MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2025-12-30 19:49:39+00:00
Lets conceed that what you're saying is true (I didn't check but don't find it unebelievable).

"Percentage of taxes are paid by the top %1" is just one metric, but there's no reason why we should consider it the only criterion.

I would argue that in our world what you said might be true, and at the same time the bottom 90% lives their day to day with the threat that if they disobey their employer, their lives might be ruined, and I would further argue that the latter observation is a lot more telling about fairness in our society, than "top 1% pays more than bottom 90%"
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-30 19:49:44+00:00
> American parties always seem to maintain party discipline over their members, forcing those with other views to either remain silent, or leave.

I mean, why wouldn't they? If you ran a party, and one individual seem (from your perspective) to hold opinions that goes against what you and others believe the party is for, wouldn't you also want them to leave your party?

Shouldn't be that hard of a problem really, if we could accept that people change beliefs and opinions as life goes on, and if you have more than 2 political parties as real options, people could be a bit more diverse and nuanced with their spoken opinions.
by crote | 2025-12-30 19:50:08+00:00
Defend against what?

France has nukes, so those aren't a plausible threat. Any kind of land invasion is doomed to fail - the US didn't even manage to beat a bunch of goat herders in one of the poorest countries of the world. A naval blockade is the most likely to succeed - except for the whole "land bridge to Asia/Africa" part. And if the blockade does succeed and the continent starts to starve, there's the whole "France has nukes" part again...

Besides, do you really think China/India won't get involved? And do you really think the US public is going to accept their friends and family dying because some power-hungry politician got the braindead idea to send them against Europe? The reception will be worse than Vietnam!
by a4isms | 2025-12-30 19:50:09+00:00
"As the father of a daughter, I understand the need for feminism that I ignored as a son, brother, playmate, classmate, friend, neighbour, landlord, tenant, lover, teammate, colleague, report, supervisor, and fellow citizen."

That's a particularly icky formulation of personal connection, because it has overtones of paternity as property rights.
by cyberax | 2025-12-30 19:50:10+00:00
Our current system works very well. It provides predictability and protects the rights of people. That's also why it's heavily biased against rapid changes. It's not _perfect_ for sure.

But the sortition-based systems are in general quite terrible exactly because they lack the feedback loops that keep societies stable. The main problem with the current administration, for example, is its disdain for these checks and balances and desire to move fast and break all the written and unwritten traditions.

There are also examples of failed sortition-based systems. I can give you the Soviet Union as one example. On paper, it was ruled by the Supreme Council ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_Soviet_of_the_Soviet_U... ). Its delegates were chosen mostly randomly from workers and then approved by a public vote. Yet it was a complete rubber-stamp organization with zero actual power.

Sortition made sure of that, people couldn't form reliable alliances and power-hungry people who could initiate real reforms almost never actually got chosen.
by crazydoggers | 2025-12-30 19:50:15+00:00
I’m sure it has nothing to do with the fact Iran is so mismanaged and suffering from severe drought they are talking about water rations or evacuations in Tehran.. or the plummeting of their currency.. or the fact that the majority of the country doesn’t even support the current government [1] … no must be a conspiracy. </sarcasm>

1. https://www.iranintl.com/en/202302036145
by autoexec | 2025-12-30 19:50:16+00:00
Google search sucks and it's sucking worse all the time. Nobody knows what else to use though so people keep using it. The results are mostly spam and AI slop. If a searcher has to search several times to get information they used to get with a single query suddenly the average number of searches per searcher spikes and it looks like growth I guess. Worse, lots of people are trusting the AI results which is bound to lead them astray with lies and eventually be corrupted with ads/paid manipulation. For now though, the results Google returns are also mostly AI generated crap so at least people save themselves a click.
by silenced_trope | 2025-12-30 19:50:19+00:00
> We should instead restrict the franchise by exam to provably non-ignorant, non-evil critical thinkers so that we get representatives who are non-sociopaths that we can respect.

How do we prove non-evil?

Also the exam part brings to mind the Chinese imperial exams for civil service.

