MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nerdsniper | 2026-02-06 21:55:02+00:00
Yes.

SCOTUS ruled very strictly on this in 1998. James Brogan was visited by Federal agents at his home and asked if he had accepted illegal cash payments from a company. Brogan simply answered "No."

SCOTUS upheld his conviction for this under U.S.C. § 1001. His only legal options were to say “Yes” or state his choice to exercise his 5th amendment right to remain silent.

Similar laws apply to interactions with pretty much any LEO in any US state, though the lie must be material to a criminal investigation. Note that some states make nearly everything a misdemeanor crime (like speeding 5mph over the limit) whereas other states make many of those things civil infractions.
by timschmidt | 2026-02-06 21:55:28+00:00
We do have term limits for positions like the presidency, and what we see is a perpetual power structure one layer removed, in the party system, which effectively chooses who we're permitted to vote for.

Introducing term limits only forces the wealth and power to change it's face periodically. It is addressing a symptom, not the cause.

At least one constitutional scholar has argued that campaign finance reform strikes closer to the root of the problem ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rootstrikers ) by enabling interested regular folk to afford to run for office. I would add some form of ranked choice voting to that, which permits folks to vote for a third party candidate without "wasting" their vote or throwing the race to an opponent. As well as the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-time_rule and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_doctrine
by throwaway894345 | 2026-02-06 21:55:46+00:00
> Even if you're right, you're still dead.

Yes, this is the entire point: the left is saying "the government shouldn't murder citizens for exercising their legal rights", and the right is saying "if you exercise your legal rights, it's your fault if the government murders you" (or at least "that's the risk you run").

If American patriotism has anything at all to do with valuing freedom from tyranny and oppression, then the right-wing mindset ("you might have the 'legal right' to film an officer, but the state might murder you for it") seems aggressively un-American. Specifically, if you have "the right to do X but the government might murder you for doing X" then you don't really have the right to do X by definition.
by 9rx | 2026-02-06 21:55:54+00:00
> I don't buy that engineering is not also a bottleneck.

Depends. It is the bottleneck when I'm in charge. But I have seen other people who want to spend weeks going back and forth over whether the button should be red or slightly darker red, as if they can somehow figure out the right answer from gut feeling alone, not realizing that in that time they could have tried both and learned from it all while delivering other things of value on top. Engineering isn't the bottleneck in those cases.
by palmotea | 2026-02-06 21:56:07+00:00
> I think you have every right to doubt those telling us that they run 5 agents to generate a new SAAS-product while they are sipping latté in a bar. To work like that I believe you'll have to let go of really digging into the code, which in my experience is needed if want good quality.

Also we live in a capitalist society. The boss will soon ask: "Why the fuck am I paying you to sip a latte in a bar? While am machine does your work? Use all your time to make money for me, or you're fired."

AI just means more output will be expected of you, and they'll keep pushing you to work as hard as you can.
by signatoremo | 2026-02-06 21:56:18+00:00
> you are by definition not doing a clean room implementation.

This makes no sense. Reverse engineering IS an application of clean room implementation. Citing Wikipedia:

“Clean-room design (also known as the Chinese wall technique) is the method of copying a design by reverse engineering and then recreating it without infringing any of the copyrights associated with the original design”
by airlocksoftware | 2026-02-06 21:56:24+00:00
Are you still working on this? Because I like the words I see on your GitHub -- vim-style bindings, keyboard driven, sounds like you write a definition language for your designs, basically?

Lik Matry is to Figma as openscad is to traditional CAD (Fusion 360, etc)?

Though that does sound like a huge project to take on!
by scoofy | 2026-02-06 21:56:42+00:00
>Why do you expect them to make money?

I don't.

That's why I said "variable cost of operations."

If a system doesn't generate enough revenue to cover the variable costs of operation, then every single new passenger drives the system closer to bankruptcy. The more "successful" the system is -- the more people depend on it -- the more likely it is to fail if anything happens to the underlying funding source, like a regular old local recession, creating a downward economic spiral. This is why a public transit system should cover variable costs so that a successful system can grow sustainably.

