MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sudobash1 | 2025-11-19 15:06:47+00:00
I don't get your point. This article is about control of the high level software running on your phone, not the firmware controlling your phone's radios. Even if an app store allowed any software without filter, this would not allow anyone to transmit "arbitrary radio signals". The much lower level firmware ensures that the radio communicates at proper power and protocol.

The phone hardware is not capable of arbitrary radio signals anyway. People can buy software defined radios off the shelf, but people generally don't abuse this because a) there really isn't any motivation for them to and b) they would quickly land in really hot water with the FCC.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-11-19 15:06:49+00:00
I don’t want someone to walk around, I don’t know, forcing all the phones around them in a 10m radius to blow up their batteries and hurt people.

Handheld radios, like my wireless tx/rx for lavaliers have to have their spectrums cleared by the FCC. As do most transmitting devices. There are baseline requirements before they can be sold/used.

I get often with these things if you give an inch they take a mile, but there have to be some foundational guardrails here IMO. You can’t just have a bunch of laws punishing people for behavior and no attempts at preventing it in the first place.

The ability to just transmit anything indiscriminately is just a dicey proposition to me. Like how we used to just allow a free for all with drones.
by analog8374 | 2025-11-19 15:06:51+00:00
Surely, in a conversation, the most damaging thing you can do to the integrity of that conversation is to selectively nullify the voice of a participant.

It ceases to be a conversation then. It is something else, posing as a conversation.

Maybe it would be better if this censorship-power is democratically controlled. But if this power is given to an individual. Well that's different.
by Aurornis | 2025-11-19 15:07:01+00:00
I have no doubt schools like that exist, but in every location I’ve lived and interacted with parents the private school educations they sent their kids to were no question a cut above.

I think this idea that private schools are no better are even worse is a wishful thinking narrative. Private schools, especially the more expensive ones, naturally select for parents who are more involved. More involved parents are highly correlated with better student outcomes. That alone means private schools are correlated with better outcomes. It honestly doesn’t really matter if it’s cause and effect or correlation, parents send their kids to private schools because they want them in the mix with other students selected into the higher performing environment.
by floppyd | 2025-11-19 15:07:12+00:00
The non-linear code structure (including visually) is something I've been thinking about for a long time and arrived at very naturally. I'm the "spread all the papers on the table to take in every interaction all at once" type of person, and so often I imagined a code editor that would allow me to just "cut" a piece of code and move it to the side. Separating stuff into files is kinda this, but it's not visual and just creates a lot of mess when I try to separate out small functions that are not reusable somewhere else. I don't even need the underlying non-linearity — just let me move the papers around on my code desk!
by asim | 2025-11-19 15:07:43+00:00
I have tried to hand off a project for years with many failed attempts. In the case of Mastodon they have some very high profile names that effectively want to relive the glory days of Twitter and take it over. In the case of smaller projects, you have to very diligent when deciding who to hand off too. I don't think there are great answers here.

If anyone is interested https://go-micro.dev
by Aurornis | 2025-11-19 15:08:08+00:00
> Basically, non-gifted kids learn from the gifted ones. It's that whole, "positive influence from peers" thing.

In other words, let’s drag the smart students down, disallow them a better education, and instead force them to teach their peers because we don’t think their teachers are doing a good job?

This is a terrible way to solve a problem.
by aki237 | 2025-11-19 15:08:12+00:00
+1. I was a strong proponent of RCS earlier. Don't care about Green/Blue bubble nonsense. But Google (an Ad company) started abusing RCS to send garbage ads my way. And there is no way to block that as well except for disabling RCS. I feel this is a loophole Google can abuse where local regulations ban vendors for sending promotional messages.

Whatever it is, Google of all org should not be at the Helm of this.

