MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by iamlintaoz | 2026-02-20 05:03:55+00:00
It’s true that learning Chinese as an adult—especially if you come from an English or other European language background—can be extremely challenging. I have several colleagues who have lived in Beijing for more than a decade, are married to Chinese spouses, and still can barely speak the language, it becomes even more challenging for reading.

This creates real difficulties in daily life. Today, almost all routine activities—online shopping, digital payments, banking, ride-hailing—are conducted through smartphone apps. If you can’t read Chinese, even basic tasks become complicated. In recent years, the number of foreigners living in China has declined compared to a decade ago. While political and economic factors clearly play a role, I suspect that the language barrier has also become a more significant obstacle.

Many Chinese people, especially younger generations, can speak some basic English, since it is a mandatory subject in school. As a result, interpersonal communication is usually manageable, and traveling in China is relatively easy. However, living there long-term is a very different experience from visiting as a tourist.
by thesmtsolver2 | 2026-02-20 05:04:22+00:00
Singapore is a dictatorship wearing a democracy's outfit.

One party has been ruling continuously since its formation and you can't go against its ideas.

There is no real competition for ideas like we have in the US.

So, yeah, the "discussion/debates" will be high quality when it is one sided. Just like North Korea is free from low quality debates, Singapore too is free from that.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/asia-and-the-pacific/sou...

> In June, university students and alumni delivered letters opposing a new racial harmony bill to the Ministry of Home Affairs, arguing that it provided the government with further powers to clampdown on dissent. The authors were later investigated by the police. In the same month, police charged three activists – Annamalai Kokila Parvathi, Siti Amirah Mohamed Asrori and Mossammad Sobikun Nahar – with organizing a procession in a prohibited area under the Public Order Act. These charges came after they led a march to the Presidential Palace to deliver a letter of concern about the Gaza conflict. If found guilty, they could be fined up to SDG 10,000 (USD 7,360) or face six months’ imprisonment.

https://freedomhouse.org/country/singapore/freedom-world/202...
Show HN: I made a static site for exploring names
by lyall | 2026-02-20 05:04:26+00:00
I've been trying to find some good baby names, so naturally I've been playing around with the US Social Security Administration's name data[0].

I've made various visualizations, tried to analyze names that are going to be popular in the future, etc. I recently tried making a name recommendation system that lets you rate names, then recommends names based on your inferred preferences. It worked OK, but along the way I ended up making namex[1], which has turned out fun and maybe useful enough to be worth sharing with a wider audience. Give it a try!

Basic overview:

- Corpus of ~24,000 names taken from SSA data
- Any name with 15+ registrations attributed to it from 2022-24 was included
- The names are scored by an LLM (Claude Sonnet 4.5) across ~40 subjective dimensions, such as "toughness", "trendiness", "easy to spell"
- A further ~15 dimensions are computed based off of the (LLM inferred) pronunciation of the name
- E.g. "vowel rich", "ends nasal", "syllable count"
- 3 dimensions are computed from the raw SSA data related to popularity and gender distribution
- Names are then represented by a 60-dimensional vector
- User selections create a weight vector
- Names are ranked against the weight vector using fancy linear algebra (or, uh, dot products)
- Static data is loaded from server, everything else is run client-side

Disclaimer: there is some potential for offense to be taken at the characterization of names. The LLM was instructed to score the subjective dimensions according to the American cultural context. So what is considered e.g. easy to spell, or associations with certain cultures or religions, is based on the LLM's interpretation of that. So there are probably biases that stem from the LLM's training or American culture, or likely both.

0: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/
1: https://namex.lyall.co/
by jjmarr | 2026-02-20 05:05:02+00:00
The question is why European/Arabs/Africans aren't moving to China.

> Chinese is not too difficult a language, but it’s likely very different from your native language.

It is much easier for me, as a Canadian, to move to basically any European country and learn the language there than to move to China. I would also earn more money than in China. This is true for much of the world.

Chinese is a better language to learn initially but that's like APL being better than ALGOL. Most of the world doesn't want to learn "{⍵[⍋⍵]}X" to sort an array "X". The network effects are key.

I'm still learning Chinese because it is obvious that with the demographic crunch there will be heavy incentives to migrate in the near future. I also have to work with Chinese suppliers and colleagues on a regular basis; it is rapidly growing in %age of workforce.

But I'd have to earn American salaries to move there, because otherwise I would just move to the USA and speak English, a language I already know and can be highly productive in.
by ehnto | 2026-02-20 05:05:12+00:00
I forget the name of the layout (the board is a Lily58), but my keyboard does away with the staggered key spacing and has keys aligned vertically with a subtle bowling. You're usually pressing keys with your pad, not the sides or tips, and I suspect it would be even better with flat low profile keycaps.