When you aren't growing sustainably, you open yourself up to the whims of the business cycle literally destroying your transit system. It's literally happening right now with SF MUNI, where we've had so many funding problems, that they've consolidated bus lines. I use the 38R, and it's become extremely busy. These busses are getting so packed that people don't want to use them, but the point is they can't expand service because each expansion loses them more money, again, because the system doesn't actually cover those variable costs.

The public should be 100% completely covering the fixed capital costs of the system. Ideally, while there is a bit of wiggle room, the ridership should be 100% be covering the variable capital costs. That way the system can expand when it's successful, and contract when it's less popular. Right now in the Bay Area, you have the worst of both worlds, you have an underutilized system with absolutely spiraling costs, simply because there is zero connection between "people actually wanting to use the system" and "where the money comes from."
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-02-06 21:57:19+00:00
> Traffic?

The premise of these places is that it's on your way. That's not any more traffic, it's just the people already passing by stopping there momentarily.

> Parking?

That's this:

> I suppose that wouldn't be so much of an issue if there was a lot more of these shops, but then they might not be economically viable.

This is "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded". You would get as many of them as were viable, which would be enough that none of them were inundated.

You would also get things like part-time shops. You have someone with a work-from-home job and they put out a sign in front of their house saying you can get coffee and food there. They mainly get a few customers during the morning rush and a few more at lunchtime and do the work-from-home job the rest of the day.

Those would be everywhere if it was allowed, and they wouldn't even need parking lots because they wouldn't have enough simultaneous customers to fill one and there would generally be one within walking distance of any given place anyway.

> There's a lot of space between "walkable" and "30-45m drive away."

Except that if you concentrate it all into the same place, that's how you get serious traffic congestion, and then going to that place means you get stuck in traffic. Which means there isn't actually that much space between them, because the middle isn't an option. Either you put shops near where people live and it's walkable or you concentrate them downtown and you're stuck in traffic or circling to find parking to get there.
by com2kid | 2026-02-06 21:57:24+00:00
It is complicated.

I am a big supporter of public schools, but I also understand that only allowing rich parents to opt out of public schools can lead to some very bad outcomes as schools don't have to respond directly to public pressure.

Recently the Seattle public schools reverted some very bad decisions because so many parents in Seattle pulled their kids out of public schools to go to private, at such a high numbers it started to cause budget issues.

That was only possible because the so many parents here can afford to do that.

Another example is with how many schools stopped using phonics for reading and an entire generation of kids ended up with poor reading skills. No marketplace of ideas means even if parents wanted to have their kid learn phonics, only rich parents could afford to switch to private schools. Even today Seattle schools is just slowly switching back to phonics (my local school is a pilot for returning to phonics! Year later!)

Same goes for 1:1 laptop usage. Evidence now shows that every school that moves to one to one laptops (a dedicated laptop for every kid in every classroom) has educational outcomes plummet. It will take years of concerted effort by parents to get those laptops out of public schools (to be fair, took years of effort to get them into the schools....) and break the contracts to school district has with technology providers.

Having all the kids in the city go to a single School district has many huge benefits that lift everybody up, and a well-funded public school system is essential to democracy.

But there are also issues with putting all your eggs in one basket.

I don't think anyone has a good solution to these problems.
by vunderba | 2026-02-06 21:57:52+00:00
If you're interested in donating and being reasonably assured that your money isn't getting the Worldvision treatment, I highly recommend checking out "Giving What We Can" [1] and "GiveWell" [2].

- [1] https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/best-charities-to-donate-to-...

- [2] https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities
by chris_marino | 2026-02-06 21:58:29+00:00
This news from Heroku does not come as any surprise to the people that were there (as I was). Lots of moving parts and second guessing (that I won't share), but one thing I will say is: Incentives matter.

