MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zelphirkalt | 2025-11-14 20:21:44+00:00
I have had this idea for a long time: An online realtime voting platform, where you can change your mind about policies at any time, and what the people want needs to be implemented. And of course all issues and policies must be put on the platform for people to vote on.

Of course initially we would have to learn, that changing our minds too often will lead to things not getting done at all. And it is doubtful, that a lot of people are even capable of becoming informed and reflecting beings, not to be swayed by a hip populist radical, and thus causing shit to happen. Also the sheer number of issues and policies would be so many, that most people couldn't make up their mind on everything. But that's OK, since people can raise awareness and simply vote later, when they became aware. Another issue would be what the choices are that people have on the platform. How to give all relevant opinions as choices? How to know what is relevant? Or can voters apply for adding a new opinion? But then who grants the right to add a choice? How to prevent spam?

So there certainly are huge issues with the idea. But maybe, over time, we would develop into politically reasonable societies and politicians would have to fear the opinion of the people, because one scandal uncovered, and they could end up kicked out tomorrow. Maybe it could also better designed, so that there is some minimum time between being able to change ones stance about something. Or some maximum of policies one can have an opinion about per day.

Even initially to have such a platform without real political consequences of voting, would be super interesting, because you could lookup what the current opinions of the people are.
by idkfasayer | 2025-11-14 20:21:49+00:00
OK, one of my clients is a payday lender in a wealthy country. I have the complete banking histories of 10s of thousands of low income people in front of me.

I insist that the distinguishment proposed in the article is BS.

There is a small subset of clients with disabilities AND absense of insurance/government pensions, whose situation is permanent for all intents and purposes. But everyone else, one-off clients as well as regulars have ups and downs, and get through defaults or manage to repay their debt at times. Gambling and alcohol are a clear factor (drug abuse is harder to identify on someone's bank statement), but cases such as divorce from a partner with abuse problems bring relief most of the time. Children grow up or grow older and require less work or even generate income of their own.

I know it's different, when you live in a low income country and everyone around is poor and scamming people on the internet or marine piracy are the only possible access options to wealth, but that's a different topic.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-11-14 20:21:57+00:00
Foxes too, generally. The average temperament tends to include curiosity, playfulness, and wariness but not moral fear of humans. People keep them as household pets so I'd call that domesticable. An experiment to speed up the process of fox domestication was undertaken. [0] Foxes tend to not be like almost all wolves (and many wolfdogs) which are reserved, not prone to social openness, and hard to read like American Akitas which makes them dangerous by dominance challenging, miscommunication, and untrustworthiness.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox
by brandensilva | 2025-11-14 20:22:36+00:00
That's the point of having a government for the people by the people.

But when you let billionaires take over that too then the people have zero protections from exploitation.

If they cared they would invest in America paying more taxes, ensuring citizens are educated and capable of leading their companies versus offshoring and even competing with them.

They don't want that and prefer their monopolies instead.
by btilly | 2025-11-14 20:22:39+00:00
The idea is not trivially wrong. It's the same idea as chemotherapy. Sure, it is a poison for you. But it hits the cancer harder than you, and so can also be an effective treatment.

That said, it is very unlikely that simply reducing manganese is preferable to existing antibiotics. But that doesn't rule out the potential effectiveness of a combination therapy.

Here is how we'd do that combination therapy. We'd mix a standard antibiotic with oral para-Aminosalicylic acid (PAS). Orally delivered PAS is the the standard treatment for treating excess manganese in humans. (Sorry, but you're dead wrong about needing a completely synthetic diet for months.) While PAS does harm a few kinds of stomach bacteria, it is far better than a broad spectrum antibiotic. And if the target disease is under stress already, then you need less antibiotic to finish them off.

Sure, a medicine that targets manganese in Lyme disease bacteria would be even better than this combination. But that medicine does not exist. And the combination in question is something that can be experimented with today, using drugs that have already been approved by the FDA.

