MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by forgotoldacc | 2025-11-23 04:58:29+00:00
Fly over America and you'll see that it's basically all farmland , paved over, or desert. Lots of roads have trees lining them because the space between them is hard to use. Go up in an airplane above those roads and you'll see there isn't too many truly thick forest, outside of mountains where it's hard to build things. Alternatively, pan around the world with google maps. America is only about 33% forest.

And even then, insects don't only live in forests. They live in fields, marshes, all sorts of terrain. And it's overwhelmingly tamed and sterilized.
by biztos | 2025-11-23 04:58:46+00:00
I’m working on a couple apps using Typescript and for me (ex-JS hacker coming back to it after some years) it’s still an insane menu of bad choices and new “better” frameworks, some of which are abandoned before you get done reading the docs. Though I get that it probably moved faster a few years ago.

I settled on what seemed like the most “standard” set of things (marketable skills blabla) and every week I read an article about how that stack is dead, and everybody supposedly uses FancyStack now.

Adding insult to injury, I have relearned the fine art of inline styles. I assume table layouts are next.

To lurch back on topic: I’m doing this for AI-related stuff and yes, the AI pace of change is much worse, but they sure do make a nice feedback loop.
by diogenescynic | 2025-11-23 05:00:09+00:00
>That also ends up being a pretty good predictor of who thinks masks were supposed to protect the wearer versus who thinks they were to try and slow down the transmission rate from infected people.

You're projecting. I fully understand the goal, but all the evidence shows they did nothing (air still escapes, people wear them incorrectly, the virus was never even proven to be airborne). They were telling people to take their masks off between bites/eating at restaurants. It was security theater. People who don't understand this just take safety in following the herd. They certainly aren't exhibiting critical thinking skills.

You also don't understand how to compare apples to apples. How did those death rates change from 2021 compared to previous years? I bet it was virtually unchanged. That's the point. Compare Palestine 2021 to Palestine 2015 and Israel 2021 to Israel 2015. The vaccine saved no one. If the vaccine was truly effective, you would see Israel vastly outperforming Palestine starting in 2021. Did it? And how is 63 per 1,000,000 a statistically significant number even if your argument were true? I would likely attribute that to other conditions like lack of resources compared to Israel. Otherwise, you're telling me Israel vaccinated more than 2x as many people and only saved 63 people per 1,000,000 and you think that proves your point?
by woodruffw | 2025-11-23 05:00:26+00:00
> How is someone losing their key a "technical problem"?

The human half of the problem is the loss of the key; the technical half of the problem is being unable to decrypt the election results.

> The trustee responsible has resigned so why weaken security going forward?

I don't think there's a scenario in which a 2-of-3 threshold is a significant risk to IACR.
by ericrallen | 2025-11-23 05:00:49+00:00
ISPs also have different levels of service for different entities, and seem to just barely care about you as a customer.

An ISP (like one that starts with the first letter of the alphabet and ends with a common abbreviation for an explosive compound) might not think it’s worth coming out and marking their fiber lines when you call the city’s 811 number to mark utilities before digging for a project, like a fence.

If that fence ends up cutting the fiber line when digging a post, the company installing the fence can submit a ticket through a different portal than you as an actual residential customer of the ISP can, and that ticket probably gets responded to well before your attempts to contact them and request a call back because they are always experiencing a high volume of calls.

They’ll never admit any negligence on their part for refusing to mark utility lines, and you just have to remember where they buried the new ones, if they ever came back out to bury them instead of just leaving them aboive ground and flailing around.

Sometimes they even try to charge you for fixing the fiber line.
by BrenBarn | 2025-11-23 05:00:50+00:00
I do not see any equivalence between corporate power and government power. The population as a whole controls government power. Corporate power is constrained only by government power. I think one of the most pernicious notions in our society is that the idea that "the government" is something separate from ordinary people.

Of course, our current government has a lot of problems, but that doesn't mean I don't want the government to have power. I just want it to have power to do what the population actually wants it to do (or, perhaps, what the population will actually be happiest with).

What would be your proposed mechanism for empowering individuals? How would such a mechanism not ultimately rely on the individual leveraging some larger external power structure (like a government)? I think if we want to empower all individuals roughly equally (i.e., not in proportion to their wealth or the like), then what we wind up with is something I'd call a government. Definitely not the one we have, but government nonetheless.
by sfpotter | 2025-11-23 05:00:59+00:00
I drink 2-3 cups of coffee a day (or double espressos) and have done so for about 20 years. Usually the first thing I do when I wake up is drink coffee. When we had our first child over three years ago, my wife said she wanted me to stop drinking coffee for a few months so I could nap on demand. I quit cold turkey. It was fine. Several months later I went back to drinking coffee and it was still fine. There was definitely a noticeable difference but nothing like you're talking about.
by nutjob2 | 2025-11-23 05:04:28+00:00
I do eat them, but they're not that cheap.

