MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jdross | 2025-12-15 18:17:35+00:00
I would love to address unions in public and semi-public (e.g. teachers' unions, dockworkers, police and fire unions). They are able to hold the public hostage by preventing automation at ports, stopping teaching (often doubling as daycare for children), or withholding public safety.

The counterbalance to a union and to management needs to be customers, but customers aren't able to vote no here. That's fundamentally undemocratic.

And you end up with terrible outcomes like collapsing literacy rates through the prevention of teaching phonics, which leads to parents opting out of public education entirely. There needs to be a feedback mechanism in unions for them to work.
by bilekas | 2025-12-15 18:17:48+00:00
> and the Blitz failed to inflict any meaningful damage on it

c. 40,000[1]–43,000 civilians killed[2]

c. 46,000–139,000 injured[2] Two million houses damaged or destroyed (60 percent of these in London)

Sure.. Okay.. France was worse, France is also no longer a world influence it was once.
by Noel04 | 2025-12-15 18:17:49+00:00
Thanks for the detailed debug output! This confirms what we suspected, the message is being accepted by Twilio but it might be filtered by T-Mobile before reaching your handset. Can you try sending "Error Detected" one more time just to confirm it's consistently filtered (not a one-time glitch)? If it fails again, then: 1. The immediate problem: "Error Detected" is likely triggering T-Mobile's spam filter. Try a more specific message like "[YourApp] Error in payment processor at 3:42 PM", generic error messages get filtered heavily. Let me know if that gets through. 2. Our misleading status: You're right - showing "delivered: true" when it just means "accepted by carrier" is confusing. We're working on: - Clearer status terminology ("accepted" vs "delivered") - Webhook integration to track actual handset delivery - Guidance on avoiding carrier filtering

Again, Thank you so much for testing this out.
by rbbydotdev | 2025-12-15 18:17:55+00:00
https://opaledx.com / https://github.com/rbbydotdev/opal

open source browser first server-less markdown document workspace and publisher, contending to be a free obsidian alternative

storage is done in indexeddb or it can utilize opfs to work on a local file directory

comes with git integration

can publish to aws cloudflare vercel and github pages

built with shadcn react and typescript
by thrance | 2025-12-15 18:17:57+00:00
What experts? You mean the overpaid consultants who dragged the democrats into pathetic ineffectiveness and made them lose against an obviously retarded manchild?

> The end result is of course populism. Each election cycle gets us closer to the policy positions of the Republicans being "Immigrants are bad" and Democrats being "Billionaires are bad".

Except immigrants have nothing to do with how bad things are going, while billionaires (and what they represent) are effectively the architects of this situation. "Billionaires are bad" is an oversimplified, but ultimately correct analysis of the issues of our time.

FDR basically saved the country from fascism with his "robber barons are bad" campaign. I deplore the fall into populism just as much as the next guy, but this is what the situation calls for. Social networks only play a minor part in all of this. Material conditions are degrading, and unrest will only grow until they start improving.

This country's governance has been subservient to capital, basically forever, and unchecked private power is now eating it from the inside. This is what must be fixed if this republic is to have any future, and the populist left is the only band of the political spectrum that at least acknowledges the issue.
by wrs | 2025-12-15 18:18:09+00:00
My only complaint with this excellent list is that it treats "generics" and "lifetimes" as separate things. There's a reason the lifetime is inside the generic brackets. The code is generic over some lifetimes just as it can be generic over some types.

As a Rust beginner I read lifetimes backwards, thinking <'a> means I'm "declaring a lifetime" which I then use. What that actually declares is a placeholder for a lifetime the compiler will attempt to find wherever that struct or function is used, just as it would attempt to find a valid type for a type generic <T> at the points of usage.

Once I fixed that misconception everything made much more sense. Reminding myself that only the function signature matters, not the actual code, was the other thing I needed to really internalize.

The compiler messages hinder this sometimes, as when the compiler says "X doesn't live long enough" it actually means "using my limited and ever-evolving ability to infer possible lifetimes from your code, I can't find one that I can use here".

