MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by echelon | 2025-12-24 15:05:54+00:00
A big part of what makes Google awful is that they are a monopoly across multiple domains. They have used extremely anticompetitive tactics, and the regulatory bodies have been asleep at the wheel.

Google owns search, the internet browser, and every point of ingress for the average person.

They transformed the URL bar into a search bar as a way to intercept everyone's thought process and turn it into the largest internet tax in the world.

Brands that spend millions or billions to establish themselves now have to competitively bid on their own established trademarks, because anyone can swoop in and put ads in front.

Google designed the results page such that the top results are what 99% of people click on. Google search is effectively an internet toll on every business.

They own the browsers, they own the HTML spec, they control the web.

To think this doesn't increase costs for consumers dramatically is absurd. This is a tax on all of us.

Not only do they do that, but they also starve informational businesses and news businesses of traffic by stealing their content and showing visitors first. The people that work to build the content are getting stiffed.

Google has tried so many times to kill websites and bring the entire Internet under their control. There was a time when not having a Google-controlled AMP website meant you didn't rank at all. Your content lived in their walled garden. Then Google coerced you to bear their network's ads.

Google has destroyed businesses and entire careers by being allowed to do this.

Don't get me started on mobile. While it's a duopoly, both market participants are subjecting all commerce and all participants to the same Gestapo regime. Everything is taxed, tightly regulated, and kept under thumb. The two titans constantly grab more surface area. I could spend an hour outlining the evils here too.

Google needs to be broken up. Not as one would expect into multiple business divisions (though this would also be wise), but instead into multiple copies of the same business that are forced to compete and stripped of certain business tactics.

This is what we did for Ma Bell. Google is way worse.
by lucumo | 2025-12-24 15:06:58+00:00
> on the van Emde Boas construction

Cool to see that the capitalization of Dutch names was as confusing then as it is now.

The correct way to write that would have been with a capital 'V'. The rule for these surname prefixes in The Netherlands is that they are not capitalized unless it's the first letter of the name. So it's "Peter van Emde Boas" but "Mr. Van Emde Boas".

To add to the confusion, that capitalization rule is different for Flemish names. There the first one in the surname is always capitalized: "Willy Van der Steen" and "Mr. Van der Steen".
by neogodless | 2025-12-24 15:06:59+00:00
https://bobistheoilguy.com/forums/threads/if-microsoft-built...

If microsoft built cars (joke) (2004)

Possibly better reference:

https://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/humor/WindowsVsCars.html Comparing Microsoft Windows With Cars

"If GM had kept up with the technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon"
Show HN: MonumentAI – Shazam for buildings (History without the boring parts)
by OzanYldz | 2025-12-24 15:07:39+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm Ozan, the developer behind MonumentAI.

I built this app because I enjoy traveling but find traditional audio guides and plaques incredibly boring. They usually focus on dates and architectural styles, skipping the interesting human stories—the scandals, exiles, and secrets.

I wanted a "Shazam for Buildings" that feels like a local friend whispering the gossip in your ear, rather than a history textbook.

How it works:
1. You take a photo of a landmark.
2. The app identifies the location using Google Gemini's vision capabilities.
3. It generates a short, engaging story focused on the "gossip" or hidden history (also via Gemini).

It's currently an iOS app built with SwiftUI.

The app is free to download (with a paid tier for unlimited scans), but you can try the core functionality without paying.

App Store Link:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/monumentai-scan-explore/id6756...

I'd love to hear your feedback on the UX and the quality of the stories.

Thanks!
by Jonghwa_Lee | 2025-12-24 15:08:09+00:00
Spot on. An Event Horizon indeed represents the theoretical limit of information density (the Bekenstein bound).

Since I can't create one in the lab, I'm betting on GHZ states to generate a steep enough local information gradient to yield a measurable effect. It's a scale-down, but unlike a black hole, we can test it today.
by Izkata | 2025-12-24 15:08:15+00:00
Also it looks like Santos-Dumont's plane was 2-3 years after the Wright brothers. He was doing airships before that though - lighter-than-air craft that rely on a large balloon.

