MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by turnsout | 2025-04-06 15:16:09+00:00
Here's the better design: have agents communicate via Mastodon. Take a basic JSON payload, encrypt it using basic public key encryption, and attach it to a DM.

This is far better than designing an entirely new protocol, as ActivityPub and Mastodon already have everything you need, including an API.

Now, that's just transport security. If you expose a server that will execute arbitrary commands, nothing can protect you.
by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | 2025-04-06 15:16:19+00:00
That's the fun part. They did. DISA and the NSA have had the DMCC-TS (and DMCC-S) phones available across basically every agency or department for years now. They come already provisioned with Cellcrypt for messaging and phone calls as well as email access.

These are the standard communication device for senior members of the US government who are working regularly with classified information.

https://www.disa.mil/-/media/Files/DISA/Fact-Sheets/DMCC-TS-...

The issue with these devices is that the systems they use follow all recordkeeping laws and any communications are subject to FOIA.
by turrican | 2025-04-06 15:16:50+00:00
A note for Kobo users: a lot of us (myself included) use Calibre to manage and upload our ebooks. Something about Calibre messes up Kepub files and strips out a lot of the formatting (including the book’s cover).

If I want to appreciate a nice Kepub from Standard Ebooks, I upload it directly to the Kobo.
by timschmidt | 2025-04-06 15:17:11+00:00
I wouldn't use medicine as an example in this case. Medicine does all kinds of ill advised things because they're worse for the disease than the patient. And all kinds of things they know will kill the patient if there's opportunity to learn and improve other lives.

It seems like Tesla's been pretty clear with drivers who've opted in to FSD that they're helping to test and develop a system which isn't perfect.

Just off the top of the head, look up Henrietta Lacks for a notable example of how medicine has handled informed consent.
by emacsen | 2025-04-06 15:17:11+00:00
There are arguments one can make for benefits of surveillance capitalism, but you used the exact right word, "net". We can't say "Is the a benefit or not?" but "Is there a net positive", and that's a different question from is there any positive.

With that, let me outline where I think proponents would argue there is a benefit

- Consumers get "relevant ads".

If an ad company knows you're in the market for a new grill, it's better for them to show you advertisements for grills than for soap. The argument made here is that the consumer wastes less time, has less of an issue with ads (since they're relevant) and is better informed (arguing that ads are a form of information).

- Advertisers waste less money

The argument here goes that an advertiser who puts out an ad on TV or a magazine only has some vague notion of who the audience is. If they know who they want to target to buy their product, they don't to spend money advertising to people who aren't going to buy their product.

- It lets smaller advertisers come in for a niche audience

Let's imagine that your product or service is very niche. You're likely to have less resources to spend on advertising, and you need to make your ad spending count. With surveillance capitalism and targeted ads, you can reach your target market.

I don't personally view these benefits as outweighing the net negative of the incredible amount of information collected on people and the way this information is used not only to get people to spend more (since that's what advertisement is) but also for psychological and even political manipulation as we saw in the last US election where different people would be shown customized ads to stir up their fears and doubt.
by crazygringo | 2025-04-06 15:17:14+00:00
Is there any possible justification for using the word "dripping" rather a normal word like "sinking"?

To me, dripping requires liquid drops that travel through air or a vacuum. Maybe through another liquid if the drops cohere. But solids can't drip, and substances can sink or travel or migrate through a solid but they can't drip through it.

Is there some special geological meaning of "dripping"? Or is this just bad English?
by linsomniac | 2025-04-06 15:18:19+00:00
I do think it is something that is a bit of a learned skill. I've done around 30 of them and the earlier ones I did rather poorly on, and even within the last 15 puzzles I had one where I scored 0. But the last 3 puzzles I've scored 100 on.

