MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by the_mitsuhiko | 2025-12-20 15:00:37+00:00
GitHub, Copilot and VS Code are I believe the same org. Or at least, that’s what the branding implies. Copilot / VS Code lost all headstart and barely catch up, GitHub is currently largely being seen as a leader less organization that has lost it’s direction. The recent outrage about pricing changes being an excellent example of this.
by ncruces | 2025-12-20 15:00:43+00:00
The IT guy is the TIC professor, who does it in excess of work. The guy is the son of the former TIC professor. And of course, I was roped in to help for my kids’ classes.

And yes, it includes kids from at least 2nd grade. My COVID kids got their laptop on 1st grade, but that's no longer the case.
by rramadass | 2025-12-20 15:04:22+00:00
They are wrong and dangerous takes on Pranayama. I saw a video of Wim Hof demonstrating his technique and the violence of the technique elicited a immediate no-no from me who studies this (and related) subjects.

People should get some popular books on Pranayama and then also get the original books so that they can see what the original text actually says. Follow all the cautions mentioned before starting the practice, do everything gently and proceed slowly. If you do it properly, you will see immediate results in terms of self-feeling within a week. You will also see external signs like clear skin, whites of the eyes becoming clearer, gait/body becoming lighter etc. They are all mentioned in the texts which indicate to the student that he is doing the practice correctly.

For example, here is a Tibetan Yogi demonstrating a specific type of exercise+pranayama. It is dynamic but not violent - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BESrdlf-cPg
by evanjrowley | 2025-12-20 15:04:56+00:00
Sometime around 2007, my late father was investigated by the US Secret Service for multiple reasons, including a "manifesto" that he somehow uploaded to the public directory on a White House web server.

A decade later, I was responsible for securing systems in the same type of environment. Various incidents demonstrated that these types of compromises are easier than you might imagine.

Infosec of US government networks changes less over the years than senior leadership would have you believe.
by al_borland | 2025-12-20 15:05:18+00:00
> Mullvad is in an ideal situation to not need this data because their customers are technical, identical, and stateless.

A lot of companies could be in similar situations, but choose not to be.

All of retail, for example. Target does significant amounts of data collection to track their customers. This is a choice. They could let users simply buy things, pay for them, and store nothing. This used to be the business model. For online orders, they could purge everything after the return window passed. The order data shouldn’t be needed after that. For brick and mortar, it should be a very straightforward business. However, I’m routinely asked for my zip code or phone number when I check out at stores. Loyalty cards are also a way to incentivize customers to give up this data (https://xkcd.com/2006/).

TVs are another big one. They are all “smart” now, and collect significant amounts of data. I don’t know anyone who would be upset with a simple screen that just let you change inputs and brightness settings, and let people plug stuff into it. Nothing needs to be collected or phone home.

A lot of the logs that are collected in the name of troubleshooting and bug fixing exist because the products are over-complicated or not thoroughly tested before release. The ability to update things later lowers the bar for release and gives a pass for adding all this complexity that users don’t really want. There is a lot of complexity in the smart TV that they might want logs for, but none of it improves the user experience, it’s all in support of the real business model that’s hidden from the user.
by titzer | 2025-12-20 15:05:38+00:00
> If you use our servers for illegal activity, law enforcement can still investigate. They just can't start with "who owns this account" because we can't answer that question.

You're going to have a tussle with law enforcement, and you're going to lose. Your service will last < 2 years because you will not be able to afford the lawyers you need to defend against even one muscle move by the government.

