MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by EbEsacAig | 2025-10-19 09:58:22+00:00
It's easier to be fond and/or tolerant of someone if you can occasionally get a breather from them. You go easy (or easier) on your significant other, family, friends etc because -- at least occasionally -- you can keep some distance.

Try keeping distance from yourself. :/ The self is always there, it never relents; its mistakes and weaknesses ever present, recurrent. It's less easy to accept and/or forgive when you can't forget.

In fact what you are doing with that photo -- which is a practice I completely support and agree with BTW -- is precisely that: distancing yourself from yourself, taking a look "in" from the outside. It's easier to find compassion like that, for both your child and current selves.

I'm also 47.
by oldestofsports | 2025-10-19 09:58:43+00:00
What I think is better:

- Dark mode feature

- search might be useful.

What I think is worse:

- More spacing

- Menu missing threads, past, comments, jobs and submit.

- Icon buttons.

Possibly unpopular opinion, but I think text based buttons are much faster to locate while icons require more effort to understand. Icons only make sense to you when you already know what it is supposed to represent
by vidarh | 2025-10-19 10:00:57+00:00
The father of universal healthcare by way of a state supported insurance system was Bismarck, who was far right by modern standards, and argued for it based on Christian morality, not socialism, though he was "accused" of being a "state socialist" over it, and embraced that label because it fit well with his struggle to limit the growing appeal of the actual socialists.

In European history, a lot of welfare reforms subsequently came down to Christian democrats (typically centre right to right by European standards) or cooperation between them and socialists and social democrats.

This just makes the US situation weirder - by the time socialists and trade unions gained much real power in Europe, universal healthcare was mostly already uncontroversial and settled or close to it as a result of the support of Christian groups on the right, with a couple of exceptions such as the UK, where the right wing rhetoric leading up to the NHS got pretty extreme.
by rsynnott | 2025-10-19 10:02:01+00:00
Dublin is currently making changes to traffic flow to prioritise buses, with the result that some buses now go far faster than they used to. But because everything is in flux, and Dublin Bus hates updating timetables at the best of times, it is now somewhat common for a too-fast bus to stop for a few minutes to get back on schedule (complete with recorded message to that effect). It'll pass, but it is, for now, a thing.

(They've tweaked it now, but for a few months the bus I usually use to get from home to the city centre did this on about 30% of journeys.)
Show HN: Circalify – JavaScript library for circular timeline visualizations
by Matooize | 2025-10-19 10:02:50+00:00
Built this after struggling with circular calendar geometry. Handles the trigonometry for positioning events around annual wheels.

Demo: https://codepen.io/mahmoodseoud/pen/ByjJOVE

Early version but working. Dual licensed (AGPL/Commercial).
by zigzag312 | 2025-10-19 10:04:19+00:00
Cost matters, but in my experience there's more to this story. It's more like this:

"write 99% correct code in 1 week and then try to fix it as you go, but your fixes often break existing things for which you didn't have proper tests for. It then takes you total of 2 years to finally reach 100% correct code."

Which one do you choose? It's actually not as simple as 1 year vs 2 years. For a lot of stuff 100% correctness is not critical. 99% correct code can still be a useful product to many, and to you it helps you to quickly validate your idea with users.

However, the difference between static and dynamic typing is not that drastic, if you compare dynamic typing to an expressive statically typed language with good type inference. Comparing, for example, Python to C++ is not really fair as there are too many other things that make C++ more verbose and harder to work with. But if we compare Python to for example F# or even modern C#, the difference is not that big. And dynamic typing has a costs too, just different.

1. "Story" can be harder to understand without "metadata" due to ambiguity that missing information often creates. It's a delicate balance between too much "metadata" and too little.

2. Too much composability can lead to bugs where you compose wrong things or in a wrong way. Generic constraints on interfaces and other metaprogramming features allow flexible and safer composability, but require a bit more tought to create them.

3. Reuse is similar. No constraints on reuse, doesn't protect you from reusing something in corner case where it doesn't work.