It's not for everyone I'm sure, especially if you are unfamiliar with common English phrases (like "bang for the buck").
by nextaccountic | 2025-04-06 15:18:40+00:00
The ? operator has implicit error conversion. As another user said, it usses the From trait which performs conversions between one type and another. (Note that generally in Rust type conversions don't happen implicitly and you need to call .into() -- the ? situation is an exception)

If you want to have more finer grained control on the error conversion (the From conversion is always the same for some pair of error types) you can use map_err before calling ?, like something.map_err(|e| othererror)?

https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/result/enum.Result.html#method...

If you are using anyhow and wants to attach a string message to the error (maybe to explain what happened to the user), you can also use .context(), also called .wrap_err() in eyre (eyre is a fork of anyhow)

https://docs.rs/anyhow/latest/anyhow/trait.Context.html

https://docs.rs/eyre/latest/eyre/trait.WrapErr.html

The following article is ten years old, but was continually updated to keep it fresh and I think it does a good job explaining how error handling works in Rust:

https://burntsushi.net/rust-error-handling/
by contact9879 | 2025-04-06 15:18:49+00:00
To me, that niche is already covered by Wikisource. Standard Ebooks as a project is very strict about conforming to its editorial and quality standards. On boarding more languages would require volunteer editorial experts in those languages.

Besides, projects in other languages can absolutely build upon Standard Ebooks work, but to expect Standard Ebooks itself to support other languages is just too outside the scope and expertise of the volunteers available.
by throwanem | 2025-04-06 15:19:26+00:00
No, I agree it isn't ORM-specific. I mention it in that context only because for a library dev to take it on themself to try to save the library consumer from themself in this way, strikes me as a good example of the philosophical maximalism - the do-everything, Swiss-army-knife attitude that tries ultimately to abstract away everything about the underlying datastore - that seems to me to characterize the fundamental perspective taken by ORM developers and maintainers.

I also mention it in this context because an ORM multiplies the problem. Everything you describe is indeed very easy in Postgres, but what about the other engines Active Record (or Sequelize, SQLAlchemy, etc) has to support? Now we face a choice between violating our engine-independent abstraction, and declining to offer a useful capability even where it would be no effort - a dilemma entirely imposed, in my view, by the same philosophical maximalism I've been decrying, and one impossible of satisfactory solution: I have long experience of ORMs preferring both solutions, and both are frankly lousy.

We also don't agree on pooled connection semantics, in that I'm okay with expecting callers to know what is and isn't safe to do with that abstraction, but that's a separate issue and not very interesting to me; I'm a grownup, as long as we're using a decent RDBMS and the same convention everywhere, it's fine. Really, I'm just here to grind my axe about ORMs, in hopes someone in their twenties will discover there is a rich and contentious history here, and there are worse problems to have than finding SQL's somewhat archaic syntax and uncommon rigor a little intimidating at first.
by kragen | 2025-04-06 15:19:30+00:00
I note that you, too, have failed to make a policy proposal that is concrete enough to discuss usefully.

If only 80% of advertising were illegal, probably Consumer Reports could continue to exist, although they would be exposed to some legal risk of being ruled to be illegal advertising, probably prompted by a letter to the Attorney General from a company whose products they reviewed poorly or neglected to review at all. Stricter regimes like most of those being proposed here would make it difficult for CR to discover the existence of products to review.

But possibly you are thinking of a different structure of regulation than I am, rather than just failing to think through its unintended consequences. It's impossible to tell if your proposal stays so vague.
by Taikonerd | 2025-04-06 15:20:53+00:00
I had thought Dokku was only for a single host(?) From their docs:

> Dokku is an extensible, open source Platform as a Service that runs on a single server of your choice. [0]

But they have a "pro" version that mentions something about "servers," plural.[1] So maybe that's the difference between regular and pro?

[0]: https://dokku.com/docs/getting-started/installation/

[1]: https://pro.dokku.com/
by perrygeo | 2025-04-06 15:20:55+00:00
I agree. Those offline jobs are highly productive and fun. I'd like to think they still exist somewhere. They did 15 years ago. But I'm afraid a whole generation of software professionals is growing up without ever experiencing it, just taking the current state of the industry as the norm.

I like the way you frame it as an "offline only" work environment. Offline vs online does seem to be the main distinction here.

