MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by myrmidon | 2025-11-09 03:01:14+00:00
So your position is that opinions (from all parts of the political spectrum, depending on topic) get routinely supressed via the flagging system, making HN a "non-functional social space"?

I disagree with that strongly as well. Looking at the main thread on this post, every single flagged comment looks perfectly justified to me, as an example.

If such suppression is common, it should be easy to point out comments that are unjustifiably flagged?

I also disagree that the system is "incredibly punishing"-- at worst, some other people won't be able to see your comment or post, you don't even get banned or anything.

I'm quite happy with how moderation is being done on this forum compared to basically anywhere else.
by ggm | 2025-11-09 03:01:17+00:00
I don't doubt China's investment in Myanmar for a pipeline path and other things has been deeply regressive. I also don't really doubt that western action to restore some sense of democracy to Burma is going to include western goals regarding that pipeline and there probably isn't much China can do without a lot of pain. If they put too much energy into sustaining a junta in Myanmar their ability to grow support internationally from non coup-ridden nations will drop. And China wants those votes in the UN and associated bodies.
by raddan | 2025-11-09 03:01:59+00:00
There’s a difference between being required to perform the normal functions of the government and being required to espouse a political philosophy. The Hatch Act makes it clear that you can have a political opinion, but that it occurs on your own time. So the rationale of the court is “nobody is allowed to use their office for politics” and “by putting words in government employee mouths, their right to free speech is being abridged.”

5 U.S.C. § 7323(a)(1): “An employee may take an active part in political management or in political campaigns, except an employee may not — (1) use his official authority or influence for the purpose of interfering with or affecting the result of an election.”

There’s a lot more after that.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/5/7323
by fouc | 2025-11-09 03:02:06+00:00
I was curious what the "cheapest" ready-to-use ESP32-S3 setup would be, it seems like there are dev boards with built-in displays ranging from 3.5" to 5", WiFI/BT/USB-C for $20-$30 on ebay.

I guess those of you doing IoT / home assistant stuff would likely know about these. Just found out about ESPHome[0]

[0] https://esphome.io
by hbrav | 2025-11-09 03:02:51+00:00
> But if you offer paid servies, collect money from UK citizens, you must have a business representation in the UK

I don't think that's true at all. You be taking payment by credit card, which doesn't require you to have any local presence.

I think your bigger risk is that you get a judgement made against you by a UK court, which a court that has jurisdiction over you is willing to enforce. I'm not sure under what circumstances that is the case, but I believe that it being the case with libel judgements has been an issue for a while (since plaintiffs can 'forum shop').
by FireBeyond | 2025-11-09 03:03:25+00:00
This is a reasonably common (sadly) methodology that many agencies utilize.

"We are not legally permitted to blanket surveil/ALPR entire neighborhoods/towns, etc. ...

... and we can't pay a private company to do this for us ...

... but nothing prevents us from paying a private company who is doing it already, to give us that data."

The line between the last two is blurry but also utilized - you can't put out an RFP for a company to capture such data that you're not permitted to, but if that company is doing it because it sees a/your market for it, then it's a free-for-all.
by tptacek | 2025-11-09 03:04:34+00:00
Right, so, I'm not making a normative claim about the right about of immigration. I don't know if I'd go so far as to call myself an "open borders" person, but I'm very pro-immigration. Pro-immigration in the sense of believing we benefit from the mix of new Americans we get over our southern border, not in the weird doublespeak sense of appreciating skilled immigration from Europe.

But from 2021-2023, we experienced a destabilizing sudden amount of immigration. We'd had immigrant-friendly policy during Obama, but I don't recall many dozens of Venezuelan refugees on the doorstep of our Village Hall. Obviously, that happened in large part because southern governors bussed people (often without their informed consent) to northern states. But so what? All that says is that we were experiencing something the southern states had been experiencing all along.

