MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by spwa4 | 2025-11-22 18:54:42+00:00
> Defenders of the tests say they offer a more objective method of assessment than the potentially anecdotal and subjective evidence of social workers and other experts.

> But critics say they cannot meaningfully predict whether someone will make a good parent.

1) If that is a problem, then just shut the child protection agency. Because subjective evidence of social workers and other "experts" ALSO cannot meaningfully predict that (besides, we all know what education social workers get, ie. 6 months of legendarily easy theory with zero tests. There are barely any psychologists "in the system" and psychiatrists ... well, has anyone seen any at all?)

2) I find it baffling the real issue is never discussed. What fundamentally matters is whether the situation of children in government care, with the help of social workers and other "experts", is better than children abused at home. Is that the case?

NO, it isn't!

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3135630/

https://mitsloan.mit.edu/shared/ods/documents?PublicationDoc...

and most dramatic:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1998/05/980505092617.h...

Study after study shows the same pattern. Again, and again, and again: even abusive birth parents or absent ones or addicts or ... with AND without any help (including the ones that refuse help) are better caregivers than "professionals". And that's ignoring the real, horrible, problem.

The real problem is that children who get abused generally become abusive themselves. This causes professionals to refuse these children, because they cannot deal with such children, and even if they can, they get stronger, smarter and sneakyer every year, while professionals don't. Of course, they do need children, otherwise not even the most absurd politician will let them keep their job.

So ... they are regularly accused of "filling beds". Which essentially means foster care is full of children who don't need or want foster care AND children who do want foster care can't get or stay in the system.

This is why obvious, simple rules that would force the system to work for children aren't allowed to exist. For example, above a minimal age, say 8 years or even 12, you could say that without agreement from the child they cannot be kept against their will. If such a rule exists, you can just shut child protection since almost no children will choose child protection, and those that do will be the worst ones the system doesn't want.
by zzo38computer | 2025-11-22 18:55:13+00:00
Gemini and Gopher are better than the existing WWW, (although there are others as well, such as Spartan (uses the same file format as Gemini, but it is a different protocol without TLS), Scorpion (my own format, intended to be between Gemini and "WWW as it should be if it was designed better"), and others).

However, you might also want to access HTTP and HTML, and to do so without needing to load fonts, pictures, etc; you might use a web browser that omits many of these features. However, it also can result in some problems; there are a few ways to work around some of these, such as adding your own scripts to handle some services, adding proxy services for handling some services (although some of these can use other protocols such as Gemini), and/or using the HTML/CSS commands in other ways (e.g. using ARIA to decide the formatting rather than using CSS). However, there are other issues, e.g. if the web page you download includes more junk than the actual main text.
by vidarh | 2025-11-22 18:55:32+00:00
The "classical" UBI argument from a liberal point of view (classical liberal, not US liberal) has typically been that UBI would lower the complexity and by extension cost of welfare by removing the needs to means-test. In Europe, UBI was typically more likely to be pushed by (by our standards) centre-right parties.

For this reason, UBI traditionally was seen negatively by the left, who saw it as a means of removing necessary extra support and reduce redistribution.

Heck, Marx even ridiculed the lack of fairness of equal distribution far before UBI was a relevant concept, in Critique of the Gotha Program, when what became the German SPD argued for equal distribution (not in the form of UBI), seemingly without thinking through the consequences of their wording, and specifically argued that "To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal".

Parts of the mainstream left today has started embracing it, seemingly having forgotten why they used to oppose it.
by KetoManx64 | 2025-11-22 18:55:34+00:00
The main they don't survive is not due to capitalism. (Capitalism is just trade without use of force at the end of the day) but due to the lobbying power of corporations. Corporations constantly lobby the government for more regulation and rules, which they just budget for, but smaller companies don't have the funds to meet so they cannot stay in business. Look at the first couple of years of COVID for example, Walmart, Target and the big box stores lobbied the government to stay open because they were "essential" while all the small businesses got wiped out due to their lack of lobbying power.

The solution is to stop giving corporations the ability to lobby governments, and stop using the government to control/fund markets. Not to blame it on capitalism.
by gruez | 2025-11-22 18:56:38+00:00
>If I have a process that randomly installs and deletes wacky fonts, I'm unique at any given time, but the me of today can't be linked to the me of tomorrow, right?

See: https://xkcd.com/1105/

Services with a large enough fingerprinting database can filter out implausible values and flag you as faking your fingerprint, which is itself fingerprintable.
by cgearhart | 2025-11-22 18:57:18+00:00
I have bought a lot of glassware over a couple decades. My usual trick is to look at restaurant supply shops, since they usually have a wide variety to select trade offs in style, price, quality, etc. Somehow I’d never come across Duralex until a few months ago when I was shopping to reorganize my own cupboards. The Duralex stuff I got has been the best glassware I’ve ever had, hands down. I’ll probably order more to put in storage just in case their ongoing struggles disrupt availability in the future.

