MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by defrost | 2025-12-07 01:09:02+00:00
It's a bit of a non story, even with the fake image.

From the article:

Trains were halted after a suspected AI-generated picture that seemed to show major damage to a bridge appeared on social media following an earthquake.

...

Railway expert Tony Miles said due to the timing of the incident, very few passengers will have been impacted by the hoax as the services passing through at that time were primarily freight and sleeper trains. "They generally go slow so as not to disturb the passengers trying to sleep - this means they have a bit of leeway to go faster and make up time if they encounter a delay," he said. "It's more the fact that Network Rail will have had to mobilise a team to go and check the bridge which could impact their work for days."

Standard responsible rail maintainance is to investigate rail integrity following heavy rains, earthquakes, etc.

A fake image of a stone bridge with fallen parapets prompts the same response as a phone call about a fallen stone from a bridge or (ideally !!) just the earthquake itself - send out a hi-railer for a track inspection.

The larger story here (be it the UK, the US, or AU) is track inspections .. manned or unmanned?

Currently on HN: Railroads will be allowed to reduce inspections and rely more on technology (US) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46177550

https://apnews.com/article/automated-railroad-track-inspecti...

on the decision to veer toward unmanned inspections that rely upon lidar, gauge measures, crack vibration sensing etc.

Personally I veer toward manned patrols with state of the art instrumentation - for the rail I'm familiar with there are things that can happen with ballast that are best picked up by a human, for now.
by shevy-java | 2025-12-07 01:09:32+00:00
Interesting how Brian works. I guess it is the UNIX spirit he carries there. Or perhaps he is damn fast with the tabbed WM. Or is that OSX?

I use mostly IceWM these days. I can't use the leaner WMs such as ion or ratpoison and XFCE, mate-desktop, KDE and GNOME are too slow or too crap (KDE unfortunately also now; before that only GNOME was crap. KDE killing xorg-support also means it is one less thing I can use anyway.)
by dimal | 2025-12-07 01:10:15+00:00
That tend to hold "on average" for a population but often don't hold for the individual within a population. This is the ecological fallacy [0], just one of the fallacies underlying psychiatry.

My argument isn't that psychiatric symptoms don't exist or aren't real and there is no real underlying phenomenon. My argument is simply that we've drawn the lines between the units of study too high up and we should be more granular. This level of nosology was chosen in 1952. Do you really think they got it 100% right almost 75 years ago? And what is the mechanism for defining and maintaining these categories? A bunch of committees get together every few years and decide on them, then they tell us all what's "true". Bullshit. What are the odds that a committee will define itself out of existence? Pretty slim. [1]

I have traits that could be considered as autism, ADHD, obsessive compulsive personality disorder, PTSD, bipolar II, social anxiety disorder, and probably a dozen more disorders. But by quantizing the disorder at the current level, by necessity, the other traits are cropped out of view. Relevant information is lost and irrelevant information is blurred together. And the level of overlap between disorders is absurd. They cannot possibly be "real" because the lines between them aren't even distinct.

The useful unit to study is the individual trait, not the cluster of traits that is different in each individual. The traits are more granular and map more closely map to underlying biology anyway. The current model is akin to what the geocentric model was in astronomy. It's outdated, wrong, and holding us back from a more accurate, detailed view.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_fallacy

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law
by jkrejcha | 2025-12-07 01:10:47+00:00
> And that's not even getting in to the major breakages in point version upgrades or the whole python 2 to 3 language switch.

