MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by baq | 2025-12-15 16:19:43+00:00
capitalism is kinda-sorta weaponized greed, but in a way that tries to promote competition and thus create actual value. IMHO blaming regulators for not nudging capital in the politically desirable way is appropriate: either they shouldn't be regulating because they don't know how, or they're regulating according to a hidden policy instead of whatever they say. (cue 'why not both'.)
by ig0r0 | 2025-12-15 16:19:49+00:00
I’m working on Yomu, an iOS app for reading Japanese text with adjustable furigana.

I’m learning Japanese myself (recently took JLPT N4), and I noticed that full furigana makes me rely on readings instead of actually reading kanji. Yomu lets you hide furigana for kanji up to your level and keep it for harder ones.

It’s offline-first, supports importing text from anywhere, camera OCR, and a fast dictionary.

https://yomuapp.kulman.sk
by kamaal | 2025-12-15 16:19:53+00:00
I was casually chatting with my uncle who is a doctor, he says something along the lines that if a chemical can kill a rat or a mosquito, to assume it won't do any damage to humans is kind of hilarious.

Of course humans who inhale this thing in small quantities won't die, but you can be sure they will kill some tissues that they go into. Now comes another problem of regular exposure, and these chemicals having an entry, but no exit path. That just means there are tissues, that are likely dying out every time there is a exposure.

Again none of this might kill you at the first exposure, but if there are enough dead tissues, there sure is likely to be things like Parkinson's or may be even diabetes.

Im guessing combined with this, if you already some bad genetics it could cause issues like these.
by gortok | 2025-12-15 16:20:17+00:00
One thing to point out that is lost in these arguments of “they create value for the shareholders”.

Folks that own a vast amount of stock do not pay taxes on that stock. They own the shares, and they take out loans against those shares. At some point they rollover or pay off those loans by selling some shares, but the shares have increased in value significantly in that time, or they’ve been granted new shares.

When we say “<business> has created value for shareholders”, it’s said in a way that implies that somehow that wealth creation makes its way into the tax system by virtue of the fact the wealth was ‘created’. It does not.
by assemblyman | 2025-12-15 16:20:20+00:00
I came to the US for college from Asia to study physics (and mathematics). I actually came to study astronomy because I found it fascinating but didn't really like physics or math. My first physics encounter in college here transformed my life. There was no memorization. Instead, we had short quizzes in each class (first 5 min), weekly individual assignments, weekly group assignments (two students each), four "midterms" where one could get densely written "cheat-sheets" as well as weekly physics lab that often went on far beyond the time slot.

In high school, physics was mostly based on memorization. There were a few problems but all based on some patterns. None made you think extremely hard.

I also found that many American students (who were extremely good in my experience) seemed to have a much better practical sense.

One of the key steps in the development of a physicist is the transition from solving textbook problems to creating your own problems. In essence, the skill one learns in graduate school is defining/crafting problems that are solvable and interesting. The primordial phase starts in college as one is solving many problems. Initially, the new problems are straightforward extensions of existing ones (e.g. add an air resistance term for parabolic motion). Eventually, one (hopefully) develops good taste and essentially is doing research.

Interestingly, I also find very different attitudes to physics in the west (at least in the US) and other parts of the world. In US universities, physics is still seen in glowing terms. In many other places, physics is what you study if you couldn't do engineering. Young people (well, all people) are impressionable and this subtle bias affects what kind of students end up studying the subject.
by sejje | 2025-12-15 16:20:31+00:00
Parker's Automotive is a pretty cool youtube channel, guy goes around in his truck and mostly does work for free. Seems like every day he's finding someone stopped in a lane.

I think he's been able to parlay it into an awesome youtube career, and the amount of people who stop on the street to sing his praises is unreal. Sometimes 15+ in one video, it's nuts. He's a hero to the people. Love to see it.
by Nasrudith | 2025-12-15 16:20:41+00:00
That is the opposite of a problem - it emerges because we have tools that make things more efficient than just throwing toiling bodies at it. We had economies which were based upon it, it was called slavery. Capital compounding its gains through better capital is how we get progress. The presense or absense of the capital advantage is part of what separates third world wages from first world.

