MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by terminalshort | 2025-11-09 02:38:07+00:00
I fundamentally don't understand the rights of government employees. They are supposedly there to execute the will of the political branch that controls them whether or not they agree with it, which is why they are given immunity from firing by each incoming administration. So how do they also have the right to personalized communication from their work email addresses (a right that no private sector employee has)? How can they have the right to exercise government authority without being democratically elected, or at least accountable for their actions to someone who is?
by gnabgib | 2025-11-09 02:38:30+00:00
King 5: Judge orders police to release surveillance camera data, raising privacy questions (11 points, 10 hours ago, 2 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45857944

Skagit Valley Herald: Court denies request that it find Flock Safety camera data is exempt from Public Records Act (32 points, 1 hours ago, 7 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45861829
by tenacious_tuna | 2025-11-09 02:41:20+00:00
A lot of Ruby's syntax lends itself towards cramming as much business logic on the screen as it can. I used to say it's a "semantically dense" language, but I don't actually know if that's technically accurate. Compared to Java or Rust I certainly felt like Ruby fit more "logic" into a screenful of code, but at the cost of any other context (type annotations, import notes, etc)

I strongly appreciate how much decision fatigue Rails avoids by just offering you so much batteries-included stuff. I tried getting into Django and immediately spun out fretting over what ORM or migration manager or caching system to use. (One of my coworkers who is a huge Django says I'm nuts and that Django offers those things too, so I may be misremembering.) Rails being as opinionated as it is saves so much thinking effort along those lines.

I think both of those facets make it extremely appealing to, as you say, anyone greenfielding code, and are the exact things that make it an absolute trash fire to maintain anything of appreciable size.

We're constantly fielding incidents due to something being undefined or unexpected nils or other basic typecheck failures.

> it just optimizes for a set of values that I don't happen to share anymore

That is a lovely way to put it, I'm gonna steal that
by chocalot | 2025-11-09 02:41:26+00:00
> The same goes for things like offshore wind power, my life is made more difficult because most people expect their home to be 70F when it is 60F outside and 60F when it is 70F outside, anything else would incur undue hardship.

This is an overly simplistic view of demands on energy, but it might be one of the easiest for people decry. (As it happens, comfort is nice though.)

> should I be penalized for wanting to live a life that has little or no environmental impact at cost of those who want to live in reasonable comfort while being a part of/contributing to, society?

No, but it's also unrealistic to expect to be sheltered from all externalities of society.

After all, switching to sail cargo ships is itself reducing an externality incurred by others.

> what happened to the first 'R' of the three R's (reduce, reuse and recycle)

This is a good principle, but it's not universally accepted, and it still permits things that involve cargo via ocean.

As more and more people are pulled from poverty, they too will begin to use more energy to improve their lives, perhaps to the point that they can choose to follow their dreams upon retirement.
by dataflow | 2025-11-09 02:42:25+00:00
Is there no federal defamation law that could apply here? I would've thought this would fall under something like that, rather than 1A. Even without 1A, you could still be defaming someone by misrepresenting that they hold a certain view, right? I know states have laws against this regardless of the constitution, but is there no such thing at the federal level?
by rainsford | 2025-11-09 02:43:02+00:00
> IMO governments should have started doing something about 20 years ago if they wanted to keep things on-track...

I guess my thought is that it's non-obvious what "doing something" would have looked like. The seemingly inevitable outcome of economic, social, and technological progress has been declining birthrates, and many proposed solutions would effectively involve reversing one of those three things. I'm honestly not sure that would be a better outcome. I'd welcome a more palatable alternative, but it's not clear one will be forthcoming.
by apical_dendrite | 2025-11-09 02:44:59+00:00
This is not a case where the government is telling employees that they cannot say certain things while on the job. That would be reasonable (see the Hatch Act, for instance, which the Trump administration violates constantly). It is compelled speech. They are sending out a message from that person without that person's knowledge or consent. The first amendment prohibits the government from forcing someone to say something that they do not want to say. That is true even for government employees (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janus_v._AFSCME)
by gusgus01 | 2025-11-09 02:45:21+00:00
I mean it depends on what we are talking about. The case you mention was about the right to peacefully assemble, and that the swastika does not count as "fighting words" and thus not grounds to say the assembly isn't allowed. In the case of Europe, they don't have the same constitution as the USA so I'm not sure how to compare that, and if those extremists are merely being silenced over swastikas or calls for the deaths of people since you didn't specify.

