MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by WalterBright | 2026-01-25 18:14:06+00:00
> Also what has this to do with the current discussion?

The point is C does not allow doing anything you want. The C type system, for example, places all kinds of restrictions on what code can be written. The underlying CPU does not have a type system - it will multiply two pointers just fine without complaint. The CPU does not even have a concept of a pointer. (The C preprocessor doesn't have a notion of types, either.)

The point of a type system is to make the code more readable and reduce user errors.

We have a difference of opinion on C. Mine is that C should have better rules to make code more readable and reduce user errors. Instead it remains stuck in a design from the 1970s, and has compromised semantics that result from the severe memory constraints of those days. You've defended a number of these shortcomings as being advantages.

Just for fun, I'll throw out another one. The C cast syntax is ambiguous:

(T)(3)

Is that a function call or a cast of 3 to type T? The only way to disambiguate is to keep a symbol table of typedef's so one can determine if T is a type or not a type. This adds significant complexity to the parser, and is completely unnecessary.

The fix D has for this is:

cast(T)(3)

where `cast` is a keyword. This has another advantage in that casts are a blunt tool and are associated with hiding buggy code. Having `cast` be easily searchable makes for better code reviews.
by al_borland | 2026-01-25 18:14:23+00:00
Last time I tried Android I had to sign my rights away to everything the app wanted just to install it.

In contrast, on iOS I get prompted to allow or deny access to my information when the app tries calling Apple’s API to fetch that information.

For example, if an app wants access to my contacts to find other people using the app. On iOS I can simply say “no” when it prompts me to allow it to read my contacts. I lose out on that feature to find other people using the app, which I don’t care about, but I can still use the rest of the app. On Android it seemed like by installing the app, I had already agreed to give up my contacts… it was all or nothing. If I don’t like one privacy compromising feature, I couldn’t use the app at all.

Android may have improved this in the last few years, but I found it to be a dealbreaker for the entire platform.
by filoeleven | 2026-01-25 18:14:27+00:00
Not sure why this is being downvoted. It's from the same poster who just gave all the info.

It mirrors what is working in Minneapolis. It shows public outrage at what is happening. The absence of violence in the crowd makes it even clearer that ICE are the ones provoking incidents. It helps city and state officials make their case that their people need protection from ICE, not the other way around.
by dashundchen | 2026-01-25 18:14:33+00:00
ICE has been harassing and following legal observers to their houses. They've shot and executed at least two people who were exercising their legal right to record their activity.

The FBI has been showing up at the door of some people who dare to organize protests against ICE.

Stingrays have been deployed to protests, ICE is collecting photos of protestors for their database, and has been querying YCombinator funded Flock to pull automated license plate camera data from around the country. Trump, Vance, Noem and Miller are calling anyone who protests them domestic terrorists.

It's pretty clear this isn't just about immigration, that this is about pooling data for a surveillance state that can quash the constitutional rights of anyone who dares to oppose the current regime. We've seen this story before.
by gruez | 2026-01-25 18:14:36+00:00
>Sure, you could argue it helps to express a distinction but that doesn't mean it has to live inside the verb install.

Right, which is why they used "sideload".

>In other ecosystems the store path is described as "store install" not the other way around. Android chose the inverse framing and that choice isn't neutral.

No, this is just being non-neutral in the opposite direction. Given the fact that installing from the play store is the default experience for the overwhelming majority of the user, calling it "store install" is even more obtuse.
by cratermoon | 2026-01-25 18:14:40+00:00
From Hannah Arendt's book The Origins of Totalitarianism, first published 1948. She identified what we now call stochastic terrorism but did not give it a name.

Mostly such orders were "intentionally vague, and given in the expectation that their recipient would recognize the intent of the order giver, and act accordingly", for the elite formations were by no means merely obligated to obey the order of the Fuehrer (this was mandatory for all existing organizations anyway), but "to execute the will of the leadership". And, as can be gathered from the lengthy proceedings concerning "excesses" before the party courts, this was by no means one and the same. The only difference was the the elite formations, thanks to their special indoctrination for such purposes, had been trained to understand that certain "hints mean more than their mere verbal contents" -- Arendt, Hannah. 2025. Hannah Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism Expanded Edition (LOA #389). Edited by Jerome Kohn and Thomas Wild. New York, NY: Library of America. (588-89)
by metalman | 2026-01-25 18:14:57+00:00
and because of all the restrictions on imigrants, the only ones still trying to get in are hard core grifters, trades are aging out, H1B is getting thrown out along with there tech skills, tourism must be fucking weird right now, lots of people will be avoiding any work related travel to the US as it can hardly be sold as a "perk" and horror storys abound.
Cant tell for sure, but it does seem that there are less americans around in Canada right now, or it could be they are "blending", but wooooo!, are they ever getting an ear full, anywhere, anytime!
by smallstepforman | 2026-01-25 18:15:33+00:00
This is how Haiku packages are managed, from the outside its a single zstd file, internally all dependacies and files and included in read only file. Reduces IO, reduces file clutter, instant install/uninstall, zero chance for user to corrupt files or dependancy, and easy to switch between versions. The Haiku file system also supports virtual dir mapping so the stubborn Linux port thinks its talking to /usr/local/lib, but in reality its part of the zstd file in /system/packages.
by credit_guy | 2026-01-25 18:16:23+00:00
Not sure the choice of the word "bankruptcy" is meaningful. "Bankruptcy" is short for "bankruptcy protection", where an insolvent debtor tells a court they have no way of paying back all their current debts with whatever assets they have, and the court deals with the creditors and restructures all those debts in an equitable way (according to the law), so the debtors liability is limited. This is one of the cornerstones of capitalism, the limited liability concept.

