MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by phantasmish | 2025-12-15 20:20:45+00:00
I entirely bounced off Dickens in high school, but over a decade later read and loved Oliver Twist.

I tend to struggle with art when I can’t tell whether it’s supposed to be funny, but I’m finding it funny (I’ve been very slow to warm up to hip-hop for this reason, and metal remains inaccessible to me because of it). Something clicked on that second approach and I just got that yes, it’s pretty much all supposed to be funny, down to every word, even when it seems serious—until, perhaps, he blind-sides you with something actually deeply affecting and human (I think about the fire-fighting sequence from that book all the time).

Dickens is an all-dessert meal, except sometimes he sneaks a damn delicious steak right in the middle. Like, word-for-word, I’d say he leans harder into humor, by a long shot, than someone like Vonnegut, even. But almost all of it’s dead-pan, and some of it’s the sort of humor you get when someone who knows better does poorly on purpose, in calculated ways. If you ever think you’re laughing at him, not with… I reckon you’re probably wrong.

What’s perhaps most miraculous about this turn-around is that I usually don’t enjoy comedic novels, but once I figured Dickens out, he works for me.

(To your broader point—yeah, agreed that this sucks, good advice for bad writers becoming how most judge all writers has been harmful)
by cue_the_strings | 2025-12-15 20:21:00+00:00
There's a very common line of thinking that goes like this:

From the end of WWII until the fall of communism, the public in the West (as opposed to the elites) enjoyed much better treatment, and prospered more than ever before or since. This would include both fiscal gains, and the public's opinion being truly taken into consideration. This is mainly because the elites were afraid of people turning socialist / communist, so they gave them a reason to actually be invested in the system. Once that threat of communism evaporated, the elites could proceed to gut the majority as in the previous centuries with no fear whatsoever.

My comments:

I'm not sure I agree with that, though, too simplistic. On the other hand, I also think that people have a rose-tinted view of what "democracy" always was - with enough money / media control and a bit of time, you can convince the majority of anything, anywhere. Letting people prosper does make it easier. Maybe it did play a bit of a role. A counter argument is that (independent) media coverage made the Vietnam war unpopular, and then the US pulled out because of that, a miracle of democracy which never really came close to happening again ever after.

But I think the USSR itself murdered any real chances of communism's further spread in 1968, when they invaded Czechoslovakia. (The Hungarian thing in 1956 isn't nearly as important because of country's undeniable previous Axis affiliation; few had sympathy for that back then). The US and west in general couldn't get rid of their Woody Guthries, and their Klaus Fuchses, until USSR did it for them through sheer idiocy. But after that, was communism really a threat?

But I do think that the 1950s policies were affected by the war (+ Korean war) even more than communism itself. All these traumatized vets, desensitized to violence, were now back home, and the elites were truly afraid. But that doesn't seem like it brought democracy in today's sense of the word? There's a reason why feminism regressed in the 50s - letting men be little despots in their own (cheaply bought) homes was the least the government could do. But that seems to have lasted only until the mid 60s, then the Vietnam thing happened, ... Let's not go further.
by schmuckonwheels | 2025-12-15 20:21:05+00:00
I remember the days when movies shown on aircraft were edited for both content and dialogue.

These days, with so much content expected to be available at your fingertips, both in your seat and people bringing iPads on board loaded with R-rated streams, it's expected to be mindful of your neighbor on such things.

How that is distinctly "American" I don't quite understand.
by hyperman1 | 2025-12-15 20:21:14+00:00
BB is a mod-97 checksum. The first A of AAA encodes your gender in an even/odd fashion, I forgot if its the first or last A doing that. MM or DD can be 00 if unknown. Also MM has +20 or +40 in some cases.

If you know someones birth date and gender, the INSZ is almost certainly 1 in 500 numbers, with a heavy skew to the lower AAA. Luckily, you can't do much damage with someones number,unlike an USA SSN (but I'd still treat it confidential).
by drnick1 | 2025-12-15 20:21:16+00:00
I don't think Julia really solves any problems that aren't already solved by Python. Python is sometimes slower (hot loops), but for that you have Numba. And if something is truly performance critical, it should be written or rewritten in C++ anyway.

