MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by itsyonas | 2026-01-11 08:10:00+00:00
> I am a huge fan of SpaceX and I think that establishing a multi-planetary civilization is the most important thing to do, and, I’ll say bluntly, will save lives.

How can we credibly talk about saving lives on other planets when we are demonstrably unable to protect life on the only habitable world we actually have? If we are failing at basic stewardship here, what evidence is there that we would act more responsibly anywhere else?
by foxglacier | 2026-01-11 08:10:23+00:00
It's probably more because of the news than the world. It's not possible for there not to be plenty of unfixed problems. No matter how many problems we solve -- and we've solved a hell of a lot over the past decades or century -- other existing problems will take their place as seeming to be important.

If I'm being too extreme, can you describe a world where you'd consider enough problems have been solved that it's worth spending billions colonizing space?
by zippyman55 | 2026-01-11 08:10:29+00:00
I did caveat the location and the required reliability. Highway miles in a place Seattle would probably require a better car. Other places, like Santa Cruz or Monterey, CA can have a pretty dumpy car. I guess, if you have two cars, you may not need two $30K cars.
But, I did put on 348K miles on my Madza B2000 truck and I think that cost me $5600 when I purchased it. But, it did get to a point of not being safe to drive.
by imiric | 2026-01-11 08:14:39+00:00
It's not about building a wall. It's about ensuring that the terms of the license chosen by the author are respected.

This is why I think permissive licenses are a mistake for most projects. Unlike copyleft licenses, they allow users to restrict the freedoms they enjoy to users of derivative works. It's no surprise that dishonest actors take advantage of this for their own gain. This is the paradox of tolerance.

"AI" companies take this a step further, and completely disregard the original license. Whereas copyleft would somewhat be a deterrent for potential abusers, it's not for this new wave of companies. They can hide behind the already loosely defined legal frameworks, and claim that the data is derivative enough, or impossible to trace back, or what have you. It's dishonest at best, and corrupts the last remnants of public good will we still enjoy on the internet.

We need new legal frameworks for this technology, but since that is a glacial process, companies can get rich in the meantime. Especially shovel salespeople.
by Jensson | 2026-01-11 08:14:46+00:00
> FGM generally has much more severe consequences than circumcision

There are variants that are equivalent to circumcision, but those are banned as well. It is illegal to cut into female genitals and legal to cut into male genitals today.

To stay consistent people should either support making some versions of FGM legal or make all versions of MGM illegal.
by Sesse__ | 2026-01-11 08:14:57+00:00
FS.com is great for all kinds of fiber stuff… but curiously, nothing long-distance. I never really understood it; you can get a 40-channel DWDM setup (including tunable 100gig SFPs) just like nothing, but a drum of quite normal G24 loose tube cabling meant for outdoor use? Nope. You'll have to go elsewhere for that. And I guess that's also what happened here; the poster picked the best thing they had for the purpose, and it's just not that good.

I've also had problems with their pigtails also being weird, by the way (layers separating so that automated cutters can't stretch the pigtail properly). It's weird when everything else is so good—it's as if they only care about what's going on internal to a data center and you never need to do a splice. :-)
by techspecs | 2026-01-11 08:15:06+00:00
It’s not open source at the moment.

I initially explored a fully client-side approach (including WebAssembly), but it didn’t work well in practice. Real-time audio transcription and multi-language translation are both compute-intensive, and browser-only solutions ran into performance and reliability limits, especially for longer videos and live streams.

Using a dedicated backend allowed more consistent latency and accuracy across browsers, and made features like multiple simultaneous subtitle languages and searchable transcripts feasible.

If you’re curious to see how it behaves in practice, I have a temporary install available while the Chrome Web Store listing is pending: https://content.ray.techspecs.io/public/assets/apps/extensio...

It’s a standard unpacked Chrome extension install (developer mode → load unpacked). Happy to answer any technical questions about the pipeline or trade-offs.
by jonway | 2026-01-11 08:15:55+00:00
Anecdote:

literally just had to use one of those employee terminals for our work process. As i activated the display, a box popped up and read: "Windows will soon be restarting." with a Close button. It was an odd number of minutes on a half-hour.

