MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by devilbunny | 2025-10-30 23:18:58+00:00
Even better: while some public WiFi spots block VPN authentication, Tailscale (if already connected while on a different network) will continue to send traffic.

You can't VPN out of the guest WiFi at my work (using personal device), but Tailscale, if connected while I'm at my house or via phone hotspot, will happily let me use my home devices as exit nodes. So I just leave it on all the time and only disconnect if there are issues (rare). I can use sketchy WiFi without really worrying about snooping, and for services that require me to use a US IP address... well, my house is definitely in the US and it's not going anywhere.
by array_key_first | 2025-10-30 23:19:29+00:00
The main problem with this is that the commercial offerings are pretty much just bad.

Windows isn't the way it is because of some purposeful design or anything. No, it's decades of poor decisions after poor decisions. Nothing, and I do mean nothing, is intuitive on Windows. It's familiar! But it is not intuitive.

If you conform to what these commercial offerings do, you are actively making your software worse. On purpose. You're actively programming in baggage from 25 years ago... in your greenfield project.
by stouset | 2025-10-30 23:19:30+00:00
Git rebase is an enormous pain in the ass.

Rebases must be done linearly. And right now! Oops, you made an error in an earlier stage of the rebase? Start over, good luck! Want to check something from earlier while you’re in the middle? Sorry, you’re in a modal state and you don’t get to use your regular git tooling.
by dragonwriter | 2025-10-30 23:19:42+00:00
> The plane, after I eject, should do something reasonable.

There’s a good chance that it can't, and its not impossible that trying to do something reasonable combined with damage that led to and/or resulted from ejection could make things worse.

> starts broadcasting a mayday?

Great idea for peacetime over the homeland, maybe a very bad idea for military operations over contested or enemy territory.

> crashes into the nearest large body of water?

> attempts to fly itself back to base (we have the technology)?

If either of these are useful in a nontrivial share of ejections (except perhaps the former in conditions where it takes no special effort), then there is a serious problem with the training of the people pulling ejection handles and that needs to be fixed, rendering the action not valuable.

> Why would it be controversial to say "Look, guys, we should decide what the plane does after the pilot ejects. Maybe the best policy is just flying same course and speed until fuel exhaustion, but we should choose this policy, not default into it without consideration."

Because ejection is an action chosen when you can no longer meaningfully say what the plane does in any significant way. That’s the whole purpose. If it it is useful to address this question then you have a bigger problem that you need to urgently fix first.
by immibis | 2025-10-30 23:20:01+00:00
Luckily not everyone agrees with Richard Stallman's hard-line take on proprietary chips.

IMO, if the radio chip just acts as a radio, and passes packets as requested, and any needed firmware blobs are freely distributable, it's fine. It's not ideal, but it's good enough to make a libre-phone.

We all know the network is spying on us anyway, and the radio should be treated as being part of the network, on the other side of the security boundary from the main processor - and since we don't trust it, we don't have to demand that it helps us verify our trust in it!
by honkostani | 2025-10-30 23:20:17+00:00
Its like a ocean wave, crashing against the cliff, year in, year out, proposal after proposal, waiting for that final atrocity, justifying pushing it through. The white cliffs of Dover, with no plan on how to regain one day that land, once the crisis subsides. And no mechanism to prevent a permanent crisis, because the controls justify the manufacturing of endless crisis.
by immibis | 2025-10-30 23:20:36+00:00
Datapacks kind of ruined the Java side. Instead of (metaphorically) "grass.colour = green;" now you have several layers of indirection to look up the mapping of block types to colours, in several real and virtual entity-attribute-value stores that shadow and inherit from each other, and the easiest way to make grass green becomes to write a data pack - with all the limitations of that, not to mention the obscure syntax (do you write "{"inherits":"dirt", "variables":{"colour":"green"}}" in stuff/things/blocks/grass/index.html.json?)

This is called the inner-platform effect, where in order to avoid programming in the original language, you invent a worse programming language. Apparently it used to be a big killer of enterprise software. It's also one of the reasons Minecraft needs ten times the RAM it used to. To be fair, we have fifty times as much RAM as we did when Minecraft came out, but wouldn't you rather have it put to use doing extended view distance, extended world height, and shaders?
by brailsafe | 2025-10-30 23:20:36+00:00
> it would be outdated by now.

