MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by TheNewsIsHere | 2025-04-29 15:53:52+00:00
> …”the SSA "master death file". If you're in this file you're digitally "deleted from society", after which all credit cards are automatically cancelled, bank accounts frozen, so one cannot get paid, see a doctor, travel or function in US society.”

That is the general idea and working theory, but in practice experience has taught me that the MDF doesn’t actually reliably perform this function. As always, it comes down to implementation.

I’ve handled the estates of multiple deceased members of my family, and in that capacity I have witnessed that the result of your death being reported to SSA varies wildly even across businesses in the same industry.

My favorite is ISPs. At least two of the major national ones don’t actually seem to close accounts upon death, even if notified, with no services active and the account settled to $0.

I still receive bills even after notifying the sender of the account holder’s death. There are still financial services accounts with no activity that seem never to close.

I assume that many businesses are just using open accounts they know belong to dead people in order to artificially inflate their customer counts.

The federal government and its agencies very quickly update their databases with additions to the death file, and that seems to stick. Private sector is a crap shoot.
Show HN: King of the Prompt
by dcastm | 2025-04-29 15:53:53+00:00
Hey HN,

Yesterday, I saw this https://www.vaultbreak.ai/daily-jailbreak here and thought it'd be fun to set up a similar game.

But instead of trying to solve daily puzzles, in this game you fight other people's prompts in a king of the hill type of game.

The idea is to break the "current king"'s prompt to retrieve a secret code injected into it. If you succeed, then you get a chance to set your prompt to defend the new secret code.

It includes a leaderboard with the best results.
by bArray | 2025-04-29 15:53:54+00:00
Just to add, I was at a University campus when the entire building's electrics went out and there was a significant pull due to relatively powerful computers in every room. They initially tried to bring the building back online altogether and failed. Then they tried to bring it back in sections and failed too. In the end they ended up going into each lab, turning every computer off at the wall to bring each lab's power back, and then turn each computer on one by one.

I can only imagine the difficulty of bringing large parts of the grid back online, that rush current must be immense.
by krisoft | 2025-04-29 15:54:07+00:00
I’m not sure that comparision makes sense. The magic of GPS is that it is one way. The satelites send signals and the ground receivers receive them. There space and control segment doesn’t know and doesn’t care how many users there are. Their job remained the exact same even after GPS was allowed to be used for civilian applications.

In other words GPS scales very flat. Launching the constellation costs X, control activities cost Y per month. And those prices don’t change if there is only a single receiver, a thousand, or a billion. Basically allowing GPS to be used by civilians didn’t cost them any extra on top of what they were already paying to keep it operational for the military. Plus there is no natural limit on how many gps receivers there can be.

This is not the same for Starlink. There user stations have a two way connection with the satelites. The system have very real limits on how many users it can serve. And every new user cost something to the provider. Because of this the government would need to manage who can have access and how much they can use the constellation. That would be a nightmare to manage for a government and everyone would be unhappy with them. In short: not a good idea.
by rendaw | 2025-04-29 15:54:12+00:00
I tried consent-o-matic. Aside from the name making it sound like it says ok to all forms of tracking, it broke a few websites for me and failed to get rid of the banners on many others, and I quickly had to turn it off. TBH I'm not sure how it could be expected to work either, unless all websites use the same consent banner solution.
by LoganDark | 2025-04-29 15:54:25+00:00
> I don't understand the concern here, autism is a developmental neurological disorder, why does that fact need to be avoided?

I said nothing about avoiding any facts. Here is specifically what I said:

1. I don't like that the article includes phrases like "who has autism" and "people with autism", because those carry an implication that autism is "something you have" rather than "something you are". I'm very strongly in the "something you are" camp; I firmly believe that "something you have" has never told the full picture, and probably never will.

2. For the same reason, I don't like that the article opens with "For people living with autism, [...]". Even though technically, (say) I could be said to be "living with autism" if "autism" were in the same sense as (say) "style", I wouldn't appreciate if "autism" were in the same sense as (say) "a disability", and that's how the article seems to treat it.

Nowhere do I contest that autism is classified as a developmental neurological disorder. What bothers me is how autism is addressed in the article.

> That isn't an insult, it isn't dehumanizing, after all it's people who have this disorder and autism doesn't make them any less a person.

I think it's important to point out that there are a couple different things that "autism" can refer to:

1. Autism, the neurological difference itself.

2. Autism Spectrum Disorder, social and personal difficulties typically consequent of autism.

Autism Spectrum Disorder has long been the primary way for autism to be diagnosed because diagnosis is typically performed in the context of treatment. However, that does not mean that autism and Autism Spectrum Disorder are necessarily one and the same thing. They are often confused for one another and that is my issue.

> [...] For context I have ADHD, I am not "an ADHD" or "ADHDistic".

