MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thaumasiotes | 2025-12-15 21:17:20+00:00
> These things are spoken entirely differently than — and on the page, they read entirely differently to — regular parenthetical-bearing sentences.

> No, seriously, compare/contrast: "these things are spoken entirely differently than (and on the page, they read entirely differently to) regular parenthetical-bearing sentences."

Those are spoken the same way, they read the same way, and they mean the same thing.
by jshmrsn | 2025-12-15 21:17:57+00:00
I wish Taiwan’s reactors were never shut down in the first place, and I hope Taiwan can hold out long enough to get it started back up again. It’s a step towards being able to withstand a blockade (Taiwan lacks oil, gas, and goal resources, so it relies on imports). If PRC chose to attack a nuclear power plant, it might give the necessary pressure for international intervention.

For what it’s worth, I’ve personally walked around the nuclear containment area on Orchid island and swam in the waters around it. It’s a well managed and nice place.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-12-15 21:17:58+00:00
>But you would probably never come across the boring stat that less than 1 in 500,000 police encounters ever register on the "ACAB" radar.

This is hardly a revelation. There are levels of bastardy in between "angelic philosopher-saint and paladin of justice" and "demonic hellspawn stomping babies for resisting arrest". The cop who just hands out false tickets to meet quota is just as ACAB as the one who finally loses his temper and shoots someone without true cause, but one gets to hide it better. Intuitively, I suspect that the cumulative actions of the low-level ACAB behaviors add more misery and injustice to the world than all the wrongful deaths and incarceration combined.
by rpdillon | 2025-12-15 21:18:22+00:00
My position is that AI is going to end up being good at certain things, and it's going to be not so good at others, and that mix will change over time, but generally improve. I don't think it's going to replace all jobs and I don't think it's a world-ender.

My job as an engineer is to understand the technology and understand how to deploy it for the benefit of the people that I work for, up to and including myself. There's no room for dogma here. It's purely curiosity, investigation, and trial and error. See what works, see what doesn't.

Personally, I dislike centralized power because I think it's dangerous. And so, one of my goals is to find ways to use AI in a more distributed context that people have control over. Technology accrues benefits to those who deploy it. Therefore, I'd like to find ways for everyone to be able to deploy good technology.
by zimpenfish | 2025-12-15 21:18:41+00:00
> You’re not going to run a transformer on it in real time

Why not? You can run BirdNET's model live in your browser[0]. Listen live and let the machine do the hard work of finding interesting bits[1] for later.

[0] https://birdnet-team.github.io/real-time-pwa/about/

[1] Including bits that you may have missed, obvs.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-12-15 21:18:46+00:00
> We already get taxed multiple ways. I pay income tax and sales tax

Shouldn't we also not do that?

Suppose you pay a 25% income tax and then a 10% sales tax. You're paying the same amount, almost a third of your income, as you would with a 47% sales tax. Which to begin with misleads people into thinking their rate is lower than it is, and on top of that incurs the significant overhead of needing two independent collection infrastructures.

Why isn't it better to just pick one?
by dh2022 | 2025-12-15 21:18:50+00:00
The West would probably cut economic ties with China like they cut them with Russia. For the simple reason that economic ties would help their enemy.

Invadin Taiwan would have a huge negative impact in China. Another poster in this thread, in the process of contradicting himself, said that the longer PRC waits the stronger they become. The conclusion then being that the best course of action for China is to never invade Taiwan. I fully subscribe to this conclusion.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-12-15 21:18:55+00:00
Well, option 1 implies that there was something else going on before the event described in the sentence. Option 2 is neutral about that.

Compare:

1. I did the work for that last week.

2. I proceeded to do the work for that last week.

Sentence 2 strikes me as questionably grammatical. It needs to be proceeding from something in the context.
by Seattle3503 | 2025-12-15 21:19:42+00:00
> Should American owned or controlled companies be banned in other countries? Should Israel be banned from interfering in American politics? If yes, then I am more open to this concept.

