MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jpgvm | 2026-02-09 18:08:14+00:00
> Singapore is a much more democratic country than most outsiders realize

Yeah no.

In Singapore you have a single party which has used it's constitution, laws, courts and media control to enforce a defacto one-party state for 60 years.
Singapore citizens can (and do) vote but those votes have absolutely zero chance of changing anything.

Is it technically democracy? Well they vote so yes? Is there any chance at all of peaceful regime change through voting? Technically yes, in practice? Probably not. I would expect extreme suppression and HK style riot crushing. They have been doing it quietly for decades, targeting and legally destroying/bankrupting any opposition to the PAP.

So the only real difference vs say China is that while both are authoritarian regimes the Chinese didn't bother with a mechanism to pretend you can throw them out.

To be clear, I don't object to their form of government. I think it works for them and thus it's completely ok. If anything I find Singapore a really safe and efficient place and visit frequently.

I do object to people pretending it's somehow a liberal democracy though, that just ain't the truth.
by drecked | 2026-02-09 18:09:02+00:00
Do they also lock you up on the property for 5 months while they figure out how to remove you from the property?

People’s inability to comprehend the need for basic legal rights like Habeas Corpus is incredible. We literally have leaders who don’t know what that means and when challenged on it, don’t even bother to look it up and remain uninformed when asked months later.

And fools defend them.
by ux266478 | 2026-02-09 18:09:20+00:00
What do you mean? America has 2 offerings from Chevy, and now the Slate truck as well. Japan has the Nissan Leaf. Korea and Germany produce a few cheap EVs too. None of these vehicles are large and all of them are focused on being cheap for the mass market. The PRC's offerings rely on favorable currency positioning and extremely apathetic labor conditions (leading to better cost-efficiency). It's not an industrialist's miracle.
by antonymoose | 2026-02-09 18:09:33+00:00
Your commentary has me reflecting on my own hometown. I grew up in a wealthy resort and retirement island, the kind of place that is now so expensive I could not afford real estate anywhere on or even near to.

Very aged population relative to the rest of the nation and so during the Great Recession a wave of retirees found themselves owning a home but otherwise impoverished and working service jobs out of desperation. Always was a sad interaction, and working alongside them was often worse. You would never hear the end of their misery, understandable bitterness, and regret.

Nowadays, thanks to the same demographic shifts, those jobs are back in the hands of the youth. Except now it’s all folks who grew up on the island that seemingly will live at home with their parents for the rest of their lives working those jobs. They otherwise would not be able to live anywhere close.

I have to ponder what the next shift in staffing there will look like.
by quotemstr | 2026-02-09 18:10:14+00:00
Compiler bugs and standards warts suck, but you know what sucks more? Workarounds for compiler bugs and edge cases that become pessimizing folk wisdom that we can dispell only after decades, if ever. It took about that long to convince the old guards of various projects that we could have inline functions instead of macros. I don't want to spook them into renewed skepticism.
by squidbeak | 2026-02-09 18:10:20+00:00
I'm a layman to this jargon, but are 'crystallized intelligence' and 'emotional intelligence' in any actual sense 'intelligence'? I can't see how these terms mean anything other than judgement, experience, maturity etc, which are already good enough labels for this stuff. Can anyone explain what these flashier new terms offer over them?
by marssaxman | 2026-02-09 18:10:43+00:00
What a strange premise. Aside from the brief period of infamy around the Michael Fay case (mid-90s, a teenager caned for acts of petty vandalism), when were Americans ever paying attention to Singapore?

The author keeps referring to "right-wing" this and that, so presumably he is buried too deep in some weird political subculture to realize that his question makes little sense to the rest of us.
by gjsman-1000 | 2026-02-09 18:10:56+00:00
> That's why parents need to be involved in their children's lives.

Can't, aren't, look at iPad kids, won't. This is about as logical as saying people should just drive safely, so we don't need guardrails and seat belts. Or saying parents should always watch their children, so we don't need age verification at the alcohol store. Besides, it's not like the school library or the friends of friends don't have devices themselves you as a parent can't see.

Parents should not need to be tech experts or helicopters to feel their kids are safe online. That's fundamentally unreasonable. In which case, privacy and child safety need to come to an unhappy compromise, just like any other conflicting interest.

For that matter, I'm surprised that HN automatically always accepts the "slippery slope" fallacy while lambasting it everywhere else.
by JimmaDaRustla | 2026-02-09 18:11:03+00:00
We need this for social media.