It's way easier to update the tail end of knowledge you have and practices you've learnt than to start from scratch when you have no time.

Likewise, if the only stuff we could teach in grade school was stuff that would never become outdated, then we wouldn't even be able to teach more than the highest level of recent history, math foundations, super basic geology and physics, which is a pathetically low bar. Things change, it's the way it is, we should have a higher standard.

Kids won't otherwise get early exposure to learning how to start a business unless their parents did so, or investing unless their parents did, which means they probably had a surplus of resources at home and the cycle of a widening class divide continues.

The most powerful type of compound interest is early exposure to anything; an idea, a sport, money, business, computers, art. If your parents did it, you're off to a great start, but if they didn't, you're automatically set back at least a decade if not two for any of those, and public school should aim to smooth out those bumps.
by cpncrunch | 2025-10-30 23:21:04+00:00
>It's still annoying and it's unacceptable for my fridge to have a screen I can't control the content of.

Also, and more importantly IMO, is the risk of the fridge getting hacked. I really don't want to have to worry about keeping my fridge updated, and having to throw it out after 7 years or whenever support ends.
by gambiting | 2025-10-30 23:21:07+00:00
>>You’re conveniently ignoring that Hamas took 200+ hostages and refused to return them throughout the war.

Are you saying what I think you're saying? Holding 200+ hostages justifies killing 18 thousand children? "inevitable casualties" - what a feckless way to call what anyone else can see clearly as a systematic attempt to kill and eradicate a group of people.
by pron | 2025-10-30 23:21:13+00:00
> Unfashionable languages like Java and .NET that have quality multithreaded runtimes are the way to go because they provide a single paradigm to manage both concurrency and parallelism.

First, that would be Java and Go, not Java and .NET, as .NET offers a separate construct (async/await) for high-throughput concurrency.

Second, while "unfashionable" in some sense, I guess, it's no wonder that Java is many times popular than any "fashionable" language. Also, if "fashionable" means "much discussed on HN", then that has historically been a terrible predictor of language success. There's almost an inverse correlation between how much a language is discussed on HN and its long-term success, and that's not surprising, as it's the less commonplace things that are more interesting to talk about. HN is more Vogue magazine than the New York Times.
by prmoustache | 2025-10-30 23:21:24+00:00
> but new cameras and lenses do keep coming out which at minimum need correction profiles.

For it to be a problem you need to actually buy said new cameras and lenses.

I am still using my Pentax K5 II and Samsung NX from a bit more than a decade ago (as well as some analog cams but I disgress).

There is a lot of FOMO + Gear Aquisition Syndrome to make that a problem. Maybe one should focus more on actually having a life,using the products they akready own, make arts or memories instead of thinking what is new on the market they are missing out and what to buy next.

Makes me think of those people, perfectly happy with Airpod pro v2 who purchase v3 ones, only to end up frustrated by their new purchase.
by uyzstvqs | 2025-10-30 23:21:25+00:00
GNOME's libadwaita solves this beautifully. It's simple, nice looking, yet powerful. You could absolutely use it to make an ffmpeg front-end that's both fully featured and friendly to less technical users. But if your app can't, then another good option is to have a "simple mode" and "advanced mode".

And IMO, Handbreak is more complicated than CLI ffmpeg. It's really chaotic.
by vanadium1st | 2025-10-30 23:21:49+00:00
Speaking of the Apple test, as many other commenters here I truly believe that people who describe themselves as being at 1 are actually much closer to 4, they just aren’t aware of it or don’t understand the concept well. https://lianamscott.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/f4c55-1_b...

I’m an artist - I draw professionally and studied drawing in a group setting. It seems like a profession that would require the highest level of visual imagination. And I wish I could see clear pictures in my head, but I don’t. I need to have a reference in front of me, constantly compare it with my sketch, and refine it using knowledge and techniques that took years to learn.