Good luck!
by snapplebobapple | 2025-12-20 15:07:54+00:00
i dont think it has anything to do with threats to way of life. It has everything to do with public subsidy of physics that has pushed peripherary mathematics forward without much to show for actual physics advancements. New observations cause changes to string theory not validation of string theory. String theorists can keep do*ng their string theory but its time to subsidize something(so else and see if that leads to actual advancement. I think sabbine hossenfelder is largely correct about this
by runarberg | 2025-12-20 15:08:35+00:00
Note that the comma in browserlist queries are OR. So if any given browser version still has > 0.2% usage, it is included. This would include Chrome 109 which is three year old. Meaning developers with this browswerlist target would fail their static analysis / peer review (actually even a more reasonable > 0.5% still fails on Chrome 109) if they used a feature which Chrome 109 doesn’t support without graceful degradation or polyfill.

Furthermore the "baseline widely available" target (which IMO is a much better target and will probably become the recommendation pretty soon) includes versions of the popular browsers going back 30 months, meaning a competent team of web devs with a qualified QA process should not deliver software which won‘t work on your 2 year old browser.

I can‘t speak for the developers of the websites which break on your 2 year old browser... Maybe they don‘t have a good QA process. Or maybe you were visiting somebodies hobby project (personally I only target "baseline newly available" in my own hobby projects; as I am coding mostly for my own amusement). But I think it is a reasonable assumption that user tend to update their browsers every 30 months, and you won‘t loose too many customers if you occasionally brake things for the users which don’t.
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2025-12-20 15:08:39+00:00
Physicist here. My PhD is in an area that was spawned into existence due to inspiration coming from string theory, not string theory proper.

I've made some comments here [1] to discuss how I see the situation. It's difficult to be thorought in the world of research, and even more so in an HN comment. I'll be writing more as the subject pops up in HN.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46336655
by 20k | 2025-12-20 15:08:54+00:00
The problem with sabine is that she's become the worst person to make a correct point for the wrong reasons

If you do research it becomes pretty apparent that a high number papers are not great. There's varying issues, but a big one is that the funding model incentivises pumping out papers which are often of low quality, researching whatever happens to be in vogue at the moment

Literally everyone I've ever talked to in research as a frank conversation knows that this is a massive problem, but nobody wants to talk about it publicly. Research funding is already completely screwed as it is, and researchers are incredibly aware of how fragile their livelihoods are

Its clearly leading to a big reduction in the quality of the literature. I went on a replication spree recently and found that a pretty decent chunk of the field I was working in was completely unreplicable by me, with a few papers that I strongly suspect 'massaged' their results for various reasons

I wish someone would talk about this who wasn't also in bed with right wing grifters, and was actually credible. We need someone more like ben goldacre for physics

Sabine's most interesting content is the paper reviews, and where she sticks to actually examining the evidence - but it makes up a tiny fraction of what she produces these days, and her support for some truly grim figures is just gross
by tdeck | 2025-12-20 15:10:14+00:00
> had been very distrustful of government in-general, and I suspect they still are.

They were never really distrustful of the government. People who really don't trust the government want to downsize the parts that can kick down your door and point a gun at you. These people have demonstrated time and again that they want more of that, because they actually trust that institutions of state violence will be on their side and uphold their interests.

Instead what they oppose are parts of the government they suspect are helping people and groups they dislike. This is what the American right reliably can't stand, for all the flavor of the month posturing they might engage in to keep things from getting stale.
by osnium123 | 2025-12-20 15:10:53+00:00
When Intel Custom Foundry started, Intel was in the lead with process technology and that may have led to a sense of arrogance and also apprehension about the need to open up and disclose information to third parties like design rules. Now that Intel is far behind TSMC and Samsung in semiconductor technology, they have less to lose and hopefully they have been humbled enough to be desperate for foundry customers.
by gnfargbl | 2025-12-20 15:11:17+00:00
People often say that the problem with string theory is that it doesn't make any prediction, but that's not quite right: the problem is that it can make almost any prediction you want it to make. It is really less of a "theory" in its own right and more of a mathematical framework for constructing theories.

One day some unusual observation will come along from somewhere, and that will be the loose end that allows someone to start pulling at the whole ball of yarn. Will this happen in our lifetimes? Unlikely, I think.
by PunchyHamster | 2025-12-20 15:12:55+00:00
> But then you as a consumer/user of Debian packages need to stay on top of things when they change in backwards-incompatible ways.