This is also (for me, anyway) a common "it's fine but it won't compile" case, where you don't have enough lifetime parameters. In other words, you're accidentally giving two things the same lifetime parameter when it's not actually necessary to require that the compiler come up with a single lifetime that works for both. The compiler error for that does not typically lead you to a solution directly.
by rq1 | 2025-12-15 18:19:27+00:00
As much as I agree with you. Iran is signatory of the NPT with all its consequences.

Instead of letting more countries develop these weapons, we should work on denuclearizing all countries, starting with the US and Russia and their insane arsenals! And maybe build a unified international legal framework for civilian nuclear developments and applications from energy to medical outside of the "security council's" ferule!

A nuclear war cannot be won, thus never fought!
by LexiMax | 2025-12-15 18:19:27+00:00
> Aside from attempting to subvert democracies with botfarmed divisive politics, sure.

When Twitter had its recent VPN reveal, what actually took me by surprise was how many divisive accounts weren't from China or Russia, but from regions of the world like Turkey, India, Africa, and South America. Sure, they could be spouting divisive politics to push an agenda of someone who is paying them, but the simpler answer might be that they spout divisive politics because it earns them money in terms of advertising dollars.

And that's the real problem, IMHO. The subversion of democracy isn't happening because of China, Russia, or any number of adversarial countries, but because our social media companies don't care enough about our country or the people living inside it to meaningfully crack down on ragebait engagement farming.
Show HN: Hope Tree – a calm, minimal reflection app
by manesvenom | 2025-12-15 18:19:28+00:00
I made Hope Tree, which helps people reflect and build small moments of hope during difficult times.

It’s a mix of a simple journaling tool and a calm, lightweight emotional companion, designed to be private and distraction-free.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/hope-tree/id6753673053
by jeffbee | 2025-12-15 18:19:37+00:00
Why do we need to assume so many things, when we can peg it to reality.

Worldwide, Google's data centers averaged 3.7GW in 2024. Globally, they use 8.135e9 gallons of water in the year, which is 30.8e6m³ per year, which is 84e3m³ per day. Double that to meet the assumed 8GW data center capacity, 168e3m³/day. QED: the estimate 1.4e6m³/day is high by a factor of 10x. Or, in other words, the entire information industry consumes the same amount of water as one very small city.

I believe this is why Google states their water consumption as equivalent to 51 golf courses. It gives a useful benchmark for comparison. But any way you look at it the water consumption of the information sector is basically nothing.
by GuB-42 | 2025-12-15 18:19:40+00:00
We need some more nuance here.

Companies are not evil, they are profit driven, and they make profit by responding to demand. If people demand evil, they will make evil, if people demand good, they will make good. I think it is too easy to blame them when ultimately, we are the one who support them.

In the case of farming, we want cheap food, and the way to make cheap food is intensive farming, with pesticides and synthetic fertilizers. So, companies make pesticides, farmers use them, and we eat the cheap food. Because we recognize that some checks need to be put in place, we elect governments to regulate all that, and or vote goes to whoever makes the best balance between cheap food, taxes and subsidies, and general health and precautions. This is crucial because cheap food is a matter of survival to some.

So in the end, there are no "baddies", just a system that's not perfect. Also keep in mind that big corporation are made of a lot of people, you may be one of them. I am. Does it make us evil? Maybe a little, but I don't think any more than average, as middle-class, I even tend to think we define the average.
by jtrn | 2025-12-15 18:19:48+00:00
I don’t think the nurse is lying at all. The medical case is real. My point is that the article omitted the fact that the patient she treated had ingested a massive, lethal dose of concentrate (acute poisoning), and she was exposed to it when extracting it. The journalist used the symptoms of a suicide attempt to illustrate the risks of routine farming, which I think is misleading. It’s not about the nurse making it up... it’s about the article leaving out the context that matters most. Especially when pushing the argument that it causes Parkinson's.