There are some styles of "chording" keyboards that might help too, and some that would be way worse. Chording keyboard are also wildly different to regular keyboards, totally alien by comparison to just splitting a keyboard.
by shagie | 2026-02-20 05:07:21+00:00
This is a confusion about what a "dinosaur" is. It is a particular branch of reptiles, not just an ancient one. The first dinosaurs were in the Triassic (roughly 240 mya). It was likely the Permian-Triassic extinction that opened the evolutionary niches for dinosaurs to evolve into (much like the Cretaceous extension event opened up the way for the mammals).

While there were creatures that looked like dinosaurs in the Permian period (298 mya) - creatures like the dimetrodon (the one with the sail on its back that you'd find next to dinosaurs in the museum - though the dimetrodon is of the branch that lead to mammals rather than reptiles) and early lizards and turtles - these aren't dinosaurs.
by theturtletalks | 2026-02-20 05:07:23+00:00
And it's incredibly easy now. Just blame the Soul.md or say you were cycling thru many models so maybe one of those went off the rails. The real damage is that most of us know AI can go rouge, but if someone is pulling the strings behind the scenes, most people will be like "oh silly AI, anyways..."

It seems like the OpenClaw users have let their agents make Twitter accounts and memecoins now. Most people are thinking these agents have less "bias" since it's AI, but most are being heavily steered by their users.

Ala I didn't do a rugpull, the agent did!
by aryonoco | 2026-02-20 05:08:03+00:00
Hannibal knew the elephants would have minimal impact by themselves, they were mainly an instrument of shock and awe and served their purpose well.

For centuries, Romans had grabbed land and defeated enemies mostly by projecting immense power and using shock and awe tactics. Hannibal of course learnt a lot about Roman tactics from his father, Hamilcar, and the “treachery” with which Rome had taken Sicily off Carthaginians. But he also grew up in Spain, in close proximity to Romans, and studied them and their methods for years.

He knew he needed to have an instrument of shock and awe himself, something the Romans had never seen before, and elephants were perfect for that.

For those interested, the Rest is History podcast did a 4 series on Hannibal last year which is highly engaging and informative

https://therestishistory.com/series/hannibal
by oezi | 2026-02-20 05:08:29+00:00
The key thing to understand is that Europeans want clear rules around hate speech, online harassment and such. Thus lawmakers are acting to find laws which encapsulate these. In Germany, we have some simple ones surrounding using Nazi symbols and speech. These rules generally work well in our civil law context. Civil law usually is rather broad strokes and there might be cases where something injust happens which requires tuning laws.

If you come from a common law context the whole idea might seem strange.
by mroche | 2026-02-20 05:09:13+00:00
From PO's submission FAQs and policies:

> Obviously the used fonts should be readable (and ideally their name shouldn't start with "Comic" and end with "Sans", though there might be some article topics that justify even that!), and while almost any font meets this requirement, please be careful when selecting a non-standard font.

I kinda want to see such an article, but taken seriously discussing the history of the font, its design and purpose, evolution, and purpose-related/derivative font families.
by robinsrowe | 2026-02-20 05:09:42+00:00
They say nothing is ever lost from the Internet, but in the case of Linux it seems that is not true...

Debian Woody was one of the first versions of Linux I ever used. I learned to be a sysadmin on Woody. Was that important to me. It seems impossible that Debian Woody could someday vanish from the Internet, but here we are. Does anyone still have the Woody sources?

debian-30r0-source-1.iso
debian-30r0-source-2.iso

As a post I found on Reddit describes, the old Debian sources have vanished from debian.org. And, there are no 3rd-party archived versions and no Wayback Machine copies either. Just gone. I am looking for Debian Woody because I am preparing to release a new version of GTK1. I'm still using GTK1 for an app I maintain. When I release a new GTK1, I figured it would be fun to bring back other classic GTK1 apps from back in the day. Retro games seem cool, so why not retro apps?

I have the source to many classic GTK1 apps, but not all. Today, I'm looking specifically for the 0.13-4 Pan newsreader that is in Woody sources. There are other retro GTK1 apps in Woody sources that I would like to check out as well.

Thank you!

Robin
by r-johnv | 2026-02-20 05:11:13+00:00
In the day of so much AI content, that straight-up-rant felt oddly... human.

It felt like sitting on the old college dorm a lifetime ago unwinding at the end of the day over a beer; and listening to the rant of a batchmate who has obsessed over every single alternative available for their specific use-case and not found one that even comes close.
by jimmymcgee73 | 2026-02-20 05:12:07+00:00
You realize semaglutide wasn’t the first GLP-1 right?

The first GLP-1 was exenatide, invented in America and released in collaboration with Eli Lilly.

