MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by _menelaus | 2025-12-18 17:04:28+00:00
Yes, the tyranny in Iraq was the US occupation, though I am merely using it as an example that an armed, civilian populace can resist military control, not commenting on the morality of the occupation.

FWIW, Iraq was already well armed before the occupation, and looting of state arsenals in the chaos of the invasion amplified this. Afghanistan was a similar situation but armed networks were already organized moreso before the US occupation.

I don't think there are examples in very modern times of an enlightened, armed populace revolting against tyranny. The most recent I can think of is the Irish war of independence. They had low gun ownership, but correctly recognized the attainment of arms as of utmost importance, and it was through arms that they obtained liberty. I also still think that the American revolution is a fair example because the fundamental dynamic is still relevant. The Algerian war of independence comes to mind as well, which was more recent, though they were neither enlightened nor well-armed at the outset. Generally an enlightened society will produce a democracy which will take centuries to decay to the point of warranting revolt, and we are still in the first generation of these.

To your point about the US, merely having an armed populace does not gradually move society away from tyranny. The mental model myself and the founding fathers have is that even in the case of an armed populace, democratic institutions eventually decay to the point that the government is corrupt, despotic and intolerable. Its just entropy, as happens to our bodies. The population then revolts, and installs a democratic government, which then starts to decay again, and the cycle repeats. The fact that America is moving in a bad direction is confirmation of this tendency to decay, and not in any way antithetical to my stance. Eventually the decay surpasses a threshold which triggers the guns to come into play and reset the system.

And its been interesting talking to you too.
by stocksinsmocks | 2025-12-18 17:04:29+00:00
I feel like I may be insulting your intelligence with how obvious this is, but the Israeli government has had turning Iran into a failed state as an open policy objective since the 1980s. Given that Israeli interests have achieved this end in basically every non-monarchy in the region, I think this is a credible threat. Israel has a highly aggressive and influential lobby in the United States, which has posed debilitating sanctions on Iran for many years now. I’m not saying the religious leadership in Iran are the good guys, but the siege mentality is hardly irrational.
by beAbU | 2025-12-18 17:04:36+00:00
Presumably these shootings are done with the guns of parents/friends? How else is it possible for a school kid to get access to firearms so easily?

I think the solution is to make it difficult for underage kids (U21's) to access guns so easily. And maybe start fostering some healthy habits and relationships by starting with the young.

In countries with rational gun laws the owner is held fully responsible for everything their guns do, until they declare it stolen/lost. And then an inquest is held to determine if the owner was negligent in allowing the firearm to be lost/stolen in the first place. Subsequently, guns are either kept on the person of the owner (in the case of a handgun), or they are locked away in a Proper Safe (not a filing cabinet that's painted black ffs).
by Obscurity4340 | 2025-12-18 17:04:37+00:00
I've started to come around to this point of view, where I break down something i want to learn into more modular loops that I can get the most iterations of the basic result I want to get and save the rehearsing the whole thing for the end when I feel confident with each part. Otherwise, you basically have to unfluently rehearse and rehash content you're likely good for at the peril of never getting around to as or more important stuff further along
by aDyslecticCrow | 2025-12-18 17:04:45+00:00
The energy threshold for adding a new unit test to the suite and a new row to the docs are vital for it to be done.

If I need to install pandoc to test compile a doc change before i submit it for code review with 3 other maintainers, id rather keep my note or useful screenshot to myself.

If i need to create a c binding of my function so that pytest can run it through 50 rows of cryptic CMake, I'd rather do happy testing locally and submit it as a "trust me bro".

Good and fast international tooling matters massively for good software. And it all comes back to speed and iteration loop.

On top of that, slow meticulous work can then be done. 100% test coverage, detailed uml diagrams describing the system, and functional safety risk analysis matrix documents.