Edit: So it looks like the Wright brothers had catapult but didn't actually need it (their claim-to-fame flights didn't use it), but did otherwise need a "dolly" (a wooden cart, not a catapult) because the plane didn't have wheels attached to it. Then also Santos-Dumont was declared first in Europe because he demonstrated it in Paris during a period bad reporting had people in Europe questioning the legitimacy of the Wright brothers' flight.
by saubeidl | 2025-12-24 15:08:22+00:00
Technically there is a level of indirection even in the presidency, but sure.

Nobody ever complains about ambassadors not being democratic though. Same thing goes for, idk, a Secretary of State or whatever, they all go through the same process.

Only when it comes to EU institutions people can't hide their hatred and can't help themselves but make the same old dishonest claim.
by cogman10 | 2025-12-24 15:08:25+00:00
Redactions are just hard in general. It's easy for stuff to slip through the cracks (as we've been seeing).

It's why deleting documents outright is something we aren't really seeing. Those docs can still be floating around and, worse, there can be references to missing docs within the released docs.

And with just the sheer volume of documents that are being released, it's clear to me why the Trump admin didn't release anything sooner. There's simply too much and the effort to prune it down to a specific narrative is too much of a monumental undertaking. It'd involve too many people which ultimately means it's more likely to leak out.
by holowoodman | 2025-12-24 15:08:53+00:00
A subset of an ISA will be incompatible with the full ISA and therefore be a new ISA. No existing software will run on it. So this won't really help anyone.

And x86 isn't that nice to begin with, if you do something incompatible, you might as well start from scratch and create a new, homogenous, well-designed and modern ISA.
by mlissner | 2025-12-24 15:09:16+00:00
It’s a fine line. Most redactions are for the good, to protect someone or something. For example even in the Epstein files, where some redactions are being abused, most redactions are protecting victims.

If there’s a way to undo huge amounts of redactions, that’d certainly be a net negative. Sort of like if encryption were suddenly broken, you wouldn’t publish a paper saying so.

Our goal has always been to educate about the problem so that it can be addressed. We didn’t have resources to push on the font metrics approach, so we stayed mostly quiet about it.
by randerson | 2025-12-24 15:09:17+00:00
Thanks for clarifying and agree with that.

Having owned a few Miatas I can attest that they spin if you're not careful on slippery surfaces. :) TC/DSC is a lifesafer particularly when driving at normal speeds.

Driving my NA (pre-TC) was a pleasure in part because it had so little grip and so little power, that it would let go progressively and at low enough speeds that I could always catch it and not risk a serious crash. Between the squealing of tires and the immense body roll, I always knew how much grip I had left to play with. I now drive a 911, and stability control stays on permanently because I'm not confident I'd always catch it if I accidentally give it too much power (or lift off too quickly) in a turn.
by tremon | 2025-12-24 15:10:05+00:00
Here in NL if confidential information about offenders leaks from court documents, it usually leads to a reduction in sentencing because the leak of classified information is weighed as part of the punishment. If the leak was proven to be intentional, it might lead to a mistrial or even acquittal. Leaking of victims' information usually only results in a groveling public apology from the Minister/Secretary of Justice du jour.
by kergonath | 2025-12-24 15:11:12+00:00
> Looking at the history of left wing movements in countries post-WWII, can you think of a reason why they wouldn't be successful and far-right ones would?

In western democracies, I can think of a couple. For example, the wave of left-wing intellectualism that was prevalent up until the 1980s got somewhat lost and lost contact with the lower classes, which left an opening for far-right populists.

> The center doesn't exist anymore. The right-wing has labeled the US Democratic Party as extreme left.

You’re right. In that frame of reference, it might indeed regress to the far left, but that would still be slightly to the left of Bill Clinton. The US don’t strike me as having a particularly strong left-wing culture and I don’t see it appearing any time soon.

> There should be a term for 'forcing your opposition to materialize because you are unable to distinguish between propaganda and reality'.

