MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by PaulHoule | 2026-01-09 20:47:38+00:00
I agree there is more than one way to look at it. There are good points to RRO but I think the legalism drives away a "silent majority" [1] of people who out of their background or temperament are particularly repelled by it.

Over the long term I've seen the governance of organizations like my food co-op be quite complex and not what I thought when things were going on. For instance we had a conflict that boiled for years which looked like a conflict over the vision of the organization but in retrospect it really was the bad personality of the manager because that manager left and went to run Borders [2] and had the same problems over there whereas the conflicting camps reconciled pretty quickly when that manager was out.

But there really are tensions over professionalism, vanguardism, and such that we'll be arguing about for a really long time. The asymmetry between the left and right wings is also interesting -- I think left wing organizations have an unhealthy tendency towards centralization because fundraising is more difficult and you get the "membership organization" model that inevitably fails because of the issues pointed out in [3] [4] vs many right wing millionaires that fund parallel right wing causes that compete in a healthy way and always stay on mission because they can be defunded when they go off mission.

In 2026 I have a new commitment to activism but Jacobin magazine would rip into my approach as being radically apolitical but I think that is what is needed in 2026.

[1] 20 years ago I didn't think I'd be talking like Nixon...

[2] Personally I am not inclined to blame individuals, plus that manager had allies, which is why it took me so long to see it

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty
by ceejayoz | 2026-01-09 20:47:49+00:00
That overstates things somewhat.

https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/llglrd/2019...

> To some extent, judges are subordinated to a cabinet minister, and in most instances this is a
minister of justice of either the federation or of one of the states. In Germany, the administration of
justice, including the personnel matters of judges, is viewed as a function of the executive branch of
government, even though it is carried out at the court level by the president of a court, and for the lower
courts, there is an intermediate level of supervision through the president of a higher court. Ultimately,
a cabinet minister is the top of this administrative structure. The supervision of judges includes
appointment, promotion and discipline. Despite this involvement of the executive branch in the
administration of justice, it appears that the independence of the German judiciary in making decisions
from the bench is guaranteed through constitutional principles, statutory remedies, and institutional
traditions that have been observed in the past fifty years. At times, however, the tensions inherent in this
organizational framework become noticeable and allegations of undue executive influence are made.
by nuancebydefault | 2026-01-09 20:48:13+00:00
> one might even call the act of accepting generosity a type of compassion. The compassion of being kinded.

When reading this, I can suddenly relate. There's a colleage who always smiles but I know she's hurt inside. Sometimes in a quiet moment I try to comfort her with careful listening, kind words and genuine advice. She's very receptive and thankful to this act of kindness and I find it a pleasure to be kind to her. The reward is so high that it almost feels compassionate towards me.
by ksherlock | 2026-01-09 20:48:13+00:00
I keep hitting the start button -- which switches to a different melody -- when I want to hit the listen button -- which re-plays the current melody.

I feel like "listen" should be the first, more prominent button and "start" should be moved to the end and renamed to something more meaningful like "ahh shit, give me a different one"

other than that, cool.
by jimmar | 2026-01-09 20:48:29+00:00
I took meds for depression a few years ago. I don't know that they did anything other than signal to myself that I wasn't ready to give up. They may have served as a kind of "dumbo's feather" that helped me get through a rough patch. Exercise might be similar. People who choose to exercise make the statement to themselves that they are worth doing something positive for. Some mental health problems resolve with time and without medication, and in those cases, exercise might be a great way to address them. But if you're struggling, call your doctor and make and appointment. Medication is sometimes the answer.
by erikig | 2026-01-09 20:48:34+00:00
Exactly. For many, the idea of being able to see England, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India in one 50 day trip with many similar minded travelers who aren't in a rush is really quite appealing.

Also, with bus travel you could, if you felt like it, leave the trip to enjoy many more local attractions and resume your travels later in a way not afforded by airplane or rail travel.
by coryrc | 2026-01-09 20:48:50+00:00
> leader in nuclear accidents since the 1980s

I also want to put things in perspective: far, far more people are dying from fuckups with fossil fuels, but like "Florida man" (Florida has a law that crime reports must be published) we actually report and collect accidents involved in Nuclear production, so you can see every mistake. But you don't see mass protests because natural gas infrastructure failed in Texas and building pipes burst and people froze to death, including a young boy.
by immibis | 2026-01-09 20:49:33+00:00
You might be conflating description with prescription.

Descriptively, powerful people have all the rights and weak people have none. This is what we observe in the world. No amount of philosophical thought outweighs actual observations. For example, Donald Trump has (retroactively!) the right to r**e ch*ldren. We know this because he is not suffering consequences for doing that. But Renee Good did not have a right to free speech. We know this because she was executed because of her speech.

