MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by resource_waste | 2025-05-28 16:14:57+00:00
Maybe I am a bit jaded by life, but I think Trust is a bit foolish. However I have some notes from my International Relations Realist studies:

>Trust is subordinate to anything that can flip Power dynamics. If things will not change the Status Quo of power, trust can be a held as it has benefits in reducing costs. If a power dynamic can be flipped, trust will be broken.

>Trust being broken has implications. After Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia, Britain refused to negotiate with him. Not even minor issues could be resolved and only naked power decided things. Stalin had this issue after enforcing communist parties over Eastern Europe.

>As an alternative to trust: Verification. Verification mechanisms exist. Weapons inspectors are an example of this. If the weapons inspectors are not allowed somewhere, you should not just Trust blindly. Obviously the cost is higher when you need to spend resources on verification.

It feels weird to say, but I don't need much trust. I ensure interests are aligned and have verification for things that are important.

Blind trust that wasnt earned is absurd. Trust when stakes are high is absurd. I genuinely feel bad for children and young people who are taught to blindly trust, as they will get burned.

/unpopular reality.
by staticman2 | 2025-05-28 16:14:57+00:00
I love this as a science fiction thought experiment but altering the male/ female ratio will never happen.

If someone tried to implement it- aside from the obvious problem of authoritarianism- the resulting male minority would live life in romantic "easy mode" so people who want the best for their kids would want male children and rebel against a system more likely to give them female children who would find romantic prospects difficult.

I suppose if someone invented a way to alter sexuality to allow straight women to opt into becoming gay the romance problem could be mitigated, but I'm guessing that this is impossible given the human brain is only so neuroplastic in adult years.
by stego-tech | 2025-05-28 16:14:58+00:00
And that’s what he was getting at: if TDS hadn’t put words in Cloudflare’s mouth and kept paying their bills on time, there’s little doubt Cloudflare would have ever removed them as a customer.

Cloudflare’s consistent response to accusations it defends illicit or harmful content has been some variation of “they’re paying customers and it’s not our place to judge their content”. Which, sure, noble hill to die on and all that jazz, but also something of a cowardly defense for speech whose sole purpose is creating harm.
by mushufasa | 2025-05-28 16:15:04+00:00
Yes you can name a brand name without using their logo.

That's not what the author did here -- he invented a fake logo and chose a domain name and title that include "WaffleHouse." Trademark law is specifically designed to prevent people from creating a fake logo and registering a domain that makes people think it is your own brand. Yes, there is some exception for parodies and criticism, but writing a review / parody sketch is a completely different format than a website that lists information that purports to be official open/closures of your business.

You can't create a product that contains the brand name of another product; I can't invent "Magic Kleenex" or "Better Google," so he similarly can't name something a "Waffle House Index." What he could do is name something "disaster index" or "breakfast restaurant index" where the data happens to be from the waffle house locations.
by whalesalad | 2025-05-28 16:15:13+00:00
I maintain there is no issue. It's really not hard. conda is a smell for me though.

pyenv is all you need. it manages python versions and python virtual environments. you can create and destroy them just as easily as git branches.

pyenv + good ol' requirements.txt is really all you need.

if your env dictates containers, it's even easier to work with. FROM python:version and done.
by lafond | 2025-05-28 16:15:15+00:00
Author here!

After receiving the C&D, the method with which I was getting the data was removed/patched (which I'm now noticing was not mentioned in the blog post...) I did ask them if there was any thing I could to keep it up and never received a response, and rather than playing a cat & mouse game of "now you don't have our branding, but you are scraping are data so here's another C&D" I just took it down :)
by FeloniousHam | 2025-05-28 16:15:16+00:00
I wonder how much of "markets adjust and other types of employment opportunities pop up" is just the aging out through retirement and death of the redundant workers.

Basically, the labor theory of Planck's principle: '"A great scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it", Planck once wrote.'
by everfree | 2025-05-28 16:15:39+00:00
Of course if you want to buy something useful you have to pay someone who created it or someone who is reselling it.