Python doesn't use semver and never claimed to do so, but it's probably worth treating "x.y" releases as major versions in their own right (so like 2.7 -> 3.0 is a major version and so 3.10 -> 3.11). If you do that, the versioning makes a bit more sense
by credit_guy | 2025-12-07 01:11:43+00:00
Here's what's important about this paper. It is written by AMD researchers. It shows AMD is investing in AI research. Is this the same level of achievement as DeepSeek 3.2. Most likely not. Do they have novel ideas? Difficult to say, there are hundreds of new ideas being tried in this space. Is this worthless? Most certainly not. In order to make progress in this domain (as in any other), you first need to get your feet wet. You need to play with the various components, and see how they fit together. The idea in this paper is that you can combine somehow SSMs (like Mamba) and LLMs (like LLama). The examples they give are absolute toys compared to DeepSeek 3.2 (the largest is 8 billion parameters, while DeepSeek 3.2 has 671 billion parameters). The comparison you are trying to make simply does not apply. The good news for all of us is that AMD is working in this space.
by DonHopkins | 2025-12-07 01:11:45+00:00
Jordan's the rapscallion who scribbled all over Dennis G. Perry's Interleaf windows (program manager of the Arpanet in the Information Science and Technology Office of DARPA) with his infamous global rwall on March 31, 1987.

Milo Medin said "Dennis was absolutely livid, and I recall him saying something about shutting off UCB's PSN ports if this happened again."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31822138

From: Milo S. Medin <medin@orion.arpa> Date: Apr 6, 1987, 5:06 AM Actually, Dennis Perry is the head of DARPA/IPTO, not a pencil pusher in the IG's office. IPTO is the part of DARPA that deals with all CS issues (including funding for ARPANET, BSD, MACH, SDINET, etc...). Calling him part of the IG's office on the TCP/IP list probably didn't win you any favors. Coincidentally I was at a meeting at the Pentagon last Thursday that Dennis was at, along with Mike Corrigan (the man at DoD/OSD responsible for all of DDN), and a couple other such types discussing Internet management issues, when your little incident came up. Dennis was absolutely livid, and I recall him saying something about shutting off UCB's PSN ports if this happened again. There were also reports about the DCA management types really putting on the heat about turning on Mailbridge filtering now and not after the buttergates are deployed. I don't know if Mike St. Johns and company can hold them off much longer. Sigh... Mike Corrigan mentioned that this was the sort of thing that gets networks shut off. You really pissed off the wrong people with this move! Dennis also called up some VP at SUN and demanded this hole be patched in the next release. People generally pay attention to such people. Milo
by makeitdouble | 2025-12-07 01:12:13+00:00
> It is a matter of funding conpatibility.

Key clients requesting support for the alternative OS will be a way faster route IMHO. The same way nobody bribed banks to support android, they saw the market share and potential and decided by themselves it was a worth doing. Which is why it came so late.

I understand you're offering a way to get around the chicken and egg problem, I'm saying dealing with the supply part is crazy hard. Somewhat paying users to buy into your ecosystem despite the lack of support could be a better use of money (I'm thinking about Meta subsidizing Occulus until it got some traction, and I assume it's still in the red after so many years)

> the Android API

People loosely explain the lack of technical challenge, but from the institution's POV you're asking them to expand their trust from Google, a US company which will be solely responsible if anything critical happens...to potentially each single phone maker, whoever happens to be selling the device to your clients ?

If Google didn't exist that's what they'd do. But Play Services is a thing. The more I think about the less I see an incentive for any established player to do that move until customers are actively clamoring for it. There's just no upside otherwise.
by nathan_compton | 2025-12-07 01:13:03+00:00
I think the primary reason is that laws are about human convention, not real objects which one can clearly and deliberately define. Like at the most basic level nothing exists at all except for quantum fields or something like that. Everything else we talk about on a regular basis, people, dogs, streets, businesses, etc, is defined by convention to a greater or lesser degree.

It is therefore quite hard to create a formal system to refer to objects in the world in a way which induces no contradictions with intuition. This is why we have courts, among other functions of government.
by iJohnDoe | 2025-12-07 01:14:01+00:00
This photo is amazing.

Can you imagine being so far away from Earth and looking back to the planet you live on? The experience is said to be life changing.

The realization we’re all human and we’re all living together on this small rock that is floating through space. The overwhelming feeling that we should all be working together for the collective good of our species. Because in the end, all we have is each other.