So speed and slowness supplement in different levels of analysis.
by roblh | 2025-12-18 17:05:28+00:00
I think they make good devs 2x more productive for the first month, which then slowly declines as that good dev spends less time actually writing and understanding and debugging code until it falls well below the 1x mark. It’s basically a high interest loan people take against their own skills. For some people that loan might be worth it. Maybe they’re trying to change their role in an organization and need the boost to start taking up new responsibilities they want to own. I think it’s temporary though. The slow shift into “skim mode”, where the authors just don’t quite put that same amount of effort into understanding what’s being churned out. I dunno, that’s just what I’ve seen.
by GoatInGrey | 2025-12-18 17:05:33+00:00
I'm seeing parallels between this and factory-assembled houses.

Input costs are lower and velocity is higher. You get a finished product out the door quicker, though maintenance is more expensive. Largely because the product is no longer a collection of individual parts made to be interfaced by a human. It is instead a machine-assembled good that requires a machine to perform "the work". Therefore, because the machine is only designed to assemble the good, your main recourse is to have the machine assemble a full replacement.

With that framing, there seems to be a tradeoff to bear in mind when considering fit for the problem we're meaning to solve. It also explains the widespread success of LLMs generating small scripts and MVPs. Which are largely disposable.
by PaulHoule | 2025-12-18 17:05:49+00:00
For me it was that and their unqualified support of H-1B visas.

The ACM always said it wanted to build bridges with practitioners but paywalled journals aren't the way to do it.

I would be 100% for more green cards or a better guestworker program of some kind, but I've seen so many good people on H-1Bs twisted into knots... Like the time the startup I was working for hired a new HR head and two weeks in treated an H-1B so bad the HR person quit. I wanted to tell this guy "your skills are in demand and you could get a job across the street" but that's wasn't true.

I joined the IEEE Computer Society because it had a policy to not have a policy which I could accept.
by dijit | 2025-12-18 17:05:57+00:00
This is sort of how I designed Accelbytes managed gameserver system (previously called: Armada).

You provide us a docker image, and we unpack it, turn it into a VM image and run as many instances as you want side-by-side with CPU affinity and NUMA awareness. Obviating the docker network stack for latency/throughput reasons - since you can

They had tried nomad, agones and raw k8s before that.
by griffzhowl | 2025-12-18 17:06:10+00:00
They only started adding feathers after they found evidence of them being feathered, though.

Plus there's zero direct evidence for their colours so there's no option but to use guesswork in these cases.

And a lot of dinosaur reconstructions may be more for edutainment value rather than reflecting a scholarly best-guess. There's no uniform methodology across all these disciplines.
by egberts1 | 2025-12-18 17:06:12+00:00
Need further breakdown on why those got happier without condition.

It could be IQ, cultural-specific, polarized against authority, much of which deserve monitoring.

I do not think it is a cost-effective way for working population to fund this "freestyle" living unless society gets something from the idles.

Otherwise, like a professor giving out highest grade of a student to rest of the class, that too shall normalizes ...." at the lowesr level.
by littlecranky67 | 2025-12-18 17:06:12+00:00
> what problem do consumers have that Steam Machines solve?

It fixes a lot of issues for me (I will buy a steam machine upon release):

I used to prefer consoles for the living room - put the disk in, and go. But nowadays consoles have the same issues: Giant downloads, patches, tweaking GUI settings and fear of not getting the best performance (PS5 Pro variants, Xbox S/X etc., performance vs. quality mode settings). PC games are now not only more price competetive through the sales, but consoles use now downloads at high prices to undermine the second hand market, or account-lock your game even when purchased as disk. Plus, I need a subscription to play online.

Game controller support has become superb on ALL OSes (I use a PS5 controller on macOS as well as Linux, and it is pretty much flawless.

Windows is annoying. I used Windows 10 for a long time as a glorified bootloader into Steam (on a dualboot Linux machine), but it become full annoyances and win11 worsens that ("You need a Onedrive account" - "oh, did you try Edge yet?" - "Your computer is at risk" - "We installed copilot for you!" etc.). I basically want a computer that boots into steam BigPicture and is quiet the rest of the time.