Autism and ADHD aren't directly translatable in that way. It's actually ASD that you'd be looking to substitute, and which would make the article okay:

1. "who has ASD" and "people with ASD" are essentially fine because ASD refers to the diagnosis for the relevant disordered symptoms.

2. For the same reason, "For people living with ASD, [...]" is (still not the most ideal in my opinion, but) also fine.

> What about autism is so different?

That autism doesn't refer to symptoms but ADHD refers to symptoms. To refer to autistic symptoms one should use ASD, in my opinion.
by kristofferR | 2025-04-29 15:55:00+00:00
Kagi has the opposite problem though, there's no way to search for results only in a specific language.

99% of the time I like that English results are included in country specific searches (I keep "Norway" as default) so I don't have to switch back and forth all the time, but when I only want Norwegian results I am forced to switch back to Google.
Ask HN: Writings that you'd like to share but haven't
by govideo | 2025-04-29 15:55:01+00:00
Like some people, I believe many of you have written things (short/long; fact/fiction; school/pleasure) that you have not posted broadly but that many others would would enjoy reading.

I believe this because of my experience at YouTube in the early days, focused on individual creators and because of the many great writing pieces I remember reading of my classmates assignments in school.

Two questions, please: 1a. Where have you tried sharing your pieces? What was your experience? 1b. If you haven't or now stopped, why? 2. Can you paste some of your writing (snippet or full) or link here?

I love to hear/read under-published writing!
by shadowgovt | 2025-04-29 15:55:30+00:00
Funny enough, the effect of inverters on the grid may be mitigated with a relatively simple solution: add a flywheel to the inverter-based connection farms to "fake" a turbine.

The wind or solar farm drives the flywheel and if the grid-side power starts to fluctuate, it pulls on the flywheel before the inverters feel it. You lose some total efficiency in the electrical-to-mechanical-to-electrical conversion, but get enough flywheels and maybe you don't care (because they also act as a place to store peak energy production when demand is low).
by MobiusHorizons | 2025-04-29 15:55:49+00:00
Nice article, I hope we see the volume of spam and marketing reduce overall, but I wouldn’t bet on it even if it does become ineffective.

Just fyi, there are a few typos I noticed:

> where the accuracy and quality of the has improved tremendously at scale.

Missing a word. Maybe “content “?

> this is also going to cause a certain about of fatigue for the users and customers.

about -> amount
by venantius | 2025-04-29 15:55:58+00:00
It is possible for all of the following to be true: 1. This study is accurate 2. We are early in a major technological shift 3. Companies have allocated massive amounts of capital to this shift that may not represent a good investment 4. Assuming that the above three will remain true going forward is a bad idea

The .com boom and bust is an apt reference point. The technological shift WAS real, and the value to be delivered ultimately WAS delivered…but not in 1999/2000.

It may be we see a massive crash in valuations but AI still ends up the dominant driver of software value over the next 5-10 years.
by ceejayoz | 2025-04-29 15:56:03+00:00
> First off autism rates are provable increasing in the US.

Yes. That's what happens when you make a brand new label. (And then redefine it a few times; Asperger's used to be separate, now it's part of the spectrum. Or when we started realizing that, say, women are underdiagnosed with it and started working to address that.)

Rates of female "hysteria" are at an all-time low, for similar reasons.

> It is a proven fact that older fathers have a higher change of having offspring with autism…

Which could be just because of biological changes from their age, or environmental exposures during that time, but also could have other explanations, like autistic people having a harder time on average finding long-term partners.
by nrvn | 2025-04-29 15:56:05+00:00
you are not alone... https://socket.dev/blog/curl-project-and-go-security-teams-r...

I believe there must be some "Murphy's law" or something with a name for that situation. When there is an established system and process there will be people geniunely using and it will work 100% for such people and bring value to all parties. And then there will be people "gaming the system" (for instance "security" "researchers" using CVE created by them as a personal or corporate KPI) and abusing other legitimate players. It is like patent trolls but better fortunately for us.

Fortunately for all people of reason, the system itself gets patched. Maybe not in the best way possible but still. Two examples:

- Openvex - this is my way as a project owner/developer/maintainer to declare that CVE-XXXX-YYYYY is false positive and why.

- context-aware vulnerability scanning (or exploitability scanning) - govulncheck is a great example of that. You run and it says, module X has vulnerabilities Y and Z but you keep calm because we have not found any symbols in your codebase using it.

I wish more scanners would adopt the second approach and projects like npm would greatly benefit from it. As you truly note you pick a random project and it will be 50% filled with ReDos or something that will be sitting in some nested dependency of eslint's dep tree that will never see the light of production environment's CPU.