My gut intuition just didn't like the framing. Now that I have read through it thoroughly, my answer is this: It's untrustworthy because it is obviously extremely selective with what it includes, omits relevant base rates, uses graphical examples out of context, and has an obvious bias and agenda. That is just one of tens of examples in the article.

Your tobacco reference can be condensed into: "Large firms are known to lie and cover up things." I agree 100%. They plainly outright lied directly AND lied by covering up. But the reaction to that is not to lie better. And by better, I mean lying by omission, juxtaposition, and framing. These are still methods of lying, just that they are harder for people to detect.
by honeycrispy | 2025-12-15 18:19:48+00:00
Apple may have good hardware, but their software support is comically bad. Their support for backwards compatibility (aside from Rosetta) has basically been "FU, I'm apple", which you need for gaming.

Apple has had little to no interest in becoming a real gaming platform. Unless that changes, gamers will more likely be moving into the sweet embrace of Gaben on Linux.
by JohnBooty | 2025-12-15 18:19:58+00:00
Those damn plebs just have no idea what's best for them.

Most people are not an expert in a single field, much less multiple fields, and never every field.

So yes, we need experts to play a substantial role in running things.

Perhaps even more importantly: it's not solely about what's best for every individual. You know what would be best for me? If the government gave me a free giant SUV that gets 4mpg fuel economy, and also let me drive as fast as I wanted while also subsidizing 90% of my fuel costs. Also it should drive itself so I can sleep while driving.

Sometimes we need to consider what's best for society and the planet, too.
by jimbokun | 2025-12-15 18:20:10+00:00
Can we have a grown up discussion that uses numbers instead of hyperbole?

Certainly you can argue income inequality is too high and capital holders and high earners need to pay much more.

But you cannot seriously argue that capital owners "avoid contributing to the financing of our states and social systems". They pay a lot in capital gains and income taxes, even if they don't contribute as much as they should.
by didgetmaster | 2025-12-15 18:20:11+00:00
Several of your assumptions are correct.

My project Didgets (short for Data Widgets), started out as a file system replacement. I wanted to create an object store that would store traditional file data, but also make file searches much faster and more powerful than other file systems allow; especially on systems with hundreds of millions of files on them. To enhance this, I wanted to be able to attach contextual tags to each Didget that would make searches much more meaningful without needing to analyze file content during the search.

To facilitate the file operations, I needed data structures to support them. I decided that these data structures (used/free bitmaps, file records, tags, etc.) should be stored and managed within other Didgets that had special handling. Each tag was basically a key-value pair that mapped the Didget ID (key) to a string, number, or other data type (value).

Rather than rely on some external process like Redis to handle tags, I decided to build my own. Each defined tag has a data type and all values for that tag are stored together (like column values in a columnar store). I split the tag handling into two distinct pieces. All the values are deduplicated and reference counted and stored within a 'Values Didget'. The keys (along with pointers to the values) are stored within a "Links Didget'.

This makes analytic functions fast (each unique value is stored only once) and allows for various mapping strategies (one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one, or many-to-many). The values and the links are stored within individual blocks that are arranged using hashes and other meta-data constraints. For any given query, usually only a small number of blocks need to be inspected.

I expected analytic operations to be very fast, like with other OLAP systems; but I was pleasantly surprised at how fast I could make traditional OLTP operations run on it.

I have some short demo videos that show not only what it can do, but also benchmark many operations against other databases. Links to the videos are in my user profile.
by vkou | 2025-12-15 18:20:32+00:00
40,000 dead[1] and two million houses damaged in a country of 40 million people (presiding over a global empire of a billion souls) over six years is not meaningful... Especially in the context of the largest and most destructive war the world has ever known.

> Sure.. Okay.. France was worse,

Don't look at Metropolitan France, two thirds of it got to sit the war out as a puppet state.

Look further east. How many houses were 'damaged or destroyed' in Germany, Poland, the USSR..?

