MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by anovikov | 2025-11-06 07:07:20+00:00
This is such a bunch of nonsense!

The ROI of using a diesel-powered pump isn't so high so few farmers have one. It means, they work well and those who don't have one, still get some water for their fields, too.

A solar pump is many times cheaper to run. It means ROI of using it is huge and many more people will get them. But it doesn't mean there will now be magically more groundwater to pump!

Which mean, those who don't have a pump, will soon find themselves completely without water - it will be all sucked out by people with pumps. So they will also HAVE to install those pumps.

As a result, no one will be better off because same amount of water will be redistributed among same number of farmers. Even an "arms race" of more and more powerful pumps is likely when people will realise theirs are not working as good anymore now than everyone has one.

All until the point where ROI of having a solar pump will become negligible.

Farmers will not be better off - they will be worse off. Chinese will make money - money funded by Western funds for "reducing" carbon emissions which do not really reduce anything as they are "replacing" diesel pumps 90+% of which did not exist.

And yes, people will also have a little bit of electricity at home - about 100x less than in grid-connected Western homes - a 200-watt panel per household at about 15% average output or maybe 20 KWh per month. It's not enough to run a blowdryer, or kettle, not even a fridge. But enough to charge a tablet to watch online TV - and become far right.

Bingo, enshittification comes to Africa, in it's purest form.

Only good thing about it is that money will go to Chinese vs Arabs for diesel fuel. Chinese are a problem that will gradually solve itself due to demography, while Arabs will not.
by Uptrenda | 2025-11-06 07:08:11+00:00
>IOT-backed hardware linked to a novel asset whose issuance serves to make the world a little bit better

I swear: this was meant to be the pitch for like 99% of blockchain companies, only in this case they managed to do it. This is super interesting on so many levels.

The zero-cost payments with a low-barrier to entry. Again, this is what digital currencies were meant to do. Only, it turns out that at scale a combination of tech problems and legislative red tape made everything break. Just solving this one problem here is industry-defining in its own right. And shows the kind of products that open up when banking is enabled to everyone.

What about the hardware though? Well, I've worked at startups that were exactly dedicated to this kind of IoT stuff. They even were linking it with payments. But can you guess what happened? Well, of course: it had to be linked to blockchain shit, you know, just because... Then on the product side of things: nothing ever left the lab... Not that customers would have been able to use a blockchain-based payment rail anyway...

Getting reliable IoT hardware is hard enough but you still have to build customer relationships. They did it all through a simple technology the users were already familiar with. You don't need a frigging comp sci PhD to use SMS mobile payments. I think that's genius and blockchain tech bros could truly learn a lot from this. Pay-as-you-go here is also genius because as the author states: the chances of the owners having tons of disposal cash around to outright buy equipment are slim. Yet offering equipment to strangers under a pay-to-buy scheme by itself is risky for the lender and would typically lead to the kind of bureaucratic red tape that would slow down financing. With the IoT stuff, they can shut off the equipment on non-payment. But also: the economics are already there because the only other game in town is expensive disposal fuels like kerosene and petrol.
by isr | 2025-11-06 07:08:22+00:00
Interesting. Shows how aware they were of these 2025 criticisms, way back in the 80s (which shows how much of an oversimplification these criticisms are of the real situation).

You probably already know about this, but in case you didn't, there is 1 project which adds modules to cuis Smalltalk:

http://haver.klix.ch/index.html
Show HN: Data Formulator 0.5 – Vibe with your data (Microsoft Research)
by chenglong-hn | 2025-11-06 07:09:15+00:00
Data Formulator 0.5 released! It's a new research prototype from Data Formulator team @ Microsoft Research.

It's quite a leap since our first prototype last year -- we bring agent mode to interact with data, together with an online demo that you can play with (https://data-formulator.ai/).

"Vibe with your data, in control" -- featuring agent mode + interactive control to play with data, it should be more fun than last time you discovered it!