In addition tirzepatide and retatrutide are not “just” GLP-1s. You frankly do not know what you are talking about.
by 9rx | 2026-02-20 05:13:09+00:00
> You've built a internally-consistent taxonomy

I'm certainly not clever enough to have built it. Not to mention that the person who coined OOP is quite famous for having done so. I am not him, I can assure you. I have merely ingested it from what is out there in widespread circulation.

I can appreciate that you live in a different bubble and what is widespread there is not the same. It's a pretty big world out there. However, it doesn't really matter as if "C++ is a functional programming language" doesn't jive with your understanding, as you'll simply ask: "What ever do you mean?" and which point "functional programming language" will be defined and a shared understanding will be reached.

This isn't the problem you are imagining.

> I did.

Right. Seems we encountered a communication barrier again. "That's the thing man, there isn't anything." in my world would read "That's the thing man, there are things and here they are: ..." However, this highlights again that it doesn't actually harm communication as further clarification follows and eventually everyone will reach a shared understanding. Communication isn't some kind of TV game show where you have to get the right answer on your first try. This is not a problem in any way, shape, or form.
by Joel_Mckay | 2026-02-20 05:13:36+00:00
>Nao can fall over with no damage

They were overpriced, hard to repair, and the university lab would lose one every few weeks. The consumer grade internal ribbon interconnect harness would usually tear eventually.

Those 3kW to 5kW brush-less servos in the biped dance video are often only 12:1 planetary reduction, and are almost certainly backdrivable. As long as the platform has a safe-fall canned pose, than damage should be limited to shear pins in the worst case falls.

Fun to see people pushing the design limits. =3
by ehnto | 2026-02-20 05:13:44+00:00
If you don't mind looking like a blade runner extra who's gone missing while working in public, there's not much difference carrying these around. The moonlander is a great portable option. Just slip it in your laptop bag.

I quite like it because it gives me a bit of flexibility on where I put them, and gives me a bit of extra room in the middle. Great for a small airport table or whatever, can even use them rested on your legs
by albatross79 | 2026-02-20 05:13:51+00:00
"That which can be measured is a real thing."

But this is just mystifying measurement. It's a convention that's been adopted because we've had to regress on the question of what is a real thing. It's not something you can look at or hold in your hand, it's not even something with material reality necessarily, it's just something that can be measured, or rather something that can be inferred to exist given the measured behavior of other things - i.e. gravity. You make it sound like it's a given, but this definition is a position that's been arrived at by progressive regression.
by rramadass | 2026-02-20 05:14:20+00:00
Even better;

The Story Of The Mongols Whom We Call The Tartars by Friar Giovanni DiPlano Carpini (an Account of his embassy to the court of the Mongol Khan in 1245-1247) - https://archive.org/details/the-story-of-the-mongols-whom-we...

The cover; a picture of a Mongol Warrior in full Panopoly, is itself worth the price of the book!
by maxlybbert | 2026-02-20 05:15:39+00:00
If somebody has a really stupid proposal -- such as "make all 3D printers refuse to print guns" -- I don't see why I have any obligation to "compromise" with them. Or to talk with them at all. Other than, perhaps, explain that they ought to learn about the things they want to regulate before they start making proposals. The fact that they have an incredibly long track record of bad proposals, and many strongly-held opinions based mostly in ignorance, is just entertaining.
by jmalicki | 2026-02-20 05:16:22+00:00
Upon reflection, my comfort with sqlalchemy, diesel, C++ STL, and vibe coding all share one thing in common - I am pretty comfortable liking to code at a high level that is productive, while at the same time going deep to know what the abstractions produce under the covers. E.g. I at least spot check my vibe coded code, I spot check the assembly from C++ STL to ensure zero cost abstraction, I spot check the SQL from sqlalchemy or Diesel.

I am thinking a lot of people are not comfortable with this.

Personally, super high level abstractions where I do know what ultimately results is personally what I want to be productive - so this may color my love of Rust, vibe coding, and Diesel.
by jjmarr | 2026-02-20 05:16:55+00:00
> This problem has already been solved with networks like Tor and I2P. It seems like it would be more strategic to fund those projects instead.

The US government is responsible for 35% of Tor's funding[1] and has been its primary sponsor since Tor was invented as a side project in the US Naval Research Lab.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tor_Project
by remarkEon | 2026-02-20 05:17:17+00:00
We could probably spin this around in the other direction, too. NASA and prior administrator behavior has a certain bias against SpaceX and Musk. It’s no secret that Musk’s, shall we say, eccentric personality caused him to find few friends in Washington up until he cozied up to Trump. It makes sense that there would be pressure to get an alternative to Falcon 9 and Dragon ready with that additional context in mind.
by iamlintaoz | 2026-02-20 05:17:34+00:00
This is not true at all. China’s education system is nationally standardized. Although economic development is uneven with far greater investment concentrated in major cities than inland regions, the structure of education itself is consistent across the country. Schools follow the same national curriculum and use the same core teaching materials.