The industrial era problem isn't capital but that economies of scale encourage consolidation heavily and make running small business an even more uphill battle. There is at least a counterbalancing force of competitive pressure and antitrust to promote some splitting for innovation's sake as opposed to just one big stagnant monopoly winning out just because it is biggest.
by rpcope1 | 2025-12-15 16:21:04+00:00
> Obviously this is a use-case for NFC or a variety of other technologies but for some reason I've seen the iButton-based systems used in a half dozen buildings.

If I had to guess, it's probably because another Dallas Semi product, 1Wire, already gets used a lot for things like facilities, and so far as I can tell iButton seems to integrate OK into that whole ecosystem.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-15 16:21:08+00:00
> Most fast-food chains went to vegetable oils

This is the legitimate end of the spectrum. The science that drove tallow out of kitchens and homes was incomplete, particularly when it was replaced with trans fats.

Where it goes off the rails is when nutters conclude that because tallow was wronged in one context, it is wronged in all of them, which leads to folks rubbing tallow on their faces [1]. (It's probably harmless. I've used it as a foot cream because I got samples at my farmers' market.)

[1] https://www.prevention.com/beauty/skin-care/a63833046/beef-t...
by palmotea | 2025-12-15 16:21:22+00:00
> The problem is that in most cases businesses can afford you, but they choose to be "unable to".

Exactly, some businesses even do stuff like this:

> https://www.nytimes.com/shared/comment/4cfau7?rsrc=cshare&sm...

> How do the wealthy get so wealthy? Mostly by some form of cheating. One way that's relevant to one current case is depicted in Philip Roth's 2004 novel 'The Plot Against America':

> "Every subcontractor when he comes into the office on Friday to collect money for the lumber, the glass, the brick, Abe says, 'Look, we're out of money, this is the best I can do,' and he pays them a half, a third -- if he can get away with it, a quarter -- and these people need the money to survive, but this is the method that Abe learned from his father. He's doing so much building that he gets away with it..."
by tastyfreeze | 2025-12-15 16:21:43+00:00
I live near a sub listening station. Schools tour the base. Their hydrophones are built on site in long oil filled tubes. They can hang these from the listening barges or lay them on the bottom. Hydrophone arrays can be paired with anchors attached to a sound triggered buoy. The buoy sinks with the anchor and will be released when it gets the right signal. With this setup the Navy can lay down semi-permanent arrays without a surface buoy.
by watwut | 2025-12-15 16:21:48+00:00
There is no real way for teacher to check whether I read the book or not. People who read books regularly fail trivia tests and people who did not read them can quick read "about the book" analysis off web and call it a day.

And crutially, my inclination to finish assigned book and my willingness to read books in general are unrelated. A kid that reads a lot wont neceasary enjoy and finish assigned books - I know I skipped quite a lot of them.
by goku12 | 2025-12-15 16:21:57+00:00
> 1. The civilian planes fly on pre published routes and communicate with air traffic controllers in plain text

That's called a flight plan. It's just a declaration of intent, so that the ATCs know that you're expected. There are many valid reasons for deviating from the flight plan. For example, technical difficulties, bad weather, last minute diversions etc. That makes it very unreliable to predict the aircraft's location. You have to rely on your radar instead. The Military has some of the best radars around - especially on AEW&CS aircrafts and ships that stay close to conflict zones at all times.

> 1. I understand that there may be reasons why military planes might want to fly undetected but given they know where the civilian planes are and where they are flying, it should be trivial for the military ships and planes to avoid those areas.

Did you know that the Ronald Reagan Intl airport (DCA) saw one 'close call' between a civilian airliner and a military helicopter every month for the 13 year period from 2011 to 2024? [1]. That's close to 150 near disasters in total, for consecutive months for more than a decade! This is ridiculous!