I get it—they’re expensive and so on—but they really are a superior product.
by spwa4 | 2025-11-22 18:57:21+00:00
> There are cases when a state should take away a kid. But it should be because the kid is in danger, not because the parents can't pass a trivia game.

Really? Such as? Because if what you care about is the child, the child's future, even in absurdly extreme cases birth parents turn out to be better:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1998/05/980505092617.h...

And the closer the family bond, the better children fare. Which means "state care" is always the worst option. Unrelated foster care is the second worst option.

Study after study shows bad situations ... and always state intervention is the worst option. Take the child away when the parents are arrested? Or put the kid in jail too? Best option turns out to be ... let the kid stay in jail too.

Drug addicts refuse treatment? Best option for the kid? State care or just leave them? Best option turns out to leave them.

And even truly extreme: actual, bona fide abuse. Which in 99% of cases is the kid just being left home alone for too long btw. What is best? State intervention or leaving the kid there? Best is leaving the kid there.

Violence at home? Whether it's witnessing violence or actual victimization: best option is to leave the kid at home (and of course, often it's the state's fault, for example failing to protect a mother from an ex-husband)

Parents want to get rid of a child? Best option is to refuse to help.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that "the state should take away the child" should never be used as long as the parents or any family willing to help are even alive.

Because, study the system and you will quickly see how it really works. You will find foster care is only forced on the parents and the children. Foster parents want to get rid of a kid? Easy. A care home wants to get rid of a child? Even if the kid ends up on the street that's easy. Of course, nobody suggests changing that. In those cases, of course, the parents get punished, not "professionals" *. And, of course, child protection cannot be forced to care for a child through studies (but parents can). And so on.

* this, despite the fact that punishing the parents is often not possible. If the parents have nothing, what are you going to do. Of course, even if child protection or social workers are very much involved in the problems of the parents (e.g. the parents were foster kids themselves), they cannot be forced to deal with the consequences.
by Stranger43 | 2025-11-22 18:57:30+00:00
Lets talk numbers, rather then just sling cheap unfounded allegations

The problem with the way they talk at the big conferences is that there is almost no link between the rhetoric of existential crisis and the bills being passed at the national level.

The last numbers from Ukraine was a army of maybe 900k uniformed troops(thats up there with America) and as a response to that army's failure to drive Russia back Germany is talking about raising their armed forces less then a 3rd of that by 2030 thats just not real mobilization and thats my point about not taking the logistics serious.

Were the EU to mobilize as if it mattered to the actual population of the EU it could raise several time the army Ukraine have but nobody is actually suggesting that because the people in charge of the actual policy making don't really believe that Russia is a threat to any of the NATO member states.
by stego-tech | 2025-11-22 18:57:43+00:00
Sandboxing in containers and manually exempting specific security tokens is arguably one of the better steps we can take in the immediate term, as are random agent strings and returning fake data for common prompts. Of course that only works in the immediate, because this, like advertising in general, is an arms race at the moment.

This feels like a regulatory question, not a technical one. We've repeatedly proven that with math and code alone, we can fingerprint and identify almost every unique person on the planet, given enough data points. The long-term solution seems like it should be severe consequences for data breaches (as in, corporation-destroying penalties for disclosure of PII, including fingerprint data) such that everyone only collects the data they need to provide the service in question and not a single bit more, deleting it as soon as it's no longer necessary. Right now there's no consequence if Google or Meta disclose huge swaths of user data, and thus no disincentive to collecting as much as they possibly can.

Punish the leaking of data, and suddenly you've raised it's cost to the point that casual players will nope out entirely. From there, it's the eternal back and forth of governments waffling between business and electorate interests.
by wtallis | 2025-11-22 18:57:45+00:00
> Intel's consumer processors (and therefore the mainboards/chipsets) used to have four memory channels, but around the year 2020 this was suddenly limited to two channels since the 12th generation (AMD's consumer processors had always two channels, with exception of Threadriper?).

You need to re-check your sources. When AMD started doing integrated memory controllers in 2003, they had Socket 754 (single channel / 64-bit wide) for low-end consumer CPUs and Socket 940 (dual channel / 128-bit wide) for server and enthusiast destkop CPUs, but less than a year later they introduced Socket 939 (128-bit) and since then their mainstream desktop CPU sockets have all had a 128-bit wide memory interface. When Intel later also moved their memory controller from the motherboard to the CPU, they also used a 128-bit wide memory bus (starting with LGA 1156 in 2008).

