MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kruffalon | 2025-12-12 10:01:26+00:00
I really think this is it.

And I suspect that in general more people (and sub cultures) in the US will start using more non-committal language in the coming decades. When repression grows harder it might become more important to not be noticed.

It would be interesing to know if the regional differences in the US that people are talking about here could be traced back to those places having a more homogeneous population with regards to hierarchical religious practices, country of origin, single-ish way to make a living or similar so that it is very important to not be cast out of the group.

Another perspective is also how this phenomenon relates to what I think is called "code switching" that individual persons from oppressed groups often use in contact with an individual from the oppressing group in daily life. Like how BIPOC interact with white people, women with men or young people with adults - where a not insignificant part of the interaction is about keeping the oppressive party calm and content.

----

English is not my language and I'd like to learn better. Please help me by correcting spelling, expressions and idioms.
by seszett | 2025-12-12 10:01:57+00:00
> any nutcase in the US with access to a shotgun

It's actually not easy to shoot down a drone with a gun if it takes any measure to evade interception. It's not like shooting ducks taking off from a lake.

That said, last week the French navy did shoot at drones around the Île Longue nuclear submarine base, but as far as I understand just one drone came within close enough range to be targeted by radio jammers (which means maybe a few hundred meters at sea) and either it went away on its own or sunk but it apparently wasn't retrieved. It's very unlikely they could shoot it down with conventional firearms.
by KellyCriterion | 2025-12-12 10:02:05+00:00
Ive not seen any model being good in graphic/svg creation so far - all of the stuff mostly looks ugly and somewhat "synthetic-disorted".

And lately, Claude (web) started to draw ascii charts from one day to another indstead of colorful infographicstyled-images as it did before (they were only slightly better than the ascii charts)
Show HN: A simple web app to memorise Hiragana
by bryanhogan | 2025-12-12 10:02:06+00:00
I made this web app because I wanted to learn Hiragana myself. I have used Anki a lot for language learning, but there are some things I dislike with it. I wanted a more gradual introduction of new characters. To be able to focus and get into a flow state more easily. No Spaced Repitition algorithm, instead memorise them as quickly as possible, to then be able to use them, the best way to remember things.

Instead of a binary pass/fail, every character goes through a 4-stage "session funnel" in a single sitting:

1. Matching: Simple pair matching to introduce characters and sounds.

2. Recognition: See Hiragana → Select Romaji.

3. Listening: Hear Audio → Select Hiragana

4. Writing: Hear Audio → Type the character

It's built using Svelte. A SvelteKit project but with a static build, plan is to use Capacitor to make Android and iOS versions of it.

Let me know what you think :)
by fauigerzigerk | 2025-12-12 10:02:30+00:00
I agree, but the question is how better grounding can be achieved without a major research breakthrough.

I believe the real issue is that LLMs are still so bad at reasoning. In my experience, the worst hallucinations occur where only handful of sources exist for some set of facts (e.g laws of small countries or descriptions of niche products).

LLMs know these sources and they refer to them but they are interpreting them incorrectly. They are incapable of focusing on the semantics of one specific page because they get "distracted" by their pattern matching nature.

Now people will say that this is unavoidable given the way in which transformers work. And this is true.

But shouldn't it be possible to include some measure of data sparsity in the training so that models know when they don't know enough? That would enable them to boost the weight of the context (including sources they find through inference time search/RAG) relative to to their pretraining.
by Protostome | 2025-12-12 10:02:33+00:00
Authoritarian regimes don’t act aggressively because they’re provoked; they act aggressively because projecting power and testing limits is part of how they survive internally. History is full of cases where no meaningful provocation existed at all.

Nazi Germany didn’t need Allied ships near its coast to invade Poland. Saddam Hussein didn’t need US aircraft nearby to invade Kuwait. Argentina didn’t need British naval pressure to seize the Falklands. Russia didn’t need NATO forces near Kyiv to annex Crimea in 2014 or launch a full invasion in 2022.

Tyrannies tend to frame any foreign presence as “provocation” after the fact, because it’s politically useful at home. Liberal democracies publish their movements precisely because they operate under scrutiny; authoritarian states act first and justify later.