Can I build my own living room PC? Yes, but then without proper SteamOS installation, or finicky linux setups. With the Steam Machine I just buy the package, put it next to my TV and lets go. I will re-use my PS5 dualshock controller and be done with it.
by zahlman | 2025-12-18 17:06:22+00:00
> Related: there is a known scam where someone will ask for payment by things like Ebay gift cards. To "prove you have the card", you are asked to read off just the last few digits of the card - which unbeknownst to the intended victim is actually all that is needed to redeem the card.

I'm not following. If things have gotten this far, the victim has already been duped into buying the card and intends to send it to the scammers anyway... ?

But also, how could the card possibly work that way? What are the other digits even for; and wouldn't they quickly run out of valid "last few digit" combinations for issued cards?
by cynicalsecurity | 2025-12-18 17:06:34+00:00
It gets interesting when a company assigns 2 story points to a task that requires 6 minimum. No time for writing tests, barely any time to perform code reviews and QA. Also, next year the company tells you since we have AI now, all tickets must be done 2 times quicker.

Who popped this balloon? I know I need to change my employer, but it's not so easy. And I'm not sure another employer is going to be any better.
by jb_hn | 2025-12-18 17:06:51+00:00
Good point – we’ve definitely noticed a lot more Cloudflare representation these days. That said, there seems to be tiers in terms of the protection they offer (and thus the protection used by the websites in this long-tail), where lower tiers (so far) haven’t required proxies.

Curious if you’ve noticed any particularly well defined, obscure websites? Would love to take a look if so.
by delichon | 2025-12-18 17:06:56+00:00
> If someone cant land a job at minimum wage it is because employers think they would be a net negative at a $0 wage.

Strong disagree, no foundation. There are lots of profits to be made at $10 per hour that can't be made at $15.

A minimum wage raises the bottom wrung of the economic ladder and declares victory for the workers.
by mrinterweb | 2025-12-18 17:07:03+00:00
HTML over the wire frameworks like HTMX, Hotwire (rails), LiveView (phoenix), Livewire (laravel), LiveView (django), etc. They all have the same basic idea with differences in how they achieve it. I feel this approach is overlooked, and it drives me crazy. There is a huge complexity cost attached with JS frontend app + backend that everyone seems to have accepted as reality. HTML over the wire (really need a catchy acronym maybe HotW) can greatly simplify and speed up development with pretty much the same end user experience as a react app.
by csa | 2025-12-18 17:07:11+00:00
So much of your comment is wrong:

> These extra curricular activities, were the secret game you had to play, to get into prestigious universities. At least, it was just a few years ago.

Extracurriculars have been a part of elite school admissions for about a century.

It hasn’t really been a secret for most of that time.

Some people (somewhat correctly) say that this requirement was added to discriminate against Jews at that time, but it was also an education idea (“Progressive Education” by Dewey) that gained popularity around the same time.

Regardless of what the initial catalyst was, the universities seemed to like having folks who were “doers” as a significant part of their student body.

> Besides niche sports like lacrosse and rowing

These are not “niche sports” in certain parts of the country.

> there was the volunteer activities like serving at a soup kitchen.

I can tell you point blank that serving in a soup kitchen does not help you get into an elite school.

For any school that ranks such things, if you have a laundry list of volunteer activities like this, it would get you the next to lowest rating in extracurriculars — this is basically the same as not doing anything.

The key to getting an high rating for any volunteer activity would be to show leadership (which is something the elite schools says point blank that they want) and meaningful impact.

> When Ivy League universities saw a resume like that, they knew which social class the student belonged to.

I’ve got news for you. A wide range of classes of people do these things.

There might be a floor at the absolutely lowest end of the economic spectrum (just due to instability of housing and food), but I’ve seen a ton of great examples from folks who were not upper or upper middle class. Often times necessity can be the mother of invention!