After I press close to use the website I have to use this to use (ugh) it immediately shutdown. I had to stop work, wait, and bill for a full 17 minutes (counting!) before the computer terminal literally did nothing but reboot and auto-open a website in Microsoft Bing or whatever stupid shit they named the browser.

Linux can so easily do this in single-digit-seconds. Ask ChatGPT how. yeah linux security blows unless you add all the shitty domain security stuff that makes it not suck, adding god-knows-how-many-seconds to the boot also and yeah, windows could be literally more secure (more reliance on C&C makes detection easier, Endpoint monitoring is okay, except all those whitelisted things which totally subvert the entire shebang and of course you need a team of scientists to write your Security Policy for you.) but...

This sucks.

ADDENDUM: Dear open source or—scratch that—some one paying for this already,

Please just maintain an OK security policy with all the convoluted, ancient, corner-cased, yak-shaving commercial starring windows weird bullshit from 40 years just regularized and de-shitted to not fuck us over or confuse my mom or grandmom (2026 and the fact that the answer is still "iPhone" Sucks!) on like, github. Just let the 14 year olds, gamers, and us fat people download this and use it. Laugh at the issues, idc. Help. Hey maybe people would pay for MDM admins that are at least pretending to be competent!?
by alienchow | 2026-01-11 08:16:19+00:00
Hey actually I didn't know! It's my very first time dealing with fibre networking so I just maxed out the supposed durability specs. I figured I'd rather go overkill than regret not having done so. Ironic I know.

Unfortunately I can't easily dig the cable out and bury it again in this case. I'll have to figure out how to pull a new cable using the existing cable through the PVC conduits as the cable shares a larger conduit with multiple other fibre and Ethernet cables. The whole project was orchestrated remotely in a different timezone with me giving the electricians instructions over WhatsApp photos and audio recordings, so that limited what I could realistically control onsite back then. Often the contractors would proceed with a do first ask questions later approach while I was still asleep. The networking project was holding up the entire home renovation so everything was learnt and planned in a short amount of time.

AFAIK fibre splicing and terminating tools are very expensive. Do point me in the right direction for the $50 tools and I could go get some and DIY.
by Tepix | 2026-01-11 08:17:18+00:00
Found a shorter version, again with linebreaks for readability:

<p id=r>
<script>WebAssembly.instantiate(Uint8Array.fromBase64(
'AGFzbQEAAAABBwFgAn9/AX8DAgEABwUBAWEAAAoJAQcAIAAgAWoL'))
.then(x=>r.append(x.instance.exports.a(51,4)))
</script>
by ZeroConcerns | 2026-01-11 08:17:35+00:00
There's no link to the data sheet of the actual cable, but, yeah, looks like this should not have happened in such a short timeframe unless there's something really funny going on in that room, like ambient temperatures above 50 degC.

Another thing that should not have happened is installing the cable in loops in this way: any 'building' or 'underground' type cable needs to be of the exact length required at the demarcation point, fastened properly to prevent movement and terminated on a proper patch panel (can be a one-port box-type thingy for small setups), from where you use regular patch cords to connect your equipment.

(Loops are definitely allowed though, but that use case is mostly for aerial fiber to enable repair splices, and there are some very specific bend-radius and strain relief requirements, which, again should be spelled out in the cable data sheet)
by lostlogin | 2026-01-11 08:18:25+00:00
I’ll add fatigue/stress.

A long bike ride after a stressful week and off it goes.

An interesting observation from a cardiologist to me was that cyclist have 5x the rate of rhythm disorders compared to to general population.

But… ‘It’s hard to work out if that’s drug induced or not’.

Say maybe lay off the performance enhancing drugs.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2026-01-11 08:18:25+00:00
I'm lost by what is notable here.

Valve always said the Steam Machine would be priced like a PC in its communication and is apparently delaying the launch while waiting for the components market to cool down so you would expect the MSRP might not be final.

The leaked prices if they turn out to be correct are perfectly aligned with expectations.

