MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by crazygringo | 2025-12-14 00:24:27+00:00
> Try to extrapolate on your own.

No need for the snark. Obviously we're not talking about somebody in Iran or Russia connecting to a VPN that just leads back into their own country, that would be idiotic. None of the VPN providers are providing anything like that. Those don't even make sense conceptually. A Western VPN provider that an Iranian or Russian is using isn't even legally allowed to operate nodes inside of Iran or Russia due to sanctions.

I'm talking about the realistic mix-ups that the article is using as examples. Where Somalia is actually going to France or something. That's why my original comment started with "Is there any real-life situation..."

No VPN providers are accidentally routing into an oppressive dictatorship.
by qingcharles | 2025-12-14 00:24:57+00:00
It's interesting that you differentiate between analog and digital electronic cameras.

My first "digital" camera was one of the Canon Ion ones that use floppy discs but actually record the photos in analog, so technically just an "electronic camera", but was marketed as a "Still Video Camera" (!). You had to use a video capture card to get the images into the PC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Floppy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4G_1uy_7B5w
by tomcatfish | 2025-12-14 00:25:01+00:00
The THIRD sentence in the article explains that they ship to the US. You are tone-policing your hallucinated version of the article!

> Enter Navjot Sawhney, who founded the UK-based social enterprise The Washing Machine Project (TWMP) to tackle this, and has now shipped almost 500 of his hand-crank Divya machines to 13 countries, including Mexico, Ghana, Iraq *and the US.*
by smaudet | 2025-12-14 00:25:22+00:00
> Be ready for a blog post in ten years how they broke apart the monolith into loosely coupled components because it was too difficult to ship things with a large team and actually have it land in production without getting reverted to an unrelated issue.

Some of their "solutions" I kind of wonder how they plan on resolving this, like the black box "magic" queue service they subbed back in, or the fault tolerance problem.

That said, I do think if you have a monolith that just needs to scale (single service that has to send to many places), they are possibly taking the correct approach. You can design your code/architecture so that you can deploy "services" separately, in a fault tolerant manner, but out of a mono repo instead of many independent repos.
by jasonwatkinspdx | 2025-12-14 00:26:13+00:00
Yeah, I had an unexpected insight into all this as growing up, my best friend's dad was a COBOL programmer for Metlife insurance.

The upside of those old mainframe centric systems is they do have impressive reliability. But you increasingly become dependent on just a handful of old souls like my friend's dad that are the only people who understand it in sufficient detail to try to update it.

My friend's dad had good job security but it seemed pretty demoralizing otherwise.
by bsder | 2025-12-14 00:26:42+00:00
> To read and speak English? Ok, then why can't kids test out of it most of the time? Is the purpose to be knowledgeable about a canon of literature? Why can't people test against that?

Because people VASTLY overestimate their ability with their native language or their command of native language literature.

The SAT English Achievement tests used to absolutely obliterate even students who got good AP English scores. This isn't limited to English--even native Japanese speakers struggle with the advanced JLPT levels, for example. Grammar is hard, yo.

If you don't actively study your native language, your working vocabulary is quite small and your grammatical constructs are excessively simple.

As for shared literature, we were in front of what was claimed to be the house of Jonathan Swift with a bus full of tourists from various English-speaking countries, and the tour guide cracked a joke about "A Modest Proposal". I snickered a bit but didn't think much else. The tour guide pulled me aside later that I was the first person to get the joke and it was almost the end of the year--we're talking hundreds to thousands of people from the US, Australia, India, etc.

I mean, just ask someone to name three main characters and what they did in the last book they read. Most people will struggle. You need to spend some discussion time in order to affix a book into your memory.
by miltonlost | 2025-12-14 00:26:51+00:00
> To read and speak English?

And how are you, right now, communicating? You're writing in English. Grammar, spelling, punctuation, all written down, is its own subject that people aren't born knowing or can acquire like they can speak.

In addition, it's English Literature and Language in the same, so yes, about knowing partly a canon, but how how to interpret texts, both nonfictional and fictional and poetic.

> It just seems to me that the entire purpose of school is not clear.

