MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gorgoiler | 2025-10-23 15:26:47+00:00
My partner and I were re-watching Father of the Bride the other day (rest in peace, Diane Keaton) and during the early parents meeting the son-in-law to-be describes himself as a communications consultant, working on X.25 networking installations.

I had to pause the movie and explain to my partner just how close the world came to missing out on The Internet, and having instead to suffer the ignominy of visiting sites with addresses like “CN=wikipedia, OU=org, C=US” and god knows what other dreadful protocols underlying them. I think she was surprised how angry and distressed I sounded! It would have been awful!

Poor her!
by tosh | 2025-10-23 15:26:58+00:00
Kudos on the launch. Love the local-ai approach.

Regarding open models: what is the go-to way for me to make Surf run with qwen3-vl? Ollama?

As far as I understand any endpoint that supports the completions API will work?

https://github.com/deta/surf/blob/main/docs/AI_MODELS.md

If I attach image context will it be provided to qwen3-vl? Or does this only work with the "main" models like OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini and so on?
by bryanlyon | 2025-10-23 15:27:12+00:00
This is cool and fixes a very big need I have. I often use Comfy as a shortcut to generating content in a larger pipeline and the JSONified API is OK, but not the easiest to use. Node graphs are just complicated and difficult to edit in the JSON form. Love this! Now if someone would point me toward a way to better pass binary data to/from comfy I'll be a happy camper.
by ajross | 2025-10-23 15:27:19+00:00
> When a different side takes control of the justice department

That's an argument about the degradation of the rule of law, taking as a prior that the rule of law won't degrade. It's... unpersuasive. The end goal of this kind of thinking is that the other side never does take control, ever.

The current administration pretty clearly does not intend to give up power. They tried to evade democracy once already, and have fixed the mistakes this time.

Whether they will be successful or not is unknowable. But that's the plan. And the determining factor is very unlikely to be the normal operation of American civil society. Winning elections is, probably, not enough anymore.
by maxglute | 2025-10-23 15:27:53+00:00
PRC roboticizing more than RoW combined to PLUG bluecollar workforce gap, they're already short on manufacturing labour supply. Well rather kids don't want to assemble widgets. The goal is always to maintain current industrial base with fraction of headcount from demographic contraction, and by "100s millions" out of work, we're really talking about 10s of millions going to retirement and hopefully robots can keep the machine brrrting to replace productivity and drive down costs so system can caretake 10sm retirees with cheap goods - PRC manufacturing sector already down to like 120m from 250m high in 200s. Another 20m in next decade is easily absorbable. PRC just trying to keeping things steady, bad things are going to happen to every one else when they realize they don't have PRC industrial chains to replicate affordable abundance. It's going to extra screw developing economies now labour saving tech + US shifting away from global consumer via tariffs going to kill export-led model dead, and there really isn't another model on the horizon to replace it. VS west PRC going to weather fine at least longer for the simple reason they have stupid high household savings rate, this isn't leveraged US households living paycheck to paycheck that will lead to different tier of instability.
by walkabout | 2025-10-23 15:28:13+00:00
It’s also the case that market-ideals tend to become miserable to experience in practice if you approach them too closely.

Usually the discussion of that kind of thing revolves around the near-elimination of profit via (hypothetical) too-perfect competition among producers and too-perfect information for consumers, but with the rise of automated mass-scale spying and automated finer-grained price discrimination (plus enormous consolidation of markets due to near-abandonment of anti-trust enforcement in the ‘70s), we’re kinda seeing the real deal play out the other direction: approaching-maximum extraction of profit from every transaction.

Which sucks, to put it mildly. You do not want markets that function “too well” in any direction.
by ModernMech | 2025-10-23 15:28:13+00:00
The Constitution constrains the executive, it doesn't give him very many powers at all. Frankly, the Constitution bars him from having run in the 2024 election for having caused an insurrection against the United States. Aside from that, he should have been impeached and removed and barred from running again for extorting a bribe from a foreign government.

