skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
i'm conflicted. i don't want chinese controlled propaganda but i don't want us controlled propaganda either. but i suspect that the "safety"/propaganda arguments are window dressing and it's really economic protectionism, which at least i understand. but from a free-enterpise perspective, banning a legally operating company simply because of it's ownership seems worrisome, and it would seem a toothless unenforceable thing in the long run (e.g. sell TikTok to its own "independent" company on paper and keep pulling the strings).

the realization is that this is a binary choice, either we ban it or we don't. but we shouldn't be in this position in the first place. neither choice is the right answer. i don't want any of the outcomes. i don't want a chinese facebook. i don't want a us controlled facebook. i don't want a facebook controlled facebook.

you want to know how to keep giant governments out of your shit (us and china and russia, etc.)? how to keep giant corporations out of your knickers? if you favor economic protectionism, how to keep other countries from undermining your industries? how to keep giant corporations (us or chinese) from exploiting their monopolies to wreck our culture just so they can serve more advertisements?

everyone on this forum, especially if you decry this ban, needs to stop defending, accepting, and allowing closed monopolistic computing and networking. app-store monopolies, for instance, secure-boot, device-non-ownership. we've given these companies persistent 100% control over our own devices and we (as surprised as you are) got monopolies. now we have to argue about which flavor of monopoly we want.

the minute, via app store policy or via crypto/secure boot, you allow a company to select what i am or am not allowed to do, see, or buy on my own devices - this is what we are doomed to deal with as a result.
They're still keeping the trackpoint in all of their existing models. This is just for a new thinkpad model.
Ash Framework: Build Declarative Elixir Web Apps
Also launched:

New homepage and installer builder - https://ash-hq.org

Ash Weekly newsletter - https://ashweekly.substack.com
(can't edit the downvoted comment)

for the curious, from Merriam Webster dictionary:

rational
1 a
- having reason or understanding

b: relating to, based on, or agreeable to reason : reasonable

From American Heritage dictionary:

rational

1. Having or exercising the ability to reason

2. Consistent with or based on reason or good judgment; logical or sensible.

It creates misunderstanding to choose to create a differentiation between two words that most people view as synonymous.
Stallman's reasoning wasn't flawed (at least, not in the respect you state). Corporations are simply a group of humans. I don't think there's a good argument to be made that humans should have a right to X, but suddenly lose that right when they get together as a group.

> Further, I would argue that providing megacorporations with unpaid labor is deeply misguided, if not actually unethical itself.

Nobody is "providing megacorporations with unpaid labor". People are making an effort to put something out there for the benefit of the entire human race, and if that includes corporations that's fine. Not one person is harmed if Amazon takes my open source project and uses it to turn a profit, even if they make it into closed source. My project remains freely available for the benefit of all, just as it was before Amazon used it. So who exactly has been harmed? Not me, I'm in the same state as I was before. Not my (non-Amazon) users, they are in the same state as they were before. Not Amazon, of course. If every single person is no worse off or even better off than before, I don't see how you can argue that the corporate users are doing something unethical. It seems to me that really this isn't about ethics, but is about "we don't like those icky people" masquerading in pretty sounding language.

> tl;dr Nobody should go broke to enrich Bezos in their spare time...

Nobody should go broke to make open source software, period.
The Alliance of Civic Technologists
The Gentle Romance
I struggle to use computers without it.
I love the Thinkpads that have both a touchpad and a trackpoint. It gives me an opportunity to use more than one position for mousing. For me all mice and also touchpads are not the most comfortable thing to use, so having more than one option is very important.
Exactly.

So what is the tiktok ban really about? If it's about the lack of narrative control, we should see the same ban being applied to RedNote.
I didn’t expect HN to be full of bootlicking fascists totally fine with censorship as long as the bogeyman is China.

