MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Supermancho | 2025-12-11 22:45:49+00:00
>> The size of the American economy

> And how did the American economy get to that size without the military protecting it from IDK, the USSR just taking it?

The US hegemony successfully strangled the USSR leading to the current Russian oligarchy (with a dictator at the top). The USSR never found itself in a position to expand its borders without threatening an internal insurrection, a coup, and/or the extermination of most of the military forces in a single conflict. US funded the rebuilding of Europe as part of the manufactured hegemony, allowing free trade to supply europe with cheap goods and workers safely across the waters, or under strict supervision of US intelligence for deals with the USSR and the rest of Asia. The USSR wasn't part of these agreement negotiations per se. They had to deal with their own internal politics and manufacturing limitations, while negotiating with countries that had a veto-enabled silent partner.

TBH, I have no idea what people are talking about when are implying "the American economy" is large. It's 8% of world pop and is largely an exporter of natural resources. The strength of the US economy is the reliability of the bond market. The USSR had no chance of taking the US, but did meaningfully threaten the security of the US during the cuban missile crisis. USSR was considered a credible threat to most of Europe for the duration of the cold war, in a carefully structured scenario of mutual destruction.

> And what happened to you if you wanted to trade with the USSR? You're omitting that part

World politics is not as simple as cause and effect. Many countries did deal with embargoed/sanctioned countries, including the US - notably the sale of grain to the USSR during the 70s. If you wanted first crack at new trade deals or wanted security guarantees from the US for delicate trade deals, you had to make allowances according to US wishes. Germany made it clear that they were going to purchase natural gas from the USSR as a matter of their own energy security. The US made an allowance. Maybe one US partner attacked another (Iraq vs Kuwait), the US would step in militarily. You wanted to sell oil to Russia? Sanctions or embargoes or worse, you were not able to call on the US navy when your shipping lanes were disrupted. Maybe the US called on some pirates regularly to raid your ships, maybe not. Thems the breaks, mafia style.
by pksebben | 2025-12-11 22:46:04+00:00
As many others have mentioned in this thread and others, there are ways - effective and straightforward ways - that we could be protecting our kids from the harms that come with the www.

The harms are real. The solution is a Surveillance Wolf wearing a dead Save The Kids Sheep(tm).

Solutions that might work - RTA headers [0]. More robust parental controls. Not this reimagining of the rules of the internet in service of a fairly vague and ineffective goal. It's like the whole AV concept was designed not to work in the current context at all - almost as if that was the point.

Perhaps I'm going a little out on a limb. I don't think I am - but quick, tell me you need to know where I'm dialing from without asking me where I'm dialing in from.

0 - https://www.rtalabel.org/index.php
by wat10000 | 2025-12-11 22:46:51+00:00
Subscriptions are how things are going to go in general. This is just one example of the larger trend. Companies find it very annoying that they have to keep coming up with ways to provide new value in order to keep getting money from people.

Some car companies are already trying out subscriptions for stuff that requires zero ongoing support, like seat heaters. Outside of cars, so much software is switching to subscriptions, whether or not it makes sense. The software for my security cameras has become completely infested by ads, but you can pay for a subscription to make them go away. I own the cameras outright, but not really, since the software needed to use them is basically rented, either with cash or with my eyeballs. Most paid apps I come across these days want a monthly fee to keep using it, they're not content to just sell me a copy.
by nanolith | 2025-12-11 22:47:09+00:00
Around 15 years ago, I built a barbecue controller. This controller had four temperature probes that could be used to check the temperature of the inner cooking chamber as well as various cuts of meat. It controlled servos that opened and closed vents and had a custom derived PID algorithm that could infer the delayed effects of oxygen to charcoal.

