MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tibbar | 2026-02-09 23:06:39+00:00
It's interesting to take the counterfactual, what it looks like when large projects are run poorly. The answer often looks like:

* Poorly defined goals / definition of success

* Overly-complex plans, slowly executed against

* A focus on issues that aren't the real bottleneck

* Large cost and time overruns

* Project is eventually cancelled

I've had the interesting experience of watching the same type of "transformation" project run twice at similar companies. In the first case, the project was bogged down to the extent that I genuinely updated to believe it wasn't possible to achieve. In the second case, I saw incredible progress / pace with a much smaller team, pushing on all the key points with the right planning, and learned some lessons I wish I'd known on take 1.
by johnea | 2026-02-09 23:06:47+00:00
This is why the heat pump should come along with local electric generation (mostly solar) and local storage (mostly battery banks).

In this configuration a typical suburban home can provide ALL of it's own energy needs, including 2 electric cars.

This also needs to come along with a massive reorganization of the US' electric utilities, which are primarily optimized to provide the most money possible to some rich assholes.

Instead we should be optimized for local generation, storage and distribution.

That is to say, we should be technologically optimized, not shareholder return optimized.

Obviously, this won't happen while the world's richest have the sway that they currently hold on policy.

But in the mean time, each homeowner can move ahead with local generation and storage that provides for all of their local energy consumption.

And YES, it does pay for itself over a shorter time span than a typical mortgage...
by nkrisc | 2026-02-09 23:07:16+00:00
> Sure, he's on path, MAYBE (that's up to immigration courts), to legal status but he's not quite there yet and it's one of those "Are we going to forgive past transgressions?"

For a productive member of society? Absolutely, bring him in and let him stay.

There are absolutely some immigrants who should be deported for violent crimes and likewise, but they are a tiny minority of immigrants. So when you set quotas far above that, they start rounding up productive members of society to fill the quotas and ignoring the violent criminals because it’s easier to arrest parents and children.
by caconym_ | 2026-02-09 23:07:24+00:00
I understand that (IIUC in Matrix the client decides what push gateway to use, and the Element client just hardcodes matrix.org and lets anyone use it for free), but it doesn't really do much for my practical concerns. I'm looking for something my users can tolerate (which means no monthly fee) and that I can be reasonably confident won't rugpull us or vanish in the next ~10 years.
by ttfkam | 2026-02-09 23:08:19+00:00
If the Executive Branch doesn't care about the Constitution and inconvenient laws when directing the law enforcement agencies under its control, Congress doesn't hold the executive to account by either withholding funds or threatening impeachment, and the SCOTUS majority doesn't try to rein in these acts while seeming to lack the ability to enforce its own decisions, the words printed on the Constitution are just useless ink.

Elections have consequences, and we're all paying them. Some paying a lot more than others.
by gwbas1c | 2026-02-09 23:08:20+00:00
> I think it's possible to write a kernel with GC, and to still be judicious about memory usage with a GC language. ... but I will still afford that it is technically possible.

I need to split some hairs for a bit:

Do you mean what is colloquially referred to as "GC", as in the dotnet / Java / Javascript / golang "mark-and-sweep", fully-automatic style?

Or do you mean other automatic memory management systems, which some people technically define as GC, like automatic reference counting? (IE, they clean up memory immediately, and except for requiring some manual form of breaking cyclic loops, generally are fully automatic?)
by hnav | 2026-02-09 23:08:47+00:00
I think if you look at e.g. Model 3 Performance it's not quite so hopeless. 80kwh packed into an EV roughly the same size, weight and performance as a contemporary BMW M3. Even with today's technology (0.2kwh/kg, 3-4 miles/kwh) a Miata-sized 250hp, 2500lb, 200 mile EPA EV is possible. Whether that would be a compelling driving experience and anybody would buy such a thing is another question.
by monkeycantype | 2026-02-09 23:10:43+00:00
One of my favourite conversations I ever had with another human being, was with someone who was telling me about a book he was reading, which he evidently loved very much. He spoke almost no English, and I spoke absolutely no Cantonese, so the entire fifteen minute conversation was conducted with gesture, intonation and the phrases:
'one man'
'many mans'
'some kung fu'
'many _(* n)_ kungfus!'