Furthermore this is a combination that we already have a lot of experience with. Back in the 1950s, a variation on this, working on the same principles, was the standard treatment for tuberculosis. It was abandoned not because it was ineffective, but because we developed treatments with fewer side effects.
by macintux | 2025-11-14 20:23:16+00:00
You can object to the "digital invasion", but using the phrase "freedom of speech" as some sort of magical shield is pointless.

> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The U.S. federal or state governments, courtesy of that amendment, have very limited authority to control your speech. That's where the legal authority ends.
by awsanswers | 2025-11-14 20:23:21+00:00
I had ChatGPT explain why this is works as a unlimited hotpot. Very cool: "It works because carriers detect tethering partly by looking at TTL values. Android subtracts 1 from TTL when hotspot/tethering packets are forwarded, so the carrier sees a different TTL and knows the traffic came from a tethered device. Your eBPF program increments the TTL back by +1, hiding the fact that the packet was forwarded through your phone. So to the carrier, the traffic looks like it originated directly from the phone, not from a tethered device. That defeats one of the carrier’s tethering-detection methods."
by Swenrekcah | 2025-11-14 20:23:33+00:00
These entities facilitate value creation yes, but they do not create much value and certainly not in proportion to the profits they extract.

I have met people who sincerely seem to believe that if an entity makes money then it must be societally useful because otherwise the market would not reward them with profits.

This seems to me like a self-help belief for people in these lucrative but ultimately not very meaningful positions.
by cloud-oak | 2025-11-14 20:23:52+00:00
I was very reluctant about the polars syntax as well initally, but it has grown a lot on me.

Pandas syntax is super ergonomic for quick one-off analysis, but it becomes hard to read/maintain once your processing gets more complex.

For example, the innocent

df[arg]

can mean wildly different things - does it filter rows? Subset columns? Extract a single column as a pd.Series? There really is no way of knowing except for checking the value of arg.

In contrast, polars syntax feals clunky initially, but it's much easier for me to revisit a pipeline and quickly understand what it does.
by ghurtado | 2025-11-14 20:23:58+00:00
Semantics are literally the only reason we write laws down and argue endlessly about exactly which words to use

Outside of law, I have never once heard "that's just semantics" in a context that made sense, or said by an intelligent person. Not once. Maybe it turns out semantics are never "just semantics", and instead it's something that always matters.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-11-14 20:24:14+00:00
Whether people would switch off meat on their own is a separate issue. If water became scarce enough to start moving the price, then you'd absolutely see people eat less meat.

But their point does disarm the suggestion that water consumption for AI is bad because it's just for fun while meat feeds people.

Because when you eat meat, you could have eaten something far less resource intensive like tempeh. But you ate meat for reasons beyond survival. For most of us, it's because we like the taste and we're used to it.

I don't see that as having any stronger of a claim to water consumption than the things we use AI for (fun, getting work done, writing nix/k8s config) much less a claim to many times the amount of water consumption than AI data centers.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-11-14 20:24:21+00:00
Animal Auditions: Cute vs. Food - Denis Leary

https://youtu.be/IZBAtd9rty8

Perhaps a combination of adaptableness, small size, prodigious reproduction, and cuteness saved some species from being wiped out whereas other species didn't fare so well once humans arrived and transformed their territory. Adapt to urban encroachment or face extinction.
by quantified | 2025-11-14 20:24:33+00:00
How solid is the archaeological record, in the peer-reviewed stuff?

There is no evidence in the Red Sea of the water getting parted and loads of soldiers getting drowned. So Exodus is partly bunk.

Genesis is largely bunk. Who did Cain marry from the land of Nod?

Noah did not collect murder hornets and South American poisonous insects to take on the Ark.