And the amount of moral policing they did to apple. Disgusting assholes. I hate Apple for a lot of reasons. iMessage is definitely not one of them.
by jjk166 | 2025-11-19 15:08:28+00:00
The feeling when you know you need to power through and just do something isn't frustration. Cleaning a dirty toilet isn't frustrating - it's unpleasant and unrewarding work that just needs to be done, but there is no feeling that it is substantially harder than it has to be. You may feel frustrated during the time period in which you are powering through a task, but that's almost always because you are frustrated that you are in a situation where you have to power through a task that probably could have been avoided, the task itself isn't frustrating.
by maccard | 2025-11-19 15:08:51+00:00
I would put $100 that within 6 months of that, we'll get a post on here saying that their startup is gone under because AWS deleted their account because they didn't pay their bill and didn't realise their data would be deleted.

> (the cap should be a rate, not a total)

this is _way_ more complicated than there being a single cap.
by belter | 2025-11-19 15:08:51+00:00
This has nothing about punching down. Writing a blog about this basic mistake, and presenting as advice shows a strong lack of self awareness. Its like when Google bought thousands of servers without ECC memory, but felt they were so smart they could not resist telling the world how bad that was and writing a paper about it...Or they could have hired some real hardware engineers from IBM or Sun...
by Joker_vD | 2025-11-19 15:09:10+00:00
Go's "defer" can't prevent return from actually returning from the function. Most of the time, it can't change the computed return value either, unless you go out of your way and use named return values. Go's "defer" also can't do crimes with "break" and "continue".

So Go's "defer" has more "and also do some things on the way out" semantics than "you suddenly forget why you were going to leave the kitchen, so you don't".
by amiga386 | 2025-11-19 15:09:17+00:00
One does not typically run games directly. That's fraught with the compatibility concerns you raise, and also the slowness of loading them from their disks, even when using an emulator, and needing a cumbersome UI to swap disks as needed.

Instead you run them with WHDLoad, originally designed to install all games onto the hard drives of real Amigas.

A lovely group of programmers have made WHDLoad installers for every game you know of, that patch the game in just the right places so it runs correctly, regardless of Amiga model or OS version.

WHDLoad also lets you press a "QuitKey" that returns you back to Workbench. And if you have an emulated Amiga with lots of RAM, you get to preload all the disks into RAM so there's basically zero loading time.

People have made large collections of "preinstalled" WHDLoad installers, bundling games in a ready-to-run way for any Amiga.
by alexjplant | 2025-11-19 15:09:39+00:00
"Hard" by whose definition? I had to implement those in MIPS assembly and write a hash table in x86 assembly in school but I don't think I could do that today without a good deal of refresh. I'd venture to say that most software developers today wouldn't even know where to begin because most software written today targets a VM that doesn't expose pointer arithmetic.
by lproven | 2025-11-19 15:10:06+00:00
> I did the same, but with Tandy 4000s.

Never saw one of those. Tandy computers did exist in the UK, and even here on the Isle of Man there was a single Tandy's store. (They weren't called "Radio Shack" here.) But while they sold lots of spares and components and toys, they didn't sell that many computers.

> I had kind of the reverse feeling: when the 486 came out, I knew those expensive SPARC and MIPS workstations were all doomed.

Well, yes. Flipside of the same coin.

Expensive RISC computers were doomed. Arm computers weren't expensive back then: they were considerably cheaper than PCs of the same spec. So for a while, they thrived, then when they couldn't compete on performance they moved into markets where they could compete on power consumption... which they then ruled for 30 years.
by frumplestlatz | 2025-11-19 15:10:27+00:00
Explicit error handling strategies allow you to not worry about all the code paths that explicitly cannot throw -- which is a lot of them. It makes life a lot easier in the non-throwing case, and doesn't complicate life any more in the throwing case as compared to exception-based error handling.

It also makes errors part of the API contract, which is where they belong, because they are.
by lapcat | 2025-11-19 15:10:34+00:00
> If you look at the recent shenanigans of WordPress and Ruby, they are causing discontent within the existing organisation of contributors.

This is why I think the article is a bit of misdirection. Your criticism is about project governance not about project succession.

