MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pjc50 | 2025-11-10 09:59:06+00:00
If you're going to talk about Edinburgh (I could almost see the Tasman ferry from my house), may I introduce you to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_ferry_fiasco

"Originally intended to come into service in 2018 and 2019 respectively, both ferries have been delayed by over five years, and costs have more than quadrupled to £460 million"

The Scottish government tried to do what commentators here are saying is the "right thing", maintaining the last gasp of a dying shipbuilding industry, but it turns out that part of the reason they were dying was not actually being able to build ships on time and under budget.

How do you tell the difference between "maintaining a strategic industry" and "throwing taxpayer money into a lossmaking business with nothing to show for it"?

> In the immediate short term, buying hulls and laying them up might be wise

By "wise" you mean "expensive", right? Ships of all sizes require continuous maintenance to remain seaworthy.
by le-mark | 2025-11-10 09:59:49+00:00
> now wonder if XSLT is implemented by any browser that isn't controlled by Google (or derived from one that is).

Edge IE 11 mode is still there for you. Which also supports IE 6+ like it always did, presumably. They didn’t reimplement IE in Edge; IE is still there. Microsoft was all in on xml technologies back in the day.
by bayindirh | 2025-11-10 10:00:04+00:00
> I think it’s safe to say that by “We” we can assume it would be your country and its allies.

I live in a country which has been spied on for years by its closest "ally". See Crypto AG scandal for more details. So in my case there's no "we".

Yeah, the most realistic trade-off might be installing OpenWRT and some tripwires to see whether anyone is trying to do something nefarious remotely.

In spying, there's no "we".
by room271 | 2025-11-10 10:00:24+00:00
The brigades are out, but most people in the UK have a high level of trust in the BBC (https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/45744-which-media-out...). This whole incident is a storm in a teacup; yes the program was edited badly, but it is a single incident. It is ridiculous that the DG and News CEO have resigned.
by raymond_goo | 2025-11-10 10:00:27+00:00
I'm working on Solitairle – a Yukon solitaire game where every board is guaranteed solvable: https://solitairle.com

Why? Most solitaire apps frustrate players with impossible games or endless randomness. Solitairle is designed for people (like me) who want a satisfying win through skill, not luck. Every day brings a new, solvable challenge, complete with helpful tools (back button, dead-end warnings) to keep it fun and frustration-free.

I’m especially interested in feedback from people who:

Enjoy casual puzzle games but get discouraged by unwinnable setups,

Value clean, minimalist interfaces without ads,

Have ideas for daily challenges or fun player stats.

Would love your thoughts: What frustrates you most about digital solitaire? What would make you want to play daily?
by cco | 2025-11-10 10:01:07+00:00
Typically you incorporate union representatives onto boards of companies, make the members shareholders etc. You tie incentive structures together.

Even so, I'm a reject your framing to a certain degree. Employees, and by extension labor unions, typically want to see the company they work at succeed. Labor always pays the price, e.g. forgoing wages during a strike.

And even when a deal is struck, employees often put the interest of the company ahead of their own, e.g. trading away already agreed upon wage increases in a labor contract in order to keep the company solvent.

Are there examples of both situations? Of course! I've seen both first hand, but it certainly isn't completely one or the other. Some companies have a good relationship with their unions, others are very antagonistic.
by kragen | 2025-11-10 10:01:24+00:00
Yeah, I was just doing some calculations on this. You'd think that with 3.5 meters you could do better than a few kilometers, wouldn't you? Is something wrong with their telescope?

I don't know what wavelength they're using, but at 555nm, 1.22λ/d would be 0.193 microradians, which, unless I'm doing the math wrong, works out to a 74-meter Airy-spot radius at the distance to the moon. At that sort of size, you'd think the majority of the photons in the desired wavelength band would be from their laser rather than stray Earthshine.

