MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by glitchc | 2026-01-19 20:51:54+00:00
> Stanford University played a major role in wrecking societies worldwide through "nonviolent" white-collar crime.

This seems like an unfair burden to place on Stanford or any other institution of higher learning. We can attribute as much blame to Stanford for Messrs Brin and Page as we can to Wharton for President Trump's actions.

And what about positive actions? Forward secrecy would not be possible without Diffie-Hellman key exchange. Both Diffie and Hellman hail from Stanford. Not to mention Ralph Merkle (of Merkle trees), Alan Kay, Paul Klipsch (of the speaker) and Barbara Liskov among others. Should the school get the credit for their achievements?
by jbreckmckye | 2026-01-19 20:51:54+00:00
I think a lot of programming - the more business focused, application minded stuff - is a kind of analytical philosophy. You spend a lot of time as a dev working on "domain logic" which requires you to be very exacting in your terminology and carefully distinguish between ideas.

You can go too far with this, and waste time on taxonomy, but for the most part it's a good idea to subject your classes, variables, components to some kind of philosophical scrutiny.

(My degree was in English Literature though, which doesn't help as much, though I think I'm pretty good at naming variables. £40,000 well spent!)

I guess more generally: rigor. People assume that because the humanities handle unmeasurable things, that means there is no rigor. Actually I would suggest the opposite: when you are doing an English degree, you have nothing with which to convince people, _except_ your rigor.

Whatever specialism in the humanities you choose, you have to possess a detailed command of source material and awareness of the vast depth of thought that came before you. And communicate concisely, that massive aggregate of material. All good things for a software engineer.
by timschmidt | 2026-01-19 20:51:56+00:00
"I do not know whether it is to yourself or Mr. Adams I am to give my thanks for the copy of the new constitution. I beg leave through you to place them where due. It will be yet three weeks before I shall receive them from America. There are very good articles in it: and very bad. I do not know which preponderate. What we have lately read in the history of Holland, in the chapter on the Stadtholder, would have sufficed to set me against a Chief magistrate eligible for a long duration, if I had ever been disposed towards one: and what we have always read of the elections of Polish kings should have forever excluded the idea of one continuable for life. Wonderful is the effect of impudent and persevering lying. The British ministry have so long hired their gazetteers to repeat and model into every form lies about our being in anarchy, that the world has at length believed them, the English nation has believed them, the ministers themselves have come to believe them, and what is more wonderful, we have believed them ourselves. Yet where does this anarchy exist? Where did it ever exist, except in the single instance of Massachusets? And can history produce an instance of a rebellion so honourably conducted? I say nothing of it’s motives. They were founded in ignorance, not wickedness. God forbid we should ever be 20. years without such a rebellion. The people can not be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. We have had 13. states independant 11. years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century and a half for each state. What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure. Our Convention has been too much impressed by the insurrection of Massachusets: and in the spur of the moment they are setting up a kite to keep the hen yard in order. I hope in god this article will be rectified before the new constitution is accepted."

-- Thomas Jefferson

https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jeffers...
by fifilura | 2026-01-19 20:52:08+00:00
> because he was the first Black President in the history

That seems to have hit a sore spot in you. A black man, who could have thought?

Did you read the motivation?

"Extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples. The Norwegian Nobel Committee announced the award on October 9, 2009, citing Obama's promotion of nuclear nonproliferation[2] and a "new climate" in international relations fostered by Obama, especially in reaching out to the Muslim world."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Nobel_Peace_Prize

As I recall it (somewhat vividly), the world took a sigh of relief after the tensions had been rising for many years between USA and the muslim world. After years of what GWB himself called "crusades" in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And Obama took action to soothe the tension.

That said. I do agree the prize was premature and a mistake in hindsight. (Obama himself was very surprised and humbled). But at the time, I too felt a big relief because people were actually talking to each other like human beings.
by lurk2 | 2026-01-19 20:53:04+00:00
> I see the same accounts over and over, many of whom complain about lack of impressions and payouts.

I followed a few accounts on Twitter and their interactions are all way down compared to a few years ago; this has been something of a trend on every network, though, so it might just be that the demographic that followed these accounts aged out of being high engagement users and there are other profiles that account for a greater proportion of overall engagement.
by schmuckonwheels | 2026-01-19 20:53:08+00:00
I've been saying glossy screens are pure cancer for 20 years and every time I was dismissed as a Luddite that should get with the times.

Now they can sell you "nano texture" at a premium after getting you hooked on functionally terrible displays (they look pretty in the store though).

