MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bell-cot | 2025-04-17 13:32:26+00:00
A very misleading headline:

> SpaceX is pitching for the part of the Golden Dome initiative called the "custody layer," a constellation of satellites that would detect missiles, track their trajectory, and determine if they are heading toward the U.S., according to two sources familiar with SpaceX's goals.

> SpaceX has estimated the preliminary engineering and design work for the custody layer of satellites would cost between $6 billion and $10 billion, two of the sources said. In the last five years, SpaceX has launched hundreds of operational spy satellites and more recently several prototypes, which could be retrofitted to be used for the project, the sources said.

Sounds like SpaceX (with a couple partners) is only bidding to build a constellation of Early Warning & Tracking satellites. Obviously pretty similar to SpaceX's Starlink constellation. And there are zero other companies in the world with anywhere-near-comparable cred for quickly building, deploying, and operating a major global satellite constellation.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-04-17 13:32:36+00:00
The surest defense against fashionable nonsense is a sound philosophical education and a temperament disinclined to hysteria. Ignorance leaves you wide open to all manner of emotional misadventure. But even when you are in possession of the relevant facts — and a passable grasp of the principles involved — it requires a certain moral maturity to resist or remain untouched by the lure of melodrama and the thrill of believing you live at the edge of transcendence.

(Naturally, the excitement surrounding artificial intelligence has less to do with reality than with commerce. It is a product to be sold, and selling, as ever, relies less on the truth than on sentiment. It’s not new. That’s how it’s always been.)
by monkeyfun | 2025-04-17 13:32:37+00:00
1. It's a quote, not an expression of the poster's opinions directly.

2. We wouldn't even be talking about that industrial scale genocide this early on Hitler's term, which I don't say to suggest he's going to be Hitler 2 but rather to point out how it can be quite valid to be concerned before someone's getting into full swing with atrocities.
by eru | 2025-04-17 13:32:46+00:00
> The canonical Haskell compiler, GHC, is excellent at transforming operations on immutable data, as Haskell programs are written, into efficient mutations, at the runtime level.

Yes, at the level of native machine code and memory cells, there's not that much of a difference between immutability + garbage collection, and higher level source code that mutates. Thanks to GC you are going to overwrite the same memory locations over and over again, too.
by 9rx | 2025-04-17 13:33:13+00:00
> A warehouse with shutters and bulky padlocks, a night security guard and camera system is a crime?

No, why would it be? The security guard isn't going to wage war with the police/military when they want in. The guard will politely comply to any legitimate (and probably even illegitimate) request for access.

> A bank vault is a crime? Safety deposit boxes?

Banks are heavily regulated by the government. They especially aren't going to impede access if push comes to shove.

Laws aren't created on purely theoretical grounds. They are created only when a problem that needs to be solved is identified. The government has never had much trouble accessing physical spaces when they feel a need to. They have had trouble accessing encrypted data.
by wulfstan | 2025-04-17 13:33:26+00:00
Playing devil's advocate here...

What is wrong with:

* an expiring certificate

* issued by the device manufacturer or application creator

* to law enforcement

* once a competent court of law has given approval

* that would allow a specific user's content to be decrypted prior to expiry

There are a million gradations of privacy from "completely open" to "e2e encrypted". Governments (good ones!) are rightly complaining that criminals are using encryption to commit particularly awful crimes. Politicians are (mistakenly) asking for a master key - but what I feel we should as a community support is some fine-grained legal process that would allow limited access to user information if justified by a warrant.

Competent jurisdictions allow this for physical search and seizure. It's not unreasonable to ask for the same thing to apply to digital data.
by commieneko | 2025-04-17 13:33:28+00:00
I’ve seen very little cost cutting that matters in that $35 trillion dollar debt. But I’ve seen plenty of cutting social programs that will result in much misery. And trashing of long standing allies and economic partners.

For fun go and look at the history of the ups and downs of that $35 trillion dollar debt, and which administrations it shrank and grew under.