That being said, any vulnerability reporting and obtaining a CVE ID bypassing the project's security policies and responsible disclosure procedures must be prohibited. As a maintainer I want to know about a newly discovered vulnerability in my code to fix it and then the kind person that reported it to me can proceed to MITRE with the report in one hand and fixed version in the other.
Show HN: Xilt – A concurrent log parser written in Go
by tackx | 2025-04-29 15:56:17+00:00
xilt is a utility for parsing Common and Combined Log Format (CLF) log files and storing them in SQLite for further analysis. I have built it as a learning project but it ended up proving useful in my work day-to-day. Maybe someone else occasionally working with CLF logs will also find it handy!
by specialist | 2025-04-29 15:56:35+00:00
Soil science continues to march forward. Noob me trusts we'll invent ways to mitigate metals and metalloids (and toxins in general).

It could prove to be as easy as novel fertilizers and soil amendments.

Much like how Zeke Hausfather is researching how to leverage agriculture to accelerate carbon capture.

"What's the deal with enhanced rock weathering to store CO2?" [2025-02-07]

https://www.volts.wtf/p/whats-the-deal-with-enhanced-rock

https://thebreakthrough.org/people/zeke-hausfather

Surely there's (economical) ways to neutralize toxins in place. Storing them in compounds which are no longer bio-available.

IIRC the term of art is bio-remediation.
by mettamage | 2025-04-29 15:57:13+00:00
Ah fun! SDT is one of my favorite theories that I'm still actively using to this day to get myself intrinsically motivated on something. I've thrown a lot of theories away due to the reproducibility crisis and similar things concerning psychology. SDT isn't one of them :)

One of my other favorite theories is HEXACO. And personality does play into intrinsic motivation, to some extent.

Disclaimer: I skimmed the article.

Fun autonomy hacks:

1. Reframe the narrative. For example, when I studied CS at school, I didn't study CS. I studied how to learn as fast as possible. I happened to have studied CS.

2. Listen to Spotify to get into a solo task. I usually turn it down if I happen to get focused.

Also a note: intrinsic motivation is tough when you're sleep deprived. I've had moments where I was motivated and sleep deprived but they often don't coincide.

This is all to say that stuff like this go onto a fundamental layer of physical health. Something I dind't quite get when I was younger.
by unquietwiki | 2025-04-29 15:57:25+00:00
I already know of at least one company that's pivoted to using a mix of AI and off-shoring their support, as well as some other functions; that's underway, with results unclear, aside from layoffs that took place. There was also a brouhaha a year or two ago when a mental health advocacy tried using AI to replace their support team... did not go as planned when it suggested self-harm to some users.
by fnordpiglet | 2025-04-29 15:57:26+00:00
Except there is no absolute coordinate system. Position is relative to something, and it’s not space. Likewise movement is only meaningful if defined with respect to something else.

Momentum is simply established movement with respect to something else. Acceleration is the only really meaningful thing, as it involves force and a transfer of energy. Momentum is a measure of how much acceleration it would require to change relative speeds with respect to something else. If you removed the something else from the system or substituted it for something with the same “momentum,” everything would cease to have momentum and would not be moving.

The insight that there is no global coordinate system in space is a key insight of relativity. Momentum is a measurement of the state of a system in an inertial frame and can be seen as a measure of the energy required to effectively get all the mass to have that velocity, or the energy required to bring the entire frame to relative rest. It’s a conserved measure, and a bunch of other useful things - but it itself isn’t “a thing,” it’s a measure.
by jjordan | 2025-04-29 15:57:34+00:00
The app id (com.facebook.stella) was for an app called Meta View. It looks like they just rebranded an app that was previously used for Smart glasses and is now using it as their official AI app.

Why rebrand rather than create a new app? Who knows. Maybe to demonstrate a high(ish) download count at launch, maybe for app/play store credibility.
by dragonwriter | 2025-04-29 15:58:14+00:00
> I thunk it boils down to the fact that acquiring land near San Francisco or LA through imminent domain would be both hideously expensive and extremely unpopular.

“Eminent domain”, and the SF to SJ run for CA HSR uses almost entirely existing rail right-ot-way shared with Caltrain.

> Building "High Speed Rail to nowhere" in the Central Valley allowed them kick that can of political infighting down the road.

You are right that doing Central Valley first was political, but you have the wrong political motivation. The political motivation was (1) to mitigate partisan political resistance to the project by prividing the most immediate benefit to the Republican districts in the Central Valley, and (2) to secure federal funding under ARRA, which prioritized shovel-ready projects, because the issues that needed cleared to reach an approximation of that state for the termini were more time consuming.
by idiotsecant | 2025-04-29 15:58:29+00:00
Grid operators are, as a rule, not opposed to renewables at all. They are 'opposed' to resources that do not provide frequency support and are non-dispatchable. Renewables need storage to be well behaved. As soon as we start factoring that into the build at scale the problems go away. Generators want to ignore all the inconvenient physics of power transmission networks and just want $$$ for MW. The system doesn't work if enough people operate like that.
by zahlman | 2025-04-29 15:58:32+00:00
> And outside of HN, no one seems to blink at a 250MB bundle.