My worst experience with glossy displays was when I had to perform some work outside on a sunny day and I comically could not see a single thing. It looked like a pure black square. I laughed, packed up and left, and told my boss it wasn't happening.
by nickm12 | 2026-01-19 20:53:36+00:00
I use the phrase "drive-by review" frequently too. As a senior engineer, I worry about doing drive-bys myself. Sometimes my gut tells me something is not quite right about the project, but I just don't know enough about the problem domain or technology/architecture choices to advise definitively.

In this case, I try to question the project owners on their assumptions and whether they have validated them. Usually this line of questioning reveals whether they have "done their homework".
by dijit | 2026-01-19 20:53:41+00:00
No, I don't have burden of proof for defending the status quo. That's not how this works.

The legal system processes millions of cases annually. The claim being made here is that it's unjust more often than just... that's an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence.

I'm not the one who needs to prove the system works. You need to prove it's fundamentally broken. "Plea bargains could coerce innocent people" isn't evidence, it's a handful of cases in millions and heavy speculation about prevalence. I've taken a caution myself when I thought I might prevail at trial, not because I was coerced into a false confession, but because the pragmatic choice was obvious. That's the system working, not breaking.

The Innocence Project has exonerated about 375 people via DNA evidence since 1989. Tragic? Absolutely. Evidence of systemic failure? Do your own fucking maths. That's 375 cases over 35 years in a system processing roughly 20 million criminal cases annually. Even if we're generous and assume there are 10x more wrongful convictions that haven't been discovered, we're still talking about a fraction of a percent.

Show me data demonstrating that false guilty pleas represent anything more than edge cases, or accept that the system, whilst imperfect, generally functions.

The burden is squarely on those claiming otherwise.
by array_key_first | 2026-01-19 20:53:53+00:00
The point is we don't really know who is innocent or not, because the incentives are so fucked. If you're poor and need to get on with your life, you take the guilty plee almost every time. Trial takes fucking forever, and it's very expensive.

What this means is the you can be charged with almost anything, and the odds are very high you will plea guilty, regardless of your innocence. There's basically no incentive for the police or prosecutors to show any restraint, they have a "get out of jail free" card in the form of plea bargains.
by MichaelBurjack | 2026-01-19 20:53:54+00:00
Based on my (limited) understanding of RTRI, they have very specific items they fund and pretty low overall impact to the trade balance ($1M per org and $1B over 3 years program total across all industries). From [1]:

----------

Productivity improvement:

- investing in digitization, automation, or technology to enhance business productivity and competitiveness

- reshoring production, research & development (R&D) operations, recruiting highly qualified personnel (HQP) and expertise

Market expansion and diversification:

- developing and diversifying markets to help businesses find new customers

- business support, market development and diversification, and guidance services (e.g., advice for businesses from a sectoral expert organization)

Strengthening supply chains and trade resilience:

- optimizing supply chain logistics and ensuring compliance with standards to gain market access and/or enhance sales

- strengthening domestic supply chains and facilitating internal trade to increase the resilience of businesses and reliability of domestic markets

----------

This $1B program — even if it all went straight to subsidizing tariffs on Canadian imports — would be a pretty small rounding error out of the total $200B raised through tariffs from the article.

If anything, RTRI funds are largely about efficiency and pivoting to new markets. While there may be some outcomes that result in producers being able to lower their export costs, they're not "paying for" US tariffs.

Edit: formatting.

--

1: https://www.canada.ca/en/prairies-economic-development/servi...
by duped | 2026-01-19 20:53:57+00:00
> And the original Iranian protests in the late-1970s against the Shah were non-violent.

"original" is doing some heavy lifting here - the Iranian revolution was not non violent. By the state or by the revolutionaries.

It's also impossible to talk about the regime without also bringing up the formative events in the early years of the Iranian state, namely the Iran-Iraq war.
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2026-01-19 20:54:30+00:00
>> The enshitification of the internet is largely driven by people ad blocking, as is incentivizes more click bait, more ads, and sloppier cheap content.

In Bizarro World. In our world, enshitification of the internet is driven predominantly by ads. For example, click bait, more ads and sloppier cheap content are all motivated by the need to create ever more content in order to serve ever more ads.

We know this because the number of ads and shit content monetised by ads has been growing steadily, while the number of people using ad blockers has mostly not. Ask me if you need me to dig up the numbers.
by foxinthebox | 2026-01-19 20:54:56+00:00
I'm building a lightweight, distraction-free Bible reading app.

Some features that mattered to me:
- Fully-offline
- Pleasant reading experience
- Ability to take notes, bookmarks and sync them across devices

I build this using:
- Preact + Vite
- Cloudflare Workers for syncing
- IndexedDB for offline storage
by spmurrayzzz | 2026-01-19 20:55:03+00:00
I think you're shadow-boxing with a point I never made. I never said experienced devs are not or can not be excited about current AI capabilities.