I assure you that these stories stand out to admissions committees, with the biggest challenge often being simply to get some of these folks from modest means to apply.
by quesera | 2025-12-18 17:07:14+00:00
Your math is wrong.

The merchant wants you to use the card, in all cases, always. Because statistically, you are likely to spend 30-40% more than the card face value, when you do.

The unused portion of the card sits on the merchant's balance sheet as a liability, for years, until they decide to recognize it as revenue ("breakage"). They prefer this over NOT selling a GC, of course, and some merchants (e.g. Starbucks, high volume, low ticket) make a ton of money on breakage. But in all cases, merchants greatly prefer their cards to be used.

You're also wrong about how the fraud works. Usually, the card is not purchased but sniffed prior to legitimate sale. The mechanisms for this vary, but a common method is to literally pull armloads of cards off of display shelves, open and repackage the carriers, then surreptitiously return to shelves for legitimate sale. This is purportedly the process for large organized crime rings based in Asia, mostly China.

And you're wrong about how easy it would be to fix. Packaging costs money, retailers have to be on board for activation, this has to be integrated into POS systems, and it all has to be very easy for consumers.

This is a hard problem at scale, and smart and motivated people on the merchant side, the program manager side, the bank side, and the law enforcement side, would love a simple solution.

...

What is not a hard problem, though, is that Apple should separate "AML investigation in process" from the user's ability to access their own data. This would turn a very large problem (for all involved) into an annoying inconvenience (for the customer).
by 1-more | 2025-12-18 17:07:23+00:00
> make a case for good behavior when they come before the parole board

It can be a bit more explicit than that: in Colorado, inmates can earn 10–12 days per month of "earned time." Earned time shortens the time until eligibility for parole. Section D in the linked document (from the linked department policies page section 625-02) gives examples of behavior that can add up to earned time. For instance, a day of work at a disaster site is worth a day of earned time (D.4.a.1)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1q6IXf-yWnbA3Ujjejola7fiwijv...

https://cdoc.colorado.gov/about/department-policies
by bryanlarsen | 2025-12-18 17:07:35+00:00
In 2025 none of Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo sell their consoles at a loss. They're sold for very slim margins, which is what I assume Valve will do with the Steam machine. I expect the Steam Machine to be price competitive.

ish. Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo likely have contracts locking down RAM prices whereas Valve will have to negotiate theirs based on current prices.
by subpixel | 2025-12-18 17:07:50+00:00
> The biggest problem here in Barcelona is that most airbnbs / short term rentals are companies buying housing as an investment and so are stealing the opportunity from actual people and families trying to live.

This problem exists regardless of who does the buying. Where I live the locals got into the market first. Still, it's a zero-sum game, every short-term rental is a house a family cannot live in and probably cannot afford to buy.

On my street 30% of the houses are short-term rentals. Some rent out for $10k/week just 8 weeks a year and are closed up the rest of the time. My daughter is currently the only kid on the street, which has over 100 houses.

Not only are all the houses now priced as income-producing investments, they are killing the community that used to exist here.
by ttcbj | 2025-12-18 17:07:50+00:00
This article is the second time I have seen a news outlet try to 'break' the vending machine experiment. That is definitely really entertaining. In this case, they convinced the AI that it lived in a communist country and it was part of an experiment in capitalism. That's funny!

But I really wish Anthropic would give the technology to a journalist that tries working with it productively. Most business people will try to work with AI productively because they have an incentive to save money/be efficient/etc.

Anyway, I am hoping someone at Anthropic will see this on HN, and relay this message to whatever team sets up these experiements. I for one would be fascinated to see the vending machine experiment done sincerely, with someone who wants to make it work.

