MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Teever | 2025-12-05 20:09:38+00:00
Yeah but that's a bit of a motte-and-bailey fallacy isn't it?

Just because the chemical in question is safer than the previously existing alternatives doesn't mean that the way that Monsanto promoted it and marketed it for use and the way people ended up using it because they believed that marketing didn't result in a net greater detriment to society and the ecosystem than if we had adopted totally different pest management protocols that didn't require as many chemicals that a company like Monsanto conveniently sells.

I had a boss at a greenhouse tell me once that his old-timey agriculture prof at a big university would swear by the safety of glyphosate and he would literally drinking a shot glass of the stuff in every first year class like he was that dude who drank H. pylori to prove ulcers were caused by an infection.

This kind of insane grandstanding where a professor openly drinks herbicides for years in university classrooms came from absurd marketing from Monsanto and neither of these things have any place in our society.

Monsanto had a financial interest to make that professor into a fervent Jonestown-esque believer of their product and the end result was that spread that fervour to thousands of students who went out into the industry and figured that if it's alright for that guy to drink it then it must be alright to spray that shit everywhere as often as they want.

The downstream effect of that is you're on HN in 2018 advocating for glyphosate and then again in 2025 when someone points out how ubiquitous confidentially incorrect opinions about glycophosate are.
by ACCount37 | 2025-12-05 20:10:14+00:00
Deep space missions yes. But Starlink isn't deep space - and neither is the vast majority of commercial payloads.

Propellant transfer is relevant because it's vital for sending entire Starships to Moon and Mars - which are the exciting Starship missions. This includes Artemis. But commercially? Artemis contract isn't even a large part of SpaceX's revenue.
Ask HN: Cloudflare WAF Alternatives?
by rco8786 | 2025-12-05 20:10:37+00:00
I don't know if we're ready to pull the trigger yet, but curious if other folks are looking at alternatives.

The WAF is great, but recent events have made it obvious that having a single point of failure entirely defeats the purpose of DNS being a distributed/decentralized service.

Is anyone doing anything creative here? We like the features that the WAF provides - but not at the expense of global outages. If you have a 3 9s availability SLA, you've just blown 90% of your allotted downtime because of Cloudflare's WAF.
by loughnane | 2025-12-05 20:11:12+00:00
I use miniflux and like it. Still, this post got me thinking.

I’d like to try out a feature where by self-hosted instance learns what I like and highlights relevant posts in my feed. Then I can go through the other ones later.

Main things are that I would control what feeds go in and there is no monetization incentive since it’s self-hosted.
by gf000 | 2025-12-05 20:11:22+00:00
Well, it's far from trivial to introduce such a change if you don't want to throw away 3 decades of code/assumptions. Of course null safety would be very welcome, I'm with you on this.

As for unchecked exceptions, that may be a bit of an "unreasonable ask". The only language that properly solves the problem are languages with effect types, which are an active research area. Every other language have either FP-like error values, or just unchecked exceptions (and there are terrible "solutions" like errno and whatever go does), or most likely both. E.g. Haskell will also throw exceptions, not everything is encoded as a value.

In my opinion both is the most reasonable approach, when you expect an error case, encode it as the return type (e.g. parsing an Integer is expected to fail). But system failures should not go there, exceptions solve it better (stuff like the million kind of connection/file system issues).
by delusional | 2025-12-05 20:11:23+00:00
> If I were an asshole, I would have trained them poorly and drug it out.

That's of course the obvious way this goes wrong. Bad intentions. The much more insidious version is that you could have just been a terrible teachers, maybe you suck at training your peers, and you don't know.