I've theorized what a solution would look like, though it'd have a different end goal to ignore bots so true discourse could be achieved. The theorized solution would be less communal though - instead, institutions would be "vouchers" and be provided the ability to confirm individuals as a real person. This could be colleges, workplaces, unions, banks, etc. There'd be no "denouncing", only "vouching" the individual as a real person. The individual's identity would never exposed - social media platforms would use a key, such as an e-mail, to verify the individual's existence as a real person, not their identity. Platforms could identify what rules would qualify an individual's recognized "existence", such as what institutions they allow, minimum number of institutions, etc. In theory, the individual "existence" could be built before they ever register for a platform. This could go way beyond social media platforms too - some examples could be vetting job applications, accepting contributors on OSS projects.

This would create a digital fingerprint of a real individual using their unique identifiers (email, phone number, etc) which may be undesirable, but individuals would absolutely have the ability to revoke their unique identifiers from participating in the program if they desire.
by Someone1234 | 2026-02-09 18:11:09+00:00
I think if people take out their phone and start pointing the camera at others in the changing room, most people would interpret that to not be ok and that's what we're discussing here.

You're essentially setting the scene to where people cannot know if they're being recorded or not while a camera is always pointed at them. That's a problem. Least of all because law enforcement will need to investigate to determine if the law was broken on each complaint.

"But internal processing!" isn't quite the slam dunk defense you seem to think it is. It won't work like that in the real world, people being recorded while changing won't care about that distinction.
by Terr_ | 2026-02-09 18:11:25+00:00
Compare: "The man refused to sign confession-papers, so that means his continued imprisonment is actually a choice under his control. He could simply confess to jaywalking, and they'd rip him away from his family and life and exile him to the streets of another country within a mere day or two. No problem."

Abject surrender in the face of threats/violence is always, technically, a fast resolution to anything, but it's not the kind of thing we (or the framers of the Constitution) wanted to optimize for.
by paganel | 2026-02-09 18:11:27+00:00
Nobody is stoping anyone on putting a quick project up-and-running using Rust, let's say. But good luck finding people to maintain it in the long run. And good luck finding the "batteries included" stuff. And good luck on many other things. We're all building bazaars, not cathedrals, and that's ok, even though we oftentimes seem to forget that.
by rayiner | 2026-02-09 18:11:29+00:00
He is getting due process. He admitted to a federal court that he came to the US in 2009 under a Visa Waiver Program, which is limited to 90 days: https://www.universalhub.com/files/attachments/2026/culleton... ("Culleton concedes he is removable under the VWP. Reply 10.").

By contrast, I'm a naturalized citizen. My dad came here on a valid H visa because he's an expert in public health and a U.S. company wanted to hire someone with his qualifications.
by palmotea | 2026-02-09 18:11:36+00:00
>> Or why do you think your small AI-driven business can survive against richer people who can pay for more compute and thus do better than you?

> I don't know. Maybe because of my creativity?

How would you keep that up? I think there's a false belief, especially common in business-inflected spaces (which includes the tech sector), that skills and abilities can be endlessly specialized (e.g. the MBA claim that they're experts at running businesses, any business). The more you outsource to AI the less creative you'll become, because you'll lose touch with the work.

You can only really be creative in spaces where you regularly get your hands dirty. Lose that, and I think your "creativity" will become the equivalent of the MBA offering the same cookie-cutter financial engineering ideas to every business (layoffs, buy back stock, FOMO the latest faddish ideas, etc).
by lasgawe | 2026-02-09 18:11:39+00:00
This is the first time I have seen a post like this on Hacker News.

And I just launched Writtte yesterday, a writing platform for drafting articles with built-in grammar checking and AI-based refactoring with custom styles, and for the first time, with a better copy/paste mechanism for other platforms like Medium, and Substack :D

https://writtte.com
by umi36535 | 2026-02-09 18:11:47+00:00
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by gruez | 2026-02-09 18:11:56+00:00
>I suspect it could be due to Japan requiring that cameras play a sound when taking a photo or video.

That depends on what "taking a photo or video" means. If it only covers making a recording, then it won't apply to airpods. The same applies for faceID for instance, I doubt japanese iPhones are making shutter sounds everytime you pull out your phone, even though it's obviously using the camera.
by lenerdenator | 2026-02-09 18:12:55+00:00
Let's look at the facts here:

1) There is, as of today, no country (at least, no country that isn't a failed state) where you may enter, stay within, and exit its borders without having to follow the terms as dictated by that country's government, and aren't subject to removal by law enforcement if you break the terms of that agreement.

2) There are people who are in the US without proper authorization who we would benefit from their removal due to their criminal activity beyond their immigration violations.

3) The people in point 2 are, at this point, not likely to be the bulk of people in government detention for immigration violations. For example, you don't need the ability to detain thousands of criminals in the region around Kansas City, but that's the capacity they're trying to build out for.

4) Point 3 means that there are otherwise peaceful people being shoved into detention with people who are actually violent criminals.

There has to be a better way of handling this then sending God-knows-who out into American cities in tactical gear to grab people off the streets for staying past their visa or for having an unclear status, which is easy to do given how complex some immigration cases can be.