Red panic is back. I’d be careful honestly.
And nothing of value would be lost. Just like with TikTok “going dark”.
It’s from the Open Project’s Annual Statistic Survey, I believe. /s
Maybe this is why I despise Apple products so much? (Though I'm not named after Bob Dylan)
>Blocking things as they actually become a problem for you has a way higher chance of success than outsourcing it.

On small sites, yes. You can actually do this in human bound time limits.

On a big site that attracts millions of small time spammers along with commercial and nation state level scammers, you've already lost. The rate new scam channels are created are faster than you can even click the UI button to remove them.

If you value your time you'll make a whitelist of a few trusted channels and avoid the rest. If those channels have recommendations that fill your interest, add those channels to your whitelist. This will stop the constant doom scrolling and brain rot traps we humans love to fall into.

Simply put, there is too much information in the world for you to ever be able to see and filter it all. Propaganda techniques like the 'firehose of falsehood' will exploit this to wear you out and make you ineffective. Select your media choices wisely.
The 'Tech-Industrial' Oligarchy Is Already Here
I agree they're different, but IMO they're on the same spectrum - "a difference in degree, not in kind". Where would you draw the line?

Bad - quietly manipulating social media recommendations for millions of Americans
...
- a chinese company launches a Netflix competitor in the US. They don't create content but they can choose which shows and movies are "recommended"
- a Chinese TV show series becomes popular in the US. They know it's popular in the US and not China. It slowly and subtly starts injecting plot points that are pro-China
...
OK - foreign news sources
> It lacks the critical transactional nature.

I'm sorry, what? You realize they're still making money off you, right?

I don't think "if the product is free, then you are the product" is 100% right, but it's not entirely wrong either.

A business' offerings being ad-supported doesn't somehow stop them from being commercial in nature. Hence: trade.
China banned Youtube in 2009. What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
Has the trackpoint been improved upon in the last 20 years?

I was servicable back then, but could have been better.
Foreign governments don't have a right to free speech in the US. They never have and the very idea is absurd. It's getting really tiresome to have to repeat this.
The ban on a communications platform effectively censors people's speech.
I looked into this at one point, I was typing out entire codebases for didactic purposes: SQLite 3 was 120,000 lines of code, but SQLite 2 was 12,000.

So for a bit more effort you get a battle tested real world thing!
RIFF (used for .wav and.avi files) was just a pure container format. The actual payload content was compressed/represented by an open-ended set of CODECs, as indicated by the "FOURCC" (four character code) present in the file.
I think what you are describing is what the central bank calls hedonics. They substitute one good for another in the basket of goods used to calculate inflation. Otherwise the inflation figure would be much higher than it is. So instead of solid 2x6 studs in the floor, we use engineered struts. I visited Pompeii, I was amazed at how well preserved all the marble was.
Yeah, putting a good screen in a ThinkPad? What are they thinking?! Nothing is sacred anymore.
Oh, hey, I purchased one of your leather phone cases recently. Big fan!
Or you could just read the statements of various politicians of our government:

Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn: "It would not be surprising that the Chinese-owned TikTok is pushing pro-Hamas content"

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla.: "We’ve seen TikTok used to downplay the Uyghur genocide, the status of Taiwan, and now Hamas terrorism"

And of course, Romney's explicit statement as well, when in context, it's actually far worse because it seems he is very concerned about lax fact checking on TikTok (which American social media platforms announced they are doing away with): https://xcancel.com/ggreenwald/status/1880979821901332773#m

I fundamentally disagree with all of these representatives. Americans are allowed to view all sides of every geopolitical issue and make up their own minds and vote according to their own beliefs. We should never ever be "shielded" from propaganda because we are smart enough to vote for and lead democracy, so we should be trusted as smart enough to ingest any geopolitical information existing in the world.
It feels very weird to count this as a win, but a small win is still a win.

We need cheap and abundant power, and the situation until now (in the US) makes that coal, oil, gas and some nuclear (without intentionally tilting the scale towards renewables).