We have the necessary laws to have prevented this but money and power and bigotry won the day, as usual. Don't look to laws to fix this, no amount of laws will fix voting in a felon, adjudicated rapist who tried to kill his own VP. At that point you have to fix the society, because it's sick.
by pton_xd | 2025-10-23 15:28:21+00:00
> They are tools above all else, and should leave their politics at the door when serving the user just as a therapist does.

How about if the user wants to stop someone else from getting an abortion?

Or what if they want to convince someone else to get an abortion?

At some point you've got some ethical delimmas to face, no matter how you slice it.
by wat10000 | 2025-10-23 15:28:22+00:00
People have been saying for decades that Congress has delegated far too much power to the executive and that it's ripe for abuse if a malevolent president ever takes office.

Hey guess what, a malevolent president took office and is now abusing all that power delegated by Congress. Who could have foreseen this.

(Yes, his predecessors also abused that power in various malevolent ways, but there's a massive difference in degree now.)
by redleggedfrog | 2025-10-23 15:28:36+00:00
Just making sure there is less noise when they start (already started) using U.S.-armed U.S. forces here in the U.S. to oppress people they don't like - non-Magazis, people without white skin, non-Christians, non-straight, and the poor. It's a lot quieter to disappear people when no one can report it and there isn't anyone to appeal to anyway.

Who's going to protect you now America? Federal government, police, your Mom? Nope nope nope. You noodle armed programmer geeks need to break out your 2nd Amendment rights and get strapped.
by ethbr1 | 2025-10-23 15:28:40+00:00
The issue is that current law around monopolies defines them from the wrong angle.

Instead of taking a consumer-centric / competition perspective, they should be defined in terms of market share (with markets broadly defined from a consumer perspective).

>10% = some minimal interoperability and reporting requirements

>25% = serious interoperability requirements

>35% = severe and audited interoperability requirements, with a method for gaps to be proposed by competitors, with the end goal of making increasing market share past this point difficult

Close the "but it's free to consumers (because we monetize them in other ways)" loophole that every 90s+ internet business used: instead focus on ensuring competition as measured by market share.
by herpderperator | 2025-10-23 15:28:56+00:00
That would cause your active connections to break because the source IP changed entirely. Are you sure the IP changes abruptly, or they keep it for as long as the session is live? Though keeping the original IP would mean that, for example, if you are sailing around the world, you'd start getting worse and worse latency as all your data continues going to the original ground station which may be on the other side of the world at that point.

An interesting problem - I wonder what they truly do here. I suppose people expect interruptions with Starlink so doing an IP swap wouldn't be all that different to losing service due to obstruction for a few minutes.
by dominicrose | 2025-10-23 15:29:27+00:00
Functional programming is actually good for performance. Clojure uses "Persistent data structure", which has its own Wikipedia page. You can have a very complex object, like a long and wide JSON with several levels of indentation. If you want to modify a tiny part of this object, you won't waste memory or time. The object won't be copied entirely. The parts that haven't changed will be reused.

This is only possible because the objects are immutable. If they were mutable, you wouldn't be able to trust that the parts that haven't changed won't change in the future. This means you can share these parts. This is good for memory and for parallelism.

If you're building a React app in JS, React has to check if the object has changed deeply. If you're doing a React app with Clojure, this check is actually disabled. React will only use a single === comparison to know wether two objects are different or not, and this is basically an integer comparison (like a memory address comparison).
by supportengineer | 2025-10-23 15:30:07+00:00
EDIT: I am offended that you guys think my awesome explanation is from GenAI.

Imagine a circuit. Like a flashlight. The electrons flow from the battery to the lightbulb and back. It’s like a race track. They proceed in an orderly fashion.

There are some other electrical components. If you hook them up in just the right way, you get something called an LRC circuit. The electrons don’t flow in an orderly way now. They go back-and-forth. In spurts and fits. You’re making them wiggle. There are some very nice equations that allow you to specify exactly how much and how fast the wiggling is.