I think there are important differences between China any democracy. In China, each company needs a internal party cell or party commitee to police and control that companies actions. If you don't find differences between China and open democracies compelling, we won't find much common ground.

Nonetheless, we are seeing US tech companies facing scrutiny in Europe.

Something else I'll say is I think some of the big tech companies should be broken up, which I see achieving similar goals by similar means. Reduce centralized control by a change in ownership. If China were a corporation instead of a country, old likewise advocating divesting control of TikTok
by jeffbee | 2025-12-15 21:19:44+00:00
Even the golf course trade association only claims 10% grey water use.

Also, you're going to be shocked, data centers can cool with grey water as well. The now-cancelled Project Blue data center near Tucson was going to build and operate a wastewater pipeline and treatment plant and give it to the city, but the shouting NIMBYs prevailed anyway. The developer now intends to use air-to-air cooling, which costs more energy.
by penguin_booze | 2025-12-15 21:19:45+00:00
I'm fairly out of touch with Rust. I think generics and lifetimes are also separate in the sense that only the generics get monomorphised, while lifetimes don't. I.e., you get distinct structs Foo<u32> and Foo<i32>, depending on the (type) argument with which Foo was instantiated (just like it is in C++), but only one Bar<'a> no matter what (lifetime) argument it was "instantiated" with.
by btown | 2025-12-15 21:19:57+00:00
Even Salesforce doesn't have a good way to quickly port an Excel-based workflow, with file handoffs and backwards compatibility, into Salesforce. In theory, you could have an LLM generate all the metadata files that would execute a relevant schema migration, generate the interface XML, and build the right kinds of API calls and webhooks... but understanding what it's doing requires a Ph.D. in Salesforce, and many don't have time for that.
by Aloisius | 2025-12-15 21:20:07+00:00
> What lead it to being "banned in dozens of countries all over the world, including the United Kingdom and China"?

Almost everyone who banned it did so because of acute toxicity - it requires careful handling to use safely.

Unfortunately, it was commonly used to commit suicide in many countries. In other countries, it was deaths from accidental ingestion, lung damage from unsafe handling, etc.

I don't know of any country that banned it because of a purported link to Parkinson's.
by oersted | 2025-12-15 21:20:19+00:00
I do think it's an interesting idea, I'm just musing.

I think a worker-owned for-profit union might quickly start hiring other kinds of workers and become a regular worker-owned company, because often selling actual end products and services is more profitable than selling one flavour of labour.

Are you arguing that the workers being significant shareholders of companies is a better alternative to unions? Or that there should be a special kind of corporation that is a for-profit union and has some restrictions of who they can accept and what they can offer?

It's an intriguing twist on communism: instead of abolishing private property and having "the people" (the authoritarian government) own everything, you keep private ownership and free-markets, but you restrict company ownership to the active employees, instead of capital investors and/or initial founders.

I'm not making any value judgement here, again I'm just musing.
by tredre3 | 2025-12-15 21:20:22+00:00
All your data is owned by your user. If you run a program, it will have access to all your data. Admin or not is irrelevant here.

The keyring is pretty open on Windows, if you know the key you can request anything even if stored by another app. There is a way to lock a secret to a specific app but it's not properly enforced in most versions of Windows.