When discussing this concept with my artist peers, many say they’re at 1. But they clearly aren’t - I can see that in their work process. There’s an immediate difference in art quality depending on whether the artist is drawing from reference or not. If someone could truly see the picture in their head and draw from it, they could skip years of art training and become good almost immediately. Such a genius would be clearly obvious to their peers. But I haven’t met a single person like that - it seems like everyone works with roughly the same hardware as I do and has to develop the same workarounds to become good.

I believe that Kim Jung Gi was a 1. I’m sure there were other historic geniuses with such a superhuman ability. But I’m also sure that 99% of people just aren’t there - whether they admit it or not.
by whatevertrevor | 2025-10-30 23:21:52+00:00
> There's so much in life that makes no financial sense that creates meaning. The moment you start having to think sensibly from a financial perspective, is when so many of these things no longer make sense.

I get the sentiment, but it implies the opposite of your conclusion.

Since so many things make no sense from a financial point of view, the only sensible strategy is to break free of the financial constraints as soon as possible. Money cannot buy you happiness, but it can buy you the freedom to pursue it.

Retire early to give yourself the best cushion (and best possible chance) to pursue meaningful things, without the everlooming sword of making ends meet. The added benefit of life experience to filter out pursuits that only look meaningful on the surface, is a nice side-effect of this strategy.
by solid_fuel | 2025-10-30 23:22:25+00:00
Fantastic video, I really enjoyed this. A couple thoughts:

1) The presentation quality and polish of YouTube creators is really good these days. I'm continually impressed by what individuals and small teams are putting out there.

2) It's hard to tell which version of ChatGPT this was done with, I know they claim to have improved on some of these problems recently. But the sycophantic tendencies are extremely alarming and the way that ChatGPT continually builds on this fantasy instead of periodically grounding itself and the user in reality illustrates exactly the problem with LLMs.
by throwawaymaths | 2025-10-30 23:22:35+00:00
i think you are missing that a proper io interface should encapsulate all abstractions that care about asynchrony and patterns thereof. is that possible? we will find out. It's not unreasonable to be skeptical but can you come up with a concrete example?

> As a library author, how do I handle an io object that doesn't behave as I expect

you ship with tests against the four or five default patterns in the stdlib and if anyone wants to do anything substantially crazier to the point that it doesnt work, thats on them, they can submit a PR and you can curbstomp it if you want.

> function coloring

i recommend reading the function coloring article. there are five criteria that describe what make up the function coloring problem, it's not just that there are "more than one class of function calling conventions"
by stouset | 2025-10-30 23:22:51+00:00
I am (was) a git expert. I’ve written a git implementation. I’ve used it since shortly after it was first announced.

Git has lots of sharp edges that can get hairy or at least tedious really rapidly. You have to keep a ton of random arcana in working memory at all times. And a bunch of really useful, lovely workflows are so much of a pain in the ass that you don’t even conceive of doing them.

I learned jj in one day and never went back.
by immibis | 2025-10-30 23:22:58+00:00
You could start by subpoenaing the registered holder of the IP address.

In general, you can ask a lawyer for your options. Chances are good there are more than zero. But only if you can afford a lawyer.

If you're getting scraped from a country where you don't do business, you can block the country. It's not good to block a country, but it works as a temporary measure. If they really want your data, they will move to a country where you do business, which means a country where you can get a lawyer. Assuming you can afford a lawyer. If they're using rotating IPs, likely some of them are from your country. You might show a judge: "Hey, look, we're getting so much traffic, from a wide variety of IP addresses but it all seems to be the same person on the other end, which would make it illegal DDoS. Can we trace back some of these?" and if you're lucky, the judge might say yes.

DDoS is not a relatively trivial matter.
by anyfoo | 2025-10-30 23:23:06+00:00
I'd say the title is like that (and I agree with someone else's assessment of it being clickbait-y). I think the actual article does a pretty good job in distinguishing a lot of these transforms, and honing into which one matches most.

But the title instead makes it sound (pun unintended) that what the ear does is not about frequency decomposition at all.
by verdverm | 2025-10-30 23:23:28+00:00
I wonder if this takes account of any of the quirks or quasi-connectivity in redstone?