My big point here is just: it's not enough to say how strongly you feel about immigration in 2021-2024. Enough people hated it that it motivated a materially important bloc of voters. I disagree with those voters. But I also disagree with people upset about inflation, and I feel like we generally understand that those of us on my side of the employment/inflation question were just, you know, wrong. In an electoral sense.
by backscratches | 2025-11-09 03:05:05+00:00
Being a medieval king would be insufferable compared to being a middle class drone today. That you (and many others!) find your staggering privilege unsatisfying is a lack of creativity and laziness on your part.

> Work in an office job for 40-60 hours a week and then ferry your kids around to scheduled extracurriculars in the evenings and weekends to make their college applications look good so they can replace you in the middle-class-robot-drone-job. Is that the best we can do? Hustle 24/7, but in more comfort than scrabbling in the dirt for a historical king?

Work 60 hours a week, sleep 56, suffer 4 hours per day with your kid (28hrs)... That leaves 24 hours (per week!) of freedom, information and wealth the richest king pre 1800 could only have dreamed of.

That's 1248 hours per year, 52 24 hour days, a month and a half of every year where you can travel anywhere on the globe, eat anything, do practically anything. Let's only count age 30-50 as good years, only 20 years of 52 days of pure freedom... That is a total of 2.8 YEARS of free time. No one, not even a king, ever in history up until modernity has had 3 years of not working with so few strings attached. Not even close!

Absolute imaginationless whining. Just because nobody showed you how to live your life doesn't mean there aren't people out there thriving beyond history's wildest dreams.

Sure you have to vacuum and do laundry and go to the dentist with some of that free time (offset by week long vacations not included above), but goodness you have to have no self awareness to complain about laundry. 50% of babies (virtually the same for kings and peasants) died in infancy in premodern times [https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-in-the-past]. Your free time is greater than the length of the majority of humans lives pre-1800.

This may not be the best we can do, but it is beyond anything anyone could have fantasized accomplishing, and the only way to describe it is wonderful. Life was brutal and now it decidedly is not. You can do practically whatever you want, why decide to complain (about a lifestyle you chose!)?

Make good use of your life! MILLIONS of children died so that you could have the chunk of time you got!
by kieranl | 2025-11-09 03:06:01+00:00
I got to see this in person at pacificon a few weeks ago. Also the creator is my friend from UIUC who I consider a brilliant rf/DSP engineer.

The demo was able to show and end to end tx chain from gnuradio to a receiver. Really excited to see this! As there are a myriad of other things that this hardware can be used for as well.
by themk | 2025-11-09 03:06:20+00:00
AFAIU, for LDL and ApoB, the real danger lies in the area under the curve. Lifetime exposure. That's not to say that lifestyle improvement can't help in other ways, but the damage caused by LDL is very difficult (impossible) to reverse.

So, if you hit the point where you already had a heart attack, you really want to prevent any further damage, but the "accumulated" risk is still there.

I think that's part of what makes LDL so tragic. You should care about it your whole life, but when you are young, you just don't.

Worse, high LDL is becoming a thing in children as well, that's an extra decade of accumulation which has historically not happened.

I don't think people should panic about these things, but I think it highlights the importance of developing good habits early, and the role parents and society has in making those habits easy for young people to adopt.
by UncleMeat | 2025-11-09 03:06:29+00:00
Losing in 2026 barely matters. Existing dem leadership has no desire to end the filibuster, which means we get one bill a year that is full of technocratic approaches. The Trump administration, backed by the supreme court, is accruing more and more power to simply ignore the will of Congress. Even if the dems get some guts and defund ICE, the Trump administration has already demonstrated that it is happy to just illegally distribute or withhold funds wherever it likes.

The only way out of this is replacing dem leadership in congress with people who give a shit, winning the presidency in 2028, killing the filibuster, and then going on a serious denazification effort to restructure our institutions so that this sort of shit can't happen. Court packing. Total dismantling and rebuilding of federal law enforcement. Recreating a functional congress.
by Brybry | 2025-11-09 03:06:32+00:00
So looks like you're right but there's also some weird language technicality for "closed shop" where it's really a "union shop".

Per the APFA contract[1] employees are forced to join the union within 60 days of assignment as a flight attendant. This is technically considered a union shop (not a closed shop) because it doesn't require people to be union members before being hired.