If you need to put them on probation until the system gets through their application, fine, but this is a bad approach on every level.
by adolph | 2026-02-09 18:12:58+00:00
I was confused how someone could become a tycoon in "pro-democracy" but it seems as if he became a wealthy businessperson before and has been active and influential in preserving Hong Kong autonomy since the transfer of management to the PRC/CCP.

Born in the Chinese city of Guangzhou, Lai was 12 when he arrived in Hong
Kong as a stowaway on a fishing boat. He started working menial jobs and
eventually founded a multi-million dollar empire that included the clothing
brand Giordano.

Lai began a new journey as a vocal democracy activist after China's crackdown
on pro-democracy protesters in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 1989.

He went on to launch pro-democracy news outlets like Apple Daily and Next
magazine, while regularly participating in demonstrations.
by phonon | 2026-02-09 18:13:23+00:00
Not according to the 5th Circuit, sadly....

"The majority stakes the largest detention initiative in American history on the possibility that ‘seeking admission’ is like being an ‘applicant for admission,’ in a statute that has never been applied in this way, based on little more than an apparent conviction that Congress must have wanted these noncitizens detained — some of them the spouses, mothers, fathers, and grandparents of American citizens,” she added. “Straining at a gnat, the majority swallows a camel.”

https://www.courthousenews.com/fifth-circuit-upholds-trump-a...
by notpushkin | 2026-02-09 18:13:23+00:00
Yes, mostly for drug trafficking and murder. You could in theory argue that drug trafficking is kinda comparable to being gay [1], but the capital punishment is only for huge amounts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_Singapor...

[1]: I mean, in my book consensual trade between two grown up people is closer to consensual sex between two grown up people than it is to murder. That said, there is still some difference.
Show HN: Pompelmi – Privacy-first file upload scanning for Node.js
by alrjoe | 2026-02-09 18:13:26+00:00
Hi HN — I’m the author of pompelmi, an open-source, in-process scanner for untrusted file uploads in Node.js.

Motivation: I wanted a practical “upload guard” that reduces common upload risks (ZIP bombs, traversal in archives, MIME spoofing, polyglots/macro hints) without sending files to a cloud AV service (privacy + latency + GDPR concerns).

Key points:
- Runs in-process (no cloud calls); files never leave your infrastructure
- Deep ZIP inspection with configurable limits (depth/entries/ratio) + nested archive scanning
- Composable scanners (heuristics + optional signature engines like YARA), fail-closed policies
- Drop-in adapters for popular frameworks (Express/Koa/Fastify/Next/Nuxt/Nest)

Try it in 2 minutes (Express example):
1) npm i pompelmi @pompelmi/express-middleware
2) Add createUploadGuard middleware (docs + examples in the repo)

It was recently covered by Help Net Security and previously mentioned in Risky Bulletin; also featured in Node Weekly / Detection Engineering Weekly / Bytes and daily.dev (links in the README).

I’d love feedback on:
1) What’s missing for production use in your upload pipeline?
2) Which integrations/templates would be most valuable next (e.g., SvelteKit/Remix/hapi)?
by komali2 | 2026-02-09 18:13:27+00:00
Stop redirecting. Invading Taiwan won't stop 996 and won't give you communism. You're just like an American Trump supporter, allowing yourself to be distracted from your degrading working and living conditions imposed by an aloof ruling class exploiting your labor for their excessive profit. All it takes is picking a foreign bad guy and you clap and cheer and believe the people exploiting you when they tell you that actually it's these Big Bad Other People that are making your life worse.
by manwe150 | 2026-02-09 18:13:41+00:00
I'd be willing to sell you a rust to rust compiler. In fact, I'll even generalize it to do all sorts of other languages too at no extra charge. I just need a good name...maybe rsync?

Snark aside, the output targets of compilers need to be unsafe languages typically, since the point of a high level compiler in general is to verify difficult proofs, then emit constructs consistent with those proof results, but simplified so that they cannot be verified anymore, but can run fast since those proofs aren't needed at runtime anymore. (Incidentally this is both a strength and weakness of C, since it provides very little ability for the compiler to do proofs, the output is generally close to the input, while other languages typically have much more useful compilers since they do much more proof work at compile time to make runtime faster, while C just makes the programmer specify exactly what must be done, and leaves the proof of correctness up to the programmer)
by HoldOnAMinute | 2026-02-09 18:14:05+00:00
Is there any vehicle that uses it's sensors to make a gentle suggestion about following distance?

It's probably the best single thing anyone can do to improve safety. It also reduces wear-and-tear on your car, and increases your fuel economy as a side benefit.