The seeds of this outcome were planted years ago when sales comp plans changed. When a sales rep can hit their target by simply converting the way an existing customer gets billed, none of them look for new business. Don't need new leads. Don't need to win competitive deals. But finding new customers and losing opportunities are the only things that signal/drive innovation. But from a budgeting perspective, why increase investment in a product that already hits/exceeds their sales targets?

Over time sales targets get met, but the product doesn't advance. By the time all existing customers that can convert have converted, the product is no longer competitive. Like bankruptcy, it comes gradually, then suddenly.
by throw0101c | 2026-02-06 21:58:48+00:00
> Trump, as we know, has an insatiable need for recognition and attempts to put his name on everything he can.

"Trump says he’ll free infrastructure funds for New York if Penn Station is renamed after him":

* https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/06/trump-penn-s...

"Trump wants Penn Station, Dulles Airport named after him in funding deal with Schumer, sources say":

* https://abcnews.go.com/US/trump-penn-station-dulles-airport-...
by sandworm101 | 2026-02-06 21:59:10+00:00
Has anyone looked at the teacher's math scores? I have read about problems with basic numeracy amongst educators.

>> (2008) Primary school teachers in England are often scared of basic numeracy and should be required to study English and maths at A-level, a report suggests.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/8162803.stm

>> This lack of confidence on the part of teachers can be transmitted to students and result in their own lack of mathematical confidence

https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ743586.pdf
by phil21 | 2026-02-06 21:59:22+00:00
Eh, I think it’s a bullshit complaint too - but you can absolutely hear a commercial kitchen in operation a few buildings away if the doors or windows are open on a summer day.

I personally find it quite pleasant - and if not I can just shut my damn window - but many others apparently get super annoyed at even the tiniest of potential inconveniences.
by saint_fiasco | 2026-02-06 21:59:33+00:00
My bicicle got stolen a long time ago and I never recovered it. The perpetrator was never caught.

From this we can conclude many things. Maybe the thief was very crafty. Maybe the local police are incompetent. Maybe everyone is trying their best and the job of going after bike thieves is much harder than I thought.

But you cannot ever convince me that an appropriate conclussion could be "your bicicle didn't actually get stolen". I saw it. I can't identify the thief, there will never be a conviction, but don't tell me it didn't happen.

A conviction in a court of law is very important to be able to confidently say "so-and-so has committed fraud". But requiring a criminal conviction just to be able to say that fraud has happened is lunacy.
by minikomi | 2026-02-06 22:00:31+00:00
When writing Janet, i enjoy the judge[0] style of testing because it's so interactive. I added emacs helpers, one for running existing tests and one for updating the tests. It made for a nice repl-like experience, especially nice when writing grammars[1].

[0] https://github.com/ianthehenry/judge

[1] https://github.com/minikomi/advent-of-code/blob/d73e0b622b26...
by eljojo | 2026-02-06 22:00:47+00:00
services going offline is a big concern for me! that's why my solution is offline first, I like the idea of the encrypted backup living in my friend's email inbox and working entirely without internet. a true hard copy.

for the time lock mechanism, how do you go about it? I'm interested in exploring using drand time lock, but that also relies on the service continuing to run (which is admittedly very likely) https://github.com/drand/tlock
by jjcm | 2026-02-06 22:01:24+00:00
Ex-Figma.

I'd be worried about a lawsuit here, primarily due to the overall app architecture and property panel on the right. While there are differences between your implementation and Figma's, it's close enough that things are very clearly Figma-inspired. There've been a lot of Figma copycats, and Figma does have a track record of successful lawsuits against them.

Great work with the backend architecture (a lack of a proper wasm renderer is why penpot will never be competitive), but you're in dangerous territory with the UI.
by shortformblog | 2026-02-06 22:01:38+00:00
Curious to see how this worked, I tried this on Deepseek using Claude Code Router, following the author’s guide, with two small changes: Make it an emo song that uses acoustic guitar (or, obviously an equivalent), and it could install one text-to-speech tool using Python.