The end result is the same. You look like the only person who gets it amongst the riff-raff, but in this case you don't even have a choice. The system has produced a poor outcome not because anybody abused it, but because it was a bad system.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-05 20:12:00+00:00
> Phoenicians made a strategic mistake at the outset of the Punic wars

Out of curiosity, what would that be? I'd argue Rome's ability to sustain martial force well beyond what others would have considered reasonable was decisive in their advantage. Their culture, meanwhile, in assimilating and appropriating from outsiders meant Scipio was able to learn from Hannibal, and the Senate was willing to support his novel ideas. (Granted, Carthage is a bad example since they were a diversified maritime empire. They just got conquered.)
by varispeed | 2025-12-05 20:12:12+00:00
I found the hard way that nowadays manufacturer's authorised (branded) service centres optimise for making you get rid of the car. For instance, I had something wrong with the car, they kept gaslighting me that the car is absolutely within specs and drive exactly how it should. Next appointment they admitted that maybe something indeed is wrong, but probably not. After complaint they said the car is faulty but it will be very very expensive to repair and maybe I should consider buying a new one. They they offered me part exchange for one of their approved used models framing it as a gesture of good will and that it will be cheaper than the repair. Unbelievable.
Ask HN: Did Mark Zuckerberg try to recruit you with soup?
by ddeguzman | 2025-12-05 20:12:23+00:00
I'm a reporter with Eater, and I'm curious about the rumors that Mark Zuckerberg delivered "homemade soup" to recruit folks to Meta.

Has anyone heard of this happening to someone they know, or experienced it themself? I'm curious to hear some personal or second-hand stories.

From Fortune: https://fortune.com/2025/12/03/mark-zuckerberg-hand-delivering-soup-poach-talent-openai-sam-altman/

Another story on the topic: https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-soup-story-openaai-employee-recruiting-attempt-2025-12
by simonw | 2025-12-05 20:12:34+00:00
I was surprised at how poorly GPT-5 did in comparison to Opus 4.1 and Gemini 2.5 on a pretty simple OCR task a few months ago - I should run that again against the latest models and see how they do. https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/29/the-perils-of-vibe-cod...
by rsync | 2025-12-05 20:13:25+00:00
"So I ended up using glyphosate, but I'm looking for something better."

Not for everyone and not for every situation, but ...

If you get a propane torch - the full sized ones that attach to a 5gal. propane tank - you can very quickly point-and-shoot a large area with similar effort expended to walking around spraying a liquid.

We have a 2500sf veranda made of decomposed granite and it takes about four man-hours to fully clear it of all creepers and flat broadleafs and all the other things that are impossible to pull by hand ... and since it kills them you're clear for the season ...
by ben_w | 2025-12-05 20:13:52+00:00
> Now with AI they're extracting our souls. Who do they expect to sell them to?

Expect? To work those souls to build the Dyson swarms.

Well, some of them, anyway. Zuckerberg clearly uses the word "superintelligence" as a buzzword, he doesn't buy that vison for how "super" it could be given what he says his users will do with it.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-12-05 20:13:55+00:00
The main difference I've noticed is that the core devs in the rust community are, above all, extremely thoughtful and systematic about how language changes address the core language goals. The zig devs I've interacted with seem much more focused on having a clean developer experience instead of trying to find elegant solutions to hard language design problems. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's a very different thing. In particular, the borrow checker is enforcing rules 99% of your pointer code should be following anyway.

The main complaint about the borrow checker is that what seem like trivial changes can have subtle implications that require wildly different ownership patterns to be made correct. Rust tells you something's wrong. If you don't thoroughly understand how you're using pointers (which few people do), it can feel like trivial changes exploding into much larger refactors than you'd need in languages where the rules aren't statically enforced.
by VerifiedReports | 2025-12-05 20:13:55+00:00
Nothing in there indicates "misunderstanding." You're simply declaring, without evidence, that the difference in quality "is not particularly meaningful." Whether it's meaningful or not to you is irrelevant; the point is that it's unnecessary.