Mumbo Jumbo recently got a lesson in, and made a video about, computational redstone. Some seriously impressive builds in there (like ms paint). One of the major design constraints is tick/lag. The recent addition of copper bulbs turned the t-flipflop into a single block solution

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTZaUz8bYW8
by array_key_first | 2025-10-30 23:24:36+00:00
Well, you're cheating a bit here. You're basically assuming the user has never seen a text prompt before. Which is a good assumption.

But, if we assume the user has never seen a graphical application before, then likely all GUI tools will be useless too. What is clicking? What does this X do? What's a desktop again? I don't understand, why do I need 1 million pixels to change an mp3 to an avi? What does that window looking thing in the corner do? Oh no, I pressed the little rectangle at the top right and now it's gone, it disappeared. No not the one with the X, I think it was the other one.

Pretty much all computer use secretly relied on hundreds if not thousands of completely arbitrary decisions and functionality you just have to know. Of all of that, CLI tools rely on some of the least amount of assumptions by their nature - they're low fidelity, forced to be simple.
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-10-30 23:24:56+00:00
At the very least, something to keep the flight path predictable would make sense, to give the pilot a chance to point the plane at a "safe" area to crash in before pulling the lever. I remember reading several stories of pilots taking "where is the plane going to crash" into account for their ejection decision or last moves before ejection.

There were also several incidents where a pilot ejected because the plane was somewhat controllable but it was clear it couldn't be landed safely. At least one of them where they had tens of minutes of controlled flight before ejecting (they flew it over the ocean to minimize the risk of collateral damage).
by YurgenJurgensen | 2025-10-30 23:24:58+00:00
The apple was red.

I didn’t even try to imagine anything. Apples are just conceptually red by default. I can also tell you that it was tart, and crisp. I didn’t imagine those sensations either, they were just the first words that came to my mind when thinking about apples. The table is brown. I didn’t try to imagine anything table either, but the table in my kitchen, where there might be apples, is brown.

Can you see how this exercise is flawed?
by renewiltord | 2025-10-30 23:25:02+00:00
Soft power isn't a thing. As people have recently pointed out with the USAID situation: helping someone and then stopping the help is far worse than not helping at all. Therefore, soft power isn't power, it's actually more like soft debt. Every time you do charity, you add on to your moral obligations. The less charity you do, the fewer the requirements on you.
by tokai | 2025-10-30 23:25:17+00:00
It's interesting that Peter Hummelgaard's former party comrade Henrik Sass Larsen recently got 4 months of prison for possession of child porn; 6200 pictures and 2200 videos.

So we are to believe Hummelgaard wants to protect children by enabling vast surveillance, so all the bad offenders out there can get ... 4 months in prison.

Its not really adding up. And he still hasn't presented any argument for the thing except that you are pro child abuse if you don't agree with him. I'm at the point where I hope he's corrupt and its not just all about power for him.
by travisjungroth | 2025-10-30 23:25:30+00:00
The point is to not be so tight, leaning on the correspondence. The fact that you’re coming at the problem differently (even that it’s a different problem, “for some” versus “for all”) is actually helpful. You’re less likely to make the same mistake in both.

There’s a technique for unit testing where you write the code in two languages. If you just used a compiler and were more confident about correspondence, that would miss the point. The point is to be of a different mind and using different tools.
by Andrex | 2025-10-30 23:25:46+00:00
Gimp actually, finally had their big 3.0 update earlier this year which "modernized" (to ~5 years ago) a lot of the codebase. The UI is mostly the same but it's using much more modern UI components (editing text isn't terrible now, etc.)

https://www.gimp.org/news/2025/03/16/gimp-3-0-released/

Gimp's problem is mostly one of funding and attention, like most OSS projects. But it's never stopped development, which I think is impressive 27 years on.

Imagine where Gimp would be if any company treated it like Valve treats WINE.
by falcor84 | 2025-10-30 23:26:08+00:00
What does this have to do with anything? Obviously science should be independent from these considerations, but then social policy should not be.

