MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by antonkar | 2025-04-03 00:52:45+00:00
There is a planet-wise eternal 100% safe AI solution that can be a billion dollar startup, too:

Put all the GPUs in cloud/s controlled by international scientists (now you can use your GPU on any device, can earn money by renting it when you don’t need it, nothing changes except you need to be online to us it, but we’ll have 5G and better worldwide. You can develop, sell or release free math-proven safe AI models in this cloud “AI App Store”, etc).

Because the main risk is an AI agent botnet - current GPUs are like nukes that are 100% unprotected - any hacker can make a virus with AI agent component just to steal money, this AI will be not aligned at all, will become a per perpetual and eventually autonomous botnet.
by VogonPoetry | 2025-04-03 00:54:26+00:00
Yes, totally agree. Also a paragraph on the relationship between energy, heat, cooling and that computers effectively turn all energy into heat might have been useful.

The April 1st date on the article is telling.

Shout out to "Technology Connections" YouTube channel for recently publishing "Power is not energy" - <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOK5xkFijPc>.
by phillipseamore | 2025-04-03 00:54:29+00:00
A blanket 10% minimum tariff is a great excuse for any local US manufacturing to increase their prices.

I used to live in a country with heavy tariffs, every time tariffs were raised the local producers increased prices to be just below the imports. Even after the tariffs were abolished the prices (on local and imports) never really lowered in any significant way.
by stephen_g | 2025-04-03 00:55:24+00:00
It's a pretty common method in industry (a wet scrubber) but I don't know of any indoor-scale, self-contained units - it sounds like a recipe for mould because a misting one would basically be a humidifier too, and they are hard to maintain because bacteria like legionella can grow in the water and then you're dispersing it inside your house!
by wat10000 | 2025-04-03 00:56:14+00:00
I’ve heard most of that. And yeah, it’s pretty disconnected from reality.

Rabid DEI? Mythical.

Highest tax rates in the world? No we don’t. And did you notice that this guy just enacted a massive tax hike? Voting Trump for lower taxes is idiotic.

Drugs, poverty, war? Trump has no effective plan to fight any of these.

Importation of new voters? Why do Republicans assume immigrants are automatic Democratic votes? Hispanic culture is pretty socially conservative. Those millions of people coming in over the southern border should be an easy demographic for the Republican Party to recruit.

Rapists and racists? When you support a rapist and racist to run the country, expect that to be criticized. And aren’t Republicans supposed to be all about “free speech”? But oh no, somebody called me names, it’s awful.
by pmags | 2025-04-03 00:56:33+00:00
Would you care to share which parts you see as "disguised" opinion versus fact?

These all seem like established facts:

* "...bringing the total HHS workforce from 82,000 to 62,000."

* FDA — "..will lose 3,500 employees, about 19 percent of staff"

* NIH — "...is set to lose 1,200 employees, about 6 percent..."

* CDC — "...will lose 2,400 employees, about 18 percent..."

When the article quoted opinions or op-eds it was quite clear and gave citations as to who offered those opinions:

* " In an op-ed Tuesday, Tom Frieden, former CDC director under Obama, called the cuts to the CDC a threat to "America’s health, safety, and economy." "

* " "In a matter of just a couple days, we are losing our nation’s ability to prevent HIV," Carl Schmid, executive director of the HIV+Hepatitis Policy Institute, said in a statement. "
by anenefan | 2025-04-03 00:56:51+00:00
I'll share what's posted at reddit

Jellyfish8775 replied to the reddit thread "

Hey, we totally understand how stressful this must have been, and we're glad to see your hosting plan is back up and running. That said, we want to clear up a few things.

When phishing activity is detected, whether intentional or due to a security breach, we have to take action to protect other users. Suspensions aren’t random, we follow strict security protocols, and while we understand it’s frustrating, keeping the platform secure is a top priority.

Also, managed hosting doesn’t mean full security management, server security is a shared responsibility. If an account gets compromised (through weak credentials, outdated software, or vulnerabilities in third-party apps), action needs to be taken on both sides to prevent issues.

About data access, when phishing-related suspensions happen, we have to be extra cautious before restoring access. That said, we always work with our customers to resolve these cases properly, as happened in your situation.

Again, we’re glad this was sorted out, and if you ever need help tightening security on your server to avoid future issues, just reach out!"