You are ignoring the fact that the scheme described in the article does not retain the pixel data any more than what I'm proposing does; in fact, it probably retains less, even if only slightly. The analysis phase examines grain, comes up with a set of parameters to simulate it, and then removes it. When it's re-added, it's only a generated simulation. The integrity of the "pixel data" you're citing is lost. So you might as well just allow content creators to skip the pointless adding/analyzing/removing of grain and provide the "grain" directly.

Furthermore, you note that the creator may provide the footage as a JPEG2000 (DCP) or ProRes master; both of those use lossy compression that will waste quality on fake grain that's going to be stripped anyway.

Would they deliver this same "clean" master along with grain metadata to services not using AV1 or similar? Nope. In that case they'd bake the grain in and be on their way.

The article describes a stream of grain metadata to accompany each frame or shot, to be used to generate grain on the fly. It was acquired through analysis of the footage. It is totally reasonable to suggest that this analysis step can be eliminated and the metadata provided by the creator expressly.

And yes I'm well aware that West Wing was shot with optical filters; that's the point of my comment. The dated look is baked in. If the creators or owner wanted to rein in or eliminate it to make the show more relatable to modern audiences, they couldn't. Whether they should is a matter of opinion. But if you look at the restoration and updating of the Star Trek original series, you see that it's possible to reduce the visual cheesiness and yet not go so far as to ruin the flavor of the show.
by drnick1 | 2025-12-05 20:14:30+00:00
I have seen this time and time again: first complain that C/C++ are too complex or lack feature X, new language is proposed, then sooner or later people find out that's it's not fast, expressive, flexible enough or imposes a nonstandard way of doing things (Rust), then back to C/C++ and few years after the cycle repeats.
by hellojesus | 2025-12-05 20:14:36+00:00
Given the negative responses, I'd like to strengthen the position against positive rights by stating that positive rights require slavery the extreme whereas negative rights do not.

If the government guarantees food for children (or anyone), the government must provide it. If nobody is willing to be a farmer at any rate the private or public sector affords, the government must force someone to be a farmer to produce food to fulfill their positive right grant.
by Aurornis | 2025-12-05 20:15:09+00:00
> Yeah but that's a bit of a motte-and-bailey fallacy isn't it?

Speaking of motte-and-bailey fallacy, pivoting from "Dr Oz was right about glyphosate" to this run-on claim:

> Just because the chemical in question is safer than the previously existing alternatives doesn't mean that the way that Monsanto promoted it and marketed it for use and the way people ended up using it because they believed that marketing didn't result in a net greater detriment to society and the ecosystem than if we had adopted totally different pest management protocols that didn't require as many chemicals that a company like Monsanto conveniently sells.

Is a textbook motte-and-bailey play. The original argument wasn't that "society and the ecosystem would be better if everyone didn't use chemicals". The claim above was that anyone who said there wasn't evidence that glyphosate caused cancer was wrong and Dr. Oz was right.

And that argument was a fallacy in itself. The retraction of a single paper is not equivalent to saying that glyphosate is dangerous, that it causes cancer, or that Dr. Oz was right.

These threads are frustrating because a small number of people are trying to share real papers and talk about the subject, but it's getting overrun with people who aren't interested in discussing science at all. They've made up their minds that chemicals are bad, glyphosate causes cancer, and Dr. Oz was right and they're here to push that narrative regardless of what the content of the linked article actually says.
by jmclnx | 2025-12-05 20:15:10+00:00
We know the current supreme court will end this.

But the big question is how will this be enforced ?

What happens if the parents became citizens after their children were born. Will the children be deemed non-US ?

Also I know many people who's children were born in the US but parents were from Ireland and not US citizens. Either on a tourist visa or work visa or undocumented. Some kids have been here for over 50 years.

Will this only be enforced if the child has the "wrong" skin color ? That is what I expect.
by kelnos | 2025-12-05 20:15:18+00:00
I agree with your overall point about lack of integrity, but just to clarify this bit:

> Not to mention that if you have a "disability" that is treatable with medication, should you still be accommodated?

