MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lostlogin | 2026-01-25 23:58:42+00:00
The usual boogie man.

Did you read that link? It’s hardly damming.

“Through a fund, the foundation issued a $3 million grant to the Indivisible Organization that was good for two years "to support the grantee's social welfare activities.” The grants were not specifically for the No Kings protests, the foundation said.”

If 7 million people protested, that 3 million over 2 years sure went a long way. They work for pennies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_2025_No_Kings_protests
by SpicyLemonZest | 2026-01-25 23:59:56+00:00
It's not a dichotomy. One key value of protests is that they can force people who neither agree nor disagree to pick a side.

Obviously this requires the protesters to make a bit of a judgment call. Do I think the typical person leans so strongly towards my side that they'll take it when I force the issue, even if I'm a bit annoying about provoking the conversation? Sometimes the answer is no, but sometimes the answer is yes.
by shoo | 2026-01-26 00:00:18+00:00
There are some interesting examples in the "The Book of Why" [y] by Pearl and Mackenzie. This book is all about causal inference & has examples from things like drug trials where the analysis and inferences drawn from analysing experimental data depend upon what causal model you assume is generating the data. There's a chapter about the historical scientific debate around if smoking causes lung cancer.

Andrew Gelman has an interesting review of the book [g], from the perspective of someone working within the statistical establishment that Pearl's book often critiques.

[y] https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/judea-pearl/the-boo...

[g] https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/01/08/book-pearl...
by jmye | 2026-01-26 00:00:56+00:00
I have a hard time parsing your first paragraph, but there is no reason at all for any part of the US government that isn't CMMS to have any access to Medicaid data, writ large, at all. And even CMMS should only see de-identified data. It's absolutely absurd to think that law enforcement has any reason to see anything in any MC database.
by JoshTriplett | 2026-01-26 00:02:18+00:00
Even if I agree entirely with the premise, this is not something Open Source projects can use, just like every other restriction on use.

Open Source is a Schelling point ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory) ). It's not perfect, but it has the advantage that people can agree upon what it means and what does and doesn't qualify. Once use restrictions like these start cropping up, any non-trivial project would become a maze of restrictions, all different.

And in losing Open Source, we'd gain absolutely nothing. AI training already ignores all Open Source licenses, and proprietary licenses, and complete lacks of licenses. What makes you think this will be respected where every other Open Source license isn't?
by gucci-on-fleek | 2026-01-26 00:02:24+00:00
> Party leaders are picked internally by party members via leadership races

Correct.

> not by the general public. This is good because the leader is selected not by "Low Information Voters" […] but by people who have gone through a qualification filter

Not really. It's true that only party members can vote, but the only requirements to be a party member are to be a Canadian citizen and to not be a member of another party [0] [1], which is effectively the exact same requirements that the US primaries have.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Liberal_Party_of_Canada_l...

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/how-will-canadas-next...
by gwern | 2026-01-26 00:02:34+00:00
> Who knows why? I’m usually more willing to spend than she is, and I bet that's represented on my user profile. I was paying with a gift card, which surely contributes. Maybe it was a price scraping update, comparison shopping detection, or a system that explores “face-in-the-door” high prices before backing down. From the outside, no one really knows.

The most obvious possibility omitted is that your wife got the first, easy, cheap car and then Uber had to quote you a higher price to get a second car. Cars don't fall from the sky; if two people successively ask for bids, how else could it work? What if the app quoted you both the cheap price for the only car within X blocks, and you bought it before she did? Is it suddenly going to go 'oops sorry, changed my mind, it now costs twice as much'? Sounds like a very bad experience to me! More sensible to give the first person a low quote and then when - unexpected and unpredictably - someone requests something similar, quote them the higher price reflecting the sudden local micro-shortage.
by fL0per | 2026-01-26 00:03:30+00:00
They most probably sold you 'up to 1 Gb' bandwidth, not just '1 Gb'. Overhead is about the same in these cases. Your losses are negligible. It's more painful having 4-5 (on worst time periods/peers) or 6-7 (on best) of the 'up to 10 Gb' (clearly sold as such) fiber access I have.
by nuc1e0n | 2026-01-26 00:03:33+00:00
Some issues could only become evident over a period of hundreds of years with gene editing. That's longer than any medical trial I'm aware of. And mistakes made would be difficult, if not impossible, to undo.

If medications can already do what's required for cholesterol issues, why wouldn't we continue to use them rather than making some change to affect a complex balance that could cause problems over very long timescales?

