MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Nextgrid | 2025-11-23 17:28:40+00:00
For all the concerns about surveillance/tracking/etc, the only saving grace is that the UK government is too dysfunctional and incompetent to demand and oversee a proper implementation. The digital ID scheme is the latest reason for politicians to get paid for busywork and funnel money to an incompetent private-sector contractor (obviously this is not going to be built in-house by the excellent GDS - Government Digital Service) who will go over time and budget and deliver something not fit for any purpose (whether beneficial to citizens or hostile such a tracking).
by AlotOfReading | 2025-11-23 17:29:20+00:00
Think of all the use cases where the output is going to be ingested by another machine. You don't know that "perceptually lossless" as designed for normal human eyeballs on normal screens in normal lighting environments is going to contain all the information an ML system will use. You want to preserve data as long as possible, until you make an active choice to throw it away. Even the system designer may not know whether it's appropriate to throw that information away, for example if they're designing digital archival systems and having to consider future users who aren't available to provide requirements.
by StillBored | 2025-11-23 17:31:02+00:00
And generally considered unconstitutional, until suddenly it wasn't, just like GWB nationalizing the TSA itself thereby creating the single largest case of the federal government pilfering through everyday Americans persons and property hunting for things that are legal to own. Which was also wildly considered unconstitutional, until it wasn't.

And go read the 4th amendment, with the understand that no one who signed it thought anything in the constitution authorizes any part of the federal government to ignore the absolutist language the bill of rights is written in. The assumption was that if there arose a need to justify the federal government searching people like this it needed a super majority to pass an amendment to fix it.
by kace91 | 2025-11-23 17:31:46+00:00
I've been convinced by my team that unified light mode is a good idea.

There's always a website, a person screensharing, a shared screenshot or something else that is light, and it WILL bother you if everything else is set to dark.

A dark thing in otherwise light settings doesn't produce the same issue, therefore adapting your settings for light work is more protective.

My main issue has been finding good light color schemes, particularly for neovim. Most have awful ideas like light yellow colors over light background, that I suspect come from just porting the dark mode to a light background as an afterthought. All of the themes I use have a few adjustments in my config.
by teiferer | 2025-11-23 17:31:49+00:00
I find it shocking that most comments here just accept the article as fact and discuss the implications.

The message might not even be wrong. But why is everybody's BS detection on ice in the AI topic space? Come one people, you can all do better than this!

Thanks for flagging. Though whenever such a made up thing is flagged, we lose the chance to discuss this (meta) topic. People need to be aware how prevalent this is. By just hiding it every time we notice, we're preventing everybody to read the kind of comment you wrote and recalibrate their BS-meters.
by dangus | 2025-11-23 17:32:14+00:00
That’s just your opinion, man.

Like, what do you mean by “permanently unusable state?”

This is all just vague nonsense.

Windows bad because Microsoft, or something.

I’m gonna guess you’ll come back and say something dated or exaggerated like “OneDrive nags you all the time” (nope, it can be fully uninstalled in windows 11 just like any app).
by dustbunny | 2025-11-23 17:33:02+00:00
Try telling these reasons to your aging father who no longer understands how to print a file the government sent him because windows has changed windows explorer so much that he doesn't even understand that it's part of the OS anymore.

The disaster that is the ever shifting UX of windows is having serious harm on our senior citizens.

I've fielded several issues like this from many different seniors I know.

We've left these people behind and it's a shame that is having serious consequences.

Yes, things are better under the hood. But the surface, the UX, is a mark of shame on our entire industry.
by anonym29 | 2025-11-23 17:33:12+00:00
This is the privileged majority punching down at minority, not unlike an abled person whining about the existence of accessibility options, or a native-born American complaining about government forms also having a Spanish section after the English section.

There's a reason that extensions like Dark Mode¹ have 10,000,000+ installs while no "Light Mode" extensions can even exist as far as I can tell: more or less the entire internet is already light-mode by default, with no option even provided by webmasters for dark mode for those who want it on a vast majority of websites.