I have some hope that the engineering side will make renewables the default option more, which we seem to be gradually moving towards. An energy secretary who isn't paid by big oil (too much?), gives me hope that we at least use renewables where they make economic sense. (though preferably tilting the scale would make that go faster, but I'm not too hopeful about that)
Show HN: Interact with multiple search engines and AIs without switching tabs
My friend and I built this browser extension to scratch our own itch of having to switch tabs often to (1) see results of different search engines (Google, Perplexity and Reddit) and (2) chat with multi AI chatbot (ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude).

We felt it was a problem many of you would be facing. So we made it into a full-fledged browser extension.

Some key features:
-> Search Mode and Chat Mode
You can set the default number of windows and default search engines and AI chatbots of your choice.

-> Select from the exhaustive list of search engines and AI chatbots
We included the most commonly used ones. Please let us know if you want us to add anything

--> Quickly access the extension from any website by clicking on the side widget. Also, set it as your default new tab and default search engine.

This browser extension is completely FREE. Also, It does not involve any APIs or personal data storage.

Check it out: https://multisearchai.carrd.co and let us know what you think
I've seen this TikTok thing turn staunch leftists into libertarians overnight.

I think a lot of normal and applicable arguments aren't entirely valid when the company in question is more or less an entity of a political adversary.
Opioid deaths down 2x, for one
Maybe I wasn't clear enough, I meant cutting out the gtkwave step. Oscilloscope is great, pulseview great, but what's gtkwave doing here that the others can't?
> In some accounts of the Roman triumph, a companion or public slave would stand behind or near the triumphant general during the procession and remind him from time to time of his own mortality

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_mori
Eh-- Interjecting one's own opinion arguably amounts to intellectual imperialism.

Imperialism is a part of life-- whether it's mold in a petri dish, prides of lions or chimpanzees raiding neighbors.

We live in the wild where strength conquers. It's just that we forget that when we're insulated from reality by convenience, comfort, concrete, and naivete.

No one should be ashamed for conquering or for exercising their own strength to their own benefit. Only those unable to do so are the ones to complain. And the complaints are futile-- Resource Competition is a fact of life and it is not going away.
The nature of the last universal common ancestor and its impact on early Earth
I don't see it in the law. [0]

If you mean section 2.1.a.2.a, it just allows the president to add additional apps to the ban list, not to lift TikTok, which is "hardcoded" into the law.

[0] https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521...
we’ve seen this strategy of “intelligence agencies have proof, but they’re not releasing it” play out many times. i remember when the Hunter Biden laptop story had “all the earmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign”.

i am not sure why this would give you any confidence that they have actual proof.
The mistake is in thinking that there is no need for an American (or Canadian, or EU) firewall. The reality is that either due to corruption or naivety, western countries let foreign information attacks and foreign propaganda spreads completely unchecked.

One could argue in the US that this was very useful to the new regime gaining popularity.
If you are an American, the intelligence community already treats you like you are the outgroup.
Not remotely the same experience. One never picks up the pointer finger during input with the nub. The thumb on the track pad looks like one is a crab, constantly twitching and lifting.
Google Whitepaper on AI Agents
Yes, so you're agreeing with me.
On the opposite, it allows pixel-perfect precision, something you simply cannot have with a trackpad.
The whole idea of "corporate personhood" is a bit of a tortured way to describe Citizens United. It was introduced by the people (media and democrat lobbyists - the case was about a group that made a very negative documentary on Hillary Clinton) who had the most to lose from Citizens United and somehow stuck. There was never a ruling that corporations are people. The ruling in that case was more along the lines of "people don't lose fundamental rights by virtue of creating a corporation to exercise those rights." Calling that "corporate personhood" is a borderline misrepresentation, and leads to a lot of confusion when you think of other laws.
Canadian politicians and diplomats have been telling interviewers that they are astonished at how little U.S. politicians seem to be aware of the staggeringly huge interconnection of the two nations' economies, and of the equally dreadful implications for both countries of the proposed U.S. across-the-board 25% tariff on all imports from Canada. The best-informed (and thus most alarmed) U.S. leaders are apparently those in 17 States who directly rely upon Canadian heavy crude oil, automobiles & products, strategic and common minerals, lumber, and hydroelectricity. I believe that my tone of impending economic pain in this comment is reflective of how Canadians seem to be preparing.
For a while new grads had a severe lack of hands on ROS experience. Though many companies don't use ROS, it is so entrenched in the industry that most solutions look similar enough for transferrable skills. (Src: was hiring mgr in robotics)

