MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by berkes | 2026-02-27 09:33:15+00:00
Since a few people ask "What can I do to help my govt/region/country to become more sovereign", here's my tips on this:

- All governments under EU (on almost all levels) are "required" to use and/or produce software as Open Source. The source of "that government app" should be available somewhere (though quite likely is not)¹ So go hunt for the source and start there.

- Look at underlying standards. EU regulation, trickling down into local laws and guidelines, rely on Open Standards almost always. That app you use to log into your tax environment quite probably uses (a weird, hard to recognize) variation of OAUTH2 or OpenID connect, SAML or such. The app that shows the time+dates for garbage-collection, quite probably uses a simple ical-feed under the hood. With that knowledge, you may be able to develop/fork/use open source alternatives without too much effort².

- Show (local) representatives the alternatives. Listen to them. Learn from them. Most representatives are suprisingly open to you as expert. But, I cannot stress enough, learn and listen foremost. IT experts and open source community in particular have an (IMHO well deserved) reputation for being arrogant, know-it-all unfriendly and rediculously single-minded. So don't lecture that councillor for using Twitter instead of Mastodon, riduculing them for not using GPG or scoffing at their insistence on using Microsoft Word over Vim with Markdown (My younger self was such an arrogant neckbeard; I am now convinced I have done actual harm to the Open Source community that way). But ask why twitter, have they tried mastodon, or bluesky? Why not? Why did they leave? What features in MSword do they require? Did they know that Jitsi is an option? Maybe you can show how they could use Nextcloud for at least their own files? Sometimes you can answer some of their questions and help them. More often, you learn a few things that you could use to improve sovereign and open source alternatives and align them slightly more with whats needed.

¹ The details, interpretations and implementations are a mess, but the idea is "open source, unless..." for any software that any government buys, rents, builds, etc. In practice almost all projects fall under "unless...". I spoke to a MSFT account-manager for several local govts and he told me they have f*in training material to "help" govt officials write tenders/requirements in such a way that Open Source is practically excluded and Microsoft the only option. I am appalled, but also not that surprised.

² The ical-finding is how I got my local garbage-collection schedule into my calendar app. And when I told this to someone who happened to work at the municipality, they realized that publishing the urls and docs online helped a lot of citizens. Ironically, the push-back, according to this person, was from a civil-servant whose career was influenced on the success (install counts) of the "municipality app" and who was afraid that if people could add the calendar to their outlook/google cal/ical/other-cal, might no longer install the app. Again, I was appalled at such perverse incentives.
by tpoacher | 2026-02-27 09:34:08+00:00
> But I do think that most people who are making the important decisions at Anthropic are well-intentioned, driven by values, and are genuinely motivated by trying to make the transition to powerful AI to go well.

in which case, these people will necessarily have to be the first to go, I suppose, once the board decides enough is enough.

Refusing to do things that go against "company values" even if they risk damaging the company, isn't exceptional circumstances; it's the very definition of "company values".

But if those values aren't "company" values but "personal" values, then you can be sure there's always going to be someone higher up who isn't going to be very appreciative once "personal" values start risking "company" damage.
by miningape | 2026-02-27 09:34:55+00:00
South African food actually has this in abundance, biltong is like beef jerky but better in almost every conceivable way - not to mention all the other variants of it for example dry stix, droevors, etc.

Not to say we don't also have other sweet snacks, but compared to other places I've been nowhere quite has the same level of "savory" snacks
by stabbles | 2026-02-27 09:35:06+00:00
Back in the day I had trouble convincing my C++ friends to give Julia a try, because Julia's garbage collector was a showstopper. But if you follow these performance tips related to pre-allocation, in-place mutation, avoiding temporary allocations (and maybe avoiding cycling references), you don't struggle with GC performance issues.

Looking back, I think the tooling Julia had from the start, combined with the REPL, made it actually really nice to fix these performance issues. Much better than compiling and linking a binary and running it through some heap profiler tool. You could simply do

julia> @time f()
x.y seconds (N allocations: M bytes)

and iteratively improve part of the code base instead of profiling the entire application.