It's not anti-Jewish to point out that folk tales are not real.
by throwup238 | 2025-11-14 20:24:37+00:00
You’re confusing my argument. I’m not arguing that meat is more efficient than plants; that by itself is obviously untrue because of the trophic efficiency loss. I’m arguing that meat uses marginal resources that would otherwise be useless for growing food. If we eliminate meat we’d eliminate a lot of marginally productive farmland that is naturally irrigated and have to replace it with industrialized irrigation farming that will be significantly more expensive and use more water and energy. Maybe if we had a global cultural reset with industrialized farming, but no one is going to be happy replacing their beef and chicken with the corn and barley and hay that those lands normally grow, much of it inedible to humans.

That paper isn’t actually debunking anything that I’m saying. If the water foot print per calorie is 20x for beef but the feed is grown with 90% of its water from rainfall, that’s not a 20x bigger footprint in a way that practically matters because most of that water is unrecoverable anyway. The water that is recoverable just makes it through the watershed.

Meat is a way to convert land that cant grow things people can or want to eat into things that people will eat. That pastureland and marginal cropland growing animal feed can’t just be converted to grow more economically productive crops like fruit and vegetables without Herculean engineering effort and tons of water and fertilizer. Instead the farming would have to stress other fertile ecosystems like the Southwest which would make the water problems worse, even if their total “footprint” is smaller. The headline that beef uses 20x more water per calorie completely ignores where that water comes from and how useful it actually is to us.

I don’t doubt that we can switch to an all plant diet as a species but people vastly underestimate the ecological and societal cost to do so.
by TMWNN | 2025-11-14 20:24:39+00:00
Reposting my proposals regarding copyright:

Any content, once published/distributed/broadcast in the US, that is not made readily available to the public going forward loses copyright protection. This includes revisions.

* A film, TV show, sound recording, book, or any other copyrighted content must, once made available for public purchase, always remain available. If the only streaming service willing to pay to stream your movie has the smallest market share, too bad; the market has spoken on the value of your content. An ebook can fulfill this purpose for a print book; streaming can fulfill this purpose for a theatrical or physical-media film. But it must be available to maintain copyright.

* Compulsory licensing should apply; if Netflix wants to pay the same amount of money as the above-mentioned small market-share streaming service for the film, Netflix must be allowed to do so. The film's rights owner can demand more, raising the price for all, but if every outlet refuses, the film immediately goes into public domain. This process is reversible, but it would set a ceiling to prevent the owner from setting a ridiculously high price to prevent its availability.

* If a Blu-ray of a film or TV show has excised or modified scenes for whatever reason, and the original isn't also made available (whether on a different "theatrical cut" release, or as a different cut on the same disc), the entire original version immediately goes into public domain.

* If NBC posts Saturday Night Live skits on YouTube that have removed "problematic" scenes[1] without explaining the differences—a diff file, basically—the entire original skit loses copyright protection.

Separate issue, but also very worthwhile:

* Streaming services must make all data regarding their content available in some standardized format. Consumers should be able to use one application to access all content they have access to. The creator of SmartTube (a very nice YouTube-compatible player) should be able to add the appropriate API support to search for and play Netflix/Prime Video/Disney+/Paramount+ content.

The above applies to software, too. Legalize abandonware!

[1] Something I understand already happens
by d_silin | 2025-11-14 20:24:43+00:00
I can tell your income bracket from this phrase alone:

> Most people have a dozen friends or family who would gladly give them the guest room for a few weeks.

No, most people do not.

I am aware of classic triad of "malignantly antisocial personality + substance abuse + criminal record" that makes people stay on the streets.

But a lot of people end up on the streets simply because they were already only one notch above financial destitution and so all of their friends and family.

Lose a job + get sick in body or mind, even temporarily = game over. "Friends and family" who are also financially vulnerable would ruthlessly shed the load of extra mouth to feed, much less to house.
by sph | 2025-11-14 20:24:49+00:00
Cypherpunk activism is closer to anarchist ideals, and criticism of the State and its coercive power is central to its ethos. Yes, citizens are being milked and oppressed against a state and a political caste that has grown too powerful.

