MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by krapp | 2025-10-23 16:26:12+00:00
I've made plenty of left leaning comments that got flagged. Try arguing against the literal truth of the Bible or the necessity of religion to morality or society, for instance. Or that vaccines work. Or that free market capitalism has flaws and socialism has merits. Or that transgender identity is valid. Or that DEI is valid. Or that feminism is valid. Or that immigration and multiculturalism are valid. Or that gun control is valid.

There are tons of left leaning views that get flagged on HN. What matters isn't political polarity but the specific zeitgeist of the thread and whether you go with it or against it, and who happens to show up first with the most downvotes.
by ethbr1 | 2025-10-23 16:26:28+00:00
I think 00s+ tech history has demonstrated that the free market is no longer sufficient to promote healthy competition.

Partly a consequence of the biggest tech firms getting bigger.

And partly because of newfound technical ability to achieve mass lock-in (e.g. vendor-controlled encryption, TPMs, vertical integration in platforms, first-party app stores, etc).

The 'but regulatory capture' counter argument rings hollow when the government has given the market a lighter monopoly regulatory touch... and we've ended up with a more concentrated, less competitive market than when it was more heavily regulated.
Show HN: hist: An overengineered solution to `sort|uniq -c` with 25x throughput
by noamteyssier | 2025-10-23 16:26:38+00:00
Was sitting around in meetings yesterday and remembered an old shell script I had to count the number of unique lines in a file. Gave it a shot in rust and with a little bit of (over-engineering)™ I managed to get 25x throughput over the naive approach using coreutils as well as improve over some existing tools.

Some notes on the improvements:

1. using csv (serde) for writing leads to some big gains

2. arena allocation of incoming keys + storing references in the hashmap instead of storing owned values heavily reduced the number of allocations and improves cache efficiency (I'm guessing, I did not measure).

There are some regex functionalities and some table filtering built in as well.

happy hacking
by jordanpg | 2025-10-23 16:26:44+00:00
This is often described in terms of adherence to democratic norms, but I like your framing better.

If we have to distill the problem down to its simplest essence, it's the political parties. In particular, it's the existence of the two political parties, whose priorities have transcended those of the Republic itself (mostly the members' self interest). It just so happens to be the Republicans in power when the consequences of this have spiraled out of control.
by mkipper | 2025-10-23 16:26:49+00:00
I work in software now, but I have an electrical engineering degree and started my career on a project developing a radio. Our project probably had ten or more electrical engineers on it, and only one or two of them really understood the RF side of it. It's a very specialized skill -- even EEs with >20 years of experience would describe things as black magic.

So I don't think you're alone feeling this way. Even with a good foundation in the theory and math, I think most people hit a wall with radios at some point. All the people I worked with who intuitively "got" RF stuff had been doing nothing else professionally for over a decade.
by meowface | 2025-10-23 16:26:52+00:00
What we're seeing now isn't exactly the power of capitalist oligarchy but right-wing populist authoritarianism. They forge alliances with wealthy figures to achieve goals and engage in a corrupt patronage system like in an undeveloped country, but if this were a capitalist coup we would not be seeing anything like the absurd and illegal tariffs, brutal response to immigrants, etc.

I know leftists like to describe these sorts of phenomena (including Hitler's rise) as all part of the capitalist overlords' master plans, but that's not the most accurate description. Capitalists like Andreessen will cynically exploit it and hop on the bandwagon and benefit from it to the extent they can, but right-wing populist authoritarianism is its own beast, and they're just trying to position themselves as along for the ride rather than in its jaws. The regime is happy to reward capitalist loyalists and I do not deny there is a mutualism occurring, but it is more complex than a movement centered around capitalism.
by verdverm | 2025-10-23 16:26:56+00:00
All LLMs and agents have stupid issues like this.