I don’t think the word exist, but the concept proved very useful to a lot of dictators.
by zipy124 | 2025-12-24 15:11:51+00:00
Technically there is a closed form solution as long as the answer is less than 2^24 for a float32 or 2^53 for a float64, since below those all integers can be represented fully by a floating point number, and integer addition even with floating point numbers is identical if the result is below those caps. I doubt a compiler would catch that one, but it technically could do the optimisation and have the exact same bit answer. If result was intialised to a non-integer number this would not be true however of course.
by koakuma-chan | 2025-12-24 15:12:00+00:00
The point is that Ukraine used to be a part of Soviet Union, and this is why "obviously" Ukranians speak Russian, and we are drawing a parallel to how former British colonies also speak English. France et al are not former British colonies, and I assume they prefer to speak their native language at home, and not English. Not because they are forced to, but because English is not their native language.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-12-24 15:12:21+00:00
I would say after somebody spends years not tooting their own horn, when a bit finally comes out I wouldn't let it bother me even if it's more exuberant than others who do it all the time.

I understand that most people who do it as a habit are often mostly exaggerating, and that's what doesn't really inspire me.

In Texas there's a common saying, "No brag, just fact."
by matheuzsec | 2025-12-24 15:12:43+00:00
Nowadays, there's only one rootkit that can hide itself so perfectly: the Singularity rootkit. It also hides from auditd by using netlink_unicast hooking and other evasive functionalities. Analyzing a machine compromised with Singularity loaded is a real headache, since it prevents memory dumps for analysis.

https://github.com/MatheuZSecurity/Singularity
by reconnecting | 2025-12-24 15:12:52+00:00
Surprised how such a small website has problems with browser compatibility.

In Safari 15.6.1 (2022), half of the CSS is not loading properly: background color, menu, link colors, and fonts etc.

@layer defaults {

a:not(.toc-backref) {
{
--textDecorationColor: var(--linkDecorationColor);
text-decoration-color: var(--textDecorationColor);
text-underline-offset: auto;
text-decoration-thickness: 0.15rem;
}
by bgbntty2 | 2025-12-24 15:12:52+00:00
Those aren't real problems for most people, though. I've never damaged a piece of clothing and I only use a few programs. It's obvious what you can put in the dishwasher. And expiry dates don't mean anything. Food is usually fine to eat long after the expiry or best before date. It's easy to see if someone is bad because the color, texture, smell and taste change.

Those examples seem like they would be useful for mentally disabled people. Not trying to be a dick here, but someone with declining cognitive abilities is more likely to put a sock in the dishwasher, to wash delicate clothing at 90 °C or to forget food in the fridge for months.

It reminds me of those items primarily designed for physically disabled people that (used to) be advertised for normal people on infomercials because the market for disabled people wasn't big enough.
by ben_w | 2025-12-24 15:12:59+00:00
Back when LLM chatbots were new and shiny, I was comparing the failure modes to journalism by way of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect.

Sure, deep investigative jounalism with real skill and effort behind it is a thing; but it is an expensive thing, and opinion pieces disguised as jounalism are much cheaper, as is reporting on other people's reports.
by throw5f3d5y | 2025-12-24 15:13:19+00:00
Perhaps if we were on Reddit, and also on a general subreddit, then people would speak in less technical terms.

Since this is HN, it’s almost expected the participants here would either know the terms, or at the very least be able to find out what they mean on their own and realize it’s not made up jargon but rather common industry terms.

Tailscale is not trying to sell to the average buyer, it’s trying to sell to a specific audience.
by crazygringo | 2025-12-24 15:14:18+00:00
Are you trying to suggest that indicated it was fraudulent? That has very much been debunked -- it's just an artifact of OCR and compression, something that many scanners do automatically [1].

You can still open it with Illustrator if you want to see: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/rss...

[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/birth-certificate/
by hylaride | 2025-12-24 15:14:18+00:00
> Probably cause modern logistics, especially last mile logistics, is dependent on trucks/delivery vans/etc. So even though folks in a local area might like to walk around, their groceries won’t make it to the stores and packages won’t get to their homes without a robust road network.