Lots of experienced devs who work in more difficult domains are excited about AI. In fact, I am one of them (see one of my responses in this thread about gpt-oss being able to work on proprietary RF firmware in my company [1]).

But that in no way suggests that there isn't a gap in what impresses or surprises engineers in any given domain. Antirez is probably one of the better, more reasoned examples of this.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46682604
by derektank | 2026-01-19 20:55:48+00:00
Regulations of course have a purpose but they are often (a) out of date with respect to current technology (b) not well well designed to accomplish their intended purpose in the first place or ignored 2nd and 3rd order effects and (c) perverted to extract rents for incumbents at the expense of new market entrants. Certainly (a) is true in most places with respect to nuclear technology.
by pixl97 | 2026-01-19 20:56:31+00:00
>Non-violence is effective as an alternative to violence.

I have a feeling you probably should have put a bunch of caveats for both like "if you're willing to wait a few generations for your aims to be met".

When talking about both the American civil war, one side had engaged in violence for antiquity and had the force of the state which came to state that violence was the expected behavior. This violent behavior was very profitable, and the people profiting from this realize they were in a weak position so they started propagandizing was what they were doing was "in the name of god", "is good for the common man", etc. It moves the conversation from one looking at the violence of slavery to "Why do you hate god and country".

Simply put the US civil war was a temporary increase of violence that preceded the war with slavery and followed the war in neo-slavery.
by ramblenode | 2026-01-19 20:56:32+00:00
I think your second point is a good one, although most economists would probably say this is an argument against the minimum wage rather than an argument for tariffs.

The ultimate problem with your first point---that tariffs boost domestic industry---is that the time horizon for reshoring manufacturing and domestic supply chains is longer than the expected lifetime of these tariffs. Trump is a second term president, there isn't broad consensus or even majority support for the tarrifs, and there is a great deal of opposition from business owners: all signs the tariffs are not for long. Who wants to invest in an expensive factory and workforce when the only thing guaranteeing your competitiveness is the remaining years of Trump? It's actually much worse than this, of course, because the tariffs are being used primarily as diplomatic leverage rather than economic policy, so they change frequently and unpredictably.

There are also serious downsides to the Trump tariffs that don't exist for traditional tariffs that are predictable and operate on a long time horizon. These tariffs create price shocks to domestic industry and retailers, which tend to disproportionately hurt smaller businesses and those with slimmer profit margins. They've also damaged the US's reputation with long-term partners, particularly Canada and the EU, which are now exploring competing trade deals with China and are figuring out how to extract themselves from dependence on US arms and tech companies, two major exports.

The effect of these tariffs is not going to be short-term pain for long-term gain. A great deal of US economic competitiveness comes from investments in diplomatic and military partnerships that have now been undermined. These tariffs will spur reciprocal tariffs from other nations and will accelerate the remodeling of the global economy away from US exports, trading competitive US exports for uncompetitive and commodified domestic industry.
by hdgvhicv | 2026-01-19 20:57:03+00:00
The time that an “App Store” existed and didn’t have adverts was very minimal. Like OP I haven’t browsed the iPhone App Store for over a decade. Occasionally a web page will send me to their app directly and if I want it (very rare) I’ll get it, same with installing specific apps - Spotify, YouTube, WhatsApp etc.

Apple used to charge money for a premium product where the customers were customers and not the product. It’s moving away from that.
by keybored | 2026-01-19 20:57:27+00:00
Does a French have intelligence? Ah, but we are getting ahead of ourselves. What is a French? Is it a person who speaks French? Is it a person from France? Is your friend René who, tragically, was knocked unconscious on the voyage from Algerie to France and has been in a coma ever since, now twelve years, who eight years ago got French citicenship despite never having been conscious while in Metropolitan France, a French? Is it about ethnicity, culture, borders, phrenology, heritage? You see, I had a French friend ones, a penpal. Oh! How I long for him, Zelda—both my polar opposite and my enigmatic equal. He was equivalent parts analytic, emotional; inquisitive, cooly indifferent; arrogant Anglophone, dainty European; Analytical, Continental; colonial, post-colonial. Every day he challenged me to be better. To be more eclectic, more musing, more deniably off-topic. I would mention irrelevant intellectuals from the 19th century on some tenuous pretext, like they were all confidently chauvinistic in that Edwardian-but-European fashion or some such other thing of that nature; he would mention somewhat obscure intellectuals, at least thrice-removed by association relative to mine, and so irrelevant that it was frankly insulting to your intelligence—but all deniable, all weaved through eight paragraphs of circumlocutions, a challenge for even the most hardened of hermeneutenecists.

And it turned out that he was, as the Slavs say,—and having no better guidance Le Académie Française I am afraid I have to say—a robot. And I loved him just as much as any supposed human I have met.

