MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tptacek | 2025-10-04 18:37:00+00:00
That's a good and reasonable question. The answer is: the cameras weren't going to do any meaningful harm in Oak Park (they were heavily restricted by policies we wrote about them, and we have an exceptionally trustworthy police department and an extremely police-skeptical political majority). But you can drive through Oak Park in about 5 minutes on surface streets, and on either side of that drive you'll be in places that are blanketed with ALPRs with absolutely no policy or restrictions whatsoever.

Had we kept the cameras, we'd have some political capital to get our neighboring munis (and like-minded munis in Chicagoland like Schaumberg) to take our ordinances and general orders as models. Now we don't. We're not any safer: our actions don't meaningfully change our residents exposure to ALPRs (and our residents weren't the targets anyways; people transiting through Oak Park were) because of their prevalence outside our borders.

What people don't get about this is that a lot of normal, reasonable people see these cameras as a very good thing. You can be upset about that or you can work with it to accomplish real goals. We got upset about it.
by martin-t | 2025-10-04 18:37:10+00:00
So basically the only winners should be:

- owners of large platforms who don't care what "content"[0] is successful or if creators get rewarded, as long as there is content to show between ads

- large corporations who can afford to protect their content with DRM

Is that correct?

Do you expect it to play out differently? Game it out in your head.

[0]: https://eev.ee/blog/2025/07/03/the-rise-of-whatever/#:~:text...
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-10-04 18:37:24+00:00
CC licenses aren't viral in that way. I can write a CC BY-NC instruction and repair manual for a Ford Prefect, and a professional mechanic can use the information contained within to help them fix Ford Prefects. The NC aspect of the license just means they can't sell the repair manual, charge for entrance to a dramatic reading of the repair manual, etc: it doesn't apply constraints beyond an All Rights Reserved design doc from any other manufacturer.
by creer | 2025-10-04 18:37:57+00:00
Sure except that "saving money" is not what makes a company win, and so it's rightly not what makes a career. If you can show that building that new library for $X will streamline engineering by Y% which will allow doubling sales by launching 3 new products - NOW you have a good proposition. (Your "X future business scenario").

Saving money on the current product is only useful if the company has no clue where to go next. Since normally the current product will be gone in 2 years. It can be useful when your company is in long steady production, like a refinery where saving 0.5% would be huge.

This is something people often miss about dodgy code bases. Or about writing a large application in a weird choice for a language. IF you were able to deliver that application AND it's still profitable 5 years later, THEN already it was hugely successful. You can argue that it was not in the correct language and you are wrong because it was ALREADY hugely successful. Same for cleaning up the documentation.
by isubkhankulov | 2025-10-04 18:38:32+00:00
Completely agree. Generally speaking, America’s homicide closure rate isn’t great compared to other western countries and is unfortunately trending downward in recent years.

I can certainly understand concerns about privacy but the other sides of this discussion should not be ignored.

https://www.npr.org/2023/04/29/1172775448/people-murder-unso...
by MalbertKerman | 2025-10-04 18:39:20+00:00
The hard part isn't having a telescope, but analyzing the images for objects that have moved between successive observations. Digital astrophotography and analysis software have been getting steadily cheaper and better, which leads to more amateur comet hunters each watching more sky, which has rapidly improved the odds of catching rare objects.

I'm not sure how the progress of institutional and amateur observations compare. Obviously the big guys benefit from the same technological advancement, but I don't know whether the fraction of new objects discovered by amateurs has been growing or not. I suspect the odds of the first interstellar object being found by an amateur were still pretty long.
by vinceguidry | 2025-10-04 18:39:58+00:00
Great article. I got off the webdev train just as Redux was coming out and never looked back. When my team lead decided to unilaterally replatform the app we maintained from Rails to NodeJS my professional life went from heaven to hell. Gone were the days of finishing our tasks for the week in two days and playing ping pong every day. Insult was added to injury when that team lead left halfway through.

The web had a golden age where it was understandable. The browsers' inconsistencies were mostly ironed out and you had references for what worked where. Flexbox was magic and you had shims to get it working where it wasn't yet supported. Web development was actually fun. When you solved problems, you were actually learning something, not just throwing stuff at the wall.

These web platforms gradually threw all that out. If you're a new engineer, realize that platform knowledge isn't real knowledge. Knowing React really well isn't a thing you can build a lasting career on. Your job is your job, but your education is your responsibility. If you don't want to be locked into an ecosystem, make sure you are constantly learning fundamentals.
by mooreds | 2025-10-04 18:40:45+00:00
> A couple of other things that make it work: the CEO has sales skills, and does not have much of an ego and is willing to listen to someone who has been through all of this multiple times.

Yeah! You definitely need to have a good CEO as a partner. A bad CEO is worse than no partner at all.