American right-libertarianism is a joke that originally started as an anarchist branch and has degenerated into getting in bed with the state to further its selfish ideals. Criticism of the state has nothing to do with those posers, as their goal is solely to become the state (i.e. the oppressor), rather than truly pursue the ideal of a free society.
Show HN: Shelly Systems – Process Modeling as Code
by chrisshella2 | 2025-11-14 20:24:52+00:00
Hi everyone, sharing a tool I have been working on for modeling processes and systems as code. Write YAML with spreadsheet-like formulas and generate flowcharts. Still pretty early on but wanted to share.

https://systems.shellysys.com/demo

Looking to tackle the problem of having to manually design and document processes using graphical tools (like Vizio) when there are many complex, interconnected, or nested processes that are subject to change in an evolving system (such as a web application that is actively being built and enhanced, as I've personally experienced).

I built Shelly Systems because I like the idea of UML and SysML creating a single source of truth for system analysis, using YAML as an easily readable data format, and using Excel spreadsheets for item tracking and basic data analysis.

The link sends you to the interactive demo where you can play around with making flowcharts and using formulas. There's also a guide available on the page for how to use the YAML-based language.

Would love to hear thoughts! Thanks!
by 1v1id | 2025-11-14 20:24:54+00:00
I can appreciate the totally different perspective that must bring. I would also add that living in a car-centered society where you are expected to have a car presents its own set of challenges, namely that you can't afford to live near food sources (grocery stores, etc.) or jobs because it's expected that people drive to those things. For people in those situations struggling to make ends meet, I think they view their car more as a required liability they struggle to maintain rather than a privilege.
by mk89 | 2025-11-14 20:25:09+00:00
It seems it was a matter of time.

Germany first voted against chat control 2.0, then they clarified why they were against it, became "undecided". And now "Denmark" came out with a (lighter) version "some others" are more willing to vote for. [0]

What a joke. In front of our eyes.

Then they wonder why people hate their guts and are becoming increasingly violent, euro-skeptical, etc.

[0]: https://euperspectives.eu/2025/09/germany-backtracks-chat/
by Dylan16807 | 2025-11-14 20:25:19+00:00
> I rarely see software patents that don't cite more than a few recently issued patents.

How many are patents by unrelated companies? That's where the real delays are.

> Nor have I seen much evidence of software patents actually stiffing invention

Video encoding has been held back a lot. And it's a bit different but troll lawsuits keep happening over super basic website features. And I'd call instruction sets software and those keep getting piles of patents, doing things like severely limit x86 competition.

And software patents get weaponized so often, there's a million stories about it.

If we have all this hassle and the best we can cite for advantages is RSA, then software patents are not promoting the progress of sciences and the useful arts. Unlike copyright, a more limited duration doesn't really fix anything. Just get rid of them.
by kaoD | 2025-11-14 20:25:22+00:00
> there is nothing today as secure as GPG

Depending on what part of the huge hulk that GPG is, there are many tools that are as secure (or more) than it.

For encryption age[0] comes to mind. For signing minisign[1] or, more recently, plain ssh-keygen[2]. For encryption at rest, restic[3].

PGP having all this built-in with forward-compatibility is a liability.

[0] https://github.com/FiloSottile/age

[1] https://github.com/jedisct1/minisign

[2] https://man.openbsd.org/ssh-keygen.1

[3] https://github.com/restic/restic
by potato3732842 | 2025-11-14 20:25:28+00:00
You're projecting the current onto the past. It was a problem, but it wasn't the show stopper it would be today. Not having access to credit wasn't as big a deal when there weren't subsidized credit products and you therefore weren't competing with people who had artificial access to cheap money.

The reason minority communities exist is because those people were wealthy enough to own land, have businesses, etc. And this was before the modern idea of a home or business as a leverage investments so when they bought homes or started businesses they mostly did it where people like them were, not where a bunch of snobbish white people who hated them were (because that's where the best investment growth potential is).