Also, what is this website? It seems like an AI generated submission on a news aggregator which contains a list of sources which would have objectively been better links to share. All the other submissions have no comment.
by arter45 | 2026-01-11 08:19:09+00:00
If an application gets 4 thousand req/s for an hour, and an additional 10% requests in the rest of the day, it is handling nearly 15 million reqs/day, which is completely different and of course requires scaling in most cases.

That said, even then, there are a lot of business cases where you are not constrained by the time required to sort or traverse a custom data structure, because you spend more time waiting for an answer from a database (in which case you may want to tune the db or add a cache),or the time needed to talk to a server or another user, or a third party library, or a payment processing endpoint.

There are also use cases (think offline mobile apps) where the number of concurrent requests is basically 1, because each offline app serves a single user, so as long as you can process stuff before a user notices the app is sluggish (hundreds of milliseconds at least) you're good.

What do you do with those 4 thousand req/s? That's what makes the difference between "processing everything independently is fast enough for our purposes", "we need to optimize database or network latency", or "we need to optimize our data structures".
by lisper | 2026-01-11 08:19:37+00:00
> You’re fixated on a particular model of aether

Well, yes, of course. This is a discussion of Michelson-Morley interferometers. In that context the word "aether" has a very specific and well-established meaning, and it is not at all the same as a quantum field.

> fields are aethers

You are free to employ the Humpty Dumpty theory of language and redefine the word "aether" if you like. But in the context of Michelson-Morley interferometers, no, quantum fields are not "aethers". The whole notion of making the word "aether" plural in that context is non-sensical. In the context of Michelson-Morley interferometers there is only one aether: the luminiferous aether, a hypothetical physical substance that exists in three-dimensional space. Quantum fields are not even remotely like that. They are not physical. They do not exist in 3-D space. They cannot be directly measured. Physical objects are emergent properties of fields, but they are not "made of" fields. The constituents of a piece of lab equipment are particles, not fields.
by patcon | 2026-01-11 08:22:14+00:00
I grew up in New Brunswick. It is a strange place politically.

I find it wild that the BBC never mentioned the most glaring underbelly of this:

New Brunswicks most significant employer for the past 100 years is Irving Oil & Irving Paper and Irving Forestry. They are different arms of a privately held family-run business, run by the descendants of the original founder (whose records are not as public as a traded company), in charge of the main industries of the province. They owned every newspaper in the province, and are known to be adversarial to any community paper, starting new papers just to drive out of business the small upstarts they don't own -- I've seen it play out in my community. People are literally afraid to criticize this family publicly, because they fund SO MUCH of the nonprofit sector. If you are trying to get a project off the ground, you can't look sideways at them or your project will be buried. And their papers certainly won't speak kindly of your criticism.

And most glaringly, one of their ex-Vice Presidents was premier of the province during this time.

So there is an extra level of concern that some locals have about the optics of the province shutting down the research.

The Irving family is highly manipulative of political affairs, and imho have held the province back for decades (e.g. influencing what schools get funded/built, to create the working stock that support their businesses, etc)
by HauntingPin | 2026-01-11 08:24:31+00:00
The only way to believe this is if you're a Westerner being fed a purely US-centric media diet. Otherwise you'd know all the ways that the Iranian government has been failing their people recently and for a long time now, and how unhappy Iranians are with their government. You people act like people can't be upset at how they're being treated by their own government without being incited by an external actor. That's honestly quite the dehumanising and insulting way of looking at it.

Also, if the US wanted to do a regime change, they'd just move in militarily a la Venezuela and Trump would be talking about it non-stop. He's not the subtle type, I promise. We'd already know if they were involved.
by xyzzy123 | 2026-01-11 08:25:03+00:00
Fellow old guy here, I think this is _really_ noticeable in shows for young kids, across most mediums. There's been a sort of, not sure what to call it, cocomelonization of everything? You can see it clearly in long running shows, such as Sesame Street.

There are some modern standouts like Bluey but they're rare.
by thelastgallon | 2026-01-11 08:25:34+00:00
Thank you for the context.

