MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zephyrthenoble | 2025-12-15 20:34:59+00:00
Always interesting (in an informative way) to see people "defending" em-dashes from my personal perspective. Before you get mad, let me explain: before ChatGPT, I only ever saw em-dashes when MS Word would sometimes turn a dash into a "longer dash" as I always thought of it. I have NEVER typed an em-dash, and I don't know how to do it on Windows or Android. I actually remember having issues with running a program that had em-dashes where I needed to subtract numbers and got errors, probably from younger me writing code in something other than an IDE. Em-dashes always seem very out of place to me.

Some things I've learned/realized from this thread:

1. You can make an em-dash on Macs using -- or a keyboard shortcut

2. On Windows you can do something like Alt + 0151 which shows why I have never done it on purpose... (my first ever —)

3. Other people might have em-dashes on their keyboard?

I still think it's a relatively good marker for ChatGPT-generated-text iff you are looking at text that probably doesn't apply to the above situations (give me more if you think of them), but I will keep in mind in the future that it's not a guarantee and that people do not have the exact same computer setup as me. Always good to remember that. I still do the double space after the end of a sentence after all.
by oblio | 2025-12-15 20:35:21+00:00
Now? No. But West Germany alone had 5000 main battle tanks in 1989. Demographics have changed, the economy has changed, but Europe could definitely project force all over the area about 1000-1500km in its vicinity if it really wanted to.

But Europeans definitely do not want that and up to a point, that's a good thing, yet Europe still needs a big enough force as a deterrent, and it currently does not have that.
by phantasmish | 2025-12-15 20:35:29+00:00
> I'd characterise Americans as less pretentious and more straight talking.

Various registers representing a huge proportion of US English we see and hear day-to-day are terrible. American “Business English” is notably bad, and is marked by this sort of fake-fancy language. The dialect our cops use is perhaps even worse, but at least most of us don’t have to read or hear it as much as the business variety.
by HNisCIS | 2025-12-15 20:35:32+00:00
We need an established secure anonymous/subpoena-resistant chat app at this point. Signal is great for a minimal threat model but we're kinda past that now given everything going on.

Simplex was a decent option but they're going down the crypto rabbit hole and their project lead is...not someone who should be trusted by anyone in the crosshairs right now.
by wrs | 2025-12-15 20:35:49+00:00
It's actually a classic and much-repeated case in Rust education:

fn pick_first<'a>(x: &'a str, y: &'a str) -> &'a str { x // We only actually return x, never y } fn main() { let s1 = String::from("long-lived"); let result; { let s2 = String::from("short-lived"); result = pick_first(&s1, &s2); } // s2 dropped here println!("{}", result); }

The error here is "borrowed value [pointing to &s2] does not live long enough". Of course it does live long enough, it's just that the constraints in the function signature don't say this usage is valid.

Thinking as a beginner, I think part of the problem here is the compiler is overstating its case. With experience, one learns to read this message as "borrowed value could not be proved to live as long as required by the function declaration", but that's not what it says! It asserts that the value in fact does not live long enough, which is clearly not true.

(Edit: having said this, I now realize the short version confuses beginners because of the definition of “enough”. They read it as “does not live long enough to be safe”, which the compiler is not—and cannot be—definitively saying.)

When this happens in a more complex situation (say, involving a deeper call tree and struct member lifetimes as well), you just get this same basic message, and finding the place where you've unnecessarily tied two lifetimes together can be a bit of a hunt.

My impression is that it's difficult or impossible for the compiler to "explain its reasoning" in a more complex case (I made an example at [0] [1]), which is understandable, but it does mean you always get this bare assertion "does not live long enough" and have to work through the tree of definitions yourself to find the bad constraint.

[0] https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&editio...

[1] https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&editio...
Show HN: Cordon – Reduce large log files to anomalous sections
by calebevans | 2025-12-15 20:36:14+00:00
Cordon uses transformer embeddings and density scoring to identify what's semantically unique in log files, filtering out repetitive noise.