One cool thing about a circuit with wiggling electrons is that if you put some wires close by those electrons will also start wiggling.

This is called radio.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-10-23 15:30:11+00:00
>If Congress had a full Republican majority during Nixon’s years, he would not have been impeached.

That's at best "unclear". Attitudes were different, and there is some evidence of principled intentions even by the Republicans. If I were pressed for an answer, I'd say that the Republicans would have impeached, just weeks later than the Democrats. But, during that era Congress still thought itself coequal to the presidency and wanted to preserve their own power, which might have had something to do with that too.

>If Congress had a full Democratic majority during Clinton’s years, he would not have been impeached.

Which is funny if you ask me. They still defend him to this day, despite the fact that he opened the presidency up to extortion by any intelligence service competent enough to have caught on to his behavior.
by candiddevmike | 2025-10-23 15:30:22+00:00
> I don't know if the founders ever saw this coming.

Surely there weren't any historical examples of that happening, like in the Mediterranean...

I kinda dislike how folks hold the founders up with some kind of religious reverence (for some, only when it suits their agenda). These guys may have been bright at the time, but you can tell they didn't think a lot of things through and certainly didn't "plan for scale". That we now have judges acting as pseudo priests "interpreting the founders" is just laughable, I doubt the founders envisioned their constitution still being in use 300+ years later.
by nla | 2025-10-23 15:30:33+00:00
The Leahy Law requires the U.S. government to facilitate receipt of information about alleged abuses by U.S. supported forces.

The State Department confirms it no longer operates the HRG, but says it is still receiving reports through other direct channels.

I couldn't find any requirement in the law that requires a public website.

NGOs can still submit information through established contacts or by email.

I would think email is a lot easier than a webform.
by glenstein | 2025-10-23 15:30:42+00:00
>Or maybe I'm not aware of the biased physics theorems out there!

Well I did just mention the flat earth, so there's one. TimeCube for another that's simultaneously hilarious and depressing (the proponent claimed he was silenced by a worldwide conspiracy). Conservapedia, the conservative wikipedia alternative, argues in full sincerity that Relativity theory is liberal and maintains a page titled "Counterexamples to Relativity" [0]. And there's actually a growing phenomenon of Physics Grifters, as noted in some fascinating posts on HN [1]. If you said they were wrong "because physics", they would say you were biased, and you would say you weren't, and you'd be off to the races with all the traditional hallmarks of polarization.

And if you were really unlucky, someone from the outside the debate who wasn't interested in facts would say there's no underyling truth, and it's just polarization, and the best approach is to be neutral between the two sides. And if ever an LLM were to start talking about it, they would need to avoid taking a side to avoid the appearance of "bias."

I think the fallacy here is thinking that opinions somehow don't encompass claims about the real world capable of being right or wrong, when counterexamples abound, and the search for a patch-job corrective principle (oh, that's just physics) unfortunately can't patch that leak.

0. https://www.conservapedia.com/Counterexamples_to_Relativity 1. https://timothynguyen.org/2025/08/21/physics-grifters-eric-w...

(edited to shorten)
by ratrocket | 2025-10-23 15:30:50+00:00
One way I compare the git to jj transition (if it happens, or for whom it happens) to the svn to git transition is: branching in svn was awful. It was heavyweight and you were signing up for pain later down the road. Git made branching easy and normal, almost something you barely need to think about. jj does a similar thing for rebasing. For someone whose familiarity with git is clone, pull, push, merge, creating branches (so, basic/working/practical familiarity but even "rebase -i" might be pushing the limits)- for someone like that what jj offers is a similar "lift" of a feature (rebase) from "scary" to "normal" similar to what git did for branching compared to svn.

That's just one aspect of the whole thing, and of course if you're a git rebase wizard (or have tools that make you that) then this won't seem relevant. But I think for a lot of people this might be a salient point.
by Ray20 | 2025-10-23 15:31:26+00:00
> fly a plane that detects Starlink signals

Starlink are quite directional. They are easily detected even from a standard vehicle.