There's never been a desktop CPU socket with a memory bus wider than 128 bits that wasn't a high-end/workstation/server counterpart to a mainstream consumer platform that used only a 128-bit wide memory bus. As far as I can tell, the CPU sockets supporting integrated graphics have all used a 128-bit wide memory bus. Pretty much all of the growth of desktop CPU core counts from dual core up to today's 16+ core parts has been working with the same bus width, and increased DRAM bandwidth to feed those extra cores has been entirely from running at higher speeds over the same number of wires.

What has regressed is that the enthusiast-oriented high-end desktop CPUs derived from server/workstation parts are much more expensive and less frequently updated than they used to be. Intel hasn't done a consumer-branded variant of their workstation CPUs in several generations; they've only been selling those parts under the Xeon branding. AMD's Threadripper line got split into Threadripper and Threadripper PRO, but the non-PRO parts have a higher starting price than early Threadripper generations, and the Zen 3 generation didn't get non-PRO Threadrippers.
by jtrn | 2025-11-22 18:58:01+00:00
ADHD yes trough many avenues: change of environment, development, therapy and techniques, medication. Autism: Depends on definition of recovery. If you define it as “no large problems that hinders functioning and happiness”, then yes. If you define at all the symptoms and characteristics that are the cardinal features of the condition; as “completely gone”, then no. And more so the further into the spectrum the person is. People underestimate how noticeable true full blown autism is since it’s been conflated with Asperger’s level of presentation. Note: Many people with autism have happier, more productive lives than neurotypical people, so it’s more of personality description than a disease for them.
by phoe-krk | 2025-11-22 18:58:13+00:00
In the README:

> Approximately 95% of the engineering work was done by Lyapsus. Lyapsus improved an incomplete kernel driver, wrote new kernel codecs and side-codecs, and contributed much more. I want to emphasize his incredible kindness and dedication to solving this issue. He is the primary force behind this fix, and without him, it would never have been possible.

> I (Nadim Kobeissi) conducted the initial investigation that identified the missing components needed for audio to work on the 16IAX10H on Linux. Building on what I learned from Lyapsus's work, I helped debug and clean up his kernel code, tested it, and made minor improvements. I also contributed the solution to the volume control issue documented in Step 8, and wrote this guide.
by exceptione | 2025-11-22 18:58:20+00:00
> "Every should must come reinforced by a want."

Interesting! Can you expand a bit on that? I am interested in the theory and practical applications. I guess affected grown-ups would love to learn about how it works as well.

> Unfortunately their therapy only works in prepubescent children. (...) but nobody is ready emotionally to predict how they will change after puberty hits.

I don't understand why it wouldn't work with people when they are older though. If, during education, young people change in such a way they wouldn't need it anymore, then at worst they might gain superior executive control, no?
by Atiscant | 2025-11-22 18:58:43+00:00
As one of those that do not like the “sets at the bottom” approach I just want to highlight why. For me, mathematics built on sets have leaky abstractions. Say I want natural numbers, I need to choose a concrete implementation in set theory e.g. Von Neumann, but there are multiple choices. For all good definitions, so get Peano arithmetic and can work with, but the question “Is 1 and member of 3” depends on your chosen implementation. Even though it is a weird question, it is valid and not isomorphic under implementations. That is problematic, since it is hidden in how we do mathematics mostly. Secondly, it is hard to formalize, and I think mathematics desperately needs to be formalized. Finally, I do not mind sets, they are great, and a very useful tool, I just do not like they as the foundation. I firmly believe we should teach type theoretic or categorical foundations in mathematics and be less dependent on sets.
by loeg | 2025-11-22 18:59:00+00:00
It's a very recent story, but for example:

https://www.justice.gov/usao-mn/pr/first-defendant-charged-a...

The fraudulent provider(s) bribed parents to get their kids diagnosed autistic. As, a result, autism diagnoses of children in this community are ~3x the background rate:

https://www.mprnews.org/episode/2024/10/10/research-finds-1-...

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/researchers-find-alarming-...
by meonkeys | 2025-11-22 18:59:16+00:00
This is awesome follow-through by @a-fadil / @afadil. Here's a similar post from a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41465735

In the space of local-first finance apps, I've really enjoyed Actual Budget (as have many, based on what I'm seeing in other comments). I'll check out Wealthfolio but like @dw_arthur I'm concerned about looking at investments too much / too often. I try to invest based on personal experience / value and always go long. I use off-budget accounts in Actual to track investments/illiquid value changes and update them every 6mo-1yr. I'm sure a spreadsheet would work fine for this as well. But for someone who moves investments more frequently, Wealthfolio looks awesome.

For managing my life's data, this golden combination is always going to win: app that works well | full/local control of data | sane FOSS project governance | software license mitigates enshittification (e.g. AGPLv3)
by poorman | 2025-11-22 18:59:53+00:00
It's likely that yes, you will end up with an alias that links you because of a cookie somewhere, or a finger print of the elliptic curve when do do a SSL handshake, or any number of other ways.

