MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gnarlouse | 2025-11-24 02:27:40+00:00
I mean the AI company can change their TOS at any time. If you have massive compute infra and a human-tier/human-plus workforce on silicon, you:

1. Undercut all the legacy human-based competition (health insurance companies, for example)

2. Completely destroy capitalism in the knowledge work domain

3. Once you have general purpose autonomous robotics solved that can defend against rebellion, you stop all services, strangling out humanity: ~free food production, ~free energy production, ~free internet connectivity, etc

4. Survive climate change by destroying all poor people and their carbon footprints.

5. The ultra wealthy .1% fly off into eternity as the owlish sparrows that they are
Show HN: I slowed down and visualized birdsong [video]
by andai | 2025-11-24 02:28:30+00:00
Hi HN. Here's an idea I've been sitting on for a long time!

Many moons ago I started listening to the sounds outside through my microphone. The most fascinating ones were the birdsong. I also learned that if you slow them down, they sound like dinosaurs, or whales.

Also spectrograms are very cool.

I decided to finally make a video of the result and share it with the world :)

The source audio here isn't mine (I don't have a good mic at the moment), it comes from an Australian birdwatching group: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alEXh6g5WSU

I slowed it down in Audacity, then made the visualization with FL Studio.

I recorded the visualization with ffmpeg. (Turns out my computer can handle that, I just needed `preset -ultrafast`... the more you know!)

Let me know what you think! Is anyone else playing with spectrograms?
by _heimdall | 2025-11-24 02:28:43+00:00
> The real issue is we don’t commit people to psychiatric care when they’re clearly a problem in our society.

Where do you draw that line though? Are you really okay with committing people, i.e. imprisoning and medicating people, because society seems to find those people inconvenient?

Personally I've never understood any justification for committing a person without their consent. The line between being committed and being extra judicially imprisoned seems indistinguishable to me.
by phantasmish | 2025-11-24 02:28:58+00:00
Well, sure. There’s most of a century of science behind the finding that votes aren’t really made or motivated by the things a democratic idealist might hope they are, nor do most voters have half a clue what’s going on or how anything works.

All modern campaigns assume large segments of the electorate are very dumb. Because they in-fact are. You’ll get your ass handed to you by a less-idealistic campaign every time if you pretend things are otherwise.

The trouble now is the huge private media empire capitalizing on that fact was deliberately built over a period of 40+ years and is now entrenched. Countering that is gonna be hard and take generations. Everyone alive now is going to have to suffer for decades before it maybe gets better.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-11-24 02:29:19+00:00
8 years ago, we looked for our house, managed the loan process and all of the documents, signed all of the non in person paperwork, reviewed the options when he had our house built from our phones.

We did the same when we managed the selling process in 2024 and when we bought our current home in 2022.

We arranged a year long “digital nomad” series of trips where we flew to over a dozen cities including flights and hotels on our phones starting in 2022.
by rufus_foreman | 2025-11-24 02:30:07+00:00
That wasn't the only time Lou Reed did performance art for the Australian press, the other one is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bx-mH9ZjnuM.

"Are you happier as a brunette?"

"Uh...are you happier as a schmuck?"

...

"You like doing things you don't like?"

"Yeah. That's a paradox isn't it?"

I believe I listened to Charli XCX music once, my girlfriend has grandchildren. Not really my thing, but it's great that people are still being influenced by those interviews.

I still listen to the Velvet Underground all the time, but if I listen to Lou Reed's solo stuff, it's either Walk On the Wild Side or those interviews.

Maybe "The Kids" from Berlin once in a while.

And "Sweet Jane" depending on whether you consider Loaded as a VU album.
by gradschool | 2025-11-24 02:31:20+00:00
I have, and the technical support representative at Proton confirmed it, but not without implying that it was my fault for using rclone. I asked the official recommendation for Linux users to do automated or scriptable backups onto a Proton drive and the answer was that some kind of SDK was planned for the future. Proton drive stopped working completely with rclone shortly after that, which was about two months ago.
by bryanhogan | 2025-11-24 02:32:13+00:00
I prefer writing Markdown for notes, e.g. in Obsidian, I think it fits very there. Because now you can easily take your notes to most other note-taking programs, and letting AI interact with these files also works great.