This isn't a suffering Olympics, but compared to war expenditures, the cost of rebuilding the damage inflicted to the Isles was a rounding error. Those expenditures (and their associated debts) were what crippled Britain's ability to maintain an empire, not the cost of rebuilding.

---

[1] That sort of thing was a normal day over there. A normal one - not even a bad one.
by fwsgonzo | 2025-12-15 18:21:10+00:00
I agree. I also challenge readers to watch TV broadcasts from politicians speaking in 70s, 80s and even 90s. You won't even believe your ears. But, the slow takeover of the world by international conglomerates buying up everything else, merging and bankrupting competition just doesn't seem to be on anyones mind with any power to deal with it. An acquaintance works at one of these Frankensteins monsters and there is a hodge podge of internal systems. It's hard to believe how many companies they have bought up over the decades.
by anthk | 2025-12-15 18:21:31+00:00
A) LLM's caused disasters because juniors have no clue on the context of the applying commands.

B) With the current enshittification, your comment it's the obsolete one. 100 times over. Why? Enjoy your crappy iOS'ified OS with a maze of dependencies (Python3 for instance), SIP and updates breaking everything.

C) If any, the newbies are the doomed ones, as they don't know anything about computers. Solaris SMF commands (or AIX ones) blindly applied ro RHEL systems? Why not?
by x0x0 | 2025-12-15 18:21:44+00:00
The bit about building an internal app for eg marketing or sales is super fun. Getting calls starting at 8am EST because they then (reasonably!) expect it to work less so. Software still has an enormous ktlo tax and until that changes, I'm skeptical about the entire thesis.

Not to mention the author appears to run a 1-2 person company, so ... yeah. AI thought leadership ahoy.
by yeutterg | 2025-12-15 18:21:50+00:00
Yes, the bulb can be controlled with a smart dimmer like the Leviton model we sell on our site, or the Lutron Caseta plug-in dimmer.

These bulbs are not smart and do not have a full RGB array. But what you gain is way higher color quality even at low color temperature (1700K), much lower flicker, and infrared.

Atmos is a smart lamp, and we will get our Matter certification in early 2026. This one is also not RGB, but it has extremely high color quality in the whites and no blue spike. Flicker is lower and at a way higher frequency (32 kHz). We haven't updated the specs on the site yet as we are wrapping the calibration, but the CRI is 98 on the Atmos lamp.
by etothepii | 2025-12-15 18:21:53+00:00
Apologies, in an attempt to be precise I have used convoluted language.

The point I'm trying to make is that assets such as land are not denominated in any currency and typically end up being held for such large amounts of time with such substantial transaction costs that's there would be a large cost involved in knowing what the value of the thing being taxed is.

If I pay you $100k, £100k or ¥100k we can use spot rates to work out how many € that is within much less than 1%.

If I own a piece of land how would you answer the question, "what should the value for taxation be?"

If you go with the last transaction price then this will have a substantial impact on properties that haven't been sold for a long time and encourage people to enter into transactions that look like sales but aren't (such a 999-year lease).

Leave it up to a government agency to decide and this agency will come under huge pressure to favour one type of activity over another. How do you value land owned by the government? What if that land is privatised? The UK's attempts to deal with this when it privatised BT completely destroyed the fibre to the premises industry in the UK for years.
by palmotea | 2025-12-15 18:22:06+00:00
>> US companies can’t beat Chinese companies completely subsidized by their national government.

> Except our companies do just that, all the time. Who is the Chinese Intel? The Chinese Microsoft? The Chinese Boeing? The Chinese NVIDIA?

Where are the new ones?

Also Intel is not doing well, and the Chinese (after a fashion) Intel is TSMC, who also does NVIDIA's manufacturing.

> People forget that the US is still the #2 manufacturer in the world, and that's (apparently) without halfway trying.