The only user data that would require admin privilege is that of sandboxed Windows Store applications where even the owner can't access it directly from outside the program and you have to be admin.
by nradov | 2025-12-15 21:20:24+00:00
The tax rate for corporations should be zero. The need to do tax accounting and associated financial engineering is a deadweight economic loss. Eliminate corporate income tax and raise taxes on the highest income employees and investors to make the change revenue neutral. Ultimately the profits flow to those individuals one way or another so better to collect all the tax revenue from them anyway. This change would increase economic growth and benefit everyone.
by catapart | 2025-12-15 21:20:35+00:00
Ah, okay, yeah, I get you now. I could get behind a splashy section about how users can "walk away at any time" with a roadmap that seems reasonable. I think that fits in with the general ethos of what these things should offer to consumers. I can certainly see why a company wouldn't be keen to advertise "if we die, here's what you can do.", but a way to tell consumers how to gracefully exit doesn't seem so antithetical to a marketing plan, and personally, knowing they've given me an off-ramp does make me more likely to use a thing.
by mchaver | 2025-12-15 21:20:49+00:00
I wonder about having gamification as something you can turn off. I am working on a math practice web application. I have not added any gamification to it. I am ok with minimal gamification like Math Academy does with experience points or the sound effects and trophies you get in Khan Academy, but Duolingo is too much. A friend told me he would like gamification in it. Any thoughts on making gamification something you can opt out of?
by baranul | 2025-12-15 21:20:59+00:00
In agreement, that this looks like a false dichotomy being presented to readers, C-derived versus Rust. First, Rust is usually considered or positioned as a C-family language, despite its ML connection. Second, in the context of C alternatives, there are many other memory-safe languages (Golang, Vlang, Dlang, etc...). Third, the context of when Rust is really needed (as a high-level language), is few.

Many of the high level features that Rust offers, outside of memory-safety, other C-family languages have too. And those other languages can have different advantages over Rust: easier to learn, easier to use, readability, compilation speed, etc... Very much a depends type of thing.
by ojr | 2025-12-15 21:21:12+00:00
https://slidebits.com/isogen

An AI coding tool desktop application written in Rust and Javascript. Cursor, Windsurf and etc uses too much memory on my machine. As an engineer it is important that the tools I use daily are performant and fast and I could use while watching a youtube video or browse hackernews.

While working on the tool I am building some boilerplates to start from, starting with mobile games targeting arcade games like Flappy Bird.
by angry_octet | 2025-12-15 21:21:38+00:00
Tibet is clear-cut annexation of a sovereign country. HK / New Territories was only leased, and it wasn't going to be practical to keep it longer. The problem is that Beijing no longer needed HK as a gateway, the US/EU had already embraced going directly to the mainland to do deals by the early 2000s. The HK I knew was already gone by 2014.
by agentifysh | 2025-12-15 21:21:44+00:00
not really projects but productivity tools for codex/claude code etc

https://github.com/agentify-sh/safeexec/ - this will prevent rm -rf or git reset --hard being run by off chance when used with --dangerously-bypass-permissions flag

https://github.com/agentify-sh/10x/ - codex productivity booster which adds skills (most likely need to be phased out now since codex has skills), redundant checkpoint/backups with git and jj, subagents, parallel agents, PLAN/RUN/THINK modes.... im actually not sure about releasing this anymore because of how much better codex has gotten.
by dsernst | 2025-12-15 21:21:54+00:00
This was a special situation because of a mid-term early retirement. The standard practice, responsible for 25% of the current state legislature, is a handful of party insiders deciding the appointed replacement. That process has little-to-no coercion-resistance, often not even secret voting, with a lot of egos and status games in play.

I hear you on wanting to limit mail voting. I agree there are many challenges there: not only coercion, but also voter authentication, ballot chain-of-custody, and delays. Many of the summer 2020 results were delayed by 2 weeks while all the mail-in ballots continued to be counted.

With that said, there's also considerations about accessibility. In this particular case, every last voter had the option to vote in-person, with 5 different polling locations staffed by volunteers over 3 days. Despite that, 50x as many people voted digitally as came in-person. For context, this district is also very rural, spread out over a huge area. If you limit voting to exclusively in-person, some people will take the time and effort to make it work, but certainly not all. People may start using phrases like "voter suppression". :'(

To be clear, I agree with all of the issues you bring up, and care about them too. Why we spent the last year working to develop strong coercion-resistance tools. I just want to highlight the tradeoffs in play.

Re voter coercion, in-person voting security is not exactly Fort Knox — it's almost all volunteers. If a coercer really wants to force a particular vote, they can demand a video recording, not just a photo, with the voter first marking the ballot then walking up to drop it into the ballot box. Sometimes it may be caught, but it's far from guaranteed. Becomes even easier as glasses-with-cameras become more widespread (I see some for $40 on Amazon).