Anyway, of relevance to this thread is that the controller connected to the local wireless network and provided an embedded HTTP server with an SVG based web UI that would graph temperatures and provided actual knobs and dials so that the controller could be tweaked. SVG in the browser works nicely with Javascript.
by chriswarbo | 2025-12-11 22:47:46+00:00
If HN is social media, then so are PHPBB, NNTP, BBS, etc. and the term loses its semantic relevance.

My heuristic is that social media focuses on particular people, regardless of what they're talking about. In contrast, forums (like HN) focus on a particular topic, regardless of who's talking about it.
by MerrimanInd | 2025-12-11 22:47:47+00:00
> This would be career suicide in virtually any other technical field.

The cognitive load is unavoidable and in some ways worse in industries with highly technical names.

At one point in my career I was an engine calibrator at a large automotive OEM. Our lexicon included physics industry terms (BMEP, BTDC, VVT, etc), a large software package where every variable, table, and function was an acronym (we had about 75k tunable parameters, each with an acronym), and all the internal company jargon and acronyms you'd expect in a large corporation. But every name was as technical and functional as the author would desire.

During my first month I was exhausted. I would doze off in afternoon meetings or pass out in my car as soon as I pulled in the driveway. I finally mentioned this to a more senior coworker and his insight was that my brain was working overtime because it was busy learning another language. He was entirely right! The constant mental load was a very real and tangible load. He relayed an anecdote when he went to S. America on his honeymoon and despite him and his wife having taken ~4 years of HS/college Spanish the mental work they had to do to function basically nixed half the daily activities they had planned due to exhaustion. That was what I was experiencing.

The idea that more technical and specific names reduces mental load does not track with my experience. The complexity is intrinsic not incidental and I don't think it has much to do with the specific names chosen.
by pembrook | 2025-12-11 22:47:58+00:00
Unfortunately The Anxious Generation is a very well-written house of cards built on questionable studies [1] and its success is simply a reflection of the fact it capitalizes on the trendiest moral panic of our times.

Social media is akin to violent video games in the 2000s, tv addiction in the 90s, santanic heavy metal in 80s, and even 'bicycle face' in the 1890s bicycle craze.

Jonathan Haidt seems extremely earnest and thoughtful, but unfortunately being lovingly catapulted to fame for being the guy who affirms everyones gut reaction to change (moral panic)...makes it extremely difficult financially, emotionally and socially for him to steelman the opposite side of that thing.

Even if he hadn't compiled a bunch of suspect research from pre-2010 to make his claims, the field of Psychology is at the center of the replication crisis and is objectively its worst offender. Pyschology studies published in prestigious academic journals have been found to replicate only 36% of the time. [2]

1. https://reason.com/video/2024/04/02/the-bad-science-behind-j...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproducibility_Project
by omh | 2025-12-11 22:48:17+00:00
Thanks. That wasn't clear from the Mail article above.

But the Times article also says:

> A spokeswoman for Leicestershire police said crimes under Section 127 and Section 1 include “any form of communication” such as phone calls, letters, emails and hoax calls to emergency services.

So I think the categorisation is a mess, and probably not even consistent across forces
Show HN: Data Axolotl – Monitor analytic data without writing individual tests
by johnstimac111 | 2025-12-11 22:48:42+00:00
I used to work as a data engineer, and one of the big aspects of that was data monitoring. Data scientists & analysts do a lot of monitoring on the analytics side for changes in business metrics (signup rate, retention, etc), but as a DE I also needed to just to make sure that nothing broke. Data Axolotl focuses on the latter.

There are tons of tools that support data testing (love a dbt test), but even after writing robust tests we still ran into unexpected breaking changes. Most of the time, this became an issue when a product manager showed up wondering why some obscure metric was now null across the board. We didn't know that metric was being used (sometimes not even that it existed), so how would we have written a test for it? (A common cause was that an engineering team stopped recording a number because no one knew it was important; even when engineering did everything right, sent out comms "fyi we're removing the legacy user id values", and rolled out safely, no one expects that the marketing ROI dashboard depends on that.)