Oats, brown sugar, milk, (frozen) french fries, chicken burgers, "American" cheese, gnocchi, tomato basil pasta sauce, turkey nuggets, tinned beans, xv olive oil, lemon juice, cayenne pepper, garlic powder, chicken salt, seedless grapes
by pear01 | 2025-11-23 05:07:24+00:00
Why not make the civil case path easier then? The extreme nature of your remedy is the idea of a government taking over and owning a corporation. That creates bad incentives. I think if individuals could reasonably expect to be able to knock people like Mark Zuckerberg out of the billionaire class in a civil suit, then yes, he and the types of people he represents would behave better. Having the government run Facebook or Enron or Google or whatever both sounds less desirable than empowering individuals and weakening corporate protections in civil cases, and frankly; worse than the prevailing situation re the "capital class". If you think the current political situation is bad the last thing you should want is more government power.
by orev | 2025-11-23 05:07:35+00:00
I stopped caffeine in large part because of the culture around it. So many people treat it like a competition: who needs more before they can get started in the morning. Like some kind of perverse contest over who’s more addicted, as if that’s something to be proud of. Even this article starts the same way—a brag over how many pots they needed.

I adopted the perspective of treating it like a drug, and to use it for its benefits when appropriate.
by superkuh | 2025-11-23 05:08:09+00:00
I've used Canonical's free 3-seat extended service mantainence (ESM) support on my one 14.04 LTS machine for a long time. It's so nice having a stable target for more than decade for my personal projects. I have so much software defined radio software that absolutely does break in ways I can't fix on a newer version of any Debian-alike. The ESM program has been a provider of peace of mind when still leaving that SDR machine connected to the internet and running javascript.

>30-day trial for enterprises. Always free for personal use. >Free, personal subscription for 5 machines for you or any business you own

This "Pro" program also being free is a suprise to be sure, but a welcome one.
by lovich | 2025-11-23 05:08:20+00:00
Brah, If you have a type with that many characters in it that isn’t a super long string name, it’s not easy to understand unless you are the 1% of 1% when it comes to interpreting this specific language.

On top of that I fully agree with the poster you’re responding to. In general application code that’s and extremely complicated type, generally done by someone being as clever as can be. And if the code you’ve written when you’re being as clever as possible has a bug in it, you won’t be clever enough to debug it.
by wk_end | 2025-11-23 05:08:45+00:00
What I wrote would be a syntax error in TypeScript (no name for the argument, wrong arrow), not a function that returns array with one element; I used Haskell-ish notation instead of TypeScript's more verbose "(structure: MyStructure) => MyElement[]".

I thought it was clear enough that I was being informal and what I meant was clear, but that was admittedly probably a mistake. But to infer an implication from that that I'm "unwilling to learn new things" is a non sequitur and honestly kind of an unnecessarily dickish accusation.
by bigiain | 2025-11-23 05:08:57+00:00
I'm less sure and perhaps more optimistic.

Spottily has clearly identified a paying market for "incidental" music, something that people will play just to fill in as background noise while not caring about it. But it relies on a huge number of people who're prepared to pay a vanishingly small amount for it, or even to put up with ads to have it play for free.

But that's not "the audience" that all "creatives" are seeking or writing for. At least some of them are writing for the sort of person who actively seeks out and values "manually created art". People like me. People who'll not only go and listen to an artist's back catalog after enjoying hearing a previously unknown artist, and who'll buy the music that they love (including buying the vinyl even though they have access via streaming and paid downloads as well). People who'll keep an eye open for tours, and who'll buy concert tickets and encourage friends to do so as well.

That will probably never generate Taylor Swift or Rhiannon style careers or income, but I think "1000 true fans" is a valid today as it was almost 20 years ago when it was written:

https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/

Anybody "putting out slop" using GenAI in their art is fooling themselves if they think it's ever going to be possible to become truly rich and famous that way. If there's money to be made from AI slop music, it'll be raked in by streaming services and AI companies who can produce a million tracks a day and A/B test then on streaming services with a billion listeners. And _maybe_ there'll be a very few specialist AI music production companies, someone with a finely tuned AI and extremely skilled prompters - and with enough skill and talent to recognise when the AI output is going to be popular enough to be worth releasing. Someone like Stock Aitken Waterman used to be back in the 80s. But those production companies are directly in the targets of enshittification by the AI companies (the same as every company in any industry that becomes dependent on someone else's GenAI).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_Aitken_Waterman
by cyberax | 2025-11-23 05:09:10+00:00
The thing with Gaza is that HAMAS there had 20 years of unlimited power, wholly funded by the UN/US/Qatar aid. Gaza literally has no other significant income streams.