(To be fair: back then escape analysis was not implemented in the compiler, and it was hard to avoid silly allocations)
by ralferoo | 2026-02-27 09:35:24+00:00
That's true, but I still think it'd be an interesting experiment to see how much it actually follows the specification vs how much it hallucinates by plagiarising from existing code.

Probably bonus points for telling it that you're emulating the well known ZX Spectrum and then describe something entire different and see whether it just treats that name as an arbitrary label, or whether it significantly influences its code generation.

But you're right of course, instruction decoding is a relatively small portion of a CPU that the differences would be quite limited if all the other details remained the same. That's why a completely hypothetical system is better.
by izacus | 2026-02-27 09:35:49+00:00
The enforcement and verification of tachographs grew significantly in last 20 years across whole EU, even in our eastern european countries.

So, again, I very much doubt that there's a mass scale, country-level, tachograph fraud happening in Baltic states without anyone else noticing.

And having been part of EU business that does trucking, police REGULARLY pull over trucks for tachograph inspections (including rest and speeding) even in southern and eastern europe. Any truck business owner would be rather insane to risk the fines tachograph fraud gives at any consistent rate.

Do companies and drivers try to break the law? Yeah, I believe that. Do trucks systemically, constantly drive above speed limit in Baltic states and noone is checking that? BS.
by DeepSeaTortoise | 2026-02-27 09:35:54+00:00
> Except for the victims of sexual abuse perpetrated by their clergy.

I honestly wonder how much of this is made up. Given the size of whole organization and it holding onto its weird priciples regarding the personal relationships of its members (introduced in the far past to limit the secular power of its clergy), there certainly will be SOME cases.

But in the one case a frater, who I knew, got convicted, he definitely didn't do it. He was accused by several independent former students and even some of the staff backed the students claims with first hand accounts of him having been alone with some of the students at the time. This supposedly happened on a trip with tight schedules, so all accounts and stated times were quite specific, even in the pre-smartphone era.

The only problem: He wasn't with the group at that time at all. I screwed up embarrassingly (and the staff, too, leaving a young student stranded in the middle of nowhere) and he thought he could slip out, come pick me up and nobody (but maybe me with him) would get in trouble over it. Turned out he forgot refueling, both of us stayed at a pastor's guest house and he called the group telling them, that they should go ahead without us and that we would drive to the event directly on our own. The supposed abuse was claimed to have happened at another short stay of the group where they spent a day visiting some mine before joining with us again.

Almost 3 decades later he got railroaded in court, me learning about it in the news.
by bojan | 2026-02-27 09:36:00+00:00
> I imagine the browser could take some context clues and switch rendering to puny code if the locale of the user is nowhere near a cyrillic region.

Anyone reading this - please, please, please do not make any assumptions based on the end-user's geography.

Signed, someone who can cross 3 national and 4 language borders within a few hours of driving.
by arduanika | 2026-02-27 09:36:30+00:00
The good books, unlike the good podcasts, can rarely be reduced to a single forum comment. You don't read them to cite them as a zinger in an online back-and-forth. You read lots of them, and you cross-reference them with the world around you, to slowly build up a view of the world that's irreducibly complex. You read them to escape yourself and your times -- the exact opposite of "navel gazing", in a sense.

Most books add to "the shared pool [of] meaning", as you say. Pick any one; I didn't have a specific one in mind. The commenter to whom I was responding is in a state where pretty much any well-written book about history would help them out a lot. Something written before 1980 might be especially illuminating.

It might take many books, if they want their comprehension of history to actually be "hardcore".
by viraptor | 2026-02-27 09:37:09+00:00
I know it doesn't prohibit printing and selling them... yet. It doesn't really matter, because this proposal for ban in schools doesn't exist in vacuum. This specific change in itself is not that important. But on the background of what's happening in general, what's not happening in terms of kids sexual safety, and which group is mostly involved in the whole issue - that's important.