That's where Data Axolotl comes in: Data Axolotl is a CLI tool that catches unexpected breaking changes in analytics data sets, without you having to know in advance what might break.

Simply put, you point it at some data tables, run it daily, and it collects a ton of common metrics over time. (Column minimum, maximum, mean, row count, distinct count, etc.) If any of the metrics suddenly change, Data Axolotl generates an alert.

The whole thing runs from a python package, so you can run it locally or on your own infra via a scheduling tool like Airflow. You don't have to sign up for any new cloud services and risk data leaking data to a third party. History can be stored locally with sqlite (default), or in a remote db on your infra.

This is a pretty early release, so right now it only supports Snowflake tables, but we hope to add other database types in the future.

You can try out Data Axolotl today, directly from your local machine, by installing via pip. `pip install data-axolotl` A full setup guide can be found in the Readme.
by sfn42 | 2025-12-11 22:48:43+00:00
I kind of struggle with this. I basically hate everyone elses code, and by that I mean I hate most people's code. A lot of people write awesome code but most people write what I'd call trash code.

And I do think there's more to it than preference. Like there's actual bugs in the code, it's confusing and because it's confusing there's more bugs. It's solving a simple problem but doing so in an unnecessarily convoluted way. I can solve the same problem in a much simpler way. But because everything is like this I can't just fix it, there's layers and layers of this convolution that can't just be fixed and of course there's no proper decoupling etc so a refactor is kind of all or nothing. If you start it's like pulling on a thread and everything just unravels.

This is going to sound pompous and terrible but honestly some times I feel like I'm too much better than other developers. I have a hard time collaborating because the only thing I really want to do with other people's code is delete it and rewrite it. I can't fix it because it isn't fixable, it's just trash. I wish they would have talked to me before writing it, I could have helped then.

Obviously in order to function in a professional environment i have to suppress this stuff and just let the code be ass but it really irks me. Especially if I need to build on something someone else made - itsalmost always ass, I don't want to build on a crooked foundation. I want to fix the foundation so the rest of the building can be good too. But there's no time and it's exhausting fixing everyone else's messes all the time.
by notahacker | 2025-12-11 22:48:44+00:00
Even though most of the satellites affected would be other Starlinks, I don't think the many entities with other spacecraft in sub 550km LEO would be particularly delighted to lose them (and the ability to safely relaunch for 5 years)

Satellites in higher orbits do a lot that can't be done in LEO and typically have much lower collision risk (though GEO is fairly crowded). There are plenty of plausible candidate technologies for cleaning up debris, just few practical demonstrations (and even tracking smaller pieces is work in progress)
by zmmmmm | 2025-12-11 22:49:09+00:00
If they voluntarily collude then yes, you can't avoid that. It's like third party cookies - once two parties collude it's game over. But that just outlines a situation where the user's chosen trusted service is hostile to their interests and they need to find one that isn't.

If Big Brother starts mandating the collusion - then yes, there's a hill to die on. But in some ways that's the point here. There are hills to die on - this just isn't it. And if you pick the wrong hill then you already died so you are losing the ones that really mattered. If the EFF pointed out to everyone that there is a privacy preserving answer to the core issue that is driving this, they could then mount a strong defense for the part that is truly problematic, since it isn't actually required to solve the problem.
by pvtmert | 2025-12-11 22:49:27+00:00
I agree for internal names but disagree for public software/external names.

I disagree for public/open-source software, because: So many kinds of software actually have good names. Yes they use mythical names but with the similar function or relatedness.

Meanwhile, I agree for internal names, because: So many (legacy) code I worked with had terrible naming. This goes beyond only the names themselves but also their capitalization or consistency. I kid you not, in a $FAANG company I saw "SpidermanActivity" and "BatmanActivity" on a system that is used by Tier-1 services' on-calls.

> (Although this thing was not a Tier-1 service, it was not also completely Tier-2 either, as it was actively supporting operations of Tier-1 services, depending on the incident, a downtime could cause significant problems...)