If we were to be editing a specific gene to match what the wider population has, then I'd be more ok with that.
by fragmede | 2026-01-26 00:03:34+00:00
> a session with Gemini 2.5 Pro (without Code Execution tools)

How good are you at programming on a whiteboard? How good is anybody? With code execution tools withheld from me, I'll freely admit that I'm pretty shit at programming. Hell, I barely remember the syntax in some of the more esoteric, unpracticed places of my knowledge. Thus, it's hard not to see case studies like this as dunking on a blindfolded free throw shooter, and calling it analysis.
by techcode | 2026-01-26 00:03:52+00:00
In the age of centralized broadcasting where everyone watched the same TV channels ...

Those TV channels were virtually always (and to this day still are) controlled by "the government".

Meanwhile other TV channels, if there even were any, and if enough people even had chance to watch them (because limited frequency/transmission allocations, artificial limits on cable distribution ..etc) - were and still are labeled as "funded by foreign (state) actors that are trying to destabilize our independance/values/etc".

And it's more of the same online.

---

This reminds me of an old website that's an absolute gold mine.

Knock yourself out https://changingminds.org/explanations/theories/minority_inf...
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-01-26 00:03:55+00:00
You can always use resources more efficiently, you just have to invest and make traeoffs. No one is saying that the region can’t live with less water, farmers just have to change to products that make them less money. So while California is the ideal place to grow walnuts, they need water so maybe the world can just do without? Yes, that’s always a possible answer, it isn’t a simple easy choice to make though.

You make it sound like there are easy things that can be done that are somehow win win.

It’s like telling a poor person that they should do an hour of cooking after their second 8 hour shift in one day rather than grabbing a burger and that will be better for them, no trade off at all.
by grishka | 2026-01-26 00:04:01+00:00
So suppose someone had a domain and a Bluesky identity associated with it. They deleted their account for whatever reason and let the domain expire. Later, someone else bought the domain, but since it had a previously-deleted account associated with it, it's permanently banned from identifying a Bluesky account ever again. Do you really think that's adequate?

I really like the ActivityPub approach more. There, if a domain changes hands, so potentially do all accounts associated with it. An account can be permanently deleted by sending a Delete{Person} activity to the network, but that doesn't prevent an account with the same username from being created again.
Tell HN: I Have Won HN
by neilv | 2026-01-26 00:04:30+00:00
What an incredible journey it's been.

It took almost 7 years, and sometimes I lost hope that I would make it to a successful exit.

But today I am pleased to announce that I finally achieved the ultimate Hacker News karma:

31337

I'll now be pivoting away from day-to-day HN responsibilities, into more of an occasional advisory role.

The maximum available points for that role is 32767, so I'll try to spend it wisely.

If anyone needs to hire a founder type, I know one who has freed up a lot of discretionary time, to spend on work.

https://i.imgur.com/HnB30Ff.png
by foresto | 2026-01-26 00:04:55+00:00
Steam creates its pressure-vessel containers using namespaces, and there is a Steam flatpak, which I think was made possible by some work a few years ago specifically for the purpose of nesting. I don't know if that work applied to flatpak, bubblewrap, or both. It might be worth investigating.

https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/steam-runtime-tools/-/t...

https://github.com/flathub/com.valvesoftware.Steam
by lilOnion | 2026-01-26 00:05:07+00:00
No we can't. Beacuse at anytime people like Elon Musk can come in and mess everything up. If all of your data is in someones server you are one ban away from becoming noone. Of course that is still true with atproto since majority of users are on bluesky PDS's. But the whole tech is being designed in such a way to prevent such issues while still looking and acting qs traditional social media.
by diogenes_atx | 2026-01-26 00:05:28+00:00
An article published in Saturday's edition of the Mexican newspaper La Jornada provides more details about the cause of the crash. The article is in Spanish; here are some of the main points, translated into English:

1. According to the CIAF, the break in the track was "practically undetectable." The fracture on the track was not noticed by the trains that passed over it, or by the technicians responsible for the maintenance of the infrastructure.

2. The damaged train, which belongs to the Italian company Iryo, is heavier than other trains running on the track; the additional weight of the Iryo train may have been a factor, or possibly even one of the causes, of the derailment.

3. The CIAF said that the notches registered in the wheels and the deformation in the rail are "compatible" with the fact that the track was broken before the Iryo train passed over it.

4. Spanish Transportation Minister Óscar Puente rejected criticism of the delay of the rescuers; according to the Minister, rescuers arrived within "18 minutes."

The full article is available here: https://www.jornada.com.mx/2026/01/24/mundo/020n3mun
by defrost | 2026-01-26 00:05:47+00:00
My comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46751234 and the link to a Coroner's report might be of interest.

Most LEO's are lawful well intentioned, but they do stand by and cover for a good many who are not, those that these days have encrypted chat groups dehumanising those they interact with and swapping notes on what they can get away with and come out smelling of roses.