Pretty much every discernible ethnic group in the history of the US has made an upward march from generally poor to more or less the same as average. There are two exceptions, native americans and blacks. And the latter was poised to do so in the 1960s. Much has been written about both so I don't feel the need to opine here.

Yeah, society was racist AF back then and imparted a lot of glass ceilings and certainly kept certain groups a little more down, but the past wasn't simply like the present but with more racism.
by PopAlongKid | 2025-11-14 20:25:32+00:00
>To Perl connoisseurs, this feature may be known as Autovivification. In general, AWK is quite unequivocally a prototype of Perl. You can even say that Perl is a kind of AWK overgrowth on steroids…

Before I learned Perl, I used to write non-trivial awk programs. Associative arrays, and other features are indeed very powerful. I'm no longer fluent, but I think I could still read a sophisticated awk script.

Even sed can be used for some fancy processing (i.e scripts), if one knows regex well.
by zzyzxd | 2025-11-14 20:25:35+00:00
If your infrastructure can justify the complexity of Kubernetes, keeping up with Kubernetes native software is extremely easy comparing to anything else I have dealt with. I had some horror story managing nginx instances on 3 servers with ansible. To me that's much harder than working with ingress controllers in Kubernetes.

Replacing an ingress controller in Kubernetes is also a well documented practice, with minimum or even zero downtime if you want to.

Generally, if your engineering team can reasonably keep things simple, it's good. However, business needs to grow and infrastructure needs to scale out. Sometimes trying too hard to be simple is, in my experience, how things become unmanageably complex.

I find well-engineered complexity to be much more pleasant to work with.
by anon_cow1111 | 2025-11-14 20:25:37+00:00
Lyme desperately needs more attention and revised CDC guideline as it's becoming an epidemic in the northeast United States.

As and outdoor-hobbies type person I've had it 3 out of 4 previous years and have begun sourcing antibiotics from agricultural suppliers, or directly from India. Contrast this to my childhood in the same region, when tick-borne diseases were never even a blip on the radar. Supposedly this is because of climate change and much warmer winters allow deer ticks to spread rapidly.

From my own anecdotes and research, none of the traditional guidance is accurate:

-Never had a bullseye rash

-Never had a tick attached more than 24 hours

-When a tick was attached around 24 hours, infection rate was close to 50% and symptoms appeared within 10 days. Contrast to ~3% infection rate per cdc average.

...I suppose the sad irony here is that lyme is not getting attention because well... current generations never touch grass and the outbreak never appears as bad as it actually is.
by jquery | 2025-11-14 20:25:51+00:00
I’ve been using Kimi K2 a lot this month. Gives me Japanese->English translations at near human levels of quality, while respecting rules and context I give it in a very long, multi-page system prompt to improve fidelity of translation for a given translation target (sometimes markup tags need to be preserved, sometimes deleted, etc.). It doesn’t require a thinking step to generate this level of translation quality, making it suitable for real-time translation. It doesn’t start getting confused when I feed it a couple dozen lines of previous translation context, like certain other LLMs do… instead the translation actually improves with more context instead of degrading. It’s never refused a translation for “safety” purposes either (GPT and Gemini love to interrupt my novels and tell me certain behavior is illegal or immoral, and censor various anatomical words).
by mlmonkey | 2025-11-14 20:26:10+00:00
The other crime in that photo is the lack of cell service, despite billions of dollars that the USG has given ATT/Verizon/T-Mo over the years.

But these phone companies just give unfettered access to their networks to the various TLAs and everybody ignores the fact that they are not providing the cell service they are contractually obligated to.
by Gave4655 | 2025-11-14 20:26:12+00:00
in normal you would do use this trick. but however new phones does not include the kernel module that helps you to modify the TTL using iptables

iptables -t mangle -A PREROUTING -i "$INTERFACE" -j TTL --ttl-inc 1 iptables -t mangle -I POSTROUTING -o "$INTERFACE" -j TTL --ttl-inc 1