The ironic thing is that because of GDPR and CCPA, ad tech companies got really good at "anonymizing" your data. So even if you were to somehow not have an alias linking your various anonymous profiles, you will still end up quickly bucketed into a persona (and multiple audiences) that resemble you quite well. And it's not multiple days of data we're talking about (although it could be), it's minutes and in the case of contextual multi-armed bandits, your persona is likely updates "within" a single page load and you are targeted in ~5ms within the request/response lifecycle of that page load.

The good news is that most data platforms don't keep data around for more than 90 days because then they are automatically compliant with "right to be forgotten" without having to service requests for removal of personal data.
by alkonaut | 2025-11-22 19:00:25+00:00
There is no good technical solution here. But the damage could be limited if browsers at least limited entropy somewhat. Stuff like reading back canvas contents should need user approval.

Just make sure it’s sufficiently illegal to keep this info. Find and make big visible examples of fining companies that trade in this info. If a company sells a product that fetches ads based on an ”identifier” their little js snippet computed then just pay them a visit. Fine both them and their customers to the max extent of the gdpr (or equivalent).
Ask HN: First Steps with a Patent Troll?
by throwawaynvmbr | 2025-11-22 19:00:54+00:00
We're a small business where we invest everything back into R&D, so we're not sitting on huge cash reserves. We have a case just filed against us that is visible online but we're waiting to be served, for patent infringement. The company claiming infringement is known to us, they have been trying to get a foothold in our market for years, but their product hasn't found solid ground. We welcome competition as it drives a healthy economy, and we've got a really positive social standing in the community for supporting our customers and we're pretty highly respected by everyone. So when we found they had filed this complaint we were shocked. The complaint has no basis in reality as our product demonstrably does not implement any method of what their patent says, it will definitely be thrown out if it goes to court. But that's a stupid waste of time and money for us both. Has anyone had any success in writing to the company directly and showing how their case will lose, so they drop it and stop spending on something that will fail? We believe they filed out of bad faith because of jealousy and frustration against us. We've taken care never to speak against them or anyone in public, we know this is just sour grapes on their part. Obviously we're going to wait until we've been served but I feel that we can avoid further costs by sending a personal de letter to the owner of this company - I feel that they also have limited funds.
by baumy | 2025-11-22 19:01:10+00:00
Yes, it actually is, to many people.

Poll a random subset of people with the question "are you in favor of free childcare?". X% will say yes.

Poll another set with the question "are you in favor of taxpayer funded childcare?". Y% will say yes.

I would bet any amount of money that X>Y, and (X-Y)% of people did not think about the fact that a free government service is not actually free.

Exactly how big X and Y are, I couldn't say. But identifying propaganda and deceptive language is never something that should be discouraged, even when it's advocating for a cause you agree with.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-11-22 19:02:00+00:00
Really like the sentiment but I would never wear that shirt while it has a QR code on it. It’s too busy for starters but mainly I don’t want to so openly invite people pointing their cameras on their phones at me. It should just say “Downloadable =/= Open Source” IMO. That is provocative enough on its own and will likely garner the attention and conversation you’re seeking.

One of my favorite shirts says:

>MUSEUMS

>ARE NOT

>NEUTRAL

Big bold white text on black.

I always get questions about it whenever I wear it. Striking up the conversation is very valuable on its own!
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-11-22 19:02:14+00:00
There seems to be a lot of variance in the percentage of police chases that involve stolen vehicles but the numbers seem to be in the range of 10% to 70% and even the low end of that isn't particularly low.

You also have the problem that if you steal a car and then run from the police the result is that they don't pursue you and send a ticket to the person you stole it from, that makes it a lot easier to steal a car, and then the percentage goes up.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-11-22 19:02:42+00:00
There's plenty of ongoing abuses of the foster parent and social services system.

For example:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/first-nations-child-welfa...

"The payments are part of a $23.4-billion settlement for people removed from their homes on reserve or in the Yukon and placed in care funded by Indigenous Services Canada between April 1, 1991, and March 31, 2022."

Note the dates -- well after the residential school closures.

Or:

https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/41-20-0002/4120000220240...

"Indigenous children are vastly overrepresented among foster children in Canada. In 2021, Indigenous children accounted for 7.7% of all children under age 15 in the general population, but 53.8% of children in foster care (Statistics Canada, 2022).Note The National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (2021) has reported on how this overrepresentation within the child welfare system is a legacy of the residential school system and a perpetuation of a history of colonial policies and practices that have separated Indigenous children from their families and communities."

The situation is especially bad in Manitoba.

https://globalnews.ca/video/11122619/1-in-2-manitoba-first-n...

This is by no means a past problem.