When it comes to nature, there is no limited liability. If you don't have water, you don't have water, there's no way to get any "bankruptcy protection" from anyone.
by codyb | 2026-01-25 18:18:03+00:00
There's a lot of folk out here downvoting my protest and boycott encouragement. I just assume they're do nothing goobers or worse.

The sad fact is, even most of the people who're sympathetic to democracy and human rights will do just about zero to protect or fight for them.

I don't really know what else to do though, so I keep trying!
by baggy_three | 2026-01-25 18:18:18+00:00
Thank you for a live demonstration of what I'm talking about. You sound just like the arseholes I fell out with back in the day.

Not my government, by the way. I'm in the UK and so the propensity of USians to blast each other away with guns for stupid reasons isn't something that particularly concerns me. You people have a school shooting pretty much every week. Absolute shithole of a country no matter who is in charge.

Also, are you aware you have neo-Nazi numbers in your username? Funny to see such an account complaining about fascism, in an incongruous kind of way.
by Analemma_ | 2026-01-25 18:18:38+00:00
I don’t have hard numbers on this, but I once read a claims that the lawnmowers and weed-whackers in California with their two-stroke engines are responsible for more nitrate and particulate emissions than all the cars and trucks in the state put together, even though by fuel burned the latter outnumbers the former by orders of magnitude. I could totally see a malfunctioning four-stroke ICE with dirty burns being worse than 100 maintained ones.
by Oras | 2026-01-25 18:18:38+00:00
If you mean in coding context, then yes it went down pretty bad to what it used to be back in December.

I’ve using paid AntiGravity and it was brilliant back in December, similar quality to Sonnet 4.

But it’s been degrading in the last 2 weeks. Now I either use Sonnet in anti gravity or Codex.
by prmoustache | 2026-01-25 18:19:16+00:00
> agreed upon

That is the main issue.

There are alternatives but waaaay too many already. Some will say Signal, others matrix, xmpp, jami, deltachat, olvid, simplex, briar, tox,...there is a new one every couple of months but none everbody can agree on.

The sad part is we were halfway there with XMPP 2 decades ago when both google and facebook were interoperable with it.
by sosomoxie | 2026-01-25 18:19:18+00:00
The parent's example is of an individual using that "legal" state collected data for nefarious purposes. Once it's collected, anyone who accesses it is a threat vector. Also, governments (including/especially the US) have historically killed, imprisoned and tortured millions and millions of people. There's nothing to be gained by an individual for allowing government access to their data.
by rustyhancock | 2026-01-25 18:19:52+00:00
Scientists, are not quite like explorers, just venturing off in direction and see what they find.

They have interests, that align with funding, which aligns with actionable data. And they follow them.

So who would even do such research? The best you could find is some meaningless difference in mean scores that is likely swamped by environmental factors. And the fact that "race" is far fuzzier than our intuition leads us to think (it turns out we're very good at applying racial labels to people, that genetically are simply not so clear especially at the edges of categories).^*

So it's hard to fund research with no purpose, that scientists aren't particularly interested in conducting. Instead [GWAS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome-wide_association_study) studies answer more useful questions that are actionable (you can do a genetic test and calculate a risk in principle).

* I'll clarify this statement because it's a common misconception. There are clearly genetic differences between racial groups. But they are complex statsical genetics that are impossible to cleanly pin down without large levels of miscategorization. And GWAS studies are answering the question which genes are associated with cognition and disorder.
by fcarraldo | 2026-01-25 18:21:01+00:00
There are a ton of job/queue systems out there that are based on SQL DBs. GoodJob and SupaBase Queues are two examples.

It’s not usable for high scale processing but most applications just need a simple queue with low depth and low complexity. If you’re already managing PSQL and don’t want to add more management to your stack (and managed services aren’t an option), this pattern works just fine. Go back 10-15yrs and it was more common, especially in Ruby shops, as teams willing to adopt Kafka/Cassandra/etc were more rare.
by philipallstar | 2026-01-25 18:21:11+00:00
> Well, I'd argue the system failed in that the bad person is not removed.