The reality is that even most customers are smart enough to realize that driving a business they rely on out of business isn't in their interest. In fact, in a B2B context, I think that is often the case. Thanks.
by bilekas | 2025-12-18 17:08:06+00:00
I know very well and I absolutely am not advocating for removing TLS. I am only saying that there is no need for them to remove it as IsP's can already access your traffic if needed through a lawful intercept. These are part of ISP certification. You're very naive if you believe there is no way for the ISP to view your traffic just because you're over an Https connection.

The ISP has "Intercept Access Points" withing their infra that will just clone you're data. Without you knowing. This is a feature. Turned on with a warrant always I'm sure.

Making my point of your ISP not being there to defend your privacy. It's not their mandate. Their mandate is to provide an internet service to you, and a mechanism to intercept to law enforcement.

Nobody is talking about passing around plain text over the wire here.
by mschuster91 | 2025-12-18 17:08:10+00:00
> One of Microsoft's biggest mistakes was to give up on Windows Phone.

They had no other choice.

The technical foundation of the prior WP versions (aka, Windows CE) was just too dated and they didn't have a Windows kernel / userland capable of performantly dealing on ARM, x86 performance was and still is utter dogshit on battery powered devices, they didn't have a Windows userland actually usable on anything touch based, and most importantly they did not have developer tooling even close to usable.

At the same time, Apple had a stranglehold over the upper price class devices, Android ate up the low and mid range class - and unlike the old Ballmer "DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS" days, Microsoft didn't have tooling that enticed developers, while Apple had Xcode with emulators that people had been used to for years, and Android had a fully functioning Eclipse based toolchain.
by csense | 2025-12-18 17:08:44+00:00
One could just as easily say "The EV market is twice its natural size because it's being unnaturally propped up by subsidies."

Are there worthier causes the government could spend that on? Or maybe not spend the money at all, to reduce the deficit and ease pressure on interest rates and inflation? It's a politically charged question.

My personal thought is that government subsidy gets the best return on investment when the market is small (so the investment / denominator is small) and difficult to operate without the subsidy (so the improvement / numerator is increased a lot by the subsidy).

Heading into 2026 the EV market is pretty established and is no longer in that regime. The subsidies scale linearly with market size. Whether it makes sense to continue investment depends on how the positive externalities scale and the ratio of marginal positive externality to marginal government subsidy.

Maybe it's worth it, maybe it's not. But you can't assume the juice is still worth the squeeze in ~2026 just because the investment was justifiable when these policies were originally established back around ~2010 or so -- especially considering a fixed credit (per vehicle) means you need a lot more squeeze in ~2026 (when there are a lot more people buying vehicles than in ~2010).
by reactordev | 2025-12-18 17:09:04+00:00
Yes, it's unfair to force a human being into labor. Paid or unpaid. It should be voluntary. Community Service as a punishment is different. That's a do labor or else do time so you're trading labor for hours/time. Paid in trust. I have issue with do time and do labor as a form of punishment without reward.

Most inmates are incarcerated due to circumstance. They lacked the ability to better their lives and required monies to live, so they resorted to crime. Given a chance, many inmates get degrees behind bars, learn skills, write books, practice art.
by igornotarobot | 2025-12-18 17:09:26+00:00
> Just friendly remember that Open access publishing is the new business model that is more lucrative for publishing industry and it is basically a tax on research activities but paid to private entities and mostly paid by taxpayer money...

While I do not disagree with this statement, this makes a significant difference for the citizens who do not happen to work in academia. Before open access, the journals would try to charge me $30-50 per article, which is ridiculous, it's a price of a textbook. Since my taxes fund public research in any case, I would prefer to be able to read the papers.

I would also love to be able to watch the talks at academic conferences, which are, to very large extent, paid by the authors, too.
by iamwil | 2025-12-18 17:09:29+00:00
He didn't need to finish it in order for it to have an impact. Makers of FilePilot and Animal Well both attribute Handmade as being big inspirations for them to go the way they did. They said, they got the most value from the first 50 eps or so. You'll hear lots of them on the Wookash podcast.