I had been politely waiting for the OP to update rather than just repost the above response ... but I guess we could assume they are working hard to sort out their troubles with the 70 sites in regard to however many had been suspended. I dare say organising back up as well if that's also their role.
by shw1n | 2025-04-03 00:57:04+00:00
I don't think I ever make the only-nuanced-opinion claim, the claim I'm making here is many people don't want to have useful discussions, they just want to proselytize

I actually say there are reasons to persevere and encourage debate if it's not just trying to "win":

"However, one reason to persevere is to find the 1% of people that also want to see the world as it is. Aka, finding your own community of anti-tribalists."

"Few things give me greater joy than a discovery-ridden conversation with smart friends, and this is only enhanced if I learn something I previously believed to be true is actually wrong. Seriously, come prove some core belief I have as wrong and you will quite literally make my week."
by LeifCarrotson | 2025-04-03 00:57:38+00:00
The problem is that this miserable state of affairs works at scale.

Yes, on problems that exist at the scale of one or intelligent, educated, experienced, and dedicated human (or maybe up to 3-5), an individual or small team will run circles around a business. You can have a top-notch CEO and COO and HR manager and six program managers (each with zero domain experience other than running a Jira board) and four dozen junior consultants who memorized just enough to pass the interviews and an art department and sales and finance and IT. For some problems, that whole $50M enterprise will be utterly demolished by a couple of determined engineers.

Likewise, a monarchy with a wise, benevolent, and just king can flourish, whereas a corrupted and bureaucratically entangled democracy is woefully inefficient.

But if you want your kingdom to last more than two generations before succumbing to a greedy monarch, or want your enterprise to solve bigger problems that don't decompose nicely to small ones, to vertically integrate huge manufacturing systems and scale out to billions of units, the only method that works is the inefficient one. And it does work!
by ElfDragon11 | 2025-04-03 00:57:59+00:00
I’ve been thinking about an idea called Ownyth—a platform that would bring back real ownership to digital media (movies, books, shows, etc.) using blockchain to track and secure who actually owns what.

The concept:

When you buy digital content, you get a downloadable, DRM-free file.

Ownership is recorded on-chain, so you can resell, gift, or keep it—just like a physical copy.

It’s kind of like a “used DVD store,” but for the digital world, with decentralized proof of ownership.

I’m curious if this is something people actually want, or just a niche thing that sounds cool but doesn’t scale.

A few questions I’d love thoughts on:

Is there still real demand for true digital ownership in the age of streaming?

Which types of media (or communities) might this resonate with the most?

What major blockers or flaws should I be thinking about?

The idea’s loosely outlined at ownyth.com. Open to all feedback—technical, business, critical, anything.
by wat10000 | 2025-04-03 00:58:28+00:00
I think we’re addressing different points. I’m talking about how difficult it is to judge quality when shopping for something. Sure, if I’m hiring a contractor I’ll get quotes and talk to them. But I’m deeply unqualified to judge their competence or work ethic. If I’m lucky I’ll go on personal recommendations from someone I know and whose judgment I trust. Otherwise it’s just vibes.
by pentagrama | 2025-04-03 01:00:22+00:00
You're absolutely right. End-to-end encryption protects message content, but WhatsApp still collects metadata, which is incredibly valuable.

Even though they can't read your messages, they know who you talk to, how often, when, and for how long. They also track your device info, IP address (which can reveal your location), network details, and app usage patterns.

And this data isn’t just sitting there—Meta uses it. For example, if you chat with a business on WhatsApp, you might start seeing ads for that business on Instagram or Facebook. They don’t need to read your messages when they can infer so much just from how you use the app.

Disclaimer: Comment translated from Spanish and corrected by Chat GPT.
by kevinventullo | 2025-04-03 01:00:25+00:00
This was previously recommended to me on HN, so I’ll pass it along. The book “Seeing Like A State” gives a pretty reasonable explanation for why this happens: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State

The basic idea is that the only viable way to administer a complex and heterogenous system like a massive corporation is to simplify by enforcing “legibility” or homogeneity. Without this, central control becomes far too complex to manage. Thus, the simplification becomes a mandate, even at the cost of great inefficiencies.

What makes the book particularly interesting is the many different historical examples of this phenomenon, across a wide array of human endeavors.
by slt2021 | 2025-04-03 01:01:09+00:00
>uniform, unbiased, automated enforcement of law?

the only uniform thing would be data collection, loss of privacy, and being a victim of gov-t oppression.