Highly recommend if you want to get into robotics you have ROS experience and demos / stories at hand.
Depends on what country you are in. These are technically export controlled.
Rare Futuristic EBike Is a Total Nightmare
Recently there was a discussion [1] about direct drive hubless motor/wheel combo devices. This isn't that, but has some of the same issues I would be concerned with as a street e-bike.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42631876
Honestly it's not all or nothing. It really depends on your threat model. If you assume all native code is both not malicious and incapable of being compromised to run untrusted code then the existing model works. At that point it's more important to focus your security efforts on how native code ends up running, and therefore the distro specific packaging ecosystem.

Now for many that threat model is not sufficient as they both run increasingly less trustworthy software, obtained by less trustworthy mechanisms such as npm or off a website, or simply want to protect against bugs that cause otherwise non malicious software from being compromised and resulting in security incidents. I'm in this latter camp but we can't ignore the fact that there are many who happily operate in the former. There also exist solutions such as we browsers with their sandboxes and VMs that somewhat fill the requirements for running untrusted software for these individuals.
I think we as Europeans would do better if we actually defended against Russia's hybrid warfare.

I understand all these principled stances and I do support them ethically, but sometimes you have no choice but to choose the lesser evil.
good, not only is it malware/spyware, the chinese government can shape the beliefs and behaviors of > 100,000,000 americans at the flip of a switch. albeit users are idiots for giving their attention in the first place. and because capitalism = god, will probably end up selling to the saudis and/or elon co.
Definitely a matter of taste- your dev environment sounds downright VILE to me ;-)
It's been banned and unbanned in Pakistan at least 4 times.

It is permanently region banned in China and India, and has been for years.
Think of it like parenting a teenager. If you be extremely disciplinarian, ban a bunch of stuff, have rigid rules, you don’t get an obedient child, you just get painful rebellion and if you quash it hard enough, you get a child ready to run away at the first notice.

The best way to deal with teenagers, is if you are cool in their eyes, then they will naturally try to copy you. This is hard for most parents, try too hard to be cool and you will be relentlessly mocked. In fact if you can’t be cool, it’s best to just be neutral and let them drift the way they drift, because if you try to impose too much, you just encourage their natural rebellious streak and get opposite results.

The Chinese government has always been in the position of the uncool parent who is trying to take control by being a disciplinarian. Thinking they can control US public through some hidden levers, is like thinking the parent secretly is making the teenager do his bidding by playing 5D chess. It is a fantasy. The US regime was more cool, maybe not as cool as actual Gen Z, but cool enough that they were not relentlessly mocked. Unfortunately this act, just exposes them as uncool after all, and makes them get relentlessly mocked. If the goal, is to win hearts and minds, US could not have scored a better own goal. That said, maybe this was going to happen anyway, the newer generation seems the most ironic and the quickest to mock existing social mores and ideals, and this act just sped up the process.
You can't scroll with just your thumb, while you can scroll with a TrackPoint while holding down the middle mouse button. Using your thumb on a trackpad with your hand positioned above the keyboard is also less accurate and restricted to a narrower range of motion.
China's grandiose plot to take on Rolls-Royce
we are not at war with China. i did not vote to be at war with China. i am an adult and should be trusted by our elites to be able to read whatever i want.

the entire ethos of our country is antithetical to this notion of well-educated, affluent urbanites deciding what information diet is ‘correct’ for the dirty masses to consume.
Nazi Germany was a democratically elected govt, which decided opposing propoganda must be blocked for the better of the nation. So irony?
Hmmm... if Bluesky owns identity then it's just another centralized SaaS play which I guess is to be expected.