What I can't comprehend is why the people who already have light mode as the default across the entire internet can't be content letting people with a preference for dark mode even exist without aggressively trying to erase the preferences of people who don't feel the exact same way as themselves.

Further, for anyone using OLED panels, which is a non-insignificant portion, black backgrounds reduce power draw and therefore global carbon emissions. Light backgrounds literally accelerate climate change, however marginally.

¹https://darkreader.org/
by dijit | 2025-11-23 17:33:28+00:00
I think it's a bit more democratic, though many in Sweden would prefer it to be more-so. (the major parties used to just sort of agree on 95%+ of issues, leading to some disenfranchisement across the population).

I think though it's a lot about the fact that the UK is sort-of an "adversarial" kind of democracy, and Sweden is more like a "consensus" driven democracy..

The UK is also pretty often plagued by sleaze scandals for officials in public office, by contrast Swedish politicians can be incompetent or fuck-up, but there's much more public access to what they're doing.

I think it's also true that people feel that public services are pretty good, even if the healthcare system is overburdened, and that there could be more police officers: taxes are high but most people definitely think that it's worth it.

The way COVID was handled and the ongoing freedom of speech issues in the UK are also something that make me not trust the government, they'll violate my rights on a whim. Compared to Sweden where even during COVID they didn't lock down (even if it was arguably the right thing to do and would have saved a lot of lives) because it would have violated peoples rights.

I'm not going to sit here and claim that Sweden is a paragon of virtue, they get a lot wrong and there are plenty of inefficiencies, but compared to the UK it's pretty stark.

It's like comparing trust in government between the UK and Russia. (I think that's actually a pretty fair comparison, USA and UK have comparatively similar trust in government compared to Sweden vs UK).
by cess11 | 2025-11-23 17:33:32+00:00
There's a link in the preview of TFA that unlocks the rest of the article, looks like this for me:

https://medium.com/@teja.kusireddy23/i-reverse-engineered-20...

The article is basically a description of where to look for clues. Perhaps they've contracted with some of these companies and don't want to break some NDA by naming them, but still know a lot about how they work.
by dragonwriter | 2025-11-23 17:34:03+00:00
> The expectation set by OpenAI and everyone else has set is that you will have one model that can do everything for you.

I don’t think that’s the expectation set by “everyone else” in the AI space, even if it arguably is for OpenAI (which has always, at least publicly, had something of a focus on eventual omnicapable superintelligence.) I think Google Antigravity is evidence of this: there’s a main, user selected coding model, but regardless of which coding model is used, there are specialized models used for browser interaction and image generation. While more and more capabilities are at least tolerably supported by the big general purpose models, the range of specialized models seems to be increasing rather than decreasing, and seems likely that, for conplex efforts, combining a general purpose model with a set of focussed, task-specific models will be a useful approach for the forseeable future.
by vpShane | 2025-11-23 17:34:04+00:00
Yeah, it does. It's not the worst in the world but dark mode my eyes relax and I can better enter flow-states. Too much non-dark mode and I get eye floaters.

Probably has something to do with having an all black background on desktop / IRC, terminals, steam since 1996/1997->now

Even MSN Gaming Zone where I started was 'dark moded'
by cjbgkagh | 2025-11-23 17:34:38+00:00
In my opinion these institutions only had stated intentions of keeping democracy in check. I think they’ve always been tool for oligarchic forces to use against the masses and each other.

To me the apparent incompetence of the SFO is better explained as a mechanism for the UK gov to double dip on bribes / campaign donations when the first one was insufficient.

I think the effective anti corruption institutional culture was built when there was competition between empires and it was in the empires interest to do so.