I know people with incredibly severe ADHD, who are on medication, but in their case the medication is only able to make them reasonably functional. They still have difficult day-to-day issues.

But yeah, in general I'd say if you have something that is entirely fixable with medication, you don't need an accommodation.

The problem is that the ADA is worded such that businesses and organizations can't dig into these sorts of details, so they err on the side of accommodating in order to avoid lawsuits.
by giobox | 2025-12-05 20:15:18+00:00
While Unifi supports wireless backhaul/mesh, the entire system is heavily designed to encourage wired backhaul - all their wireless APs are PoE for a reason. If you are going to invest in the Unifi ecosystem, it makes sense to invest in decent networking - wireless "mesh" is always a compromise for running multiple wireless APs.

If you are in a situation you need multiple wireless APs but can't run ethernet to them (like renting etc), I'd probably pass on a Unifi system personally.
by stego-tech | 2025-12-05 20:15:43+00:00
I’m very curious where you get that number from, because I thought the same thing until I got a job inside that market and realized how much more vast it actually is. The revenue numbers might not be as big as Big Tech, but the product market is shockingly vast. My advice is not to confuse Big Tech revenues for total market size, because they bring in such revenue by catering to everyone, rather than specific segments or niches; a McDonald’s will always do more volume than a steakhouse, but it doesn’t mean the market for steakhouses is small enough to ignore.

As for this throwaway line:

> Also I don’t upload stuff I’m worried about Google seeing.

You do realize that these companies harvest even private data, right? Like, even in places you think you own, or that you pay for, they’re mining for revenue opportunities and using you as the product even when you’re a customer, right?

> I wonder if they will allows special plans for corporations

They do, but no matter how much redlining Legal does to protect IP interests, the consensus I keep hearing is “don’t put private or sensitive corporate data into third-parties because no legal agreement will sufficiently protect us from harm if they steal our IP or data”. Just look at the glut of lawsuits against Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc from smaller companies that trusted them to act in good faith but got burned for evidence that you cannot trust these entities.
by Ancapistani | 2025-12-05 20:15:52+00:00
It's really not.

First, _jus soli_ is relatively rare in the world at large.

Second, the Supreme Court has never ruled on birthright citizenship; the meaning of the phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" has not been tested.

Regardless of your political views, this is an extremely important area of US law, and for it to be undefined isn't fair to anyone.
by wonderwonder | 2025-12-05 20:15:58+00:00
That's interesting, from his Wikipedia page:

"Ellison was married to Barbara Boothe from 1983 to 1986.[92] Boothe was a former receptionist at Oracle (RSI at the time).[93] They had two children, David and Megan, who were (as of 2024) film producers at Skydance Media and Annapurna Pictures, respectively"

So he bought studios so his kids could make movies
by tptacek | 2025-12-05 20:16:02+00:00
I don't know what you're talking about. None of my opinions about glyphosate have anything to do with some stunt where somebody drank glyphosate. I wouldn't drink glyphosate. Nothing has happened between 2018 and 2025 that has changed my (not very strongly held) beliefs that glyphosate is broadly safer than the herbicides that get used when it isn't. I also don't give a shit how Monsanto is promoting glyphosate; Monsanto's success or failure as an enterprise simply doesn't factor into my thinking at all.
by jibal | 2025-12-05 20:16:13+00:00
Completely wrong about the facts. Long COVID is real and not restricted to those on the left. Right wingers constantly "lament" over all sorts of bogeymen, rarely anything from personal experience. Most talk about vaccine injuries is based on misuse of VAERS.

> lots of skepticism was generated by dishonest messaging

Yes, from right wing media ... which you are echoing. Dead bodies were overflowing and public health officials were acting in good faith to try to deal with it. Right wingers and good faith are complete strangers.
by echelon | 2025-12-05 20:16:56+00:00
Cloudflare is supposed to protect me from occasional ddos, not take my business offline entirely.