Why hasn't gamification of safe driving habits been built directly into the car itself before now?
by nico_h | 2026-02-09 18:14:14+00:00
Oh you sweet summer child. Under capitalism money is a function of how low you can pay your fungible organic units before they look for other opportunities or worse, unionize (but that can be dealt with relatively easily nowadays). Except for a few exceptional locations and occupations, the scale is tilted waaay against the individual, especially in the land of the free (see H-1B visas, medical debt and workers on food stamps).
(See also the record profits or big companies since Covid).
by notahacker | 2026-02-09 18:14:19+00:00
Think it's more looking at the trend for Very Serious Political/Economic Commentators to suggest it as a model to emulate in long form articles than the Twitterati, but yeah, it's explicitly asking about opinions rather than whether there's anything about it that's actually broken down. Which is, relatively speaking, a nice place to be as a country.

Cowen is focused mostly on the US commenteriat, but the trend is similar in the UK, where "we should totally be like Singapore" peaked around Brexit, under the delusion idea that all we needed to do to emulated the success of the city state that founded ASEAN two years after declaring independence was leave the EU.

Meanwhile HN generally forms its opinion from a decades-old William Gibson article lamenting that it wasn't cool enough to write cyberpunk about :)
by geboss | 2026-02-09 18:14:20+00:00
Hey,

I've been building Vehique for the past year – basically an AI operating system for car shopping and research. Users describe what they want in natural language, we search live inventory and curate results, they can compare 2-4 cars side by side, and a scout agent runs hourly and daily to find new listings that match their preferences.

Here's the thing, I don't have savings, will be graduating in may, and building solo. users keep visiting the product (3k monthly now) but scaling is tough on my own. been considering applying for yc and other accelerators but also job hunting as backup.

For those who've built marketplace or consumer products or worked on similar problems – am i chasing something real here or should i take a swe job and shelve this? not looking for encouragement, just honest takes on whether this problem is worth the next year of my life.

The tech stack is a multi-agent system with llms. happy to share more details if useful.

~Ge
by drewda | 2026-02-09 18:15:09+00:00
Yeah, Google and Apple do probably have much more first-party probe data of passenger vehicles. But it really depends on the type of traffic data product. For some use-cases, it's more than sufficient for the vendor to buy probe data from specific types of fleet vehicles (like work trucks).

Where Google/Apple's coverage is quite valuable is for near-real-time speeds for atypical events -- say like yesterday's Super Bowl. But that's not what this blog post is about -- this post is about a well-established pattern that can be identified with historical datasets.

All that to say that vendors sell a wide variety of data products to transportation planners, but just because Google is now entering this niche market doesn't mean they'll be "the best" or even realize what their strengths are.
by ominous_prime | 2026-02-09 18:15:12+00:00
It certainly makes sense as a proxy for competence across a diverse population for insurance purposes. You have a baseline of hard braking events that a competent driver may encounter under normal circumstances. If a driver routinely exceeds that number, they are either unable to correctly estimate closing distance and reaction times, which makes them higher risk for causing accidents, or they are driving abnormally aggressively, which also makes them a higher risk for causing accidents. If you consistently put yourself in situations where hard braking is required, it doesn't matter what your skill is, you've reduced your safety margins and an accident is statistically more probable. You said it correctly with "would've been safer to start building a distance buffer", that is the proxy the insurance companies want to use for risk assessment.

35 years without an accident on my record isn't because I'm a magnificent driver, it's because I always try to leave a way out for when something unexpected happens, because the unexpected _does_ happen.

The fact that some people may have the skill to drive more aggressively means nothing in the aggregate as far as insurance companies are concerned. If you are skilled enough to drive in that manner, you are skilled enough to avoid it as well. It's simply statistics.
by knowtheory | 2026-02-09 18:16:01+00:00
This is a piece written by Jeff Jarvis who was a founder of Entertainment Weekly and then a long time professor focused on innovation and journalism.

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

So, it's a term of art, and i'll even agree that it's got a bit of a tech-y pejorative lean to it, but it's in wide use, and Jarvis certainly isn't solely a person who comes from tech.
by rayiner | 2026-02-09 18:16:59+00:00
> I don't see why people need to be detained while they have ongoing court cases.

Because it turns the immigration system on its head. People come to the U.S., stay for years while court proceedings drag on, and in most cases the government eventually gives up. The U.S. issues 65,000 or so skilled worker visas annually, but over a million people enter illegally. At that point, why even bother having an immigration system?

> Most of them are not criminals, they're just here for better living conditions, work opportunities or family.

Do you think keeping out criminals is why we have an immigration system?
by measurablefunc | 2026-02-09 18:17:13+00:00
Poker is also finite & closed. Comparing programming to finite games is a category error. You can ask any chat bot to explain why the analogy fails: https://chatgpt.com/s/t_698a25c0849c81918bdd5cfc400e70d1, https://chat.qwen.ai/s/t_09ccef1c-b1e1-4872-86ca-54d4972797e...