It's not the remoteness. It's the apps and the intellectually-lazy culture they encourage. Slack, Jira, Github, Docs, Sheets, etc. So much of modern work is navigating those byzantine digital games to score virtual communication points, rather than actually communicating anything of value. Being terminally online is almost guaranteed to lead to presence monitoring, stilted communication, territoriality, lack of clarity, poor product quality and dehumanization. It can happen remotely, it can happen in the office. Doesn't matter. The app-ification of all communication lines is what's harmful.

At some point, you need to stop with the digital games and just use your brain. Commit to the deep work of communicating. There are a shocking number of people who would rather shuffle tickets around all day than read or write a single coherent paragraph. Thinking in slack responses and Jira tickets is a symptom of brain rot.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-04-06 15:20:57+00:00
Including a web browser seems a lot easier and simpler than coming up with your own rendering system once you want to support a feature set past the trivial.

Also, xhtml is just markup. It doesn’t mean you have to support all the possible tags and styles of modern html and css. It would be a sensible choice even if you had basic needs. You just parse it into whatever representation you want.
by oliwary | 2025-04-06 15:21:12+00:00
This is really good feedback I think. My puzzle has an overarching thing with down direction also forming words: https://squareword.org/

I think that would not work here as there are though as there are not enough combinations. I quite like this one though, combining the unscramble mechanic with a category. A bit like a combination of connections and waffle.

For the "play again" issue, in my latest game https://spaceword.org I made it an open-ended puzzle, where there is no correct answer, so people can keep improving as long as they want.
by lambda | 2025-04-06 15:21:44+00:00
I live in Vermont, where billboards are illegal. It's great, there is so much less visual pollution driving anywhere.

And yes, some people do try to push it, renting space to park their hay carts that happen to have their business information on the side.

But you know what? Those cases eventually get dealt with too, and overall, the law is a complete win, even with a few people testing the line.
by Ygg2 | 2025-04-06 15:21:46+00:00
> I still write a lot of Python and shell. I still use Linux

All of those listed things have changed. Python went from 2 to 3, number of shells has multiplied like rabbits. Linux changed in leaps and bounds. It got async, BPF, different tech stacks, and window environments.

> Do you want the list of things that haven't changed since I started programming as a kid?

Sure basic principles have remained the same, but huge chunks of ecosystem have been transformed. Perhaps we are looking at it from different perspectives.

It's kinda like ecosystems. Amazon tropical rainforest looks the same now as it did 1000 years ago from birds eye view. But on the ground entire species came and went, and the species living there changed dramatically, in quality and quantity.

My issue is, employers don't want general knowledge, they want an easily slottable asset. You need to know their tech stack. Even if it changes. Hence why LLMs are so in demand.
by selfhoster | 2025-04-06 15:21:48+00:00
"These people"

Indeed, like this:

https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/statement-by-fbi-dir...

"From the group of 30,000 e-mails returned to the State Department, 110 e-mails in 52 e-mail chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received."
by frereubu | 2025-04-06 15:22:15+00:00
Another question - in https://standardebooks.org/contribute/producing-an-ebook-ste... you talk about "modernising" spelling, e.g. changing "some one" to "someone". This may be against the implicit goal of making these accessible for a general reader, but I prefer to read what was originally written, and it feels like it crosses a line into editorialising rather than letting the original feel stand as-is. (Although of course these texts have already been "editorialised" by their original editors!) Totally your decision given the amount of effort that has clearly gone into this, but I'd be interested to read the rationale for that decision.
by thfuran | 2025-04-06 15:22:20+00:00
>What about a waiter asking you "would you like to try a rosé with that dish? It pairs very well together. Is that "advertising" that would need to be outlawed?

Were they paid by a vintner to say that?

>What about giving out free samples? Is that advertising, and thus should be illegal?

To and by whom? From Nvidia to a GPU reviewer: Yes; from a chocolate shop to a patron: No.

>What about putting a sign up on your business that says the business name? Is that advertising?