GPT-5 insisted on using bash commands to edit a file, despite the dedicated tool for doing this. Problem was that the bash tool it used wrapped at 80 chars, splitting some strings between lines, which then broke the code at a syntax level. It was never able to recover, I was not impressed with GPT-5
by nerdsniper | 2025-10-23 16:27:17+00:00
Rather than age differential, I think that view is primarily founded in the belief that the President's implied power over the career of their employee (a White House intern) makes it a particularly difficult choice to risk the ire of the President by refusing their advances.

I don't get the impression from talking with younger Democratic voters that they would generally be as concerned with issues of consent if it was a 22 year-old sex worker (where it's purely a transactional relationship) or 22-year old pop star (where their career isn't particularly threatened by the President's favor).

With a White House intern, there's a potential element of silent or implied coercion which puts into question whether enthusiastic consent was freely given. Similar to the national security risk - regardless if it was/wasn't, it also calls into question the President's judgment for why they would engage in such morally ambiguous behavior - it would also be fairly difficult for the President to even know themselves whether the intern is feeling coerced or not.
by pjc50 | 2025-10-23 16:27:19+00:00
> There's no way we sold $1T of bonds and t-bills in 1 year.

Yes? They're sold at auction. https://www.treasurydirect.gov/auctions/upcoming/ - I make that $547bn for auction over the next couple of days.

> who accepted the debt risk

The financial services industry. It's kind of what they do. Just because it "feels fake" doesn't make it so.
by bloak | 2025-10-23 16:27:30+00:00
I'm a bit suspicious of that sort of claim. You can go through a list of people who got Nobel prizes and investigate their ancestry and argue that lots of those people were "Jewish" but nobody does that sort of investigation on random members of the general population for a fair comparison. (And perhaps it would be impossible to do so: Nobel prize winners tend to come from social classes that have better records of their ancestry.) Also I've seen a huge range of values given for what proportion of the British population might be "Jewish", which shows the level of uncertainty involved.

So the Nobel prize committee might not actually be racist ... :-)
by lenerdenator | 2025-10-23 16:27:43+00:00
People give up on getting companies to be good actors because ultimately they're just a single person with a job and maybe a small savings account, looking at suing a company with absolutely no guarantee of ever recovering a cent on all of the trouble that their lax security policies cost them. Oh, and litigation is a rich man's sport.

> To pick an example: in 2014 Home Depot had a breach of payment data. Basically everywhere that has Home Depots also has Lowes and other options that sell the same stuff. In most places, if you're pissed at Home Depot for losing your card information, you can literally drive across the street to Lowes. But it doesn't seem like that happened.

No one considers these things when they're buying plumbing tape. Really, you shouldn't have to consider that. You should be able to do commerce without having to wonder if some guy on the other side of the transaction is going to get his yearly bonus by cutting the necessary resources to keep you from having to deal with identity theft.

> Is it possible that outside of tech circles where we care about The Principle Of The Thing, the market is actually correct in its assessment of the value for the average consumer business of putting more money into security?

Let's try with a company that has your data and see how correct "the market" is. Principles are the things you build a functioning society upon, not quarterly returns.
by mhuffman | 2025-10-23 16:27:51+00:00
>Business school will tell you constantly that best quality is where you want to compete in almost all cases.

Hmmmm, I don't remember it that way. I remember the constant take was to build a moat (typically based on intellectual property), then optimize net profit and/or network effects. Quality never really came up unless it is so bad as to cause lawsuits.
by bccdee | 2025-10-23 16:27:54+00:00
Are math and physics objectively provable?

Hollywood celebrity Terrence Howard infamously thinks that 1×1=2. He's a math crackpot—someone with an irrational amateur theory about math or physics. Another famous example is the Time Cube guy; they're not that rare.

Crackpots don't know they're crackpots. They think they're correct. Consider this: What if we're ALL crackpots? What if all humans share some essential irrationalism, such that there's some fundamental math mistake we all make (like 1×1=2) that we just don't know about?