Proximity makes for a convenient narrative, not a causal explanation.
by keepamovin | 2025-12-12 10:03:56+00:00
Intresting. I'm not saying (to pick some well-known execs/founders/leaders at random) Jobs, Musk, Zuck, Bezos, Huang, Trump, Xi are "high functioning sociopaths" but Jobs and Bezos both had missing biological fathers. Musk had a violent one. Zuck, not sure - but something seems weird with the dad, it's never spoken of tho. Huang was raised without parents present (only communicating via casette tape shipped on boat - wow!), living overseas from age 9, in a violent type of environment. Trump's dad was a disciplinarian tough on his brother, but Trump found ways to stand up to him. Xi's father was purged/rehabilitated by the Communists and they had to live in caves, farming dust and being bitten by lice, etc for years. I don't know any of them personally and I'm not speaking to their actual stories, as I don't know.

All this tho -- can the mother have no impact? I don't think so. Children are raised by their mothers. Why put the blame on dads, if solely? Seems not fair. A bifurcation in blame in society that can only cause a fracture that leads to greater wrongs later.

Also, while such questions are intriguing -- much of this talk of what's wrong with the internet, points the blame at a few rich people. This seems misguided, and misses the point that the internet is largely "us" - all of us. If we are doing something "wrong" but deflect, we're never going to get better. Even if some bad people are trying to push buttons, we're the ones that have to take responsibility for how we act and to do good.

When I'm chatting online, I'm sure as hell not talking with Bezos - he can't text that much, least of all in the hot-tub. I'm talking with some random. And we each have to take resopnsibility for our behavior. If the rando I'm talking with says, "Why am I bad? Because Jeff Bezos made me this way." It sounds totally ridiculous. And it is, of course. I think the hijacking of a question about "why is the internet negative sometimes" into a 2-minutes-hate on rich-elite is the wrong approach to solutions and understanding.
by notarobot123 | 2025-12-12 10:04:47+00:00
There seems to be a tipping point when a language ecosystem's work is mainly about design to it being mainly about broader governance issues. Good design needs a grand vision. Good governance needs broad participation.

I wonder if @rtfeldman has some thoughts on what milestones might mark the need for a transition. I also wonder if the experience of the Elm community has taught him any lessons here.
by aebtebeten | 2025-12-12 10:05:16+00:00
4.3

> Regarding the state, armed groups typically seek to violently disrupt and prevent the state from fulfilling core functions, such as protecting the population and delivering essential services. This not only erodes state presence, but also undermines perceptions of state legitimacy and sends a message to the civilian population about the costs of supporting the state.

Even in (some) industrialised first-world countries there are political groups which seek to prevent the state from fulfilling core functions, such as protecting the population and delivering essential services.
by inglor_cz | 2025-12-12 10:05:34+00:00
At the risk of sounding crazy, I de-indexed my blog myself and rely on the mailing list (which is now approaching 5000 subscribers) + reprints in several other online media to get traffic to me. On a good day, I get 5000 hits, which is quite a lot by Czech language community standards.

Together with deleting my Facebook and Twitter accounts, this removed a lot of pressure to conform to their unclear policies. Especially around 2019-21, it was completely unclear how to escape their digital guillotine which seemed to hit various people randomly.

The deliverability problem still stands, though. You cannot be completely independent nowadays. Fortunately my domain is 9 years old.
by latexr | 2025-12-12 10:06:10+00:00
> that looks exactly like the ones I was used to growing up

Unless you’re so young you just finished growing up, I find that unlikely. Sure, this ad isn’t visually revolutionary by today’s standards (nor does it need to be; it’s an ad, it’s not being played in theatres before the next Disney movie), but it’s still competent and has a ton of detail which surpasses earlier Pixar pictures.
by skydhash | 2025-12-12 10:06:24+00:00
>> So, assuming the domain of infrastructure-at-code is mostly known now which is a fair statement -- which is a better choice, Go or Rust, and why?