There is still a general perception that the UK has comparatively low levels of corruption but I attribute this to low levels of petty corruption. It is still in the interest of a corrupt state that lower level corruption is effectively policed as they are in competition. So it’s very possible that the majority of the population will not be privy to corruption while at the same time the majority of important decisions made are corrupted.
by linsomniac | 2025-11-23 17:34:47+00:00
I found this one weird trick that'll get a Xfinity manager to personally come to your residence and leave a card with their cell phone number for you to call if you have any problems with your service. All it takes is for your city to start a build out of a fiber ISP.

I really had no complaints about Xfinity service other than the limited outbound bandwidth. But when our city deployed their own fiber ISP and our neighborhood was one of the first to get deployed, I was anxious to switch. The week they pulled the fiber down our street, a manager at Xfinity came down our street super concerned with keeping our business.

Prior to the city fiber we had no real other choice (4-6Mbps DSL or terrestrial wireless that was struggling). Having real alternative pushed the Xfinity price down by at least half, and made them start to care. The phone company has started deploying fiber in the last year or so as well.
by mh- | 2025-11-23 17:34:51+00:00
> just escaped [..]

About 20 years ago, haha, but yes. Am familiar with that term from Crichton.

> [..] UK in American media

If it's any consolation, much of the reporting I see on America in American media is also inaccurate.

> survey data

To me this is perhaps the most egregious bad faith reporting I see. The survey questions themselves are often designed in a way that will likely produce a given result, whether through malice or incompetence. Then the reporting on those results buries the actual questions asked.

I saw one recently, from the early 2000s, that said "majority of Americans cannot locate the Middle East on a map".

But the actual survey's findings were "the majority of Americans can not identify the Middle East on a map".

And what did it mean by that? It was a multiple choice question and if you failed to include the correct extent of North Africa that is regarded as the Middle East, you were considered unable to identify the Middle East.

Something like 85% correctly included Saudi Arabia.
by Telaneo | 2025-11-23 17:34:53+00:00
Yes. I have Dark Reader[1] on by default for all websites and only disable it when it activly breaks a site, or a site has a suitibly dark theme and Dark Reader thus flips things the wrong way.

If a site is borked to the point that Dark Reader can't fix it, I'll use reader mode or just go somewhere else.

Your site looks just fine to me.

[1] https://darkreader.org/
by asim | 2025-11-23 17:35:34+00:00
I guess we can speculate or theorise on potential strategies but beyond hope we should also try to do something. I have seen some X clones with variations but a lot of the same behaviour plays out when you have no rules around posting, moderation, types of content, etc. Effectively these platforms end up in the same place of gamification and driving engagement through addictive behaviours because they want users. Essentially I think true community is different, true community keeps each other accountable and in check. Somehow we need to get back to some of that. Maybe co-operative led tools. Non profits. I think Mastodon meant well and didn't end up in the right place. Element/Matrix is OK but again doesn't feel quite right. Maybe we should never try to replicate what was, I don't know. BitChat (https://bitchat.free/) is an interesting alternative from Jack Dorsey - who I think is trying to fix the loss of Twitter and the stronghold of WhatsApp.
by anonym29 | 2025-11-23 17:35:54+00:00
Dark mode already isn't the default option across a vast majority of the entire internet.

There are easily 10x if not 100x as many sites that only support their default of light mode as those that even offer built-in support for dark mode, and it's more like 1000x as many as those that default to dark mode.

TFA does seem to be explicitly demanding erasure of the preferences of an insignificantly tiny minority of websites.
by locknitpicker | 2025-11-23 17:35:56+00:00
> I see it differently. That's the name of the game. Language design is always striving toward making it more intelligible, but it is reasonable to expect pros to have command of the language.