This can be architected in such a way that if one rules engine crashes, other systems are not impacted and other rules, cached rules, heuristics, global policies, etc. continue to function and provide shielding.

You can't ask for Cloudflare to turn on a dime and implement this in this manner. Their infra is probably very sensibly architected by great engineers. But there are always holes, especially when moving fast, migrating systems, etc. And there's probably room for more resiliency.
by WorldMaker | 2025-12-05 20:16:58+00:00
My pattern in a case like that is often to start a commit named "WIP thing I'm doing" and `commit --amend` each snapshot, updating the commit message as it starts to come together. `commit --amend` is nicer/gentler than `rebase`, most of the time.

Though there are also times I don't mind working in a very dirty worktree and `git add -p` (interactive add that also makes it easy to stage only parts of files) pieces only once they feel complete and start to tell a story. (And in those cases I may use a lot of `git stash -u` and `git stash pop` snapshots, too, especially if I need to switch branches in that worktree.)
by teachmetolearn | 2025-12-05 20:17:03+00:00
Lucid definitely missed their mark. I know all the websites/blogs are like Lucid is the pinnacle of luxury. Its not.

The UI is buggy, slow and just meh, the design is imo lame and uninspired. They went for an understated luxury vibe but somehow it has less presence than a Volvo.

I feel bad for the shareholders but the market isnt interested (look how many they sold this year) and they can either be a automotive supplier or get sold for parts.

Their spend rate is unsustainable, especially with no exciting product to offer.

The gravity is way to little to late, it competes in a now insanely competitive market.

When you have options from Cadillac, Audi, Mercedes and Rivian, why take a chance on an uninspired minivan from Lucid
by Aurornis | 2025-12-05 20:17:06+00:00
I agree. It's weird to see HN comments turn into cheap shots (albeit fallacious ones from someone who isn't making a logical argument) against other HN users.

Maybe I'm a little sensitive to this since I've rotated HN screen names a couple times after someone tried to track me down off-site to argue a (rather benign) comment I made about something.
by smeej | 2025-12-05 20:17:25+00:00
Fixed-rate 30-year mortgages have been around for generations now. They're long since priced into the market.

Whether any specific person actually thinks through whether spending as much money as the bank will lend is prudent, instead of buying a house they can actually afford, saving the money, and upgrading later, is a different question. But it's not fair to blame the mortgage itself.
by margalabargala | 2025-12-05 20:17:28+00:00
> The parents are getting them FOR their kids.

That's not mentioned in the article. Is this your personal speculation or do you have something to support that claim? The article seems to make it clear that it is the students themselves getting these accommodations, so your claim is directly contradicting the article we're commenting on.

> why are we acting like stanford students are unaccountable teenagers

Well they're definitionally teenagers, and if you know of a way to make teenagers act en masse accountable to society's values, that would be a novel development in social human history going back to Ancient Greece. So barring that, we should treat the teenagers whose brains have not yet developed enough to grasp society-wide consequences for personal actions as such.
by OutOfHere | 2025-12-05 20:17:34+00:00
I don't understand the point in detaining immigrants indefinitely. If they're in the country illegally, they must be put on the first flight to their home country. If they're not illegal, they must be freed. No one needs to be detained for more than 48 hours. Their humanitarian and medical requirements must be fully met. Civilized countries do not allow for indefinite detention.
by phartenfeller | 2025-12-05 20:18:40+00:00
I think you are true to a point. But great movies get almost universal praise with scores of 9/10 on IMDb or near 100% on Rotten Tomatoes.

The same goes for food; there are things that are quite controversial, but who says no to fantastic ice cream or bread?

But most importantly for movies, it is not the micro-genre that decides. People who are not into fantasy or astrology still love Lord of the Rings or Interstellar because they are particularly highly produced, where all crafts making up that movie are treated highly instead of strategizing and optimizing.