If you need latest packages, you have to do it anyway.

> I believe the sweet spot is Debian-like stable as the base platform to build on top of, and then commercial-support in a similar way for any dependencies you must have more recent versions on top.

That if the company can build packages properly. Also too old OS deps sometimes do throw wrench in the works.

Tho frankly "latest Debian Testing" have far smaller chance breaking something than "latest piece of software that couldn't figure out how to upstream to Debian"
by throw310822 | 2025-12-20 15:13:12+00:00
> China is decidedly anti democratic and authoritarian

Let's also say that democracy is very important internally. But as a EU citizen (or even better as a middle east citizen) whether they're democratic or authoritarian makes very little difference to me- I don't get a say in what they do. And in the case of the ME, it wasn't China or its allies that reduced several countries to rubble, it was the democratic US.

> it is prudent to not depend on those who have a fundamentally different and incompatible world view

There are no such things as "incompatible world view" but certainly closer or more distant ones. And I think the fundamental values of the US are pretty far away from those of the EU.
by 20k | 2025-12-20 15:13:41+00:00
This is one of the reasons why I'm surprised to see so many people jump on board. We're clearly in the "release product for free/cheap to gain customers" portion of the enshittification plan, before the company starts making it completely garbage to extract as much money as possible from the userbase

Having good quality dev tools is non negotiable, and I have a feeling that a lot of people are going to find out the hard way that reliability and it not being owned by profit seeking company is the #1 thing you want in your environment
by hiddendoom45 | 2025-12-20 15:13:48+00:00
I was burnt by the mutability of keys in go maps a few months ago, I'm not sure exactly how go handles it internally but it ended up with the map growing and duplicate keys in the key list when looking at it with a debugger.

The footgun was that url.QueryUnescape returned a slice of the original string if nothing needed to be escaped so if the original string was modified, it would modify the key in the map if you put the returned slice directly into the map.
by jrronimo | 2025-12-20 15:14:23+00:00
I'm the Manager of the Computing group at JILA at CU, where utcnist*.colorado.edu used to be housed. Those machines were, for years, consistently the highest bandwidth usage computers on campus.

Unfortunately, the HP cesium clock that backed the utcnist systems failed a few weeks ago, so they're offline. I believe the plan is to decommission those servers anyway - NIST doesn't even list them on the NTP status page anymore, and Judah Levine has retired (though he still comes in frequently). Judah told me in the past that the typical plan in this situation is that you reference a spare HP clock with the clock at NIST, then drive it over to JILA backed by some sort of battery and put it in the rack, then send in the broken one for refurb (~$20k-$40k; new box is closer to $75k). The same is true for the WWVB station, should its clocks fail.

There is fiber that connects NIST to CU (it's part of the BRAN - Boulder Research and Administration Network). Typically that's used when comparing some of the new clocks at JILA (like Jun Ye's strontium clock) to NIST's reference. Fun fact: Some years back the group was noticing loss due to the fiber couplers in various closets between JILA & NIST... so they went to the closets and directly spliced the fibers to each other. It's now one single strand of fiber between JILA & NIST Boulder.

That fiber wasn't connected to the clock that backed utcnist though. utcnist's clock was a commercial cesium clock box from HP that was also fed by GPS. This setup was not particularly sensitive to people being in the room or anything.

Another fun fact: utcnist3 was an FPGA developed in-house to respond to NTP traffic. Super cool project, though I didn't have anything to do with it, haha.
by PunchyHamster | 2025-12-20 15:14:55+00:00
> If someone gets a hold of your key, can't they also just change your backup deletion policy, even if it supported one?

Minio have full on ACLs so you can just create a key that can only write/read but not change any settings like that.