- Load whatever data - structured data, database connections, or extract from screenshots/messy text - Flexible AI exploration - full agent mode OR hybrid UI+NL control for precision - Data threads - branch, backtrack, and manage multiple exploration paths - Interpretable results - inspect charts, formulas, explanations, and generated code - Report generation - AI creates shareable insights grounded in your data

* Online demo at: https://data-formulator.ai/ * Github: https://github.com/microsoft/data-formulator * new video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfTE2FLyMrs * take a look at our product hunt page: https://www.producthunt.com/products/data-formulator
by jesterson | 2025-11-06 07:09:50+00:00
> Legal and medical advice can directly impact someone’s life or safety, so AI tools must stay within ethical and regulatory boundaries

Knives can be used to cook food and stab other people. By your suggestion, knives must be forbidden/limited as well?

If people following chatgpt advise (or any other stupid source for that matter), it's a not a ChatGPT but the people, issue.
by dragonwriter | 2025-11-06 07:10:14+00:00
The more I think about it the more I think calling it a bad example may be unfair. It can be extremely misleading for someone unfamiliar with the concept coming at it with a particular viewpoint, but I’m less sure, with more time to think, that an example that is better for that wouldn’t be worse in other ways.

I like sorting as an example, and I like that using the built-in is concise, and reimplementing the behavior of an existing function where using the existing function as an oracle is a reasonable thing to do for a test isn't all that uncommon.

I feel like something with a couple of properties described in comments with assertions testing those properties (but where the functionality and properties are familiar enough that it would make a clear connection) would be a bit better, in theory, but I don't have a great particular example to use, and anything done that way will be, at best, somewhat less concise.
by absurd1st | 2025-11-06 07:10:52+00:00
You are essentially saying: AI occupies an unfamiliar category of behavior; human beings have not developed a mental model for it.

If we think of AI as a machine, it is stochastic, not deterministic. It breaks our cause-and-effect understanding of machines.

If we think of AI as a agency, it does not have goals or beliefs. It mimics goals, following a mathematical path to an optimal answer.

So, we are confused, frustrated, angry: "What the heck is this thing?!"
by aaronbrethorst | 2025-11-06 07:10:58+00:00
sure does, but temporal considerations matter and the United States military has been killing people—at the President and SecDef's direction—in the Caribbean and Pacific for weeks, now, without even the slightest fig leaf of Congressional authorization. In other words, even if there's a formal declaration of war on Venezuela (which will never happen), that doesn't excuse the prior behavior.
by serial_dev | 2025-11-06 07:11:20+00:00
My theory, web apps are extremely bloated and slow, teams behind it always “optimize” and switch things up, and desktop apps are usually just wrapped web apps. TUI developers don’t mind settling and not always messing up the product and they keep the TUI “lean and mean”. Some users appreciate fast, simple UIs and they don’t want to be constantly A/B tested on only for the core experience to break all the time.
by Jean-Papoulos | 2025-11-06 07:11:41+00:00
Imagine having human volunteers do the work for you, than paying an AI to overwrite their work without communicating this with them (no validation of any sort it seems). And once they quit you corporate-speak to them "let's hop on a call to understand your frustrations!" in response to a post where they outline precisely their frustrations.

Disgusting behavior.
by BoredPositron | 2025-11-06 07:13:01+00:00
The market fit of your words matter and the non apology "sorry you feel that way" doesn't help. It's one of those gnarly phrases that only get used if you feel the need to act but in reality don't want to. Maybe the person is sincere his words are tainted by the overuse in shady corp responses. If you are engaging with your community you need to know this otherwise you'll always look like a clown.
by sib | 2025-11-06 07:13:01+00:00
No, you are talking past the point of the poster to whom you are replying.

"The issue is that there is a place where this model ~is working. It's in China and Russia. The GFW, its Russian equivalent, and the national security laws binding all of their tech companies and public discussion do exactly these things in a way that has allowed their leadership to go unchallenged for decades now.

The rest of the world isn't stupid or silly for suggesting these policies. They're following a proven effective model for the outcomes they are looking for.

