MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Havoc | 2025-12-27 21:16:38+00:00
USD position as global reserve is very much based on trust.

Between the weaponizing that for sanctions via SWIFT, US becoming unreliable as a partner (militarily, politically and economically) and Trump rambling about replacing pieces of the financial system with crypto [0] that trust was bound to waiver

Think we'll have a parallel system in record time. Question is who/how. Russia wants it but they're well Russia. China's yuan isn't open enough. Euro is a bit to regional and dependent on the US lead system anyway. So there isn't an obvious candidate.

Something is going to have to give though given US shenanigans.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/economy/comments/1otdio8/trump_says...
by georgeecollins | 2025-12-27 21:16:51+00:00
Best novel of the year for me: Playworld by Adam Ross.

I read a lot of books for work, talk to people who read a lot of books, and that is my #1 recommendation. Also this year I enjoyed Demon Copperhead, Mobility, Land of Milk and Honey, Afterworld, The Terror. Many of those books aren't new, but I enjoyed them in 2025.
by archagon | 2025-12-27 21:16:57+00:00
Well, I firmly believe that the social value of a human being far exceeds their financial impact. It’s almost tautological that if a person can pack up their suitcase and flee anytime taxation becomes slightly unfavorable, then they’re not socially or culturally integrated into local life. Like I said: a mercenary citizen.

You might have built businesses in California and Washington (and that’s great) but it doesn’t sound like you particularly care about being a Californian or Washingtonian. So who are your people? Who are you?
by tptacek | 2025-12-27 21:17:18+00:00
Your mail either needs to be encrypted reliably against real adversaries or it doesn't. A private emailing circle doesn't change that. If the idea here is, a private group of friends can just agree never to put anything in their subjects, or to accidentally send unencrypted replies, I'll just say I ran just such a private circle at Matasano, where we used encrypted mail to communicate about security assessment projects, and unencrypted replies happened.
by levocardia | 2025-12-27 21:17:51+00:00
Require housing in certain places? Now that's what I'd call broken economics. If there is such a need for housing near job centers...why wouldn't that automatically create the incentive to build it? (Hint: It does; the problem is that in most places there are "requirements" that make it nearly impossible to build new housing. Texas is notable in that it lacks the worst extremes of this problem, hence the recent trends in rent in Austin).
by 999900000999 | 2025-12-27 21:18:14+00:00
Getting screwed over is a part of life.

The problem imo is when you actively lie to me. I won't go into specifics, but I was lied to , said F em, went the legal route and got smacked down.

It's not even worth a name and shame. Just sip a shot of whiskey and try to move on. This is why I like contract jobs. Ain't no equity. It's much more honest.
by akerl_ | 2025-12-27 21:18:16+00:00
It's not like GPG solves for secure key distribution. GPG keyservers are a mess, and you can't trust their contents anyways unless you have an out of band way to validate the public key. Basically nobody is using web-of-trust for this in the way that GPG envisioned.

This is why basically every modern usage of GPG either doesn't rely on key distribution (because you already know what key you want to trust via a pre-established channel) or devolves to the other party serving up their pubkey over HTTPS on their website.
by epistasis | 2025-12-27 21:19:11+00:00
Ok so now we are asking people uninvolved to a tiny number of incidents to jump (how high?) on things they have no control over. Instead of focusing on the politics that is actually their domain: the unconstitutional destruction of institutions mandated by Congress by an out-of-control executive branch that is breaking the law. Let the FBI and police deal with local property crimes.

And even if more Democratic politicians condemned it, how would you hear about it? What media do you consume that would let you hear that voice? And what does your respect translate into?

Even asking Democratic politicians to condemn the violence shows that you are placing the onus on Democrats for something that they did not do. It's very strange behavior.
by TheServitor | 2025-12-27 21:19:11+00:00
I think the desire to not centralize identity has more to do with it than anything. We present different facets to different communities. The pseudo-indelible nature of internet commentary means saying something to anyone potentially means saying it to everyone, in any context.