You want the leaders of WordPress and Rails to step down now because you don't like how they behave in power, not because of the danger that the leaders might die or disappear and leave a power vacuum. I feel that the Mastodon example is a red herring here.
by burntsushi | 2025-11-19 15:10:38+00:00
`slice[i]` is just sugar for `slice.get(i).unwrap()`. And whether it's a "local" invariant or not is orthogonal. And `unwrap()` does not "require lying about invariants across your API surface."

> The blog post doesn’t address the issue, it simply pretends it’s not a real problem.

It very explicitly addresses it! It even gives real examples.

> Also from the post: “If we were to steelman advocates in favor of this style of coding, then I think the argument is probably best limited to certain high reliability domains. I personally don’t have a ton of experience in said domains …” > > Enough said.

Ad hominem... I don't have experience working on, e.g., medical devices upon which someone's life depends. So the point of that sentence is to say, "yes, I acknowledge this advice may not apply there." You also cherry picked that quote and left off the context, which is relevant here.

And note that you said:

> I have to disagree that unwrap is ever OK.

That's an extreme position. It isn't caveated to only apply to certain contexts.
by FooBarBizBazz | 2025-11-19 15:10:39+00:00
Fantastic article. And their "light touch" approach seems very correct.

Now --

What counts as a cult?

One sufficient condition, in my opinion, would be ritualized sexual abuse, especially of children.

But this is baked even into several mainstream religions, if you only open your eyes.

What is good, at least, is that, like viruses, cults/religions generally evolve to be less harmful to their hosts over time. (This is over time scales of multiple human generations. Within a single generation, a cult may do just the opposite, as it becomes marginalized from society and increasingly normalizes deviance, e.g. Aum reacting to humiliation in Japanese elections by releasing Sarin.)

Examples of this "taming" process: Flayed prisoners of the Aztecs are now dancing skeletons, "local color", used in America to sell tacos. Likewise the Abrahamic religions are an evolution of animal sacrifice cults, themselves echoing earlier human sacrifice cults; they are still shaking off frankly-insane practices, but could be worse. The history of LDS provides a less dramatic example, but one recent-enough that early stages are still well-documented in the historical record.

And if all this sounds New Atheistic, note that I am actually quite sympathetic to (almost apologetic for) certain aspects of religion (though I increasingly do wonder whether it is religions that teach goodness, or whether it is goodness that religions must attach themselves to for legitimacy, mixing it with other content). (For example I have pushed back, here, against characterizations of Christianity as "right wing", as that is not at all the content of the New Testament.)

One thing is certain: If a religious identity has bound itself to a person, then attacking the person will only strengthen the identity. The memetic parasite and the human victim must be clearly distinguished. Failure to do this results in violence against people which only strengths the meme. Blood for the blood god.

I suspect many of these memes can be tamed to the point of decency over multiple generations. Though they always carry the risk of reversion to older forms. Somehow the "DNA" is still there. So I'm not sure. They have to be stabilized to their nondestructive manifestations.

I also wonder about "non-religious" cult dynamics, e.g. those attached to political movements (both MAGA and woke), or financial/moral/credit systems, e.g. crypto.

One of my concerns also is the way that Silicon Valley leaders may study these methods not to defend against them but to exercise them in the formation of totalizing company cultures. Theil and Karp have been explicit about this. It distresses me: You should read about the scapegoat mechanism to destroy it, not to start using it.
by nathan_compton | 2025-11-19 15:11:01+00:00
A truly epic weird take.

My weird take is this: calculus and other sorts of advanced mathematics are cultural artifacts as much as they are tools and people should be exposed to them more or less for the same reasons that we are exposed to Shakespeare or the history of world religions: they are beautiful, and learning them changes us in positive ways.