I don't know how to explain to you why it's important to educate humanity.
by sakopov | 2025-12-14 00:26:58+00:00
About a decade ago I walked El Camino de Santiago. On the very last day I had to catch a bus from Santiago de Compostela to the local airport to get on the flight to Madrid and head back home. I remember standing with my backpack on some random street at 6AM not really knowing where the hell the bus stop is. A woman walked up to me and asked me something. I could see she seemed frustrated and couldn't really understand what she was saying. Then started telling her in my very non-existent Spanish that I'm trying to get to the airport. She immediately grabbed my hand and just dragged me through all of the traffic straight to the bus stop a couple of block away ignoring all traffic lights. Then showed me on her fingers how many minutes the bus will arrive and walked away. Forever grateful to this woman for helping me not miss my flight home. I've had a number of similar encounters with strangers while on this trail. Spaniards really appreciate anyone dedicating their time to be on the trail and a lot of them go out of their way to accommodate people either with a free stay, food, a ride to a grocery store and etc.
by krisoft | 2025-12-14 00:27:02+00:00
> He’s working with a company to develop nanosensors able to detect movement in the iceberg so he has advance warning of a flip

The "nanosensors" doesn't sound likely at all. If I were to tasked to create a "iceberg sudden flip detector" I would break the problem into two parts. Part 1 is monitoring the shape of the iceberg as it is changing. Part 2 is modelling how stable the iceberg is given the measured shape. Both sounds like a wicked hard problem even if you have a large team of engineers.

For the first maybe you could do periodic ultrasounds from the inside out. Embeding an array of accustic transducers and an array of microphones in the ice and then using signal processing black magic to pick out the shape of the echo you get back from the ice-ocean surface. Or just hang around with a ship mounted side scanning sonar and monitor the iceberg from the outside.

The second one should be a "simple" monte carlo simulation. But to validate it you would need data recorded from the evolution of many icebergs. Which I suspect would be expensive and lengthy to obtain.
by samastur | 2025-12-14 00:28:20+00:00
EU has been a neighbour of Russia since a very long time as Finland joined EU in 1995. Not being a neighbour hasn’t been an option in a very long time as there are now several countries bordering it. Beside EU is not a military alliance so why should it matter?

Russia has only ever expanded, but since you seem to be wrong just about everything no surprise there.
by smegger001 | 2025-12-14 00:28:58+00:00
realistically you can't ban computers for home work as you dont control the environment. and as for banning them for exams that may work for most of the humanities math chemistry and physic, but good luck trying to teach a computer science degree without computers, or graphic design, or any of a number of of programs that are reliant on them if you want student to be competent with standard tools of their trad which are on computers. audio engineering computer video editing computers
by Telaneo | 2025-12-14 00:29:26+00:00
I agree that that's its purpose, but the fact that there are many adults who are as bad at reading and writing as there are just goes to show how bad the classes are at actually teaching what they're trying to teach.

That said, maths aren't much different. Being bad at maths is a cultural marker of sorts, since many maths classes are very bad indeed at teaching much beyond basic addition and subtraction.
by tolerance | 2025-12-14 00:29:54+00:00
If you start a link blog with an RSS feed and an email or some way to comment I will subscribe and participate if it’s good enough.

Start here:

https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/6/what-to-blog-about/

https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/22/link-blog/

https://bearblog.dev
by sshine | 2025-12-14 00:30:21+00:00
> Rust has macros that make serde very convenient, which Gleam doesn't have.

To be fair, Rust's proc macros are only locally optimal:

While they're great to use, they're only okay to program.

Your proc-macro needs to live in another crate, and writing proc macros is difficult.

Compare this to dependently typed languages og Zig's comptime: It should be easier to make derive(Serialize, Deserialize) as compile-time features inside the host language.

When Gleam doesn't have Rust's derivation, it leaves for a future where this is solved even better.
Show HN: Interactive Common Lisp: An Enhanced REPL
by atgreen | 2025-12-14 00:31:02+00:00
I created this because sometimes I want more than rlwrap but less than emacs. icl aims to hit that middle sweet spot.

It's a terminal application with context-aware auto-complete, an interactive object inspector, auto-indentation, syntax colouring, persistent history, and much more. It uses sly to communicate with the child lisp process and aims to be compatible with any sly-supporting implementation. I hope others find it useful!
by hamburglar | 2025-12-14 00:31:52+00:00
All Waldorf schools aren’t created equal, but things I’ve seen are anti-vax beliefs, hard belief in mystical karmic stuff, a sort of groupthink that encourages conformity and obedience and shunning of people who question authority, and (and this one is really strange IMO) a prohibition on fantasy play among the children (eg you aren’t allowed to pretend you’re running a restaurant and your friends are guests —- for reasons of crackpottery).
by teleforce | 2025-12-14 00:31:54+00:00
This distributed logs nature of the exchanges is very much suitable for Kafka.

But for the required stringent latency, Kafka for head of line (HoL) blocking under concurrent events can be an issue though [1].

[1] What If We Could Rebuild Kafka from Scratch? (220 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43790420
by xpe | 2025-12-14 00:33:10+00:00
> A circle of competence is the subject area which matches a person's skills or expertise. The concept was developed by Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger as what they call a mental model, a codified form of business acumen, concerning the investment strategy of limiting one's financial investments in areas where an individual may have limited understanding or experience, while concentrating in areas where one has the greatest familiarity. -Wikipedia

> I try to temper my tendency to believe the Halo effect with Warren Buffett's notion of the Circle of Competence; there is often a very narrow domain where any person can be significantly knowledgeable. (commenter above)

Putting aside Buffett in particular, I'm wary of claims like "there is often a very narrow domain where any person can be significantly knowledgeable". How often? How narrow of a domain? Doesn't it depend on arbitrary definitions of what qualifies as a category? Is this a testable theory? Is it a predictive theory? What does empirical research and careful analysis show?