4. (depends on how you design your types)

5. Dynamic languages require you to write more tests.

6. F# and C# for example both have REPL.

Quality statically typed language is much harder to create and require more features to be expressive, so there are less of them or they have some warts and they are harder to learn.

It's a game of tradeoffs, where a lot of choices depend on a specific use case.
by vidarh | 2025-10-19 10:09:14+00:00
In most of the world, private treatment is far cheaper than equivalent private treatments in the US. To the point where even to a high cost location like London, it can be cheaper to fly to London from the US to have things done at a high end private hospital.

Medicare+Medicaid in the US costs about the same person taxpayer as NHS costs per UK taxpayer. The NHS could be better, but we get universal care for a similar price than what leaves most Americans still needing private care to have any cover at all.

That strongly suggests that the US could at a minimum do far better at providing cost effective care - both public and private.
by XorNot | 2025-10-19 10:10:42+00:00
Charging money I suspect feels like more of a solution to people who would otherwise prefer something be free, then an actual solution though.

The one principle benefit it has is it provides a resource stream to fund other things - but that's kind of it, because the other assumptions essentially assume there are no monetary thresholds in the system - i.e that spammers and botnets rely on volume and thus can be priced out of the market.

And to an extent it's true - but there's a threshold problem. How many accounts do you need to pay for in order to seize narrative control of a space, or to effect a takeover by seizing positions of power like moderation positions?

People I think like to think "hundreds or thousands" - but at least temporally this is well within reach of motivated threat actors (i.e. consider bot farms which are literally just racks of stripped down actual smart phones being puppeted - that is not a trivial investment), but the other side of it is - it's probably closer to like, 10 relatively active personalities.
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2025-10-19 10:11:22+00:00
>Black people (specifically this means people in the US who have dark skin and whose ancestry is in the US)

So dark-skinned Africans aren't "Black"? (But they are "black"?)

Why not just use black/white for skin tone, and African-American for "people in the US who have dark skin and whose ancestry is in the US"? Then for African immigrants, we can reference the specific nation of origin, e.g. "Ghanaian-American".
by rsynnott | 2025-10-19 10:14:04+00:00
Just looking at Google Maps, if I wanted to get to the city centre right now:

- Car: 22 minutes (and, er, park... somewhere? Who knows)

- Walk: 42 minutes

- Bike: 14 minutes

- Bus: 17 minutes (including 3 minutes walk)

- Train: 20 minutes (including 10 minutes walk)

Buses work in some places.

(Granted, this is traffic-dependent and the train would def beat it at rush hour in my particular case, particularly as Google Maps' time for walking is very conservative.)

I could fairly handily afford a car, but for my lifestyle, where I like, there just doesn't seem to be any real _point_.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-10-19 10:16:46+00:00
I suspect that moderation is something that “AI” may eventually be quite good at.

But human or machine, open or closed, moderation will always be biased. Each community will have its culture, and moderation will reflect that.

A community of Nazis will moderate out stuff that many places would welcome. Some communities would moderate anything not cats on Roombas.

HN is one of the best-moderated communities I’ve ever seen, yet, it has its biases. Organic moderation reflects cultural biases. I’m not always happy about what gets put on the chopping block, but I usually can’t argue with it, even if I don’t like it, or am cynical about why it’s nuked. I stick with HN, because, for the most part, I don’t mind what gets moderated. The showdead thing lets me see what gets nuked, but I usually like to leave it off. I’m not really one for gazing into the toilet.

The main thing that an open fediverse can bring, is transparent moderation, so folks will know when stuff is being blocked, and can use that knowledge to decide whether or not to remain in the community, or advocate for change.
by GistNoesis | 2025-10-19 10:17:35+00:00
Can measurements and calibration be done easily at home to see if your sound system is well calibrated ?

I was thinking of playing a pink noise on the speaker and recording it with a cheap microphone or displaying it with the Spectroid app, but the microphone probably has it's own frequency response.