But Julia also introduces new problems, such as JIT warmup (so it's not really suitable for scripting) and is still not considered trustworthy:

https://yuri.is/not-julia/
by water-data-dude | 2025-12-15 20:21:16+00:00
If you were able to JUST "move the kids out of this area", that would be one thing, but we can't do it without treading on the rights of adults - especially their right to privacy and anonymity.

There are technically some implementations that will let adults prove they're adults while staying anonymous, but none of those implementations have gained serious traction with an actual government. The actual, REAL result is "you can't go online anonymously" - because governments and ad tech companies are DYING to know everything you look at and say online.

The kids are an excuse, just like they've always been.
by kotaKat | 2025-12-15 20:21:43+00:00
From ~April 2019 to this event was nearly 6 years of flawless performance from UA’s GE90 engine fleet, but the P&W ones tend to have a few problems a year.

Being this is the first time a GE90 popped on a 777-200 in a while? Eh, the future’s gonna keep flying ‘em.
by jabl | 2025-12-15 20:21:54+00:00
Yes! Make something built on top of binder, and use something with orders of magnitude more users and developer resources behind it..

> hardened stuff that already exist.

To make it even more hardened(?), Google recently contributed and got merged a Rust implementation of binder for the Linux kernel (and they're apparently planning to eventually remove the old C implementation).

https://lwn.net/Articles/953116/

https://lore.kernel.org/rust-for-linux/20231101-rust-binder-...
by kllrnohj | 2025-12-15 20:21:57+00:00
Why would it need to be a new implementation? AOSP is like... right there, and it's not like libbinder has crazy dependencies.

> also depends on having a obscure Linux feature enabled

An extremely widely used and battle hardened Linux feature, though, with corporate sponsorship and active development. With the only real reason it's obscure on desktop linux at all is because upstream blocked it for a long time. If desktop linux embraced it, it certainly wouldn't be obscure anymore, now would it?
by jchw | 2025-12-15 20:21:57+00:00
> And pointless here, since everything runs under the same uid. You need to authenticate this is the same browser that stored this secret, not that this is the same uid (useless), or the same pid, or any other concept that unix domain socket authentication understands.

I disagree. With UNIX domain sockets it is absolutely possible to determine the PID of the process that you are talking to and use pidfd to validate where it is coming from. Would be entirely possible to use this for policy.

> In fact, if you do not need a shared secrets service, and your applications are containerized... why do you need a secrets IPC at all? Just let each program store its secrets in some of its supposedly private storage...

And how exactly does the app container service store something encrypted securely on disk? That's literally the point of a secrets service on a modern desktop. It usually gets keymatter in the form of a user password carried to it from PAM, in order to allow on-disk encryption without needing separate keyring passwords. (And yeah, sure, this could use TPM or something else to avoid the passwords, but the point is literally no different, it shouldn't be each application's job individually to manage their own way of getting secure storage, that's a recipe for data loss and confusion.)

> Much better to have a million non-extendable protocols competing with each other. To this day there are two protocols (at least) for exposing the address of the DbusMenu service of a surface, one for gnome-shell and one for kwin. So much for the uglyness of X atoms. And this has nothing really to do with the design of the IPC mechanism itself...

That's a problem that occurs because the protocols have multiple distinct implementations. Most of the dbus services don't have to deal with that problem at all. (And the ones that do, tend to have problems like this. There are plenty of weird incompatibilities with different XDG desktop portal implementations.)

I'm pretty sure the point of bringing up xdg-shell is because the new bus is inspired by the Wayland protocol. For all of the incessant bitching about Wayland online, Wayland protocols are only about 1000x nicer to use than dbus. You can actually do decent code generation for it without having to have like 5 competing ways to extend the XML to add basic things like struct member annotations (and then have things like Qt's own DBus code generator unable to actually handle any real DBus service definitions. Try throwing the systemd one at it, doesn't fucking work. The code doesn't even compile.)
by stuffn | 2025-12-15 20:22:11+00:00
I never implied congress is expected to be experts on everything. What I do expect is a level of scrutiny much higher than what is considered rigorous by academic standards.