This was the question. And my answer was that Go or Rust have no relevancy in the IaC domain. Ansible is relevant, but Python is not. Chef is relevant, Ruby is not. And I’m pretty sure there are in-house stuff that are just Perl scripts.

The goal is solving some problem in IaC, by the time, you are considering language choice, you’ve already left the domain and are looking at implementation problems where each choice is balancing tradeoffs.
by tacker2000 | 2025-12-12 10:08:00+00:00
I am also in love with Inertia, it lets you use a React frontend and a Laravel backend without a dedicated API or endpoints, its so much faster to develop and iterate, and you dont need to change your approach or mental model, it just makes total sense.

Instead of creating routes and using fetch() you just pass the data directly to the client side react jsx template, inertia automatically injects the needed data as json into the client page.
by dlubarov | 2025-12-12 10:08:15+00:00
ICRC is not really claiming that those examples are indiscriminate, they're giving examples of weapons that might arguably or sometimes be considered indiscriminate.

Some booby traps might fall into that category, but this isn't a toy or a banana, it's a device specifically issued to enemy personnel.

There can be separate textualist arguments about Israel's operation based on the specific language of CCW, but that's unrelated to the customary IHL you linked to.
by Smaug123 | 2025-12-12 10:08:16+00:00
It's not the same. Recently Opus 4.5 diagnosed and fixed a bug in the F# compiler for me, for example (https://github.com/dotnet/fsharp/pull/19123). The root cause is pretty subtle and very non-obvious, and of course the critical snippet of the stack trace `at FSharp.Compiler.Symbols.FSharpExprConvert.GetWitnessArgs` has no hits on Google other than my own bug report. I would have been completely lost fixing it.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-12-12 10:08:17+00:00
Context. That wasn't the original question. That's a short restatement of the real question which is up in an earlier post:

>> Such questions may be decided by personal preferences, but their impact can easily be demonstrated.

> I really don't think this is true. What was the demonstrated impact of writing Terraform in Go rather than Rust? Would writing Terraform in Rust have resulted in a better product? Would rewriting it now result in a better product? Even among engineers with 15 years experience you're going to get differing answers on this.
by tejtm | 2025-12-12 10:08:33+00:00
This coming year ... if the crik don't rise (as it does with some regularity). Some of you may be able to take a picture of yourself with one of Ril ter Horst lenses as it will be launched in a 2U cubesat named OreSat1 by Oregon's Portland State University undergrads.

https://www.oresat.org/home

pictures would be captured by hand held groundstations

https://www.oresat.org/technologies/ground-stations
by xg15 | 2025-12-12 10:08:49+00:00
> “However, we notice – based on the social comments and international media coverage – that for many guests this period is ‘the most wonderful time of the year’.”

How to make your corporate response sound even more AI than the actual AI...

> "And here’s the part people don’t see: the hours that went into this job far exceeded a traditional shoot. Ten people, five weeks, full-time.”

If it didn't even save time, then what was the point?
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-12-12 10:09:13+00:00
There is a generic flaw in humanity that controversy brings popularity. The result is that if you take the core of something popular (e.g. the political beliefs of half the population) and then sprinkle some rage bait on top of it, you'll have an audience. This is the business model for the likes of Tate.

The problem is, it's also an asymmetric weapon when you try to ban that unevenly. If you censor Tate but not the likes of Kendi who use the same tricks, you're saying that it's fine for one side to play dirty but not the other, and that's how you get people mad. Which plays right into the hands of the demagogues.

So all you have to do is achieve perfect balance and censor only the bad things from both sides, right? Except that that's one of the things humans are incapable of actually doing, because of the intensely powerful incentive to censor the things you don't like more than the things you do, if anyone holds that power.

Which is why we have free speech. Because it's better to let every idiot flap their trap than to let anyone else decide who can't. And if you don't like what someone is saying, maybe try refuting it with arguments instead of trying to silence them.
by latexr | 2025-12-12 10:09:44+00:00
> There seems to be this pressure to either go fully vegetarian or it doesn't count, which is obviously total nonsense.