No, that's an extremely naive and clueless opinion to have. Any basic book on software engineering will tell you in many, many ways that the goal of any software engineer is to write simple code that is trivial to parse, understand, and maintain, and writing arcane and overly complex code is the Hallmark of an incompetent developer. The goal of a software engineer is to continuously fight complexity and keep things as simple as they can be. Just because someone can write cryptic, unintelligible code that doesn't make them smart or clever: it only makes them bad at their job.
by zkmon | 2025-11-23 17:36:17+00:00
>> the author’s wish to present ... mathematics, as intuitively and informally as possible, without compromising logical rigor

The books in the West in general kept getting less rigorous, with time. I don't see Asian or Russian books doing this. The audience getting less receptive to rigor and wishing for more visuals and informal talk. When they get to higher studies and research, would they be able to cope with steep curve of more formalism and rigor?
by dkdcio | 2025-11-23 17:36:24+00:00
you’re just doing ad hominems and strawmans. I’m not suggesting banning anything other than digital advertisement. you’re not open to having a productive discussion about it, just misdirection and whataboutism

please stop ascribing intent I do not have and words I did not say in your juvenile attempt to win an argument

p.s. still would love to hear your constitutional argument against it! banning digital advertisement at the federal level is not unrealistic and if you've actually given it the thought you’re pretending to and still reach that conclusion, I do have an ad hominem to throw back at you
by malnourish | 2025-11-23 17:36:27+00:00
Ditto is the best tool for clipboard history I've found. One of my first installs on any Windows machine.

I agree with you on PowerToys - that's also a first install. Raycast is really PowerToys for Mac... But now on Windows, perhaps for the people that started on Mac and have to use Windows, rather than the other way around.
by Nextgrid | 2025-11-23 17:36:55+00:00
> Given all the above forms of id I currently have, what's the point of me having a digital one.

The issue is that none of those can be really used online, except the passport if used on an NFC-enabled device.

This means services that need identity verification for legitimate reasons like banks, interacting with the government for sensitive matters like tax refunds/benefits/etc and so on can't actually verify your identity; so they either have to spend money on snake oil like "fraud protection", bullshit camera-based document verification combined with credit reference agencies (a whole other privacy nightmare), or they have to make you visit in-person and maintain facilities to do so.

Being able to prove your identity cryptographically would be a significant advantage and remove the need for a lot of parasites like "fraud protection" services, CRAs, etc. You could actually do legally-binding signatures online, removing the need for security theatre such as paper documents (which are trivial to falsify, but enough people don't know how to use Paint that there is belief they are secure enough).
by derektank | 2025-11-23 17:37:21+00:00
I certainly believe that if you want to be a successful musician, not even a pop star necessarily just one that's able to draw crowds large enough to sustain you financially, you probably are bound by certain norms and expectations. Not necessarily because audiences hate women (or men for that matter) that break the mold, but they're not as easy to digest. It adds friction. And when there are thousands of other artists out there to listen to, that friction can be the difference between success and failure.

I agree with you though, if you're willing to live a small life where you only need the love and respect of a small handful of people, you can do almost anything and very few people will genuinely hate you.
by clanky | 2025-11-23 17:37:41+00:00
The issue is that Epstein was involved in much more than just sex trafficking. He was a kind of Zelig ruling class fixer with his hands in eugenics, cryptocurrency, AI, geopolitics, money laundering, etc. Clearly his relationships were all of a highly transactional nature. So what did he get out of his connections to the most well-known figure of the (compatible) left?

Some positions of Chomsky's that I believe should be considered (even more) sus in hindsight:

- There is no useful parapolitical analysis to be done of the JFK assassination or 9/11

- People who refused to take undertested COVID vaccines in 2021 should be evicted from society, including grocery stores

- Israel is a vassal state controlled by the U.S. (IMO the reality is much more of a coequal relationship among transnational elites)

- Anarcho-syndicalism and anti-communism more broadly
by tremon | 2025-11-23 17:37:46+00:00
I don't think that's true, for me it is the concept that's wrong. The second-order effects you mention:

- Parasitic capacitive coupling - Propagation delay differences - Analogue behaviours of the silicon substrate

...are not just influenced by the chip design, they're influenced by substrate purity and doping uniformity -- exactly the parts of the production process that we don't control. Or rather: we shrink the technology node to right at the edge where these uncontrolled factors become too big to ignore. You can't design a circuit based on the uncontrolled properties of your production process and still expect to produce large volumes of working circuits.