I love the left hand of darkness, the dispossessed, all the hainish books,
but I have never loved any book as much as my conversation partner loved his book about many many Kung Fus.
by socalgal2 | 2026-02-09 23:10:58+00:00
that's not either

See the first row in this table: https://livingwage.mit.edu/counties/06075

Compare 2 adults (1 working) 3 kids to 2 adults (both working) 3 kids

First off, you'd expect it to be

1 adult = X
2 adults = X + X(0.?)

Where 0.? is something less than 1 because 2 adults need less than 2x the money

Similarly for kids

1 kids = Y
2 kids = Y + Y(0.?)
3 kids = Y + Y(0.?) + Y(0.?)

You'd expect 2 kids to be less than 2x 1 kid. And you'd expect 3 kids to be les than 1x + 2x 2nd kid. Each kid is cheaper for various reasons like hand-me-downs etc...

But instead, under 2 adults 1 working we see

1 adult = $29.31 (from one adult)
2 adults = $41.83 (so X + X * 0.42)

2 adults 1 kid = 50.47
2 adults 2 kids = 54.77 (so + $4.30)
2 adults 3 kids = 63.97 (so + $9.19)

Why does the 3rd kid cost more than the 2nd?

Then you can also compare 1 adult 3 kids with 2 adults both working + 3 kids

1 adult + 3 kids = $107.95
2 adults (both working + 3 kids) = $55.67

Assuming that $55.67 is wages for each that means we're comparing

1 adult + 3 kids = $107.95
2 adults (both working + 3 kids) = $55.67x2 ($111.34)

We already established that above that adding one adult is only $12.52 a month yet here, suddenly that adult only costs $3.40 a month.

Again, these are nonsense numbers.
by obius_prime | 2026-02-09 23:11:16+00:00
https://github.com/Cosmolalia/akataleptos-geodesic-constants...

https://github.com/Cosmolalia/akataleptos-geodesic-constants...

We present observational and computational evidence that the large-scale filamentary structure of the universe is topologically equivalent to a Menger sponge at finite iteration depth. Recent work has demonstrated that thirteen fundamental physical constants can be derived from the seven structural parameters of the Menger sponge (S=5, P=2, b=3, d=3, Δ=17, removed=7, kept=20) with zero free parameters and sub-parts-per-billion precision for dimensionless quantities. If these constants genuinely originate from Menger geometry, the physical universe should exhibit Menger-like topology at observable scales. We compile observational data from WMAP, Planck, NEXUS+, IllustrisTNG, EAGLE, and other surveys and simulations to test this prediction across eight independent metrics. We find: (1) the cosmic energy budget (WMAP: 73% dark energy, 27% matter) matches the Menger first-iteration void/structure ratio (74.07/25.93) to within 1%; (2) the cosmic web volume void fraction (NEXUS+: 76%) corresponds to Menger iteration 4.7, consistent with 13.8 billion years of finite-time evolution; (3) cosmic filaments are one-dimensional at their core, carry over 50% of total mass in under 6% of total volume, and exhibit hierarchical self-similarity down to at least 10 parsec scales, matching the Menger construction algorithm at every tested scale; (4) the mathematical tools used to identify cosmic web structures (Morse theory, persistent homology, discrete topology) are the same formalism used to characterize Menger-type fractals. We propose that discrepancies between observed and ideal Menger ratios arise from the universe being at finite iteration depth with spatially varying iteration rates due to gravitational time dilation, yielding testable predictions including a spatial dipole in the fine structure constant correlated with local matter density.
by maxglute | 2026-02-09 23:11:39+00:00
Switzerland + japan and now PRC, i.e. US also can't build ballpoint pen tips (not that US couldn't). The TLDR is it's like a 20m per year market, TISCO china has revenue of 15B, it wasn't worth rounding error effort until politics compelled them to. And even then it wasn't really about metallurgy but submicro tungsten manufacturing to close precision gap for other strategic industries. The meme/rumor is TISCO made one batch of ball point tip metal to prove a point and that chunk is enough to last PRC ballpoint tip industry for decades.
by crabmusket | 2026-02-09 23:11:40+00:00
You don't have to click into topics. Zulip has a "channel view" which lets you see all messages in a channel, chronologically, just like Slack or Discord or IRC. That's actually the default experience when you click on a channel in the sidebar.