Re vote-by-mail— the reality is, in the 2024 Presidential election at least, the vast majority of voters had it as an option. A quick search is showing me over 75% of Americans live in states with no-excuse mail voting. It's easy to say "oh yeah, that shouldn't be allowed". But now feels like goalpost moving, and not dealing with the situation as it is.
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-12-15 21:21:54+00:00
It will make ACME the only viable option. I believe there is a second free ACME CA and other CAs will likely adopt ACME if they want to stay relevant.

Ideally, this will take less ongoing labor than annual manual rotations, and I'd argue sites that can't handle this would have been likely to break at the next annual rotation anyways.

If they have certificates managed by hosters, the hosters will deal with it. If they don't, then someone was already paying for the renewal and handling the replacement on the server side, making it much more likely that it will be fixed.
by sophia-martinez | 2025-12-15 21:22:18+00:00
I’m building something that keeps finding gaps I didn’t realize were gaps.

It’s called Riftur, a gap analysis tool that compares two documents and highlights gaps, missing requirements, and inconsistencies. The interesting part for us has been getting the system to understand intent instead of just keywords, so it can flag partial matches and subtle gaps rather than just “present / not present.”

Still early, but it’s been useful in ways we didn’t fully expect. If anyone’s curious, you can demo it out here: https://riftur.com I'm happy to hear thoughts or learn how others handle this kind of review work.
by 0x457 | 2025-12-15 21:22:19+00:00
> modern police institutions are directly descended from slavecatchers and strikebreakers;

That's not (entirely) true, though? Every modern police department has its roots in London Metropolitan Police Force which had nothing to do with salve catching can't say much about strikebreakers, but I know specifically LMPF went on multiple strikes themselves. It had also nothing to do with solving crimes, that's just a bonus.
by factsperiodt | 2025-12-15 21:22:46+00:00
Love the idea! I was thinking it would be great if it could include a toggle that's kind of like the emotional version of selecting reverse y-axis in games (i.e. you can either push the controller up to look up, or push the controller up to look down) - you can either have the app show you tasks as how you see them. You could either use a view that has the more effortful/urgent ones in red, which may grow over time the longer you take to do them OR the tasks that cause you more anxiety to have a high blue capacity the moment you plug in the task and it reduces over time the longer you take to get to it. I guess my idea has a factor of procrastination that comes into play with the anxiety.
by zephen | 2025-12-15 21:23:14+00:00
You just replied to someone who explained it was about the DRM, with 'nuh-uh."

Pivot much?

The rest of the capabilities were all being done for over a decade before HDMI came out, and quite well by some companies.

Sure, firewire was typically used for video plus two channels of audio, but it's a single twisted pair, and HDMI uses 4 high-speed twisted pair to transmit clock and data, plus another few pins for out-of-band signalling information.

Technically, HDMI is actually a huge failure. It wasn't until 2.1 that they started supporting compressed video.

Take a system, figure out where it has the highest possible bandwidth need, and then insert the communication cable at that point. Yeah, that's the ticket!

Before HDMI, some equipment did AV sync really well, and even after HDMI came out, some TVs still didn't do the A/V sync very well. The correct buffering for that has nothing to do with the cable, although it might seem like it because when the audio comes out of the TV, the circuits in there sure ought to be able to do delay matching.

The adoption of HDMI was, in fact, completely driven by HDCP.
by tomek_zemla | 2025-12-15 21:23:25+00:00
I am building a calm, serious English vocabulary learning application for mostly adult, motivated individuals. The opposite experience to Duolingo. No dancing mascots or childish sound effects. I am betting on attracting young professionals, academics, white-collar types that like books, language and the experience of a white page with classic, black typography.

Strangely, through iterative prototyping, the app evolved into something that my testers (and teachers) are calling... a game. I see it as a good thing, and I am adapting this language. The free version is about 'play,' and the paid version is about 'study'.

Reach out if you would like to chat!
by collingreen | 2025-12-15 21:23:37+00:00
I guess the equivalent here is the teachers and the teachers unions covering up that abuse, moving the abuses around to other schools, and lobbying for special protection for those abusers even after they are caught and convicted.