You can prescribe whatever fancy academia language you want, but the facts in the real world don't seem to currently support any of it beyond "might makes rights".
by somekyle2 | 2026-01-09 20:50:11+00:00
Certainly not my intention. Some of my post is projection: I don't like the implications of the AI enthusiast stance, and I know I want "actually, AI can't fully take over the task of programming" to be true even though my recent experience with uses it to handle even moderately complex implementation has been quite successful.
I've also seen the opposition narrow in scope but not firmness over the last year from some coworkers while watching others outsource nearly all of their actual code interaction, and I think some of the difference is how invested they are in the craft of programming vs being able to ship something.
So, if you like the part AI is expected to take over and see it as part of your value, it makes sense that your threshold are higher for accepting that outcome as accurate. Seems like typical psychology rather than an attack.
by Illniyar | 2026-01-09 20:50:51+00:00
He did mention that they were fighting the law before they were fined and they plan to challenge the fine in court.
He has also been vocal about other similar legislation before they were enacted or the company got fined (not sure about this specific one though).

So I don't think it's fair to characterize it as he "only complains about it when his company is fined".
by SoftTalker | 2026-01-09 20:51:37+00:00
Last check I wrote was for some car repairs at a local shop, where using a credit card would add a 3% premium. I agree, local services and contractors are some of the last people who you still can't pay electronically, but it's getting increasingly rare. Most will now at least take Venmo/Zelle.

I do own a home but find that almost everything can be paid online now. I write just a few paper checks per year. Even my taxes I pay on the state or IRS website (with ECH, so effectively a check but without the paper).
by 9dev | 2026-01-09 20:51:45+00:00
I think you're looking at it from the wrong angle. Wrestling the computer is stuff like figuring out how to recite the right incantation so Gradle will do a multi-platform fat bundle, and then migrate to the next major Gradle version. Unless you have a very specific set of kinks, tasks like these will make you want to quit your career in computers and pick up trash on the highway instead.

You very likely have some of these toil problems in your own corner of software engineering, and it can absolutely be liberating to stop having to think about the ape and the jungle when all you care about is the banana.
by touisteur | 2026-01-09 20:52:13+00:00
And from the state of note-taking and summarizer bots on audioconferences it's going to become potentially worse. The number of times I've had to correct negations in the results of several of those applications in the last year or so... to add to annoyance of either sifting through the emmms and errrr, or through the summarizers' annoying tone...
by LorenPechtel | 2026-01-09 20:52:50+00:00
I definitely agree, there are two fundamental forms of "depression"--internal and a reaction to a bad external situation. Very different causes, what works for one doesn't work for the other. And I don't even like the "depression" label for bad situations--as with the previous post about willpower. We have a limited ability to cope with bad, when it's exceeded (or our efforts are misapplied resulting in the same end) we get "depression". No, we get reality! That's why things like forcing rehab does nothing about addiction--it doesn't remove what drove the person to the drugs in the first place.
by lynx97 | 2026-01-09 20:52:53+00:00
Wait, requiring a passport to cross a border did prevent people from forming relationships? I really don't follow. It is not like we were prisoners in our home countries before the EU was invented. And "love" has always been a huge driver of immigration, way before the EU. I even know people who sold marriage so that the buyer could immigrate. So why exactly was the EU a driver for international love?
by spacechild1 | 2026-01-09 20:53:12+00:00
That's interesting!

There is also this email from Tue, 16 Jan 2001 19:02:12 +0000 in https://www.audiosynth.com/files/sc-users-archive/v01.n225 where he is clearly talking as Aphex Twin. He might be just an impersonator, but given that he speaks directly to James and James calls him Richard has me pretty convinced that it's actually him.
by languagehacker | 2026-01-09 20:53:19+00:00
There are a lot of reasons why people are here illegally. Over 50 years we created an environment in Latin America that made it dangerous and unlivable for normal, law-abiding people. At the same time, we radically altered what we consider to be refugee status for immigration, and introduced rules that unfairly put requirements on other countries that refugees going over land need to apply for refugee status in every other country, whether or not there is infrastructure or jobs to support those refugees.

This is all while companies reap the benefit of and build their pricing structures off of cheap, undocumented labor. We are profiting off of criminalizing people who are just trying to live their lives.

You might count yourself fortunate not to be in this kind of a predicament, but it may benefit you to consider educating yourself on the subject and having a bit of empathy for others instead of relying on categorical absolutes.
by conductr | 2026-01-09 20:53:23+00:00
Tutorial sites circa late 90s, before blog was a term. I bought a book about HTML but quickly found it was easier to search and W3schools came online around this time. Google was new and a godsend. Had a few failed attempts with Perl and C. Then stumbled on PHP 3 and the LAMP stack and was off to the races.