So you just need to keep the "master key" that you use for setup away from potentially vulnerable devices, the "backup key" doesn't need those permissions.
by CraigJPerry | 2025-12-20 15:15:22+00:00
Thats quite an impressive amount of functionality for not much code. Tokei says 4.4k sloc in the ui dir which contains the editor implementation. I was over 25k sloc for a less ambitious editor in typescript recently.

I'm also a bit jealous of how clean the reframe usage model is, i really liked the dominoes explanation when i first learned about it. https://day8.github.io/re-frame-wip/dominoes-60k/
by adgjlsfhk1 | 2025-12-20 15:15:43+00:00
I think it is fair to argue that there is a strong correlation between criticality of data and network scale. Most small buisnesses don't need anything S3 scale, but they also don't need 24 hour uptime, and losing the most recent day of data is annoying rather than catastrophic, so they can probably get away without flushing but with daily asynchronous backups to a different machine and a 1 minute UPS to allow for safe storage in the event of a power outage.
by 8n4vidtmkvmk | 2025-12-20 15:15:44+00:00
Good library. API can be a bit quirky. Like if you want to read image size before and/or after a resize or if you do or don't want to respect the image orientation/rotation in the image meta data. I usually have to convert to a buffer and then back to Sharp again for it to reload the changes but it works!
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-12-20 15:17:40+00:00
> Most of her criticism is with media coverage of string theory, not the research or the researchers.

I pretty strongly disagree with that categorization of Collier's video, as it makes it sound like string theorists were innocent bystanders and "the big bad media" just ran overboard.

I think she puts the blame squarely on string theorists (e.g. "celebrity string theorists who wrote all these books") as constantly hyping up the field with promises of "in a decade it will be amazing" - a phrase she uses to great dramatic effect throughout the video - despite never acknowledging the fact that it fails miserably at making testable predictions.

When she says "they lied to us", the "they" she's clearly talking about are specific researchers in the field (which she names), and the string research community more broadly, who are hyping up their field, not just "the media".
by timschmidt | 2025-12-20 15:18:03+00:00
OR you respect individual liberty and agency, hold individuals responsible for their actions, instead of tools, and avoid becoming everyone's condescending nanny.

Your pre-judgement of acceptable hammer uses would rob hammer owners of responsible and justified self-defense and defense of others in situations in which there are no other options, as well as other legally and socially accepted uses which do not fit your pre-conceived ideas.
by jshaqaw | 2025-12-20 15:19:03+00:00
Theoretical physics is subsidizing a handful of people sitting at white boards.

Even accepting the premise that string theory is wrong I can list hundreds of ways the US budget spews money down black holes orders of magnitude bigger. The spending on string theory isn’t even a rounding error compared to the way my tax dollars are allocated to special interest pork.

But only string theory impinges on a generation of cranks who are convinced they alone have the insight into the true ToE and would be recognized as the new Einstein were it not for some entrenched cabal. Maybe I shouldn’t reflexively trust “big science” or something but it’s also not great to evaluate science by who is more charismatically narcissistic on a podcast.

Again, I don’t have a big axe to grind on the merits here. But it’s hilarious that folks with zero science background past middle school hear some of these cranks on YouTube and feel worthy to decry Witten as an enemy of the people. Between the podcast bro who was just told his ToE was right by ChatGPT and Witten I’ll take Witten.
by al_borland | 2025-12-20 15:19:27+00:00
I wish I had a list, as you said, they are in short supply. If there is a site out there that catalogs simple straightforward business that don’t compromise a customers ability to be anonymous, I’d like it very much.