Those rotten apples corrupt new recruits and normalise harshly putting the boot in, curb stomping, and other extremes.

An acquaintance of mine has seen the full roller coaster over the past 45 years, first defending police that were unquestionably exuberant in violence, later shunned for having had enough and pulling the rug.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Quigley_(politician)
by yesco | 2026-01-26 00:06:09+00:00
Agreed on the slacktivism point. Physical presence means something that bots and polls can't fake. My issue isn't with protesting itself, it's that the assumed impact often seems out of proportion with what's actually being achieved. A crowd showing up doesn't automatically translate to minds changed or policy moved. And crowd sizes can be just as ambiguous as poll numbers when it comes to representing broader sentiment. If the tactics alienate more people than they persuade, visibility alone isn't doing much.
by follower | 2026-01-26 00:07:03+00:00
I encountered the Sony MMCD when I fell down a rabbit hole *checks literal notes* around five years ago while researching Microsoft Encarta MindMaze[0] and its related file formats.

It turns out the data associated with MindMaze (& other encyclopedia data) changed storage format over subsequent releases of Encarta and these changes provide some interesting historical insights--including that if MS had had its way we'd all be writing web pages in RTF rather than HTML[1]. :D

You may ask, "What connection does this have to the Sony MMCD?".

Well, one of the storage formats used with early Encarta data is `.mvb` which is a format used by Microsoft Multimedia Viewer[2] (also known by multiple other names--none of which are any easier to web search :D ).

And, it turns out, "Multimedia Viewer could compile titles for Tandy Video Information System and other Modular Windows systems, as well as Sony Multimedia CD-ROM Player, a portable MS-DOS-based CD-ROM XA reader released in 1992."[2][3]

According to my research the tool "...includes software tools that simulate the look and feel of the Sony player titles on a PC" which is interesting in the context of the emulator for the Discman mentioned in the original post.

Anyway, that's the very short version of the rabbit hole--maybe in another five years I'll get around to writing up the rest...

Oh, just found my original tweet thread (including screenshots) about this rabbit hole as it happened[4]: https://xcancel.com/RancidBacon/status/1401009436949237763

----

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encarta_MindMaze (New as of October 2025.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackbird_(online_platform)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Multimedia_Viewer (First added some time after my ~2021 research.)

[3] The Tandy VIS being a "Modular Windows" system is also of historical interest and FWIW has some support in MAME.

[4] Including screenshots of "Modular Windows Shell" and various "Multimedia Viewer" versions running under WINE.
by badsectoracula | 2026-01-26 00:07:37+00:00
I tried the dev version on Firefox and didn't seem to fix the issue though it was "reversed" in that things became brighter now. On Falkon it worked better though there was still some weird coloration for pixels that shouldn't have been altered - see the images i attached in the bug report.

Also in both cases the brush area remained intact (it was just 'moving around') instead of being smudged, it is more obvious in the Firefox shot because i only did a simple circular motion but can also be seen in the Falkon shot in that there is a floating corner at the top right corner of the orange box that was 'dragged' from the left side (i was doing a horizontal motion to show that the pixels above the brush were affected even though there wasn't any vertical motion to push the orange colors up to the blue area).
by cdata | 2026-01-26 00:08:20+00:00
I read a lot of AI generated code these days. It makes really bad mistakes (even when the nature of the change is a refactor). I've tried out a few different tools and methodologies, but I haven't escaped the need to babysit the "agent." If I stepped aside, it would create more work for me and others on the backend of our workflow.

I read anecdotes of teams that push through AI-driven changes as fast as possible with awe. Surely their AIs are no more capable than the ones I'm familiar with.
by adrianmonk | 2026-01-26 00:08:47+00:00
No really, I'm a normal person, and I went to the most recent No Kings protest. I've never protested anything before in my life, but now I've gone to two protests against Trump because he's just that bad and dangerous and my country is important to me.

I wasn't paid anything. I rode the bus downtown, thinking it'd be easier than driving / parking, which wasn't quite the brilliant strategy I thought it'd be. I marched down the street with literally tens of thousands of people.

There were definitely some people there who seemed to be the activist type (who find something to protest every weekend), but it was mostly normal people. I saw at least three people I know. I saw regular-looking men in cargo shorts and women in straw hats. It was during the football game, and I saw many people wearing team colors and one sign that said, "It's gotten so bad I'm missing football to protest." One guy was wearing a "Jesus is King" t-shirt. A woman was carrying a "Hicks Against Facism" sign. Another guy was carrying his vinyl copy of Rush's "A Farewell to Kings" as a protest sign.