It sounds like you're basically describing the software market, and more broadly, intellectual property in general. When you write software, it creates something using near-zero physical resources and physical effort, but it isn't a Ponzi scheme.

Your description could also apply to all fiat money, too. You're born with zero of it, and you have to buy it from someone who ultimately got it from someone who printed it out of thin air. That doesn't mean all money everywhere is a Ponzi scheme.

Expenditure of real resources isn't an indicator of a product's worth. If it was, Microsoft would be burning coal to power Microsoft Word.
by xyst | 2025-05-28 16:15:58+00:00
The mere threat of legal action for most Americans means $$$.

As a college student, probably broke as well. This person probably does not have the legal understanding or access to lawyers to guide him through it.

Much easier to take it down rather than deal with potential legal ramifications.

A half decent lawyer or even the "free" lawyer services at most universities probably would have advised just removing the "trademark" elements as you would.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-28 16:16:07+00:00
In fact, IPv4 and IPv6 both have a reserved range of multicast addresses (formerly called "Class D"):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicast_address

There were more than a few people who spotted how disused this range had become after mbone experiments, and sometimes suggested reclaiming the range as IPv4 address space was being exhausted.

Interestingly, there are reserved multicast addresses (yes, addresses, not ports) not only for OSPF, but for many other interior routing protocols, as well as mDNS, LLMNR, and NTP. Conspicuously absent is any reservation for BGP.
by Teever | 2025-05-28 16:16:25+00:00
The assumption underlying this is that the governments that implement the WIPO treaty are doing so without duress or threat of tariffs from the United States which may or may not be true. We'll never know.

But what we do know is that the EU has recently put regulations in place that allow them to curtail the IP privileges given to companies in countries that they feel economically threatened by.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Coercion_Instrument

It will be interesting to see them use this or if the mere existence of the law is and the mere possibility of use is them using it.
by hagbard_c | 2025-05-28 16:16:31+00:00
There used to be an ad on Dutch television back in the 80's from a loo paper manufacturer with the punchline Koning, Keizer, Admiraal - ${brand_of_loo_paper} kennen ze allemaal which translates to King, Emperor, Admiral - they all know this brand of loo paper. We (i.e. my father whom we naturally followed in this respect) turned this into Koning Keizer Admiraal, schijten moeten ze allemaal or ...they all have to shit.

Everybody shits, farts, burps... device or no device. I´d say those who feel the need for a device like this are guilty by association of farting and burping even louder than average, why otherwise get something to mask their clearly obnoxious and dare I say noxious emanations in the privy?
by palmotea | 2025-05-28 16:16:32+00:00
> big government is bad. therefore we should have government run journals.

IIRC, RFK is not a small-government conservative at all. He's a big-government liberal vaccine crank. He's the HHS secretary not for any kind of conservative ideological affinity, but because of a quid-pro-quo for throwing is support behind Trump during the election.

The Trump administration is weird.
Show HN: SoundHSA's "Move-to-Earn" MVP – get paid sats for steps ( BitcoinConf)
by vveerrgg | 2025-05-28 16:17:33+00:00
Hey HN! We’re testing a fun “Move-to-Earn” MVP at the Bitcoin Conference (May 27-29) in Vegas:

Walk 30,000 steps during the conference for a chance to Earn 21,000 sats (≈ $X) – paid to your Lightning wallet Login with Nostr to participate ([Lightning NWC supported?])

Why?

HSAs (Health Savings Accounts) are already tax-advantaged – we’re exploring how to gamify health incentives with crypto.

This is a proof-of-concept; if it works, we’ll expand to more challenges. Download it live for iOS or Android here: https://soundhsa.com

Looking for feedback:

Would you use a “steps-for-sats” app long-term? What other health/fintech mashups would excite you? Technical Qs? We’re using [tech stack, e.g., Lightning API, step-tracking SDK].