This is just a proxy for "the person is bad" then. There's no need to invoke a system. Who can possibly trace back all the things that could or couldn't have been spotted at interview stage or in probation? Who cares, when the end result is "fire the person" or, probably, "promote the person".
by shermantanktop | 2026-01-25 18:21:22+00:00
Bad acts are in the past, and may be situational or isolated.

Labelling a person as bad has predictive power - you should expect them to do bad acts again.

It might be preferable to instead label them as “a person with a consistent history of bad acts, draw your own conclusion, but we are all capable of both sin and redemption and who knows what the future holds”. I’d just call them a bad person.

That said, I do think we are often too quick to label people as bad based one bad act.
by greentea23 | 2026-01-25 18:21:40+00:00
Despite the opt in limitation, I wonder if this interop capability will allow a bridge that doesn't require you to install whatsapp apk on a real device (unfortunately signal has the same problem). I fortunately kept an old android whose sole purpose is to keep these 2 apps installed. Not ideal, but works well.

Even better if we could ditch the phone number requirement. Many have said to me things like "I use whatsapp not SMS because I am not American", but of course everyone on WhatsApp uses SMS. To stay logged into WhatsApp you necessessarily must have an SMS enabled non-VOIP phone number that you are regularly paying a telecom provider for to receive auth codes.
by subscribed | 2026-01-25 18:21:42+00:00
Of course.

It's like Dell telling you that CPU voltage/RAID controller alert and server reboot is your fault that will get fixed if you just install EXACTLY the same firmware version you have, or this another firmware update to completely different component. Yes, it's market "optional", but you must have it installed before they actually consider it a hardware problem next time it happens.
by snakepit | 2026-01-25 18:21:42+00:00
I solved test concurrency and flakiness in Elixir with Claude by developing a test library specifically to address this. It's used for most projects now. In your implementation prompt, simply specify including the library and include context from the README.md and manual with instructions to apply the concepts to the test suite. Works fine to refactor a flaky test suite, too.
by dns_snek | 2026-01-25 18:21:45+00:00
WebUSB is a giant gaping hole in the browser sandbox. Innocent use cases are really nice, I've used WebUSB to flash GrapheneOS on my device, but the possibilities for users to shoot themselves in the foot with nefarious website are almost endless.

Consider the fact that Chromium has to specifically blacklist Yubikey and other known WebAuthn vendor IDs, otherwise any website could talk to your Yubikey pretending to be a browser and bypass your 2FA on third party domains.

I'm conflicted on WebUSB because it's convenient but on the balance I think it's too dangerous to expose to the general public. I don't know how it could be made safer without sacrificing its utility and convenience.
by smitty1e | 2026-01-25 18:22:54+00:00
I hope that we can agree that blowing off the 10A and allowing all of this federal bloat has not been a swift call.

Social services left at the State level would be subject to a smaller pool of votes for approval and are more likely to be funded by actual tax revenue instead of debt.

That is: sustainably.

Furthermore, the lack of One True Database is a safety feature in the face of the inevitable bad actors.

In naval architecture, this is called compartmentalization.

There are good arguments against this, sure, but the current disaster before you would seem a refutation.
by luckylion | 2026-01-25 18:23:31+00:00
It's not always a protest against government, sometimes it a campaign of lobbying, sometimes it's international attention.

The US government wasn't a friend of Kony in 2012. Before Trump 2, the US were not that friendly with Russia, yet people protested in many places around the world to show support for Ukraine and to voice their opposition to Russia's imperialistic wars, being aligned with their governments' position.

It's different with Iran. Some of that is likely to be Iran's lower profile, but not all -- it's not like media outlets are not reporting on it at all and you have to get your information from niche sources to hear about events in Iran.
by pstuart | 2026-01-25 18:23:57+00:00
> This is a fundamental organizational and societal problem

Absolutely, and we'd collectively be better served if we had tools to deal with it.

I think of it as "incentive ecology" -- as noted, everybody has their own incentives which shapes their behavior, which causes downstream issues that begin the process anew.

Obviously there's no simple one-shot solution to this, but what if we had ways to simplify and model this web of blame (some sort of game theory exposed as an easily consumed presentation, with computed outcomes that show the cost/ROI/risk/reward) that could be shared by all stakeholders?

Obscurity and deniability are the weapons wielded in most of these scenarios, so what if we could render them obsolete?

Sure, those in power would not want to yield their advantages, but the overall outcomes should reward everybody by minimizing risks and maximizing rewards for the enterprise and everybody wins.