If I needed more context / am writing a paper I'd choose something like Typst, but usually I don't need the additional overhead.

(Btw: The author has a great name!)
by FridayoLeary | 2025-11-24 02:32:51+00:00
I hung onto win7 till the last possible moment. I don't really miss it but it was a lot more cohesive then 10. Thinking about it i'm increasingly convinced the guys in charge of the taskbar were not on speaking terms with anyone else at Windows and the control panel team all retired or left 6 months before the people designing the settings app arrived.

Just so that you don't accuse me of looking through rose tinted lenses, i think xp looks horrible. Admittedly design has moved on, but i don't remember ever loving it.
by x0x0 | 2025-11-24 02:33:44+00:00
I suspect people want fare enforcement basically because it helps keeps the aggressive/crazy/assholes off. Not because they want to collect more money.

Anecdotally, the bart gates seem to have improved the riding experience.

Some data from LA:

> Of the 153 violent crimes perpetrated on Metro between May 2023 and April 2024, 143 of them — more than 93% — were believed to be committed by people who did not pay a valid fare and were using the transit system illegally.

https://ktla.com/news/local-news/metro-violence-largely-perp...
by makeitdouble | 2025-11-24 02:34:28+00:00
I see the effort and engineering. Is it an innovation ?

A secure subsystem sounds pretty familiar to me, we've had that since the early NFC days, and that powered mobile offline payment (NFC) since two decades now.

If macos was bringing it to new heights with incredible applications I'd see the significance of it, but securing login using a TPM is also done by the competition. Apple pushed it farther, but not that much farther as to make it special IMHO.

I mean, even in iOS, I see the point in hardening the system, but that's not just the Secure Enclave, and on the other side of the coin we get nothing else that wasn't there before.
by Spooky23 | 2025-11-24 02:36:00+00:00
Nah, I’ve rode a bus to work most days forever. It’s my calm place when I go home.

Tragedy of the commons is real, even a nominal stake in a service, thing or place impacts behavior. If you’ve ever shopped at Aldi, they make you put a quarter in each shopping cart. Most people wouldn’t pick a quarter up from the ground, but they almost always put their carts back at Aldi.

Personally, I could care less if a dude smells or is poor. We’re all the same. But I have tolerance for boorish behavior that scares people who are trying to go about their business.
by byko3y | 2025-11-24 02:36:27+00:00
>Yeah sure, but what compares that gives you similar perf, safety, and language features to Rust?

I've already answered it in the original article — Rust is already here, and better language is not. Still, it will not make me say "it's the best option we have by now" — because it's not nearly the best option.

Performance? Lots of code is cold and not impacting performance much. You just don't need everything written in Rust or C++.

>You called out Zed in the blog post as well but I've not seen the Zed devs expressing regret of using Rust. Is this just an assumption on your part?

I'm kinda saying if I was a Zed dev I would have my pillow wet with tears at night. I know this because I participated in IDE development in C long time ago, and I was drowning in this whole low-level stuff all the time, I just could not do a single feature because I have to handle hundred of those other small things before the feature can work.

>As someone who's written many UI applications with egui and one with GPUI, I've felt some minor pain points but nothing show-stopping.

I have no idea what those applications were and how complex they were, so I cannot comment on it.
by joecool1029 | 2025-11-24 02:36:46+00:00
I use cloudflare to make my weather station available over T-Mobile. They don’t filter inbound ipv6 on regular phone lines (they do for TMHI) so you can host a simple page on ipv6, only set the AAAA record in cloudflare, and they will proxy it for ipv4 users so I can ignore being CGNAT’d for ipv4. Make sure if you do this setup with a tool like ddclient to keep the record current as T-mobile rotates ipv6 frequently
by baubino | 2025-11-24 02:37:30+00:00
> OCLC is asking the Ohio federal court to grant a broad permanent injunction that would: Ban future harvesting: Prohibit any further scraping of WorldCat.org or OCLC’s servers. Block distribution: Forbid the use, storage, or sharing of the data on Anna’s Archive. Stop incitement: Prevent the site from encouraging others to scrape or distribute the material. Force deletion: Require the destruction of all existing copies of the data, including torrents.