No. Do you have any hard questions?
by Jtsummers | 2025-04-06 15:22:49+00:00
Lisp is a tool meant to be molded to the work, not to have the work forced into a broader, less expressive Lisp mold. Tongs are tools that can be molded to fit the work, rather than forcing the work to fit the tongs (or awkwardly, and perhaps disastrously, not fitting the tongs).

That's it, not too complex.
by rayiner | 2025-04-06 15:22:57+00:00
> The point I soured on Musk was when he ditched radar/lidar and tried to go with camera's alone. This made me realize he is not the genius he is made out to be but instead he is a fraud/charlatan and over the years his statements on different topics have only hardened that belief.

Yeah, he was arguably wrong about one thing so his building both the world's leading EV company and the world's leading private rocket company was fake.

As they say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Between Tesla, SpaceX, and arguably now xAI, the probability of Musk's genius being a fluke or fraud is close to zero.
by jfengel | 2025-04-06 15:25:12+00:00
I misread your first sentence, in that having multiple pilots is not necessarily a good thing, like multiple cooks.

You have a main and a backup pilot, but either one must be 100% capable of doing it on their own. The backup is silently double checking, but their assignments are more about ensuring that the copilot doesn't just check out because they're human. If the copilot ever has to say "don't do that it's going to kill us all" it's a crisis.

Lidar is a good backup but the car must be able to with without it. You can't drive just with lidar; it's like driving by Braille. Lidar can't even read a stop light. If they cannot handle it with just the visuals, the car should be not be allowed on the road.

I concur that is terrifying that he was allowed to go without the backup that stops it from killing people. Human co drivers are not a good enough backup.

But he's also not wrong that the visual system must be practically perfect -- if it's possible at all. Which it surely isn't yet.
by jofer | 2025-04-06 15:25:33+00:00
It's called "mantle drip" or "lithospheric drip" in the technical literature. "Lithospheric mantle delamination" is a more descriptive variant. We're fond of fun terms in geology. E.g. the "jelly sandwich model" vs the "creme brulee model" for lithospheric strength is closely related to what's being discussed here. And yes, those are the proper technical terms.

Solids can indeed "drip". The mantle is a solid, but it still very much flows. "Fluid" means no shear strength, but fluids are not the only things that flow and flowing is separate from having a shear strength. Fluids do not behave elastically. If you stress them at all, they permanently deform. Elastic materials behave like a spring up until a point. When you stress them, they deform, but will pop back. The mantle is viscoelastic. Strain rate matters in how it deforms. When you stress at high strain rates it, it deforms, but pops back (i.e. shear waves from earthquakes can pass through). If you maintain those stresses at a low strain rate, it will slowly permanently deform. That's, by definition, flow.

This is a good analogy for what's being discussed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_drop_experiment

The reason "mantle drip" is used is to evoke a mental image similar to that experiment.
by bradlys | 2025-04-06 15:25:33+00:00
Being full stack used to be more exciting to me but with the front end still changing after what felt like we had reached some stability, I have decided I can’t do it anymore. It really caters to a particular type of early startup engineer who is constantly doing greenfield and creating new repos. The issue there is that means you’re constantly poor because you’re always at early stages of funding - and in this market and the market for the next few years… good luck seeing any of those options become liquid.

It’s just not a sustainable path for someone who has to pay a $3m mortgage in Silicon Valley. It’s for the already rich to tinker and the young who can live in a room in a 6bd house.

My career is entirely built around full stack and it’s no shock that I’m back to being penniless. Worked so hard for nothing. Specialize and join big tech. These early stage startups suck and aren’t worth it.
by PaulRobinson | 2025-04-06 15:26:50+00:00
Whitworth [0] showed that you can make a more precise tool than the one you use to make it. This means you "evolve" towards tongs, or screws, or high-precision calipers, or anything else you want to make, if you use the right process.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Whitworth
by LMYahooTFY | 2025-04-06 15:28:20+00:00
I guess I just have to accept that for the foreseeable future, any article in any way related to Elon Musk will result in a lot of angry low quality comments that get lots of upvotes.