I was doing calculations based on λ = 350nm and a 500-mm reflector, and no retroreflector, and getting rather sad estimates of 3 joules of light transmitted per returned photon (per receiver). While that's clearly a feasible commnications system, it's going to be pretty limited in bandwidth. I'm not sure if C-band radio is better?
by James_K | 2025-11-10 10:03:48+00:00
To make the web safer, they will replace simple static web pages with remote code execution on the user's machine. Yet another “fuck you” to people who don't want to shove JavaScript in everything. God forbid I serve a simple static site to people. Nonono. XSLT is fantastic for people who actually want to write XML documents like the good old days, or add styling to Atom feeds.

Edit: and for a slightly calmer response: Google has like, a bajillion dollars. They could address any security issues with XSLT by putting a few guys on making a Rust port and have it out by next week. Then they could update it to support the modern version in two weeks if it being out of date is a concern. RSS feeds need XSLT to display properly, they are a cornerstone of the independent web, yet Google simply does not care.
by coldtea | 2025-11-10 10:04:10+00:00
>How about because they are human people like you and me

Oh, sweet summer child.

>You don't think you are a bad guy who always does things only in your own interest right? So why do you think they are like that?

Because I wasn't promoted and passed all the exams of a system designed to promote sociopaths, party interests, and corporate/financial/M.I.C. interests, nor did I have the sociopathic self-selection to want to get to the highest offices of power.
by KurSix | 2025-11-10 10:04:52+00:00
LLMs like Chat GPT don't actually understand text the way a person does. They don't have concepts or any life experience. When you type something, the model turns your text into a bunch of numbers (called a "vector"). Every token (like a word or part of a word) is basically a point with coordinates in a massive, high-dimensional space. The distance between these points shows how related their meanings are

For example, the vectors for "king" and "queen" will end up being really close together, while the vectors for "king" and "table" will be way far apart. Then, the transformer part kicks in with its self-attention mechanism. This is a fancy way of saying it analyzes how all the words in your text relate to each other and figures out how much "attention" to pay to each one. This is how the model gets the context. It's how it knows that the "bank" in "river bank" is totally different from the "bank" in "open a bank account" Based on all those relationships, it then predicts the next token. But it's not just guessing -it's making a highly probable prediction based on all the context it just looked at

To put it simply: the model isn't "aware" of what anything means. It's just incredibly good at modeling how meaning is expressed in language
by Quarrel | 2025-11-10 10:05:10+00:00
It certainly seems to me that using this would eliminate 75% or so of the objections to it.

For this use case, at least, it feels like a CS version of racism. MSFT is bad, so no MSFT.

It largely clears up an idiosyncrasy from the evolution of C.

(but, as someone that briefly worked on plan9 in 1995/96, I like your idea :)
by pjc50 | 2025-11-10 10:05:10+00:00
> Every country should be able to defend itself, without reliance on allies

This definitely wasn't true for the UK in WW2. Probably wasn't even true for WW1, especially if in both cases you count "UK" as "GB&NI" rather than the full British Empire of the time.

The only country which managed autarky+export during WW2 was the United States, due to having a large land area, all the required natural resources (except maybe rubber), but especially oil and food.

Defense autarky isn't possible for any European country except maybe Natural Fortress Switzerland.
by asdfbank | 2025-11-10 10:05:50+00:00
Recently launched my free app for gardeners to share plants with each other, Plantshare.

Now I'm working on a few changes to the app, most notable is moving any plants marked as 'for sale' out from the main section because it turns out people are more greedy than I anticipated and it's getting in the way of sharing the free stuff, cuttings etc.

There's also some demand for a web front end so I might work on that next. (currently only android and ios)

I had an initial boom of downloads in South Africa but lately most new downloads are in USA.

https://ps-prod.bloodys.cc/links/getplantshare/
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-11-10 10:06:14+00:00
The content is generally good, but we should reject this click bait framing that every minor decision regarding the grid is going to plunge us into Mad Max for a decade if we make the slightest mistake. Even in cases where the clickbait is meant to draw people in to give them the real facts.

The decision really comes down to what is slightly more or less expensive and it's more than possible to adjust as we go as things develop.