Is there an App for that ? With each phone model microphone factory calibrated ?

Is there a way to use known fact about physics like harmonics should have a specific shape (timbres) that's should help equalize frequency with respect to each other ? Or from various microphone positions, calibrate it so that any cheap microphone can do the trick ?
by dvdkon | 2025-10-19 10:18:01+00:00
> You assume centralization means total monopolization, which neither Twitter or Facebook or Reddit or anyone has been able to do. You may lose access to a specific audience, but nobody has a right to an audience.

When almost everyone has access to something and you are singled out and denied that access (without due process), then there's a problem, discussions on the definition of monopoly notwithstanding.

You can try to fix that by ensuring the process is fair and transparent, or by changing the market so that there is no single entity whose services almost everyone uses.
by koolba | 2025-10-19 10:18:30+00:00
No, I’m deeply confused why he would have massive medical bills when he’s covered by Medicare. Medicare covers 80% of bills and Medigap plans cover the other 20%. I think some recent changes obviate their need too by capping the annual out of pocket to (I think) $2,000.

I don’t think he has any such bills. From the article:

> He has said he intends to use the proceeds to help manage medical expenses for possible health crises, and to fund programs for people with disabilities.

He doesn’t need the money to pay for some treatments for himself. He wants the money to give it away to others.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-10-19 10:19:15+00:00
>No reason? Was it Covid, or the Ukraine war?

Covid virus didn't make you poor, it was the government's response to it of shutting down large parts of the economy(and not others) plus printing endless money and dumping it on the market(mostly on rich people/businesses running on debt) distorting the market and creating hyper-inflation that wiped out your savings and wages.

Same with the war in Europe, they weren't forced to give up on cheap Russian gas that was the base of their economy, they voluntarily chose to do that to save Ukraine, with the obvious effect their prices would go up and standard of living would go down.

People need to start holding their elected governments accountable for their actions of putting too many thumbs, arms and legs on the economic scales that cause wealth transfer form the poor to the rich under the pretext of every crisis("never waste a good crisis"), and for the "let the peasants eat cake" response they get in return.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-10-19 10:20:05+00:00
Nicely done, but I’m not convinced that “number of stars” should be the only metric. It’s not a bad one, but it naturally eschews a lot of indie stuff.

This is a chronic issue with discovery queues. I like to listen to music during my morning walks, and want to have the chance to hear new, not-yet-popular songs. I may not like a lot of them, but I want the chance to decide for myself.
by krapp | 2025-10-19 10:20:56+00:00
Given how pedantic and cargo-culty the HN community can be about even the tiniest detail of the layout here, it doesn't surprise me that the mods don't make it a priority. The arguments about implementation details and edge cases would be ceaseless, and people would clutch their pearls about HN "turning into Reddit."

Also dark mode seems way too modern a feature for a forum whose entire aesthetic is frozen in the 1990s. Dark mode doesn't directly improve the signal to noise ratio or quality of conversation.

Maybe the best solution is to just let everyone use whatever plugins or browser scripts they want to and leave HN as it is.
by repstosb | 2025-10-19 10:23:19+00:00
Of course you should offer some method to disable caching/compression/encryption/ECC/etc. in intermediate layers whenever those are non-zero cost and might be duplicated at application level... that's the ancient end-to-end argument.

But that method doesn't necessarily have to be "something like O_DIRECT", which turns into a composition/complexity nightmare all for the sake of preserving the traditional open()/write()/close() interface. If you're really that concerned about performance, it's probably better to use an API that reflects the OS-level view of your data, as Linus pointed out in this ancient (2002!) thread:

https://yarchive.net/comp/linux/o_direct.html

Or, as noted in the 2007 thread that someone else linked above, at least posix_fadvise() lets the user specify a definite extent for the uncached region, which is invaluable information for the block and FS layers but not usually communicated at the time of open().