It should not be a hard ask that regulatory bodies produce meaningful, thoughtful, and extensive uneditorialized reports on a subject. These are then given in summary to congress who can use this information to inform regulation.

This strategy is superior for a few reasons:

1. It keeps regulatory bodies honest and when held to the highest possible standard of scrutiny works to prevent a lot of trivial gaming of the system

2. It separates the powers appropriately. Congress can ask anyone to do research and return results. This is not the same as providing an unelected body defacto law writing power.

And on the final point regulation can be good. I think it's dishonest to interpret my position as anti-regulation. Rather, I think regulation is trivially corruptable. Regulatory capture is the mechanism by which the largest wealth-having class maintains their power. Regulatory capture is trivialized through the use of Chevron Deference (see my post above). By cleanly separating the two we reduce the probability of corruption. If a corrupt politician can't inject their stooges to defer to then we have an extra mechanism by which to protect our rights, and protect our health. It then falls on congress to do the right thing. Then it's OUR responsibility to elect people who will do that.

If we allow for the assumption congressmen are not idiots, are capable of reading and referring to experts, and act accordingly then there should be no meaningful difference modulo preventing unelected officials from writing law. If we cannot guarantee that, then it's not corruption, it's a complete failure of the legislative branch of government and the election system. Which I think we both agree here in one way or another that the system has completely failed.
by random9749832 | 2025-12-15 20:22:24+00:00
A lot of those "enemies" can't protect Ukraine which they are much more geographically positioned to defend.

Plus a lot of morals go out of the window when there is a real threat and a lot on the line. Even between the new tensions with China and Japan, the US appears to be quiet: https://www.ft.com/content/bf8b5def-db4d-43ac-91cf-bea5fcfa3...
by quentindanjou | 2025-12-15 20:22:48+00:00
> Store your files

On a non-backup "Personal Cloud" that does not even have a RAID 1 for a bit of redundancy? Big no no.

It looks really cool, but I really dislike products that encourage dangerous behaviors, especially to users that might completely be unaware and think about replacing their Apple or Google Cloud with this so called "personal cloud".
by jiggawatts | 2025-12-15 20:22:48+00:00
Single payer is easy!

If you reject the best and only easy option from the outset because you don’t want actual healthcare, then yeah… whatever remains is going to be “hard”.

What the US has right now is a complex entrenched system of financial middlemen that refuse to abandon their rent seeking. They provide only(!) financial “services” and will fight actual healthcare tooth and nail.

Trump wasn’t strong enough — or simply didn’t care enough — to fight these people.
by keeda | 2025-12-15 20:22:57+00:00
Yes and no -- filing patents is quite affordable (probably outdated info, but I recall average costs for drafting and filing was ~10K / patent, most of the costs being related to the drafting rather than filing.) Compared to all the other capital investments required for hardware startups, these costs are negligible.

But you're totally right that enforcing them is extremely expensive, slow and risky.

That said, Roomba isn't exactly a startup but wasn't a tech giant either, and did enforce their patents often.

And especially against imported infringing products, the ITC provides a much cheaper, faster mechanism to get protection via injunctions.
by bpt3 | 2025-12-15 20:23:11+00:00
The only hope the EU has is that Trump fucks up the US enough in the next 3 years that we aren't able to continue to attract the vast majority of the people worldwide who actually want to work and reap the rewards of their efforts.

The EU has chosen stagnation, which seems fine at first but looks worse and worse as all the people (or nations in this case) who didn't make that choice continue to grow. Unless you have a closed, close knit community like the Amish, stagnation does not end well.
by zamadatix | 2025-12-15 20:23:30+00:00
On top of what the others have said, any faster interface you replace SATA with will have the same problem set because it's rooted in the total bandwidth to the CPU, not the form factor of the slot.

