MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by treetalker | 2025-11-13 17:02:54+00:00
My pet view is that the fundamental flaw in the Constitution is its decreasing ability to enable coordinated change as population grows and more states enter the Union. Thus, change becomes progressively more difficult over time, whereas changes are increasingly necessary as time passes.

Yes, one of its main goals was to make change difficult. But political-party and legislator capture of the system has taken hold (easy example: representatives now pick their voters) and coordinating amendments we need is nigh impossible.

Periodic constitutional conventions would have helped.
by philwelch | 2025-11-13 17:03:10+00:00
> It is abundantly clear the USA is no longer a dependable ally, and that it will use all kinds of strings attached to hobble what they sell to be able to exert political pressure.

This isn’t a US-only problem, and if anything the US has been more reliable on this account than some major European countries. For instance, in the first several months of the war Germany actually prohibited other countries from exporting their own surplus Leopard tanks to Ukraine.
by conradev | 2025-11-13 17:03:31+00:00
If you've been a developer long enough, you might recall the teletype package for Atom—both built by Zed's founders.

I first experienced this in SubEthaEdit in 2013 or so, but it has been around since the early 2000s:

Appropriately working together on a truly collaborative tool, Martin Ott, Martin Pittenauer, Dominik Wagner, and Ulrich Bauer of Technische Universitat Munchen won the Best Mac OS X Student Project for Hydra 1.0.1, a Rendezvous-based text editor that enables multiple people to contribute to a shared document. (Adam and about ten other attendees at MacHack used Hydra to take notes during this year’s Hack Contest.)

It seems like the "unlock" here that makes it different this time is organization-wide sharing.

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

https://tidbits.com/2003/06/30/apple-announces-design-awards...
by larkost | 2025-11-13 17:03:45+00:00
I haven't used Jenkins in a few years, so some of this might change, but in working with it I saw that Jenkins has a few fundamental flaws that I don't see them as working to change:

1. There is no central database to coordinate things. Rather it tries to manage serialization of important bits to/from XML for a lot of things, for a lot of concurrent processes. If you ever think you can manage concurrency better than MySQL/Postgres, you should examine your assumptions.

2. In part because of the dance-of-the-XMLs, when a lot of things are running at the same time Jenkins starts to come to a crawl, so you are limited on the number of worker nodes. At my last company that used Jenkins they instituted rules to keep below 100 worker nodes (and usually less than that) per Jenkins. This lead to fleets of Jenkins servers (and even a Jenkins server to build Jenkins servers as a service), and lots of wasted time for worker nodes.

3. "Everything is a plugin" sounds great, but it winds up with lots of plugins that don't necessarily work with each other, often in subtle ways. In the community this wound up with blessed sets of plugins that most people used, and then you gambled with a few others you felt you needed. Part of this problem is the choice of XMLs-as-database, but it goes farther than that.

4. The way the server/client protocol works is to ship serialized Java processes to the client, which then runs it, and reserializes the process to ship back at the end. This is rather than having something like RPC. This winds up being very fragile (e.g.: communications breaks were a constant problem), makes troubleshooting a pain, and prevents you from doing things like restarting the node in the middle of a job (so you usually have Jenkins work on a Launchpad, and have a separate device-under-test).

Some of these could be worked on, but there seemed to be no desire in the community to make the large changes that would be required. In fact there seemed to be pride in all of these decisions, as if they were bold ideas that somehow made things better.
by tracker1 | 2025-11-13 17:03:57+00:00
But the runtime is in the base image, so that is shared across all deployed services on the a single host system(s). So it's much less of an issue, also, the entire runtime isn't loaded into RAM for every application. From Task manager in windows, I'm running a local app in debug/dev mode and it's taking 226mb ram, which is a lot compared to IIRC well under 20mb for the last rust-axum project I wrote.

That said, you get a lot of functionality in the box and nearby out of that extra resource usage and it doesn't really grow by much under load.

Beyond that, there's nothing particularly wrong about having a mostly monolithic backend for a lot of things, I would say most applications are better served starting with a more monolithic backend in a mono-repo with the FE.
by jrockway | 2025-11-13 17:04:09+00:00
I think that connecting outlying areas (especially ones you the railroad build yourself) to department stores is what got Japanese rail companies going, but it's probably less important now than it was initially. Farebox revenue covers profitable operation of the railroad. It even appears to cover upgrades; browse around on the satellite view of Tokyo and you can see many private companies moving their above-ground infrastructure to (expensive!) subways because ... trains hitting cars interferes with their ability to earn money. It is honestly something that I have trouble wrapping my head around. The business is so good you can afford to make it better, but the business is a commuter train? Weird!

I think Japan is successful because of a less pervasive car culture than the US. People expect to walk 30 minutes to the train in the morning, that's just something you do. It would be unheard of in the US (and also dangerous in many suburbs, because they are designed to move as many giant SUVs as possible per hour, not to let pedestrians and cyclists get to the train station).