It double-tracked the vocals like freaking Elliott Smith, which cracked me up.
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2026-02-06 22:01:53+00:00
Politics and ideologies aside, just trying to be rational....

Can someone better informed about these metrics (the NAEP specifically) comment: how exactly do we know that we're comparing the same thing each year? Is the NAEP based off answering the same questions every year? Because if it's just like "average exam result" - those can change a lot. And can in fact trend, meaning change in the same direction for several years (e.g. becoming harder, becoming easier)
by kypro | 2026-02-06 22:02:16+00:00
I agree. It's shockingly good.

It's not just good at producing complete songs though, AI has made it trivial to take garbage and make it sound good.

I largely stopped making music because imo unless you're in the top 5% of musicians AI is probably able to write better music than you.

I guess it's the same with visual artists. Unless you're really, really good it's hard to understand why anyone would produce art by hand these days.
by vunderba | 2026-02-06 22:02:37+00:00
The collapse sort "algorithm".

A = [2, 7, 1, 8, 28, 18]
sort = A => A.reduce((B, x) => (B[x] = x, B), []).filter(x => x)

Nothing says efficiency like a sorting algorithm where Big O is more influenced by the largest element's value rather than the number of elements in the array. /s
by throwaway894345 | 2026-02-06 22:02:49+00:00
1. In the United States, we have Constitutional rights, including the right to carry a gun with proper permits. Like other rights, the state can't murder you for having a gun on your person, but if they have a credible reason to think that you are an immediate threat, they can shoot you. The legal standard for "immediate threat" does not cover this scenario because (1) Pretti wasn't resisting (2) the police stripped him of his gun before they executed him and (3) the agents approached Pretti for no reason at all; Pretti was clearly peacefully recording with his hands clearly visible.

> If you were a cop would you take chances

I wouldn't be a cop if I was afraid that every person with a cell phone might shoot me with a gun, or if I was afraid that every soccer mom in a car might try to run me over. And while American policing is riddled with accountability problems, it's important to emphasize that the crushing majority of American police can manage much riskier circumstances without murdering anyone--it seems to be exclusively the agencies under the Department of Homeland Security that behave like secret police on a regular basis.
by palmotea | 2026-02-06 22:03:00+00:00
>> I suppose that wouldn't be so much of an issue if there was a lot more of these shops, but then they might not be economically viable.

> This is "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded". You would get as many of them as were viable, which would be enough that none of them were inundated.

No, I think you're misunderstanding what I'm saying. What I'm saying is a busy coffee shop has negative externalites on its surrounding neighborhood (traffic, people parking in front of your house all the time). That could be mitigated if you had so many coffee shops that none of them were busy enough for those externalites to matter (e.g. at most a handful of cars out front), but a coffee shop that slow may not make enough money to actually survive.

So you may have a natural and legitimate resistance to more, because of the externalites.

>> There's a lot of space between "walkable" and "30-45m drive away."

> Except that if you concentrate it all into the same place, that's how you get serious traffic congestion, and then going to that place means you get stuck in traffic. Which means there isn't actually that much space between them, because the middle isn't an option. Either you put shops near where people live and it's walkable or you concentrate them downtown and you're stuck in traffic or circling to find parking to get there.