I don't know whether that's good or bad, it didn't work out well for them.
by jaggederest | 2025-12-30 19:50:57+00:00
In my own defense, the kinds of term limits I'm talking about are much lengthier than most people start out wanting, I think. I would term limit senators at 5 terms, perhaps, and representatives at 12 or 15? I think the issue is not so much long tenures per se as losing relevance by spending an entire lifetime in one position in government.
by glitchc | 2025-12-30 19:51:40+00:00
It would be better to hold referendums instead. An important decision should be brought directly to the populace rather than be driven by the whims of the currently elected party in power (regardless of political stripes). Examples of important questions are: Should we allow X people to immigrate per year? Should we go to war with country Y?Should the new tax rate be Z?

The Swiss do this. They are one of the populations most satisfied with their government. Referendums work.
by FridayoLeary | 2025-12-30 19:51:55+00:00
It will probably be crushed like all the other protests, unfortunately. But iran is in a worse state then it's ever been. The catalyst for this round is a currency collapse and a looming water crisis. Sadly, the Revolutionary corps seem well funded from oil money.

At the moment Iran is rebuilding it's rocket stockpile with help from china (something which Israel and the US should be much more proactive about IMO) in preparation for the next round of hostilities in which they will no doubt be humiliated again. They are probably hoping to hit more then 1 hospital and 3 residential blocks next time and retain what's left of their shattered ambitions and ego.

Still we can always hope for a regime collapse. From a foreign policy point of view they are weaker then ever. Security wise i don't know how they are doing.
by lucid-dev | 2025-12-30 19:52:18+00:00
Love this. May a recommend some kind of "disperse pieces to edge" feature/button, (or perhaps automatic behavior, flag-to-enable or not), so that when you zoom-out a bit, you can automatically "disperse" all the pieces to the edge or at least "equally space them" in the available space, etc.

I.e. the problem is a lot of time spent on moving the pieces off-of each other. While this is more pleasent in real-life tactile space, not as much fun when using the computer to have to click-and-drag all the pieces around (of course, sorting them etc, is up to the user, but just some kind of initial "see all the pieces in the space without them overlapping each other to the greatest extent possible depending on the total space avaliable given the current zoom settings" ...
by georgebcrawford | 2025-12-30 19:52:31+00:00
New Zealand isn’t on that list, but two parties generally take 70-80% of the vote. Last election (~65%) was an outlier due to the two leaders being pretty unpopular.

However, NZ has a proportional voting system that leads to coalitions forming governments. This is considered a good thing, but can lead to…interesting outcomes. The current government is very much the dog being wagged by a couple of nasty tails. Current PM is a weak “I've run a company so can run a country” type.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-12-30 19:52:41+00:00
Most things don't require SotA models.

But still, right now, you don't have to worry as even these SotA models are subsidized really so much and you can just use them for free on websites and then if you don't even want to type, go use a cheaper model or even a free model with something like opencode even to then act as a mini agent of things

Usually I just end up it being more focused in a single file which isn't really the best practise but its usually for prototyping purposes anyway so it ends up being really good

uv scripts are good for python, and I usually create golang single main.go files as well as I feel like it can be a binary, compile fast and cross compilation and still easy and simple so yeah :)
by phtrivier | 2025-12-30 19:52:43+00:00
The "let's pick people at random to discuss hairy topics" has been done at least three times in France in the form of "Convention Citoyenne".

In each case, people came up with relatively "popular" solutions (one of them is still in progress)

In each case, the elected officials all but ignored the output, on the ground that the body had not been elected, was manipulated by experts, had no responsibility and accountability, etc...

Anyone who solves this will indeed have found an improvement over elective democracy.

In the case of the US, a lower hanging fruit would be getting out of "elections that can easily be bought by corporations with litteral money".
by 2b3a51 | 2025-12-30 19:53:12+00:00
I was sort of thinking that these 'cables' ought really to be rendered in a teletypewriter font, but then having lower case would be anachronistic.