I can remember when I would have to leave a 250MB download running overnight.

Before that, I can remember when it would have filled my primary hard drive more than six times over.

... Why can't the app-specific code just get plugged into a common, reusable Electron client?
by canadianwriter | 2025-04-29 15:58:39+00:00
I never have more than like 10 tabs open at a time, so likely wont be helpful to me, but I find this super interesting!

Can someone explain what normal people use so many tabs for? It seems to be super common to have tons and tons open.

Are people using tabs as a soft bookmark of basically anything interesting? Afraid to close the page because they wont find it in their history or bookmarks? Is this more an issue with bookmarks and history not being as useful as they could be?

Not judging or anything, I just find how other people use tools differently than I do an interesting subject.
by rvz | 2025-04-29 15:58:49+00:00
Exactly. No mention of writing automated tests or even TDD at all.

It's best to save everyone by writing tests that prevent a $100 issue on your machine from becoming a costly $10M+ problem in production as the product scales after it has launched.

This won't be the last time and this is what 'vibe coding' doesn't consider and it it will introduce more issues like this.
by pydry | 2025-04-29 15:59:20+00:00
>We start with: assert factorial(1) == 1

Part of the problem with discussions and tutorials about TDD is that they always used contrived, oversimplified, unrealistic examples which bypass to demonstrate or prove a point.

Sadly Kent Beck is not an exception to this.

The majority of criticisms of TDD dont really apply to "what if I were implementing factorial?" they apply to the kind of features an average dev would build.
by reverendsteveii | 2025-04-29 15:59:23+00:00
The denial from amazon is only half an hour old as of this writing, which means it was about 6 minutes old when you posted this. and again, as I had said plainly before you even joined this thread, the thing I want to discuss is politicians using the word 'political' as a pejorative. I think it's interesting how he seems to be redefining the term and taking advantage of everyone else's distaste for it in order to make what other people do "political" (conniving, backstabbing, and all sorts of other negative connotations) whereas what he does AS THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES is not "political".
Show HN: Personal site and guestbook from a 17-year-old dev
by jonbng | 2025-04-29 15:59:38+00:00
Hey HN! I’m Jonathan, a 17-year-old student and developer from Denmark (currently on exchange in the U.S.).

I’ve been working on this portfolio to better present what I’ve built, what I’m learning, and where I want to go.

It’s fully custom-built (Next.js + Tailwind), includes some of my favorite projects, and a public guestbook you can sign

Would love your thoughts or feedback, and feel free to leave a message!
by Tepix | 2025-04-29 15:59:54+00:00
I did a little variant of the classic river boat animal problem:

"so you're on one side of the river with 2 wolves and 4 sheep and a boat that can carry 2 entities. The wolves eat the sheep when they are left alone with the sheep. How do you get them all across the river?"

ChatGPT (free+reasoning) came up with a solution with 11 moves, it didn't think about going back empty.

Qwen3 figured out the optimal solution with 7 moves and summarized it nicely:

First, move the wolves to the right to free the left shore of predators. Then shuttle the sheep in pairs, returning with wolves when necessary to keep both sides safe. Finally, return the wolves to the right when all sheep are across.
by yuliyp | 2025-04-29 15:59:59+00:00
> however, you would immediately have a civil case against the person and/or their representative for their false claim.

Look how well that's worked against DMCA and Youtube copyright strike abuse. In the case that the posts that are being taken down are not commercial, being able to prove damages means that the effectiveness of such a deterrent are minimal. The act could have put in some sort of disincentive against fraudulent reports, or even provided for a way to find the reason your stuff was taken down, but notably does not do so.
by 28304283409234 | 2025-04-29 16:00:14+00:00
To me, it is not the results that are the kicker. It is that I no longer have to waste my time filtering out Google customers paying for my attention.

Every result in Kagi is there to try to help ME. Not Google. Not their customers.

And even though DDG is fine privacy-wise, in this regard they are no better than Google.
by a_t48 | 2025-04-29 16:00:19+00:00
I’ve done worse. At my very first job I wrote some slow login rewards calculation code for a mobile game that caused a black screen on startup for long enough that users thought the app was broken and closed it out. (I was simulating passing time one minute at a time in lua or some BS. Oops!) It cost the company some large fraction of my salary at the time. My boss very kindly said that it was okay, everyone ends up mucking up like that at some point in the career, and no I wasn’t fired because the company just spend a large sum teaching me a lesson. We sat down at a whiteboard and I quickly came up with a solution that could just calculate the rewards one should get between two dates - there was some complexity that made this harder than it sounds on paper, but simulating time manually was not the answer.