Like have you lived in a suburb? Shops aren't usually walkable, but they're not "concentrated downtown" either. The middle is totally an option, and that's probably the usual situation. I don't know why people are gravitating to this false dichotomy (walkable OR 45min away, NO in-between). Grocery stores and coffee shops are like 10-15 minute drive away from most suburban homes, and there's never a jam.
by bornfreddy | 2026-02-06 22:03:14+00:00
I have (had?) a Google account tied to my email (which is on a domain I own). Not sure if I ever gave them my phone number, initially. Tried to login a few years back, correct password, but they insisted on me entering my phone. Finally I did - and they can't let me in because my "provider is not supported" and they can't send an SMS with the code, so I'm locked out. Tried every few months since then, no go. Fortunately I didn't lose much (except some family photos), but it is annoying as hell. I wouldn't trust Google with anything important. And yes, I tried with an brand new number on a new phone, unrelated provider. No dice. According to reddit I'm far from alone in this. So if you rely on a Google account for anything... Well, good luck!
by paxys | 2026-02-06 22:03:20+00:00
Why don't they just spin off the company or sell it? Heroku is a well-established brand (despite Salesforce's best efforts) and there are still plenty of customers and hobbyists relying on it today. Its value to the parent company is clearly 0. Give it away and let someone else have a run at it. Keep an ownership stake in case someone does manage to turn it around. Literally zero downside in it.
by yummypaint | 2026-02-06 22:03:28+00:00
By leveraging Genie’s immense world knowledge, it can simulate exceedingly rare events—from a tornado to a casual encounter with an elephant—that are almost impossible to capture at scale in reality. The model’s architecture offers high controllability, allowing our engineers to modify simulations with simple language prompts, driving inputs, and scene layouts. Notably, the Waymo World Model generates high-fidelity, multi-sensor outputs that include both camera and lidar data.

How do you know the generated outputs are correct? Especially for unusual circumstances?

Say the scenario is a patch of road is densely covered with 5 mm ball bearings. I'm sure the model will happily spit out numbers, but are they reasonable? How do we know they are reasonable? Even if the prediction is ok, how do we fundamentally know that the prediction for 4 mm ball bearings won't be completely wrong?

There seems to be a lot of critical information missing.
by Eduard | 2026-02-06 22:03:45+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Gelsenkirchen_heist

In December 2025, items worth an estimated €30 million were stolen from a Sparkasse bank in the Gelsenkirchen suburb of Buer, Germany. The thieves used a large drill to break into the bank's underground vault and proceeded to crack over 3,000 safe deposit boxes.
by servo_sausage | 2026-02-06 22:04:00+00:00
Trains need well behaved people, otherwise they are shit.

I don't want to hear tiktok or full volume soap operas blasting at some deaf mouth breather.

I don't want to be near loud chewing of smelly leftovers.

I don't want to be begged for money, or interact with high or psychotic people.

The current culture doesn't allow enforcement of social behaviour: so public transport will always be a miserable containment vessel for the least functional, and everyone with sense avoids the whole thing.
by chrisweekly | 2026-02-06 22:04:05+00:00
Hmm, your comment resonates in principle [caring about quality production of worthwhile narratives], but your specific examples show how much YMMV when it comes to subjective preferences. I was so grateful that Amazon Prime somehow did justice to The Expanse [I highly recommend the novels, and feel the show was one of the best-ever translations of sci-fi to the screen] and could never get into the Wheel of Time book series [tho I guess that was Jordan, not Sanderson, shrug].
by Spivak | 2026-02-06 22:04:08+00:00
This article is super weird because it's looking at an issue from orbit where the only things you can see are vague things like "funding" where the problem is on the ground and probably can't be solved by the levers available from orbit. The lesson of funding having arguably no effect on outcomes should either be that we genuinely don't know what improves outcomes or that we do but schools are lighting money on fire buying other things.

It means the problem is unfortunately local and you have to actually go to the schools and see what the issue is. Based on what my former HS spent money on I figure we will eventually find some commonalities:

* New computer labs, laptops, digital textbooks, learning software licenses, smart boards, and other and other expensive crap that is at best neutral from a learning perspective.

* Pointless building improvements that don't service education but instead service the prestige and egos of the administrators of the schools.

* Chronic long-term understaffing and light-speed "just get through it" lesson plans that makes teachers not give a shit, and powerless to do better even if they do.

I think "just blame the administrators" is too easy a cop-out because I've yet to meet one who isn't also underpaid and dying of stress. Although maybe I just don't have access to the real higher ups.