Putting that aside, there are useful mathematical ways to get an idea of some of the backing concepts without making assumptions about people, culture, education, etc. I'll cook one up now...

Start with 70K balls split evenly across seven colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. 1,000 show up demanding balls. So we mix them up and randomly distribute 10 balls to every person. What does the distribution tend to look like? What particulars would you tune and/or definitions would you choose to make this problem "sort of" map to something sort of like assessing the diversity of human competence across different areas?

Note the colored balls example assumes independence between colors (subjects or skills or something). But in real life, there are often causally significant links between skills. For example, general reasoning ability improves performance in a lot of other subjects.

Then a goat exploded, because I don't know how to end this comment gracefully.
by tekla | 2025-12-14 00:33:12+00:00
School is good for people who care to care. American students do pretty decently on international standard exams. It's that we have a culture of not giving a fuck, and thus we have adults who can't read something that is over a 6th grade level.

See this very website on people who complain that they can't digest a pretty straightforward article

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46008788
by esperent | 2025-12-14 00:33:52+00:00
I've had a thought in my mind recently. There's been a sudden push in Western countries towards "think-of-the-children" online age gating, and hence online verification tools, and any age verification tool that works can verify other things, like whether the user is a real person or not. The "that works" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, but we should assume that the politicians pushing for this at least believe it's possible.

Of course, any push for new legislation like this has many factions, and I'm sure there's a large faction who genuinely want better CSAM scanning tools, and another large faction who want to spy on and control what people can say online.

But those factions have always existed. Why is this push coming so strongly now in so many countries, and getting so much traction, when it previously failed?

Perhaps it's because politicians have recognized this existential threat. If they can't control what fake AI accounts say online to their real citizens, and the cost of running those fake accounts is trending down to the point where they'll vastly outnumber real people, then western civilization is lost. Democracy only works when there's a reasonable amount of signal in the noise. When it's basically all noise, and the noise is specifically created to destroy the system, the system is dead.

So perhaps there's another faction for whom this think-of-the-children stuff is a way to get verification normalized, and that's a way to get real humans verified online. This would not be accepted if it was done directly (or at least, politicians believe that people wouldn't accept it, and I tend to agree).

I personally react strongly again almost any kind of online control. But for the first time in my life, where we're no longer faced with troll centers that required real humans to work, but we're instead facing millions or billions of AI agents that are rapidly becoming indistinguishable from real humans, and are specifically designed to fight a hidden war against western civilization, I don't really see any other good option either.

Small forums with strong moderation like HN are great, but they don't scale. At best they'll be small enclaves of resistance, but most people will be using larger services that are overrun by fake accounts. And realistically, if we fast forward ten years where I can spin up a few thousand (or million) fake accounts for $1000, that are indistinguishable from real humans and tell them to target any small forum of my choice, I don't think any moderation team can survive that.
by mossTechnician | 2025-12-14 00:34:40+00:00
Windows virtual machines are much slower than bare hardware, especially for things GP mentioned like games. I have also found Linux lags behind in many areas that matter to me in functionality, performance (even compared to Windows 11) and general ease of use. Lots of people Linux or Chrome OS is sufficient for them, and that's great, but it's not enough for everybody.

In response to your initial question, I believe everything must be criticized, especially things we like. Internal criticism, such as criticism of Windows, is just as important as external competitors, such as Linux.
by Telaneo | 2025-12-14 00:34:59+00:00
> I wish schools didn’t force books onto children and make them think they hate reading for their whole lives.

It's a tough position to be in, although I'd imagine it could be remedied by having the kids pick whatever book they want. So they can read whatever they want, but they do have to actually read it. Form a learning/teaching point of view, this is probably ideal, but I'd imagine it's not really possible from a logistical point of view, since the teacher would likely have to familiarise themselves with as many books as they have pupils, which isn't viable unless the class is fairly small.
by enaaem | 2025-12-14 00:35:18+00:00
Hungarian population have been declining for decades [1]. Hungary has already lost 5% of their population since 2010. For comparison their neighbour the Czech Republic has been growing [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Hungary [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_Czech_Repu...
by Findecanor | 2025-12-14 00:36:41+00:00
I would say that it is the term "UX" that is the confusing part of "UX/UI".

By Don Norman's original definition [0], it is not merely another term for "UI" but specifically when you do have a wider scope and not working with a user interface specifically.