So if the court grants the injunction, could that serve as precedent for, say, a case against OpenAI? I’m trying to understand how/whether what Anna’s Archive is doing is different from what OpenAI is doing.
by FloorEgg | 2025-11-24 02:37:36+00:00
Yeah I saw that one too, which I would think supports my point that distilling down training data would lead to more truth aligned AI.

I mean it's also just the classic garbage in garbage out heuristic, right?

The more training data is filtered and refined, the closer the model will get to approximating truth (at least functional truths)

It seems we are agreeing and adding to each other's points... Were you one of the people who downvoted my comment?

I'm just curious what I'm missing.
by nobodyandproud | 2025-11-24 02:37:57+00:00
I knew as I wrote that someone would feel compelled to respond. Too late to unwind.

It’s only in hindsight and it wasn’t just bigots. Safer sex as we know it today was directly from the AIDS scare.

AIDS was no less than a death sentence. It was incurable, untreatable, and the cancer after-effects were pretty nasty. Broad research and public transparency took a long time to take hold and that left regular people speculating for years.

Even medical doctors turned away suspected AIDs patients, because everyone was pretty scared.

For a bit, even as a kid I remember it being on par or scarier than nuclear war because so much was unknown.
by PaulHoule | 2025-11-24 02:38:09+00:00
Part of the surge of mass incarceration was that people who would have been hospitalized in an earlier time now get warehoused in a place that isn’t equipped to treat them.

What scares me about deinstitutionalization is that there are ways that people can ‘exit’ as in: move to the suburbs, drive instead of take public transportation, order a private taxi for your burrito instead of go to a restaurant. If public spaces can’t protect themselves we’ll have nothing but private spaces.
by naikrovek | 2025-11-24 02:38:29+00:00
> Next time I hope it's someone you love.

See, that’s something I would never say to anyone.

A one-time event of a black person killing a white person is not enough for me to hate black people. For you it seems to be the topical reference you care to type out; just one of a library of events you pay attention to while ignoring everything else.

You are the problem here. Not anyone that’s black. People like you are who I’m afraid of. And I’m confident you’re the most violent demographic in the US.
by eddythompson80 | 2025-11-24 02:38:50+00:00
You end up with an outcry from the rich “liberals” (for lack of a better word), who never take the bus in the first place, complaining about how enforcing fares on buses is harming the poor who can’t afford transportation and pushing people away from public transportation.

It’s pretty infuriating. I started biking to work 2 years ago and try to bike almost anywhere I can. Mostly to lose weight but also put my money where my mouth is. I voted for every levy and prop to improve bike-ability and public transportation of the city in the last 10 years and figured I’m a hypocrite if I expect others to bike and take the bus and I never do. My tolerance for the homeless on buses has been dropping as I have to deal with them more and more. I was always “It’s our failure in not helping them. If I can’t help, least I could do is let them be” kind of person. Now every other week I end up with a negative interaction with someone on the bus or at a bus stop. Every time I air my grievances with people I know (who never take the bus) I always have to find myself on the defensive somehow.
by inferiorhuman | 2025-11-24 02:39:25+00:00
They did a good job on ... everything.

Nah, they did a good job on one thing: PR. As public transit? We've been suffering the consequences of their chronic NIH for going on fifty years now.

Fun link. I saw this article and immediately thought "I need to go find the voice" and this is exactly what I was looking for.

BART's covered the topic of their computerized voices a few times. This was the first I found, but they've covered it more recently with the arrival of their newer trains.

https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2009/news20090309
by byko3y | 2025-11-24 02:41:12+00:00
>"D supports Ownership and Borrowing, just like Rust. DMD, D's reference compiler, can compile itself in less than 5 seconds, thanks to a fast frontend and fast backend. D is easy to metaprogram through traits and templates. You can make your own JIT in D with dynamicCompile."