Imagine you are trying to make sense of a large system, which has maybe tens of dependencies and as much of dependents, you are also trying to remember which API was Spiderman and how it related to the business at all...

More on the naming conventions, the horrible case of acronyms (which spans outside of software engineering) and PMs creating polls/surveys for "fun names for our new shiny thing that does X but we don't wanna call it that".

Going even lower-levels, engineers themselves are not careful. I had way too many CDK stacks named with not only varying dash vs underscore differences, but also with subtle "case-sensitivity" differences.

Each year, I am solving issues of Java devs' issues. Some of being "but it works on my machine" type of problems. And significant percentage of that is most developers use a Mac & macOS. Hence the filesystem is case-insensitive by default. But the deployment target & CI being a Linux, filesystem is case-sensitive. As you can see here, The camel-case combined with inattentiveness can simply cause many hours of waste.

> It's a plague.

Yes, there is an AI slop, but there is also human sloppiness too. I am quite happy with LLMs/GenAI that it is able to catch and capture these and less prone to make such sloppiness in the first place. (As it being a "predictive-text engine", next word suggestion is a clone of existing copy of historically occurring words)

At the same time, amount of "hallucinations" for various acronyms are staggering. Obviously I cannot expect otherwise. Even as a human, if I am missing the context, I would be either confused or plug-in something I already know...
by mathewsanders | 2025-12-11 22:49:58+00:00
This makes me think of a tool from semiotics called the Greimas square where you can have opposing concepts e.g. A and B (ugly & beautiful, for & against, legal & illegal).

At the surface level they can appear as binaries, but the negation of A is not equivalent to B and vice versa (e.g. illegal is not equivalent to not-legal) and encourages the consideration of more complex meta-concepts which at surface level seem like contradictions but are not (both beautiful and ugly, neither for or against).

--

Others have pointed out that English speakers do have the capacity, and do use these sort of double negatives that allow for this ambiguity and nuance, but if you are an English-only speaker, I do believe that there are concepts that are thick with meaning and the meaning cannot accurately be communicated through a translation - they come with a lot of contextual baggage where the meaning can not be communicated in words alone.

--

As a New Zealander who's lived in the U.S. for the last 15 years, I've realized in conversations with some native Americans where despite sincere (I think) efforts on both sides, I've not been able to communicate what I mean. I don't think it's anything to do with intelligence, but like author hints how language shapes how we think and therefore our realities.

--

I've never found poetry to be interesting, but recently I've come to appreciate how I think poets attempt to bypass this flaw of language, and how good poets sometimes seem to succeed!
by energy123 | 2025-12-11 22:50:28+00:00
But 400k was never usable in ChatGPT Plus/Pro subscriptions. It was nerfed down to 60-100k. If you submitted too long of a prompt they deleted the tokens on the end of your prompt before calling the model. Or if the chat got too long (still below 100k however) they deleted your first messages. This was 3 months ago.

Can someone with an active sub check whether we can submit a full 400k prompt (or at least 200k) and there is no prompt truncatation in the backend? I don't mean attaching a file which uses RAG.
by davnicwil | 2025-12-11 22:52:06+00:00
I have to say I'm similarly not really sure I'm getting it, and I've been following litestream pretty closely over the years (not an expert but certainly familiar).

I think what we're getting here is a way to just spin up a local shell / app and run arbitrary queries from any point in time over the network without having to sync the full prod database. I guess with LiteFS you would have to do this, or pre-plan to do this, it's not totally on-demand.

Or said another way, do things locally as though in prod without having to ssh to prod and do it there (if you even can, I guess if 'prod' is just s3 you can't really do this anyway so it's an entirely new capability).