It also has an "entire server" view if you want to see everything in one stream.
by TexanFeller | 2026-02-09 23:11:46+00:00
Sounds like you’re talking about the presumed free speech rights of corporations, which is part of this debate. I think corporations should have much more limited speech than an actual person and the concept of corporate personhood in general needs to be walked back significantly.

Yes it’s important for news organization and such to have unrestricted speech, but that seems solvable by keeping them in a separate category and excluding corps that engage in other lines of business. I don’t want say Google to be have full censorship and editorial privileges just because one of their many products surfaces news.
by h4kunamata | 2026-02-09 23:11:46+00:00
This is world wide, look around us, everything is broken.
Early 2000s is when humanity peaked, the technology is making some people dumber.

Kids cannot speak and yet have access to tablet.
Students cannot study without AI anymore.
Teachers saying not even giving them the answer helps, they don't know what to do.

If you never watched the movie 2006 Idiocracy, do it!!
It was supposed to be a comedy movie but sadly, it describes the world we are living right now.
by Rochus | 2026-02-09 23:11:55+00:00
I didn't try what you suggested, but even without better control of the music with more structured prompts, I think the musicality of this system is much lower than what we have commercially. I made the following two songs with the system:

- http://rochus-keller.ch/Diverses/Ace-Step-v1.5_demo1.mp3

- http://rochus-keller.ch/Diverses/Ace-Step-v1.5_demo2.mp3

with the same prompt as e.g. this song https://rochus-keller.ch/?p=1428 which I made with Suno (though by first uploading my own audio, which I didn't try with ACE-Step). It doesn't take much to understand that there are worlds between these results.

Though I think it's very good that university researchers are on it and we can expect to have equivalent open-source systems one day.
by tabbott | 2026-02-09 23:12:41+00:00
(There has always been an option to just not include message content in mobile notifications).

Cryptography is not something you can do sloppily, and requires coordination between the mobile and server teams. Zulip 11.x included the protocol, but while doing the mobile implementation, we decided to make several more changes which have delayed it to the upcoming Zulip 12.0.

Some important context is that we retired the old React Native mobile app this summer in favor of the new Flutter apps (https://blog.zulip.com/2025/06/17/flutter-mobile-app-launche...), which has been an enormous improvement in the quality of the app and developer experience.

But as you can imagine, the cutover and relentlessly addressing feedback after it took a lot of time for the mobile team. We've also experienced an AI slop bombardment in the last few months that has consumed a lot of time. I'll save that story for another time.
by NooneAtAll3 | 2026-02-09 23:12:51+00:00
Imagine communication server as... a house

Discord server is a flat. It's full of predetermined brick-walled rooms (channels) that have titles on the doors. You look at the titles, you choose the closest to the topic you want to talk about, you walk in.

Slack server is a meeting place. It has rooms, rooms have titles... but you can't talk in them. If you start a conversation there, you're encouraged to "go outside" (to a thread) with whoever joins you to solve the problem. If you walk into the room, you'll only see pointers to "meeting places outside" (also sometimes you can't even discover that room exists without a pointer?)

And Zulip is a warehouse (or a blimp hangar) - it's one open space with no walls. When you come in you hear everyone echoing off the walls. To not get lost, there are markings on the ground that color-code which parts of the space are for what category. And people are standing in groups, so you can come closer and concentrate on one topic at a time

---

If I want to ask a question,

- on Slack I'm immediately get shoved into a car and driven away to discuss (I don't feel community)

- on Zulip I have to navigate the cacophony of main screen, stand in the open and scream my question, hoping that people approach and form a group around me (I feel both open and alone)

- while on Discord I walk into a room that's "close enough", maybe look at conversation that happened right before to get a feel, and ask away (I feel like I'm in a lived-in space and can navigate the tone)

---

If I want to participate in a conversation

- on Slack I have to keep track of new threads. I have to explicitly open each one. I have to read through to see the convo state

- on Zulip I have to scan the "all recent messages" main screen, form an opinion on what discussion I'm interested in, explicitly open it, start reading last messages (now of the specific topic) again to form opinion again on what the state of convo currently is

- on Discord I can see the channel name to pre-emptively get general theme I'll be in (and I can mute channels I'm completely not interested in), I open it and start acquainting myself with the current convo state right away, learning specific topic from the context

---

I can definitely see how Discord's hard structure-ization can fail on large scale, when there is constant demand to use the rooms.