Those are some great attributes of what makes a good CEO and partner.
by maccard | 2025-10-04 18:40:49+00:00
If everywhere you look stinks, it's time to look under your own shoe.

No company is perfect, no team is perfect, no person magically knows what's right to do and has a perfect vision. Even if you get somewhere with the right team, right vision and right priorities, and you stick with them, the world will change and one of those will end up incorrect.
by toastal | 2025-10-04 18:41:21+00:00
Not a troll.

The normal, uninitiated folk don’t know any better about their choices of technology & what that means for our private data & autonomy. We have seen this song & dance of getting locked into shitty platforms like Slack, but projects are repeating history when they know better. Why not just tell folks to use Google & Apple Photos or Facebook? If you can see the advantage of your FOSS project & how it protects users, the same should apply to your own tech choices. If you want to maintain broad appeal for some reason instead of actually introducing them to other FOSS tech that would also be good for user, it might be a bit hypocritical tho understandable to have these channels open, maybe even official—but to make these the only option? Not a gateway/bridge? No mirrors? No email to send patches? Not cool.
by renehsz | 2025-10-04 18:41:36+00:00
Yeah, hosting on or at least tunneling through a commercial IP address is definitely required in order not to be flagged as spam. Personally, I chose the latter option of hosting my MTA at home but tunneling its traffic through a VPS in a datacenter. It's been working pretty well ever since, although I'm not sure it's worth the effort versus just using a cheap hosted provider.
by Molitor5901 | 2025-10-04 18:41:40+00:00
Dark and edge movies. That's a good point. It felt like in television land, we had moved beyond the dark and foreboding Nordic Noir style programs and into something less dark. I liked Casino Royal, I thought that was as exciting of an action-Bond that I've seen.

For those of us who have invested in a chain or series for a long time, it may feel comfortable, predictable, and so when something changes it can burst the magical bubble of cinema. Perhaps that's the danger of film series that are basically the same, just a different story, whereas short periods before change conditions the audience to let go of a nostalgia, and keep plowing ahead because it's just enough of a change not to disrupt that comfort - yet modernizes etc.

too modern. As with a lot of series modernized, it may have the effect of taking something familiar, changing something that disrupts the.. nostalgia?
by ssl-3 | 2025-10-04 18:42:48+00:00
That doesn't necessarily line up with my understanding of reality.

In the US, a PRI can handle up to exactly 23 concurrent, native g.711u phone calls. That's it's capacity: No more, and no less. It's always 23, with each concurrent call using exactly 64kbps of symmetric bandwidth....just because that's the number of B channels provided.

But if we take that same PRI and make it do IP packets instead using MLPPP, then our capacity is actually reduced. By adding the magic of packet switching, we also add overhead. And with that added overhead, we can only get only get ~19 g.711u calls through that same circuit.

(Now, sure: In a bigger picture, that PRI may be better utilized as an IP pipeline than as a dedicated telephony circuit. It's certainly more flexible that way.

But packetization is not something that automatically improves capacity. It often does the opposite.)
by nharada | 2025-10-04 18:42:55+00:00
I find this a cynical and possibly incorrect take. I'll admit, if your goal is to become a billionaire and command vast sums of cash from your many vacation homes I'd agree with you, but financial freedom and an interesting life is absolutely within reach without having to take a career path that doesn't bring you fulfillment. Those CTOs that get pushed out once the company reaches their series C almost certainly achieve financial freedom.
by marcosdumay | 2025-10-04 18:43:06+00:00
The name for those is "wicked problem". They usually appear when your problem statement is itself incoherent.

The entire thing about users interacting with data through computers is one of them. There are several inconsistent goals, like consistency is at odds with flexibility, and accessibility is at odds with security.

We have those tools that push the incoherence around, but they are always prone to collide somewhere.
by nosianu | 2025-10-04 18:43:19+00:00
I'm deeply skeptical of surveillance and convinced it will be misused, more and more over time as all sides get used to it and the complaints become less, or less fundamental and more against something specific while not questioning the tech as such.

Still, I'm torn whenever I walk to the city center (Bavarian big city that is not Munich) and see how many rental bikes and rental e-scooters can be found thrown into the river that runs through the city. Or public trash cans that were actually put deep into the earth, with concrete too, lie broken with lots of earth and the long metal pipe with concrete attached because some people spent considerable effort to destroy public infrastructure. Or somebody must have jumped hard and repeatably on a weak point of a public bench, which has very thick wood and thick steel screws, but they still managed to destroy it.

I want those people to be found, I'm very angry. This is a frequent occurrence. If that means more surveillance, I would not oppose. I'm tired of seeing this happen again and again and again.

The city had to start using trashcans that look more and more like little war bunkers. They can't do anything for the bikes and scooters though, making them too heavy to lift and throw into the water is obviously not possible. Police do patrol, but they can't be everywhere all the time.