So, not paid protesters carrying boilerplate signs supplied to them by some organization. Just regular people who are not OK with what's going on.
by palijer | 2026-01-26 00:08:57+00:00
It ain't normal to me. If I bought a phone, I should be able to decide that I want to run different software on it.

Let's say OP takes a very different turn with their software that I am comfortable with - say reporting my usage data to a different country. I should be able to say "fuck that upgrade, I'm going to run the software that was on my phone when I originally bought it"

This change blocks that action, and from my understanding if I try to do it, it bricks my phone.
by 47282847 | 2026-01-26 00:09:31+00:00
It is accurate to state that we don’t know if the protests had any influence on how things went down with DOGE. It is equally accurate to state that we don’t know if they didn’t have any influence on it. It is not accurate to state that he left as planned since the announcements of the USG change by the minute and don’t mean a thing.
by kevin_thibedeau | 2026-01-26 00:10:10+00:00
The bigots and sociopaths will need a place to exercise their freeze peach. Groups that don't want to be involved with that rancor need a way to evict such people when they are disruptive. Wikipedia hangs on with its NPOV policy. You can't do that on centralized open fora where opinion is the currency of the realm.
by bsder | 2026-01-26 00:10:22+00:00
The problem I have with streaming radio is that it seems to be caught rehashing rather than discovering.

For example, I like SOMA's Underground 80s, but I also want to hear new artists in the same vein. I haven't found any streaming stations that are actively good at curating like this.

Where are the streaming stations that play Smiths and Smithereens but also play Blossoms and Johnny Marr's new stuff, for example?
by LadyCailin | 2026-01-26 00:11:00+00:00
Who is most responsible for stopping Trump from doing horrible shit? Besides of course, Trump himself. Surely that must be his base, yes? Then followed by Americans at large. It’s surely not, say, Canada’s responsibility, no? There’s a spectrum of responsibility, and you can find out who is at the top of that spectrum of those that think the thing is bad, and hold them at least morally responsible. In this case, yes, that is individuals.
by Barrin92 | 2026-01-26 00:11:10+00:00
>to make them think and act in specific ways.

with the kind of images that are out in the open for everybody with their own eyes to see, if that does not move you in your heart of hearts, where no government or anyone else can touch you, there is something rotten in that person.

Governments and authority figures can show you a lot of things but the amount of people who not just accept it, but gleefully celebrate the most vulnerable people in society beaten by government thugs, there is no excuse. People can show you false images, false numbers but they can't make you feel proud for the strong abusing the weak. It's particularly appalling if you see the amount of them who call themselves Christians.
by ofalkaed | 2026-01-26 00:11:31+00:00
>David Foster Wallace (on KCRW? Or oft-repeated elsewhere) about how he had to come to terms with the purpose of writing not being to show off how smart you are to the reader.

He expands on this in his conversation with Bryan Garner (of Garner's Modern English Grammar) published as Quack this Way, and I think he gets to the core issue, which is that your ideas are not interesting to anyone but you; if you are showing off how smart you are, you are assuming the reader will find your ideas as important and interesting as you do. It is the writer's job to show the reader why they should be interested, why they should care.

Infinite Jest is a also a good example of something which goes against TFA's point, it opens with a very sterile, impersonal, literal and completely disconnected first person narrative, he gives us nothing to care about. But it evolves, but he still doesn't give us anything to care about, just has the narration turn in on itself despite it seeming to have nothing to turn in onto. All he really gives us is the suggestion that there is something more than what we can see. He gets us interested and curious but I don't think we really care at that point.
by ordu | 2026-01-26 00:11:42+00:00
> If you don't draw a line, then nobody in the world is a bad person. So my question is where exactly is that line?

I don't think that that line can be drawn exactly. There are many factors to consider and I'm not sure that even considering them will allow you to draw this line and not come to claims like '99% of people are bad' or '99% of people are not bad'.

'Bad' is not an innate property of a person. 'Bad' is a label that exists only in an observer's model of the world. A spherical person in vacuum cannot be 'bad', but if we add an observer of the person, then they may become bad.

To my mind, the decision of labeling a person to be bad or not labeling them is a decision reflecting how the labeling subject cares about the one on the receiving side. So, it goes like this: first you decide what to do with bad behavior of someone, and if you decide to go about it with punishment, then you call them 'bad', if you decide to help them somehow to stop their bad behavior, then you don't call them bad.

It works like this: when observing some bad behavior I decide what to do about it. If I decide to punish a person, I declare them to be bad. If I decide to help them stop their behavior, I declare them to be not bad, but 'confused' or circumstantially forced, or whatever. Y'see: you cannot change personal traits of others, so if you declare that the reason of bad behavior is a personal trait 'bad' then you cannot do anything about it. If you want to change things, you need to find a cause of bad behavior, that can be controlled.