Totally. Banning automobiles is usually a bad idea, especially for residential zones. Years ago, I remember seeing a presentation about redeveloping a bad public housing block that was built in the 1960s with no auto-access (the assumption being poor people don't have cars), but it turns out that it meant they couldn't even get pizza.
by westurner | 2025-12-24 15:14:41+00:00
In a concept green fab design, I have pyrolysis of (fractionated) cellulose feeding CVD to make CNT (metallic CNT, nonmetallic (semiconducting (*)) CNT, A-CNT, VACNT), or Methane, or CO2.

Now that there's a scholarly article describing creation of air filters and CO2 filters out of graphene, CO2 capture that yields high carbon graphene wafers would also be useful to feed to a pyrolysis reactor that feeds to CVD.

The model indicated that CVD from pyrolysis of cellulose biofeedstock would yield 33% metallic CNTs and 67% non-metallic CNTs, which are semiconducting.

In this concept design at present, I have Lignin and Phytic acid to contain the Carbon Nanotubes so that the CNTs are not hazardous to life if they enter soil or water or are burnt.

A research question for basic research with real world applications:

If lignin is not enough to make the inflamed CNTs char instead of ~aerosolize, is the phosphorous in phytic acid would encase the CNT in phosphorus and char.

This is apparently already an issue because CNTs are added to various products - like synthetic tires - and the CNTs are ~aerosolized if burnt.

For safety in a production process, this model (Gemini3Pro) suggests that all-liquid low-pressure lower-tempetature processing of CNT would help to minimize risk.
by simonw | 2025-12-24 15:15:02+00:00
> Why die on a hill that it "is" something it says it isn't?

Because I think they're wrong about that.

If you'd prefer a different metaphor this is windmill I will tilt at.

To provide a little more of a rationale: React code calls the code I write - the JSX and the handlers and suchlike.

It's also pretty uncommon to see React used at the same time as other non-React libraries that handle UI stuff.

Most importantly, the culture and ecosystem of React is one of a framework. You chose React at the start of a project and it then affects everything else you build afterwards.
by benchloftbrunch | 2025-12-24 15:15:08+00:00
I would add to that, replace #include with a proper module system that fixes the encapsulation and redundant parsing problems once and for all.

It's 2025 and C++ modules still aren't suitable for real world use yet despite being standardized 5 years ago.

Additionally standardize the ABI up front so that different compilers can interoperate. Make namespaces native to the object file format.

Also, explicitly standardize a compiler optimization mode that does not try to exploit UB in eldritch ways that break basic assumptions about how the machine works for 1% performance gain. I get that's an undecidable problem so it's ok if some extra annotations (call them "attributes" and write them [[like this]]) are needed here for explicit optimizer hints.
by cogman10 | 2025-12-24 15:15:16+00:00
The power/right came from national security legislation written and enacted by elected officials. Because we have a government that works by proxy, it means that the leaders we elect are effectively supposed to represent the people they serve (that's the ideal. Obviously we've fallen WAY short of that).

Pragmatically, I think it's easy to recognize that the government should be allowed to have some secrets from the public. I think the clearest and most extreme example is the details of our nuclear armaments.

But the question of where the line is is a tricky one. IMO, we definitely allow the government far more secrets than it should have.
by ProjectArcturis | 2025-12-24 15:15:26+00:00
>In a few years they will have realigned the whole power dynamic in the country

I disagree. It felt that way for the first few months, but the wheels are coming off. Trump is too old and unpopular to steal a 3rd term. Therefore everyone around him has to worry about what will happen in 3 years, and plan for post-Trump rather than forever-Trump.
by simne | 2025-12-24 15:16:12+00:00
Well people, knowledge become belief. - Position of Moon creating tides, which affect some places very strong, because line of shore constantly moving more then by cup meters, so some operations need to be planned according to tides, this is not belief, this is fact. Position of Sun amplifies tides for up to 50%.
BTW, people knowing Astronomy, easy conclude, most extreme Sun tides amplification happen with Sun Eclipse.

I also seen few other wrong classifications.