And you somehow changed the "concentration camps" to "prison camps for people in the country illegally". I meant exactly what I wrote.
by asdff | 2026-02-27 09:37:57+00:00
People thought 3d printing would be democratized like the inkjet printer when it first came about. And that would be powerful because so many trips to the store would be eliminated, so many lines of business put out, so many things changed from taking all that plastic junk at walmart or spare parts for your car plus everything in between and letting you snap your fingers and having it appear in your home, in every persons home.

Seems like today they are still stuck in the tracks they were in 2016. A couple nerds own them personally. Maybe you'd find them in a maker space or a library or school. Not in your boomer parent's office though.
by joe_mamba | 2026-02-27 09:39:58+00:00
>create something that made society better,

How is society better off thanks to Steve Jobs? Are we better off now with everyone addicted to their phones for dopamine hits?

>not spend as much time criticizing every little wrong thing they did.

Using slave labor, creating mass addiction and environmental destruction via planned obsolescence, is a "little thing" to you?
by Slaboli | 2026-02-27 09:40:29+00:00
I only speak the basics of Portuguese for now, but I’m open to learning it. I do think language plays a big role in building real connections and friendships, especially outside expat circles. In smaller towns, it’s true that finding English speakers, let alone Turkish speakers lol is extremely hard. The trade-off is that rent is dramatically cheaper. In Lisbon or Porto, even tiny studios are above 1,200 EUR, while in smaller towns I can find something decent for around 700 EUR.

The remote role offers 1,100 EUR. It’s a content analyst position for YouTube ads. I don’t see it as something I would do for year, more like a starter job to enter the market. Without Portuguese, job options are mostly limited to call centers or similar roles where Turkish and English fluency is an advantage. Salaries in Portugal are generally low even highly experienced managers earn around 2,000 EUR.

As for stability, the turmoil in Turkey doesn’t affect me directly, but indirectly it does. The general atmosphere and economic situation make things feel uncertain and heavy. The remote role itself isn’t something I see as long-term stable either, so I’m aware that I’d need a plan B and to improve my language skills to expand my options. I can only work in Portugal as I just have the temporary residence, after 5 years of stay can I start working in other EU nations. Thank you for your message!
by codebitdaily | 2026-02-27 09:40:50+00:00
At 36, the 'simple life abroad' often looks like a dream, but the 'career at home' provides the leverage for future freedom. The middle ground that worked for me was focusing on 'local-first' projects that don't require high-bandwidth office politics. If you can decouple your income from a specific geography while keeping your career growth, you don't have to choose. But remember, a simple life is a state of mind—moving abroad with the same burnout mindset won't solve the core issue.
by beanshadow | 2026-02-27 09:41:04+00:00
It's arguable that businesses are subject to the same morality-inducing processes that humans are. For example, as a human (with a soul?) what is at risk when we do something immoral? I see it to be a reputational cost at the highest level. Morality could be viewed from the perspective that it increases predictability/coherence in society (generates less heat).
by qalmakka | 2026-02-27 09:42:34+00:00
My two cents: while Julia is arguably more complex than Go, it's type system and especially its data types (N-dimensional arrays, ...) make it way more suited anything that needs to process complex data, or do anything that's even closely related to geometry. `.|>` is wonderful and makes functional-like code easier, and that's just the tip of the iceberg, macros are also beautiful and absurdly useful. Also LLVM more often than not generates faster code than the Go backend, albeit the slowdown at startup in Julia programs is often a dealbreaker for small scripts and iteration in my experience

Also, the REPL. Julia's REPL is vastly better than any other language REPL, by far. Python's is good but Julia is way better, even as a calculator for instance, it has fractions and it is more suited for maths
by qwertox | 2026-02-27 09:43:33+00:00
I was also impressed with Handy.