I think it's quite reasonable to consider the real problem to be the user code that after 20 years hasn't managed to migrate to something more sophisticated than open(O_DIRECT), rather than Linux's ability to handle every single cache invalidation corner case in every possible composition of block device wrappers. It really is a poorly-thought-out API from the OS implementor's perspective, even if at first seemingly simple and welcoming to an unsophisticated user.
by Gualdrapo | 2025-10-19 10:23:26+00:00
Note that the HN hivemind loves crammed, almost unreadable text content, so the feedback you're getting is more than expected.

From my part I see this kind of exercises quite often, but I happen to like this exercise. Actual good content density and the favicons are actually a good idea since they let you know where a link would take you to.

The only downside I saw (for me) is that article titles, in the article pages, are too big.
by prisenco | 2025-10-19 10:24:09+00:00
That's not entirely true. The big platforms yes, but that's a combination of economic incentives and technical challenges at scale (such as moving data to cold storage).

But even then, that means there's resistance, but that's not the same as things being technically impossible. In federated systems, a delete is not a delete. It can't be because there's no way to confirm deletion on nodes you can't control.

And I understand your perspective as a realist on deletion generally, but that's not most social media users understanding when they're told they can control their own data, which is a common selling point of federation.

A centralized system which is properly incentivized to completely wipe all data associated with an account will be able do so, but a federated system can't.
by Acen | 2025-10-19 10:26:11+00:00
Practically all of audio land is logarithmic.

The orders of magnitude in power/loudness is pretty astonishing.

When introducing decibels to new audio engineers, we generally introduce it as a 3db increase is a doubling in power, a 10db increase is a 10x increase in power.

It gets silly when you start talking sound pressure level, because how people perceive a 10x increase in the output power, is about a doubling of the perceived loudness.
by constantcrying | 2025-10-19 10:28:35+00:00
>Is there a 2D accelerated GUI that can help me do the same?

Of course. Just mount it through ssh and use whatever file manager you already have. It is very silly to switch tools just because the machine is somewhere else.

Switching tools just to accommodate the machine being remote is just bizarre to me. You even said that you used mc mostly for remote machines. What is the point of that? Now you have to use at least two tools which do the exact same thing, except you only use one when the system is remote? Does that not seem like a total waste? It would be one thing if you said that mc is what you always used, but that is not the case, you actively switch tools just to accommodate the machine being remote. Why? Do you think that is reasonable at all, when something as simple as just mounting over ssh exists?
by radu_floricica | 2025-10-19 10:28:56+00:00
Weeks. I'm talking about multiple business weeks to spin up a new server. Sure, in a pinch I can do it in a weekend, but adding up all the stakeholders, talking it over and doing things right it takes weeks. It's a normal timespan for a significant chunk of extra power - a modern day server from Hetzner comes with over 1Tb of RAM and around 100 cores. This is also where all the reserve capacity comes from - you actually do have this kind of time to prepare.

Sure, there are scenarios where you need capacity faster and it's not your fault. Can't think of any offhand, but I imagine there are. It's perfectly fine for them to use cloud.
by lelanthran | 2025-10-19 10:31:01+00:00
> FSF tactics for producing and promoting free/libre do not.

What is your criteria for judgement here? The FSF GPL licenses, in reality have worked quite well, if the criteria is longevity, high usage, popularity, utility and maintained.

If your only criteria is "Well, they're only #2", then sure, by that criteria they did not "work".
by lenkite | 2025-10-19 10:31:11+00:00
> There are more beggars in EU than in other countries in my experience,

Are there really more beggars and homeless in the EU compared to the US ? Admittedly, my anecdotal viewpoint is only that of a visitor, but having been to both, it seemed US cities had a far more severe problem.

The first time it was a bit of a shock to me - the US had this patina of glory that crumbled for me after my first visit.
by Thlom | 2025-10-19 10:31:47+00:00
80% of the time social media is just increasingly bad slop created to generate clicks/views/engagement. 10% is people screaming into the void, the last 10% might be valuable content. The Internet was better when we all hanged around in big and small web forums and group chats. To this day the most interesting conversations I see and participate in happens in forums and on group chats.
by gpderetta | 2025-10-19 10:31:54+00:00
If I had to guess, the actual GCC maintainers[1] had no interest into integrating a very large codebase into GCC which would duplicate a lot of its functionality.

