up indexes, optimize and vacuum.

It's fine for the use case, but still it would be nicer to be able to achieve that in half the time.

The app has no dependencies, database is a single file I can store on S3 and with a little bit of magic use it as a real database - meaning I can run a complex queries over http on that whole database and exchange 50kb.

The client is a standalone HTML file with some JS. No need of server for client, no need for hosting for server except of that S3 bucket.

Sure, it's definitely a niche application, but, at least for me, it makes perfect sense. Start your app with zero deps and add only what you really need. There's too much projects that start with google-esque architecture, with plenty of microservices, only to reach MVP with technical debt the size of US treasury.
by kazinator | 2025-10-15 01:00:26+00:00
> The C language is old and boring. It is a well-known and well-understood language.

So you might think, but there is a committee actively undermining this, not to mention compiler people keeping things exciting also.

There is a dogged adherence to backward compatibility, so that you can't pretend C has not gone anywhere in thirty-five years, if you like --- provided you aren't invoking too much undefined behavior. (You can't as easily pretend that your compiler has not gone anywhere in 35 years with regard to things you are doing out of spec.)
by AkelaA | 2025-10-15 01:00:53+00:00
In my experience it’s usually the engineers that aren’t worried about AI, because they see the limitations clearly every time they use it. It’s pretty obvious that whole thing is severely overhyped and unreliable.

Your boss (or more likely, your bosses’ bosses’s boss) is the one deeply worried about it. Though mostly worried about being left behind by their competitors and how their company’s use of AI (or lack thereof) looks to shareholders.
by ocdtrekkie | 2025-10-15 01:01:03+00:00
So the Android MADA and the AFA was wholesale struck as illegal a couple years ago, both in the US and elsewhere. So this requirement cannot legally exist. Whether Google will give someone a license who also ships a fork though is certainly in question, I suspect most OEMs aren't willing to risk their business seeing if the mafia wants to follow the law. Google has such a reputation for being abusive at this point an actual agreement or rule is no longer necessary.
by aloha2436 | 2025-10-15 01:01:33+00:00
I think you're misreading the article; the point here is not "LLMs are bad and can't replace humans," the point is that many non-technical people have the expectation that LLMs can replace humans _but still behave like regular software_ with regard to reliability and operability.

When a CEO sees their customer chatbot call a customer a slur, they don't see "oh my chatbot runs on a stochastic model of human language and OpenAI can't guarantee that it will behave in an acceptable way 100% of the time", they see "ChatGPT called my customer a slur, why did you program it to do that?"
by aeonfox | 2025-10-15 01:02:11+00:00
> This is literally desert wasteland sitting alongside a freeway

"Desert wasteland" teems with life, just maybe not the kind that most people care about. Land use is one of the sticking points of the energy transition, both for agriculture and biodiversity.

One of the only plusses to nuclear power is reduced land use, though it has it's own water use and waste issues. Much better alternatives are rooftop solar and residential batteries, and grid scale batteries located closer to where they are needed for industry, commerce, and high-density housing. It really kills the need for these large scale deployments and the costly transmission lines to service them.
by schoen | 2025-10-15 01:02:14+00:00
Yeah, I think this can really happen, and it's just about the heart of the preparedness paradox, a term that I mentioned somewhere else in this thread.

I've often said that my grandmother was so grateful for all the childhood vaccines that came out during my mom's and my aunt's childhoods, or around that time (the Baby Boom era), because my grandmother really concretely saw how terrible some of those diseases were, with people in her generation actually contracting them in childhood, maybe even dying of them. But if you've really never seen them, it's pretty natural that they start to seem like something that barely even exists at all.

Like, I don't even know the different between typhus and typhoid, or what their symptoms are, or what you actually do to prevent them, or exactly how they're spread, or whether they've been eradicated in certain regions or whatever (or even whether there are any vaccines against them or whether or not I've personally received those vaccines in infancy!). I just barely have a vague sense that these are truly awful things that apparently exist in the world, probably relate to water contamination somehow, and may potentially come back in war zones or disaster zones. (Way to go, people who do ... something? ... to prevent those two!)
by _blk | 2025-10-15 01:02:19+00:00
UBS bank mandates their "Secure Access" app as second factor even when logging in from a desktop. They used to allow the smart card reader for existing customers that had it as a work around for a few years but they disabled that.

Also many websites are making it remarkably hard to not use the app if they even remotely sense you're not on an actual PC. FB and LinkedIn aren't banks but prime examples.
by pezezin | 2025-10-15 01:02:44+00:00
You are looking back with rosy glasses indeed.

Last year I assembled a retro PC (Pentium 2, Riva TNT 2 Ultra, Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold) running Windows 98 to remember my childhood, and it is more stable than what I remembered, but still way worse than modern systems. There are plenty of games that will refuse to work for whatever reason, or that will crash the whole OS, specially when existing, and require a hard reboot.

Oh and at least in the '90s you could already ship patches, we used to get them with the floppies and later CDs provided by magazines.
by Gigachad | 2025-10-15 01:04:26+00:00
Semi regularly the police do stop terrorism plots before they happen. And just solving existing crimes is valuable itself. Especially for things like car crime, unless there was a video of it happening there is very little chance you’ll find the perpetrator.

Increasing the chance of criminals getting caught does a lot more for dissuading crime than increasing the penalties. Would you litter if you knew there was a 100% chance of getting a $50 fine?