Yes, I'm looking at it as a an engineer and a dreamer, but I think if such a tool existed that was open source and easily accessible that this work could be done by rogue participants that could put it out there so it's undeniable.
by glenstein | 2026-01-25 18:24:28+00:00
"That’s why they used sideload" is exactly the point being contested. Historically, install was the unmarked, neutral verb for adding software, regardless of source. The distinction, when needed, lived in qualifiers about provenance. Introducing a new verb for non-store installs does more than merely describe a difference, it reassigns conceptual ownership of "install" to the store path.

And neutrality here isn't about mirroring current usage frequency (which is unique to Android and recent relative to the history of computing), it's about continuity with prior computing norms. Even when one distribution path dominated in practice, it didn't get to redefine the base verb.
by recursivecaveat | 2026-01-25 18:24:33+00:00
I don't understand why it has been acceptable to not upload a tarball of your data with the paper in the internet age. Maybe the Asset4 database is only available with license and they can't publish too much. However, the key concern with the method is a pairwise matching of companies which is an invention of the paper authors and should be totally clear to publish. The number of stories I've heard from people forensically investigating PDF plots to uncover key data from a paper is absurd.

Of course doing so is not free and it takes time. A paper represents at least months of work in data collection, analysis, writing, and editing though. A tarball seems like a relatively small amount of effort to provide an huge increase in confidence for the result.
by filoeleven | 2026-01-25 18:24:34+00:00
The instant there is armed pushback, Trump will declare martial law. It's entirely plausible that had there not been so many people with cameras around, this would have been used as the excuse.

The best thing to do is to be out there recording everything. You are right that they are emboldened, so you're putting yourself in danger by filming. When people continue to do that despite the danger, and despite the internal or external pressure to escalate, it shows more people what's really happening.

I've witnessed people change their position on ICE's actions based on the video evidence of the last killing. Videos 1 and 2 weren't convincing to them, but the 3rd angle was. That's important, because they now know that the administration is lying in the face of directly contradicting evidence.
by mindslight | 2026-01-25 18:24:37+00:00
Who needs to care about the Constitution, Individual Liberty, or limited government when there are iMmIgrAnTs around?!

It's like these people never got past their childhood phase worrying about the monster in the closet. In fact I do have to wonder how much of the non-Boomer+ support for this regime is just from naive kids who have zero life experience.
by andy_xor_andrew | 2026-01-25 18:24:45+00:00
Curious if someone could enlighten me-

How much of these sorts of patches are specifically checking if a certain application is running, and then changing behavior to match what that application expects? And how much of it is simply better emulating the Windows API in general?

I think there are benefits to both approaches, not criticizing either one. I'm just curious if the implementation of a patch like this is "We fixed an inconsistency between Wine and Windows" vs "We're checking if Photoshop is running and using a different locking primitive" or whatever.
by al_borland | 2026-01-25 18:25:25+00:00
Everyone I know on iOS just uses Messages, they don’t feel a need for other apps.

People on Android I’ve run into seem to have a half dozen apps and use anything but the built in messaging.

A few months ago while on a trip I ran into an older couple that wanted some picture I took in a place they weren’t physically up to going. They were not tech savvy at all. Had they been on iOS, they would have just been using Messages and it would have been easy. They had Android, and the guy opened about 5 or 6 different messaging apps, not really knowing what any of them were, it seemed like a real mess. I sent them using Messages over RCS, assuming they’d go to Google Messages, or whatever the default equivalent standard app is for Google (they seem to have changed it a dozen times). It could be that the pictures were taking a while to send, my phone showed they sent, but he had no idea where to look or where they might have went, despite having so many messaging apps. I hope he is able to find them or they came through with a notification once he had a better single.

Having one good app that everyone uses is better than the default app being sub-par, or so constantly in flux that the users and smattered about to dozens of different apps that can’t talk to each other.
by tripletao | 2026-01-25 18:25:46+00:00
Ioannidis corrected for false positives with a point estimate rather than the confidence interval. That's better than not correcting, but not defensible when that's the biggest source of statistical uncertainty in the whole calculation. Obviously true zero can be excluded by other information (people had already tested positive by PCR), but if we want p < 5% in any meaningful sense then his serosurvey provided no new information. I think it was still an interesting and publishable result, but the correct interpretation is something like Figure 1 from Gelman's

https://sites.stat.columbia.edu/gelman/research/unpublished/...

I don't think Gelman walked anything back in his P.S. paragraphs. The only part I see that could be mistaken for that is his statement that "'not statistically significant' is not the same thing as 'no effect'", but that's trivially obvious to anyone with training in statistics. I read that as a clarification for people without that background.

We'd already discussed PCR specificity ad nauseam, at

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36714034

These test accuracies mattered a lot while trying to forecast the pandemic, but in retrospect one can simply look at the excess mortality, no tests required. So it's odd to still be arguing about that after all the overrun hospitals, morgues, etc.