That's why people have multiple fediverse accounts, to limit context or purpose of communication channels. Not because they don't value genuine communication within those channels.
by onion2k | 2025-12-27 21:19:57+00:00
When I was a kid I had a big box of C15 tapes. The number is the length in minutes. 15 minutes isn't all that useful for music or voice, but it was ideal for ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 games (and saves, and software I wrote myself.) I also had a reporter's notebook with the tape name and tape counter numbers for when things I'd saved started. They were very easy to copy and quick cheap.
by lovich | 2025-12-27 21:21:10+00:00
> Regulations shouldn’t have to change with every new fintech innovation…

Hard disagree given that a lot of fintech innovation is increasingly devious ways to circumvent the spirit and the letter of the law

> … and VCs would face the choice of taking half the payment and fucking over workers, or taking the same size payment while not fucking over workers. They may be selfish, but there not so self-destructive as to choose the former out of spite

Also hard disagree. The VC and investor people I’ve met and work with seemed to have a cultural aversion to labor being anywhere near the same level of compensation or power as them. I would fully expect them to take a deal that fucked over the employees if they got paid the same either way.

You’d have to tune your suggested system so that not fucking over the employees was heavily incentivized
by vlovich123 | 2025-12-27 21:21:39+00:00
> and allows you to make much stronger guarantees than TrueTime (due to higher precision distributed ordering guarantees, which translate to lower latency and higher throughput distributed writes).

TrueTime is the software algorithm for managing the timestamps. It’s agnostic to the accuracy of the underlying time source. If it was inaccurate then you get looser bounds and as you note higher latency. Google already does everything you suggest for TrueTime while also having atomic clocks in places.
by kpil | 2025-12-27 21:22:00+00:00
I'm assuming they mean the old way of signing each others signatures.

As a practical implementation of "six degrees of Kevin Bacon", you could get an organic trust chain to random people.

Or at least, more realistically, to few nerds. I think I signed 3-4 peoples signatures.

The process had - as they say - a low WAF.
by bentcorner | 2025-12-27 21:22:27+00:00
I love this paragrpah and I think it provides an interesting insight:

> They are entertainment platforms that delegate media creation to the users themselves the same way Uber replaced taxis by having people drive others in their own car.

Taking this analogy further, is today's end goal of social media to provide AI generated content that users can endlessly consume? I think Facebook is heading this direction.
by armchairhacker | 2025-12-27 21:22:40+00:00
A 2 hour rant about C++

> C++ is absolutely atrocious.

> First of all, there’s like, 20 different ways to initialize a variable, and there’s so many rules and edge cases about initialization, that somebody wrote a 300 page textbook solely on this one topic.

> Just about everything in C++ is a mess.

> ...

It's quite informative: its criticisms are mostly objective and it touches related subjects like job opportunities and other languages.
by _flux | 2025-12-27 21:22:41+00:00
So we are on agreement that "weights" are not source code. Training data might not also be actual "code", but it is source. After all, the model trained using that data tries to estimate its training data. It is the ground truth for the model.

About the access of binaries or providing working implementations, where did those come from? I don't think this thread was discussing those at all.

Indeed I would be willing to call something an "open source model" if it came without weights, but did come with the training data and with a documented process (preferably executable); and a release with just the training data could be called "open dataset" while the software to run the training would be just plain old open source software.

And, of course, a model with only the model data distributed with an open license is relatively commonly called "open weights", this being pretty self-explanatory term.
by ChadNauseam | 2025-12-27 21:22:52+00:00
A good analogy is a queue. Imagine a society of mostly-identical people. You set up a stand that offers free sandwiches, but you can only give the sandwich to one person a minute. What will happen? A line will form outside your stand, growing longer until the length of the line is such that the discomfort of waiting in line is equal to the pleasure of eating the sandwich. So even though your sandwiches are supposedly free, a cost is still imposed on everyone who wants one, because they have to waste time standing in line.