Its not perfect as an analogy since police are the state's sanctioned violence and teachers are not, nor are teachers in charge of preventing rape generally, but it kind of works since kids generally do have to go to school of some kind.

I expect in the above hypothetical the person you're asking would agree that yes, all teachers are part of the rape problem. The logic is the same and it hinges on the idea that allowing and intentionally enabling <very bad abuse if power> instead of fighting to expose and stop it makes you part of that problem even if you aren't directly doing the bad thing. Doubly so if your job is to expose and stop that abuse in every group except your own.
by themeiguoren | 2025-12-15 21:23:56+00:00
Of the things matlab has going for it, looking just like the math is pretty far down the list. Numpy is a bit more verbose but still 1-to-1 with the whiteboard. The last big pain point was solved (https://peps.python.org/pep-0465/) with the dedicated matmul operator in python 3.5.

Real advantages of matlab:

* Simulink

* Autocoding straight to embedded

* Reproducible & easily versioned environment

* Single-source dependency easier to get security to sign off on

* Plotting still better than anything else

Big disadvantages of matlab:

* Cost

* Lock-in

* Bad namespaces

* Bad typing

* 1-indexing

* Small package ecosystem

* Low interoperability & support in 3rd party toolchains
by judah | 2025-12-15 21:24:01+00:00
Ah, the "Nakba", the catastrophe: the 1948 war where Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the Islamic Holy War Army invaded Israel, despite being legally partitioned by the United Nations.

Yes, what a catastrophe that invasion was for Arab nations and Arab population in the land.

Perhaps if those nations had not invaded Israel, and perhaps if local Arab communities had not committed violence and massacres of local Jewish communities leading up to Jewish independence in 1948, things could have turned out better for them.

And maybe things can be different tomorrow, too, if Palestinians turn away from terrorism and seeking the destruction of the world's only Jewish homeland.
by jmward01 | 2025-12-15 21:24:08+00:00
Fundamentally we need safety valves for labor supply that always creates a net advantage for workers, but how? My take has always been that advances in productivity that reduce the need for labor should be given back to the workforce via incentives like:

- sabbaticals/funded retraining opportunities: People leave to train creating a need for labor and at the same time increasing the value of labor. This would also create liquidity in the labor market since people would have opportunity to leave their current field and go to a different one.

- strong encouragement to retire earlier: Fewer people in the workforce and more people spending retirement means more demand for jobs and more demand for goods and services.

- limit the workweek more: Same argument as retirement

All of these have positives and negatives, but unless we start thinking about things like this we will get a world where labor is at a massive disadvantage and all the issues that leads to.
by evilduck | 2025-12-15 21:24:12+00:00
I sense that your claims and suggestions here strongly suggest that your school experience is not a recent one where you were issued a locked down Chromebook.

I would encourage you to expand your lived experience here. Circumventing "arbitrary" restrictions today will burn a hardware fuse, brick it for actual school allowed purposes and cost your parents $170 to resolve. The age of innocently hacking on school property is long gone.
by IAmBroom | 2025-12-15 21:24:27+00:00
The article goes to lengths to explain the saying, without ever mentioning its source... and so I assume the author also doesn't realize the common saying is a misquote. The actual quote makes a LOT more sense:

Shakespeare's King John, Act II (SALISBURY): ...To gild refined gold, to paint the lily, ...Is wasteful and ridiculous excess.

Gild all the lilies you want; artificial flowers have resale value.

But gold-plating gold? Yeah, that's just stupid.
by rainonmoon | 2025-12-15 21:24:32+00:00
This comment is a neat encapsulation of the hypocrisy in the “think of the children” mentality. We’ve gotta protect the kids, let’s push them around like obstacles and exclude them from society!

Meanwhile, social media is melting the brains of everyone over 45 into relitigating moon landing conspiracies. Maybe a bit less time in YouTube holes and a bit more time actually parenting would be good for both parties.