Also, a big caveat is ... all of this is Tokyo and Osaka, very large, rich, and dense cities. When you go out into the middle of nowhere in Japan (even an hour out of Tokyo, think the Hachikō line, etc.), rail service kind of sucks and is subsidized heavily.
by standardly | 2025-11-13 17:04:10+00:00
GPT-5.1 IS a smarter, more conversational ChatGPT, and I love that you mentioned it - you're really getting down to the heart - to the very essence - of how conversational ChatGPT can be.

Would you like me to write a short, to-the-point HN post to really emphasize how conversational GPT-5.1 can be?
by bko | 2025-11-13 17:05:14+00:00
I think comparison shopping works great, even with health related things. When you pay out of pocket, like for Lasik or cosmetic surgery, it works. And most medical expenses are non-emergency.

There exists asymmetry in all markets. I don't know anything about cars, but I take it to a mechanic. I get a quote, and ask around and eventually some mutually beneficial trade happens.

The market aspects of healthcare work well but so much of it is not a market and the third party payer system. Try asking a doctor what somethings costs, they will look at you like you have two heads. They have no clue.

The fact is healthcare today is not a market, not even close. Things that are a market generally work well (supermarkets, mechanics, cosmetic surgery). We should have healthcare become more of a market. As just one example a healthcare provider cannot open up in many states without a "certificate of need"

> Certificate of need (CON) laws are state regulatory mechanisms for approving major capital expenditures and projects for certain health care facilities. In a state with a CON program, a health planning agency or other entity must approve the creation of new health care facilities or the expansion of an existing facility’s services in a specified area. CON programs primarily aim to control health care costs by restricting duplicative services and determining whether new capital expenditures meet a community need.

Imagine to open a restaurant you would need to go to some board and argue how your restaurant is needed in this neighborhood, or the idea that opening a restaurant would INCREASE restaurant prices by offering duplicative services. Madness!

https://www.ncsl.org/health/certificate-of-need-state-laws
by runako | 2025-11-13 17:05:27+00:00
> This ability to tack random unrelated legislation onto a bill makes no sense to me.

"Legislation" is the "bill," which is what makes this problematic. At a high level, the only thing that relates the first page of a bill to the 10th page of the same bill is the fact that they are both included in the same document. This is definitional stuff.

Congress could choose to appropriate funds for each department in a separate bill. One could then easily take the POV that it's swampy to tack on the education funding legislation to the defense appropriations bill.
by stingraycharles | 2025-11-13 17:05:28+00:00
Reminds me of a co-founder of an adtech company I know. They are a platform that buys inventory using automated trading, mostly mobile, and they realized that most of their customers were all clickfraud / scammers / etc. He didn’t want to go into too much detail.

But he shrugged it off.

I bet there are quite a few shops online that may sell gift cards that are used in money laundering schemes. Bonus points if they accept bitcoin.

But those are all quite implicitly used by cybercrime. I can imagine there are quite a few tools at their disposal that are much more explicit.
by rmunn | 2025-11-13 17:05:29+00:00
As for how it improves security, I'm going to hazard a guess that many of the people sending zikduruqe those messages hadn't previously set up a PGP key. So by asking for the public key and refusing to send them the credentials until he receives it, he's forcing them to set one up, which then makes it possible for them to do things like sign messages. Just making someone set up a keypair doesn't mean they'll use it correctly, but it's hard to argue against the idea that a company's security posture is improved when more people have PGP keys.
by poszlem | 2025-11-13 17:06:15+00:00
Saying that joint EU debt already exists doesn’t really address the argument. The issue is not whether the EU has ever issued shared debt before. It is about whether member states are actually willing to expand that model in a politically sensitive area where the financial burden is uneven.

Germany is not objecting out of confusion about past instruments. It is objecting because a broader program of joint debt would place more longterm financial exposure on Germany, and it does not want to carry that load. Other countries support the idea precisely because it would distribute that cost more widely. That conflict keeps resurfacing every time the topic comes up.

You could just as easily point to other examples that show the same thing. Spain isn’t eager to pour money into the defense of Eastern Europe because it doesn’t feel the Russian threat the same way. And plenty of countries in Central and Eastern Europe push back hard when it comes to sharing the burden on migration, because they see that as a Southern European problem.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-11-13 17:06:17+00:00
> life is full of people doing harms and malicious actors, but we don't let Google or any other company gatekeep our lives

Yeah, you're certainly not speaking for malware victims here. android is not your life, so google gatekeeping android (actually only google approved builds) is not gatekeeping your life.

