MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by karakot | 2025-10-23 15:55:45+00:00
When school ends, I often see middle and high schoolers riding cheap (and extremely fast) e-bikes through the neighborhood, frequently blowing through stop signs and generally breaking every road rules. So it's just matter of time before it all gets over-regulated.

and by a cheap bike I mean something like these "bikes":

https://www.amazon.com/Electric-Suspension-Motorcycle-Batter...

https://www.amazon.com/Qlife-Adults-1500W-Suspension-Motorcy...
by renewiltord | 2025-10-23 15:55:50+00:00
Amusing. The typical businessperson anywhere complies with whatever rules an admin requires in order to do their business. The typical politician wants to create a loyalty based system since that allows him to be a kingmaker.

One of the defining aspects of low-corruption societies is that they don’t have the loyalty based systems and instead have rule of law. But now we see how the loyalty systems come about: it isn’t the politician who makes it; it’s the populace.

Given a single deviation from the low-corruption norm, they demand loyalty test based operation and would rather move towards high-corruption.

A low-corruption society is therefore an unstable equilibrium. The moment a norm deviation occurs, the people desire greater norm deviation.
by mattewong | 2025-10-23 15:56:07+00:00
Hi HN, I'm the author of zsv.

zsv was built because I needed a library to integrate with my application, and other CSV parsers had one or more of a variety of limitations (couldn't handle "real-world" CSV or malformed UTF8, were too slow, degraded when used on very large files, couldn't compile to web assembly, could not handle multi-row headers (seems like basically none of the other CSV parsers do this) etc-- more details are in the repo README). The closest solution to what I wanted was xsv, but was not designed as an API and I still needed a lot of flexibility that wasn't already built into it.

My first inclination was to use flex/bison but that approach yielded surprisingly slow performance; SIMD had just been shown to be useful in unprecedented performance gains for JSON parsing, so a friend and I took a page from that approach to create what afaik (though I could be wrong) is now the fastest CSV parser (and most customizable as well) that properly handles "real-world" CSV.

When I say "real-world CSV": if you've worked with CSV in the wild, you probably know what I mean, but feel free to check out the README for a more technical explanation.

With parser built, I found that some of the use cases I needed it for were generic, so I wrapped them up in a CLI. Most of the CLI commands are run-of-the-mill stuff: echo, select, count, sql, pretty, 2tsv, stack. Some of the commands are harder to find in other utilities: compare (cell-level comparison with customizable numerical tolerance-- useful when, for example, comparing CSV vs data from a deconstructed XLSX, where the latter may look the same but technically differ by < 0.000001), serialize/flatten, 2json (multiple different JSON schema output choices). A few are not directly CSV-related, but dovetail with others, such as 2db, which converts 2json output to sqlite3 with indexing options, allowing you to run e.g. `zsv 2json my.csv --unique-index mycolumn | zsv 2db -t mytable -o my.db`.

I've been using zsv for years now in commercial software running bare metal and also in the browser (see e.g. https://liquidaty.github.io/zsv/), so I finally got around to tagging v1.0.1 as the first production-ready release.

I'd love for you to try it out and would welcome any feedback, bug reports, or questions.
by jerf | 2025-10-23 15:56:22+00:00
Syntax highlighting fixed that for me something like 20 years ago.

But then, like I said, I consider extensive use of this a code smell at best. If you're doing this often enough that this is an actual problem for you, then you're probably doing something wrong. Most uses of string interpolation I see are wrong somehow, and that wrongness is often a security issue.
by MangoToupe | 2025-10-23 15:56:25+00:00
> (i.e. in practical terms, there's no way regulators can police what algorithms sellers use - I can't think of exceptions to this, but perhaps there are some special cases)

One obvious answer would be to introduce a publicly-owned, zero-margin competitor not constrained by this algorithm, thus reintroducing an incentive to drive down costs or drive up quality.
by dragonwriter | 2025-10-23 15:56:33+00:00
> To really drive the point home, I have no doubt this would be fun to learn and even useful for a certain kind of people. But because you don’t say, we don’t know if we fit the bill.