LLVM could have been integrated under the GNU/FSF umbrella as a separate project of course.

[1] since the egcs debacle was resolved, RMS has had very little control of GCC
by versteegen | 2025-10-19 10:32:21+00:00
Not to excuse ignoring the thesis, but I want to point out it's bad form to cite a supposed result from a paper you haven't even looked at (or can't read), unless you indicate (admit) you didn't read it. I have even seen it described, in a paper about the citation practices of science, as unethical. It can transform hearsay into established truth. Of course nearly everyone does it anyway when they think the chance of making an erroneous citation is low enough, and that's exactly the problem.
by constantcrying | 2025-10-19 10:33:14+00:00
How so? I use remote machines all the time, why would I need a TUI for that? VSCode and zed support editing on remote machines and the machine drives are also mounted on the local machine? What purpose would any TUI have? What even are the potential benefits?

Right now I can use the exact same software I use on my local machine. Can you give me any reason why I should consider anything else?
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-10-19 10:33:39+00:00
Maybe we understand "the world" differently, but the fall of Rome didn't mean the fall of the world, even if you consider "the world" to be Europe.

But if we had a time machine, I'm sure we could find people saying "If Rome becomes a failed state, trust me, the rest of the world will be too." unironically.
by antonymoose | 2025-10-19 10:33:41+00:00
That the government gave them out has me wondering, do they make any kind of distinction between “government does it” versus “you doing it,” i.e. is the government claiming to be monitoring and not you?

In America we have this concept that a police must have a real reason to pull over your car. Except they can just setup an arbitrary checkpoint and pull every driver over and this is magically different and acceptable to do, no violations of rights at all.
by zkmon | 2025-10-19 10:34:43+00:00
>> You make them accountable so that they have the ability to produce an account of what, how, and why happened at a given time.

The very first line in the Wikipeda article on Accountability states that "accountability is equated with answerability, culpability, liability".

Are you saying a person who is accountable may not be held responsible for the outcomes?
by neuronic | 2025-10-19 10:35:33+00:00
Uh yea, thats because we tax everyone to hell EXCEPT the rich. Wealth inequality is a serious problem and we are moving to catastrophe sooner rather than later on the current path.

It's obvious why the ultra-rich are building bunkers and hide-outs. Those are of course scams by the building companies, as they give a false sense of security, but the idea of what is REALLY going on is obviously out there.
by concinds | 2025-10-19 10:35:48+00:00
> Everything is becoming more expensive often for no reason.

- For food, this was caused by supply shocks. First COVID, then Ukraine, now tariffs and the trade war. And on top of that, excessive price-setting power in some highly concentrated sectors of the food industry.

- For housing, this was caused by a supply shortage, i.e. bad housing policy. A housing shortage gives property owners price-setting power, which allows them to keep raising the price. However, while we've made it very easy for owners to profit, we've made it harder for developers, feeding the shortage.

- For healthcare, we decided to let many middle-men profit. A decent portion of spending could be cut without harming pharmaceutical innovation or new drug development.

These problems all have causes, and the cause is bad policy that benefits a minority while harming the country. And "tax the rich and give to the poor" does not fix these; the government is gonna need to get involved in directly fixing these broken markets, not just giving money to the poor so they immediately hand it over to the existing rent-seekers.
by spookie | 2025-10-19 10:35:53+00:00
As someone who worked on a fedi platform, I really appreciate those words.

Some UX decisions even attempt to "passively moderate" content, which unfortunately also deter some from actively using the platform as they don't get the as much the feel for the "crowd". For example, not showing the amount of "likes" of a post unless you interact with said post goes a long way in preventing mob-like behaviour.

Little stuff like this adds up. But it is hard to sell...