One thing I've learned after most of a lifetime being smart is that being smart barely matters. It doesn't matter whether people are good at math or bad at it or smart. Most people never achieve fluency in most subjects. But children deserve to be taught math as a matter of basic dignity and eudemonia. The attitude that education is a pragmatic thing meant to achieve some end other than enrichment of the person is why the US is so fucked.
by Aloha | 2025-11-19 15:11:10+00:00
It's actually an 8 volume History (I have all 8 on my shelf) 3 were just on switching system - you left out the parallel development to Panel, Rotary.

Museum in seattle also has a working 3ESS (likely the only one left in the world), and have recently added a DMS-10 as well.
by Y-bar | 2025-11-19 15:11:12+00:00
> Google did at least push E2EE options, but those only landed in GSM with RCS Universal Profile 3.0 and I don't think Apple has given a date

This is my guess also. It was published in March[1] this year and I think it was too late to include in this year's iOS 26 release, so possibly iOS 27.

They have promised to implement it:

> "End-to-end encryption is a powerful privacy and security technology that iMessage has supported since the beginning, and now we are pleased to have helped lead a cross industry effort to bring end-to-end encryption to the RCS Universal Profile published by the GSMA," said an Apple spokesperson. "We will add support for end-to-end encrypted RCS messages to iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS in future software updates." [2]

1 https://www.gsma.com/solutions-and-impact/technologies/netwo...

2 https://www.macrumors.com/2025/03/14/apple-encrypted-rcs-mes...
by dietr1ch | 2025-11-19 15:11:31+00:00
> This scenario seems similarly complex with Git and jj.

It is in number of commands ran, but there's a few annoyances around changes getting into the repo automatically.

There's a lot of git commits coming from jj's constant snapshots. Maybe this is a good thing overall, but it brings some silly issues,

What to do when data that shouldn't leave the dev machine gets to the repo? I'm thinking secrets, large files, generated files. - Leaking secrets by mistake seems easier. - Getting large files/directories into the git snapshots might degrade git's performance.

It seems that you need to be diligent with your ignores or get forced to learn more advanced commands right away. I guess there's a more advanced history scrub command around though.
by Aurornis | 2025-11-19 15:11:55+00:00
> I don’t think it is about resources. Growing up in 3rd world country I have zero resources.

In America many parents do have resources, though, and they will spend those on private schools, tutoring, or home schooling.

> It is the drive of student and higher standards from parents and teachers that matters.

These proposals restrict the teachers and disallow teaching advanced subjects to students with drive to learn them.

You can’t say it’s up to the students and teachers while also holding back the students and restricting the teachers.
by yourusername | 2025-11-19 15:12:02+00:00
>Honestly, just learn it like anything else.

If you're starting from 0 that's probably a decade long commitment before you're able to start to execute a project like this. There's a youtube series 'project binky' where a pair of professional car tuners rebuild a mini cooper and stuff a Celica engine in it. They already have all the skills, own a shop and all the tools and it still took them years.
by MayeulC | 2025-11-19 15:12:04+00:00
Ah, interesting, it looks like Dune3D is based on solvespace with opencascade: https://docs.dune3d.org/en/latest/why-another-3d-cad.html

I was going to suggest solvespace. It is very barebones, but was much easier to use than FreeCad for me. It also has constraints in 3D space, which I use a lot: https://solvespace.com/index.pl
by pseudalopex | 2025-11-19 15:12:29+00:00
The article said Jefferies analysts estimated Microsoft might pay $110 to $115.

The article cited Lazard analysts' estimates to say this was more expensive than solar or wind. But Lazard's report said new build solar and storage could cost from $50 to $131. And new build wind and storage could cost $44 to $123.

Costs will rise over 20 years almost certainly.

And Microsoft had already large solar and wind power purchase agreements.[1] These could be affected by China's rare earth export controls scheduled to start next year. Hedging this position would be sensible.

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-cloud/blog/2024/09...
by insane_dreamer | 2025-11-19 15:13:17+00:00
I'm sure the US Gov has always had corruption and self-dealing, but the levels to which it is rising, and so openly, with the president's family issuing its own stablecoin while signing into law legislation that greatly enhances the stablecoin market, is truly shocking.