E.g. going to the suggested U.2 is still going to net you looking for the PCIe lanes to be available for it.
by anthk | 2025-12-15 20:23:35+00:00
DBUS -> Crappy COM

SystemD -> SVCHost.exe

Iproute 2 -> You like netsh.exe?

Gnome 3, 4 -> Windows 8 wannabe

Mono -> C# road building path

GConf -> Windows Registry; heck, dconf-editor and gconf-editor look really close.

Can't wait for MMC.exe and GPO editing under Gnome.
by hopelite | 2025-12-15 20:23:37+00:00
I haven’t really followed things in great detail, but something that has stood out to be is the apparent linchpin that was pulled in this whole affair. Like it or not, TikTok is an American company with American employees and even running on American infrastructure and oversight that was established years ago now; not somehow the cabal in our government has simply eschewed rule of law and their own ideals, to basically strong-arm this deal because there was too much free speech, a fundamental right of Americans, which the government is legally prohibited from violating and doing so is as much of a capitol offense as it can get, violating not only the law of the Constitution, but also the rights enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.

I don’t see how a competent legal team could not shred this whole effort at disowning TikTok and at the very least make it extremely expensive politically and even to the core foundation of legitimacy of the current government in what is for some reason still called the USA in spite of gross patterns of consistent material violations of all the terms.
by kakacik | 2025-12-15 20:24:14+00:00
But thats a flawed metric. How much cash do you need saved to send 2 kids to university in US vs typical Europe, without burdening them for their best years of life with crushing debt? How much is left afterwards? How much after acquiring some long term illness with expensive treatment or being in bad accident? Don't think that due to being young this ain't your concern, all elders have messed up health in many ways. Retirement. And so on. These are direct costs and its all about money. Ie US couple with teens just about to go to college with say 500k are same or poorer than similar family in Europe having say 200k savings, or will be after few years. Or maybe not, depends.

I'd say its uncomparable directly, or very, very hard. You can say visit both places and walk around and see the general state of the country and its people, compare capitals. This is where money is spent (or not).

Not going into happiness, stress levels, depression/anxiety and meds consumption, obesity levels or longevity, that would be too easy I agree. Although this is also money related, more than anything else.
by giancarlostoro | 2025-12-15 20:24:29+00:00
At least since 2016 and beyond I've seen insanely verifiably false claims from mainstream media if you just look up raw sources. Starting with the Covington High Schoolers, within minutes of the story dropping I was able to validate that CNN a major news corporation was in fact lying, why?

Then there was a lot of shenanigans regarding the Hunter Biden laptop. There was a headline from a letter written by Intelligence Officers that made it sound like the actually forensically valid laptop itself was faked Russian disinformation, but it turned out to be valid.

When it comes to politics every major news org fails misserably. Their inability to contain personal biases is astounding to me. I want raw facts if you're going to make political assertions or its just propaganda. I don't care which side is doing what, if they're doing wrong expose them all, but use facts and evidence, not just TMZ / tabloid level shenanigans. Everyone is behaving like teenagers whenever politics is brought up these days.
by AshamedCaptain | 2025-12-15 20:24:40+00:00
Most of binder is in outright Java. Libbinder_ndk is a subset that is unlikely to please anybody. The other libbinder (openbinder) is dead since 2006ish. I actually used this last one in certain commercial product.

> An extremely widely used and battle hardened Linux feature, though, with corporate sponsorship and active development.

Compared to _unix sockets_ , which is the other transport used by almost every other local IPC mechanism, and also what D-Bus uses, there is just no contest. Even Android uses unix sockets more than Binder.
by oersted | 2025-12-15 20:24:59+00:00
Agreed, but antitrust law has had a deep enforcement problem for a long time. It's too open-ended and up to interpretation, perhaps fundamentally so as a concept. It's not easy to clearly delineate a market and prove the dominance of a company, one can endlessly argue the definition of the market, especially a company with such resources.