HAMAS spent this time to build a network of tunnels below the streets, and to stockpile ammo/explosives. They could care less about the people, using them only as human shields. They also actively brainwashed the population: https://www.ynetnews.com/magazine/article/b1fjucpdgg

So what would be a "proportional" answer from Israel? They don't have any good options.

> The Isrealli response to those terrorist with guns killing and abducting some of their people, was to flatten and impose collective punishment on the whole country that those people came from.

To give you the sense of scale, HAMAS murdered 1195 people, and they also took 250 people as hostages (somehow pro-Palestinian protesters almost never knew about this!). And 1500 people is a HUGE number for a tiny country like Israel (Jewish population of 7200000). Scaled to the size of the US, this would be aroud 70000 people, many times the size of 9/11.
by jandrese | 2025-11-23 05:09:40+00:00
Radioactive waste is decidedly nasty stuff, but the total volume of it is tiny. There are plenty of chemicals that are just as nasty that were simply buried in the ground in much larger quantities over the years with nary a peep from the population. Nuclear waste is a political problem not a technological one.

The crazy part is that people want to insist that the sites need to be absolutely safe even if they aren't maintained for 1,000 years, but by that point the radioactivity would be no more than the base ore anyway so demanding these extended timelines doesn't make anybody safer. They're just red tape.
by makeitdouble | 2025-11-23 05:10:45+00:00
Driving is restricted because of responsibility (same way marriage and contracts in general require someone legally responsible)

Porn, alcohol, tobacco and gambling is cultural/religious, the same way The Prohibition happened in the US, or all alcohol and gambling is banned in hard Islamic countries and adult women are mandatory veiled.

It's pretty interesting to see where a smartphone ban would fit as a category.
by labcomputer | 2025-11-23 05:13:01+00:00
> Unions can't defeat the forces of supply and demand

Oh, but they do! A core part of most union contracts is figuring out how to limit the number of people eligible to be hired.

That’s why “union shops” exist. Or: why (in the entertainment industry) a production pays a heavy fine to hire non-union actors. Doctors do a similar thing by having the AMA lobby to limit the number of credentials granted each year.
by ethin | 2025-11-23 05:15:05+00:00
Yeah, definitely not at all a fan of stealth editing.

I suspected LLM rewriting or generation but I don't possess enough knowledge into how the Apple pre-boot environment works to make an accurate judgement on the accuracy of the post. But I definitely had very strong suspicions of LLM influence with all the bullet lists and hem-hawing the post does; I would expect that someone who successfully reverse engineered the boot chain this thoroughly wouldn't need to hedge anything but Apple's rationale on why they did things. But maybe I'm too overly focused on details.
by nashashmi | 2025-11-23 05:15:14+00:00
> I wonder how many of those people would be happy to throw an American in a wheelchair off a ship in the name of the Palestinian cause.

Not sure I follow. Are you upset at the Pro-Palestinians? Today? Do you think that throwing a person in a wheelchair off a boat makes it ok to be silent about Israel's genocide? or makes Pro-Palestinians bad?

Your opinions of what is happening now should be a bit more comprehensive and in-depth than the opinions and perceptions of the public from 40 years ago. Social media as it is known today was non-existant. And news in mainstream media was well controlled and manipulated, and less independent, yet had the facade of professionalism and integrity. So there was a lot of news about Palestinians that just were not reported, and if they were reported, were in subdued form.
by jfil | 2025-11-23 05:15:58+00:00
I encourage you to get clear on your goals for a project like this. There is a political and social dimension to this work aside from the technical challenge.

For example, ordinary people already know whether they're being squeezed or not. They don't need a CPI report. If you want them to believe your CPI report over the government's, then you have to do a lot of marketing. On the opposite side, government decision makers are generally moving away from a "technocrat" data-driven approach to decisions, towards a "great man" theory of decision making: giving them better CPI data won't suddenly make them care about using data again. A lot of people are putin in work to dismantle American government capacity, and there are worse problem than inflation tracking.

My personal opinion is that it doesn't make sense to create a community-driven CPI as a direct alternative to the government CPI. But it does make sense to collect a lot of this data for other uses (ex: to highlight illegal collusion among merchants, archival).

From a technical perspective, here are some thoughts from a Canadian lens: * CPI calculations are already fairly transparent. You can read about the work that goes into them (click TOC on upper right: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/62-553-x/62-553-x2023001...) * Government-collected raw data is not open to the public, because merchants wouldn't have give the govt' access to their POS data if it were otherwise. The Canadian government made a tradeoff: it gets very accurate data, in exchange for it being hidden from the public. * As WheelsAtLarge mentioned, data collection and analysis takes effort and money. Especially when you're doing it for the long term. You'll have to think of funding and keeping people motivated to do the work. * Scraping data might be a lot harder than you expect. I compile the largest open dataset of grocery prices in Canada, and have 20 months' worth of data. Its very difficult to average prices across merchants (because many don't reveal product UPC codes). And prices vary by geography. None of this is insurmountable, but it takes effort and money. Go ahead and play with the data to get a feel for how easy/difficult this is (https://jacobfilipp.com/hammer/)
by consp | 2025-11-23 05:16:32+00:00
> and seem to just barely care about you as a customer.