A HN user posted about a site they made for faxing documents the other day. It’s a good example of how I think most things should be setup in many cases. You pay a fee and it sends a fax, that is very simple to understand. There are no accounts and the documents are only stored long enough to fulfill the service.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46310161

You can imagine how most “modern” sites would handle faxing. Make an account, link a credit card, provide your address to validate the credit card. Then store all the faxes that were sent, claiming it’s for easy reference. Meanwhile it’s running OCR on them in the background to build a profile with a wealth of personal data. After all, people don’t tend to fax trivial things. In addition to the profits from the user, they are making a killing on selling data to advertisers… but those details are hidden away in legalese of the fine print in a policy no one actually reads.
by superkuh | 2025-12-20 15:21:05+00:00
Rydberg atoms aren't antennas. When modulated and then read out by the electrical field of a laser they can be used to infer the ambient electrical field at a arbitrary frequency over very, very narrow frequency bandwidths. This can be used to receive radio signals. But it's not very good at it and it's not an antenna. While the specific frequency can be tuned over a very large range the instantaneous bandwidth is still too narrow to actually receive anything but narrowband carrier (no modulation wings) and barely that.

These are physics tools for specific things, not general radio receivers for transmitted information.
by dfawcus | 2025-12-20 15:21:29+00:00
Partially "slamming" where agents would try to get folks to switch to a different billing provider, and get paid a commission. So some fraudulently "sign up" random addresses they were supposed to visit.

The other case has been miscommunication over phone or email to someone actually requesting to change billing provider. Or error on the part of the potential customer.

I've had a bill from some random billing provider. In my case it is common for folks newly arriving in the block of flats to get the digits of the address transposed. Due to them using the common English convention, whereas the part of Scotland I'm in uses a different convention.
by jonahbenton | 2025-12-20 15:22:31+00:00
City Journal is a right wing rag whose opinions represent propaganda. There is one correct point that the 2019 law eliminating rent increases tied to capital improvements is broken. But its other points are simply not correct. Vouchers are not a like for like replacement for stabilization. Like work and other gates applied to SNAP and similar programs, they are fundamentally broken and inhumane.
by cess11 | 2025-12-20 15:23:10+00:00
What a bizarre description of what the US did.

Greenland has been inching towards independence since the seventies, because that's the common ambition of greenlandic peoples and it's slow because there are rather deep ties between Denmark and Greenland. These ties are to some extent very negative for the greenlanders, they're generally discriminated against and have been viciously mistreated at times, but a quick clean cut would also be quite painful for them.

In the seventies Greenland joined the EU predecessor EEC with Denmark, quickly realised that europeans were emptying their fishing waters and in the early eighties left the union. It's the only entity to have done so. Then the independence process trudged on, they self-manage in many areas now, even more since a 2008 referendum where some 75% or so voted in favour of independence. Since 2009 there is a law that says that Greenland can become independent whenever they want, as long as it's approved by greenlander referendum and the danish parliament.

To the extent they're a colony international law also clearly gives them the right to unilaterally declare independence. A majority of greenlanders are likely still in favour, but a majority also would prefer to postpone it if it would result in worse living conditions, since that's what polls usually conclude.

Ignoring half a century of rather delicate politics and independence ambitions the US shat all over it and said that they wanted to buy it, and then several years later said that they might just annex instead. This is quite belligerent and nasty behaviour, which in my opinion should have caused european countries to start dumping US bonds and stop answering calls from the White House.
by gus_massa | 2025-12-20 15:23:32+00:00
> The person is a long-time user and is very enthusiastic about the app.

Can this person program?

---

I agree with the the other comments. Anyway, which project? language-learning-tool?

Do you like the general idea of the PR? Is it possible to split the PR in a few smaller one? Is it possible to merge one part and keep it disabled by default for most users?
by garretraziel | 2025-12-20 15:23:39+00:00
I have tried this very same combination - F12 + FreeBSD + KDE on Wayland and WiFi works to me out of the box (even during installation!), but a lot of things doesn’t work for me - suspend and resume doesn’t work at all (even when I blacklist WiFi kernel module - suspend starts working, but resume doesn’t). A lot of apps on KDE also crash for me - every time I try to run Konqueror or Falkon they crash immediately).