And of course the conclusion from the experts was a renewables grid was the way to go and we've seen price declines and technology advancements since then making it an even better choice.
by jack_tripper | 2025-11-10 10:07:14+00:00
> exposes your own biases

Biases towards scientific and biological accuracy?

>I'm pretty sure their only "agenda" here is to be inclusive.

Assuming anyone other than biological women can get pregnant is not "being more inclusive". Who exactly are you being more inclusive towards here? The masses of previously excluded pregnant men out there? What is that if not an agenda?

You see, this is why people hate and distrust the BBC and left leaning MSM in general and swung a lot to the right. Because they're picking the weirdest purity test hills to die on when people have other way bigger problems right now they want covered.

What people want from media is to poke politicians on how are they gonna fix: the economy, their jobs market, their housing market, their public health system, inflation, immigration, public school and childcare spots, rising CoL, addressing corruption scandals and false political promises, not to focus on making the word pregnancy more inclusive.
by eftpotrm | 2025-11-10 10:07:19+00:00
I'm aware I'm in a minority, but I find it sad that XSLT stalled and is mostly dead in the market. The amount of effort put into replicating most the XML+XPath+XSLT ecosystem we had as open standards 25 years ago using ever-changing libraries with their own host of incompatible limitations, rather than improving what we already had, has been a colossal waste of talent.

Was SOAP a bad system that misunderstood HTTP while being vastly overarchitected for most of its use cases? Yes. Could overuse of XML schemas render your documents unreadable and overcomplex to work with? Of course. Were early XML libraries well designed around the reality of existing programming languages? No. But also was JSON's early implementation of 'you can just eval() it into memory' ever good engineering? No, and by the time you've written a JSON parser that beats that you could've equally produced an equally improved XML system while retaining the much greater functionality it already had.

RIP a good tech killed by committees overembellishing it and engineers failing to recognise what they already had over the high of building something else.
by hn_throw2025 | 2025-11-10 10:08:46+00:00
[Loads up Fitbit] Yesterday, I did 15,686 steps which it reports as 6.5 miles. I always aim to get above 10K.

Due to an illness I currently have digestive problems, so I walk (stroll, rather) after eating as it provides relief.

I allow an hour after breakfast and also after the evening meal to do somewhere between 3K and 5K steps. This is at home. It’s not tedious as I listen to podcasts, audiobooks, talk radio, or music. As someone else mentioned, if you do it on a walking pad you could watch video. The rest of the steps stack up naturally as you go about your daily business.
by James_K | 2025-11-10 10:09:15+00:00
I already have XSLT in my website because I have an Atom feed and XSLT is the only way to serve formatted Atom/RSS feeds in a static site. Perhaps you have never considered the idea that someone might want to purchase some cheap static hosting to serve their personal website, but it is a fine way to do things. This change pries the web ever further out of the hands of common people and into the big websites that just want the browser to serve their apps.
by SurceBeats | 2025-11-10 10:09:38+00:00
I'm atm working on a couple of things, first the biz, a self-hosted home server OS that simplifies Docker management and provides a unified dashboard for running services at home. The goal is making self-hosting more accessible without sacrificing flexibility.

And also building as a hobbie a procedural universe generation engine that simulates galaxies, solar systems and planets in real-time. Everything is generated from a seed with actual orbital physics, seasonal changes and so... Built with Python/Flask backend too but Three.js for 3D visualization and React instead of Vue3 as in the prior one. Think No Man's Sky vibes but as an explorable simulation engine really D:
by matt_daemon | 2025-11-10 10:09:52+00:00
I'm getting back in to audio programming, starting off with Pd[1] and reading Miller Puckette's book[2]. I'm planning on writing some low-level C libraries afterwards, using The Audio Programming Book[3] as a guide

[1] https://puredata.info

[2] https://msp.ucsd.edu/techniques.htm

[3] https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262014465/the-audio-programming...
by throwaway290 | 2025-11-10 10:10:26+00:00
> it spent a little too long excusing and downplaying a nazi style genocide to depict it as having a "slight leftward skew".

a measure of how out of touch this comment is:

among the reasons for her stepdown and accusations of bias according to this article was literally that BBC (especialy BBC Arabic) parroted Hamas a little too much at times.