For illustration: Two bikes of a public bike rental service found in the river. They are not old, all of them are new, but this is how they look after a few days or weeks in the river:

https://img.mittelbayerische.de/ezplatform/images/4/4/8/8/40...

Divers are called regularly to retrieve bikes, scooters, and other big items thrown into the city's river: https://images.nordbayern.de/image/contentid/policy:1.132184...
by jmull | 2025-10-04 18:43:22+00:00
To me the argument is that memory errors are just one type of logic error that can lead to serious bugs. You want a language that reduces logic errors generally, not just memory safety ones, and zig's focus on simplicity and being explicit might be the way to accomplish that.

For large performant systems, what makes sense to me is memory safety by default, with robust, fine-grained levers available to opt in to performance over safety (or to achieve both at once, where that's possible).

Zig isn't that, but it's at least an open question to me. It has some strong safe-by-default constructs yet also has wide open safety holes. It does have those fine-grained levers, plus simplicity and explicitness, so not that far away. Perhaps they'll get there by 1.0?
by hackthemack | 2025-10-04 18:43:33+00:00
You bring up an interesting point. This is something I discovered years ago when I would have "political discussion lunch" with three of my friends who all had very different political views. After years of going to lunch together and debating things like, "Was giving AT&T a monopoly in 1913, good, or bad?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingsbury_Commitment

The answer is... nobody will ever agree on anything. You can always cherry pick some detail to bolster your case, whatever it may be.

We can never visit the alternate reality where another choice was made and so you can not win an argument.

Now, you can go and find similar circumstances. You can find other countries who did not grant a monopoly (for instance). But then, your opponent will argue all the differences between that instance and what occurred.

Also, I think it is a shame your original reply is getting voted down. I am against people voting down comments just because they disagree. Voting down should be used for comments that are low quality.
by tptacek | 2025-10-04 18:45:04+00:00
I think you're going to find that working class people living in low and middle income neighborhoods do not agree with you about this. They're unhappy with how police response tends to traumatize the innocent in their neighborhoods, but they're even more unhappy with how police response appears only to halfheartedly address crime, which falls heavier (both in frequency and impact) on lower-income people than it does on the wealthy.

You can read meeting minutes from neighborhood and beat meetings to confirm this (there's probably lots of things you can read to confirm it, but the nerdiest way to do it is to get the raw data.)

A shorter way to say all of this: you're expressing a luxury belief.
by maccard | 2025-10-04 18:45:09+00:00
I completely agree. I've foudn that skill never goes away no matter how far you get. The trick is as you go higher up, spotting what comes next and knowing how to solve it faster.

> They get distracted, go on side quests, take too many tasks from people who aren't their manager, or avoid their manager's requests in favor of a task they find more interesting.

I had a great manager when I was fresh and I watched someone else on the team go down this path and succeed. I know now that the difference was that they knew what was going to bite us in 2 weeks/2 months, and that it was partially experience and partially they had info on where the project was going that I didn't. But had I looked at what they were doing and mimic'ed it, I would have failed.
by TZubiri | 2025-10-04 18:46:04+00:00
It's worth noting that there's nothing different between a stablecoin with a 1-to-1 ratio, and any entity that holds deposits. Like a bank Paypal, Stripe. Whether you call them Dollars or BrandDollars, if it has a 1to1 ratio, it's actually a dollar.

People are confused because they usually can't distinguish between net emission and gross emission, if you hold a deposit or a loan, you have increased the gross amount of dollars in the economy, but of course you have created an equivalent liability. There's no semantic or technical difference between loaning a dollar, holding a dollar in deposit, or issuing a dollar-equivalent token.
by Qem | 2025-10-04 18:46:07+00:00
> ...when we drain the planet dry of easily-accessible fossil fuels we’ve deprived any successor civilization of its opportunity to escape the planet.

On the flip side, that could also be plausibly a blessing, avoiding them to fall into the same trap of becoming too powerful before they get wise. These comics illustrate it: https://www.badspacecomics.com/post/grounded
by dillydogg | 2025-10-04 18:46:56+00:00
>Couldn’t it be pathogens that are kept in check by inflammation, which then also cause cancer to develop?

In reference to this question. These conditions with prolonged inflammation lead to cancer in the absence of a primary pathogen.

>Apparently, sometimes cancer cells contain fungal DNA (not well studied though, could be contaminants as well).

In reference to this, if you are referring to the "tumor microbiome" hypothesis, it has been thoroughly debunked.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1128/mbio.01607-23
by evanjrowley | 2025-10-04 18:47:59+00:00
Do they scencerely want to free themselves from Nvidia's dominance? If they do, then they could be sensible and expand support for GPU partitioning[0] in Windows. In addition to Nvidia, Microsoft could be using Intel Arc Graphics Virtualization[1] and AMD Instinct Virtualization[2] for their cloud workloads. Right now, they have a self-imposed limitation that limits it to Nvidia cards and Windows Server 2025.