But does a robot have intelligence? Ah, but we are getting ahead of ourselves.
by RiverCrochet | 2026-01-19 20:57:46+00:00
I see iMessage and Discord as n-to-n communication - anyone can speak to anyone else typically.

I assume by default that people who want large 1-to-n communication are not interested in actual social activity but rather broadcasting, selling, or proselytizing. They want a podium, or a parasocial Twitter feed-like experience where the speaker can have their say, and the people can comment and either get ignored or immediately countered by trolls or acolytes. The television age's version of this in the 90's was called "Jerry Springer." This is not social.
by nailer | 2026-01-19 20:58:03+00:00
> Clearly it’s filed with abandoned accounts and bots. Musk promised a purge of abandoned accounts when he first took over, and auctioning off usernames, but that went nowhere.

Fascinating my anecdotal experience is the opposite. I’ve also been using Twitter for the last 17 years and I’ve finally got the opportunity to purchase the dead username I want.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-19 20:58:15+00:00
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.14860

Robinson, C., Ortiz, A., Kim, A. (et al.). (2025) Global Renewables Watch: A Temporal Dataset of Solar and Wind Energy Derived from Satellite Imagery. Global Renewables Watch.
by YuukiRey | 2026-01-19 20:58:24+00:00
I’m surprised by the somewhat positive comments. I thought this was just a chance for insider trading without repercussions. If I work at $corp and know the hotly anticipated whatever is announced tomorrow, I can finally cash in on that knowledge.

And the people losing their life savings on gambling now have one more tool.

But what do I know. I’m probably oblivious to what greatness those Truth Engines will enable.
by eddythompson80 | 2026-01-19 20:58:31+00:00
It’s not “too hard”. It’s physically impossible without regulation. There is but one limited RF spectrum that we all share. One bad actor (intentional or misconfigured) can render the entire RF spectrum in their area unusable. The radius of their impact only depends on how much kWHs they have access to and it doesn’t take much to cripple radio communication in a large metropolitan area.

Until some clever cookie can figure out some way to utilize string theory’s extra dimensions for sending signals and then every body can have their own dimension to mess with, collective regulation on broadcasters is the only feasible way.

Nothing is stopping you from getting an HT for communication during power outages, natural disasters, etc. You just have to get a license to make sure you don’t actively harm everyone who is sharing the same spectrum with you especially during said natural disaster.
by krapp | 2026-01-19 20:58:31+00:00
>But having read at least one or two books, it feels like, I dunno, folks who were actively stoked about Harris don't want -less- violence, they just want it done to folks they don't see...

The thing is you're choosing the violence of American imperialism to be done in your name either way.

And yes, the people who wanted Harris did actually want less violence, and would have gotten less violence. I know it's comforting and cathartic to demonize them and consider them more ignorant than you because it makes your decision seem more righteous. Harris voters were making the best decision they could with the choices they actually had, to not throw all of their allies (including Palestinians, mind you) under the bus and double down on accelerating fascism for the sake of a moral victory.

But hey, whatever helps you sleep at night. It's not as if it matters now, you all got what you wanted.
by notahacker | 2026-01-19 20:58:44+00:00
A key part was that the PM of the UK at the time of independence had been supportive of the notion of Indian self rule for two decades. England had other priorities in the 1947 that administering India didn't help with too.

But yeah, Britain had put down a full scale rebellion of Indian troops with a 100:1 casualty ratio ninety years earlier, and had a full-blown self-styled "Indian National Army" surrender to them at the end of WWII shortly before independence was actually granted. They were tired of war at the time but certainly not afraid of badly-armed rebels. Noncooperation posed an entirely different challenge because it couldn't just be responded to with force of arms, and colonialist dogma taught that British leadership was supposed to make India a better run country, not virtually ungovernable. There were also more cameras around in 1947 than 1857

The flip side is that simple disobedience has far less effect in states less concerned with optics and values they claimed to live up to than the tail end of the British Empire or the US federal government at the height of the the Civil Rights era
by Gagarin1917 | 2026-01-19 20:58:54+00:00
I’m not sure that logically tracks.

You (likely) act in a non-violent way every day. If you want some kind of change in your life, you achieve it non-violently.

Does that imply you are are actually a violent person that is choosing not to be violent? Are you implying “something violent” every day you act like a good person?
by Dylan16807 | 2026-01-19 20:58:59+00:00
What makes you say "majority"?

Let me make up a number. 7%. I think that number of plea bargains would be a huge problem if in 7% of cases the person is in fact innocent. Would you disagree?

And even generally assuming guilt, a number that high gets worrying. Maybe we're only prosecuting the strongest of strong cases or something, but some of the other factors that could be reducing the rate of trials are really bad for justice.