There is zero mechanism for the funding or promotion of anything that's not a lock-in play or a data play (or both).

I didn't realize Nostr had such scaling problems but I think it makes sense now that I consider how it's a client-server system with a network of servers. Making all traffic go through it that way is going to cause scaling issues or require scale-up of infrastructure that will break decentralization. AFAIK they intentionally passed on P2P because "it's hard," which is true, but it's also how you don't pay for bandwidth.

IPv6 has enough penetration now that you could probably get away with easy mode P2P where IPv6 is required. You still have to hole punch there but it works about 100% of the time because no port remapping. (Even the few areas where V6 NAT is deployed, it's usually 1:1 NAT without port remap.) If you don't have V6 you get a slower experience because you have to relay.
> Ozempic attacks the lack of control over the calorie input, the only thing that ultimately matters in this equation.

But in fairness, there's a complex etiology behind the lack of control of the calorie input, and attacking causes a bit earlier in the chain could make even more sense, no?

I'm not saying Ozempic is bad-- it's quite a good thing. But to the extent that it lowers our desire to really figure out these causes and deal with them, that's unfortunate.
IIRC genetic drift can reach 100%.
Here you go :)

https://joyful.com/Haskell#What+Haskell+apps+are+out+there+%...
China and Russia and others like them are definitely way ahead. And the way I see this going is that countries take their digital borders far more seriously in the future. The era of the open internet is gone, and I don't particularly think it should be mourned.

Digital borders should only be open and allow free traffic between allies.

edit: since it won't let me reply to posters under here. What I mean is in stopping foreign propaganda and interference. Elon Musk can't spend hundreds of millions to influence e.g. the Chinese people in ways that benefit the US.

I don't think many people separate out the "incoming" and "outgoing" aspects of firewalls, and conflate firewalls with censorship. Most of the countries that employ firewalls do both, censor as well as protect. But it's not a requirement that you must censor your own people in order to stop foreign agents interfering in your society.

This is quite literally what banning TikTok is about. Suddenly the US has decided that they don't like it when other countries do to them what the US routinely does to others.
I cancelled my Twitter account in 2021 or so.

I tried X again at some later point, I think even twice.

A fresh account bombards you with far-right propaganda and outright lies. At the time at least this included hateful and incoherent rambling by Musk himself, which you couldn't unfollow (or ignore, it simply didn't work).

Call it ideological, but I'm not going to spend my free time with this "content", especially when the platform clearly disregards repeated signals that I don't want to read hateful ideological propaganda comment no 73646445 by some alt right shill.

I'm all for open discourse and dealing with other peoples differing opinions.

But at this point, the "ideology" accusation by the far right against any other opinion is nothing but laughable. Well, it would be, if people didn't still pay it credibility.

And no, I'm not a "leftist", "transgender activist", or whatever group gets to be public enemy of the day for these people.

I did notice that Bluesky seems to have more politically left people.

This kind of content is not very interesting to me, we already have Reddit.

But for Bluesky, the platform bubble phenomenon didn't seem that strong to me.

Appreciate the new features to build my own (interest) bubble.

For political content, I think actual journalism and real-life discourse are most valuable.
Because that’s the way the law is written? And you were the one that added the South African qualifier?

I’m not making a point about the usefulness of the law, only the _definition_ of it. In the context of the ban Musks American-ness is more important than his South African-ness and both are more important than his wealth.
Do you know how many words it had, how accurate it was, and whether it used the disk for lookup? Do you know if it was a port of unix spell?