And I definitely have experienced channel "memory leak" (when they get allocated at one point and stop getting used as activity lowers, necessitating archival or garbage collection)

But I do feel that discord got that perfect middle ground between "everything together" and "everything in separate" extremes that all other options tend to fall into
by tristor | 2026-02-09 23:12:52+00:00
There are only two conditions under which I have had to hard brake in more than 30 years of driving:

1. I'm on a race track or back road enjoying curves
2. Some asshole did something stupid in front of me.

I agree that hard braking is an accurate metric for road segment crash risk, but what I find upsetting is that insurance companies that use vehicle data treat /all/ hard braking equally. In reality, the risk is caused not by every person who hard brakes, but by the first person in a line of cars that hard brakes.

More on #2 above is that my observation has been MOST of the time, the braking was COMPLETELY unnecessary. Often the person hard braking that starts the chain has absolutely nothing in front of them to the horizon and is probably on their phone watching TikTok, suddenly looked up and realized they were driving and braked as a spooking reaction. This happens, observably, so often that there are active conspiracies on the Internet that the government hires people to drive like assholes to cause traffic. Obviously that's complete bunk, but my observation here is certainly not unique.

Rather than spying on everyone using our vehicle data to charge us ever more money (I've had zero at-fault accidents in nearly 30 years of driving, but my rates only go up), maybe we should enforce attentiveness on the road and start punishing those who are left-lane hogs (causing many lane changes, which are also risky), on their phone, or drunk. It's really obscene these days driving on American roads, it seems like everyone drives markedly worse since the pandemic /and/ enforcement has gone to nothing. The only time I see people get pulled over now is in speedtrap small towns.
by bumby | 2026-02-09 23:13:01+00:00
It’s the second time you’ve had a snarky reply so I can’t tell if you’re having a good faith conversation.

The average wealth between me and Elon is several hundred billion dollars. That gives you very little information about me. Which is why people can hang too much inference on a simple average. Like Nate Silver said in The Signal and The Noise, the real discussion for the data literate is about uncertainty in models, not just drawing conclusions from “averages”
by wildzzz | 2026-02-09 23:13:03+00:00
Anecdotally, I know people that have a couple drinks after work each day. Two 5% beers x 5 days x 52 weeks is already 2.4gal of ethanol a year and that's not counting what they drink on the weekends. A friend's mother drinks like half a bottle of wine a night, that's 2.6gal/ year. Granted, most people don't drink like that but that's the kind of habitual drinking that most people probably wouldn't consider a drinking problem.

People that only drink socially and not to excess won't get close to 2.3gal a year but habitual drinkers and alcoholics will easily surpass that. I'm sure the median is a lot lower. Even just a fifth of liquor a week puts you at 4.8gal/year and real alcoholics are drinking a lot more than that.
by ge0rg | 2026-02-09 23:13:03+00:00
It is really great how they write "TLS use cases" and in fact mean HTTPS use cases.

CA/Browser Forum has disallowed the issuance of server certificates that make use of the SRVName [0] subjectAltName type, which obviously _was_ a server use case, and I guess the only reason why we still are allowed to use the Web PKI for SMTP is that both operate on the server hostname and it's not technically possible to limit the protocol.

It would be perfectly fine to let CAs issue certificates for non-Web use-cases with a different set of requirements, without the hassle of maintaining and distributing multiple Roots, but CA/BF deliberately chose not to.

[0] https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/srvname-and-xmppaddr-sup...
by bsder | 2026-02-09 23:13:11+00:00
> But it's also the case that PE also tends to come in when a company is already troubled in some manner.

The problem is that PE also has a nasty habit of coming into a business that is marginally profitable but not spectacularly so, saddling it with giant amount of debt to vacuum up the cash flow, and killing the business.