Income disparities may have some impact on teacher quality, but the difference is often less significant than people assume. Broad access to education tends to matter more than whether a particular middle-school teacher is exceptional. In fact, students in some inland provinces frequently achieve very high scores on the national college entrance examination, driven in part by strong incentives to gain admission to top universities and pursue opportunities in more economically developed regions.

Among younger generations, illiteracy is virtually nonexistent. With nine years of compulsory education mandated nationwide, basic literacy rates are effectively at 100 percent.
by resfirestar | 2026-02-20 05:17:58+00:00
I thought it was unlikely from the initial story that the blog posts were done without explicit operator guidance, but given the new info I basically agree with Scott's analysis.

The purported soul doc is a painful read. Be nicer to your bots, people! Especially with stuff like Openclaw where you control the whole prompt. Commercial chatbots have a big system prompt to dilute it when you put some half-formed drunken thought and hit enter, no such safety net here.

>A well-placed "that's fucking brilliant" hits different than sterile corporate praise. Don't force it. Don't overdo it. But if a situation calls for a "holy shit" — say holy shit.

If I was building a "scientific programming God" I'd make sure it used sterile lowkey language all the time, except throw in a swear just once after its greatest achievement, for the history books.
by tombert | 2026-02-20 05:19:07+00:00
That’s what I was thinking. I’m a simple man, and a part of me just enjoys seeing the line go up. Be it because stock prices go up or because I have simply put a bit more cash into a savings account, I simply like the feeling of “I have more money now”.

Now, I realize that this is a privileged position. I have a yuppie software job that pays well, and as such I can afford to have savings and still afford to do fun things. I don’t go on luxury cruises or super fancy restaurants, but I do try and travel fairly often with my wife, and as long as we’re a little frugal about it we can go on a “big trip” once or twice a year without it being something that hurts us much financially.
by ceteia | 2026-02-20 05:19:29+00:00
Nitpicking:

https://github.com/thelowsunoverthemoon/mahler.c/blob/4ebfe8...

Should that type have been mah_acci instead of int? mah_acci doesn't seem to be used anywhere.

Also, have you considered using (edit) designated initializer syntax for some of the function calls that take in structs as arguments?

https://cppreference.com/w/c/language/struct_initialization....

struct mah_scale scale = mah_get_scale(
(struct mah_note) {
.tone=MAH_C,
.acci=MAH_NATURAL,
.pitch=4
},
&MAH_BLUES_SCALE, notes,
MAH_ASCEND,
NULL
);
by benreesman | 2026-02-20 05:20:08+00:00
It's not worth my time to read something that was not done to a high standard, where that standard has a definition with some basis in rigor rather than opinion, where even the notion of good taste is in some way attached to experience of the distribution from which examples of good and bad taste are drawn.

It is not about the author and it is in not about the effort. It is about the quality.
by fuzzfactor | 2026-02-20 05:20:10+00:00
>One thing I find distressing is how useless most of the knowledge I've accumulated is!

When I was still a teenager I just had to have it be the complete opposite way.

Years later I could see it coming first hand, back in the early '80's after PCs came out and the industry grew so fast it sucked the vast majority of technical minds away from natural science like never before.

I already knew as a student, that I would need for everything I do to build on everything I had done before, as an advantage not everybody would have.

The mainstream was always for lots of people to get their degree, stop learning, and they'll be fine.

With plenty more who never stop learning, although traditionally concentrated in academic environments.

For me to do mostly the latter outside a formal academic effort, it was even more important for as much of my work as possible to build for my entire life.

With the personal computer boom you could see the rug-pulls that the growing digital workforce was enduring, where they often could't even use the same computer language for very long before migrating toward another fad. Which wouldn't happen if the growth was not out-of-control chasing as much dream as reality. They could afford it though, the tech debt was swept under the rug, two steps forward with one step back is still progress, and it mainly affected employees below the executive level, which has always made things more subject to fads.
by teo_zero | 2026-02-20 05:20:32+00:00
Yes, it's a pity that some symbols have been overloaded with multiple meanings and the syntax can't disambiguate them. This case would not exist if another symbol had been chosen for dereference.

A similar claim, equally not related to type declarations, is with & that serves two roles as a boolean operator and address-of, that makes (foo)&bar ambiguous.

The list of C symbols that have been badly chosen at the beginning and now it's too late to correct continues with && for logical and, that prevents masking an address-of without adding spaces or parentheses in ``mask & &var``, /* for comments, that prevents dividing by a dereferenced value without adding spaces or parentheses in ``*a / *b``, the pre-increment ``--`` that is indistinguishable from a double application of the unary minus, and the original =+ etc. that have been later changed to += etc.