You certainly should be able to load an alternative OS. isn't that what lineage and other android distributions do already?
by dmix | 2025-11-13 17:06:43+00:00
European countries becoming more capable of defending themselves by scaling up their own military instead of being dependent on a foreign power will only harden containment of bad actors. That applies to my country Canada.

What's much riskier to the world is the US having to take the brunt of defending Europe, the Arctic front, and dealing with a conflict in China (which is far far more serious military threat than Russia in 2025).

It's difficult medicine to swallow but that's the realpolitiks of it.
by pessimizer | 2025-11-13 17:06:47+00:00
> it's just one side is ignorant of the distinctions being made.

> No, Lumper-vs-Splitter doesn't simply boil down to plain ignorance.

If I can boil it down to my own interpretation: when this argument occurs, both sides usually know exactly what each other are talking about, but one side is demanding that the distinction being drawn should not be important, while the other side is saying that it is important to them.

To me, it's "Lumpers" demanding that everyone share their value system, and "Splitters" saying that if you remove this terminology, you will make it more difficult to talk about the things that I want to talk about. My judgement about it all is that "Lumpers" are usually intentionally trying to make it more difficult to talk about things that they don't like or want to suppress, but pretending that they aren't as a rhetorical deceit.

All terminology that makes a useful distinction is helpful. Any distinction that people use is useful. "Lumpers" are demanding that people not find a particular distinction useful.

Your "apparent L's" are almost always feigning misunderstanding. It's the "why do you care?" argument, which is almost always coming from somebody who really, really cares and has had this same pretend argument with everybody who uses the word they don't like.
by jijijijij | 2025-11-13 17:06:51+00:00
As if the US influence was built on charity for poor Europe... It's been all Red Scare and geopolitical power play. The US influence was nothing but intrinsically motivated. The only reason Germany was allowed to be rebuilt was its function as east bloc barrier.

The current US government is throwing away a world power status of unimaginable costs, which literally took almost a century to build. For better or worse, but let's not spin fairy tales about the why and when.
by Aperocky | 2025-11-13 17:07:04+00:00
I think the most difficult question are going to be how do you constraint that core feature without ever wanting to add more to it?

For instance, collaboration is a huge topic. You can have coding collaboration on the file, and that would be basic and appropriate, you can then replicate slack and you'll have chat rooms, which is entering creep territory, but it's natural! Then soon the chat room will need to link with issues and you can now have TODOs linked to some kanban board and we should be able to speak while we code on the same file! And this goes on and on.

It's exceedingly rare that the organization found hard courage to specifically avoid features that looks like easy pickings for the purpose of avoiding them.
by torginus | 2025-11-13 17:07:05+00:00
They literally went from an exoskeleton based truck bent into shape to an aluminium truck whose interior frame shatters on impact instead of the panels absorbing the hit - so instead of having to replace cheap plastic trim and collision absorbing metal bars, the energy gets dissipated inside the (almost unrepairable) aluminium frame.

Additionally, they didn't manage to find a satisfactory solution to attach the steel panels to the frame so they glued them on.

I suspect the 'parts falling off' has something to do with the inflexibility of both materials as well as the different thermal expansion coefficients.

On normal cars, bodywork is either made of flexible plastic, or is attached via spring joints so that the vibration doesn't damage them - that's why you have panel gaps - so they can move around a bit.

If you fix them rigidly, they're going to shake off eventually.
by lrvick | 2025-11-13 17:07:07+00:00
OpenSSH keys were only meant for signing OpenSSH connection handshakes. They were meant for authentication, not signing long lived data. This is why PGP has distinct authentication and signing subkey types which can have different policies and permissions.

Using ssh authentication keys to also sign software is a total hack, and worse, means you are now using a single key for multiple distinct use cases without a subkey system, CA, or rotation strategy, or the ability to revoke a key for one use case without compromising others or forcing a full keychan rotation.

Telling people to use a single private keypair for many unrelated use cases has always been short-sighted cryptography advice and still is.

I get that gpg UX is remarkably bad and makes everyone want to run screaming from PGP, but modern tooling exists now and for all the things the PGP spec got wrong, it got a lot more right.

Watching new solutions get wrong the few things PGP got right as an answer to PGP is kind of infuriating.
by tgv | 2025-11-13 17:07:08+00:00
I'll repeat it again: you don't always want a relational database. Sometimes you need a document-oriented one. It matches quite a lot of use cases, e.g. when there aren't really interesting relations, or when the structures are very deep. That can be really annoying in SQL.

> when there's even mongo-api compatible Postgres solutions

With their own drawbacks.
by myrmidon | 2025-11-13 17:07:20+00:00
An interesting take, but I think it goes a bit too far; you don't need to be a porn or gambling addict for increasingly available screen-based entertainment/interaction to "leech" time and motivation that you would otherwise spend with humans instead.

I'd be hesitant with value judgements, but this is most certainly going to affect our society massively (from decreased reproduction rates alone if nothing else).