It's highly unlikely, but it's not inconceivable. When we say "math is objective," we mean there's an overwhelming expert consensus that (e.g.) 1×1 is not and could never be 2. Consensus isn't (true) objectivity, though. It's the best we've got, and I have no issue with the word "objective" being used to describe consensus reality in most cases. But if we really want to get into whether true objectivity is possible or not: how could it be?
by gnulinux | 2025-10-23 16:27:56+00:00
There are ways to do this efficiently but it'd have to be over engineered and thus probably not worth it. You write the code in C/C++/Rust or similar and compile to WebAssembly. Then package it all in the thinnest wrapper you can find, of which I'm familiar with: https://tauri.app/ This gets you a "webpage" that runs C++ which you can let your customers install and use as a desktop app. Your mileage will vary.

It all depends on how powerful computers you want to support, if you assume your users will allow WebGPU use and your application needs 2D or 3D graphics (or more niche, GPGPU compute) imho Godot engine is actually pretty good to develop any web app (not just games) since it can compile its shader language down to WebGPU. Again, you'll probably need to write most of the code in C++ and compile to WebAssembly, which is pretty doable with Godot. If you just need graphics and very light CPU processing, GDScript will be enough. Once you do this you still need to wrap the webpage as a desktop app, I think Chrome browser has tools that can help with that.

The other obvious way is to use something like Electron and writing most of the code in Javascript. This will probably get you far if you need something simple but the memory and CPU usage will be much higher than necessary. Since the app ends up being so bloated, I personally don't like things approach, but apps like VSCode exist.
by parliament32 | 2025-10-23 16:28:06+00:00
> To try to do something about it requires curation, somebody needs to decide what is junk, which is completely antithetical to open protocols.

The contra-example, of course, is email. SpamAssassin figured this out 24 years (!) ago. There is zero reason you couldn't apply similar heuristics to detect AI-slop or whatever particular kind of content you don't want to accept.

> Radical recentralization to companies that had effective spam management

Only for the lazy.
by shmatt | 2025-10-23 16:28:29+00:00
This actually works well the other way around.

When sales are still growing YoY (like the post covid market), but prices are up 30% or 40%, you understand your customer is still willing to pay the higher price

Its similar to a McDonalds or Starbucks situation where you just keep increasing prices dramatically until you get a first quarter of lower than expected sales, then you start adapting downwards

Most corporations still haven't hit that limit, see streaming companies increasing prices every few months, they still haven't hit the point where profits decrease YoY. When they do the streaming prices start decreasing
by tasuki | 2025-10-23 16:28:51+00:00
I'm about 1950 on littlegolem, but trying again, I just lost a couple of games in a row against the 100 bot.

A couple more questions/remarks:

- It seems everything is happening on the client? My CPU (I'm on a laptop without a real GPU) goes wild during analysis. But also I don't notice any big bag of neural-net-weights being downloaded. Mind sharing how it works?

- Care to share more about the networks? How long did you train the networks for and on what GPU? Circa how many params? Any and all details you'd like to share :)

- This Tumbleweed game is fun! This game seems somewhat inspired by both Hex and Go, and the author lives in Warsaw. Interestingly, I lived in Warsaw in 2020, am very active in the Go scene (4 dan), and at least know the names of the people who play Hex, and yet somehow never heard about Michał or Tumbleweed before...
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-10-23 16:29:18+00:00
It's deeply rude to the user to strip away all the user agency they have on the web. The web is one of the only places in computing where users get more than pixels being pushed at their faces: walking backwards into the dark & shadow is a bad move.

Basically all the same faults and troubles of Towards a Modern Web Stack apply. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34612696

It's also notable that your software is grossly immoral if it does not have accessibility. You could write your desktop app that renders into an HTML5 canvas to also expose a second render of the app that is the accessibility tree (or less kindly use some of the new APIs to grammatically create accessibility, but this is far worse an option). But this greatly increases the effort of the work, and it's effort you don't need to spend if you use actual HTML with semantic tags and some ARIA sprinkled in.
by walkabout | 2025-10-23 16:29:24+00:00
They fucked up the design if they didn’t want factions (yes, a common term at the time for what we call parties) and did so in a way that makes it nearly impossible to fix in practice.