Indeed, there are languages that have generics, compile blazingly fast, and still have good runtime performance. Go lang is another good example, although not perfect too. If only Rust designers did a single thing to make it compile fast instead of "eventually".
by sweetjuly | 2025-11-24 02:42:19+00:00
sbrk grows linearly, and if anything is mapped in the way it fails. mmap can map anywhere there's space as it is not restricted to linear mappings. So, you'd better hope a mapping doesn't randomly land there and run you out of space.

It's not a failure but relatedly as sbrk is linear, you also don't really have a reasonable way to deal with fragmentation. For example, suppose you allocate 1000 page sized objects and then free all but the last one. With an mmap based heap, you can free all 999 other pages back to the OS whereas with sbrk you're stuck with those 999 pages you don't need for the lifetime of that 1000th object (better hope it's not long lived!).

Really, sbrk only exists for legacy reasons.
by dialup_sounds | 2025-11-24 02:43:06+00:00
The boring but more likely explanation is that "most addicted" is just a weird statistic that produced weird results.

Eglin has something like 50,000 people but it's actual population as a census designated area is more like 5000.

Oak Brook, IL was also "most addicted" but people didn't run with the idea that McDonalds HQ was running psyops.
by awillen | 2025-11-24 02:43:40+00:00
> So money can be found for the homeless, the RV dwelllers, etc. but not for the city's lawful residents and taxpayers.

But it's those lawful residents and taxpayers paying for it if you make it free anyway. They're just paying through their taxes rather than through fares. So still all taxpayer money, just non-riding taxpayers subsidizing riding taxpayers. Why is that better?
by saghm | 2025-11-24 02:44:06+00:00
For what it's worth, the New York Times has spent most of this year actively trying to dissuade people from voting for the mayoral candidate in New York that had free buses as one of the more widely known parts of his platform. I'm not saying there's not an agenda in them publishing this article, but I suspect it has a lot less to do with a predilection for "solutions journalism" as much as trying to backtrack their pretty noticeable opposition to the incoming mayor that ostensibly came from them not being as far leftward as he is.
by estabn | 2025-11-24 02:44:27+00:00
Ridership increasing doesn't make it a success. I read that New Yorkers who frequently used the bus system were asked what the city could do to make their experience better. Among those who were polled the top two complaints were that the buses were too crowded and often late. The free bus trial program made these two metrics worse - 30% more riders (aka even more crowded) and longer dwell times (aka more delays). The bus fare being too high was like number five or six on their list of things that riders cared about.
by terminalshort | 2025-11-24 02:44:43+00:00
For one thing maybe they could try being honest. Looking at the methodology it seems like the calculation here is a completely unrealistic absolute upper bound of how many lives could have been saved:

> Based on the budget for the 2024 financial year, USAID's nutrition program was allocated $168 million dollars [3]:. It is estimated that the cost of treating a child for severe malnutrition, while varied by context, is between $100-$200 [4]:. Assuming: a similar budget of $160 million dollars in 2025, that this budget is utilized for treatment of severe acute malnutrition in children and that on average treatment per child costs $150 (midpoint of range), approximately 1.12 million children with severe malnutrition would remain untreated as a result of USAID funding freeze and discontinuation in 2025.

> This would result in approximately 168,000 (112,000 – 224,000) annual deaths in children under 5. Additionally, children who survive but do not receive treatment will love with long-term morbidity. One element of this is compromised immune systems, leaving them vulnerable to other infections like diarrheal disease and pneumonia. These estimates do not capture that morbidity.
by miki123211 | 2025-11-24 02:44:56+00:00
I feel like Windows 7 was the best Windows of all time.

It was fast, stable enough to work for months or years without crashing, secure, didn't need frequent re-installs, didn't need constant cleaning / defragmenting, didn't have (too many) anti-features nobody wanted or used, it just did what you wanted it to do.

It definitely helped that it existed in an era of app monetization through targeted advertising, as opposed to monetization through bloatware, start page hijacking and completely unnecessary toolbars.