As for “billionaire businessman”, I’ll go with real estate swindler and gangster. And insurrectionist too.
by vaxman | 2025-04-17 13:33:28+00:00
If only there were credit-card sized, LiPol-battery powered 'puter with built-in wireless networking and a GPU-accelerated remote streaming app that output HDMI, all made and distributed by a Five Eyes alliance country for less than $15 each. If only... /s

The choice of a trusted HMD is a little more complex, but very solvable ;)
by boroboro4 | 2025-04-17 13:33:33+00:00
“The law” has ways of finding you when you least expect it. I have a friend who is in jail for last year for nothing-burger (in other country).

I think perceiving laws at the US as unpredictable is just showing that you haven’t seen countries with truly dysfunctional judicial. Of course justice can be tricky. Of course courts can be flawed. It’s a spectrum, and we’re not at the worst spot in it so far (maybe apart from SC, SC is terrible).

I’m not sure what’s a point of federal courts being creation of Congress (ie laws) and not creation of constitution. Most of the executive branch is creation of Congress too.

The nicety of laws and courts you can (by yourself) go and read courts opinions and arguments and made your own judgements who’s at fault - executive branch ignoring laws and stressing the system with bad faith behavior, or courts deciding unjustly by reading laws wrongly. I did this for bunch of court opinions and don’t expect good faith from the administration anymore.
by numpad0 | 2025-04-17 13:33:59+00:00
Was it seriously the only way to read vBulletin forums? I could just fetch each whole >>1-1000 on old 2ch.net forum topics[1] and Ctrl+F anything I wanted. List of topics were Ctrl+F friendly too. There were party apps that could search all forums with titles, and fetch updates for all topics. vBulletin seemed nothing like that to me, was that really not me being outsider but just how it was?

1: https://web.archive.org/web/20170728043031/https://egg.2ch.net/test/read.cgi/jisaku/1478413388/ 2: https://web.archive.org/web/20170715143439/http://egg.2ch.net/jisaku/subback.html
by ziddoap | 2025-04-17 13:34:04+00:00
>You should engage with the arguments the other side makes.

The arguments are "Protect the children.", "Catch terrorists.", "Catch criminals.".

Those arguments have been engaged with for decades. They are purely emotional arguments. Anyone who still pushes those arguments forth is most likely doing so with ulterior motives and cannot be reasonably "engaged" with.
by magicalhippo | 2025-04-17 13:34:32+00:00
A few factors. First, those prices are not for the Founders Edition, the MSRP is just for the Founders Edition. Card manufacturers add features (for some value of features) and charge for it.

Further, the MSRP is just a suggestion, and a weak one at that. If hardly anyone wanted the cards, would you be asking why some people would buy them below MSRP as stores tried to get rid of stock?

Finally, people have disposable income and really want the cards. People buy expensive cars for no good reason other than that they want them and they can. That's how the market works.

Personally I was ready for the 5090, as I had an aging 2080 Ti and by the time 4090 were in stock I thought the 50-series would be around the corner and held out. The MSRP was high but I could afford that. If I were single I could afford 2x the MSRP, and perhaps I would have shelled out if one were available.
by mjburgess | 2025-04-17 13:34:43+00:00
The problem is that there's no mechanism to prevent that. And there's a pretty clear route to it happening: first mistaken immigrants, then mistaken murders, then mistaken "domestic terrorists" -- and you have the federal gov. disappearing political opponents.

The issue with these extrajudicial renditions to foreign prisions is the extrajudicial part. The rest of it is just immoral -- the former part, a catastrophe.
by apercu | 2025-04-17 13:34:44+00:00
Agreed, both side-ism is ridiculous. One party has pursued their personal wealth and power, concentrations of wealth for the elite class, and globalism and the other side has done the same, but also embraces fascism and theocracy as core tenants.

The former is the only choice, because democracy is still able to maintain a slight pulse under their "leadership".
by bluGill | 2025-04-17 13:35:01+00:00
Which is in fact wrong - other people have labeled her as technical. Not everyone will label her has technical, but no matter how good you get someone will label you as not-technical. As such her argument is incorrect.