As an extreme example, give me a free weekend and I'll get you a mathematical model of how if we force everyone who ever committed a physically aggressive act to go on beta blockers, then we'll significantly reduce violent crime. But having the math worked out doesn't immediately imply that that's what we should do.
by alsetmusic | 2025-10-30 23:26:39+00:00
According to the Fall of Civilizations Podcast, the Sumerians considered themselves to be on the forefront of humanity and technology (which was true). I believe the reason was a mythological-religious understanding of a more ancient people to whom the gods or a god had given gifts like reason and technology (which is not new theme any of the many times it has been told), thus becoming the then-contemporary Sumerians.
by martini333 | 2025-10-30 23:26:58+00:00
Does anyone know if the "Borgerforslag" had an impact?

https://www.borgerforslag.dk/se-og-stoet-forslag/?Id=FT-2115...

https://www.ft.dk/da/aktuelt/nyheder/2025/09/borgerforslag-n...
by dragonwriter | 2025-10-30 23:27:22+00:00
> More than half of Americans are net debtors, with a negative net worth.

Median household net worth is around $193k, not negative. Maybe this is true on an individual basis because there a bunch of, say, young debtors and elderly parents who have transferred their positive assets living in households with working adults with more positive wealth than the youngsters and elders combined have net debt, but...
by waltbosz | 2025-10-30 23:29:22+00:00
In the early days of the Internet, there was this website with a list of payphone numbers from all over the United States. In my state, there were only three entries, and my home phone number was one of them. It was listed as being outside a publicly traded chain restaurant.

On occasion, radio stations would do bits where they would call a random payphone from the website. My house was called 3 times for the same bit by different radio stations. Within a month apart, I spoke to two different stations from New Zealand. MoreFM was one of them, but I don't remember the other. I do remember that that were very disappointed when I told them I had just spoken to MoreFM a month prior. Also MoreFM was the only station that didn't end the bit when I explained it was not a pay phone
by coldtea | 2025-10-30 23:29:50+00:00
>I do not understand your position.

Let me explain then...

> Yes, obviously. The author doesn't say otherwise.

Someone doesn't need to spell something out explicitly to imply it, or to fall to the kind of mistake I described.

While the author might not say otherwise, they do invoke the Pareto principle out of context, as if it's some readily applicable theorem.

>>If not, what makes Postgres especially the "Pareto 80%" one in this comparison? > Because its simpler.

Something being simpler than another thing doesn't make it a Pareto "80%" thing.

Yeah, I know you don't say this is always the case explicitly. But, like with the OP, your answer uses this as if it's an argument in favor of smething being the "Pareto 80%" thing.

It just makes it simpler. In the initial Pareto formulation is was about wealth accumulation even, which has nothing to do with simplicity or features or even with comparing different classes of things (both sides referred to the same thing, people. Specifically about 20% of the population owning 80% of the land).
by YurgenJurgensen | 2025-10-30 23:29:55+00:00
“Yes — I can imagine it. A simple sphere, maybe sitting in a soft pool of light.”

“I’m picturing it as a bright red ball, glossy and catching a bit of light on one side.”

Great, huh? Except that’s what ChatGPT said when I asked it those two questions. It certainly isn’t picturing anything. If a robot which only ‘thinks’ in terms of chain-of-thought of abstract tokens can act as if it truly sees things, what makes you think this test has any validity at all?
by Andrex | 2025-10-30 23:30:03+00:00
Another Gimp diehard for life here. I should make a donation, I appreciate the reminder.

People go on and on about how bad Gimp's UI is, and while I won't defend it I will the criticism is 99% overblown.

https://i.imgur.com/3gqmu9N.png

If you take 10-15 minutes to customize the UI it can be pretty damn simple if you want. I'd say those minutes are worth it to avoid a subscription and to support a true OSS stalwart project.
by duskwuff | 2025-10-30 23:30:40+00:00
You're overstating how easy these tasks are for many people. Doing brake pads/rotors or changing oil requires a driveway, some tools, and (for oil) a way to collect and dispose of the old fluids. Not everyone has access to those things - for instance, people who live in an apartment complex may not have the space to work on their car.

(Air filters are, admittedly, pretty easy.)