There is nothing wrong with a sustainably profitable business. Investors, however, want returns from the lottery ticket that they fund.
by cogman10 | 2026-02-09 23:13:36+00:00
That's capital gains, which we currently recognize on realization events (selling the asset or trading it). With current capital gains, if you sold in 2025 you'd pay the taxes on 40k at ~15% (depending) so 6k. If you repurchased it at $100k and then sold at $60k, you can claim the losses.

People advocating for a wealth tax aren't pushing for a tax on gains and losses but rather the total asset value. I've seen 1% and 2% bandied about.

So in 2024, you'd pay $1.2k in taxes (at 2%). In 2025, you'd pay $2k. And in 2026 you'd pay $1.2k

Though, usually, there's also a minimum wealth paired with the tax. Again, I usually only see it for things like individuals with over $100M in assets.

For options, it'd still be the same thing. If the strike price is $1 and the actual price is $60 and the option is vested then you'd be taxed on the $59 per option you hold.

This only gets difficult if you are talking about options in a privately held company. But, again, that's not really the case for a lot of the most wealthy who the wealth tax is targeting.
by observationist | 2026-02-09 23:13:44+00:00
Some of these companies have (local) law enforcement subscriptions, and default opt-in disclaimers throughout their ToS to make it all tidy and legal.

None of them have contracts with, nor can they sell to, federal agencies. Agencies have to provide a warrant, and the processes are verified through each of the companies' respective legal teams.

Their recordings data is not generally available for sale; that's a legal minefield, but there are official channels to go through. Geofence warrants and things like that aren't conducive to real-time surveillance, and the practice of using those types of reverse-search , differential analysis uses of sensitive data is under review by the Supreme Court; it's thought that they're going to weigh in on the side of the 4th amendment and prohibit overbroad fishing expeditions, even if there's snazzy math behind it.

TLDR; They need to pay the company, either via subscription or direct charge for T&M, require warrants, and the use is limited in scope. It's burdensome and expensive enough that they're not going to be using it for arbitrary random "let's scan everyone's doorbell cams in case there's an illegal immigrant!" situations, but if there's a drug dealer, violent offender, or some specific high value target, they're going to use the broad surveillance tools wherever they can.
by nickf | 2026-02-09 23:14:05+00:00
A public CA checks it one-time, when it's being issued.
Most/all mTLS use-cases don't do any checking of the client cert in any capacity. Worse still, some APIs (mainly for finance companies) require things like OV and EV, but of course they couldn't check the Subject DN if they wanted to.

If it's for auth, issue it yourself and don't rely on a third-party like a public CA.
by chongli | 2026-02-09 23:14:23+00:00
Yeah, I don't want my preferred playstyle to be favoured, just treated fairly:

* Add all of the non-car transport options: walking paths (including underground and raised paths for walking between large buildings in the winter, a la PATH in Toronto), bike paths, buses, streetcars, light rail, subways, inter-city trains, high speed rail, ferries

* Add parking lots as a feature to all commercial and residential construction, require every car to be parked somewhere when not in use, but allow residents/property owners to decide whether to build parking or not

* Allow land-value taxes as an alternative to property taxes, as well as the possibility for things like street parking and pollution ordinances to give you levers to incentivize/disincentivize the construction of parking lots

* Simulate emissions appropriately from all transport methods

* Parking lots and heavy traffic should lower property values, as citizens complain about the ugliness, pollution, noise, and danger of excessive traffic

There's a whole conversation to be had about the design of games like SimCity and how it affects future urban planners, but that may be going too far afield. Still, I think it would be nice to have a game that doesn't reward car-centric planning while burying the drawbacks.
by maxglute | 2026-02-09 23:14:31+00:00
West had nothing to teach/copy in many cases - there's a reason PRC produced magnitude more mining engineers for decades. Leaching MREE/HREE from ionic clays is a geologic tech stack that PRC fully built out indigenously from 60s. Only reason M/HREE can be refined at _scale_ and _economically_ today was PRC innovating on geology west never bothered in (west ree stack concentrated on hard rock extraction), and now west has to try to replicate via first principles.