Started and ran a web hosting business by 2002. All from googling solutions as they arose, I knew nothing about sysadmin. Quickly got out of it by selling it in 2003.

I continued on with PHP, then rails, python, JavaScript , etc trying to build a billion dollar idea without leaving my apartment without talking to people. I didn’t but I learned a lot. My motivation was always money, I was an entrepreneurial kid way before it was cool.

I view it as a hobby now. I feel like I know enough. I like to build things like an inventor would. I never really learned to do the marketing and sales part right. I can do this pretty well IRL but driving traffic has never been fun for me.
by ImprobableTruth | 2026-01-09 20:53:30+00:00
The key thing is that you teach multiplication tables in a structured, incremental manner. Yes, it's just rote memorization, but the structure makes it way easier. You don't just dump all tables on the student at once and start quizzing them until they get it.

Imo not being able to select a subset of intervals to train heavily limits how useful this is.
by alephnerd | 2026-01-09 20:53:44+00:00
A lot of people here on HN assume Viet Nam is as lax as Thailand. It is not.

Now that VN is in the process of rolling out a "digital citizen scoring" system [0] that will include foreigners, I think it is important for most HNers to realize that certain principled positions may lead to issues down the line if they wish to visit VN.

[0] - https://antv.gov.vn/xa-hoi-4/cham-diem-cong-dan-so-khuyen-kh...
by riedel | 2026-01-09 20:54:09+00:00
Judicial oversight took a while in Germany, but it is there now (but I guess you will always find an incompetent judge if you really want). I wonder if cloudflare would implement the German blocklist now that we have judicial oversight. Currently it is as nice registry for pirating sites for anyone using 1.1.1.1 [1]

[1] https://cuiiliste.de/domains
by iJohnDoe | 2026-01-09 20:54:19+00:00
You had me until, “Such as life.” The point here is there is no reason life should be this way and that is why people have a problem with it.

Sadly, agreed, most should expect to get shot to death by police in any given situation. Most become a police officer with the sole purpose of being able to shoot someone and they are continuously looking for any opportunity to do so. They are literally a junkie waiting to get their fix.

Sadly, agreed, pitbulls should not be kept as pets and certainly not when children are present. Most people can’t control their pets, let alone a pitbull. Also, pitbull owners know they are choosing a pitbull for the sole purpose of proving others wrong, or the opportunity to blame someone else if their pitbull attacks someone. Weirdly like police.
by metaphysicalyes | 2026-01-09 20:54:21+00:00
I hope you are not claiming perception of intent is enough to claim a life. It is the actual intent that counts.

Appeal to mental ineptitude is not a defense of murder. If a person can't distinguish between intention of person to kill others vs escaping when driving in a completely different direction then that person does not have right to posses a weapon which can take human life.

Also interesting that you do not address the 2nd and 3rd shot at all.
by delaminator | 2026-01-09 20:54:37+00:00
Go back a bit further for why.

Netscape Navigator did, in fact, reject invalid HTML. Then along came Internet Explorer and chose “render invalid HTML dwim” as a strategy. People, my young naive self included, moaned about NN being too strict.
NN eventually switched to the tag soup approach.
XHTML 1.0 arrived in 2000, attempting to reform HTML by recasting it as an XML application. The idea was to impose XML’s strict parsing rules: well-formed documents only, close all your tags, lowercase element names, quote all attributes, and if the document is malformed, the parser must stop and display an error rather than guess. XHTML was abandoned in 2009.
When HTML5 was being drafted in 2004-onwards, the WHATWG actually had to formally specify how browsers should handle malformed markup, essentially codifying IE’s error-recovery heuristics as the standard.
by dfabulich | 2026-01-09 20:55:19+00:00
> The plan is however to open source when Orion is self-sufficient (business model of Orion is you are the customer and can pay for it - like we used to pay for browsers 20 years ago before advertisers started paying for our browsing), meaning it can sustain its own development independent of Kagi Search.

Orion will never reach "self-sufficiency" as long as you don't actually charge for Orion. Orion is completely free to use. I can donate to Orion+, but Orion+ offers no paid features; it's basically a Patreon. https://help.kagi.com/orion/orion-plus/orion-plus.html

(No major browser has ever sustained its own development independent of a search engine's funding, not even Netscape, which charged $40/seat in the 1990s, with a free "shareware" tier so generous that hardly anyone paid. Netscape was funded by advertising, especially from Yahoo search. Funding browser development entirely on donations to a commercial business would be completely unprecedented.)