My teacher training (quite a few decades ago) suggested that for people with dyslexia you should set large quantities of text;

# right ragged so inter-word spacing constant;

# without hyphenation;

# with line spacing larger than word spacing;

# and broken up into sections with headings that describe the content of the section.

(As it happens I rarely need to use large chunks of text in basic maths teaching)
by blain | 2025-12-30 19:53:16+00:00
> German provider with 4 shared cores, 4GB of RAM, 120GB of SSD disk space, and a 1Gbit/sec internet connection

Where on earth did he find €4 VPS with these specs. For example Hetzner's cheapest VPS has 2 shared vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 40 GB NVME SSD.

The cheapest I found is https://contabo.com/en/vps/ but it still doesn't have 1 gb/s connection with that price.

Edit: typo
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-12-30 19:53:47+00:00
It stuns me that a polished 1:1 2K/XP/7 clone DE (which it mimics is a setting) hasn’t existed for a 10y+ already. It’s such an obvious target for a mass appeal Linux desktop that many techies and non-techies alike would happily use.

Rough approximations have been possible since the early 2000s, but they’re exactly that: rough approximations. Details matter, and when I boot up an old XP/7 box there are aspects in which they feel more polished and… I don’t know, finished? Complete? Compared to even the big popular DEs like KDE.

Building a DE explicitly as a clone of a specific environment would also do wonders to prevent feature creep and encourage focus on fixing bugs and optimization instead bells and whistles, which is something that modern software across the board could use an Everest sized helping of.
by constantcrying | 2025-12-30 19:53:54+00:00
There is a very hilarious genre of political "thinkers" whose entire view of politics is entirely delusional and who are so disconnected from reality that both their diagnosis and their solution looks ridiculous.

I get that Yarvin is an icky fascist bigot, but just read the political thinkers he got his ideas from. The idea that the elected representatives, much less the method by which representatives are chosen, have any meaningful impact on politics is just laughable.
by autoexec | 2025-12-30 19:54:03+00:00
Eventually the solution for this will be you paying the AI company to promote your products or suppress your competitors. Even now, chatbots are a terrible way to get product recommendations. They're trained on way too much ad copy and too many bullshit reviews. As ever, the best thing a company can do to advertise is simply to be excellent at what they do and be very affordable.
by LarsKrimi | 2025-12-30 19:54:05+00:00
Just to save people from wasting their time reading this drivel:

`
If this approach seems fringe, things get much further afield with language-specific unikernels like MirageOS that deeply embed a particular language runtime. On the one hand, allowing implementation only in a type-safe language allows for some of the acute reliability problems of unikernels to be circumvented. On the other hand, hope everything you need is in OCaml!
`

ToroKernel is written in freepascal.

All of the text before and after is completely irrelevant
by josephg | 2025-12-30 19:54:15+00:00
Yep. But docker doesn’t help you with desktop apps. And everything becomes so big!

I think Rob pike has the right idea with go just statically link everything wherever possible. These days I try to do the same, because so much less can go wrong for users.

People don’t seem to mind downloading a 30mb executable, so long as it actually works.
by avivo | 2025-12-30 19:54:35+00:00
There is a lot of potential in this. Not just for government democracy, but for also introducing democratic elements into tech/AI policy, when that tech has impact comparable to many governments.

I worked in tech, and after some formative experiences, shifted to working on helping ensuring ensure that tech's impact on society can serve the public interest. But that leaves the question of what "what is the public interest"?

Sortitition / lottocracy / deliberative democracy / mini-publics all roughly refer to the same way to answer that question — providing a representative microcosm with the space to deeply examine an issue, and come to a set of recommendations and decisions on it. Unlike with electoral democracy, it's faster to spin up and experiment with, and it's harder for bad actors to entrench power (elections can be useful, but they're one of many tools in the democratic toolbelt).

That thinking lead to https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/towards-platform-de... . That basic approach, has been somewhat picked up by Meta (https://www.wired.com/story/meta-ran-a-giant-experiment-in-g...) and Open AI (https://aligned.substack.com/p/a-proposal-for-importing-soci..., ~ leading to their democratic inputs and collective alignment work).