I feel there must have been smaller similar trends in the past with easily obtainable written entertainment (books).
by tracker1 | 2025-11-13 17:07:29+00:00
It's not that hard to create a C# wrapper class if you need to hold on to pointers that need to be cleaned up by the C code... you can keep a private property reference and call the appropriate C code as part of your Destructor or IDisposable implementation.

If you're wanting to use a C library, yeah, you need to manage how you use that C library, this is true regardless of the language you are using, it isn't magic.
by mothballed | 2025-11-13 17:07:50+00:00
The wealthy weed stock / dispensary people wanted it as much as anything else. Note many of the senators voting against the amendment to fix it, were pro-marijuana senators from legal weed states.

Hemp was a way for mom and pops to get in the game because the regulatory overhead was much lower. They were small private operators that could enter with low start-up costs, in a free-market like environment.

No one could have seriously thought it was going to last. The likes of Philip Morris type enterprises who pay a gazillion dollars for state dispensary licensing, state chain of custody, zoning, permits, state testing, etc are not going to just let some guy in his basement start shipping out THCa hemp with nothing more than a couple hundred dollars in capital and a Square terminal, no they're going to call on their contacts to ban it.

History shows us time and time again the state will destroy the free market and create regulations that don't actually help people but rather ensure the barriers are such that their wealthy friends will capture almost all the profits.
by stoumann | 2025-11-13 17:08:03+00:00
I just launched my first iOS app - yes it's a todo list app, but it's clean and simple without any clutter.

I have looked for an app that could give me exactly this for a long time but i couldn't find one i liked, so i made my own.

https://nauu.app - link to appstore inside

Let me know what you think! I would love some feedback!
by englishrookie | 2025-11-13 17:08:13+00:00
Right now, Russia's hands are conveniently tied by their incompetently fought war in Ukraine.

In the mean time, most major EU countries have increased their defense budgets. Some of the larger ones, most notably Germany, are considering to reintroduce conscription. Within about five years, the EU will be able to withstand Russia without any aid from the USA.

In fact, right now, Poland would be able to withstand the Russians on their own. Mind you, they would not be able to defeat the Russians, but they would give them a beating and repel any invasion of Poland.
by potato3732842 | 2025-11-13 17:09:28+00:00
The senate kind of makes more sense the bigger the country is. You need something that essentially represents each whole state as a unit. This is also why they originally weren't directly elected.

When you consider that the OG federal government mostly dealt in issues that were common to the states or very clearly interstate the reason they chose the architecture they did for the senate seems even more sensible. They were meant to bicker about sending Marines to the desert and settling Ohio, not about how individuals could use certain plants (seems like a fitting example considering the source here) or the minutia of exactly what sort of infrastructure ought to get federal subsidy.
by alephnerd | 2025-11-13 17:09:38+00:00
Run-on sentences - like the one OP mentioned - are treated as a grammatical error, and the kinds of issues that lead to punctuation errors are themselves grammatical in nature (think mismanaged independent clauses).

Just because OP is being snotty doesn't mean you aren't as well. If I were grading either of you guys in an academic context (which I spent sleepless nights on in my academic career) I wouldn't have given either of you guys marks on this specific question because you are ignoring the prompt and not engaging with the content.
by khuey | 2025-11-13 17:10:30+00:00
What actually happened is that a group of squishy Democrats and Angus King didn't actually want the filibuster nuked so when they realized Republicans weren't going to extend the ACA subsidies they called the whole thing off without even reading the bill they were going to pass.

The hemp ban isn't even the shadiest part, the self-dealing of allowing certain Senators who were connected to a putsch to loot the treasury is even more egregious.
by theladybug | 2025-11-13 17:10:32+00:00
As a long time Japanese learner, I've always wanted there to be a simple, free online trainer for learning and grinding Japanese kanji and vocabulary - like Monkeytype in the typing community (fun fact: we actually have 2 Monkeytype devs on our team now!). I'm doing this because I grew tired of all the subscriptions and paywalls, which are unfortunately very common in the Japanese learning apps market. That's why I want to make the most fun, user-friendly and customizable platform for learning Japanese currently available, and the first one that is (and will be, forever) completely free, ad-free and open-source - driven not by profit, but made by the community, for the community.

We already managed to get around 600 stars on GitHub and about 7k monthly users for the app. That being said, I recognize that the app is still in its very early alpha stages and is, objectively speaking, behind paid Japanese learning solutions (at least for now) - which is why I want to change that and make it the first entirely free and open-source platform for learning Japanese to provide a real, high-quality alternative to all the current paid Japanese learning resources, which I believe we can achieve with the open-source community's help. Why am I doing this? Because weebs deserve to have a free, open-source learning platform too (I'm one of them, don't judge...)

どうもありがとうございます!