What if, instead, you made Orion "source available" to paying customers, but not open source? You could merge PRs only from users who sign a CLA. (Users would file PRs out of charity, for the same reason they sign up for Orion+ today.)
by scsh | 2026-01-09 20:55:38+00:00
No it's not strange. As someone who enjoys playing music I have heard a lot of music that doesn't suite my particular tastes, but appreciated the artistic talent of the people creating it because I truly believe they are talented. If you dig below the surface level you can find plenty to appreciate about how something is created, even if the product isn't for you.

You can find something to like about a lot of things. I also enjoy watching videos about wristwatch repairs and seeing the construction of them. However, I do not want one and would never wear one.
by chrneu | 2026-01-09 20:55:44+00:00
Reminder that border patrol and ice have shot 3 people in the last 48 hours. Then multiple government agencies lied about the evidence, got caught, and lied again. We're not talking disputing facts, the FBI and ICE and the president blatantly lied while there is video evidence showing what really happened.

Furthermore, a lot of politicians not only agree with this extrajudicial justice, they applauded the lies and the shootings.

Even US citizens are being detained. I think most tourists and immigrants should be very, very apprehensive about coming to this country.

I live in Oregon where this stuff is happening on the daily. Citizens are being plucked out of high school parking lots with no verification.

I think saying "it's fine" is pretty out of touch with reality. If you are non-white I would absolutely not travel to the United States right now. I say this as a white guy on the west coast of the US. Basically all my non-white foreign friends, mostly in academia, refuse to travel to the US right now and have no plans of doing so while Trump is in office. Their organizations and universities also aren't recommending US travel at this time.
by jasongill | 2026-01-09 20:55:53+00:00
Ignoring concerns about the security of UPnP, and the fact that this is somewhat of a "solved" problem considering there are things like libupnp and miniupnpc, I am wondering if this is really the cleanest way to solve the problem in C++ with Qt?

I'm most curious about the fact that this program has ~30,000 lines of included headers to simply generate a static string (the XML output).

Obviously if you were generating large XML payloads repeatedly, then including a dependency would be a good idea, but this implementation is using "inja.hpp" which in turn requires "json.hpp" to output what is effectively a concatenated string.

Why not just use Qt's built in QStringLiteral and feed it the (short) bit of XML to it along with your 4 variables, similar to a sprintf?
by lynx97 | 2026-01-09 20:56:11+00:00
Well, the EU is pretty firmly in conservative hands. Ask a random EU citizen if they know that EPP is secretly leading the EU since its conception? They will likely not realize, because they fall for the piece&love propaganda. Just look at what VDL has done since she overtook the lead? Know where she comes from? Used to be defense minister in germany. Was called "Flintenuschi" back then. And now, magically, we are supposed to invest a shitload of money into military. Thats what I call a wolf in sheep's clothing.
by bananabiscuit | 2026-01-09 20:56:22+00:00
Not sure if there anything definitive. I got the impression that Renee and her wife were positioning their car specifically to impede ICE, going off of what I saw from the interaction in the second video I linked in my original post. Does not look like any normal traffic interaction to me, but I could be wrong. This seems like a detail that will be easy to definitively verify or disprove once more information comes out.
by silexia | 2026-01-09 20:57:09+00:00
The services we get from government are rife with fraud and corruption. I build roads and can tell you that without government red tape and regulation and harassment and fees and kickbacks, you would have roads finished in 1/100th of the time and at 1/100th of the cost.

Billionaires created the goods and services they did DESPITE government, not because of it.
by anttiharju | 2026-01-09 20:57:52+00:00
> It's like a genie, take care with what you wish for.

I used to be stuck with this thought. But I came across this delightful documentation RAG project and got to chat with the devs. Idea was that people can ask natural language questions and they get shown the relevant chunk of docs for that query. They were effectively pleading to a genie if I understood it right. Worse yet, the genie/LLM model kept updating weekly from the cloud platform they were using.

But the devs were engineers. They had a sample set of docs and sample set of questions that they knew the intended chunk for. So after model updates they ran the system through this test matrix and used it as feedback for tuning the system prompt. They said they had been doing it for a few months with good results, search remaining capable over time despite model changes.

While these agents.md etc. appear to be useful, I'm not sure they're going to be the key for long-term success. Maybe with a model change it becomes much less effective and the previous hours spent on it become wasteful.

I think something more verifiable/strict is going to be the secret sauce for llm agents. Engineering.

I liked the headline from some time ago that 'what if LLMs are just another piece of technology'?