So, the term "UX/UI" would refer to being able to both work with the wider scope, and to go deeper to work with user interface design.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BdtGjoIN4E&t=10s
by jagrsw | 2025-12-14 00:37:49+00:00
The author has a knack for generating buzz (and making technically interesting inventions) :)

I'm a little concerned that no one (besides the author?) has checked the implementation to see if reducing the attack surface in one area (memory security) might cause problems in other layers.

For example, Filip mentioned that some setuid programs can be compiled with it, but it also makes changes to ld.so. I pointed this out to the author on Twitter, as it could be problematic. Setuid applications need to be written super-defensively because they can be affected by envars, file descriptors (e.g. there could be funny logical bugs if fd=1/2 is closed for a set-uid app, and then it opens something, and starts using printf(), think about it:), rlimits, and signals. The custom modifications to ld.so likely don't account for this yet?

In other words, these are still teething problems with Fil-C, which will be reviewed and fixed over time. I just want to point out that using it for real-world "infrastructures" might be somewhat risky at this point. We need unix nerds to experiment with.

OTOH, it's probably a good idea to test your codebase with it (provided it compiles, of course) - this phase could uncover some interesting problems (assuming there aren't too many false positives).
by lurk2 | 2025-12-14 00:37:55+00:00
> Why can't people test against that?

Most school districts do allow students to test out of classes and get placed at higher grade levels. The majority of people would never have tested above grade level. Your presence here means that you likely would have.

> The truth is that pedagogy and instruction is just a lazy way of providing childcare.

Providing every child with an education has been pedestrian in the developed world for less than a hundred years; it is far more expensive (and generally far more worthwhile) than mere childcare. The majority of people now living on earth never had the opportunities you and I had in school. This wasn’t because their caretakers didn’t love them, it’s because there was a dearth of resources available to educate them.
by novoreorx | 2025-12-14 00:37:56+00:00
Great answer! I was always confused about how CRDTs were transferred. Like you said, existing implementations often come with their own in-house networking solutions. Now it's totally clear, since CRDTs are only about data, it's no wonder their transfer methods differ. That makes Durable Stream a very good companion to work with CRDTs—the boundaries are clear, and they complement each other perfectly.

I also feel that I could give Durable Stream's protocol spec to a coding agent, and it could blend into the best suited implementation for my current project (say, a Go repo). The simple yet sophisticated spec is more valuable than a bunch of SDKs.
by q3k | 2025-12-14 00:37:58+00:00
It has a VM with 32GB RAM and 4x the cores for 1/10th of the price: 25eur/mo. Effectively even lower because it has 20TB of included traffic, and the overage cost for it is ~1/10th of the AWS egress cost.

Or, for 184eur/mo you can get one of their bare metal GPU offerings with 64GB of RAM, a i5-13500 and an RTX4000.
by preinheimer | 2025-12-14 00:38:19+00:00
I'm a co-founder at WonderProxy, we didn't make their list (we target people doing application testing, not consumer VPNs).

We're in 100+ countries, and I'll stand by that claim. It's a huge pain in the neck. In our early years we had a lot of problems with suppliers claiming to be in Mexico or South America who were actually just in Texas. I almost flew to Peru with a rackmount server in my luggage after weeks of problems, that plan died when we realized I'd need to figure out how to pay Peruvian income tax on the money I made in country before I could leave.

We've also had customers complaining that a given competitor had a country we'd had trouble sourcing in the Middle East. A little digging on our part and it's less than a ms away from our server in Germany.
by Telaneo | 2025-12-14 00:38:31+00:00
I can read analogue clocks only because I was taught in school, and prefer digital ones for all use cases I have myself (other than maybe decorative?), and even when I do read an analogue clock face, I convert that to digital time in my head before I can properly parse it, so I have a hard time blaming them. There aren't many analogue clock faces I need to read in my life, and there are probably even less in theirs. The last time I strictly needed to be able to read one was, funnily enough, teaching kids how to read one.
by gambiting | 2025-12-14 00:38:37+00:00
>>Most people do not hand write anything more than a short note in 2025

Is this like....a personal feeling? Or something with actual data behind it? But even if so - why does it matter? If you write short notes, do you not write them in cursive?

>>Of course to be pedantic, modern pens are machines too.

That's beyond pedantic, I struggle to imagine that anyone other than the a professional linguist would call a ball pen a machine.
by cogman10 | 2025-12-14 00:40:31+00:00
> Do you just write in block capitals?

Block capitals? no. It's print. With upper and lowercase letters.

I rarely handwrite now. The last time I really did was in college.

> But....It still is? Without using some kind of machine of course.

But of course this is HN where most people are technical. We all have some sort of machine at our disposal otherwise we'd not be writing back and forth to one another.