> After the 2008 subprime disaster, someone asked the investor Jeremy Grantham, What have we learned from this crisis? Grantham answered: “In the short term a lot, in the medium term a little, in the long term, nothing at all.”
by sega_sai | 2025-11-19 15:13:39+00:00
I wanted to like it as a Gemini Pro subscriber who does not want to also pay for Claude Code, but after running Antigravity for ~ 10 minutes, and a few back and forward exchanges I got the 'Model quota limit exceeded' message with no indication when it will reset. You get the impression that these products from Google (including Gemini CLI ) are just made as prototypes -- they are supposed to work as a demo, but Google does not actually care about having a working workflow with them. Claude Code on the other hand is an actual product that works well.
by tr45872267 | 2025-11-19 15:13:58+00:00
They do perform better on average

>The average private school mean reading score was 14.7 points higher than the average public school mean reading score, corresponding to an effect size of .41 (the ratio of the absolute value of the estimated difference to the standard deviation of the NAEP fourth-grade reading score distribution). After adjusting for selected student characteristics, the difference in means was near zero and not significant.

For math:

>The average private school mean mathematics score was 7.8 points higher than the average public school mean mathematics score, corresponding to an effect size of .29. After adjusting for selected student characteristics, the difference in means was -4.5 and significantly different from zero. (Note that a negative difference implies that the average school mean was higher for public schools.)

In the context of the specific discussion here, it doesn't really matter that the effect goes away when controling for selected student characteristics. First off this was from 2006, we would have to see if any of that has changed. The 2024 numbers are here[1]. But in any case they are not worse than public schools, although they may be no better or slightly worse than a public school in a rich neighborhood or similar.

[0] https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pubs/studies/2006461.a...

[1] https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/dashboards/schools_dashboa...
by lynx97 | 2025-11-19 15:14:15+00:00
I just recently happened to attend a community meeting which took place in a room of a trans-centric housing project. Several of the houses residents also attended. I was schocked to witness a casual chat escalating to a point where several people agreed that they should forcefully storm the parliament building of the capital, if politicians can not be made to fullfil their wishes. So there you have your Jan6 story, from the other side. I decided to distance myself from these people. I know, its just an anecdote, and therefore, according to HN, not worth a dime. But it showed to me that there is really no difference between the sides. If frustrated enough, they end up going for, or at least playing with the thought of, violence. Remember RAF? But I digress...
by delichon | 2025-11-19 15:14:24+00:00
cult (noun): A religion or religious sect generally considered to be extremist or false, with its followers often living in an unconventional manner under the guidance of an authoritarian, charismatic leader -- American Heritage Dictionary

Without the "generally considered to be extremist or false" it would be quite hard to even identify a cult. It's mostly used as way to slur a disfavored group. It's an element of a Russell conjugation, like I am part of a spiritual awakening, you belong to a religious sect, they are in a mind-control cult.

I was raised as a Jew. I consider that to be a cult, if one of the milder religious ones. My peewee football team was a cult. I belonged to a cultic political party, and worked for a startup that closely met the definition.

So getting someone to leave a cult is going to be the same as getting them to forsake any other community, just with the added coercion of social acceptability. There's no magic, no brain unwashing, it's the same kind of persuasion used to sell a vacuum cleaner.
by HeinzStuckeIt | 2025-11-19 15:14:28+00:00
The author writes, “You end up in a world where changing your mind becomes impossible because you've built your entire identity around being right”. Yet social-media personalities regularly do a 180° turn on some issue (e.g. pro-Ukraine to anti-Ukraine or vice versa) and still keep their following and ability to monetize it.

Social media is full of parasocial relationships; followers are in love with an influencer’s personality, not their views or factual content. So, the influencer can completely change his mind about stuff, as long as he still has the engaging presentation that people have come to like. Followers are also often in love with the brand relationships that the influencers flog, because people love being told what stuff they should buy.