The core insight: a critical error repeated 1000x is "normal" (semantically dense). A strange one-off event is anomalous (semantically isolated).

Outputs XML-tagged blocks with anomaly scores. Designed to reduce large logs as a form of pre-processing for LLM analysis.

Architecture: https://github.com/calebevans/cordon/blob/main/docs/architec...

Benchmark: https://github.com/calebevans/cordon/blob/main/benchmark/res...

Trade-offs: intentionally ignores repetitive patterns, uses percentile-based thresholds (relative, not absolute).
by mike_hearn | 2025-12-15 20:36:20+00:00
This is the kind of semantic argument about words that makes anything other than flat personal taxation an endless rabbit hole.

When people talk about wealth creation they mean the creation of new wealth. Filling potholes isn't normally described as wealth creation because it's sustaining activity. You can choose to define wealth creation differently, that's fine, but it makes the term useless because it'd become synonymous with any kind of work.

Additionally, there's no real world difference between investors and workers. The idea you can separate capital as a class of people from workers is a Marxist concept that doesn't make any sense outside that broken ideological framework. The classical example: if someone owns a food stall, are they capital or a worker? If they pick up that stall and cart it to a bigger town down the road, is the act of them hauling their cart along the road work or an investment? You could argue equally well both ways, which makes the distinction just a distraction.

> however high the capital gains tax is so long as the owner of capital in question still gets to pocket some of the wealth produced using it, they still have an incentive to continue

Not at all! This is the kind of weird prediction that false distinctions between capitalists vs workers causes. It's why Marxist economies always fail. Investment is work and it also requires taking a lot of risk. If you confiscate 99% of someone's ROI nobody is going to say oh well, at least I got 1%. They're going to give up investing at all because the act of making the investment not only took effort, but also meant they could have lost the whole shebang.
by jcranmer | 2025-12-15 20:36:28+00:00
You can charitably read it as "MBA from Stanford, with a focus on computer science-related stuff," or maybe "MBA and a bachelor's in CS from Stanford." Or you could assume that it's an MS in CS that was 'autocorrected' to MBA.

But the way it's phrased and worded... at best, it's the kind of really bad typo that shows rank incompetence; at worst, it's outright fabrication that is actively lying about the credentials; and what I think most likely, it's obfuscation that's relying on credentialism to impart an imprimatur of credibility that is wholly undeserved (i.e. "I got an unrelated degree at Stanford, but it's Stanford and how could anyone who goes there be bad at CS?").
by rurp | 2025-12-15 20:36:38+00:00
Even that might be changing. I follow some defense industry folks and I've never seen a time when they were less pro-republican. The gross incompetence and maliciousness by this administration is deeply concerning to most people in the industry. The idiocy we're seeing regarding Venezuela, Russia/Ukraine, alienating every single ally, fumbling on China, and more are putting the US in a much much weaker position going forward. Everyone who's paying attention and not happily in on some graft knows to be worried.
by lapcat | 2025-12-15 20:36:41+00:00
> I predict that it's a large majority, >60%, and am unsurprised to see a poll saying 65%

Yes, and I don't think I'd be surprised about how many Americans support capitalism. I generally support capitalism.

> healthcare reform shouldn't affect which doctors they can see

> no Medicare For All proposal could even approach

Of course you couldn't keep your plan but why couldn't you keep your doctor when all doctors would be under the single government plan? It's not like the public loves health insurance companies.

> the American Medical Association opposes Medicare For All, and people generally trust doctors more than politicians about healthcare.

This seems like an equivocation. People don't necessarily trust doctors about politics. Moreover, trusting your doctor is not the same as trusting the AMA.

> Again, this is something where I'd encourage people to put themselves in Chuck Schumer's shoes.

Never.

> there aren't enough swing voters

Why in the world would you conclude that in the 1980s?

You know, Jimmy Carter did win in 1976, and was pretty close in California despite losing. (Carter had already become so unpopular in 1980 that he was primaried by Ted Kennedy, before he faced Reagan.) Dukakis was also pretty close in California. It's crucial to note that Ronald Reagan was the Governor of California, and Richard Nixon was Senator from California, so they had home state advantage there. Even poor Mondale won his home state of Minnesota. And note that California had a Democratic Governor (Jerry Brown) in 1980.