Hard agree. It’s counterproductive to have that view, even, and it’s why many people give up on vegetarianism (“I wasn’t able to go all in cold turkey, so it isn’t for me and I’ll revert completely”).
by kruffalon | 2025-12-12 10:10:15+00:00
True, but on the other hand they always give themselves away so it's very easy to spot and adjust expectations.

I found this article and discussion valuable anyway.

I would also encourage you to stop using "Americans" as synonymous to "US:er", there are many countries, cultures and peoples in the American continents that are not from the USA and quite a few that geographically exist within it too.

By pointing out that they are US:ers we can help each other to remind ourselves and them that they are not in fact the only version of human that exist.
by Agraillo | 2025-12-12 10:10:29+00:00
I'd say that html+js suggestion of GP still holds, but with caveats. After all these years, HTML has everything needed for this, including images that can be embedded via the data URI scheme [1].

For example, I once adjusted an Object Pascal interactive program (target: Windows/Win32) for the browser target (FreePascal compiler has the JS target). An intermediate result was a bunch of files that worked locally on desktop but struggled on mobile. With a little help from the SingleFile extension [2], I ended up with a single HTML file containing all functionality and content. It worked great, for example, in MiXplorer's internal HTML viewer. I can't recall the exact details, but the file:/// protocol still had issues in Chrome, Firefox, or both. Anyway, preparing a local address correctly with a keyboard is a challenge so let's just assume that having capable file managers running local html files is enough

Sure, to make this manageable, you need good tools that handle all sides of the task. But at least in theory, the format is fully capable. My only global issue was that the state for locally run HTML files is a kind of ephemeral entity, but for interactive multimedia files, you may consider this obstacle small.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_URI_scheme

[2] https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile
by PurpleRamen | 2025-12-12 10:12:16+00:00
> I've been noticing lately, at least for myself, that useful technology stopped happening like 10-20 years ago. If all you could use was tech from 2000 and before you would have a pretty stable stack that just worked

That's a very romanticized view. 2000s tech is of course not useless, it was a good plateau of quality and diversity of abilities, very foundational if you want to phrase it that way. But we've seen many evolutions and smaller revolutions since then, many improvements which are making everything significant better, easier, faster.

> textfiles, makefiles, perl, php, rss, text based email, news groups, irc, icq, vim/emacs, sed, awk; all better than the crap they have spawned that is supposed to be "better".

That's a very small, focused selection of technologies. Most of them are nearly dead or have evolved several steps since then for a reason.

> Out of curiosity, what technology in the past 5 years do you use that you actually find better than something from 20 years ago?

The liberty of the whole Webstack today is already very awesome. It allows building personalized complex applications on a high level with very little effort. Not to forgotten all the apps which are allowing Add-ons now. Firefox, VS Code or Obsidian today are blowing everything away we had 25 years in terms of ability and customizability for most people, and yes, that includes Emacs even today. I know tech-people often don't understand this, but interfaces and simplicity matters for a lot of cases and people.

But if we are talking about my personal favourites, it would be apps like rofi, fzf and tilling-WMs like AwesomeWM and QTile. The amount of benefit I get from a simple fuzzy-selector and a simple shell- or python-script is insane. I don't think that was available in 2000. Similar topic would be Unicode and icon-fonts. Very small scalled improvements, but very deep benefit for everyone not living in the US-bubble. Language-situation in 2000 was awful.

Sqlite and permanently evolving Postgres are also great benefits. Python3 is very awesome, Rust and Go are really beneficial in terms of speed and security. Comparing all this with the security-nightmares of the 2000s is insane. Though, to be fair, security 25 years ago wasn't as bad as 20 or 15 years ago IIRC, because it was still escalating at the time.

And let's not talk about genre-software...I'm pretty sure even trash like Adobes products have today more useful abilities than they had 25 years ago, it's just the other situation which has become worse. But then again, we have now many more good software like Gimp, Blender, who knows what (I'm not in creative software)...
by dtj1123 | 2025-12-12 10:12:21+00:00
Sincere question: Can someone explain how you develop the skills and knowledge required to pull this off?