Instead, it’s an utter shitshow of those in power that are only in it for themselves.

https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/53ed2ba5e4b063...
by krick | 2025-12-07 01:14:17+00:00
I feel the same way, but I wouldn't be bold enough to call it dumb. I mean, I assume they know what they are doing. This is very inconvenient for me, as a buyer, but I suppose most companies just aren't Apple, so they throw at us a lot of various stuff hoping that something sticks. And, for that matter, Apple's product line gets more diversified each year too. now it's Air, and Pro, and Max, so I wouldn't bet it won't be G1 Ultra F12b in 10 more years too.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-07 01:15:34+00:00
There is (at least) two different groups of people using Raspberry PI. One of them are completely new Linux users who need a ton of help and resources to understand enough so they can achieve what they're trying to do. Raspbian/Raspberry Pi OS, even with their faults, is probably the better option for those people, as the environment and context very much takes first time users into account.

NetBSD and Tiny Core Linux, even with all their benefits, is a harder experience to get into if you haven't already dipped your toes into Linux, and doesn't have the same wide community and boundless online resources.
by aeonfox | 2025-12-07 01:18:25+00:00
Na-ion cells have roughly half the volumetric and gravimetric energy density of NMC, so it's double the weight and double the space. Apart from still being at least as—if not more—expensive as LFP, they also have a sloping voltage curve, vs lithium with is relatively flat, which poses problems for voltage conversion, and these engines are going to be taking kilovolts of power. So I think those problems would need to be solved first.
by wisty | 2025-12-07 01:18:32+00:00
But ... pda behaviour is very similar to OCD.

Is it due to stimulous overload or anxiety? I think that's the difference.

The point being misdiagnosis ocd as pda is a risk if autism is the only thing people consider. Maybe not a a huge deal since realistically a misdiagnosis often means you get a pamphlet with broadly similar advice and maybe and cbt anyway ... but maybe I'm being overly cycnical.
by tobias2014 | 2025-12-07 01:18:35+00:00
This is not true. Mathematica has the concept of contexts. You can have each notebook have it's own unique context. Mathematica Packages create their own context too, we are not talking about module's here which are useful for local variable scoping. Packages and contexts lead to the isolation you are looking for. These are things that have been around since the initial Mathematica 1.0 in 1988 (!). https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/Context.html

Same about your criticism of error handling and control flow: https://reference.wolfram.com/language/guide/RobustnessAndEr...
by konmok | 2025-12-07 01:18:42+00:00
Again, I don't care about women's sport regulations. That's a complicated issue, I get it! Barring women with high testosterone from competing seems like a very crude solution to me, but whatever.

What I do care about is your insistence that a single hormone test lets you exclude someone from being a woman, and JKR's dismissal of Banda. That's just so messed up, and ironically feels very misogynistic.
by inkyoto | 2025-12-07 01:18:44+00:00
To be able to fully comprehend Perl (even without having to embrace it), one needs a fiddle.

Perl and some of Perl's quirks will make more sense once you realise that it is deeply rooted in UNIX command line utilities, UNIX conventions and some UNIX shell defaults, except when it is not, i.e.

- What is `$_`?

$_ follows the spirit of shell variables (such as $*, $@, $! etc., heavily used in Korn, Bourne flavours but not the C flavours), but was repurposed or – more likely – picked from a pool of vacant characters with the help of a dice roll. Kind of like how ancient Egyptians built the pyramids with the help of sophisticated cranes and machinery and then vapourised their tools with high-particle beams to leave future generations guessing «how on Earth did they manage to do that». This is one of the main criticisms of Perl.

- What is this BEGIN block at the start of this Perl file? Why is that necessary?

Perl started out as an improvement over «awk», and BEGIN is an awk construct where it is used frequently, e.g. awk 'BEGIN { IFS=":" } { … do something … }'

- What does chomp do when it's just on its own line, with no arguments given to it?

It follows the standard convention of UNIX utilities that expect the input to come from the standard input stream (file descriptor 0 or <file-in in the shell) when no input file name has been specified. So, when no <FILE1> given to chomp, it chomps on the standard input.
by perching_aix | 2025-12-07 01:20:35+00:00
This is a refreshing take in some ways. I'm beyond tired of the usual rose-tinted attitudes towards customizability and after-engineered things.