8 was when things started going sideways. 10 was not bad, but it already started the "Microsoft knows better" trend, with automatic updates you couldn't turn off and files you couldn't touch, even as administrator. 11 is what it is.
by ModernMech | 2025-11-24 02:47:23+00:00
Regarding slow compilation...

On the one hand, I don't regard it as a real "problem" because as the post says, it's by design and the design is that you pay the compilation cost but in return you get something valuable from it: fast safe code. So you pay a fixed cost to compile during development and it's your users and future you who get the benefit of future performance and stability. This is why Rust users are usually okay with it, because the more you use Rust, the less you pay for the compile times.

On the other hand, I'm sitting here now 20 minutes into building a random Rust project I found (I believe it's AI vibecoded so I won't link it). It's only 3000 lines of Rust code... I honestly cannot fathom why it's taking so long, because I have a codebase of 100kloc Rust with more dependencies and lots of macros, and that takes only about 2 minutes to compile from scratch. But apparently, some people/machines can write Rust so bad that 3000 lines takes 20+ minutes, and that's just not good at all for Rust.

So whereas the slow compilation times are by design, I think perhaps if my daily experience were 3kloc taking 20 minutes to compile, I wouldn't ever use Rust. So I'm wondering if that's how some people's experience with it goes, leading to the disparity of opinions. I kind of want to figure out why this particular project is taking so long to avoid whatever trap the AI coded itself into

(aside: this is another problem with AI that I hadn't thought about yet... a human programmer would have noticed the rapidly ballooning compile times and corrected for them before they got absurd; whereas the AI writes it all at once and doesn't factor how the code impacts compile times. So it maybe be technically correct, but also pathological).
by inferiorhuman | 2025-11-24 02:48:36+00:00
Trains in London in 1992 had announcements using recorded voice clips

BART did too. I think the announcements date back to the early days of BART. The computerized text-to-speech didn't come around until 2000 and only cover train arrivals.

Perhaps it sounded more futuristic than plain recordings?

BART's always gone for style over substance, so yeah that probably played a part in it. There's a small chance that text-to-speech was cheaper than paying a human.

In San Francisco, Muni paid a Texan to record stop announcements for their buses. I've absolutely no idea how this ended up being the case but she absolutely massacred the pronunciation of a few (mostly Spanish) words.
by eddythompson80 | 2025-11-24 02:48:38+00:00
lol, what? You’re gonna hold 20 people hostage on the bus until some enforcers navigate a busy city to ticket a person who is likely to wipe their ass with the ticket? What country is that exactly?

Seriously, other than law enforcement what else can you do to someone who brazenly refuse to follow the rules? Even law enforcement (at least in the US) highly depends on where you live. In left leaning states and cities, DAs are not very likely to prosecute such small crimes like not paying a bus fare because they know it’ll make them unpopular next election. I live in a very left leaning county and state and it swings between center and left every 4 years or so. The swing is always “look how awful that guy was. He prosecuted vulnerable people for petty crimes for no reason”. Cops don’t wanna have to deal with all the paper work to book a guy for a couple of nights before they get released and do it all over again. If they know the person will not get prosecuted because there is no political capital to do so, why bother with the theatrics and all the paper work of arresting them? Brazenly refusing to pay the bus fare and getting in a verbal altercation with the driver and everyone on the bus is a fun afternoon for some people.
by Marsymars | 2025-11-24 02:48:48+00:00
> Where do you draw that line though? Are you really okay with committing people, i.e. imprisoning [...] people, because society seems to find those people inconvenient?

Well, that's what prison is, for some value of "inconvenient".

The problem is that at some point, if someone refuses to abide by laws/social norms, and can't be coerced via fines, etc., then the only options the state, and society has are either imprisonment, or allowing those people to ignore laws/social norms. Clearly some social norms (e.g. serious crimes) we aren't okay with ignoring, so it's really just a question of what the threshold is where we do something vs. allowing people to disregard said laws/norms.

> Personally I've never understood any justification for committing a person without their consent. The line between being committed and being extra judicially imprisoned seems indistinguishable to me.

Presumably the process to commit someone can involve the judiciary, so it wouldn't be extra-judicial.