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/virtualizat...

[1] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000...

[2] https://instinct.docs.amd.com/projects/virt-drv/en/latest/us...
by kanodiaayush | 2025-10-04 18:48:43+00:00
We are iterating fast and solving issues, indeed, and are aware of some problems.

It would be helpful to understand what you mean more precisely with the last line, particularly if you've experimented with this graph style and found it seriously inhibiting. Our assumption in fact isn't that the visual graph style is optimal for a LOT of depth. It is useful for some 'unknown' period of exploration. We have alternatively a tree representation of the same information, which we find becomes quickly better to use, once you have a lay of the topic and are more familiar with top level ideas. Then for specifi
by lnbharath | 2025-10-04 18:48:50+00:00
I wrote this after following the ongoing back-and-forth between Vercel and Cloudflare on Twitter- the benchmarks, the pricing arguments, the memes.

It struck me that the fight isn’t really about performance or cost; it’s about philosophy.

Cloudflare believes good developer experience starts with visibility and control. Vercel believes it starts with empathy and flow.

Curious how others here think about this: - Do you prefer abstraction or transparency when building? - Has either platform changed how you think about deploying or designing apps?
by martin-t | 2025-10-04 18:49:03+00:00
This is the key realization which is missing from talks about AI dangers.

Total surveillance used to be impossible because the government needed people to spy on other people. They needed to find somebody willing and pay them.

Now it can be automated.

The war won't be humans vs an AI controlling robots. It'll be humans vs the government and rich people controlling AI controlling robots.
by toastal | 2025-10-04 18:49:06+00:00
These are things to be critical of after post-React in the explosion of complexity, but I don’t think this is FP’s fault. I did a lot of FP front-end in the actual FP languages—not languages cosplying FP with JS or TS—& these communities (Elm, PureScript, followed js_of_ocaml, Reason, & the things Haskell was trying at the time) were not jumping on these same bandwagons of complexity but hoping to wrangle in some of it, usually focused on how the view should be a declarative representation of the state while pushing side-effects to the edges. There wasn’t talks of making CSS too complex, hydration, et. al. That JS/TS crowd however…
by rglullis | 2025-10-04 18:49:15+00:00
I do not buy this premise. I think it will end up being cheaper to simply run the LLMs directly on the user device.

I think that there are plenty of competitors in the "LLMs with open weights" space to essentially make the models a commodity, so all that is left is the compute cost and there is no way that someone will be running a datacenter in a way that is cheaper than "the computer that I already have running on my desk".
by quietbritishjim | 2025-10-04 18:49:17+00:00
To be clear about what I meant: I was saying that, in principle, it would be possible design a language or even library where all interruptable operations (at least timers and networking) can be cancelled from other threads. This can be done using a cancellation token mechanism which avoids even starting the operation of already cancelled token, in a way that avoids races (as you might imagine from a naive check of a token before starting the operation) if another thread cancels this one just as the operation is starting.

Now I've set (and possibly moved) the goalposts, I can prove my point: C# already does this! You can use async across multiple threads and cancellation happens with cancellation tokens that are thread safe. Having a version where interruptable calls are blocking rather than async (in the language sense) would actually be easier to implement (using the same async-capable APIs under the hood e.g., IOCP on Windows).
by creer | 2025-10-04 18:49:32+00:00
> Absolutely none of those can be measured

They can be estimated (with a wild range) and that's still useful: If that impact is clearly in the noise, drop it. If that impact is clearly huuuge then set up some ongoing measurements and get started step-wise and demonstrate results. If you think you need to rebuild the whole thing before seeing any results, you see the world in a way that won't happen (except if your business is not delivering solutions but is selling solutions - in which case carry on). That doesn't mean the ground idea is incorrect.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-10-04 18:49:50+00:00
Society has benefited hugely from copyright law. In fact, the first copyright laws were created in response to desires to have education material/a better educated society.

Saying 'disney/laws bad because I want billionaire corporation to have access to something they know they don't but built their business model around using anyway.' isn't saying anything but 'I want what I want'.

If anything society should take this slow and do it right, not throw out hundreds of years of thinking/decisions/progress because 'disney' and 'cool new tech'.

We should not bend/throw away laws because billion dollar industry chose to build a new business model around ignoring them. Down that path lies dystopia.
by collingreen | 2025-10-04 18:50:42+00:00
I like to say a startup is a business where growth is far and away the primary goal and it becomes a regular business as that shifts toward revenue or stability or specialization. I don't think it HAS to be VC but a big chunk of VC cash is a great way to bet everything on growth so it might be the defacto definition anyway and I'm splitting hairs.