I would submit to you that it is quite probable that the information for further learning is provided for people who do not need anything more said to know they “fit the bill”, and if you read the article and don’t know if you do, them you don’t—at least from the author’s perspective.

You might still enjoy learning more about it but you aren’t the audience the author is promoting it to.
by OkayPhysicist | 2025-10-23 15:56:36+00:00
Not even someone else's! A significant amount of the national debt is owed to themselves.

At the end of the day, in the world of fiat currency, taxes and spending are not intrinsically linked. They're mediated by public perception of the value of the currency, which can be sensitive to unexpected speed ups of the money printers, but is frankly unaffected by the normal rate.
by ratelimitsteve | 2025-10-23 15:56:37+00:00
because the poorest don't have the power to stop anyone taking their benefits whereas being rich by definition is having access to levers of power like the courts and political contributions and have also been running what is essentially a multigenerational PR campaign that says that the poorest among us are the source of all of our problems and that eliminating any help for them will simultaneously make things better for us by cutting spending and make things better for them through vague notions of encouraging responsibility or whatever.

tldr - the reason that going after the poor is always the answer is that it's the rich who are both asking and answering the question.
by mpalmer | 2025-10-23 15:56:45+00:00
I have no idea what problem this is supposed to solve. Where is the V in VCS here? How do you track the provenance/history of changes?

You may not be "forcing" developers to "screw with a graph" (what?) but you are forcing them to screw with macros (we're adding a built-in scripting layer to the VCS?) and these unfamiliar new concepts called atoms and plans.

> A VCS built around these principles would eliminate branching issues (no branches, just atoms + plans)

And it would introduce zero new confusing issues of its own?

> This would also [...] make it easy to swap in and out functionality from the atom database instead of having to hunt through the commit graph and create a patch.

This is a weird use case. Version control systems aren't typically used for storing and swapping around bits of functionality as a first-class, ongoing concern.

Not to mention you still need to figure out how atoms get stitched together. How do you do it without diff-based patches? No superior solution exists, AFAIK.

tl;dr use workspaces if you're using agents.
by bdamm | 2025-10-23 15:56:51+00:00
That's not a supportable argument. The US government has been extremely fickle about their support of SpaceX's Starlink. Witness the revocation of the funding for rural communities. If you're referring to NASA and other government agencies contracting for launch services, well sure, but that too was an open market that SpaceX won on clear merit.

In my community, Starlink is very popular, because the local DSL (the only option) is terrible. Fiber projects exist, but they are totally blocked by processes requiring the approval of native tribes if trenches dug for fiber discover piles of shells left behind by tribes hundreds of years ago.

In entirely different areas, I see Starlink terminals popping up on every mining and forestry contractor's truck. I suspect Starlink's popularity among those who roam widely is just as important, if not moreso, than any funding the federal government has provided, because that is a clear and sustainable revenue that is entirely based on practical industrial applications.
by nabla9 | 2025-10-23 15:57:43+00:00
He gets nothing.

Tranche size is $500 billion. The first tranche milestone is $2 trillion, and the last tranche milestone is $8.5 trillion (total 12 tranches) Each tranche, other than the last two, requires an additional $500 billion increase in market capitalization. Each of the last two tranches requires an additional $1 trillion increase in market capitalization.

To hit the first market cap milestone he must increase Tesla market cap 34% matched to revenue-based operational milestone or Adjusted EBITDA-based operational milestone.
by TimorousBestie | 2025-10-23 15:57:44+00:00
As always, “reforming entitlements” barely moves the needle on paying down the debt.

Even SNAP only cost 100 billion last year, and its net effect on revenue was probably positive, though these things are hard to measure in isolation: https://www.cbpp.org/blog/snap-food-assistance-is-a-sound-in...