"unbiased" - depends on the bias inherent to the training dataset and enforcement algorithm. Areas with more sensors will get more enforcement.

what if you a victim of false positive? you wont be able to appeal to "unbiased automated enforcement"

just look at recent events, when Trump just stripped some students of their greencards and deported them with 0 due process.

or took a guy with some random tatoo and sent one way to El Salvador...
by ridiculous_fish | 2025-04-03 01:02:22+00:00
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by antonkar | 2025-04-03 01:02:40+00:00
The Big Bang is maximally agentic but has zero intelligence (it has maximal future potential intelligence though). Current definitions of agency are way too narrow and unphysical, so:

Agency is time-like, energy-like, choosing, changing shapes or geometry of the world and the agent itself. It’s GPU computations. Explosions have a lot of agency.

Intelligence is space-like, matter-like, the static geometric shape like an LLM (it’s basically a bunch of vectors). It’s a file. The static final 4D spacetime of our universe has a lot of intelligence but zero agency, because it’s static.

Maximal intelligence+agency is the static spacetime of multiverse (=max intelligence) which can change its shape in an instant (=max agency, shape-changing ability).

Same way we have e=mc2, we have agency = intelligence * constant.
by meonkeys | 2025-04-03 01:02:53+00:00
Woah, how? My global search indexer seems to poop out when the sqlite db gets too big or something.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Thunderbird/comments/1jjzb6b/global...

On another note, Thunderbird feels quite snappy for me. Fast and responsive, especially global search.

Even so I think I prefer Recoll now that I've got it working. That thing is amazing.
by joquarky | 2025-04-03 01:03:15+00:00
Most of the world is also deeply addicted to the internet, and we have rapidly normalized it to at least the same degree as caffeine.

I see it all the time: people go out to restaurants, talk for a few minutes, then silently drift into their phones. The connection just evaporates. It feels like we've traded presence for stimulation.

And I'm not saying this as a Luddite. I used to be incredibly excited about technology. I still am, in some ways. But it's hard not to feel like we're losing something important.

I am often reminded of /The Game/ (S05E06) episode from TNG[0]

Are we in it?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_...
by kelseyfrog | 2025-04-03 01:03:33+00:00
As such, "The AI did not pass the Turing test because the interrogators were not sufficiently challenging" becomes a standard impossible to beat. The reductio on this is that in order for AI to pass the Turing test, it has to fool everyone on the planet which is not what I believe is intended.

Rather, we should set an upper bound on what a reasonable interpretation of "as challenging as possible" means.
by snvzz | 2025-04-03 01:03:35+00:00
>AmigaOS is small but everything runs in ring 0.

Not accurate.

In AmigaOS, everything runs in unprivileged mode, except for some specific critical code within exec.library which runs in supervisor mode or interrupt mode.

What's true is that exec.library does offer a call to run code as supervisor[0], and that there's no memory protection.

0. http://amigadev.elowar.com/read/ADCD_2.1/Includes_and_Autodo...
by shw1n | 2025-04-03 01:03:54+00:00
I personally think this is the right approach, where you can assign probabilities to the unknowns (the "thinking in bets" section)

Because then the discussions/research switch toward data and evidence, with the results downstream of those

Overall when people can agree "I understand stance 1 if the data says X, or stance 2 if the data says Y", and then all the energy goes into the data analysis, I consider that a successful conversation
by djoldman | 2025-04-03 01:04:29+00:00
Yes, but a couple problems:

1. Where to put them? In Chicago these cameras unfortunately end up being a regressive tax.

2. What to do with the money? Anytime we give the government money from things like this, we create weird incentives. I've been wondering lately what it would be like if we required all the fees to be returned to the federal treasury / burned... no incentives!
by marginalia_nu | 2025-04-03 01:05:52+00:00
I've been able to quit my job and work full time on Marginalia Search, and starting with 8 months expenses' worth of savings and an incoming grant back in 2023, the project is now funded so I can keep going for several more years.

Seems fairly important to somehow write or talk about what you do[1]. Building stuff and never telling anyone about it never got anyone paid. You don't need to become a shill, but the world needs to learn about what you're doing. Will say with full certainty I would not have been able to quit my job and do this full time if I didn't blog about my misadventures.

Risk of this being mostly survivorship bias, but I think in general it's helpful to build something that's more of an end product and not a library or some other widget in the making of products. Possibly also helpful if yours is an ambitious project that somehow seems doable. Ladybird is possibly an even better case of this going well. Exception possibly being if you end up as a linchpin tech like curl.

In general I don't think patreon/github/etc. donations will ever add up to much than coffee money. Most of my money has been from grants, one large donation from some rando anonymous person, and a nonprofit.