Under the Taft-Hartley Act a lot of states (and in some situations, court decisions) have made this illegal[2] via right-to-work laws but airlines are covered under the Railway Labor Act (45 U.S.C. § 152)[3] which allows it (upheld by the US Supreme Court in Railway Employes' Department v. Hanson, 351 U.S. 225)[4] .

So, I was wrong and the employees had no choice but continue to be union members and pay dues or be fired because of airline-specific labor law.

[1] https://www.apfa.org/contract/ [page 237, 35-10]

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taft%E2%80%93Hartley_Act

[3] https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=(title:45%20section:...

[4] https://www.loc.gov/resource/usrep.usrep351225/?pdfPage=1
by terminalshort | 2025-11-09 03:06:34+00:00
But government employees obviously do not have 1A rights in their role as employees. e.g. if a government employee feels like wearing a nazi uniform to the office every day, they will be fired, even though 1A prevents the government from punishing private citizens for doing the very same. Firing the employee is not violating 1A but charging them with a crime would be.

And how do you define "partisan" here? How can your job be to implement the policies set by politicians, but not be "partisan."
by elicash | 2025-11-09 03:06:56+00:00
This case wasn't about workers saying "whatever they want."

This was about partisan speech being compelled by government, which in fact most government employees aren't even allowed to engage in on the job. They are legally required to act in a nonpartisan way.

Failing to act in a nonpartisan way can result in Hatch Act violations, ethics investigations, or even criminal penalties. So yes, having the federal government compel them to engage in partisan speech is a problem.
by barbazoo | 2025-11-09 03:07:23+00:00
I don’t understand the filibuster thing and how it plays into this.

I’m seeing the vote for the government budget or something being voted on over and over. If there is a certain majority required to pass something then it is implied that there are negotiations. If the opposition party was just expected to vote yes then why vote at all?

That’s why I’m asking, has the content of what was voted on changed significantly? Maybe taking away healthcare from people has to be done a different way. Make a bill that opens the government, then take healthcare away.
by FireBeyond | 2025-11-09 03:08:08+00:00
Sadly, agreed. The ACLU used to be known as a stalwart on this, fighting for the right of the KKK to hold marches etc. The "their speech might be reprehensible, but we need to fight for all free speech" perspective.

Now, they're uninterested in a lot of these issues.

And I say this as someone very liberal.

You can also separately debate where the line is on the topic of say "absolute free speech", but whatever the ACLU used to fight for, it fights for a distinct subset only, now.
by Tempest1981 | 2025-11-09 03:08:08+00:00
Summarizing:

- Get a regular physical, or at least a blood test. (Don't wait 5 or 10 years)

- If it shows cholesterol issues, get an advanced lipids blood test, which can indicate whether it's caused by genetics (LipoA/ApoB?)

- If eating and exercise alone aren't helping, consider taking statins for cardiovascular health

- Consider a CT scan to check for calcium build-up, which is not reversible (afaik)

fwiw, I think the advice is much more than just "eat well and exercise".
by nullhole | 2025-11-09 03:08:30+00:00
They have a passenger service too!

€3200 for France <-> Baltimore, 13 day trip. But with that you get three meals a day, a decent looking cabin, private bathroom, private balcony, and internet service (though how solid the connection is / what surcharges there may be is a question).

~€250/d doesn't sound too bad, and you could get work done along the way. Kind of sounds nice...

https://www.voilasailcoop.fr/transatlantic/

https://www.voilasailcoop.fr/transatlantic/transatlantic-a-b...
by jez | 2025-11-09 03:08:52+00:00
> as opposed to whether the construct is allowed/part of the language

Arguably this is also semantics. Type checking and reporting type errors decides whether a construct is allowed or not, yet belongs squarely in the semantic analysis phase of a language (as opposed to the syntactic analysis phase).

> how it differs from syntax

Consider a language like C, which allows code like this:

if (condition) { doWhenTrue(); }

And consider a language like Python, which allows code like this:

if condition: doWhenTrue()

The syntax and the semantics are both different here.

The syntax is different: C requires parens around the condition, allows curly braces around the body, and requires `;` at the end of statements. Python allows but does not require parens around the condition, requires a `:`, requires indenting the body, and does not allow a `;` at the end of statements.