Edit to reply: Do you actually watch BBC? I watch BBC a lot. As in I sub and don't just get what algorithms throw at me. I didn't get even a slightest feeling they were slavishly pro Israel. Their videos about Gaza were regular and almost all negative of Israel reporting about destruction and suffering in Gaza. Just go to bbcnews youtube and search Gaza. You can also search Gaza genocide. didn't watch every video but headlines are telling.

It feels like talking to somebody who says things that exist in their head and not reality
by eftpotrm | 2025-11-10 10:10:48+00:00
What makes XSLT inherently unsuitable for an interactive application in your mind? All it does is transform one XML document into another; there's no earthly reason why you can't ornament that XML output in a way that supports interactive JS-driven features, or use XSLT to built fragments of dynamically created pages that get compiled into the final rendered artifact elsewhere.
by constantius | 2025-11-10 10:12:00+00:00
> slight leftward skew, and scores highly for accuracy/reliability

Nuance matters.

That it's generally accurate and generally leans left doesn't contradict the issues raised in the article and comments. Most topics MSM reports on are not critical for artificially pushed narratives, so MSM can afford being generally accurate.

The Guardian leans way left, scores highly on accuracy, but, for a lot of leftists, has demonstrated its bias and subservience to the elite narrative by cheerleading the slander efforts against Corbyn.

Those people should have resigned in any case: whether it's over their coverage of the genocide or over some right-coded scandal doesn't matter much.

> commenters showing up suspiciously quickly > useful canary for that persons own biases

Thinking that HN is a prime target for organised covert BBC defacement (?) and making dark implications on the BBC critics' character is ridiculous. Get out of American team-based politics.
by internet_points | 2025-11-10 10:13:13+00:00
> Felsenstein was influenced in his philosophy by the works of Ivan Illich, particularly Tools for Conviviality (Harper and Row, 1973). This book advocated a "convivial" approach to design which allowed users of technologies to learn about the technology by encouraging exploration, tinkering, and modification. Felsenstein had learned about electronics in much the same fashion, and summarized his conclusions in several aphorisms, to wit – "In order to survive in a public-access environment, a computer must grow a computer club around itself." Others were – "To change the rules, change the tools," and "If work is to become play, then tools must become toys."
by ReptileMan | 2025-11-10 10:13:24+00:00
TLDR: Failed to innovate and adapt.

In a way it is story that repeats itself on a larger scale as a whole with the western world.

One of the things that annoys me is that the west lost the opportunity to continue to be world's manufacturing powerhouse in the 90s and early 00s. We should have invested in automation and efficiency to the point where developing countries even if using slave labor and no environmental regulations to still not be able to compete on price of end product. It is not as if there was not substantial technological advantage at the time.

If there was going to be a rust belt - well it is better if jobs were outright destroyed/obsoleted than moved to other countries.

China has "dark factories" - so little labor that they could turn the lights off. Absolutely no reason those couldn't be in US or UK if proper investments were made at the time.
by walterwootz | 2025-11-10 10:14:36+00:00
The fastest free online tool to convert OpenAPI and Swagger specifications into production-ready Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers. Support for official MCP SDKs: Python, TypeScript/Node.js, Go, Rust, Java, Kotlin, C#, PHP, Ruby and Swift.

Nothing is uploaded to servers, just runs on your client. Confidentiality first.
by Sholmesy | 2025-11-10 10:14:47+00:00
As well as the childcare benefit removal others have mentioned, you also begin losing your "tax free allowance".

The marginal tax rate for 100k -> 125k is 60% (due to losing the ~£12k tax free allowance)

"Your personal allowance goes down by £1 for every £2 that your adjusted net income is above £100,000. This means your allowance is zero if your income is £125,140 or above."
by bko | 2025-11-10 10:15:54+00:00
Yes you should watch for yourself. But you forgot to include a link to the edited video, rather you appeal to authority and link how some other org says that theyre not biased.