Clearly, it's not a question if they can stay clear to avoid an incident. It's a question of if anyone cares at all.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2025/03/11/nx-s1-5324543/ntsb-dca-mid-ai...
by mike_hearn | 2025-12-15 16:22:01+00:00
The idea Switzerland's economy is dodgy or dependent on banking is an urban legend. Only 10% of Swiss GDP comes from finance at all and that includes everything, including insurance and pensions. Private banking is only a fraction of that, and private banking with anonymous accounts - which is what people tend to mean by this - was a tiny fraction of that again.

Meanwhile, financial privacy isn't inherently questionable. The USA did a big push in the 1970s to strip privacy from the financial system which until that point had been the default. That was the birth of the concept of money laundering, created as part of the war on drugs. The approach failed as drug cartels found ways to launder money cheaply enough that it wasn't a big friction for them (normal estimate, it adds ~10% to their costs). Not everyone thought that was a great tradeoff, and the Swiss numbered accounts had been used by people trying to hide from the Nazis.

At any rate, the USA forced their concept of anti-money laundering on the world (not that most countries needed the arm twisting) and Switzerland has implemented exactly the same policies as everywhere else for decades. It has no special rules with respect to banking for a long time now.

> Your three step plan says nothing about how much should be taxed at the personal vs corporate income level

It's a set of principles for answering those questions, not the full set of answers.

It's been years since I looked at this but IIRC the general agreement is that you shouldn't bother with corporate/business taxes, because they're both an indirect/inefficient way to collect tax (all taxes are paid by people in the end), and easily avoided.

It was for this reason that the designers of the EU's taxation system originally configured corporate taxation to be collected wherever the nameplate was (i.e. an arbitrary location chosen by the company). The assumption was that with time individual countries would compete the corporate tax rate to zero, fixing the underlying inefficiencies. Of course what's actually happened is some of the countries try to gang up on the others to try and force them to stop lowering taxes. It's not a stable outcome, politically.

In practice business taxes are popular because politicians view them as a way to tax citizens of foreign countries. That has bad effects too but schools either don't teach economics or don't teach it properly in most places, so there are lots of weird hacks like this where something that creates more harm than the alternative gets preferred because people can't resolve the harm to the root cause.
by 3D30497420 | 2025-12-15 16:22:10+00:00
I believe the EU tends to follow a precautionary principle, namely a substance generally must be shown to be safe before it’s approved. In contrast, the US follows a risk-based approach where a substance can often be used unless it’s shown to be harmful. So it isn't really that many "safe" things in the EU are banned, rather they have not been approved. Pretty sure this is specific to food additives, though may apply to other areas.
by mooreds | 2025-12-15 16:22:52+00:00
> people don’t want to admit that it is a way to senior-free future

Can you tell me more? Everything I've read indicates it affects juniors/new devs more. Is that what you mean by a 'senior-free' future? One in which there are no seniors in 10-20 years because there are no juniors now?

Or something else?
by mitthrowaway2 | 2025-12-15 16:23:12+00:00
It really depends. Where I live there is a large Chinese expat community, including many democracy activists from Hong Kong, Falun Gong practitioners, anti-CCP critics, and other expats who left China out of fear of persecution. They do have legitimate reasons to worry about the Chinese government tracking them down[1], and now they have to worry about whether their friends who invite them over for tea have a Roomba at home.

But if you live in an area with little exposure to these communities, I doubt the Chinese government would care about your private information.

But no matter who I am I certainly wouldn't want North Korea to have my private information, because they'd have no qualms about finding ways to use it to empty my bank account.

[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/chinese-spy-speaks-out-enquete...
by somenameforme | 2025-12-15 16:23:36+00:00
What makes you think this would not have been the case in other engineering disciplines?