The electoral college also never functioned the way it was supposed to, as in, broke almost immediately.

They also knew the Supreme Court was horrifyingly dangerous but their best answer was “uh, ignore them sometimes I guess?” Another couple sentences outlining a panel system instead of permanent Supreme Court members (which aren’t required by the constitution—the court is, fixed permanent members of it are not) could have done a lot to fix that flaw, though may have been impractical at the time due to travel and communication times before the train and telegraph.

It was an OK try for an early democratic constitutional state, but we really could have benefitted from a third attempt.
by einsteinx2 | 2025-10-23 16:29:52+00:00
It’s unfortunately more or less impossible to get an original GDEMU because the creator makes (or made) such small batches and didn’t believe in preorders or wait lists, so the only way to get one is to buy a clone on AliExpress or eBay.

I would love to support the original creator and not buy clones, but after years of waiting I gave up and so did everyone else I know. Luckily the quality of the clones is great and they work just as well as the original (some early models had compatibility issues with a very small number of games but that’s long since been resolved).

For BBA’s the only way to get one is to buy used on eBay or from a Japanese auction site. They’re not cheap though, somewhere in the $100-200 range I think, but if you do a lot of DC homebrew dev they’re absolutely worth it if you can afford it.

Otherwise you can buy a serial adapter for much cheaper and use that, but the transfer speed is significantly slower.
by OkayPhysicist | 2025-10-23 16:30:01+00:00
National debt tends to confuse people, because they imagine the government like a household, or maybe a small business: You have some income (taxes), which you use to spend on things (government services, military, social security, etc). If you run out of money, you have to borrow it. If you borrow too much, people stop lending you money, you're up shit creek and have to cut spending.

That's not really the case with a nation-state with sovereign control over their own monetary policy. In that case, currency works a lot more like an MMO currency like RuneScape gold. The government gets to set up sources (government spending, killing goblins), and sinks (taxes, buying stuff from in-game shops), with the risk of screwing up the balance being a shift in perception of value of the currency. Just like how I never need to worry that RuneScape will run out of gold, and the next goblin I kill won't drop any, the government can't run out of money. It can always print more. Taxes are used to induce a demand for the currency (since you need to pay your taxes in USD), creating a flow of money through the economy. Tax too much, or print too little, and you make people expect the money to gain value, and shrink the value proposition of investment compared to hoarding money. Print too much, or tax too little and you end up with money piling up in some subset of your participant's balance sheets, shifting people's expectation to the money being worth less in the future, leading to a devaluation of said currency (since the people with a bunch of money are willing to spend more of it for the same good).

The key is that whole "expectation of future value" element, which differentiates government debt from private debt. It's a much looser coupling than "I have 45 cents in my bank account, I can't buy groceries this month". A currency can be useful, valuable, and perfectly suitable even if it loses a couple percent of its value every year, forever. That would reflect as a forever increasing national debt, but it's fine, because national debt doesn't matter.

Unexpected changes to the rate of change of the national debt is the thing that matters, and even then only indirectly, by way of the public perception of the value of the currency, which leads to the inflation/deflation rate.
by Hilift | 2025-10-23 16:30:14+00:00
Are you serious? California has an $180 billion annual obligation just for Medicaid (Cal-Aid). Los Angeles borrowed $1 billion to fund DWP operations this year, and borrowed $3 billion to borrow another $3 billion to fund a $6 billion renovation for the LA convention center that no one wants. Denver wants to borrow $1 billion to basically fund operations.

Neither party has any intention of repaying any of the $38 trillion, or care what it is spent on.

https://www.torched.la/why-this-convention-center-expert-is-...
by cshores | 2025-10-23 16:31:00+00:00
I have a script called catfiles that I store in ~/.local/bin that recursively dumps every source file with an associated file header so I can paste the resulting blob in to Gemini and ChatGPT in order to have a conversation about the changes I would like to make before I send off the resulting prompt to Gemini Code Assist.