It was a bit disappointing to see the cold shower not reach the thermals situation however, despite the heavy emphasis on performant parts. Apple's offerings are phone-like, they let them saturate then throttle. The alternative is the ugly gamer laptops with their jet engines. Not sure I can wholeheartedly prefer either.
by lynndotpy | 2025-12-07 01:21:00+00:00
I use Brave, and I second the sentiment that it's the least bad of many bad choices. I say this as an opinionated person who has put a lot of effort into looking at alternatives. I've even spent time trying to use Epiphany and Lynx as my daily drivers.

I assume we would both already exclude the likes of Chrome, Edge, Opera, Safari, etc.

This will be a long reply though.

The TLDR is: Security is number one, so extensions are bad and built-in features are good. I hate the cryptocoin/adware/AI features but the degrading act of disabling it all is mercifully short. It also has to run on Linux, so I can't even consider browsers like Nook. Most important to me are the (1) Chrome features and (2) the Shields feature tacked on. I use profiles and shields very extensively.

The TLDR TLDR is: Shields good

---

Caveat with the below is that Brave is full of bullshit to disable, with a new piece of bullshit added every year or so. That disparaging term is not one I use lightly!

The bad aspects are made worse by the fact the CEO of Brave is a person who I generally don't trust. I've been using Brave for years with the understanding I might have to jump ship at any moment.

Onto the good things:

One of the necessary things it provides is a browser which I can use to browse the internet, including captchas. For my mileage, Firefox has been broken for me on every platform I've used it on, every time I've tried to get back into using it, for years. I've exhausted all the time I ever wish to spend trying to fix a browser. Since I could not use Firefox to browse, it was not an option for me.

A second necessary requirement is that the browser should be available on the major desktop and mobile OSes, especially Linux. So, Orion, Nook, etc. don't count as browsers to me.

A third necessary requirement are timely security updates. Last I checked, Brave got security fixes from Chrome on a timely basis. Nice.

Then, there are a bunch of nice to haves. Brave has the Chromes profile which I use heavily (although Firefox is set to get a clone of Chrome's profiles soon-- the existing 'profiles' and 'containers' solutions were not usable alternatives.)

A second nice-to-have is telemetry - how often is my browser making requests unrelated to browsing, and to how many parties? I last checked this years ago, but I remember Brave performing well here.

The third nice thing is the Shields feature, which I've come to rely on. (If Firefox copied this wholesale, like they're doing with Chrome profiles, that would be a major improvement.) It's an easy-to-use interface to block ads and JavaScript. It works on mobile as well, which is a huge advantage.

Shields can be replicated with extensions, but I try to minimize the extensions I use. Each extension requires permissions for every site (!!!) So, if just one of these extensions developers were compromised, or the extension itself had a vulnerability, then I would be compromised too.
by accrual | 2025-12-07 01:21:05+00:00
I have had good textual results with the Turbo version so far. Sometimes it drops a letter in the output, but most of the time it adheres well to both the text requested and the style.

I tried this prompt on my username: "A painted UFO abducts the graffiti text "Accrual" painted on the side of a rusty bridge."

Results: https://imgur.com/a/z-image-test-hL1ACLd
by keernan | 2025-12-07 01:22:32+00:00
>it will never go away

Chet Ramey became the primary maintainer of Bash in the early 1990s and is the sole author of every bash update (and Readline) since then. That would be an enormous task for a team of 100, no less a team of one.

I've become quite a fan (after struggling mightily with its seemingly millions of quirks.
by hedora | 2025-12-07 01:22:45+00:00
They should already be able to detect line breaks using old technology. They send current pulses down the line to detect stuck switches, since stuck switches can cause collisions. Also, the pulses are conducted through the wheels and axles of any trains, so they can use resistance and/or timing to figure out where the trains are.

Having said that, if it was 2020 and you told me that making photorealistic pictures of broken bridges was harder than spoofing the signals I just described, I’d say you were crazy.