Sorry, good idea, but such mistakes made it unplayable.
by pjmlp | 2025-12-24 15:16:34+00:00
Go could have learnt a few lessons from the languages that predated it, instead like the authors originally did with C, it was more fun to create their own thing, and leave a few warts that will never be fixed as Go will never leave beyond 1.<increment counter>.

At least it is much safer than C will ever be.

Rust still needs to get rid of its C++ dependency on LLVM, and eventually GCC.
by andy99 | 2025-12-24 15:18:15+00:00
I’m with you, I’ve had a range of professional jobs, but rarely much meaningful correspondence via email. There are definitely emails that might announce some deadline or deliverable, but the “email” part of the work might be adding a calendar reminder or something, not responding to it. If feels like (I’m sure people will disagree) email would be more of a time sink for people who have a secretarial or personal assistant role, where they are being asked to do lots of little things (get me time with your boss this week type stuff). For a developer, whether IC or manager, most coordination would take place through other channels, and not be a material part of the work.
by sebastiennight | 2025-12-24 15:19:12+00:00
I have helped someone get an executive job at a Fortune 500 company... by teaching them how to use the dev tools and edit the DOM to replace text and images.

They had been asked for an assignment as part of the interview process, where they were supposed to make suggestions regarding the company's offers. They showed up on the (MS teams) interview having revamped what looked like the live website (www. official website was visible in the browser bar).

The interviewers gave them the job pretty much on the spot, but did timidly ask at the end "do you mind putting it back though, for now?", which we still laugh about 5 years later
by ajb | 2025-12-24 15:19:18+00:00
That's unevenly distributed. Lots of people in London do walk or use public transport, but you still need many delivery drivers, tradespeople, etc and it doesn't make sense for them all to live outside the city. And people who don't usually drive occasionally need to use a vehicle, and then it's more stressful because you aren't used to having to know where the vehicular entrances are. It's too simplistic to just make provision for the majority and assume that it doesn't matter what the second order effects are.
by tzs | 2025-12-24 15:19:30+00:00
Their comment was in jest, but I've wondered before if left vs right hand driving could affect safety. As you note right-handed people are more common. The countries with the highest percentages of left-handed people are around 12-13%.

In countries that drive on the right then drivers use their dominant hand for any controls that are on the inward side and their other hand for the control that are on the outward side of the driver.

Generally that means that the non-dominant hand handles exterior lighting, turn signals, windows, and locks. The dominant hand handles windshield wipers, transmission, and anything on the center console such as the climate and entertainment systems, and often also the navigation system.

In left drive counties that is mostly reversed for right-handed people, with the possible exception of the exterior lighting, turn signals, and windshield wipers. Those exceptions are the controls that are usually on stalks attached to the steering column. From what I've read sometimes manufactures use the same stalk positions in left and right drive models instead of reversing them like they do the rest of the controls.

Could dominant vs non-dominant hand for operating things on the center console make a difference? If everyone obeyed safety recommendations I'd expect it to not make enough difference to be noticeable, but not everyone obeys safety recommendations 100% of the time.

If someone for example tried to type in a destination using the on-screen keyboard on the navigation system console while driving I'd expect that they would take longer to do so if they were using their non-dominant hand, so they would be distracted longer.
by cbeach | 2025-12-24 15:20:11+00:00
If you've ever read Thierry Breton's personal (and public) threats towards Elon Musk you'd understand who the real "bully and borderline sociopath" was.

Breton once threatened Musk simply for hosting an interview with the democratically-elected President of the US on X:

https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-elon-musk-donald-trump-in...

EU bureaucrats have behaved terribly and deserve our contempt.
by drewg123 | 2025-12-24 15:20:16+00:00
From a CDN perspective, whats missing is there is no kernel stack on FreeBSD / Linux, and no support for sendfile/sendpage and no support for segmentation offload entirely in hardware. So you can't just send an entire file (or a large range) and forget about it, like you can with TCP.

Some NICs, like Broadcom's newer ones, support crypto offloads, but this is not enough to be competitive with TCP / TLS. Especially since support for those offloads are not in any mainline kernel in Linux or BSD.