> International law and -lawsuits are a thing

No, it's not a thing. International laws operate on exactly the same principle "Or what?".

> but at the same time we (as humanity) are not (or should not be) savages.

Part of not being a savage is the ability to not give a f.ck about what the savages have written on their papers, which we call laws. Or to give a f.ck depending on what is most convenient for us, the non-savages, from the standpoint of the "or what?" principle.
by UncleEntity | 2025-10-23 15:31:53+00:00
It's funny, I've been working on a CPS (continuation passing style) graph optimizer loosly based on Cliff Click's thesis and when I show it to the robots they're like "yeah, that's academic fluffery, it'll never fly" to try inflate my ego a bit until I explain how it actually works then they're "wait, that's actually possible ...and a good idea".

His 'optimization as a constraint solving problem' thing is actually pretty powerful and it just so happens I've been fiddling with a Projective Dynamics constraint solver (which is what the VM is for, to define the constraints) whivh I can abuse to optimize CPS graphs so... take that Robots!
by wat10000 | 2025-10-23 15:31:56+00:00
Germany 1933 is also what democracy looks like. Just because the system allows it to happen doesn't mean everyone is doing their job or that the result is in any way acceptable.

"Checks and balances" was predicated on each part of government jealously guarding their power. Congress and the Supreme Court are both giving up vast amounts of their power to the executive, out of party loyalty or cowardice or just a belief that the executive should have unchecked power. This is not what working checks and balances look like.
by wiseowise | 2025-10-23 15:32:30+00:00
>> For 2: In particular since programming is separated into so many "cultures" of which many of them take deep effort to get more than a superficial knowledge (that's why you talk of "Java shops", "Microsoft/C# shops", ...), in a programming interview, you also want to see whether the candidate will likely be a fit for the prevalent programming culture in the respective company. If you advertise a JavaScript position, it is highly unlikely that if you are that deeply into combinatory logic, you will be a good fit for this position - and thus he would very likely (for good reasons) be rejected if he came up with such a solution.

> Below x IQ only

Pay enough money and I'll dance like a circus bear in your favorite OOP/FP/FRP flavor.
by lesuorac | 2025-10-23 15:32:57+00:00
Progress sure but Lincoln didn't free the slaves in the Northern states.

He only freed the slaves in the South with the emancipation proclamation [1]. The 13th amendment wasn't until 2 years later. Lincoln did it as an economic weapon against the south as well as a military recruitment tool; not out of the goodness of his heart.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emancipation_Proclamation
by justlikereddit | 2025-10-23 15:33:19+00:00
LFP have a significantly more stable battery chemistry. Much more abuse tolerant and less likely to suffer thermal runaway. You'd get LFP cells so you won't have to store them in the shed due to fire safety. And while sodium ion batteries would be happy in a frozen shed they're supposed to be even more stable.

Anyway,sodium ion taking off explains the recurrent deep sales for LFP power stations. Which might still be overpriced if there developments hold up.
by jodrellblank | 2025-10-23 15:33:45+00:00
NotJustBikes' latest video is titled "I'm so Sick of this Lazy Excuse (for bad cities)" and the lazy excuse is the cold or wet weather.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXDP9WQe0io

A previous video "How is a bike tunnel this freak'n great" is about urbanism and cycling in Bergen, Norway and has repeated digs at people who say you can't have good cycling infrastructure unless it's sunny and tropical.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCedclz03uI

And a previous video "Why Canadians can't bike in the winter (but Finnish people can)" about the city of Oulo, Finland.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU

And a previous video about Oslo, Norway, "The next great cycling city"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmp09Fd07oc

He used to work in tech, I think in ATI chip design consulting, and spent time lived in Sunnyville, California, where it was always room temperature and sunny outside - the best weather anyone could ask for - and everyone still drove everywhere all the time. He travelled short and long stay consulting visits all over the world for years, in Toronto, Sunnyville, Oxford, London, Belgium, Germany, The Netherlands, Taiwan, China, and it's those experiences which gave rise to his opinions about cities and that YouTube channel
by cheema33 | 2025-10-23 15:34:28+00:00
> Trump administration seems to actually be unusually focused on foreign policy..