Also, the semantics are different: in C, `doWhenTrue()` only executes if `condition` either is a non-zero integer, or can be implicitly coerced to a non-zero integer.

In Python, `doWhenTrue` executes if `condition` is "truthy," which is defined as whether calling `condition.__bool__()` returns `True`. Values like `True`, non-zero numbers, non-empty containers, etc. are all truthy, which is far more values than in C.

But you could imagine a dialect of Python that used the exact same syntax from C, but the semantics from Python. e.g., a language where

if (condition) { doWhenTrue(); }

has the exact same meaning as the Python snippet above: that `doWhenTrue()` executes when `condition` is truthy, according to some internal `__bool__()` method.
by lurquer | 2025-11-09 03:09:24+00:00
Good grief.

The shutdown is a temporary budget squabble in a stable democracy; a banal political stunt that has happened every few years for the past few decades.

Rome’s dysfunction meant civil wars, assassinations, generals seizing poWer, private armies, and uprising (in a fundamentally different society where, incidentally, over 25% of the population was slaves.)

There has been over 2000 years of history since Rome… when a the only analogy a person can come up with is some half-baked allusion to the Roman Empire/Republic it’s a good bet said person lacks a sense of history, knowledge of current events, and common sense.

Sorry to be harsh.
by rramadass | 2025-11-09 03:10:29+00:00
> As I understand it now it's about saying what the value of a particular language construct should be (e.g. when evaluated), as opposed to whether the construct is allowed/part of the language (syntax). Is that intuition wrong?

Your intuition is right. It falls under what is called "Operational Semantics" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_semantics) There are other aspects of looking at it i.e. "Denotational Semantics", "Axiomatic Semantics", "Algebraic Semantics" etc. which are more mathematical. The submitted book talks about all of them.

For more background, you might want to look at Alan Parkes book Introduction to Languages, Machines, and Logic.

The basic idea is that Symbolic Logic allows you to express Strings (sentences containing words) constructed from an Alphabet (set of symbols for that language) as "Programs" (which are valid i.e. meaningful strings in that language) which can then be interpreted by a Abstract Machine we call a Computer.
by ofalkaed | 2025-11-09 03:11:20+00:00
What makes you think the USCG has any bearing on my life? Even if I am an American I stated that my dream was to be blown about the oceans, which strongly implies that I will be out of USCG jurisdiction the majority of the time. You are right in context of a busy seaway like New York Harbor but in that situation a sailing freighter will be under power, not under sail and anyone in a small sailboat will be very alert. Most of the ocean is not under jurisdiction of the USCG and the rules for open water are different than those for near the coast or in the harbor.
by bediger4000 | 2025-11-09 03:11:38+00:00
Sure, there are sessions where negotiation must happen between House and Senate. I personally think we should abolish the filibuster - it's undemocratic in the extreme. Republicans (only!) still have the "Hastert Rule" for the House, which is equally undemocratic, and named after a convicted sex offender.

I'm urging the current Senate, controlled by Republicans, the party also controlling House and Presidency, to get rid of the filibuster because then the ruling party could not escape responsibility for their legislative actions.
by elicash | 2025-11-09 03:12:16+00:00
That is both true and irrelevant. The decision itself quotes from SCOTUS on the Hatch Act in making its point about the First Amendment violations.

"[I]t is not only important that the Government and its employees in fact avoid practicing political justice, but it is also critical that they appear to the public to be avoiding it, if confidence in the system of representative Government is not to be eroded to a disastrous extent."
by FireBeyond | 2025-11-09 03:13:18+00:00
Leaving aside the partisan aspect - you have to acknowledge that there is a difference between a statement that "The DOE is shutdown because X" and an email that says "I am unable to work because X". You made a statement before "organizations have entire departments intended for this" - yes, and those individuals are quotes as spokespeople, "A spokesperson for the department said xyz" not "I want to tell you xyz".
by bananaflag | 2025-11-09 03:13:29+00:00
I think the problem is that you don't get "syntax". What you think "syntax" is is actually semantics.