(Because humans are bad at large numbers: 100 billion / 38 trillion is 0.2%, or alternatively 38T represents 380 years of SNAP at 2024 levels.)
by daxfohl | 2025-10-23 15:58:04+00:00
True, but LLMs are already really good at that kind of thing. Even back in 2015, before transformers, here's a karpathy blog post showing how you could find specific neurons that tracked things like indent position, approx column location, long quotes, etc.

https://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/

That said, I do think algorithms and system designs are very visual. It's way harder to explain heaps and merge sorts and such from just text and code. Granted, it's 2025 now and modern LLMs seem to have internalized those types of concepts ~perfectly for a while now, so IDK if there's much to gain by changing approaches at that level anymore.
by rendx | 2025-10-23 15:58:10+00:00
"Extrasensory Perception Experiences" -- experiencing it as "extrasensory perception" can be very real, like verbal hallucinations are very real experiences. It's well worth to study people who experience these phenomena.

The definitions of psychological disorders are not exact, the comorbidities are high, all of this is not exact science, like you make it seem. CPTSD is not in the DSM because the symptoms are already covered by DSMs extended PTSD definition. I wonder why it is so important for some people to fight over definitions of what to me mostly look like different maladaptive coping mechanisms with very similar underlying causes and very similar treatment options.

To you, things seem to be either "pseudoscience" (on what grounds?) or "scientific", and what you write sounds very much motivated by your own political beliefs. And, why shouldn't people be motivated by their beliefs? They can still be good scientists too.

You dismiss Freud as "pseudoscientific", where he expressed very clearly that he wants people to challenge his theories and develop them further, and that he doesn't think he owns the truth. He wrote lots of material where he merely documents his interactions with patients and presents his thoughts and theories and experiments, based on what was available to him at the time. Nothing what I read of his extensive study material makes me think it's "pseudoscientific", even if many of his theories have now been challenged and disproven. That doesn't make him a bad scientist. You may want to look at your high horse here. Can you explain why you think Freud didn't do science, back when he did it?
by cowanon77 | 2025-10-23 15:58:40+00:00
It's similar to the problems with GDP, CPI, U-3 (Unemployment rate), etc. You really need at least 30-100 metrics or more to get a grasp of what's really happening in a complex eonomy. Debt can be good if it causes more growth in the economy, and bad if just gets trapped in a few foreign investment funds. But the number by itself doesn't tell us any of that, yet that is all that grabs the focus.

Often politicians will try to shrink or control the debt without deeply investiagting the true causes, because the real causes may be politically inconvenient.
by skywhopper | 2025-10-23 15:59:05+00:00
Sure, but the problem is that you can’t easily block the worst actors. And automated blocking by IP or user agent is nearly pointless or counterproductive these days. It’s not entirely clear what actors this author is thinking of, but if you think you can effectively block AI harvesters, you are either kidding yourself, or committing to doing more work for this ethical ideal than is remotely worth the effort.
by jerf | 2025-10-23 15:59:13+00:00
A perfect linter runs into the halting problem, I think, but a pretty-darned-good linter that would catch that methods on your pointer-based method doesn't do "something sensible" with nil would be pretty interesting to me. I think it could help train the community about this issue better than anything else.

I'm full up on tasks, though; even if I were writing a linter for Go that would not currently be my top goal, though it's definitely quite interesting overall.
by pols45 | 2025-10-23 15:59:19+00:00
Private individuals have learnt that the hard way through out history.

The pattern goes -

Kings and Queens get propped up not because the chimp troupe loves them, but because the village has to be defended from threats and some chimp has to be in charge of security ie find ways to pay for the upkeep of armies. Not a job for the faint of heart.

Sooner or later bankers, traders, industrialists etc etc all become richer than kings and queens, because they don't have to fund armies or deal with all the issues and temptations of having an army. They start wondering why they need to be bowing and bending to kings and queens.

And the story then writes its self, since there is only one way the kings and queens are programmed to react to threats.
by dylan604 | 2025-10-23 15:59:20+00:00
Quite obvious is if I don't like you, I can block you. What exactly it is that I don't like is arbitrary and changes with my mood. You're visiting me from a very liberal country that makes fun of me, so I'm blocking your entire country. Or you posted a very mean thing about me on some site somewhere, so now I'm blocking you.