Now I do not know her. I have no idea if I would call her technical. She appears to at least have the background to become technical, but she may not want to spend her time doing that. I'm not sure what level of others think you are technical is required to say someone really is, but it isn't unanimous agreement.
by shagie | 2025-04-17 13:35:46+00:00
Have you ever stumbled across the PEF/REV method for classifying bugs?

https://www.fincher.org/tips/General/SoftwareDevelopment/Bug...

The essence of it is that "PEF" is from the user's point of view - pain, effort (work around), frequency. "REV" is from the developer's point of view- risk, effort (fix), verifiability.

Something that has a low PEF score and high REV score would not be practical to fix while something that is high PEF and low REV is something that should be prioritized high.
Show HN: LTE-connected IoT module with remote programming and NL data analysis
by siliconwitch | 2025-04-17 13:35:58+00:00
Hi HN! I've been working on this IoT platform that aims to simplify deploying remote sensor networks by combining pre-configured LTE hardware with a cloud platform for remote programming and AI-based analysis.

The main challenges I'm trying to solve are:

1. Eliminating infrastructure setup headaches for IoT deployments 2. Making remote programming and debugging practical for devices that might be difficult to access physically 3. Using natural language for analyzing sensor data, and possibly taking actions based on the analysis

I'd really appreciate feedback on:

1. Is this approach to IoT development interesting to you? 2. What use cases would you want to explore with this kind of platform? 3. What concerns would you have about adopting something like this? 4. Could anyone recommend workflows or tools for making the AI agent more reliable? Currently using LLMs to generate isolated SQL queries to extract data, but ensuring consistent responses has been challenging.

Thanks for any thoughts, and feel free to ask any questions about how the hardware or platform works. Happy to dive into the details!
by jasonlotito | 2025-04-17 13:36:49+00:00
> confiscate the equipment if the child breaks the rules.

Even you acknowledge this plan is flawed and that the child can break the rules. And it's not that difficult. After all, confiscating the equipment assumes that they know about the equipment and that they can legally seize the equipment. Third parties are involved, and doing what you suggests would land these adults in prison.

I know you thought you were being smart with your suggestion that maybe parents should be parents, but really you just highlighted your ignorance.

The goal of these laws are to prevent children from accessing content. If some adults get caught in the crossfire, they don't care.

Now, I'm not defending these laws or saying anything about them. What I am saying is that your "suggestion" is flawed from the point of view of those proposing these laws.
by vaxman | 2025-04-17 13:36:59+00:00
Not even 24 hours later, I called it --the Administration IS asking Congress to de-fund NPR:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-administration-p...

Meanwhile NPR has new reporting that DOGE has sent two of its boys back to NLRB, but they're going to work remotely. Is the hope here that this will provide ongoing justification for DOGE remote data access as the Feds sort out what they did in the first visit? Like even though NPR's first report stated that Russia has tried to login remotely using valid DOGE credentials just after DOGE personnel left the first time?

https://www.npr.org/2025/04/16/nx-s1-5366851/doge-nlrb-whist...
by JeremyNT | 2025-04-17 13:37:12+00:00
I mean it's trite but obviously a democracy can fail in this way (see Weimar Germany). If you can make enough people feel aggrieved and give them an "other" to hate, you're off to the races.

This US slip into authoritarianism should cause us all to reconsider history too. This is the wealthiest country in the world, so economic trouble is clearly not required, and it gives lie to the notion that the US had some kind of unique structural defense against authoritarianism - maybe there is no defense, and this is inevitable.
by ksec | 2025-04-17 13:37:20+00:00
Sometimes I see in certain areas AI / LLM is absolutely crushing those jobs, a whole category will be gone in next 5 to 10 years as they are already 80 - 90% mark. They just need another 5 - 10% as they continue to get improvement and they are already cheaper per task.

Sometimes I see an area of AI/LLM that I thought even with 10x efficiency improvement and 10x hardware resources which is 100x in aggregate it will still be no where near good enough.

The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. Which is why I dont believe AGI will be here any time soon. But Assisted Intelligence is no doubt in its iPhone moment and continue for another 10 years before hopefully another breakthrough.
by apercu | 2025-04-17 13:37:26+00:00
Yep, I buy an iPhone "all day" from China.