I'm also a CS guy so I can't directly challenge this on the whole, but my experiences in some classes outside of this in other domains didn't feel like they were 'comfortably' paced at all. Without extensive out-of-class work I'd have been completely lost in no time. In fact one electrical engineering course I took was ironically considered a weed out course, for computer science, as it was required, and was probably the most brutal (and amazing) class I've ever taken in my life.
by ryandrake | 2025-12-15 16:23:59+00:00
I don't like this kind of surveillance any more than anyone else on HN, but we get this here all the time. People make these posts that X leads to Y and jump way over the details. Sometimes X does lead to Y. Other times, it's the Underpants Gnomes: There's a big "???" step between X and Y that people don't like to take the time to articulate. This is how conspiracy theories take hold--you ignore the ??? and just assume "Of course X leads to Y! We all know it!"

HN should be above that. When we make a claim that X leads to Y we should be ready to show how X leads to X1, which leads to X2, which leads to X3, which leads to Y.

Almost all articles in the press about data collection and privacy are very poor and only focus on what data gets collected, not how it's used, nor how the circle completes and it comes back to harm the source of that data. To its credit, your second link at least lists a single vague example of how it's used, "data can be misused in ways such as fraudulent insurance claims or fake medical histories" but nothing about how that results in harm to the end user. We should expect better from reporters.

We should expect better from HN though, too. Let's not make conspiratorial claims here. I'm going to call them out, even though I am an opponent of this kind of data collection, too.
by mc32 | 2025-12-15 16:24:18+00:00
No, "AI" is part of progress like other force multipliers. For the Hoover dam, the government hired thousands of people. Today you would have hundreds. What enables that is machinery. Do we want to go back to manual labor? What about paralegals? Hundreds of people reading thousands of paper documents. Or a few paralegals and lawyers reviewing AI output and following up manually to confirm?

What people seem to be against is progress, or at least the rate of progress. We certainly should stop and think and assess the repercussions of the rate of progress and the response we should have were it to threaten to destabilize society. I don't think we should say, oh, A.I., this is where I will fight. We need to be rational and assess the consequences and find rational answers to ensure social stability (we don't want famine or Hoovervilles).
by moron4hire | 2025-12-15 16:24:31+00:00
I think people focused too much on the speed too early on, which put them in a stall condition without any feedback they were stalling. For most of the run, you want to be losing altitude so you don't notice, but near the end you're probably too low with not enough speed to climb, so even though you're pulling up, you're still losing altitude, and that's where people got the idea that their inputs didn't "matter."
by 47282847 | 2025-12-15 16:24:41+00:00
I agree with your analysis but try to not agree with your conclusion, purely for my own metal hygiene: I believe one can retrain the pattern matching of one’s brain for happier outcomes. If I let my brain judge this as a “failure“ (judgment “it is wrong“), I will either get sad about it (judgment “… and I can’t change it“) or angry (… and I can do something about it“). In cases such as this I prefer to accept it as is, so I try to rewrite my brain rule to consider it a necessary part of life (judgment “true/good/correct“).
LLM guidelines, do you have the same pblm
by francoispiquard | 2025-12-15 16:24:42+00:00
Hey folks,

Nothing built yet, but I was wondering if you’ve also run into the problem of keeping strong, opinionated guidelines when working with LLMs.

I’m thinking about an open-source solution to help teams define and share high-level project guidelines (PEP8, architectural rules, naming conventions, product principles, tone of voice, etc.) in a way that’s actually usable by LLMs.

The idea would be simple:

- a few clicks to configure your guidelines.

- you get a public URL with LLM-readable content and a YAML file you can download and plug directly into Cursor/Copilot/Google Cli/other tools

The goal is that teams can have shared, explicit, opinionated guidelines that stay consistent across prompts, editors, and contributors. without copy-pasting the same instructions everywhere or relying on tribal knowledge.

Think:

- onboarding new devs faster.

- less “LLM drift” over time.

- clearer defaults for AI-assisted code and writing

- guidelines that live next to the project and evolve with it.

So, very early idea, but curious: - does this resonate with problems you’re seeing? - what kind of rules or constraints would you actually want to encode? - anything like this you’ve tried before (and why it didn’t stick)?