So? That fact sounds like pablum. I think the real story of US manufacturing has been one of erosion of capabilities and long-term loss of strength. The US may still have a high ranking, but I'd bet: 1) much of that of that is low-volume and legacy, 2) second-place is still only 60% of what China does.
by lapcat | 2025-12-15 18:22:12+00:00
> How many people would jump ship with Reed Hastings if you excommunicated him

By people do you mean voters or donors?

I suspect that approximately zero voters would care.

> which are the Republican voters who would be swayed to replace (and hopefully more-than-replace) them?

This is a false dichotomy. At this point, Republicans cannot be swayed by anything. Trump just said that Rob Reiner was murdered because of "Trump Derangement Syndrome". It's impossible for him to lose his loyal followers, no matter what he does or anyone else does.

Both major political parties are extremely unpopular among nonpartisans. They plug their noses and vote, if they vote at all. In the 2024 Presidential election, 37% of eligible voters voted for neither, mostly for nothing, whereas only 32% of eligible voters voted for Trump. Swing voters and nonvoters are not necessarily "moderate". That's a myth. They're nonpartisan, which is not to say that they're "between" the two parties. Many of them hardly even pay attention to politics. There's a lot of room to appeal to people who are disaffected with the system.

The most popular politician in the US is Bernie Sanders. And the reason is that he's the most popular politician among political independents. He's not the most popular politician among Democrats (which is why he lost the Democratic nomination), and obviously he's not the most popular politician among Republicans, but across the whole spectrum, he's more popular than anyone else.

It's also important to note that it wasn't until after the Reagan Presidency (and arguably due to its policies) that the ultra-wealthy came to monopolize most increases in personal income, so populism itself wouldn't have been as popular in the 1980s as it is now, as economic disparity has grown unabated in the decades since.
by glenstein | 2025-12-15 18:22:19+00:00
I'm perfectly comfortable saying that I don't have an intuitive grasp of the conversion between nanometers, micrometers, and inches, which represent length according to different units, across different magnitudes, and especially in a context where I'm switching between talk of scales in terms of orders of magnitude and in terms of multiples (e.g. 100x is also just two orders of magnitude).

Honestly I find it kind of nuts to insist that knowing the difference in size ratio between a mitochondria and a mouse off the top of your head and to convert between them in different units is something the average person knows but whatever, maybe everyone knows that.

You're right that I was wrong about the glider but it's kind of a pennywise, pound foolish argument in this case if you think the upshot is supposed to be a blanket denial of cellular automata ever being reflected in nature. Off the top of my head I know the triforce repeating triangle pattern, perhaps the most famous cellular automata model, is found on seashells as one of many examples, so the point stands that we find in nature remarkable similarities to structures modeled in cellular automata.
Show HN: BetterWrite – Minimalist Writing Editor
by lirena00 | 2025-12-15 18:22:21+00:00
So this weekend I and a friend of mine (@ronitrajfr) created a minimalist writing editor.

It's ui is clean, beautiful and distraction free, it also has a vim mode and everything stays on your computer no authentication is required to write your thoughts and all

we wanted an application where we just start typing with no BS and that's what we made.

and did I tell ya that it's open source as well

lmk your thoughts and feedback!!
by sillyfluke | 2025-12-15 18:22:27+00:00
> I was looking at notes I wrote in 2019 and even that gave me a flavor of looking like a ChatGPT wrote it.

This would have been my first question to the parent, that I guess he never had similar correspondence with this friend prior to 2023. Otherwise it would be hard to convince me without an explanation for the switch (transition duuing formative high school / college years etc).
by LeifCarrotson | 2025-12-15 18:22:34+00:00
The ostensible purpose of the certificate transparency logs is to allow validation of a certificate you're looking at - I browse to https://poormathskills.com and want to figure out the details of when its cert was issued.

The (presumably) unintended, unexpected purpose of the logs is to provide public notification of a website coming online for scrapers, search engines, and script kiddies to attack it: I could register https://verylongrandomdomainnameyoucantguess7184058382940052... and unwisely expect it to be unguessable, but as it turns out OpenAI is going to scrape it seconds after the certificate is issued.