There's a fine example of some one that blocks any link with HN as the referrer.
by pjmlp | 2025-10-23 15:59:46+00:00
Unfortunately it lost the opportunity back when Remedy Games and Facebook were betting on it.

The various WIP features, and switching focus of what might bring more people into the ecosystem, have given away to other languages.

Even C#, Java and C++ have gotten many of features that were only available in D as Andrei Alexandrescu's book came out in 2011.
by rictic | 2025-10-23 15:59:53+00:00
A somewhat related spec, at the page level rather than the module level, are Content Security Policies, which let a page disable various unsafe browser features for a page: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Guides/CSP

One of my favorite features in there is trusted types enforcement: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Trusted_Typ...

Lets you create your own API for what code is allowed to create arbitrary, potentially unsafe HTML at runtime, so you can allow secure templating systems but disallow code that just concats strings together naively.
by bityard | 2025-10-23 16:00:01+00:00
I was under the impression that the Supreme Court had ruled that mandatory arbitration clauses were indeed mandatory. Meaning, if you are subject to a mandatory arbitration clause in some contract, it removes ALL ability for a plaintiff to sue a company.

But, good news, it seems like they are walking back on that. They recently ruled that lower courts must "pause" a suit and the suit can resume if an agreement is not made through arbitration.

https://www.bressler.com/news-supreme-court-clarifies-mandat...
by sQL_inject | 2025-10-23 16:00:17+00:00
Not sure why you're being down voted. SNAP was bleeding us on the front end by subsidizing sugar water mega corps and on the backend by subsidizing the collosal medical bills that come from the overweight, diabetic millions.

One day we'll look back and wish we had the self-control to both impose austerity measures to get the spending under control and the foresight to spend wisely on long term functions like infrastructure.

Until then it's business as usual from both political parties.
by pavel_lishin | 2025-10-23 16:00:51+00:00
Maybe, but I get several texts a week (Telegram, SMS, etc) from what are very obvious scams of these types. The classic: "Are you still picking me up from the airport? Oh, this isn't Natasha's phone? <picture of (presumably) AI-generated Asian lady>."

I guess it's possible that they're making an erroneous assumption based on my last name, but I'm not Chinese.
by parineum | 2025-10-23 16:01:04+00:00
"Algorithm" has got to be the least useful word in English today.

It isn't the software that's responsible driving up prices, it's the information.

> Yet a widely cited 2019 paper (opens a new tab) showed that algorithms could learn to collude tacitly, even when they weren’t programmed to do so. A team of researchers pitted two copies of a simple learning algorithm against each other in a simulated market, then let them explore different strategies for increasing their profits. Over time, each algorithm learned through trial and error to retaliate when the other cut prices — dropping its own price by some huge, disproportionate amount. The end result was high prices, backed up by mutual threat of a price war.

This is nonsense. Those "algorithms" were programed to do that. I also notice they didn't add a third copy of the algorithm or a fourth. The summary of this research is that they built a novel algorithm (not one used in practice) and put it in a simulation. How this is representative of any real world scenario escapes me. They proved that software written to optimize profits optimizes profits. Shocking.

The researchers quoted in the article are, essentially, defining collusion as knowing what competitors prices are.
by paulf38 | 2025-10-23 16:01:05+00:00
Yes indeed. The backdoor author did try to claim that it was a false positive (and I’m sure that a very depressingly large number of people would happily go along with such a claim even without a scrap of evidence).

The error was related to the use of the frame pointer. Optimised code does not use RBP as the frame pointer, only using RSP for stack addresses. The XZ backdoor code assumed that the stack used this layout. The RedHat regression tests use debug builds that do use the frame pointer. The result was the backdoor code writing below the bottom of the stack.