You're right that people who can defer traveling to avoid traffic jams and congestion already tend to do so. But there are still people at the margin. People who don't value their time or don't mind sitting in traffic listening to the radio or dislike taking the bus. These people are creating congestion, imposting a cost on everyone else, and paying nothing for it. They would do it less if they had to pay. (It's okay for people to drive and sit in traffic, there's just no reason it should be free!) So it would really be more like "Good news! Surge pricing is in effect, and today your commute will cost you twice the usual price but take half as long!"
by zzo38computer | 2025-12-27 21:23:42+00:00
Downloading over HTTPS does not help with that (although it can prevent spies from seeing what files you are downloading) unless you can independently verify the server's keys. The certificate is intended to do this but the way that standard certificate authorities work will only verify the domain name, and has some other limitations. TLS does have other benefits, but it does a different thing. Using only TLS to verify the packages is not very good, especially with the existing public certificate authorities.

If you only need a specific version and you already know what that one is, then using a cryptographic hash will be a better way to verify packages, although that only applies for one specific version of one specific package. So, using an encrypted protocol (HTTPS or any other one) alone will not help, although it will help in combination with other things; you will need to do other things as well, to improve the security.
by teruakohatu | 2025-12-27 21:23:54+00:00
> BTW what's up with people pushing N150 and N300 in every single ARM SBC thread?

Because they have a great watt/performance ratio along with a GPU that is very well supported by a wide range of devices and mainline kernel support. In other words a great general purpose SBC.

Meanwhile people are using ARM SBCs, with SoCs designed for embedded or mobile devices, as general purpose computers.

I will admit with RAM and SSD prices sky rocketing these ARM SBC look more attractive.
by comradesmith | 2025-12-27 21:24:54+00:00
> Cleartext signatures considered harmful

Really? To me it seems that what’s really harmful is assuming a long string of high entropy hex bytes is a valid signature.

Both detached signatures and cleartext need to be run through verify, so what gives?

Does gpg not error when the post-verification output file doesn’t match the cleartext? That sounds like a bug in gpg
by mappu | 2025-12-27 21:25:33+00:00
What is ACPI other than a DTB baked into the firmware/bootloader?

Any SBC could buy an extra flash chip and burn an outdated U-Boot with the manufacturer's DTB baked in. Then U-Boot would boot Linux, just like UEFI does, and Linux would read the firmware's fixed DTB, just like it reads x86 firmware's fixed ACPI tables.

But - cui bono?

You need drivers in your main OS either way. On x86 you are not generally relying on your EFI's drivers for storage, video or networking.

It's actually nice that you can go without, and have one less layer.
by xlii | 2025-12-27 21:25:36+00:00
Good question - main thing is that it's saving time on repeatable searches and optimize search.

I was working with Elixir without ability to use LSP and so, my flow often looked like this:

> rg "defp|def\b|def_rule|def_helper" . | rg "something"

Only to find that someone made a "def_instruction" and it's there. I didn't want to filter our, I just wanted to... sort.

With config file I can do a simple

> rg "something" | ssort ~/ssort/elixir_methods
> # or if I use it often
> alias ssort-elixirm "ssort ~/ssort/elixir_methods"
> rg "something | ssort-elixirm

This can be solved by working LSP though, what working LSP can't solve though is:

> rg "impl" | ssort-elixirm | ssort -f MyCompany

But (given as it looks like it was buried) it's a microoptimization for CLI search freaks ;)
by _wire_ | 2025-12-27 21:26:11+00:00
"Failed to load website properly since html-load.com is blocked. Please allow html-load.com"

—OK...—

"This page could not be loaded properly due to incorrect / bad filtering rule(s) of adblockers in use. Please disable all adblockers to continue using the website. (click OK if you'd like to learn more)"

—!! OK...—

"Oops, something went wrong.
Please disable features that may affect the website, and refresh the page. In most cases, disabling the adblock feature resolves the issue.
Support: support@error-report.com
[Fix the issue]
Error: TypeError: Load failed"

THAT'S QUITE A LETTER
by toomuchtodo | 2025-12-27 21:26:24+00:00
Not opposed, but to achieve this with the current election cycle cadence will take at least 5 years, if not longer (Congressional cycles). Also, I think Medicare for All is a more pressing use of tax revenue than pouring good money after bad into sprawl infrastructure that will continue to decline in use as rural America hollows out and people keep moving to urban cores. To observe this, overlay predicted rural America population decline with road infrastructure, which you can also use to forecast which road infrastructure we should retreat from maintaining over time.