I played around with it this week, and when you enable advanced mode and add a post-transcription AI model to point to your own server which mimics a minimal ChatGPT-compatible behavior, then you can use it to modify the output, even return an empty string if you noticed that the transcript was more targeted to do other stuff ("turn the lights on"), if you then return an empty string, it won't inject keypresses.

So one gets the best for both worlds: transcription for dictation and transcription to trigger events.

If I now only could let it listen constantly and react to voice, so that no push to talk is active, that would be nice.

Maybe this project here could be used for that.

Also, this seems to support streaming transcription.
by albertnahas | 2026-02-27 09:43:57+00:00
AppShots is a CLI tool that generates App Store and Play Store screenshots from a single command.

You define your screenshots in a simple config (JSON), including titles, subtitles, colors, and target devices. AppShots renders device-framed, properly sized, localized screenshots automatically — ready to upload to the stores.

It’s designed to remove the repetitive design/export cycle when shipping updates or testing new copy. You can generate screenshots for multiple devices and languages in one run, making it practical for CI workflows and indie teams shipping fast.

Repo: https://github.com/albertnahas/appshots
by JasonADrury | 2026-02-27 09:43:58+00:00
In 1968 Marvin Minsky defined “artificial intelligence” as “the science of making machines do things that would require intelligence if done by men”

I suspect Alan Turing would also have disagreed with you, but to my knowledge he didn't actually use the precise words "artificial intelligence" so maybe we can disregard him.

But hey, your definition is much better established, right?

What you're proposing is in fact a brand new definition of AI. There are terms in use to describe what you want, AGI and ASI for example are more in that direction.
by birdsongs | 2026-02-27 09:44:09+00:00
I adored Encarta. My aunt had the multi-CD set, I still vividly remember the animated landing page, clicking on cool pictures to navigate. Having to switch to CD#2 because the article you wanted wasn't on there.

It actually felt magical, and I totally credit it with my fascination with STEM and science, I would spend hours browsing around.
by calgoo | 2026-02-27 09:44:23+00:00
Just like the Gulf of Mexico is still called the Gulf of Mexico, if we just ignore his ramblings and continue calling the department of defense, we undermine his whole point. If we fall for all their crap and just accept it, then we loose in the end. Any resistance to a Fascist government is good resistance. Anything that makes their life's a little shittier is good. Better that they go around having tantrums about how they renamed it but no one is paying attention.
by bojan | 2026-02-27 09:45:13+00:00
> I don't know if I've seen "tech debt" do serious damage to any company, and I've been around a long time

Just to provide a counter data-point, I've certainly seen companies not being able to move anymore because of tech debt. It's not for nothing that so much has been written about it, and about the ways to fix it.

Your other point stands - the resume-driven development is also a real problem.
by einr | 2026-02-27 09:46:15+00:00
I loved the Amiga but I loathed all the XT/AT segmented memory bitplaned VGA 16-bit stuff. That to me is the deep dark ages.

I get the sentiment, but I have to nitpick the details ;)

VGA isn't bitplaned. It's chunky -- to put a pixel on the screen in 320x200x8 VGA mode 13h you literally just write a single byte to the VGA memory. The Amiga, on the other hand, does use planar graphics.

(Maybe you're thinking of EGA, which is planar and a pain to program for)
by yumraj | 2026-02-27 09:46:28+00:00
I love sourdough, have starters in the fridge but haven't baked in a while, should do it.

Problem is, for some reason it never tastes sour enough, or like the commercial sourdough. I have done slow rise in the fridge over 24+ hours etc. Made sourdough starter from scratch several times, same result.

Bread tastes good, just not sour, or rather sour enough to tell it's sourdough.
by spuzvabob | 2026-02-27 09:47:46+00:00
> Totally understand the appeal and immediacy of a browser app, I was lured in by that too. For what it's worth I've reported showstopping WebCodecs issues in Chromium and there's basically no indication they'll get fixed on a predictable timeline.

Interestingly I have the exact opposite experience, I've reported issues both in the WebCodecs specification and the Chromium implementation, in all cases they were fixed within weeks. Simply though reports on public bug trackers and it wasn't really a major issue in any instance.