As a result, it is only really enforced when the political winds are aligned, and selectively towards those it is aligned against.
by SirensOfTitan | 2025-12-15 20:25:55+00:00
I’ve been working on a product for a little while that Ivan Illich would call a “convivial tool,” one that doesn’t take from the user but makes them more effective, independent, and creative from its use. I’ve been interested in these kinds of tools for a long time, but I feel some sense of urgency in the LLM era, where I’ve already seen peers lose their edge by offloading the cognitive work.

I’ve been interested in these kinds of tools for a while, that actually act as a bicycle for the mind. Most apps forgo the metacognitive and emotional labor that actually helps people learn effectively in favor of gamification because 1. Modeling these skills is hard 2. The first step to building effective learning habits is to restore the so-called “learn drive” which is the love of learning, play, and tinkering that underlies most effective learning and gamification does so but on an artificial level.

There is so much content out there, and a sufficiently motivated person will find it and make meaning out of it. Most people are not motivated and don’t know how to motivate, meander, explore without gritting teeth, and I think you’ll probably just see churn without gamification unless you deal with that side of the process.

Since I've tried to ship such tools before and ultimately failed, I’m explicitly not doing the whole SV fail fast and iterate thing here: I’m meandering, taking my time, letting motivation move me when it strikes versus going for the easiest or most obvious thing.

(also sorry if this is itself meandering: I’m lifting while typing this on my phone)
by bikenaga | 2025-12-15 20:25:59+00:00
Abstract: "Using newly-assembled data from 1980 through 2024, we show that 25% of scientifically-active, US-trained STEM PhD graduates leave the US within 15 years of graduating. Leave rates are lower in the life sciences and higher in AI and quantum science but overall have been stable for decades. Contrary to common perceptions, US technology benefits from these graduates' work even if they leave: though the US share of global patent citations to graduates' science drops from 70% to 50% after migrating, it remains five times larger than the destination country share, and as large as all other countries combined. These results highlight the value that the US derives from training foreign scientists - not only when they stay, but even when they leave."
by bob1029 | 2025-12-15 20:26:03+00:00
> Doesn't that violate all kinds of compliance controls?

Technically, only if it causes some kind of security, privacy, availability or accounting issue. The risk is high but it can be done.

Half of our customers do not have anything resembling a test environment. It is incredibly expensive to maintain a meaningful copy of production in this domain. Smaller local/regional banks don't bother at all.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-12-15 20:26:32+00:00
Support for unions in the US is at record highs (~70%), well above a majority of voters. If you slice by age cohort, highest support is Gen Z, lowest support are oldest cohorts (Boomers, Silent), which are aging out ~2M/year (55+ age cohort) [1].

Interestingly and very recently (December 11th, 2025), the US House recently voted on a bill to restore collective bargaining rights for a majority of federal employees [2]. House lawmakers voted 231-195 to pass the Protect America’s Workforce Act [3]. The entire Democratic Caucus, along with 20 Republicans, voted in favor of the legislation.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45851620 (citations)

[2] https://federalnewsnetwork.com/congress/2025/12/house-passes...

[3] https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/2550
by ceejayoz | 2025-12-15 20:26:40+00:00
> I suppose it does make some sense if we are talking about organised action from foreign powers.

It doesn't even have to be organized.

Ragebait gets clicks. X pays out for engagement. (https://help.x.com/en/using-x/creator-revenue-sharing) The amounts are low by US standards, but nice pay by developing world standards. Thus, a cottage industry of fake accounts arises, without needing nation-scale organization behind it.
by kelseyfrog | 2025-12-15 20:26:41+00:00
Evil simply has more options available than good. Sure, those options, like all options, have pros and cons. Cancer, like sociopathy, can have a pretty good run even if it ends ultimately in demise.

I very much want to push back against any bias towards a just world. Bad people often live their whole lives without any consequence (think prostate cancer) while good people struggle (think my cuticles, which deserve much more than I usually give).