But they do care about their monopoly (if they have a legal one). My approach is now to get the municipal monopoly contract void since they claim my home is "available" but they've been saying that for over four years now. They have the requirement to connect everyone within reasonable time. (note: not in the US but the same issues apply elsewhere as well).
by pear01 | 2025-11-23 05:16:43+00:00
It's a fair rejoinder, except I think it mixes idealism about government for realism. In reality, the government becomes an entity unto itself. This is a universal problem of government. Democratic institutions are themselves supposed to be a check on this impulse. However, as you are aware these are not absolute. A check that foresees a need to restrain government also sees a need to empower the government to restrain people.

I think however when we acknowledge that men are not angels, and that therefore government itself is dangerous merely as a centralization of power, then no, you cannot simply say well government is supposed to be of a different type of power than corporations. Because again, in reality this is often not the case. This is why several of the American founders and many of those who fought in that revolution also became anti federalists or argued against constitutional ratification.

I don't know what the answer is, but I don't think there has ever been a situation where it is accurate to say the population as a whole controls the government. In practice it doesn't work that way, and is about as useful as saying well the market controls corporations. I think something more like anti federalism could use a renaissance... the government should be weak in more cases. Individuals should be empowered. A government power to hold a corporation accountable could then rest on simply its strict duty to enforce a civil remedy. That is of a different nature than the government deciding on its own who (and more importantly - who not) to prosecute.

But I appreciate your push back, there are indeed no easy answers.
by tensor | 2025-11-23 05:16:56+00:00
It's certainly wrong on some things. For example, claiming that there are no examples of positive uses of LLMs is flat out wrong. I'm generally on the very conservative side when it comes to AI hype but even I'll admit it will be transformative in some ways.

Certainly not the insane fantasies most of the gen-AI CEOs are pushing, but, for example, it's clear beyond any shadow of a doubt that traditional search is dead. AI supported search is far superior in every way. For clarity, I'm talking about "deep research" style search where you get verifiable links to source materials along with your answers.

It's absolutely not crazy for Mozilla to get into this space, though I think if I were them I'd make an adjacent "AI search and agnentic AI first" web application adjacent to Firefox and keep Firefox as a legacy style browser. This would both give Mozilla a clean slate to do it right, while also keeping happy those who are not early adopters.
by naishoya | 2025-11-23 05:17:06+00:00
This! All day long. For a minute Pre-COVID and the inevitable reassessment of my life choices, I was a Private Equity fund manager for a International PE org with significant assets in a wide spectrum of energy technology and agriculture ventures.

We operated with a slightly different approach; leveraging long term lease back of land and physical resources to the original operators with caveats, such as transitioning to Organic Certification and Cost Effective Staffing - read that as Wallpapering the Products' Perceived value while shorting the personnel costs through under-staffing and underpaying - with some real improvements which included international market access and lower ecological footprints by ceasing deforestation for expansion and removing toxic petrochemical fertilizers, herbicides and insecticides from the operations which are actually beneficial to both employees and the community.

However, the standard modus operandii in the industry was and still is some flavor of this get in, grow, leverage, and then exit approach.

Individual operations' access to low to no interest financing for OPEX and CAPEX was a fundamental uplift to the value of those operations. There existed the possibility of leveraging the organizations' histories to secure low-to-no interest loans equal to the estimated market value of those operations; spend that money to expand and partially offset the cost of acquisition (protecting the investment funds from market volatility) and leverage those expansions to reduce competition through assimilation or under-pricing the competition.

Often the 'exit strategy' can include sell-off of physical assets to cover the loans; or folding the organization and defaulting on outstanding loans. The fund never actually has to be at risk, the upsides are up-front during the stage wherein the public sees the 'investment' into expansion of or improvement of goods and services before the inevitable degradation due to under-staffing and cost cutting through volume renegotiation or through changing suppliers and processes for cheaper and less effective inputs. When customer satisfaction and employee burnout reach a crescendo... move on.

The end for me was when the organization decided to use COVID as an excuse to cut an entire environmental tech development team from payroll; with zero benefits and the expectation that local government to provide the entire cost of team members and their families' survival, while selling the technology invented and being developed by those team members for approximately one dollar to show as great a loss as possible.

PE is at least as big a blight on the global economy and community well being as joint-stock monopolies serving a few majority shareholders.