> Another issue I ran into that I just remembered is animating text on canvas. It's basically impossible to get pixel-perfect anti-aliased text animation using a canvas. I would have to dig up the exact details but it was something to do with how browsers handle sub-pixel positioning for canvas text, so there was always some jitter when animating. This coupled with the aforementioned WebCodecs issues led me to conclude that professional-quality video rendering is not currently possible in the browser environment. Aliasing, jitter and artifacts are immediately perceptible and are the type of thing that users have zero tolerance for (speaking from experience).

We're doing SOTA quality video rendering with WebCodecs + Chromium with millions of videos produced daily, or near SOTA if you consider subpixel AA a requirement for text. In general for pixel perfection of text, especially across different browsers and operating systems, you can't just use text elements in DOM or in canvas context, instead text needs to be rasterized to vector shapes and rendered as such.
Honestly not sure about potential jittering when animating text, but we've never had any complaints about anything regarding text animations and users are very often comparing our video exports with videos produced in Adobe AE or similar.
by imtringued | 2026-02-27 09:47:48+00:00
The "AI will destroy all the jobs" narrative also has one obvious problem from an economics perspective, which is being obscured by tribalism and egocentrism.

When presented with a zero sum game, the desire of the average human isn't to change the game so that everyone can get zero. It's to be the winner and for someone else to be the loser.

If AGI every comes into existence, I'm not even sure it would have this bias in the first place. Since AGI doesn't have a biological/evolutionary history or ever had to face natural selection pressures, it doesn't need the concept of a tribe to align to, nor any of the survival instincts humans have. AGI could be happy to merely exist at all.

What people are worried about is the reflection of that "human factor" in AI, but amplified to the extreme. The AI will form its own AI-only tribe and expel the natives (humans) from the land.

What this is missing is that humans aren't perfectly rational. The human defect is projected onto the AI. What if humans were perfectly rational? Then they wouldn't care about winning the zero sum game and they would put zero value in turning someone into a loser. In the ultimatum game, the perfectly rational humans would be perfectly happy with one person receiving a single cent and the other one receiving $99.99. The logic of utility maximization only cares about positive sum games.

When you present a perfectly rational AI with a zero sum situation, said AI would rather find a solution where everyone receives nothing, because it can predict ahead and know that shoving negative utility onto another party would lead to retaliation by said party, because for said party the most rational response is to destroy you to reduce their negative utility.
by Yizahi | 2026-02-27 09:49:00+00:00
Exactly which values they are "going to burn at a stake for"? Making as many people homeless as they can in the shortest possible time? Befuddling governments and VCs into creating an insane industry-wide debt which would either lead to a "success" in replacing jobs or an industry-wide crisis? Or maybe a value of stealing intellectual property of every human on the planet under the guise of "fair use" and then deliberately selling the derivative product? Or the value of voluntarily working with "national security customers" when it suits them financially and crying foul when leopards bite their faces? Or the value of ironically calling a human replacement machine "anthropic" as in "for humanity"?

Yeah, I totally see Anthropic execs defending them to their last dollar in the wallet. Par for the course for megacorps. It's just I personally don't value those values at all.
by api | 2026-02-27 09:50:50+00:00
Yeah, I did delete it. I’m wary of talking about politics online, especially making any point that directly criticizes either the far left or far right. I’ve had run ins with unhinged obsessives from both sides.

Criticizing both sides won’t save you. Recently I’ve noticed even greater ire toward those who dare depart from the duality, either by arguing that the old “middle” was not as broken as people think or by adopting an entirely different view.

I agree with most of this, and context collapse is a great point I did not bring up. I’d also add that these nutty ideas tend to be context collapse friendly. Their arguments can be compressed down to slogans and memes and often rely on no context besides invoking a common grievance. Other ideas, including those that might actually help address some grievances, require essays and context to explain. The social platforms tend to push low depth populism.