MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Retric | 2026-02-11 21:40:13+00:00
It heavily depends on what kind of creative interpretations of the law you think are reasonable.

Democrats often go for “creative” interpretations that fit the existing legal framework just fine. Defining CO2 as pollution is upsetting for what it does but is within the spirit of what the law was intended and fits what it actually says just fine. Much of the civil rights movement operated on such principles because the laws where on the books it was the systems that didn’t keep up.

Republicans tend to find creative interpretations that depend on ill defined principles like executive power or corporate personhood which have about as much to do with the actual law as sovereign citizens and are open to unlimited abuse.

Failing to differentiate between each type of interpretation misses the inherent limitations of the first type.
by femiagbabiaka | 2026-02-11 21:40:16+00:00
I'm commenting on one such excess. Here is another: https://www.politico.com/news/2026/01/31/elon-musk-2026-elec.... The Nazification of X and federal subsidies for Elon's companies are another. There are many more examples.

s/relations/elections/ -- because Elon et. al don't just intervene in the elections of the country they live in, but actually any country he's interested in -- and uses the U.S. as a bludgeon in that effort, see U.S.-U.K. and U.S.-South Africa relations
by 1718627440 | 2026-02-11 21:40:44+00:00
Yeah I would expect a name starting with "Win" to be for or about the MS Windows operating system, but it doesn't need to have MS as a vendor. For that they need to use MS in the name, which is what there trademark is, and what they are very picky about to have included.

Note, that "Windows" used to be a class of operating systems, not a specific one (as in an OS with a Windowed system and metaphor), e.g. X Windows also exists. The role of "Windows" in "MS Windows" is(used to be) really the same as "Basic" in "MS Basic". Also some people also have a (legal) opinion about the implications of using non-standard abbreviations of "MS Windows": https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Trademarks.html
by phil21 | 2026-02-11 21:40:45+00:00
Underground power lines are weirdly vulnerable to lightning strikes.

I lived through two >24hr power outages at my previous place that had buried power lines into the subdivision. Both due to lightning strikes on trees that happened to be close to the buried lines. The lightning then fed into the line, and you could literally see black scorch marks on the lawn that followed the wiring until it eventually dissipated.

This required digging up 30-40ft of melted wiring each time and re-running it. These appeared to be direct-burial cables fwiw.

Talking to the utility guys, it was pretty common for this to be the failure mode. I found it pretty interesting and somewhat ironic.
by AngryData | 2026-02-11 21:40:53+00:00
My point is that if a 3rd party manufacturer can produce and sell a combination screen and camera for $20 for a profit, an automotive manufacturer has no reason to complain about the "expense" of such a setup. It is even cheaper for them than a 3rd party addon supplier since they buy in larger bulk and can integrate mounts for those devices into the car, rather than trying to devise some sort of one-size-fits-all mounting system that the addon manufacturers need.

They might as well be complaining about the costs of a rear view mirror, it is nonsense from the start. If a $20 gadget breaks the bank on a $30,000 minimum vehicle, they are a shitty business to start with and we should all be clapping our hands when they go out of business.
by zer0zzz | 2026-02-11 21:41:27+00:00
I’m pretty sure butterfly keyboard was made worse when it came to the hotter rubbing higher power Mac’s. I rarely saw folks with the original 12” low power model having issues.

It was not an entirely bad concept for the device it was conceived for, but Apple has a habit of unifying their technologies to all their products and sometimes, like with Liquid Glass, that seriously doesn’t work.
by chr1 | 2026-02-11 21:41:38+00:00
Why do you think that similar law could not be passed without direct vote? The problem is not direct democracy but the fact that it is being done in a wrong way.

Voting should be done without anonymity, online. One should be able to either vote for everything manually, or delegate the vote to any other person.

If some change is supported by 100% of the voters it should be implemented immediately. But if smaller percent supports the change, then there needs to be a vesting time (e.g. 10 years for 60%, infinity for 50%+1).