We do ourselves a disservice by acting like there is some inherent flaw in it."

I stand by my comment that these technologies are doing exactly what they are intended for.
by danieltanfh95 | 2025-11-06 07:13:09+00:00
It's funny how Japanese contributors often go nuclear whenever things don't go their way instead of communicating etc. Bugs happen. this is tech. open communication is always the way to go before escalation. we see the same phenomenon in git, ruby etc etc etc.

Ironically, Japanese work culture encourages over-communication. It seems that open-source is considered a counter-culture that they want to escape japanese work culture from.
by nozilla | 2025-11-06 07:14:46+00:00
> Hi Marsf,

> I'm sorry for how you and the Japanese community feel about the MT workflow that we just recently introduced. Would you be interested to hop on a call with us to talk about this further? We want to make sure we trully understand what you're struggling with.

> My timezone is UTC+7, so it should be easier for us to set up time. Let me know how that sound!

What a horribly condescending and patronising response. If I'd received this it would just further vindicate my decision to quit.
by peter_d_sherman | 2025-11-06 07:14:53+00:00
>"During the years there have been many attempts to improve Python speed; generally they fall into two categories:

Implement "full Python". To be able to support all dynamic features and be fast, they usually employ a Just In Time (JIT) compiler.

Examples are PyPy, GraalPy, Pyston, and CPython's own JIT.

Implement a "subset of Python" or "variant of Python", either as an Ahead of Time (AOT) or JIT compiler which is able to produce fast code. The usual approach here is to remove many (if not all) of the dynamic features which make Python hard to compile.

Examples are RPython, Mypyc, Cython and Numba.

The problem of "full Python" JIT compilers is that sometimes they work very well and produce huge speedups, other times they don't produce any speedup at all, or might even introduce slowdowns, or they might use too much memory, or they are slow to "warm up".

The problem of the subset/variant approach is that by removing the dynamic features of Python, you end up with something which does not feel pythonic, and in which many typical and idiomatic Python patterns just don't work. You often end up with "Java with Python syntax" (nothing in particular against Java, but I hope it gives an idea of what I mean)."

Isn't that interesting!

You know what I'd love to see?

A Python compiler that works on a function-by-function basis...

That is, for each function, make the determination if a straight "clean" compilation of the function is possible -- that is, if it doesn't use special Python features that make compilation difficult/challenging/complex/impossible -- or have dependencies on other functions that do...

So if you have a Python function that adds simple integer variables, let's say, then that can be converted to C or Assembler or VM or LLVM or QBE code in a straightforward way, but if a function uses objects and lambdas and higher-level/complex constructs in a way that makes compilation challenging, complex or impossible, then flag those functions (write them out in a log, so the programmer could optionally simplify them, etc.) -- those will continue to be interpreted like they always are...

Yes, some or all of that infrastructure might already exist... I'm just thinking aloud... :-)

>"The first problem is that Python is extremely dynamic. I'm not talking only about dynamic typing, but also about the fact that in a given Python process, the "world" is a moving target and "everything can change at any time" "

(If we had a future language that supported both interpreted and compiled functions, then the interpreter should have the concept of "locked" functions and objects -- that is, once the compiler has compiled something, it's now "locked", and changes (if we want to keep it dynamic) to it mean invoking the compiler again post-change, at runtime... it would be messy, but there could be a hybrid dynamic interpreted yet JIT compiled language... but it would require runtime interaction between the interpreter and compiler... which could be messy, to say the least... and yes, some of that infrastructure might already exist...)
by jillesvangurp | 2025-11-06 07:17:43+00:00
Charging phones and "studying at night" are cliches in this context. It completely misses the point. Yes, it's important. And obviously happening.

The article zooms in on cliche 2-3 use cases that while important show a lack of imagination and awareness of what's actually happening. Here are two more not mentioned in the article, at all. And they are transformational.