The offense is pretty egregious and serious. This was a huge issue w dire consequences, and BBC wilfully spread doctored evidence. Watch the clip yourself

https://youtu.be/xben0eSBQmE
by Panzer04 | 2025-11-10 10:17:13+00:00
This can go round and round forever.

It's not practical for most countries to have a viable industry in every so-called critical good across an economy. As another commenter noted, it's even less practical the more complex it gets because you need to be self-sufficient in the entire stack, not just parts of it.

What good is fuel refining without oil? What good is shipbuilding without mines and smelters? Without the ability to build massive shipboard diesels? Etc.

Moreover, it tends to make your real friends a bit nervous when you want to make yourself independent of them, because than you have less reason to defend them. It's not to say you should make your food production dependant on them, but when your sole reaosnt to figure out how to build ship engines is so you don't need to buy them from Germany (totally random, probably wrong example) it feels a bit off.

This is all ignoring the tremendous costs inherent in this sort of autarkic ideal. People enjoy the highest standards of living ever today thanks to global trade.
by roenxi | 2025-11-10 10:17:47+00:00
People have a very clear vision of 50 years in the future, it has been a major fight playing out for decades. One side wanted cheap energy and lots of industry, the other side wanted green energy and not much industry. That debate has been ongoing and everyone involved was pretty up-front about what the consequences would be.

The turn away from nuclear power around the turn of the century was probably the decisive moment. From then on it hasn't been possible to articulate a vision of a prosperous society with a realistic path to get there.
by gucci-on-fleek | 2025-11-10 10:19:23+00:00
> Last time this came up the consensus was that libxstl was barely maintained and never intended to be used in a secure context and full of bugs.

Sure, I agree with you there, but removing XSLT support entirely doesn't seem like a very good solution. The Chrome developer who proposed removing XSLT developed a browser extension that embeds libxslt [0], so my preferred solution would be to bundle that by default with the browser. This would:

1. Fix any libxslt security issues immediately, instead of leaving it enabled for 18 months until it's fully deprecated.

2. Solve any backwards compatibility concerns, since it's using the exact same library as before. This would avoid needing to get "consensus" from other browser makers, since they wouldn't be removing any features.

3. Be easy and straightforward to implement and maintain, since the extension is already written and browsers already bundle some extensions by default. Writing a replacement in Rust/another memory-safe language is certainly a good idea, but this solution requires far less effort.

This option was proposed to the Chrome developers, but was rejected for vague and uncompelling reasons [1].

> I think if the XSLT people really wanted to save it the best thing to do would have been to write a replacement in Rust.

That's already been done [2], but maintaining that and integrating it into the browsers is still lots of work, and the browser makers clearly don't have enough time/interest to bother with it.

[0]: https://github.com/mfreed7/xslt_extension

[1]: https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11523#issuecomment-315...

[2]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/Rust/markup-rs/xrust
by no3z | 2025-11-10 10:19:56+00:00
I’ve been working on ScratchTJ, a DIY digital turntable built with a Raspberry Pi and Arduino Nano. It’s based on the open-source SC1000 code, but with some hardware changes and tweaks to make it easier to build and customize.

It runs on a Raspberry Pi 2 with an AudioInjector sound card, a small LCD screen, a rotary encoder, and even an old hard-drive platter as the “deck.” The goal is to make a simple, open, and affordable way to experiment with scratching and mixing — no fancy gear required.

It’s still in progress, but it works pretty well and has been a fun way to explore DIY DJ tech and embedded audio.

Repo: https://github.com/no3z/ScratchTJ
by d_e_solomon | 2025-11-10 10:20:08+00:00
With Musk winning back his $1T pay plan and doubling down on Robotaxi, Tesla looks less like an automaker and more like a belief system.

Earlier analysis showed how the choice between Model 2 and Robotaxi wasn’t just a business decision it was about maintaining a valuation tied to imagination.

Curious what others here think: is Tesla’s brand of narrative leadership still an advantage, or does it signal fragility?