[1] Basically this: https://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/increasing-your-luck-sur...
by umutisik | 2025-04-03 01:07:26+00:00
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by Aeolun | 2025-04-03 01:08:08+00:00
In 2022, the all-cause mortality under-5 was 117 per 1000 in Nigeria.

Not per 100k, per 1000.

That means that for every child that dies from air pollution, ~600 more die from some other cause.

To be fair, most causes seem related to terrible living conditions, so everything probably improves or degrades together.
by shw1n | 2025-04-03 01:08:45+00:00
Yeah I fully accept that there could be valid dots in the top left (or even top right) corners, just didn't include them to keep the chart's point simple and b/c it was also based on Paul Graham's article which made the same point

> But politics are much more than that, it's how society organize, and if you can't talk to everybody about your city evicting the parasites who mismanaged and eventually brought down the waterlines because you're afraid of 'groupthink', you are fucked.

Yeah I guess I differentiate between the individuals who could help you determine the truth of the mismanaging parasites vs the ones that just blindly support or hate them.
by ants_everywhere | 2025-04-03 01:09:30+00:00
You don't need to re-license permissively licensed software to include it in your code.

Apple, as far as I know, doesn't release the FreeBSD fork they use in Mac OS.

Companies generally use a ton of permissively licensed software and don't release forks of it under any license because the entire point of the license is that you can take the code, make modifications, and you have no obligations to give anything back when doing so.

There was an attempt to rebrand "free software" -- meaning software focused on user freedom -- as "open source" -- referring to software permissively licensed for use by corporations. This was the point of the OSI. [0]

> The “open source” label was created at a strategy session held on February 3rd, 1998 in Palo Alto, California, shortly after the announcement of the release of the Netscape source code....The conferees believed the pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape to release their code illustrated a valuable way to engage with potential software users and developers, and convince them to create and improve source code by participating in an engaged community. The conferees also believed that it would be useful to have a single label that identified this approach and distinguished it from the philosophically- and politically-focused label “free software.” Brainstorming for this new label eventually converged on the term “open source”, originally suggested by Christine Peterson.

So literally a decision by a committee of industry folks to play down the idea of freedoms or giving back and focus instead on the business case.

So they killed the ethical argument that favored copyleft licenses in favor of the business argument that favored permissive ones.

Now people are saying "hey it's unfair that you're not giving back." Fair enough, but that's an ethical argument. That's what the OSI was trying to get rid of.

The OSI approach has its place. We wouldn't have Mac OS or Google or Meta without it. But its place is allowing industry to standardize and to reduce costs. Those benefit consumers indirectly since we have fewer competing standards and reduced development costs can imply reduced end user costs. But that only works because each company can make improvements and exclude others from using those improvements; i.e. they can make proprietary improvements.

[0] https://opensource.org/history
by __s | 2025-04-03 01:09:40+00:00
To add on here, this is how I've been able to do it

I started contributing to OSS in highschool, worked in closed source to get by, kept up contributions, eventually got hired by Citus through an HN Who's Hiring right when they got acquired by MS

After a year of working on OSS Citus extension I was moved to managed service. I continued to contribute to OSS by day tho as I would try upstreaming changes / fixes

At PeerDB (now ClickHouse) I'm again in OSS, & continue to contribute to other OSS projects as part of my day job. I'm fortunate to be working in a culture that respects devoting working hours to OSS. That's not really a coincidence when I've been doing OSS on the side for years beforehand

This isn't for everyone: I spend hours programming outside work, & I agree it's unfair to expect everyone to devote their off hours to programming. But that's how it happened for me
by mcoliver | 2025-04-03 01:10:45+00:00
Here's a csv and google sheet of the data. Turns out they aren't tariffs countries charge us. They are trade imbalance percentages. Unreal:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xK0OQ5VGl8JHmDSIgbXh...

https://gist.github.com/mcoliver/69fe48d03c12388e29cc0cd87eb...
by joquarky | 2025-04-03 01:10:53+00:00
You're not alone in feeling this way.

I'm almost 50 and hit total burnout a couple years ago trying to keep up with ever-increasing KPIs, OKRs, and the relentless churn of new frameworks and trends.

I had to quit caffeine and stimulants too because my heart was starting to have problems.

This industry didn't used to be so stressful. It feels like a Red Queen’s race now: you have to keep running faster just to stay in place.

Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if companies start offering modafinil next, just to keep the line going unsustainably upward. That’s where this trajectory feels headed, and it’s exhausting.
by zecto | 2025-04-03 01:11:00+00:00
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