That's kind of a straw man argument. Go pick up every single cord, speaker, lamp, etc. in your house and look at the label.

That low quality shit that lasts a year is what I am talking about. Furniture used to be handed down for generations. Now, if you move apartments twice it falls apart.
by i5heu | 2025-04-17 13:37:41+00:00
I do not like these framings of "not a" because it always sounds so suspicious like "we are not a cult".

It puts the idea into the world that it could be a crime and maybe that it is the status quo.

Much better IMHO is something like "Encryption is a fundamental right.", "Encryption protects everyone.", "Without encryption there is no democracy." and so on.

Maybe "Don’t let them take your right to privacy."
by xz18r | 2025-04-17 13:37:49+00:00
I work at the company selling Parallels and I let one of the PMs know of your concern; this is his reply:

"Parallels doesn't change the file associations. Parallels registers Windows apps (like Edge) for macOS in case users want to open them/files using macOS interface. macOS then decides what apps to use for this or that file type or protocol. Based on our testing if there is already a file association, then a new app registered in the system doesn't change it. Tip: Parallels provides an option to disable sharing Windows apps with macOS. It is enabled by default as the vast majority of customers like it. File associations can also be changed anytime using "Get Info" in file context menu and then "Open with:" and "Change All..."."

In other words, it looks like .html files were associated to your (in-Windows) Edge, hence it booting up a VM etc. but that can easily be mitigated.
by pjmlp | 2025-04-17 13:38:21+00:00
Except the Rust ecosystem lacks the solutions we have in C++ land to compile fast and have easy paralelisation of builds.

Because C and C++ communities for historical reasons embrace binary libraries, and binary component frameworks like COM, so while in theory a full build from scratch takes similar time as Rust, in practice that isn't the case.

Also note that D, a language as complex as C++, with three compilers, one of them being based on LLVM, is largely faster to compile than Rust while using the LLVM backend, because Walter Bright did the right decisions on what to focus for development workflow.
by lupusreal | 2025-04-17 13:38:21+00:00
I doubt there is one single grand answer for the Fermi Paradox. Probably it's lots of smaller blockers which all stack up with each other. The chance of life forming, the chance that it becomes multicellular, the chance that it develops complex nervous systems, intelligence, the physiological hardware for tool use and creation, not stagnating or getting wiped out, having the inclination to look out and broadcast their existence, the chance that they survive long enough while doing this to exist at the same time as another civilization of comparable development, etc. It's easy to come up with these and even if they all have modestly small probabilities each, together they stack up to a plausible answer to the so called paradox.
by inglor_cz | 2025-04-17 13:38:25+00:00
I don't believe that people can gain weight while eating almost nothing, but I believe that their internal distribution of energy may be out of whack.

Proponents of naive thermodynamics model tend to assume that only "excessive" energy is stored into bodily fat, once all the other tissues have had their fair share.

That is not really true in insulin resistant people, whose storage may be excessive and leave the rest of the body unsatisfied and hungry, which drives them to eat more than a healthy person would.

To us, this looks like deliberate overeating, to them, it is a result of constant hunger caused by the fact that some part of the energy consumed is being immediately locked away in fat tissues by dysregulated metabolic processes.

Notably, it isn't easy to "correct" this situation by just eating less, because that will leave those people feeling really starved. Insulin sensitivity must be restored first, then the fat stores will give up their excess willingly and that person won't suffer.
by lesuorac | 2025-04-17 13:38:40+00:00
> Of course, we tried debug builds too. Those cut the time down to ~5 minutes — but they’re not usable in practice.

I wonder how true this is.

Haven't use feldera but other rust stuff I have if I run as debug it has serious performance problems. However, for testing I have it compile a few crates that do work like `image` to be optimized (and the vast majority as debug) and that is enough to make the performance issues not noticeable. So if the multi-crate hadn't worked, possibly just only compile some of the stuff as optimized.
by TehCorwiz | 2025-04-17 13:39:04+00:00
I have yet to see a case against someone that hinged on some data that was encrypted. Almost every tale from some cell needing to be cracked has ended in a fart because they got the information anyway using old-fashioned police investigation.