> If you're behind right now and want to start winning elections, you simply can't start from the premise that anyone who identifies with the other side is unreachable.

I would submit that 2020s Republicans are not 1980s Republicans. After decades of right-wing media indoctrination, Republicans are now detached from reality and believe all kinds of crazy things. Approving of Trump after everything Trump has said and done is not even remotely the same as approving of Reagan.
by ericmcer | 2025-12-15 20:36:53+00:00
It's crazy how many security vulnerabilities are just people pinging http endpoints in ways they didn't expect. You would think in order to "hack" a system in 2025 you would need to be doing some crazy computer science wizardry but it really is just lazy engineers. Like how do you ship an API and have no rate-limiting. It literally takes a line to implement in Nginx.
by BurningFrog | 2025-12-15 20:36:59+00:00
> But also why did the Sun form at all?

I don't understand the question. There must have been a cloud of gas big and dense enough to provide the mass for the solar system.

Once that exists gravity does the rest, right?

> all the uranium we have on Earth came from such an event

That must mean the Sun also has its fair share of that Uranium? Or maybe more of it, since the heavy elements were more drawn to the center of the solar system?
by jltsiren | 2025-12-15 20:37:01+00:00
Mail voting should be limited to special situations anyway, as it's obviously a bad idea when the stakes are high.

When you vote in person, there is nothing that connects the ballot you photographed to the ballot you cast. Surveillance at the polling station might notice that you requested a new ballot, but it's an even bigger problem for your override. If you were coerced to vote in a certain way, you definitely don't want to be seen anywhere near the polling station.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-12-15 20:37:23+00:00
Edit: Puppy Linux does seem to boot to ram! Huzzah. Interesting thread that goes over some behaviors available: https://oldforum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=36508

The unique problem here is that while many of these are designed to run nicely from USB drive, I don't get the impression that many will let you remove the USB drive after boot.

FatDog talks about running from a RAM layer, which is cool. But I believe even this is still a RW layer atop the underlying root which needs to remain mounted.
by the_af | 2025-12-15 20:37:26+00:00
The citizens of the UK in general? No.

Authorities and government? Yes. Even if the current ones weren't born when history was made, it's their duty to understand the history of the country they are governing, and of how past decisions shaped the world as it currently is.

> I honestly don’t think the UK has done much to harm other countries since the Iraq War which obviously made everything worse.

The history of Hong Kong itself is deeply influenced by Great Britain's actions (as well as other world powers, of course), and it doesn't start with mainland China's takeover.

Another example of UK's actions deeply influencing the current world, unrelated to China, is Iran (and well, the Middle East in general). So the UK cannot simply point fingers at others and forget about how they helped shape the situation.
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-12-15 20:37:49+00:00
It is a shame that the author has to change to keep up, and I feel their pain but .. it’s also the price of progress. We all do things to keep up when change comes for our work and skill sets.

LLMs - like all tools - reduce redundant & repetitive work. In the case of LLMs it’s now easy to generate cookie cutter prose. Which raises the bar for truly saying something original. To say something original now, you must also put in the work to say it in an original way. In particular by cutting words and rephrasing even more aggressively, which saves your reader time and can take their thinking in new directions.

Change is a constant, and good changes tend to gain mass adoption. Our ancestors survived because they adapted.
by Defletter | 2025-12-15 20:37:50+00:00
Figured I'd add that the BBC has had to apologise recently for Question Time posing a question to the panellists about a stat of 1 in 3 children in Glasgow having English as a second language, but the text prompt they showed on screen lied, saying that 1 in 3 children in Glasgow are not fluent in English. That's a pretty substantial change.