Happy to hear thoughts or pushback.
by rpcope1 | 2025-12-15 16:24:48+00:00
It seems like it's rare to find M.2 with the sort of things you'd want in a NAS like PLP, reasonably high DWPD, good controllers, etc. and you've also got to contend with the problem of managing heat in a way I had never seen with 2.5 or 3.5 drives. I would imagine the sort of people doing NVMe for NAS/SAN/servers are all probably using U.2 or U.3 (I know I do).
by throwup238 | 2025-12-15 16:25:02+00:00
> How much depends on the local facilities and how they handle it?

None of it. With a few exceptions, non-metals take significantly more energy to recycle than to make from scratch and the end result is lower quality than the recycled material. Since that energy usually comes from fossil fuels, it's just pumping more CO2 in the atmosphere to save a tiny bit of landfill space, which isn't even remotely a pressing issue for our civilization (we have lots of space!)

Metals like aluminum and steel take more energy to make from scratch (ore) than to recycle, so they're worth recycling and anywhere from 50-80% of the steel and aluminum feedstock in the world is from scrap metal.

It also makes sense to recycle stuff like old tires because those turn into massive ecological hazards when they burn.
by 1718627440 | 2025-12-15 16:25:19+00:00
> This pretty much never comes up

I regularly use that in C, to make sure a function matches an abstract interface. Sure, that often ends up in a function pointer, but not always and when I declare the type signature, it isn't yet a function pointer.

> but not define

I think that is because the type signature only contains the types, but no parameter names, which are required for a definition. This is arbitrary, since for data types, the member names are part of the type. It sounds totally fixable, but then you either have two types of function types, one where all parameter names are qualified and one where they aren't and only could use the former for function definitions. Or you would make names also mandatory for function declarations.
by danaris | 2025-12-15 16:25:37+00:00
No.

We need to kill the idea that a) this is what investors should be looking for, and b) it's even possible aside from a 1 in 1,000,000,000 fluke.

All of these economic instruments are supposed to be there to serve the needs of real human people, not just to make the wealthy even wealthier. We need to break this cycle of ever-escalating capital chasing capital, and get investment in things that will actually make people's lives better.
by mopsi | 2025-12-15 16:25:38+00:00
> Or they could integrate it within a wider framework of allyship, or at least let it be, as both of which it has been asking for several decades, instead of advancing towards, ramping up the rhetoric, fueling millitarism, and crossing red lines.

This is exactly what happened and how we got here: turning a blind eye to the destruction of democracy and the growing authoritarianism in Russia, buying oil and gas in the hope that economic cooperation would keep Russians in check out of self-interest at least, ridiculing and belittling the security concerns of Eastern Europe, and ignoring Russia's aggression and wars and constant advances, such as subverting countries like Belarus into dictatorships loyal to Moscow and deploying nuclear missiles and offensive weapons ever closer to Europe.

This approach worked so well that missiles are now raining down on European cities every night, killing innocent people in their homes, with no end in sight, as the Russian dictator relentlessly demands a return to the Cold War era, when half of Europe was a Russian prison camp.
by miroljub | 2025-12-15 16:25:55+00:00
I'll give you one example, and you can decide for yourself.

Mid of this year, I accidentally found out about a great independent language learning app [1]. It clicked for me. It was no bullshit, no gamification, and no distraction. I used it for one or two months, 700 hours in total. I can attribute to it some progress in learning my target language.

Then I went on vacation for a few weeks and completely forgot about it. Today I tried to find it again, but since I forgot its name, I couldn't find it easily. Normally, I would search my inbox, but there was not a single mail from it. When I found it, I learned it improved quite a bit and added a way to support the app through subscriptions.

Now, if it had some promotions or gamification built-in, I would be reminded of its existence and would most probably have been using it at least 700 more hours until today, and maybe even subscribed to it. And it would bring me closer to reaching the learning goal in my target language.

TL;DR: Yes, some gamification or nagging is necessary. But don't overdo it.

[1] https://morpheem.org/