@benbjohnson is this right? I humbly suggest adding a tl;dr of the main takeaway up top of the post to clarify. Love your work on litestream, thanks for what you do!
by watwut | 2025-12-11 22:52:32+00:00
It is material exactly here. The preference for "ideology signaling" comes from desire to frame both sides as the same. "Cruelty signaling" is very accurate descriptor. It does not even suggest right wing only thing, if someone on the left signals cruelty, they would engage in cruelty signaling. And if someone on the right performatively helps poor, they are engaging in virtue signaling.

The trouble is, if the things are called as what they are, you cant say "both sides are the same". Because one side is promoting cruelty and the other is not.

> says things they don't believe to curry favour

If you do not believe that trans people should be beating up, but say so to look manly to your boss, you still promoted beating of trans.
by doctoboggan | 2025-12-11 22:52:35+00:00
I have a plex server and use Prologue for audio books. What would my experience on Rivian be like? I am guessing I would have to connect to the infotainment system as a bluetooth speaker? Would I be able to easily skip forward/backward and see the current chapter?

I've been using car play for the better part of the past decade and don't know what it looks like in vehicles without it.
by whizzter | 2025-12-11 22:52:56+00:00
Forgot to reply, dunno about what is the focus in different markets but in Sweden the HBO-Discovery merger meant that 3 of the 12 or so old linear channels got sucked into it, what those channels lived off was cheap reality-TV of drunk/famous/naked/whatever.

I got HBO to watch good shows and suddenly the frontpage was filled with promotions of this inane reality-TV crap that I didn't have any interest in really paying for.

Yes, Netflix has added some reality crap like those fixed Tyson boxing fights and similar, but the ratio of crap to good content was still in heavy favor of content (and most importantly, they didn't try to fill my front-page with the crap).
by tptacek | 2025-12-11 22:53:25+00:00
They fire guided munitions at Israeli troop positions. They fire unguided rockets and mortar shells into Israeli towns. A video of a targeted Hezbollah strike doesn't illustrate anything at all; everybody points the gun when it's useful to do so, it's what you do when you don't have a combatant target that tells the actual tale.

I can't say enough how odd it is to bring this kind of take into a discussion about Hezbollah. Note that I'm not making the case that Israel is fastidious about avoiding civilian casualties; that would be an unproductive argument to attempt on this thread. You have found one of the few arguments that are even less productive.

https://www.amnesty.org.uk/press-releases/lebanon-hezbollahs...
by matheusmoreira | 2025-12-11 22:53:32+00:00
> any relevant device supplied for use in the UK must have installed tamper-proof system software

It's happening. Computer freedom, everything the word "hacker" ever stood for, will be officially destroyed if this passes. We're about to be robbed of control over our computers by force of law. It's just the UK now but eventually it will be every country.

This is a very dark day. I've been prophesizing its arrival for a while now. I was secretly hoping I was wrong about everything, that we'd turn this around, that we'd enshrine a right to control our computers into law. The opposite is happening instead. It's so sad...
by jcalvinowens | 2025-12-11 22:53:38+00:00
I'm not defending the Ruby decision, I literally said I wouldn't have done it. It reminds me of the disttools removal from python, which was also not something I'd have done nearly so aggressively if it were up to me. Multiple distros have patched it back in.

But it wasn't up to me. It's not my project. I'm using somebody else's project, and at the end of the day it's their decision, because they own it. Unless it's impossible to work around, I feel like I have to either respect that, or switch to an alternative.

You're free to maintain a patch on top of Ruby to add the alias and run that on your machines, btw. It would probably be very simple, although certainly not as simple as aforementioned sed command...
by fragmede | 2025-12-11 22:54:24+00:00
I don't think so. My financial situation isn't hers though, and I don't even own one. I borrowed a friend's for a 550 mile road trip this past weekend and then for a few days after. It's there enough to do the usual daily trips with minimal interaction, so while road trips is the obvious situation for it it's also really nice to have the rest of the time. It sucks that it costs so much when it could be free, but we still live under capitalism so that's just how that one goes.