This allows people to either trade support for policies (i'll vote yes for your initiative if you vote for mine, or give me money), or to get high level of support locally and try out various laws on local level.

The same site that manages voting should also show detailed budget of city/state/country, where people can see where their taxes are being spent and should be able to redirect the money they have paid.
by frizlab | 2026-02-11 21:41:38+00:00
That, and also I specifically loathe the way AI has been created.

In my heart I’m a code “artist,” and like all artists that have been more directly attacked, I also feel personally attacked by all of my stolen “art” that is now monetized by big corporations that do not give a single f*ck about beauty in the code, or whatever.

This may be a strange position, idk. Anyways, that’s the reason why.
by NetMageSCW | 2026-02-11 21:41:50+00:00
The United States also covers a vast difference in climate. What good are snow tires for people in South Florida, or Texas, or New Mexico? Where I live I switch between summer and all season cause we get enough snow to justify snow tires once a decade for a couple
of days. This year has been the worse with two weekends with a decent amount of snow that was cleaned off the roads by Tuesday.
by thomassmith65 | 2026-02-11 21:42:14+00:00
If you put a question to the electorate like 'should we tax only people whose last name begins with an X, Y or Z?', it's liable to pass.

Nobody really advocates for Direct Democracy. It isn't viable: 'tyranny of the majority' etc.

Most Western governments are Liberal Democracies - where some issues aren't subject to a vote - partly so that the mob can't persecute outnumbered subgroups.
by RupertSalt | 2026-02-11 21:42:24+00:00
Yes, the Catholic Church supports and encourages belief in the supernatural. It is strange, isn't it. In fact it's nearly mandatory!

Paderborn is particularly mentioned in the article I linked.

Paderborn condemned the pagan belief in witches. They condemned the pagan accusations and persecution of witches. They condemned the pagan practices of cremating them and of eating their flesh. Paderborn opposed the view that paganism or occult practices were "efficacious", in other words that they worked for people, doing what it says on the tin, and that they may not be dangerous.

> That’s kind of its thing…

Discipline vs. doctrine and dogma; public policy vs. beliefs and teachings; governance vs. faith and morals.

It is interesting, because you will find Christians and Catholics who insist that pagan gods do not exist. Or that they're not divine. Or that they are "false", or some are demons.

And that was exactly the controversy when Moses (I mean Yahweh) brought plagues on Egypt, and when Elijah went to sacrifice on Mt. Carmel, and when St. Paul preached before the Altar of the Unknown God in Athens. It's more or less a matter of framing, isn't it?

> only God can perform miracles.

This is true. And this is also why the evaluation of alleged "private revelation" or purported "miracles" may hand down a decision called "Constat de non supernaturalitate".

https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/answers/discernment-of-priv...
by d3Xt3r | 2026-02-11 21:43:11+00:00
> Kinda wish i could run everything my family wants on Debian. I know i could do that right now, but the wife and kids will never get used to that if they have to use Microsoft products in their working and school life.

You won't know until you try. My mum used all versions of Windows from 3.1 till Windows 7. She hated Windows 8, and that's when I decided to switch her to Linux (with XFCE) - and she felt the UI was a lot more familiar to her than Windows 8. I recently showed her a few screenshots of Windows 11, and she finds her current desktop (now on KDE) a lot more familiar than Windows 11. Same with Office, she prefers the older style toolbar of LibreOffice than the ribbon UI of modern versions Office.

So maybe install it on a spare device as a trial and see how they like it?
by refulgentis | 2026-02-11 21:43:25+00:00
> I mean I just don't see how you get to this opinion after any real review of the evidence.

Graybeard here: took me a while to get it, but, usually these are chances to elucidate what is obvious to you :)* ex. I don't really know what you mean. What does the California state government look like if rich techies had even more influence? I can construct a facile version (lower taxes**) but assuredly you mean more than that to be taken so aback.