I'm no genius, but I'm reasonably sure I'm not a slouch either. I've got a masters in theoretical physics, I've worked with and written software for four years, I take an interest in anything techy I come across. I've picked up the basics of population genomics and molecular genetics without assistance.

I still find that projects like this are essentially black magic to me. Why are supercapacitors necessary to emulate a battery? How the hell does someone know how to mess with a bootloader in order to get past an internal partition corruption? How do you even tell if an internal partition is corrupted?

This is all stuff that I find massively impressive and enviable, but unlike essentially every other topic I've turned my attention to, there doesn't seem to be any readily identifiable path to mastery.
by random9749832 | 2025-12-12 10:13:31+00:00
It is worse than you think. The country is on its knees. I go outside and no one looks happy and no one is shopping or eating out unless it is McDonalds or Lidl. No one is working, children are calling sick for school and everyone is wondering how the hell so many random people suddenly got in. The next few decades will be a story of decline.

Economy: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwyp7v7r28yo

Youth unemployment: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/12/11/britains-you...

Health care: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/dec/11/nhs-bracing-...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crrkervnxvqo
by jesterswilde | 2025-12-12 10:15:23+00:00
In it, the author contrasts 无 (Wú) and 有 (Yǒu). For some extra context of that specific contrast, here are a couple excerpts from the first poem of the Dao De Jing. (spacing is mine)

无 名天地之始

有 名万物之母

---

故 常无欲，以观其妙

... 常有欲，以观其徼。

---

The duality of 'with' and 'without', existence / non-existence is central and embodied heavily by those 2 words.

I am (slowly) trying to learn Chinese by reading the Dao, or possibly the other way around. I ran across this site (which I have 0 affiliation with) but it seems to be a small and unique site made by someone who just wanted it to exist, which very HN: https://dao-de-jing.com/
by flohofwoe | 2025-12-12 10:15:58+00:00
Eh, no matter what is done about the drones there would be people who complain about 'fear- and war-mongering', and most likely it would be the exact same people who now complain that the government is 'letting this happen' ;)

Imagine the German military would shoot those drones down over Germany, the self-proclaimed 'pacifists' would be all about 'escalation', 'war-mongering' and 'militarization'. There are clear and very restrictive rules what the military and police are allowed and not allowed to do in cilivized countries, and those restrictions are in general a good thing and shouldn't be changed on a whim.
by tialaramex | 2025-12-12 10:16:40+00:00
So, although it's difficult to generalize because exactly where the line is drawn varies from one vegan to another, it's generally not enough that the animal wasn't directly harmed.

For example the honey bees make honey for a reason, just as apple trees make apples for a reason and maple trees make a sugary sap for a reason. "So that humans can eat it" isn't the reason in either case. The apples and maple syrup are categorised differently by vegans because the trees aren't animals. That's still an arbitrary line, but so are most things.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-12-12 10:16:49+00:00
It's not even that. It's that "centralization is more efficient" is a big fat lie. If you look at the "centralized systems" they're... not actually technologically centralized, they're really just a monopolist that internally implements a distributed system.

How do you think Google or Cloudflare actually work? One big server in San Francisco that runs the whole world, or lots of servers distributed all over?
by frm88 | 2025-12-12 10:18:29+00:00
Because starting from the 1980's corporate organisation was focused on managing resources, of which humans were a part that had to be dehumanized to fit with the rest of the theory. There was a brief phase where it was called HCM - human capital management, but that never caught on widely; so HRM it is with a focus on managing as opposed to organising and supporting. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/evolution-hr-terminology-why-...
by iankp | 2025-12-12 10:20:06+00:00
I'm not sure arguing in favor of alphabet soup naming is any better. At least we ended up with semantic versioning, because originally it had also been just an expression of marketing and creativity. I don't understand even slightly why he blames Google in the article. He also forgot to propose what he believes Google should have been named. Search Engine? AWCSS? And the fact that he'd be fine with Viper and Cobra if they had backronyms points to the ridiculousness of the whole article. I'm genuinely most fascinated by how he accomplished writing that much text without the nonsense of his position dawning on him.