(P.S. Not at the conference? You can still max you steps. We’re also brainstorming virtual challenges too – ideas welcome!)
by jphillips99 | 2025-05-28 16:18:12+00:00
ARES (Automatic Robot Evaluation System) is a open-source (Apache 2.0) platform for automatically ingesting, curating, and evaluating robot data using ML models to quickly and accurately understand policy performance, identify areas for improvement, and generate new robot datasets, all without setting up any heavy infrastructure. Researchers tend to chase point-solutions for specific tasks or paper implementations, but ARES is designed to be a generalized platform for long-term robot research that scales from a laptop to the cloud. ARES is built to be simple and scalable, with a special focus on ease of use. All computation and model inference can be run through local resources or cloud APIs via model providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Modal, Replicate, etc., requiring only a credit card for access - no complex cloud infrastructure or GPU setup needed. We make our data available on the Hugging Face Hub, which contains roughly 5000 rollouts from the Open X-Embodiment project. See the Data section for more details.

At a high level, ARES is composed of three main components:

- Ingestion: automatically transform raw robot data into a structured format with VLMs - Annotation: annotate the rollouts with pseduo-labels for downstream tasks - Curation and Modeling: understand data distributions and select data for training or evaluation

Who and what is ARES for?

ARES is a platform for understanding robot data, targeted at robot developers and researchers. Researchers and developers suffer from two main problems: building point-solutions for specific tasks or papers and transitioning from research-scripts to production-tools. ARES aims to solve both of these problems by providing a platform for robot data understanding, enabling rapid development of new robot systems.

You can use ARES to:

- Curate and annotate ground-truth teleoperation data - Evaluate the performance of robot models - Analyze batches of robot data to improve policies

I wrote a longer blog post about ARES and why robotics researchers need to adopt scalable platforms instead of script-based point-solutions here: https://a16z.com/ares-an-open-source-platform-for-robot-data...
by nalekberov | 2025-05-28 16:18:34+00:00
From the FAQ page (https://leta.mullvad.net/faq) :

> However, Leta is useless as a service if you use the perfect non-logging VPN, a privacy focussed DNS service, a web browser that resists fingerprinting, and correlation attacks from global actors. Leta is also useless if your browser blocks all cookies, tracking pixels and other tracking technologies.

In other words everyone can benefit from it. I don't know any browser (not talking about obscure browsers like lynx) who can completely resist fingerprinting.
by anarazel | 2025-05-28 16:18:38+00:00
The numbers in the post highlight an issue I have with Samsung consumer SSDs - they've slowed down FUA writes to an absurd degree.

open_datasync 249.578 ops/sec 4007 usecs/op fdatasync 608.573 ops/sec 1643 usecs/op

open_datasync (i.e. O_DSYNC) ends up as FUA writes, fdatasync() as a plain write followed by a cache flush.

On just about anything else a single FUA write is either the same speed as a write + fdatasync, or considerably faster.

This is pretty annoying, as using O_DSYNC is a lot more suitable for concurrent WAL writes, but because Samsung SSDs are widespread, changing the default would regress performance substantially for a good number of users.
by ceejayoz | 2025-05-28 16:18:39+00:00
> FYI it is literally required by law that, to maintain a trademark, the company with the trademark must actively enforce it on an ongoing basis. Even if this side-project was benign, Waffle House must send cease-and-desist letters to maintain their trademark generally under US law.

That's not the only option available. They can, if they find the use of the trademark to be benign (or even beneficial), offer a license to use it for this purpose.

For example, the Linux trademark has an approval and attribution process: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/legal/the-linux-mark

Folks should consider hiring Jack Daniels' law firm. https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/jack_daniels_cease-a...

> In order to resolve this matter, because you are both a Louisville ‘neighbor’ and a fan of the brand, we simply request that you change the cover design when the book is re-printed. If you would be willing to change the design sooner than that (including on the digital version), we would be willing to contribute a reasonable amount towards the costs of doing so.
by ejkra | 2025-05-28 16:18:49+00:00
Absolute certainty is challenging with a cost-based optimizer in the mix. DDB doesn't face this challenge. Although, cost for some query patterns in DDB would shift into your application layer - so you may not have exactly the cost certainty you imagine?