It’s probably the case that politicians also don’t want to be the ones who blocked the data which would have lead to preventing a terrorist attack. And they get more visibility behind the scenes after taking the job.
by danpalmer | 2025-10-15 01:04:44+00:00
In my experience it has been relatively high variance – it does get as low as 0.5, but can be 3-4. That's an order of magnitude difference, and can be the difference between a great and a terrible UX when you amplify it across many RPCs.

In general the goal should be to deploy as much of the stack in one zone as possible, and have multiple zones for redundancy.
by peacebeard | 2025-10-15 01:05:13+00:00
A lot of people seem to equate using AI tools and deploying code that you don’t understand. All code should be fully understood by the person using the AI tool, then again by the reviewer. The productivity benefit of these tools is still massive, and there is benefit to doing the research and investigation to understand what the LLM is doing if it was not clear up front.
by proc0 | 2025-10-15 01:05:20+00:00
Interesting, but after a quick read I don't see the paper addressing the possibility that the dynamical states can be first simulated by machines and that an AI consciousness would be embedded in such simulation. The paper only addresses AI architectures built directly on hardware and makes statements on the differences between computer hardware and the brain, but computer hardware could, in theory, simulate the substrate in which brains have evolved. Although this would probably be computationally too expensive with today's machines, so the paper's conclusion is still applicable today for that reason.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-10-15 01:05:36+00:00
> he mentions in his book that although he wanted to reform mass surveillance, it looked a little different once he was actually responsible for people’s safety.

This is a cowardly excuse. It's another way of saying that if you reform mass surveillance you'll be blamed for anything bad that subsequently happens, regardless of whether the mass surveillance would have prevented it. And bad things happen on a regular basis with or without mass surveillance, so then the politically risk-averse move is to not solve the problem you promised to solve and not expose yourself.

Which is cowardly specifically because the candidate's original position was correct. You can solve crimes without mass surveillance, or prevent them by reducing poverty etc. If you do those things then the chances of something bad happening go down instead of up.

And it will still not be zero -- it won't be zero no matter what you do -- but in that case you're only worried about adversarial pundits blaming you for things that weren't your fault, and adversarial pundits are going to do that regardless.
by linguae | 2025-10-15 01:06:44+00:00
This was a problem during the early 2000s when Windows and Internet Explorer were utterly dominant. Some banks, government services, and other essential websites used ActiveX controls, preventing access by non-Windows users. I remember during my senior year of high school being unable to fill out a college financial aid application circa late 2004 or early 2005 on my PC running FreeBSD and Firefox; I needed to use Windows and Internet Explorer.

I remember the stagnation of Internet Explorer combined with increased awareness of security exploits in Windows and Internet Explorer led to the rise of Mozilla Firefox and (to a lesser extent) increased marketshare for the Mac. This, combined with the arrival of smartphones around 2007, put pressure on organizations to make their Web sites accessible to a wider range of browsers instead of just IE.

Perhaps if we had a critical mass of people using phones with FOSS software, this would be enough for banks and other organizations to consider people who don’t use Apple/Google products.

The challenge, though, is getting that critical mass. Firefox benefitted from Microsoft’s fumbles in the 2000s. It’s going to be hard for a FOSS project to compete head-on against Apple and Google.
by pavon | 2025-10-15 01:06:54+00:00
This is at least partially banned by the injunction from Epic vs Google:

7. For a period of three years ending on November 1, 2027, Google may not condition a payment, revenue share, or access to any Google product or service, on an agreement with an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) or carrier to preinstall the Google Play Store on any specific location on an Android device. 8. For a period of three years ending on November 1, 2027, Google may not condition a payment, revenue share, or access to any Google product or service, on an agreement with an OEM or carrier not to preinstall an Android app distribution platform or store other than the Google Play Store.

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.37...
by _wire_ | 2025-10-15 01:06:55+00:00
The degrees of hypocrisy at play in the GOP today are striking:

Trump / Kirk U.S. Medal of Freedom hit parade...

https://www.independent.co.:uk/news/world/americas/us-politi...

Young Republican leadership's internal language about their countrymen, writ in rampant death & torture threats, unhinged bigotry and hatred, heartbreaking callousness and disregard for the welfare of others, and all of it festooned with a sociopathic posture of contrition to masquerade an utter perversion of the values of brotherhood and personal "responsibility"...

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
by jonahx | 2025-10-15 01:07:17+00:00
> I think it’s less like doubting that the given panic works and more like an extremely thorough proof that all possible branches of the control flow have acceptable behavior.

The way I was thinking about it was: if you somehow magically knew that nothing added by the compiler could ever cause a problem, it would be redundant to test those branches. Then wondering why a really well tested compiler wouldn't be equivalent to that. It sounds like the answer is, for the level of soundness sqlite is aspiring to, you can't make those assumptions.
by SchemaLoad | 2025-10-15 01:07:38+00:00
It is given the environment. But it does highlight the poor security of desktop browsers where they are only trusted to do anything when a phone app approves it. While the phone app is considered secure enough to just stay logged in perpetually without any external confirmation.

To hack the banks app you have to find an exploit in iOS or Android which would allow you to read the other apps private storage, which is borderline impossible now. To hack the banks website you just have to buy some random browser extension and add malware to it, or break into someones NPM account and distribute it there, or any number of ways to run code on someone else's computer. Something very achievable by an individual.