Heres my script if anyone is interested in as I find it to be incredibly useful.

find . -type f \( -name ".tf" -o -name ".tfvars" -o -name ".json" -o -name ".hcl" -o -name ".sh" -o -name ".tpl" -o -name ".yml" -o -name ".yaml" -o -name ".py" -o -name ".md" \) -exec sh -c 'for f; do echo "### FILE: $f ###"; cat "$f"; echo; done' sh {} +
by giardini | 2025-10-23 16:31:07+00:00
Mudguards should be default for bikes. It's absurd that when it rains people ride bikes and walk around with a stripe of shite up their back and front b/c manufacturers are too cheap to include fenders (mudguards) on bikes.

The customers aren't much smarter of course - they bought the bike! Anyone fool enough to walk around (twice) looking like that deserves ridicule.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-10-23 16:31:21+00:00
Cryptonector[1] maintains an ASN.1 implementation[2] and usually has good things to say about the language and its specs. (Kind of surprised not he’s not in the comments here already :) )

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cryptonector

[2] https://github.com/heimdal/heimdal/tree/master/lib/asn1
by kelnos | 2025-10-23 16:31:26+00:00
> Most corporations don't make extraordinary profits. They make enough to stay in business, and if you tax them too heavily they will either raise prices or just close.

Corporate taxes are levied on profit, not revenue. Raising corporate taxes would not cause any businesses to fail. And businesses can only raise prices if the market will bear those higher prices. Prices are set based on what customers will pay, not on what profit margin the company wants.
by phatskat | 2025-10-23 16:31:32+00:00
> But do we need e.g serial port or raw USB access straight from a random website?

But do we need audio, images, Canvas, WebGL, etc? The web could just be plain text and we’d get most of the “useful” content still, add images and you get a vast majority of it.

But the idea that the web is a rich environment that has all of these bells and whistles is a good thing imo. Yes there’s attack surface to consider, and it’s not negligible. However, the ability to connect so many different things opens up simple access to things that would otherwise require discrete apps and tooling.

One example that kind of blew my mind is that I wanted a controller overlay for my Twitch stream. After a short bit of looking, there isn’t even a plugin needed in OBS (streaming software). Instead, you add a Web View layer and point it to GamePad Viewer[1] and you’re done.

Serial and USB are possibly a boon for very specific users with very specific accessibility needs. Also, iirc some of the early iPhone jailbreaks worked via websites on a desktop with your iPhone plugged into usb. Sure these are niche, and could probably be served just as well or better with native apps, and web also makes the barrier to entry so much lower .

[1]: https://gamepadviewer.com/
by bradfa | 2025-10-23 16:31:34+00:00
The government won’t just write it off, that would be a default or magicing the money into existence (which the government CAN do), because the world economy would go insane. The government has the ability to do this but is extremely strongly incentivized not to do it because of the effects it would have.

The US government is a currency issuer so it’s possible but not advisable.
by mschuster91 | 2025-10-23 16:31:53+00:00
> If the receiver's location is not in an authorized service area, why allow it to connect?

Money and other KPIs. Money is an obvious KPI - 2500 terminals at 100 $ a month each, 250k a month in income, nothing to sneeze at. The more important KPI however is satellite utilization.

And it's not like either the legitimate Myanmari government nor the various oppositional factions have any interest, much less ability, in trying to curtail Starlink.
by notmyjob | 2025-10-23 16:31:58+00:00
SNAP should be the last thing that gets reformed, aside from its tendency to fund less than ethical corporations (coca-cola, big agribusiness, Taco Bell). On that I totally agree.

The wealthy boomers who own multi-million dollar California track homes and don’t pay taxes because of prop 13, who are consuming millions on quasi-necessary medical procedures because they partied too hard in the 70s, gorged on trans fats in the 80s, smoked drank and didn’t go for walks, that’s where entitlement reform should start. But those are the base of one, maybe both parties and will vote out anyone that refuses to subsidize their ozempic and knee surgeries. They will even vote to reduce democracy by gerrymandering the state to block third party candidates and ensure nobody can come for their unnecessary health care costs and other ballooning entitlements.