Plus the comparison to Europe and that specific case is especially untenable because if the specific case in Europe was in Germany, then they have a special relationship with the swastika.
by tky | 2025-11-09 02:45:48+00:00
Accurate, if even a bit softer than how it really is.

I never felt unsafe in my west side Chicago community until the Black Hawks started doing daily intimidation runs. Until they abducted community members who were out working one day, gone the next.

I used to push a wagon with side pockets full of bubbles, snacks, and toys. Now there’s fewer toys to make room for gas masks for kids and adults.

Chicago is a tough town. People here are doing an amazing job restraining themselves and others. I’ve heard on more than one occasion people in crowds reminding one another to not give them reason to pull in the Guard.

This will likely not be the case forever.

More people need to see what’s happening here. This is not sustainable; generational harm is being inflicted on those directly targeted and those who seethe with anger and have to explain to kids why their friends aren’t around anymore.
by justin-reeves | 2025-11-09 02:46:20+00:00
My Kobo Libra 2 has a “My Books” tab with no ads.

When I put it away, I always leave it there (or in an open book) and it always stays there (or in an open book).

At least on Mac, I have noticed the Apple TV app seems to stay on one of the Library tabs indefinitely if I leave it there, but maybe it has just escaped their notice.

On the other hand, there’s no separate tab for “Continue Watching.” (A partial work-around is using the widget.)
by JKCalhoun | 2025-11-09 02:46:36+00:00
An old AlphaSmart can be picked up for a few hundred dollars on eBay. Kind of a clever distraction-free text editor.

I picked up a couple a few years ago. Pretty clever in that, one way it transfers files. You connect the device via USB to a functional computer and ready an empty document in your text-editor of choice. Push a button on the device and it sends the internal text as though from a USB keyboard to your computer: speed-typing [1].

[1] https://youtu.be/xXuRZbq8-0s?si=AbLZ4DcnhpkUYANG&t=93
by dissent | 2025-11-09 02:47:24+00:00
This reminds me of the Harvard Implicit Association test, particularly the gender career one. It will tell you if you implicitly associate certain careers with certain genders.

Since the overwhelming majority of, say, auto mechanics, are held by men, associating these roles with men is entirely accurate. Without saying anything of what it "should" be.

If your results were anything else, it suggests some kind of powerful overcompensating counter bias is as play. That your desire to see more gender balance in this role is so great, that you subconsciously already believe it to be normal. The real world is a deviation from where it "should" be. This strikes me as a rather pernicious position. Dogmatic. Almost religious.
by zzo38computer | 2025-11-09 02:48:40+00:00
I have ideas as well, and wrote about some of them (including some partial specifications), although I do not have a name for my own, so due to this, there is not a repository or anything like that yet. Note that, there are multiple parts, and different projects will have a different set of these parts: hardware, kernel, user/application programs; my ideas involve all three (there may be other parts, and different ways to divide them, too).
by solid_fuel | 2025-11-09 02:48:41+00:00
> Their speech is restricted to some degree as part of doing their job

There are at least two kinds of speech restriction - not being allowed to say something, and being compelled to say something. To analogize, it's one thing to be told "you're not allowed to rant about the CEO on social media". It's another thing entirely to be told "you have to make 3 posts a day about how great the CEO is".