Yes, we have better tooling today. If you use today's 14A machinery to produce a 1µ chip like the 80386, you will get amazingly high yields, and it will probably be accurate enough that even these analog circuits are reproducible. But the analog effects become more unpredictable as the node size decreases, and so will the variance in your analog circuits.

Also, contrary to what you said: the GA fitness process does not design for robustness and generality. It designs for the specific chip you're measuring, and you're measuring post-production. The fact that it works for reprogrammable FPGAs does not mean it translates well to mass production of integrated circuits. The reason we use digital circuitry instead of analog is not because we don't understand analog: it's because digital designs are much less sensitive to production variance.
by tannhaeuser | 2025-11-23 17:37:51+00:00
Markdown inline syntax is straightforward to capture using SGML SHORTREF. What's more difficult (impossible) are things such as reference links where a markdown processor is supposed to pull text (the title of a link) from wherever it's defined before or after its usage.

Haven't heard about archforms in a while ;) but it's not a technique for custom syntax, and since markdown is specified as a Wiki syntax with canonical mapping to HTML, there's no need for the kind of simplistic element and token renaming possible with archforms.
by YouAreWRONGtoo | 2025-11-23 17:38:25+00:00
Delimited continuations as a programming construct were somewhat of interest when I learned about them, but not even my university discussed them.

I don't think I ever had a colleague that even ever heard of the concept, let alone applied it. Of the "smart people", they typically only have heard of plain continuations, if you are lucky.

The debugger in Racket was useful when I used it years ago.

Unfortunately, it's kind of difficult to beat an entire planet cranking out libraries in other languages as many interesting programs are written for an ecosystem; if 90% of your project is building FFIs to make something work, perhaps you can better just choose the language of fools dun jour.

I don't think Scheme is the most academic language, today. Such honor would go to a language supporting a computable version of homotopy types, which I would guess only 1000 people in the world would be capable of using assuming production grade implementations (of which none exist).
by zelphirkalt | 2025-11-23 17:38:56+00:00
Oh, I am surprised the original didn't include tables. Guess it has been too long, since I looked at his page.

reStructuredText of course has support for tables[1].

I think writing a grammar for reStructuredText is a larger effort of course than writing one for Markdown, which is not to be underestimated.

Though extending reStructuredText is way less necessary, because it already includes a concept for custom "directives" (iirc that is what they are called). For example I have once made a custom directive to link to other documents, so that I have a local "wiki" like structure made out of files and folders. In Markdown no specific syntax exists for things to be implemented as extensions. Customization authors need to include special things in their parser instead, or come up with an extensibility concept themselves.

I think the point you are trying to make is, that there seems to be something else making the difference in adoption of the formats. Do I interpret your comment correctly?

[1]: https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/usage/restructuredtext/...
by LoganDark | 2025-11-23 17:39:02+00:00
I think if all you want is a Unix, you're better off with Mac, or at least you would have been before the Apple Silicon transition broke Windows support, and Valve stopped supporting Proton on Mac, and CrossOver still doesn't support Unreal Engine, etc.

Stuff like games and proprietary drivers is what keeps people on Windows, I think. Either that, or just a distate for the Mac's design language / user experience, which is also completely fair.

Back in 2016 or so, I had a triple-boot on my MacBook Pro:

- macOS for daily driving, and most development

- Windows for Windows-specific development, gaming, and proprietary drivers or IDEs (Texas Instruments programmers; Samsung / OnePlus flashing; some other embedded tooling)

- Arch Linux for Linux-specific development, usually involving the GPU, which I couldn't get to work in a VM; and also just for fun

These days I simply cannot do most of those things with Mac hardware. I can't even run Asahi yet, because M4 Max.