“Everyone wants civilization but nobody wants to pay taxes” is a hard concept to solve for, most especially when those with nothing or no tax liability advocate for the wealthiest from a failed mental model.
by bwfan123 | 2025-12-27 21:26:27+00:00
> They actively exploit the -- natural, evolved -- inability of most people on Earth to distinguish language use from thinking and feeling

Maybe this will force humans to raise their game, and start to exercise discrimination. Maybe education will change to emphasis this more. Ability to discern sense from pleasing rhetoric has always been a problem. Every politician and advertizer takes advantage of this. Reams of philosophy have been written on this problem.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-12-27 21:26:32+00:00
> Are you trying to project this unto Trump when the Fed is doing everything it can to oppose his measures?

The Fed isn't opposing Trump's measures, on the contrary, the Fed is doing everything to accommodate as much of his policies as possible without wider damage to the economy.

It's Trump who doesn't understand the risks of unhinged tariffs and low interest rates which he demands because of his personal conflicts of interest.
by gsf_emergency_6 | 2025-12-27 21:27:03+00:00
(If we replace fish by "unicellular organism", it might be easier to get to "what kind of (meta)game gets them to multicellularity"?)

Note that narcissism is what PH/Kohut is trying to analyse here. I struggle to put egolessness at its foundation, because that smells too much like nihilism. seem s increasingly less healthy to scale nihilistic therapy to a handful, 37 (~Dunbar), 1000s (POUM outer party?)

Why not an alternative life-force that could legitimise the "ri" in shu-ha-ri, "acting-out", "disruption" (so take it both personal and ... solidarital (-activism)?)

[Creative] disruption is after all the unspoken (meta?)ideology on HN*

Fully hypothetically, we shall then consider the behaviour of "(self-)therapists" in that scenario- "weaponized curiosity" bootstrapping into a full alarm (as "we" model the minds running a "Bildungs"-institution (PH), the spiessig (aeb), HN mods (yours truly) :)

(I'd like to take it here to "self jokes or -tickling", but "too many knobs spoil the chat"..)

*Seems like a step up from "Schumpeterian" "creative destruction"/will-to-power tbh
by underlipton | 2025-12-27 21:27:14+00:00
"Reminder" is just as patronizing and probably the cue I was responding to. I don't regret it, because on top of meeting his "obnoxious" framing with my own, the substance of my reply was also more correct. Your busy-body response was even less necessary and I hope that my refusal to take a conciliatory tone vexes you further. Have a nice day.
by echelon | 2025-12-27 21:28:27+00:00
How is it not progress? You have full access to the code, you can use it yourself however you'd like, and the copyrights expire.

They just ask you not to compete with them for a few years.

How is that any way comparable to AWS?

Perfect truly is the enemy of good.

In this case, perfect murders good and locks you in the dungeon of eternal bad so you can think endlessly about perfect. It also stabs any good that comes along while crying about perfect.
by erinnh | 2025-12-27 21:28:29+00:00
Theres many.

Here is one Discussion/issue that is currently annoying me again.

https://github.com/netbox-community/netbox/discussions/9515
https://github.com/netbox-community/netbox/issues/20005

Netbox is full of these kinds of things. Where people ask for stuff or even create PRs for it and the Maintainer of Netbox shoots it down because reason.
by koyote | 2025-12-27 21:29:03+00:00
You're getting a lot of flak due to how you started off your comment, but I mostly agree with you.

In my opinion there are two kinds of users:
1. Users who use FFmpeg regularly enough to know/understand the parameters.
2. Users who only use FFmpeg once in a while to do something specific.

This wrapper is superfluous for users in group number 1.
But group number 2 does not really get much out of it either, for the reasons you've mentioned.