Instead of critiquing the article for liberal use of words like "overwhelmingly", "unique", and " 100% of Teslas" on an n=5 cars, with limited data and a very questionable analysis of the Snohomish accident, we discuss how Musk is a fraud.
by DwnVoteHoneyPot | 2025-04-06 15:28:27+00:00
FortNine videos are my favorite videos on YouTube. You're short changing them by just leaving the link without a description or title.

The video title is "Tesla Autopilot Crashes into Motorcycle Riders - Why?"

The amazing part is the one guy who created this video covered all insightful comments here in HN in one concise video 2 years ago.
by jmull | 2025-04-06 15:28:52+00:00
I don’t see how this “clears” Waltz.

For one thing, as far as I know, the iphone doesn’t attach phone numbers to contacts automatically, it just asks. The article claims the iphone did it, but I think Waltz must have.

Also, this why you don’t use a random group chat app for national security conversations. Your general app is designed for engagement which includes building out the social network. Of course it’s going to err on the side of inclusion, when here you want to err on the side of exclusion.

For national security, contact info would be vetted, verified, and strictly up-to-date. There would be multiple guards that would prevent a thoughtless tap months earlier from leading to the wrong person being given national security information.

It sure is frightening that these bozos are in charge of things that have high stakes.
by wat10000 | 2025-04-06 15:29:23+00:00
I think we should separate ads that people seek out from ads that people put up with. They’re very different in purpose and effect. When the ad is the thing you actually want to see, I have no problem with it. The issue is ads that you’d rather not see, but are either attached to something you do want to see, or are placed where you have no choice.
by DKordic | 2025-04-06 15:29:32+00:00
I have a challenge for You: make applications of Your choice of BlackPill [1] or Radxa ZERO 3E [2].

Hint: You might be interested in Forth Systems and Lisp Machines.

[1]: https://github.com/WeActStudio/WeActStudio.MiniSTM32F4x1 [2]: https://radxa.com/products/zeros/zero3e
by ojus09 | 2025-04-06 15:30:07+00:00
Hi HN, I have been working on a more engaging alternative to standard step counters. One that gamified the process but not to the point of losing its initial purpose. I call it Floramis Walk. In it, every step you take gets converted into in-game currency called Lux which you can use to scan real plants. Think of it as a whimsical fusion of Tamagotchi, step trackers and Pokemon GO.It even has an educational 'Florapedia' that keeps track of each species you find.

It is the first in a series of lifestyle based games that I am hoping to create centered around real life habits and gamifying them.

I just launched it with my small team on Product Hunt and have attached the link to it here. Would love to hear your feedback on the concept as well as features. Thanks for taking a look!
by toddmorey | 2025-04-06 15:30:38+00:00
This was purely an effort to improve margins on the cars that they tried to sell with other types of rationale. From the way I've seen him operate his companies, treat his employees, and now work with the government, he has a high tolerance for risk paired with a very low tolerance for perceived inefficiencies plus too little patience to fully understand the problem.

He really embodies the ethos of "move fast and break things". So let's fire 80% of the staff, see what falls down, and rehire where we made "mistakes". I really think he has an alarmingly high threshold for the number of lives we can lose if it accelerates the pace of progress.
Show HN: I made an AI news summariser for any topic in the world
by Leewlms | 2025-04-06 15:30:55+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Bitesize, a free app that lets you catch up on the news through fast, focused summaries — built for people who want context without the clutter.

It started 6 months ago when I got tired of bouncing between sites to piece together what was actually happening in the world. Single outlets felt too limited, aggregators were noisy and repetitive, and most articles buried the key info under fluff.

Bitesize is my attempt to fix that. It follows three simple principles: - Show only what matters — no filler, no repeats - Recaps that take under a minute to read - A personalized feed on any topic you care about

What’s next: - Faster, smarter topic search - Text-to-speech summaries - Multi-language support

Would love to hear your thoughts, feedback, or ideas!