These federal employees were not just restricted from publicly criticizing the administration - which is fairly typical for federal employees - but they also had their out of office messages changed without consent to point partisan blame for the current shutdown. That's essentially compelled speech, especially since Out Of Office messages still include the employee's name as the From line.
by UncleMeat | 2025-11-09 02:49:37+00:00
The fact that everybody has just become okay with the fact that police forces are actively far right agitators is outrageous. If cops are desperate to smash skulls because they hate brown people then we need to completely dismantle and rebuild all of the police forces from scratch because it is impossible for them to be anything but violence machines.

We have violent hate gangs staffed with military equipment, with the authority to kill, and with minimal care for the actual law.
by eichin | 2025-11-09 02:51:09+00:00
Existing products include Freewrite and Pomera; there's also a pretty big nostalgia/retro space around the AlphaSmart, the eMate 300, and the Tandy 100. (As far as I know the pomera is the one that's linux underneath but completely hidden - it's particularly funny that it has wifi, but the only thing you can do with it is set the clock!)
by georgeburdell | 2025-11-09 02:51:18+00:00
I’m not even a few screens into this and I’m already nodding my head in agreement. Having parents of the age where hospital trips are now a yearly occurrence at least, the level of care a patient gets is so much better if relatives are involved and knowledgeable. The medical system does not give a shit about you, they just want to make sure you don’t die in their care.

My sister is a hospital doctor and was remotely checking in with my dad’s care team every shift when he got sepsis after TWO different ERs missed pneumonia even with chest Xrays. Mistakes she corrected included getting him off the ventilator after the need had passed and also preventing him from being discharged directly home — instead he went to a rehab facility for 2 weeks. When I arrived after a few days in rehab he would barely stay awake long enough to eat. He went on to make a full recovery.
by hunterpayne | 2025-11-09 02:52:03+00:00
That's correct. Its also the case that a big chunk of the Republicans are pro-NATO.

However, in politics it is best to be liked. If you want people to send their kids to go save you (again), its best that they like you. Sneering at people you depend on for your security is just dumb. Remember that the next time you consider voting for an politician with lots of anti-US hot takes.
by thot_experiment | 2025-11-09 02:52:13+00:00
I haven't touched it in many years as well (though this thread has made me curious how I would feel about it now, so I may change that), but I think I attribute a lot of my general stability/resilience to bad trips when it comes to hallucinogens to my salvia use giving me experience with a mindstate that can easily tip into an H.R. Geiger kaleidoscope as you said.
by elicash | 2025-11-09 02:52:45+00:00
You're correct that you don't understand how those rights work.

I think you're actually struggling more with the idea that the First Amendment is a restriction on government, not on employers generally.

But the most relevant thing that you don't understand is that government employees are NOT supposed or allowed to act in partisan ways. Your suggestion seems to be that's the point of the job. In fact, that type of activity is prohibited in their official functions and can even be illegal.
Show HN: Xleak – Terminal Excel viewer with interactive TUI and search
by w108bmg | 2025-11-09 02:56:19+00:00
Hi HN! I just released xleak, a terminal-based Excel viewer written in Rust.

I was inspired by working with spreadsheets and word documents on the command line and wanted something faster than opening Excel/LibreOffice. It supports .xlsx, .xls, .xlsm, .xlsb, and .ods files.

Key features: - Interactive TUI with full keyboard navigation (vim-style search with / and n/N) - View Excel formulas in cells - Copy cells/rows to clipboard - Export to CSV, JSON, or text - Lazy loading for large files (1000+ rows) - Jump to any cell (e.g., "A100", "500", or "10,5")

Built with the calamine crate for fast Excel parsing and ratatui for the TUI.

Installation: cargo install xleak, or Homebrew, Nix, or pre-built binaries.

Would love feedback on features or use cases I'm missing!

GitHub: https://github.com/bgreenwell/xleak
by UncleMeat | 2025-11-09 02:56:46+00:00
Right.