I suspect also that Valgrind is unique in finding issues like this. Other tools do not check all memory accesses before main. Valgrind loads and runs the test binary from the very beginning and thus it detected errors in the ifunc code used by XZ that executed very early on during ld.so loading and symbol resolution.
by ratelimitsteve | 2025-10-23 16:01:09+00:00
it makes servicing a debt easier because the amount owed doesn't inflate but that doesn't actually make it irrelevant to this metric because what we're looking at is new borrowing, not accumulated debt. if an apple cost a penny a hundred years ago and a dollar today, and the government borrowed to buy an apple a hundred years ago and then again to buy another apple today, it makes sense to compare apples to apples and the only way to do that is to adjust that penny to what it would be worth today, one dollar
by PaulHoule | 2025-10-23 16:01:36+00:00
x86 -> VAX

For more than a decade Intel has been failing to get new instructions and accelerators into use. Operating systems, libraries, compilers, and such have a lot to blame, but if new features aren't widely available enough that software will actually use it they might as well not exist.

Intel wants you think it is business genius to use expensive die area for fused off features that they can charge 5% of users exorbitantly for. It is peak vice signalling, but is a business disaster for real because if you aren't paying for the features you can't use, Intel's shareholders are paying for it.
by estimator7292 | 2025-10-23 16:02:00+00:00
The point is that at this level, you shouldn't just let some engineers go wild on a physical prototype without simulating it first. You sort of have to simulate it before building the real thing or you're likely to waste a ton of time and money.

If they did simulate this design and it exceeded their expectations so much, either something is wrong with the simulation or some engineer worked some voodoo magic into the very late prototype stages.
by blurbleblurble | 2025-10-23 16:02:04+00:00
Seems like laws exist, they're just perverted or ignored. For example, this applies to the executive branch:

(a)Except as otherwise provided in this section, whoever, in any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the United States, knowingly and willfully— (1)falsifies, conceals, or covers up by any trick, scheme, or device a material fact; (2)makes any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation; or (3)makes or uses any false writing or document knowing the same to contain any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or entry; shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 5 years or, if the offense involves international or domestic terrorism (as defined in section 2331), imprisoned not more than 8 years, or both. If the matter relates to an offense under chapter 109A, 109B, 110, or 117, or section 1591, then the term of imprisonment imposed under this section shall be not more than 8 years. (b)Subsection (a) does not apply to a party to a judicial proceeding, or that party’s counsel, for statements, representations, writings or documents submitted by such party or counsel to a judge or magistrate in that proceeding. (c)With respect to any matter within the jurisdiction of the legislative branch, subsection (a) shall apply only to— (1)administrative matters, including a claim for payment, a matter related to the procurement of property or services, personnel or employment practices, or support services, or a document required by law, rule, or regulation to be submitted to the Congress or any office or officer within the legislative branch; or (2)any investigation or review, conducted pursuant to the authority of any committee, subcommittee, commission or office of the Congress, consistent with applicable rules of the House or Senate. (June 25, 1948, ch. 645, 62 Stat. 749; Pub. L. 103–322, title XXXIII, § 330016(1)(L), Sept. 13, 1994, 108 Stat. 2147; Pub. L. 104–292, § 2, Oct. 11, 1996, 110 Stat. 3459; Pub. L. 108–458, title VI, § 6703(a), Dec. 17, 2004, 118 Stat. 3766; Pub. L. 109–248, title I, § 141(c), July 27, 2006, 120 Stat. 603.)

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1001
by lkbm | 2025-10-23 16:02:12+00:00
> Why prioritise node instead of jq? The latter is considerably less code and even comes preinstalled with macOS, now.

That was my thought. I use jq to pretty print json.

What I have found useful is j2p and p2j to convert to/from python dict format to json format (and pretty print the output). I also have j2p_clip and p2j_clip, which read from and then write to the system clipboard so I don't have to manually pipe in and out.

> Any reason to not simply use `uuidgen`, which ships with macOS and likely your Linux distro?

I also made a uuid, which just runs uuidgen, but then trims the \n. (And maybe copied to clipboard? It was at my old job, and I don't seem to have saved it to my personal computer.)