We went from Patriot Act to literally disappearing people without due process in only 23 years. Imagine if they could also decrypt your phone and plant evidence in advance.
by diggan | 2025-04-17 13:39:14+00:00
> Dolphins are smart but they're never going to invent radios to broadcast their existence to other star systems.

How could we possibly know this? The only case of "Dolphins" we know of, is on Earth, with the interference of humanity, and we're looking at Dolphins at a really small timescale.

Given N thousands of years without interference from other species, who can really confidently tell exactly how Dolphins would evolve?
by dwohnitmok | 2025-04-17 13:39:15+00:00
I don't think this is a limitation of the JVM. When I've used Clojure's STM implementation it's been perfectly serviceable (barring the composability issues I mentioned). Likewise when I've used the various STM libraries in Scala. Eta (basically a Haskell implementation on the JVM that unfortunately stalled in development) also had a fine STM implementation.

It's more of a combination of API and language decisions rather than the underlying JVM.
by bee_rider | 2025-04-17 13:39:48+00:00
I propose we resolve the problem of overly centering technical people by gatekeeping harder.

Web dev? Just a graphic designer with poor tools: non-technical.

Engineering manager? Manager. Non-technical.

Write business logic? That’s just office work.

Banging out boiler plate code? Something a technical person might do, but not inherently in and of itself technical. A classical engineer must also sharpen their pencils.

Eventually we’ll deny the label to enough people that it will become a precise description rather than a trophy.
by phlakaton | 2025-04-17 13:40:03+00:00
Yeah, it's not that e.g. Haskell won't allow side effects, it's that side effects are constrained: 1) all the side-effectful operations have types that forbid you from using them outside of a side-effect context; 2) and it's a good thing they do, because Haskell's laziness means the results you would get otherwise are counterintuitive.

Other FP frameworks are far less strict about such things, and many FP features are now firmly in the mainstream. So no, I don't think this stuff is particularly rare, though Haskell/OCaml systems probably still are. There are pluses and minuses with structuring code in a pure-core-with-side-effect-shell way – FP enthusiasts tend to think the pluses outweigh the minuses.

Best, I think, to view FP not as dogma or as a class of FP-only languages, but rather as a paradigm first, a set of languages second.
by Loughla | 2025-04-17 13:40:04+00:00
I don't think so, though. I think that unless there are limiting factors (no ores or some other necessary component) life would tend toward technology.

Curiosity as an evolutionary trait is quite an advantage, and I would think is necessary for intelligent omnivores. It's what helped us figure out what we could and couldn't eat, and taught us better techniques for living. Curiosity naturally leads to technological developments, I would argue.
by hedora | 2025-04-17 13:40:17+00:00
Like many other people here, I'm wondering what we'll end up having to do at work do deal with this. We don't have the resources to put a full time person on this, and the UK's not a huge market.

For unrelated reasons, we already have to implement geoblocking, and we're also intentionally VPN friendly. I suspect most services are that way, so the easy way out is to add "UK" to the same list as North Korea and Iran.

Anyway, if enough services implement this that way, I'd expect the UK to start repealing laws like this (or to start seeing China-level adoption of VPN services). That limits the blast radius to services actually based in the UK. Those are already dropping like flies, sadly.

I hope the rest of the international tech community applies this sort of pressure. Strength in numbers is about all we have left these days.
by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF | 2025-04-17 13:40:30+00:00
That sounds like a golden key approach, and the problem is your communication is no longer protected by math, it's only protected by the will of a stranger to be tortured by the government to protect you

https://www.rsaconference.com/library/blog/a-golden-key-to-u...

The back and forth discussion on cryptography is happening because there just isn't much middle ground. Either someone else can read your messages, or nobody else can. If one person can read them, the government will push on then until they crack.
by rdm_blackhole | 2025-04-17 13:40:47+00:00
I am against it as a matter of principle.

Even if you trust someone with your life and you know this person is never going to betray you and will always have your best interests at heart, that doesn't mean that they automatically get a free pass to view and inspect everything I do every minute of every day until I die.

Unfortunately, that is what these governments want.