The plan to defeat fascism can't be "never lose a single election ever for the rest of time." Political leaders did absolutely fuck all to consign Trump to the garbage bin of history in 2021 and now we've got a fascist president motivated entirely by two things: hurting as many people he hates as possible and putting up tacky gold shit in the white house.
by keeda | 2025-11-09 02:56:57+00:00
> The election was fully determined by inflation. Biden made a reasonable (though incorrect) bet that full employment was more important than price stability.

There is credible theory (shared by a very balanced labor economist I follow) that the immigration crisis helped tame the inflation crisis, besides boosting the economy enough for a soft landing:

https://fortune.com/2024/04/12/immigration-inflation-economy...

Also some studies for and against this theory:

- https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2025/01/10/Imm... (Finds inflation lowered.)

- https://www.dallasfed.org/research/economics/2025/0708 (No effect on inflation, but yes on GPD growth.)

Now, I'm not saying this was always Biden's plan, but the economics are not as straightforward as "employments vs inflation."
by aberrantflux | 2025-11-09 02:58:07+00:00
KaiScript computes your function at compile time and at runtime, so that any arbitrary function's return will always be typed correctly given that the inputs are known. It supports branching, recursion, arithmetic operations, map(), and other useful builtins. It fully simulates your stack, so closures work as expected.

The language is implemented with a parallel type level and runtime lexer, parser, and eval that mirror each other.
by fnordpiglet | 2025-11-09 02:58:10+00:00
Why is alignment necessary? In our system compromise is the typical alignment sought where no single view dominates the decisions or direction. With enforced alignment no compromise is more than not necessary it’s not possible. That’s the dysfunction of the present because there’s a perception that holding office entails enforcing alignment, and opposing voices not only need not be heard but are forcefully silenced. However the system we have in the US doesn’t allow for that, and explicably, it’s even more dysfunctional than normal. Sooner or later they have to stop and compromise, over throw the system, or be removed. That’s precisely how it’s designed to work.

So, you shouldn’t be silenced, your opinions should be heard, and to the extent they’re reasonable, they should be considered proportional to your ability to influence. The more to which this is prevented or ignored the more unstable the system is.
by yawnr | 2025-11-09 02:58:46+00:00
Even something “custom” is still a native component. The JSX you write eventually creates native views. Whether or not those views and components match the style and behavior of stock iOS or Android is a different story, and whether or not there are performance bottlenecks due to React Native’s bridge (now in theory no longer an issue because of a big architecture rewrite called Fabric) is another.
by lurk2 | 2025-11-09 02:58:52+00:00
> before you found something you thought you could pull a misleading quote from

Do you have any information not presented in the article that suggests that this woman had legal status to reside in the country, and / or that she was not apprehended during a pursuit?

I’m not putting it past an official to lie about these kinds of things, but if this woman had the facts on her side you would usually have heard about it faster.

> the building, did not have a warrant,

Law enforcement officials do not need a warrant to enter private property while they are engaged in the active pursuit of someone suspected of having committed a crime.

> and were armed with guns while walking into the school with children and teachers present"

Per my last comment:

> The agents, who were armed but did not draw their weapons, pushed other people who were looking to intervene, he said.

You’re trying to give a very particular account of these events that the facts are not supporting.

> even if you think this is someone who ought to be deported, there are many less violent, less traumatic, and far more dignified ways to go about it.

I agree, a school isn’t the place for it. So I ask again: Do you have information that would suggest this woman was not being actively pursued by law enforcement officials prior to entering the daycare?

> Or would you like to endorse masked men with military-grade equipment storming into daycares to arrest women who work with children there?

I could (accurately) refer to this woman as an undocumented criminal who barricaded herself in a daycare after being pursued by law enforcement agents, but it’s completely hyperbolic versus just saying “a woman ran into a daycare and was arrested.” There’s nothing to suggest that these officers “stormed” the building like marines kicking the doors in at Fallujah. As was explicitly mentioned in the article (and my previous comment), their guns were never drawn. None of the three articles related to this incident suggest that the officers were masked.
by xethos | 2025-11-09 02:58:54+00:00
Without being in favour of it, this is one reason politicians are old. Not necessarily twenty years past typical retirement, but those relationships that were so useful to Biden were built over decades. Getting elected at 40 doesn't mean you also have the history with others in government to actully get things done.