* Good Atlas Shrugged quote on this: "Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check [ED: or share, if you've moseyed yourself into a discussion] your premises."

** It's not 100% clear politicians steered by California techies would lower taxes ad infinitum.
by trevwilson | 2026-02-11 21:43:27+00:00
In the context of the Dark Knight/surveillance example, it comes across to me as more of a recognition that the arguments in favor of these things can easily be made compelling if you evaluate them with no tradeoffs (don't you want to catch the bad guys??).

Then again, I guess the film ends up doing the same thing by only demonstrating concrete benefits alongside theoretical, but unrealized, harms...
by its_magic | 2026-02-11 21:43:30+00:00
Jesus Christ didn't like taxation either. He preached that it was theft also. That's one big reason why they murdered him, then sent Paul (aka Saul) along to invent a new 'explanation' of the Parable of the Coin more favorable to the Roman viewpoint.

Regardless of whatever pretense you put on, you are in fact a member of a gang of thieves plotting to rob your next victim, just as Lysander Spooner explained in the 1800s:

"If any man's money can be taken by a so-called government, without his own personal consent, all his other rights are taken with it; for with his money the government can (and will) hire soldiers to stand over him, compel him to submit to its arbitrary will, and kill him if he resists." - Lysander Spooner

"If taxation without consent is robbery, the United States government has never had, has not now, and is never likely to have, an honest dollar in its treasury. If taxation without consent is not robbery, then any band of robbers have only to declare themselves a government, and all their robberies are legalized." - Lysander Spooner

"The Rothschilds, and that class of money-lenders of whom they are the representatives and agents -- men who never think of lending a shilling to their next-door neighbors for purposes of honest industry, unless upon the most ample security, and at the highest rate of interest -- stand ready at all times to lend money in unlimited amounts to those robbers and murderers who call themselves governments, to be expended in shooting down those who do not submit quietly to being robbed and enslaved." - Lysander Spooner

"But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain – that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist." - Lysander Spooner

Hint: We are now in the "raising of the spirits of the dead" phase of prophecy; the above being an example of what is meant by that phrase. You Are Here.
by wat10000 | 2026-02-11 21:43:33+00:00
Most (all?) of Batman is based on the idea that sometimes you need a good guy who operates outside of the law. Given that Batman isn't real but the problems he encounters often are real, the natural conclusion is that we should make up for our low Batman levels by letting law enforcement off the chain.

But this is hardly unique to Nolan. Probably 90% of Hollywood movies that involve crime have this message in some form.
by throw0101a | 2026-02-11 21:43:37+00:00
Does Gallup want to keep their government contracts?

* https://www.gallup.com/analytics/647639/federal-government-s...

* https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_1305M323FNFFK0004...

* https://govtribe.com/vendors/gallup-inc-dot-the-gallup-organ...
by MarsIronPI | 2026-02-11 21:43:54+00:00
IDK, XMPP group chats have always "jest werked" for me (though admittedly I haven't used them much).

The difference between XMPP group chats and Matrix group chats is that Matrix servers replicate all the message history, whereas XMPP group chats are hosted on a single server. IMO the "bring your own account to a central server" model of XMPP is a good thing, but the "replicate all the things" model of Matrix is not.
by foobar_______ | 2026-02-11 21:44:02+00:00
I like your take. I see this same thing playing out across many parts of the world.

Dont hate the player hate the game

It is about incentives and rules of the "game" that drive things. Sure, there are a few evil people but the vast majority of it is normal people responding to broken rules/incentives. Probably you and I both fall in this category :)
by mullingitover | 2026-02-11 21:44:09+00:00
Why should all of society pay for these externalities? If some people manage to improve their energy supply and don't require dirty fuels, why should they be forced to subsidize those who won't?