I've now started an organization focusing on applying this and other democratic paradigms to decision-making about AI (https://aidemocracyfoundation.org/) as a way to solve a variety of challenging governance problems across the AI stack.
If you're curious about it, our ICML paper goes into more detail: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.09222 .
by korse | 2025-12-30 19:54:42+00:00
>Founders have to focus on signal over noise. People who are not founders focus on... whatever.

This perspective seems extremely close minded, almost as if suggesting those who are not 'founders' (of silicon valley startups?) are incapable of rational thought or action.

There are many executives who have never 'founded' a VC backed company who would heartily disagree, not to mention all of the humans with other credentials who process information, make decisions and create value.
by bobajeff | 2025-12-30 19:54:56+00:00
This is really cool. Looks like it has a way for me to use my own dynamic linker and glibc version *.

At some point I've got to try this. I think it would be nice to have some tools to turn an existing programs into a zapps (there many such tools for making AppImages today).

* https://github.com/warptools/ldshim
by silisili | 2025-12-30 19:55:36+00:00
Oh it could be much, much worse. I can only imagine the harebrained ideas that would be popular. No more taxes of any kind. Free beer and cigarettes. Monthly checks of, I don't know, $10k a person.

At some point you need adults in the room(in mind, not age). Our system is obviously not great, but this is a way to make it much worse.
by XenophileJKO | 2025-12-30 19:55:51+00:00
You are still in denial of what an LLM actually is capable of in the near-mid term.

In the current architecture there are mathmatical limitations on what it can do with information. However, tool use and external orchestration allow it to work around many (maybe all) those limitations.

The current models have brittle parts and some bad tendencies.. but they will continue to eat up the executive thought ladder.

I think it is better to understand this and position yourself higher and higher on that chain while learning what are the weak areas in the current generation of models.

Your line of thinking is like hiding in a corner while the water is rising. You are right, it is a safe corner, but probably not for long.
by crote | 2025-12-30 19:56:00+00:00
Yes, and Europe will start confiscating European assets of American companies. Your point being?

> The military is irrelevant as long as usd is the reserve currency most countries use.

The USD is rapidly losing this status, though. The current president's policies has turned the US into an extremely unreliable trade partner, so more and more trades are being done in EUR.
by MadameMinty | 2025-12-30 19:56:18+00:00
I imagine the random person, if they were to accept, would likely find themselves out of depth and simply outsource most of the job to whoever convinces them they're the right choice.

The system would then morph into a variant of representative democracy. Instead of millions voting for, say, around a thousand of various level representatives, you get a random thousand "voting" for "consultants".

These consultants would be directly hired by the random thousand to do the work for them. They would predicably have marketing campaigns to make themselves seem the right pick. They might even offer their services for free. Demagoguery and corporate sponsorship as usual.

In the end 1000 people would hire, say, 1-1000 consultants to represent them. Thus emulating the original process, or worse. The only difference is the tiny electorate, which increases volatility.

If you'd like to regulate it to prevent this, you'd have to expend an effort and fight similar pressures as with doing it in any other system.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-30 19:56:25+00:00
I can't really think of any "wholesale all lobbying forbidden", but at least for specific industries there are a couple. "WHO FCTC Article 5.3" which is about limiting the influence of tobacco companies is probably the first that comes to mind, and the most famous example. Singapore I think recently done some legislative changes around lobbying as well, but I'd confess to not knowing much about it, maybe someone here could fill out the blanks if they have the knowledge already.
by alkh | 2025-12-30 19:56:31+00:00
Have to post this monstrocity that let's you either run a python script with uv or with python directly if uv is not installed(for some of my collegues)