"Syntax" just means what strings are valid programs. For example, x=3 should be valid in C, while =+x shouldn't. Note that this doesn't say anything about what x=3 actually means in practice. The fact that there is a variable called x, and that it has a value at some point in time, and that after the execution of x=3 that value becomes 3 are all semantics.
by UncleMeat | 2025-11-09 03:13:30+00:00
> The citizens that are being wrongly violated will have their day and be compensated.

I'm curious if you have done even cursory reading on all of the reasons why people whose rights are violated by federal and state officials are unable to sue for damages. The idea that people who get abused get a day in court and get justly compromised is an absolute fantasy.
Show HN: AI text rewriter with 90%+ detection pass rate
by yanwenai2021 | 2025-11-09 03:14:13+00:00
Hi HN,

I built a tool that rewrites AI-generated text to pass detection systems like Turnitin and CNKI (知网). Unlike simple paraphrasing tools, it uses semantic understanding to maintain meaning while removing AI fingerprints.

Technical approach: - Analyzes sentence structure patterns typical of LLM outputs - Rebuilds content using varied syntax and vocabulary distributions - Preserves academic tone while reducing AI detection scores from 80%+ to <20%

Tested on: CNKI (知网), VIP (维普), WanFang (万方), and Western detection systems

Try it: https://www.yanbiai.com/tools/paper-pass?ly=hackernews

Would love feedback from the community, especially on: 1. Ethical considerations (I know this is controversial) 2. Technical improvements to the rewriting algorithm 3. Detection evasion vs. genuine writing assistance

Free tier available for testing.
by mindslight | 2025-11-09 03:15:15+00:00
You can read any mainstream source to find out the general contours of the situation. The "want you to understand" is in the context of there being too many people in outright denial about the naked autocratic fascism that has descended upon our country - eg see all the comments in this very thread trying to justify any of this as being about "the law" or "illegal immigration".
by blobbers | 2025-11-09 03:15:20+00:00
I think one thing I liked when I was in start-ups was working for folks straight out of grad school that genuinely cared about a problem, had some advanced knowledge about a topic and were just trying to turn it into a business.

I felt like those were the kind of folks I could get on board with; not someone with an MBA that needs head count to reach their KPIs. Someone that cared about solving a problem and was genuinely smart.
by nozzlegear | 2025-11-09 03:15:58+00:00
I've got a 2400+ day streak going on Duolingo. I used to love the app, it really helped me relearn the Spanish I used to know from my youth. The app is a far cry from what it used to be. I can't stand the goofy animations and characters they've added to everything – the weird gigachad Duo or anime girl Duo, what is going on here? I want something that doesn't treat me like a child clapping at Saturday morning cartoons each time I correctly spell a word.

My yearly subscription ends in December, I plan to let my streak lapse at that point and finally move on to Babel.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-11-09 03:16:03+00:00
There was a recent "why nextcloud feels slow' submission. Submission itself seemed off-course, to not really have analyzed the problem well (picked a pretty conventional a-priori whipping boy of bundle sizes). To me the clear winner in the comments was pointing out that there are massive waterfalls of fetching data to the client. https://ounapuu.ee/posts/2025/11/03/nextcloud-slow/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45799860

This data architecture problem burns you whether you are native or mobile, is the secret boss lurking in most application development. I wonder if OpenCloud is doing better than NextCloud with their middle-layers!
by hank1931 | 2025-11-09 03:17:44+00:00
Are you kidding me? Is there any one person giving better AI updates nowadays than Simonw? Back in the day, there used to be these EF Hutton commercials. There'd be some scene of a bunch of people. One person would say something like, “My broker says…” and another would respond, “Well, my broker is EF Hutton, and EF Hutton says…”. And the whole restaurant or whatever would get silent so they could hear what EF Hutton says. It was great!

I feel the same way about Simon Willison. He's a treasure!

Here's a few of those EF Hutton commercials for your viewing pleasure--

https://youtu.be/2MXqb1a3Apg

https://youtu.be/sc2GpmLx82k

Yep, that's how I feel when Simon Willison speaks!