Good faith could be assumed in some other countries, and those relationships could, subsuquently, be less vital. But that's not the political environment America has found itself in.
by dotspencer | 2025-11-09 02:58:54+00:00
I pulled out the RGB values from the solid color areas of the swatch images on the manufacturers' websites for each of the colors.

It's definitely just an approximation of the real-world color, but I figured that if that's the RGB value the manufacturer used, it's probably pretty close.

Then I calculate the euclidean distance between the RGB value from the provided hex and each of the paints, and show the two closest matches from each brand.
Show HN: Geofenced chat communities anyone can create
by clarencehoward | 2025-11-09 02:59:58+00:00
Hi HN, I built a location-based chatroom with Discord-like servers. This started as a portfolio project to learn WebSockets but has spiraled into something else entirely.

There are two features right now:

Drop - Single chatrooms that can only be seen within a specified radius and only last for a time less than 48 hours chosen by the user.

Hubs - Geofenced servers modeled after Discord. These are not time restricted. They can be created by anyone and the creator becomes the admin able to add channels and set rules. When a user enters the location’s area, they can join the hub and continue seeing messages even after leaving. Hubs cannot overlap, so once one exists in an area another cannot be created on it. The hub will persist as long as it is being actively used. If unused for two weeks, it will be deleted. (Still implementing this deletion aspect, so that is not in the landing page at the moment)

Why I built this.

I do not like the feel of most social media anymore, but I really like my university’s discord server. I wanted something more general that provided similar interactions. So I thought something that might work is a more general social app tied to location.

I think if it is done right it can recreate the atmosphere that I liked. I thought a lot about what that atmosphere is. I think for social media to feel natural it needs a “third thing”: a shared interest or object that creates a connection between two people, or a neutral ground for communication.

Having something in common just makes the interactions better and more useful. I think location can serve as general thing in common, especially if the servers are curated by locals. It could also be a good way for people to immediately connect in a new place.

Right now, I’m just having fun building this thing. I would honestly like to use it if other people were on there… and it was built better and an app.

Feedback

I’m looking for any feedback. What’s a good idea or what’s a bad idea. This is really just a prototype, so there are some rough edges, and I am actively working on it. If you find any bugs and feel like communicating them, please do. You can reach me at nhowar@uwo.ca
by SilverElfin | 2025-11-09 03:00:22+00:00
You’re not actually refuting the argument of the person you’re replying to. They’re saying that when you’re employed by the government, you’re paid to do a job and you’re at the service of the agency and leaders you work for. Your rights as a private individual do not apply when you’re paid to do a certain job.

As an example, if an agency wanted to perform a marketing campaign, and you decide to do go off script as an employee, you can be fired. There is no legal right to say whatever you want in the context of the job.
by cityofdelusion | 2025-11-09 03:00:31+00:00
I have a high end euro-style Bosch, largely seen as one of the best washers out there. No indication in the manual of running hot water. In fact the manual shows the temperatures that all the different cycles run at, and the "pre-rinse" cycle does not show a temperature. The manual also doesn't say to add any detergent other than the main cycle and recommends pacs. Its always at the top of industry testing, so I am thinking a random YouTuber might not be correct here.
by inshard | 2025-11-09 03:01:06+00:00
The article ignores agriculture and animal husbandry as the critical inflection point for property rights and mass conflict. You could argue proto-versions of these dynamics existed even in abundant hunting grounds—see Native American tribal warfare over territory. More importantly, it misses technology as a third layer. As technology deflates the base layers of Maslow’s hierarchy, inequality matters less in absolute terms. The main constraint now is housing, but even that could be solved through vertical development and better long-term urban planning. We might actually be at escape velocity to break the historical cycles described here.