Taxing the carbon at the source is simply correctly pricing it, and because it makes it impossible to shift the externalities away from the producer it fixes the accounting problem that falsely makes fossil fuels appear cheap.
by terminalshort | 2026-02-11 21:44:16+00:00
How is Elon's editorial control of X something the government needs to (or even should have the power to) "reign in?" How is that not freedom of the press just like the owner of the New York Times having editorial control over his newspaper? Same goes for his donation to the PAC. What is the nefarious activity they are engaged in? Why are they not allowed to exercise their freedom of the press in the same way as any other company?
by DonHopkins | 2026-02-11 21:44:21+00:00
I'm thrilled that you and other people are taking it and running with it! That was the whole point of making it free: it was inspired by Seymour Papert's Constructionist philosophy, Alan Kay's ideas, and the mission of the OLPC.

EA granted the right to use the trademark "SimCity" only if it passed their QA process, and it was quite an ordeal hand holding their QA department through running Linux in a VM on Windows to test it.

Since I never want to go through that ever again, I asked Will Wright for a suggestion about the name, and he recommended its original working title, Micropolis.

At the time, he had to change the name to SimCity because Micropolis was a hard disk drive manufacturer. They eventually changed names then went out of business, but was recently restructured under the name Micropolis GmbH.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micropolis_Corporation

Fortunately the owner of Micropolis GmbH is really cool, an old school hacker, who was generous enough to grant the Micropolis Public Name License that allows the game to use the name Micropolis under reasonable conditions:

https://github.com/SimHacker/MicropolisCore/blob/main/Microp...

Check out his BBS, robotics, and data storage primers:

https://www.micropolis.com/micropolis-bbs-primer

https://www.micropolis.com/micropolis-robotics-primer

https://www.micropolis.com/micropolis-data-storage-primer
by lysace | 2026-02-11 21:44:29+00:00
Fox News first reported that the airborne object was intercepted after raising concerns of a potential drone operating near the southern border. Officials later concluded the object was not an unmanned aircraft but a party balloon, a U.S. official told the outlet.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/us-military-shot-down-party...

US military shot down party balloon near El Paso after drone suspicion, official says

Would be funny if they used some new fancy laser weapon to, let's say, discombobulate this imminent threat, as indicated by other reports.
by throw310822 | 2026-02-11 21:44:58+00:00
However, the first scenario will pass the increased cost of fuel down to the consumers affecting poorer people disproportionately. Example: some good that is produced with fossil fuels (including food) will become too expensive for low-income people, while richer (and more polluting) people will not feel the difference that much.

If you go for general taxation, you distribute the cost proportionally to income, making rich people pay more. Probably the ideal is a mix of both.
by BugsJustFindMe | 2026-02-11 21:45:28+00:00
> the proposed tax will do nothing more than push the extremely small and mobile group of billionaires to take their business elsewhere

This is often claimed but has yet to be shown to actually be true. Billionaires want to live in the nicest places with the best amenities just like everyone else.

But let's pretend for the moment that it is true. Good. Billionaires are not a net positive influence anywhere.
by Schmerika | 2026-02-11 21:45:28+00:00
> However, in practice, virtually everyone who says "do your own research" is referring to skimming over a collection of Facebook posts, X posts, and podcasts.

Kinda hard to blame them for that when they were being lied to so obviously by official sources, about so many things; and when social and traditional media were censoring 'alternative' perspectives (many which later proved entirely correct) on a scale of hundreds of millions of posts.

No, we didn't all have the biology savvy to read and understand Daszak's paper ... But lots of people did have that knowledge - and either didn't speak up, or were censored into oblivion, or had literal actual death threats levelled at them.

Lots of institutions which had a duty to speak up didn't; not just about that, not just about the lableak theory, not just about the funding of GOF research [0], not just about how the virus behaved (animal reservoirs, natural immunity etc), and not just about the ways the vaccines were lied about.