> some are transmitted, typically by eating some part of an animal that contains prions, which then end up in your own body, inducing proteins in your body to take on prion configurations.

I wonder about this part. I thought consumed protein gets broken down into amino acids and new proteins are created later. Do prion proteins bypass this step?
by vlovich123 | 2026-01-11 08:27:02+00:00
Please don’t get defensive and spread silly FUD. You can be proud of what you’ve accomplished without feeling sad that a different language has strengths that yours doesn’t.

Calling unsafe mmap APIs not only is unlikely to run into the corner cases where unsafe Rust is tricky to get right, there’s “millions” of crates that offer safe APIs to do so and it’s fundamentally not hard to write it safely (it would be very hard to write it to have any issues).

And fundamentally I think Rust is much more likely to be easier to get high performance because the vast majority of safe code you write is amenable to the compiler performing safe optimizations that Zig just can’t do regarding pointer aliasing (or if it does brings all the risks of of unsafe Rust when the user annotates something incorrectly).
by elric | 2026-01-11 08:28:14+00:00
It's a diagnosis that's made only after excluding a wide range of other potential causes for the symptoms (like brain damage, structural abnormalities, strokes, seizures, MS, infections, ...).

It's not just a case of "we don't know", it's a case of "we've looked at everything under the sun and nothing fits".

Sounds like one of those things that needs more research.
by t43562 | 2026-01-11 08:28:26+00:00
Framing it as "fanatical" is a way of not understanding people's needs sometimes and that makes it harder for oneself to admit when they got it right - after all you don't want to find that you've turned into "a fanatic."

I like rolling distributions. Fedora was my longtime ship and at the beginning it was a pain because I always wanted to build something that wasn't available - the newest version of something like python. Then you wouldn't be able to build it because it had dependencies that needed to be newer also than what Fedora had.

I spent countless hours sorting out dependencies, clashes with the versions that were already installed that I couldn't remove, building and rebuilding things to keep them working and fixing @#$%@ SELinux permissions issues that made things fail extremely mysteriously. I tried making my own updated RPMs to ease the dependency management but that turned out to be so hard to do that I gave up in frustration - some tiny mistake and you have to go through almost the whole process again to get an updated RPM. One would have mysterious failures in the RPM build process that were extremely difficult to debug.

Then RedHat fixed the problem in an even worse way: by releasing new versions at a crazy rate. The upgrade process never seems to go smoothly for me.

Ubuntu was/is more uptodate generally but it's based on exactly the same strategy. Packaging on Ubuntu seems to me to be an even more incredible mess of confusion with documentation that doesn't help one iota.

I tried various things but the one that stuck with me was Artix. It's rolling and it sometimes breaks e.g. today when the new nvidia 590 drivers installed and they don't work with my old card. The upside is that it's always at the bleeding edge and I rarely need to build things myself - and if I do I usually already have the required dependencies. Packages also install with all the development headers etc and for me that is just a luxurious simplicity. I could also understand the PKGBUILD files and use makepkg without even needing to see the documentation. It just works.

It also doesn't use systemd. That's a preference you might call fanatical but I did after all get off windows to use Linux partly so that "the man" wouldn't tell me what to like so why would I accept that kind of thing on Linux? I use dinit instead and that is what I would have liked systemd to be - a service manager with a simple file format that is a million times easier to write and more reliable than system V init scripts and the ability to use it for running things in a user session as well .... and nothing else.