1) EVs. By that I don't mean the luxury four wheel road yachts common in the rich part of the world but its much more common two wheel variant: the e-bike. These are being produced by the hundreds of millions. The four wheel versions are are a rounding error. They show up all over Asia and Africa. We in the west have no concept of how important these things are to the local economies there.

You can charge those for next to nothing with solar. Most of these things only have a few hundred wh of battery on board. A single solar panel can top them up in an hour or so. What's the impact of that on in a place where subsistence farming is common and people have to walk hours to find a generator powered point to charge their phone or get some water? Well the obvious thing happens: lots of people now have affordable transport that doesn't require an arm and a leg to power.

2) AI. I know, we're all tired of the daily dose of AI utopia on HN. But like world + dog in the west has access to ChatGPT for free, so does all of Africa. "Hey chatgpt, what's a water pump and where can I find water here?". That's already a thing. AI usage is widely spread across Africa; and not just among the elite. Every subsistence farmer with a smart phone (most of them at this point) can now ask questions like that. That's massive. Knowledge is power. This is hugely empowering. People are naturally curious and now they can ask AIs for information instead of having to ask the local witch, village elder, or the nearest white person that actually had an education. That's very liberating.

Solar panels are going to be like smartphones were 15 years ago, everybody will have access to cheap power. And yes you can power one with the other. But it's really about what else you can power? IMHO this will transform some of the poorest/undeveloped regions in this world in a few mere years/decades.
by Ray20 | 2025-11-06 07:18:08+00:00
> It's not capitalism, it's technology.

Seems like it's completely capitalism

> but Russia from 1917-60 and China from 1960-2025, say, are big counter-examples.

Russia and China are good examples of that.

We have Khrushchev's memoirs about how, before the communist revolution, he, as a simple worker, lived better than workers live 40 years after the revolution. That is, the period from 1917 to 1960 in the USSR was one of complete stagnation, despite all the technological progress.

And in the example of China in the second half of the 20th century, we see yet another confirmation: their standard of living was literally directly proportional to the level of implementation of capitalist mechanisms.

> As are the many poor countries with capitalist economies.

As far as I understand, there is not a single poor capitalist country. Name a single poor country where private property is reliably protected and people enjoy economic freedom. There is no such country. As soon as even the poorest country begins to protect private property and guarantee economic freedom, it becomes rich within 10 years or something.
by palmotea | 2025-11-06 07:18:28+00:00
> long and slow consensus building that weighs existing stakeholder's opinions heavily vs doing "the right thing" from the outset.

How do you know what "the right thing" is at the outset without talking to the stakeholders?

I'm dealing with someone's "the right thing" that is actually wrong and dumb. They didn't ask us before rolling out the new "standard."
by Edman274 | 2025-11-06 07:19:17+00:00
Consider the Ultimatum game. Alice and Bob are part of a millionaire madman's experiment, and so Alice and Bob are told the following: they have won a sum of $10,000 and Alice will be given the authority to decide how to divide their winnings. If Bob accepts Alice's offer, then both of them get the money as decided in the offer. If Bob rejects Alice's offer, then both of them get nothing. In addition, they have no ability to communicate or negotiate the offer; it's a one and done thing. So let's say Alice offers 100 dollars to Bob, and she will keep 9900.

Now, most people would say that Bob is acting out of spite if he rejects Alice's offer, because he's causing Alice losses and he gains nothing, and the benefit he receives is that Alice is made sad by this. Is that a fair interpretation, though? He believes that he's acting out of a moral obligation to screw over someone who themself is (in his mind) acting unjustly. He's valuing punishing someone that he feels is breaking a social contract greater than the 100 dollars that he would otherwise have. What do you call what he is doing in this situation if not spite? And if he is acting out of a principled objection to an unfair situation, does it become something other than spite? And if it's actually principled, why does the principle seem to melt away when the offer is $7000 to $3000?