It's not very centre-left of the BBC to aid Farage in his racism, and of course there's a Reform politician there to have the first and last words about it. Keep in mind that this is a Scottish episode, with the leader of the Scottish National Party at Westminster, the leader of Scottish Labour, the leader of Scottish Conservatives, a Scottish journalist (there's usually one or two non-politicians on the panel) who did a lot of indyref coverage. And despite Reform not winning a single seat for Scotland in the 2024 General Election, or in the last Scottish Parliament election in 2021, they apparently always need to give Reform a voice on everything so they shoehorned him onto this panel.

This all just screams centre-left.
by Gualdrapo | 2025-12-15 20:37:55+00:00
Yes it is, but since "KDE 5" I've seen less of it. Besides the obvious example of Konqueror another great example of it was reKonq, which used Akregator, Okular and Kget to handle RSS and PDFs respectively (all within the reKonq window).

Now not even Falkon does that.
by red-iron-pine | 2025-12-15 20:37:58+00:00
> Isn't the look-left and look-right, one of those people won't be here next year sort of places.

the same MIT that doesn't give out grades in the first year? (just Pass / NoPass)

the high achievers who scored solid grades to get there literally kill themselves when they pull Cs and Ds, even though it's a hard class and is sort of "look left, look right"
by jotux | 2025-12-15 20:38:06+00:00
Before all of this happened the hiring I had to deal with when I was federal fell into similar buckets:

1. Completely inept or lazy people that couldn't get a job anywhere else (~50%)

2. Smart people that took the job because it was close to their family (~30%)

3. Smart people that took the job because they liked the the specific mission and felt like it was really important (~10%)

4. Smart people that took the job after retiring from a private industry job as a sort of laid-back post-retirement hobby (we called them re-treads, ~10%)

From what I've heard, a lot of federal employers can only hire from the #1 category now, and the applicants in that category have gotten worse.
by nallana | 2025-12-15 20:38:27+00:00
@mNovak -- super helpful note! Thank you!

Author of RunMat (this project) here --

> The first thing they teach about performant Matlab code is that simple for-loops will tank performance.

Yes! Since in RunMat we're building a computation graph and fusing operations into GPU kernels, we built the foundations to extend this to loop fusion.

That should allow RunMat to take loops as written, and unwrap the matrix math in the computation graph into singular GPU programs -- effectively letting loop written math run super fast too.

Will share more on this soon as we finish loop fusion, but see `docs/fusion/INTERNAL_NOTE_FLOOPS_VM_OPS.md` in the repo if curious (we're also creating VM ops for math idioms where they're advantageous).

> Would love to see something with the convenient math syntax of Matlab, but with broader ease of use of something like JS.

What does "convenient math syntax of Matlab, but with broader ease of use of something like JS" look like to you? What do you wish you could do with Matlab but can't / it doesn't do well with?
by derefr | 2025-12-15 20:38:56+00:00
> MASSIVE EM DASH

Tangent: the thing I find most annoying about ChatGPT's use of em-dashes is that it never even uses them for the one thing they're best suited for. ChatGPT's em-dashes could almost always be replaced with a colon or a comma.

But the true non-redundant-syntax use of em-dashes in English prose, is in the embedding into a sentence of self-interruptive 'joiner' sub-sentences that can themselves bear punctuated sub-clauses. "X—or Y, maybe—but never Z" sorta sentences.

These things are spoken entirely differently than — and on the page, they read entirely differently to — regular parenthetical-bearing sentences.

No, seriously, compare/contrast: "these things are spoken entirely differently than (and on the page, they read entirely differently to) regular parenthetical-bearing sentences."

Different cadence; different pacing; possibly a different shade of meaning (insofar as the emotional state of the author/speaker is part of the conveyed message.)

But, for some reason, ChatGPT just never constructs these kinds of self-interruptive sentences. I'm not sure it even knows how.
by dathinab | 2025-12-15 20:39:18+00:00
This article https://signal.org/blog/building-faster-oram/ has some details but is more focused on improving their solution other blogs from the are "we want to build this soon" kind of blogs. It seems that most articles about this topic either have too little content to be of interest or are technology previews/"we maybe will do that" articles about things Signal wants to implement, where it's unclear if they did do that or something similar.