#!/usr/bin/env bash

""":"

if command -v uv > /dev/null

then exec uv run --script "$0" "$@"

else

exec python3 "$0" "$@"

fi

":"""
by keeganpoppen | 2025-12-30 19:56:43+00:00
damn… i am a big fan of bryan and i thought i was a big fan of unikernels… well, i still am, but all the points he makes are absolutely well-founded. i will say, in contraposition to the esteemed (and hilarious) mr. cantrill, that it is quite incredible to get to the end of an article about unikernels without seeing any mention of how the “warmup” time for a unikernel is subsecond whereas the warmup time for, say, containers is… let’s just call it longer than the warmup time for the water i am heating to make some pourover coffee after i finish my silly post. to dismiss this as a profound advantage is to definitely sell the idea more than a little short.

but at the same time i do think it is fair at this juncture to compare the tech to things like wasm, with which unikernels are much more of a direct competitor than containers. it is ironic because i can already hear in my head the hilarious tirade he would unleash about how horrific docker is in every way, debugging especially, but yet somehow this is worse for containers than for unikernels. my view at the present is that unikernels are fantastic for software you trust well enough to compile down to the studs, and the jury is still out on their efficacy beyond that. but holy fuck i seear to god i have spent more time fucking with docker than many professional programmers have spent learning their craft en toto, and i have nothing to show for it. it sucks every time, no matter what. my only gratitude for that experience revolves around (1) saving other peoples’ time on my team (same goes for git, but git is, indisputably, a “good” technology, all things considered, which redeems it entirely), and (2) it motivated me to learn about all the features that linux, systemd, et al. have (chroot jails, namespaces, etc.) in a way that surely exceeds my natural interest level.
by a4isms | 2025-12-30 19:57:05+00:00
If you ran a party, and one individual seem (from your perspective) to hold opinions that goes against what you and others believe the party is for, wouldn't you also want them to leave your party?

I have run and worked for businesses in which dissenting views were important to our success. I don't personally find your argument persuasive.

But I do know people who find that kind of thing very persuasive: I think it would most appeal to the type of person who believes that groups of people should be managed in a strict hierarchal manner, with the people on top managing things for their own benefit.

And—confirmation bias alert—IMO that's absolutely what both of America's parties do, and why it is difficult for their voters to get even of a fraction of the benefits that the donors (who may donate to both parties) enjoy.
by lulzx | 2025-12-30 19:57:10+00:00
I built a PDF text extraction library in Zig that's significantly faster than MuPDF for text extraction workloads.

~17k pages/sec peak throughput.

Key choices: memory-mapped I/O, SIMD string search, parallel page extraction, streaming output. Handles CID fonts, incremental updates, all common compression filters.

~5,000 lines, no dependencies, compiles in <2s.

Why it's fast:

- Memory-mapped file I/O (no read syscalls)
- Zero-copy parsing where possible
- SIMD-accelerated string search for finding PDF structures
- Parallel extraction across pages using Zig's thread pool
- Streaming output (no intermediate allocations for extracted text)

What it handles:

- XRef tables and streams (PDF 1.5+)
- Incremental PDF updates (/Prev chain)
- FlateDecode, ASCII85, LZW, RunLength decompression
- Font encodings: WinAnsi, MacRoman, ToUnicode CMap
- CID fonts (Type0, Identity-H/V, UTF-16BE with surrogate pairs)
by mlsu | 2025-12-30 19:57:12+00:00
It's so frustrating. We already created a font for government communication, Public Sans. It looks great, it's very strong, neutral, readable, and respectable. Clearly a lot of effort went into making it accessible etc.

But we have to throw that away because the wrong party was in charge when it happened.

https://public-sans.digital.gov/

I'm so sick of this RETVRN crap happening seemingly everywhere. Yes, public buildings and typefaces and etc are uglier than they used to be. That's not because our aesthetic standards changed; it's because we financialized and technologized the entire economy and made it impossible to make an honest living as a plasterworker, typesetter, designer, etc. Those old buildings are beautiful because they were made by human beings who were allowed to develop their skills and aesthetic preferences outside of a completely efficientized, marketized, computerized system.

When we RETVRN by telling the machine to output different aesthetic preferences, it will emit a cheap simulacra of the beauty of the past. Which imo is infinitely more depressing than any of the modern crap we have now. Think Kentucky suburb McMansions, everywhere, forever. That's what these guys want.