Anyhow this is all driven by my personality - I like trying out new things. I'm not fantatical, I think?? My computer is a toy for my mind. My work machines can be "reliable."
by Ostrogoth | 2026-01-11 08:30:31+00:00
I’m on this journey myself; learning to become more emotionally well-regulated, and kinder to myself. For years I had depression, and I used self-flagellation and self-loathing as drivers to motivate myself to do better. In work, hobbies, fitness, relationships…everything. I would unfairly criticize, disdain, and lash out in anger at myself, in ways I would never treat another person. My baseline emotional state skewed negative, and I’ve realized I was suppressing or dissociating from emotions entirely. It took a while to realize I wasn’t coping well. I made improvements over many years time, but sometimes still fall back into old default patterns. I finally hired a therapist to work through stuff and develop better emotional health and cognitive strategies. Started with just checking-in and recognizing emotions, and being more fair and kind to myself, which in turn helps to respond to everyday circumstances more objectively. It has helped immensely, and I don’t think I could have made the same progress without a neutral third party. I highly encourage anyone in a similar place to hire a therapist; it can be hard to find someone you meld with, but it’s worth it.
by Sesse__ | 2026-01-11 08:30:32+00:00
> Honestly, fibre, even unarmoured with just a standard Kevlar & HDPE sleeve is hardy stuff.

To be fair, it also got a lot better in the last 20–30 years. In particular, we now have bend-insensitive fiber for the last mile (G.657.A1/G.657.A2) and in general, we just figured out how to make it more robust.
by bbor | 2026-01-11 08:31:38+00:00
Cracks me up that OP is trying Anna's Archive before Wikidata, NGL! Both great sources, though.

I recently (a year ago... wow) dipped my toe into the world of library science through Wikidata, and was shocked at just how complex it is. OP's work looks really solid, but I hope they're aware of how mature the field is!

For illustration, here are just the book-relevant ID sources I focused on from Wikidata:

ARCHIVERS:
Library of Congress Control Number `P1144` (173M)
Open Library `P648` (39M)
Online Computer Library Center `P10832` (10M)
German National Library `P227` (44M)
Smithsonian Institute `P7851` (155M)
Smitsonian Digital Ark `P9473` (3M)
U.S. Office of Sci. & Tech. Info. `P3894`

PUBLISHERS:
Google Books `P675` (1M)
Project Gutenberg `P2034` (70K)
Amazon `P5749`

CATALOGUERS:
International Standard Book Number `P212`
Wikidata `P8379` (115B)
EU Knowledge Graph `P11012`
Factgrid Database `P10787` (0.4M)
Google Knowledge Graph `P2671` (500B)
by mindslight | 2026-01-11 08:31:46+00:00
> I can guarantee that the people who argue that the second amendment is ... important ... would happily cheer on the government if they started confiscating guns from "the enemy".

Something very close already happened. It wasn't confiscation, but rather with the exact scenario of night time home defense they always trot out. Kenneth Walker lawfully exercised his second amendment right to night time home defense and the government jackboots breaking down the door retaliated by using the place as a shooting gallery, resulting in the death of his partner Breonna Taylor. Rather than realizing the same thing could easily happen to them when exercising our cherished second amendment rights, most of the second amendment fundamentalist types simply rallied around the government agents who committed the murder.

I think the hypocrisy and lack of reasoning ability is strong to begin with, but I think con artist Grump also has an uncanny knack for making gullible people rationalize anything.
by jrflowers | 2026-01-11 08:31:46+00:00
No, my ideal laptop doesn’t have a keyboard. I’m imagining like a laptop where everything other than the cpu/gpu/ram/basic storage/nic are addressed by peripherals and I can just have one that sits in my office and I plug stuff into it.

Now that I think of it, I’d also like laptops that come in standardized sizes so I could stack them on shelves and mostly just interact with them through ssh/terminal. I could imagine those laptops being super popular for compute/storage
by gertrunde | 2026-01-11 08:32:01+00:00
From one of the photos, the cable spec "G657A2" is visible on the outside - and specs listed for that indicate it's "bending insensitive single-mode fibre", apparently it can tolerate 10 loops around 15mm mandrel. (Which does surprise me).

But yes, agreed, a lot of "Er... why would you do it like that?" bits.
by Flere-Imsaho | 2026-01-11 08:32:40+00:00
A term I learnt recently:

"Anarcho-Tyranny"

From Gemini:

"The concept was coined in the early 1990s by political theorist Samuel Francis. He described it as a state where the government performs its basic duty of public safety poorly (allowing "anarchy" among criminals) but creates a web of bureaucracy and surveillance to control the innocent (imposing "tyranny" on the law-abiding)."

This is exactly I how feel.