To cut it short they use Intel SGX to create a "trusted environment" (trusted by the app/user) in which the run the contact discovery.

In that trusted environment you then run algorithms similar to other messengers (i.e. you still need to rate limit them as it's possible to iterate _all_ phone numbers which exist).

If working as intended, this is better then what alternatives provide as it doesn't just protect phone numbers from 3rd parties but also from the data center operator and to some degree even signal itself.

But it's not perfect. You can use side channel attacks against Intel SGX and Signal most likely can sneak in ways for them to access things by changing the code, sure people might find this but it's still viable.

In the end what matters is driving up the cost of attacks to a point where they aren't worth in all cases (as in either not worth in general or in there being easier attack vectors e.g. against your phone which also gives them what they want, either way it should be suited for systematic mass surveillance of everyone or even just sub groups like politicians, journalists and similar).
by viccis | 2025-12-15 20:39:22+00:00
I didn't accuse "Jews" of trying to assassinate a US president, I accused Israel of doing so.

>You started with a claim you probably genuinely believed in, realized there was no evidence for it, and instead of admitting to that, reverted to trolling.

I still believe it, as the claim was from Margaret Truman Daniel, who had first hand knowledge of what happened to her parents. You clearly don't agree, despite Israel having done the same thing at the same time to other Western politicians. There's no "trolling" or violation of "HN rules" going on, other than perhaps the antisemitic conflation of Jewishness with Israel, particularly when it comes to who is blamed for the terrorism committed by the latter. It is a form of ethnoracial essentialism and bigotry that also impacts Muslims in the US and other ethnic and racial groups (such as the targeting of Chinese citizens in Indonesia as a form of blame for the country of China's actions).
by Lammy | 2025-12-15 20:39:33+00:00
> Does it miss a spec? Write one.

FreeDesktop-dot-Org would not accept one from the author if he did:

https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2024-fdo-and-redhat

https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2024-fdo-and-redhat2
by throwaway81523 | 2025-12-15 20:39:49+00:00
Yeah the thing about the twins calling out 20 digit prime numbers did it for me. Even allowing for the twins having some ridiculous magical ability to think up such primes, Sacks iirc claimed to confirm the numbers' primality by looking them up in a table of primes. Nuh uh.

Added: ok, found a more careful description. https://www.pepijnvanerp.nl/articles/oliver-sackss-twins-and...
by tsimionescu | 2025-12-15 20:39:59+00:00
I said installed or propped up. They are certainly propping up the Saudi royal family, increasing their prominence on the world stage, even as they have killed American citizens and are conducting wars in the region. Also, the current Saudi royal family has been ruling at best since 1902, so nowhere close to "centuries" (though they do have ancestry going back to the 1700s to a royal family that briefly controlled a part of modern day Saudi Arabia).

In regards to other dictators, I'm not sure why you're only looking at post-Cold War history. What's most interesting about this period is the amount of failure by the USA to effect regime change, despite very clear evidence of such attempts, both against dictators and for them. We even have the interesting case of Haiti, where the USA supported a coup to get rid of president Aristide in 1994, then they led a UN-approved military action to re-instate him in 1998, then supported another coup to get rid of him in 2004. After the first coup, a military junta was installed, and the USA was one of few countries which traded with them. You also have US support against several islamic populist leaders in various Middle Eastern and North African countries, typically preferring secular military leaders instead - often leading to either protracted civil wars or to brief regimes that couldn't hold power. You also have a series of attempts at regime change in quasi-democratic countries, ostensibly for more democratic leaders, that failed - leaving uncertainty on whether those that they attempted to prop up would have been better or worse; the clearest example of this is the attempt to install Juan Guaido as the President of Venezuela after a deeply controversial vote.
by Daishiman | 2025-12-15 20:40:02+00:00
> When you blame all your problems on one single external factor, usually a person or a group of foreigners, then you also turn them into all mighty gods. South America is bigger than the US and richer in resources and population. If you don't look internally to fix your problems, then you'll be forever stuck where you are.

Way to show you really, really don't understand the politics of Latin America and who funds the various interests that run the show.