The idea that a kid could do this would have seen even less plausible (that’s not to say a kid did it, just that they could have).

Anyway, since recently-intractable things are now trivial, runbooks for hoax responses need to be updated, apparently.
by MarsIronPI | 2025-12-07 01:23:41+00:00
All I want is a thinner Thinkpad X220 but with upped specs and newer ports. Framework-style upgradable motherboard would be nice but optional. The X220 already has a perfect keyboard, a mousing system that doesn't suck (sorry, I've never been happy with a trackpad: they feel too imprecise), a beautiful form factor for a laptop (if I want a laptop, I want it to be 12-14in for easiest portability), it's practically indestructible and has an array of ports that makes me wonder how people manage with just 3 USB-C ports. Maybe this is just me though.
by anonnon | 2025-12-07 01:23:51+00:00
It's well-known that schizophrenics self-medicate with coffee and nicotine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophrenia_and_tobacco_smok...

The inverse possibility--that nicotine, and perhaps caffeine as well, heighten the risk of psychosis in those genetially predisposed--has also been considered.
by Izikiel43 | 2025-12-07 01:25:33+00:00
The thing is everyone on the queue aren’t citizens, so they don’t vote, so congress doesn’t give a shit if it takes 10+ years for everyone.

There is no downside for them to screw everyone equally. However, if they make immigration easier or make it simpler, a bunch of them won’t be reelected as their bases would hate that.

I’m all in for simplifying the process and what not, but congress taking action I think is very likely to screw things more than they currently are.
by dimal | 2025-12-07 01:25:58+00:00
That's a misunderstanding. I argue elsewhere in this thread that these categories aren't real, yet I identify as neurodivergent.

One problem is that the language we've been given is one of defects (ADHD, ASD) and often people are stuck using that label even if they don't see their trait as a defect. So we're stuck saying "ADHD" because psychiatry decided that it's a defect. In reality, nearly every "disorder" has some other context-dependent benefit.

And while there's no "neurodivergence" in nature, there is a divergence from what is considered "normal" by society. "Normal" is an artificial construct, but we all have to live with it, and there are many aspects of my nervous system that clearly function in a way that's outside of two standard deviations from the mean, and this causes me a lot of problems in a society that can't tolerate that. These are very very real, and 95% of the time, I never say a word, and no one else has any idea that I'm suffering. I'm not telling anyone else that they're the asshole. Most neurodivergent people are living like this, despite what you're implying, that we're all just walking around being assholes to everyone we meet. That, is bullshit.
by intelec1 | 2025-12-07 01:26:03+00:00
How does one newspaper tell a story about the power of money, media, and our future in a single day? In this issue, we analyze the December 6, 2025, issue of The Washington Post as a map of hidden currents: The $83 billion Netflix-Warner Bros. Discovery deal as a battle for control of stories and streaming wars; The EU's fine for Elon Musk's X platform for disinformation and how it's being framed as a geopolitical conflict between the US and Europe; Records for the Dow Jones, S&P 500, and Nasdaq amid the very mundane problems of ordinary people; The first snow in Washington, a LeafGuard ad, and the perfect combination of "created anxiety and immediately sold the solution"; The Style section: voice messages, dating for 50+, and a horoscope as a painkiller for a reader tired of major worries; The main omission: abnormal snow without a single mention of climate change. This isn't just a news review, but media criticism and forensics of the newspaper page: how the focus is placed, what fears are being presented, what solutions are being sold—and which stories don't make it onto the page at all.

Subscribe if you value in-depth analysis of the Western press, not just the headlines: media analysis, economics, geopolitics, wars, technology, and what newspapers prefer to keep quiet about.

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by 0_____0 | 2025-12-07 01:26:40+00:00
I've been starting days with a bowl 2/3rds full of frozen blueberries (microwaved 2mins to soften) plus greek yogurt and a dash of maple syrup.

It's a lot of blueberries. But I can afford $60/month in frozen blueberries. Plus they're tasty. Also antioxidants or whatever.