Many of the institutions which did speak up, again, were censored into oblivion [1]; rendered irrelevant by the 'requests' of a Biden admin which was simultaneously threatening every major social media company with monopoly investigations. That's documented fact now, but it was blindingly obvious at the time too.

In context, any research was better than believing whatever you were told to believe; no matter how it changed from one week to the next. And I respect the people who tried, even if they didn't do it very well, better than the people who kept their mouths shut and did what they were told without any independent thought. And I even respect those people more than those who actively derided anyone who questioned authority even the slightest bit.

0 - https://www.congress.gov/117/meeting/house/114270/documents/...

1 - https://archive.li/FhtHM
by phil21 | 2026-02-11 21:46:00+00:00
> thick gloves

Gloves are not for severe cold. They are for dexterity during limited exposure time - as no gloves can keep your fingers warm for very long no matter how well-made they are.

Look for mittens or "choppers" as we called them back in the day if you are going to be outside for a long period of time. These are outer shells (leather or gore-tex/etc.) with various types of removable liners. You basically layer your hands inside them. For folks outside all day you usually would have a few liners on hand to replace when they get wet.

Add a heat pack (iron oxide) to these on those super cold days and you'll be pretty much set.
by whynotmaybe | 2026-02-11 21:46:22+00:00
Honestly I'm not so strongly opiniated now as I was a few weeks ago. I'm in a huge questioning phase about my work/craft/hobby.

I've worked places where junior made bad code that was accepted because the QA tests were ok.

I even had a situation in production where we had memory leaks because nobody tried to use it for more than 20 minutes when we knew that the app is used 24/7.

We aim for 99% quality when no-one wants it.
No-one wants to pay for it.

Github is down to one 9 and I haven't heard them losing many clients, people just cope.

We've reached a level where we have so much ram that we find garbage collection and immutability normal, even desired.

We are wasting bandwidth by using json instead of binary because it's easier to read when have to debug, because it's easier to debug while running than to think before coding.
by d3Xt3r | 2026-02-11 21:46:30+00:00
When was the last time you tried it? Assetto Corsa EVO has a Gold rating on ProtonDB[1] and apparently SimHub also works fine, according to the SimHub forums[2].

[1] https://www.protondb.com/app/3058630
[2] https://www.simhubdash.com/community-2/simhub-support/guide-...
by supjeff | 2026-02-11 21:46:46+00:00
I agree with you, in spirit, but I think the true issue lies elsewhere.

Rich people can spend money to influence elections, yes, but how can they do it? through political donations, super-pacs and bribes. Bribes are already illegal. political donations and super-pacs can give politicians the juice they need to get their messaging out, but getting the message across isn't enough to win an election. The people need to vote. Billionaires can spend as much money as they want to support candidates, but a billionaire still only has one vote to cast.

My point is, billionaires can pay for all the political campaigns in the world, but the electorate gets the final say. It's up to us to A) run for office and B) vote for the best candidate (but tell that to the 64% turnout in the 2024 presidential election)
by asdff | 2026-02-11 21:47:28+00:00
Prop 13 is a nothingburger. Median homeownership period in california vs nationally is only like 2 years longer. It shouldn't be affecting costs that much in other words since median property is back to market rate every 15 years or so.

And what costs are we talking about anyhow? Tax shortfalls for local government? Decades later that has been rectified through other taxes and funding mechanisms and we still get new roads and schools in california. Housing costs increasing? I would say the fact that cities today are zoned within a few percentage points of present population levels (vs zoned for 10x present population levels pre 1970) is the actual source of that sucking sound from the chest.
by drecked | 2026-02-11 21:47:32+00:00
Wow. What an insane response. “Please don’t come here illegally or we will torture and treat you inhumanely. Oh, also, go back in time and make sure your parents didn’t bring you here illegally either. Also, even if you came here legally at the time you did, we decided you came here illegally in retrospect so too bad. Also, you’re following the law and attending the courts for your case but we will kidnap you so your case can never come to a resolution”.