I feel like spite is a huge motivator behind a lot of cultural issues nowadays but it can only come from people who feel as if they are coming from a place of weakness or victimization. There is always a moral indignation. The gratification is in seeing their vision of justice meted out. It isn't always a psychopathic, sadistic behavior but it can be in those cases where a vision of justice is distorted and psychopathic. Consider this: isn't imprisoning people often a form, ultimately, of societal spite? In isolation it may be cheaper to just give petty criminals whatever they want rather than paying the cost for them being jailed. Amortized cost, it's probably a lot cheaper to pay a drunkard's taxi home from the bar every single time he goes drinking than to lock him in jail for 3 months for a second DUI. Is spite the reason that we don't just give him that? Again, the justice thing.
Show HN: Standards compliant SAX-style XML parser for JavaScript
by federicocarboni | 2025-11-06 07:19:47+00:00
A while ago I wanted to write some tools to process EPUBs in JavaScript, the format is basically zipped XML so I immediately looked for a parser. There are quite a few XML parsers for JavaScript but I was disappointed to find out that basically none of them support the full XML specification, namespace support was not very good and they were quite slow for what they did.

None of the parsers I saw around support proper entity expansion or check the internal DTD for syntax errors. This approximation is not benign, if the XML data processed is passed to other software it could be interpreted differently.

And that's the story of why I made my own.

Though not definitive, I also ran some benchmarks against other libraries:

https://github.com/federicocarboni/saxe/tree/trunk/bench
by troupo | 2025-11-06 07:20:26+00:00
What makes the browser slow and inefficient is the fact that it's not a UI framework. It's a system to display text and a couple of images on a 2D plane where every element depends on every other element.

Almost every single interaction and change requires the browser to recalculate the layout of the entire page and to redraw it. It's basically Microsoft Word, with nearly the same behaviors.

And there are no proper ways to prevent that behaviour. No lower and low level control over rendering. Awkward workarounds and hacks that browsers employ to try and minimize re-layouting and redrawing. Great rejoicing when introducing yet more hacks for basic things: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/css-ui/animate-to-height-a... etc.
by ThrowMeAway1618 | 2025-11-06 07:21:02+00:00
>To put it another way, he is leading a city where a majority or close to a majority did not support his candidacy. A mandate is when a large majority of the people you are leading supported your rise to leadership and you are no leading with their approval.

No. A majority supported his candidacy. In case you're confused about that, a "majority" is more than 50%. Mamdani received more than 50% of the vote despite something like 40-60 million dollars in attack ads making all sorts of unsubstantiated claims and outright lies about him, his policies and his background.

His victory with a majority is not in question, is it? How, exactly do elections work here? The person with the most votes wins. Full stop. Are you making some sort of claim that such is not the case. If so, where's your proof?

I'd also note that Mamdani's margin of victory (~8.5%) is right in line (with a few exceptions) with margins going back decades.[2]

Mamdani was, by far, the best candidate in the race. HIs opponents being a handsy, disgraced serial sexual harasser, a bribe taking incumbent who oversaw the most corrupt mayoral administration in decades and a media clown whose claim to fame was that he used to ride the subways at night with his gang and beat up random strangers.

As such, who should we have voted for in your opinion?

Actually, if you don't actually live in NYC, we don't care what your opinion might be. We don't tell you how to vote in your local elections, so mind your own damn business!

All that said, are you claiming that Mamdani should not be allowed to become mayor? Do you claim that his election somehow illegitimate?

Shall we, as some have suggested, strip Mamdani of his citizenship and deport him[0][1] as well?

Will that satisfy you?

[0] https://www.foxnews.com/politics/house-republican-calls-zohr...

[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/gop-lawmakers-push-strip...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_mayoral_election...
by d_e_solomon | 2025-11-06 07:21:43+00:00
Every few weeks a new “collapse” hits headlines Linqto, Tesla, Walgreens and everyone calls it a failure of innovation.

But if you zoom out, it’s not dysfunction. It’s design.

We’ve built a market that rewards momentum over mastery and visibility over viability. Wrote a breakdown on how this behavioural loop keeps repeating from fintech governance to luxury strategy.

Curious how others here view it: are these cycles inevitable, or do we just keep mistaking speed for progress?