You left out threatening to invade Canada if they did not join the US. And stealing Greenland. And asking Ukraine to give in to Putin's demands. Illegal tariffs that are a tax on common people. Yes, it may come as a shock to you that other countries do not pay the tariffs. We do. And unlike regular taxes, tariffs are not a progressive tax. So rich people love it.

By almost all accounts, the US has lost ground globally. We have lost soft power and respect. Global surveys now show that the rest of world now sees us the baddies.
by maxglute | 2025-10-23 15:34:29+00:00
Well question is how long the structure that enables that life can be sustained. A lot of it is simply inertial from being tech hegemon which makes west price setters, i.e. FX fixers able to leverage indispensable technology to drive up western purchasing power. Once that's gone, when PRC basically can sell you everything the west use to that enables modern development all the leverage is gone and purchasing power will revert towards mean, which for developed countries = down. Things may only decline/contract vs others so fast, but likely noticable amount within a few generations.
by ematth | 2025-10-23 15:34:30+00:00
Hey Brian, I really enjoyed reading your work on the Pips game! I found myself applying a similar backtracking algorithm to my Pythonic solution (https://github.com/ematth/pips). I focused on finding a single solution for each puzzle as opposed to all possible solutions. For hard puzzles with longer run times, I found that running multiple processes, each with the domino list shuffled, gets the solve time down to <15 seconds.
by pengaru | 2025-10-23 15:34:31+00:00
Ron Gilbert (of Maniac Mansion / DOTT / Monkey Island / SCUMM fame) speaks to this in an interview he gave at Handmade Con, you can find it on youtube.

IIRC he says they used UNIX workstations to develop Maniac Mansion/SCUMM for the C64. Complete with hot loading of levels, presumably they had a similar hardware interface to what's shown in TFA for manipulating C64 memory contents from the UNIX box.
by rramadass | 2025-10-23 15:35:16+00:00
The author needs a strong dose of Nassim Taleb.

The headline is just clickbait and not how you actually do statistics when there are tremendous levels of non-linear and random effective parameters in the system.

An Introduction to Pareto, Power Laws, and Fat Tails (good summary of Taleb's important ideas) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wcqt49dXtm8

IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle - https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-...

In order to achieve success, you need to focus on five different aspects;

1) Timing 2) Context/Environment 3) Means/Tools 4) Talent/Hardwork/Self-Effort and finally 5) Random Chance. While all of them are important and must be considered, the effects of each will be substantially non-linear in the spectrum of Mediocristan (low to non-existent systemic effects) to Extremistan (very high systemic effects) events. See also Complex Systems - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_system

The "advanced" western countries built an all encompassing political/economic/financial/social/etc. system where the first four are maximized to amplify the efforts of even just above-average people. Such a system does not exist in China/India and that is the reason Chinese/Indians do far better when they move to western countries rather than in their own countries. It is the overall system which matters the most. Also quality over quantity is the axiom in Science/Technology research.
by walkabout | 2025-10-23 15:35:24+00:00
Not a lot comes to mind that really falls between “basically trivial” and “you’re gonna need to hire a team of PhDs” or “you have accidentally asked me to write a custom distributed file system, and you probably don’t want to pay for that”

Which is to say that usually the hard stuff is an accidental request that nobody actually wants to pay for, so the only thing “hard” about it is recognizing that the client/stakeholder has wandered into territory they really ought not.
by audelair | 2025-10-23 15:35:48+00:00
This is awesome to hear, thank you. I have more-or-less figured out how to configure things, and finally found the "local configuration keys" section, but I think I can live with the current setup (mixed toml + db) until Version 1 when I can refactor my configuration. I just installed 0.14 last night and everything went smoothly.