As a member of group 2, I usually want to do something very specific (e.g. remove an audio track, convert only the video, remux to a different container, etc.).
A simple English wrapper does not help me here because it is not powerful enough; the defaults are usually not what I want.
What I need is a tool that will take a more detailed English statement of what I want to achieve and spit out the FFmpeg command with explanations for what each parameter does and how it achieves my goal.
We have this today: AI; and it mostly works (once you've gone through several iterations of it hallucinating options that do not exist...).
by wredcoll | 2025-12-27 21:29:04+00:00
Ok, I'll play:

> We estimate that over the past two decades, USAID-funded programmes have helped prevent more than 91 million deaths globally, including 30 million deaths among children.

How about that? Or are you going to come up with some excuse that somewhere, somehow, an american also benefitted from saving all these lives and therefor it doesn't count?

[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
by doctorpangloss | 2025-12-27 21:29:26+00:00
another POV is he was extremely lucky

Pfizer decided to NOT commercialize its GLP-1 drug (https://www.statnews.com/2024/09/09/glp-1-history-pfizer-joh...) in 1992.

What if it had commercialized GLP1s?

The law that prevented Medicare from paying for weight loss drugs like GLP1s, the MMA, was passed in 2003. So Medicare would have to pay.

YEAR NOM. ADJ 23 NET NET
($B) ($B) 10% 100%

1998 69.2 129.4 102.6 -138.6
1999 125.6 229.7 202.9 -38.3
2000 236.2 417.9 391.1 149.9
2001 128.2 220.6 193.8 -47.4

Okay, only 4 surplus years. 10% uptake of GLP1s, okay, they'd be in surplus. 100% uptake, it would be a deficit.

Any number of things could have happened. This was just one thing that definitely was completely in control of people - it was in the control of Pfizer's commercialization team - it wasn't some unforeseeable crisis.

My point is, the little HN takes here and there like yours, better to not make them, because frankly you don't know anything about the budgeting process or governance, so why say anything at all?
by upofadown | 2025-12-27 21:29:49+00:00
I think it would be more accurate (and more helpful) to say that the two factions in the OpenPGP standards schism[1] have pulled away from the idea of consensus. There is a fundamental philosophical difference here. The LiberePGP faction (GnuPGP) is following the traditional PGP minimalism when it comes to changes and additions to the standard. The RFC-9580 faction (Sequoia) is following a kind of maximalist approach where any potential issue might result in a change/addition.

Fortunately, it turned out that there wasn't anything particularly wrong with the current standards so we can just do that for now and avoid the standards war entirely. Then we will have interoperability across the various implementations. If some weakness comes up that actually requires a standards change then I suspect that consensus will be much easier to find.

[1] https://articles.59.ca/doku.php?id=pgpfan:schism
by tim-tday | 2025-12-27 21:29:52+00:00
This is a hugely important strategic move. I reluctantly concede that the federal government has done exactly the right thing. (With the possible exception that they should have done it sooner and more decisively)

1) Drone warfare is critical to current and future armed conflicts.
2) us drone technology is currently 100% dependent on the Chinese supply chain
3) it takes time to build up a local supply chain
4) China has promised to attack Taiwan in 2027 and the US has promised to depend it. That conflict may pivot on who has the best drones in the opening, mid and end of the conflict.

Banning Chinese drones is step one in building a robust sovereign drone supply chain. It may already be too late but it sure as shit is better than waiting any longer. They’d better do batteries next or it will all be for nought.
by bzmrgonz | 2025-12-27 21:30:03+00:00
I am so disappointed they chose MS SQL server. Just imaging the opportunities and the giant annual recurring savings to thr public purse going with postgresql would have brought to thr table(the postgresql ecosystem spreads as far as the eye can see). It's a travesty of epic proportions. Let's hope you at least follow modern coding practices of decoupling and low code/no code to ensure survivability and maintainability into posterity.
by quantpunk | 2025-12-27 21:30:22+00:00
Have you ever done anything with tone.js?

I think of this completely opposite. C++ and audio is the incumbent relic that will progress one funeral at a time. Librosa and Pyo are just incredible in python but for offline processing.

Rust and audio would be really cool in terms of wasm. Anything VST is IMO a complete waste of time. That was saturated 15 years ago.