Would you be willing to pay more for certainty? E.g. rent the full server at peak + 20% and run at 15% utilization some of the time? Provisioned capacity or pre-committed spend seem like reasonable, but perhaps more costly, ways to get certainty.
by criddell | 2025-05-28 16:19:38+00:00
If you haven't already read it, you might enjoy Neil Postman's Amusing ourselves to Death. I'm about half way through it myself and it has already changed how I look at some things.

He wrote it from the point of view of television destroying our society, but as you can imagine, the internet is so much worse.

> 98% of a newspaper consists of content that journalism students consider worthless trash

In the book, Postman makes the case for the value of news being related to how actionable the information is. The weather report is valuable because I might change my plans if it's going to rain. The story about a mass stabbing attack in Germany (which I bet your journalism friends do not consider trash) has little value to me, a person living in Austin, TX.

If there were ever to be a HN Book Club, I think Amusing Ourselves to Death would be a great selection for it.
by lproven | 2025-05-28 16:20:05+00:00
And yet, we all coped with SMS.

Despite this terrible burden on people's SpArkLiNg 0rIg1n4l cReAtIviTy we send TRILLIONS a year.

https://www.intradyn.com/text-message-statistics-trends/

It's not so bad. You can live with it. Being CREATIVE and expressing your personality damages the medium and impairs conveying your message. So: don't.
by RiverCrochet | 2025-05-28 16:20:12+00:00
Microsoft's first popular operating system was MS-DOS, so your first versions of Windows kinda acted like DOS as far as third-party software was concerned:

- No concept of installers apart from an INSTALL.COM or INSTALL.EXE provided by the vendor.

- Installer often just copied stuff to a new root-level subdirectory, selectable in the installer, if one was there. Sometimes you just had to make your own subdirectory and copy everything yourself.

- Often everything regarding the application was done in that subdirectory, including running executables, reading data, writing data, and often saving documents. This was very different from the UNIX tradition of putting executables in /bin, and read/write data in /etc or /var, with appropriate permissions set.

Other interesting stuff:

- Apart from a couple of files (IO.SYS, MS-DOS.SYS) needing to be the 1st and 2nd "inodes" on the disk (so the bootloader could find them), and CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT having to reside somewhere in the root directory, the kernel of MS-DOS didn't really care at all about any other file. Even COMMAND.COM could be anywhere you want - you would tell MS-DOS where it was with the COMSPEC= setting in CONFIG.SYS. So all your DOS external commands could be anywhere (and reachable if a PATH command was in your AUTOEXEC.BAT), although I believe the MS-DOS installer put them at \DOS or \MSDOS, so that was probably pretty de-facto standard.

So... DOS, the precursor to Windows - it was anything goes.

When Windows became a thing (version 3.x was when it took off), the above is typically how users worked with programs under MS-DOS at the time. It's why programs tended to do everything in their "C:\Program Files" folder.

And I don't know when Microsoft developed the arcane and overengineered .MSI system but it wasn't right when Windows NT came out in 1993 and I think it wasn't even there for Windows 95 when that came out. Even if Microsoft did have .MSI right with the first release of Windows NT/95, there were still many existing programs that didn't use it and wouldn't use it right away. So Microsoft had to support the existing mess and habits from DOS days.
by mcphage | 2025-05-28 16:20:38+00:00
On one hand, yes, the author was using Waffle House's own data to populate the site. But on the other, Waffle House has no way of guaranteeing that remains the case, and they don't want their private APIs to be depended upon by a 3rd party site seen by thousands of people. So I guess I'm not surprised by their reaction. Still: it would be fun if it actually was a thing.
Show HN: An AI Stock Screener that's fast and accurate
by kintalo | 2025-05-28 16:20:55+00:00
Hello!

I built a stock screener (yes, powered by AI) that's fast and accurate.

Every AI finance tool that tries to do this has stale data or relies too much on web search. We took a different approach. We're indexing all financial and price data in real time and searching on that.

The benefit is you can input any granular query instead of fixed dropdowns and it's simply easier to type out what you want then going through a bunch of inputs.

Example of queries that would work well: - Companies with over $10b in revenue and a 10% growth rate and sort them by P/E ratio - AI stocks with revenue growth > 20% YoY - CDN companies - FinTech companies in New York sorted by rev - Stock that beat earnings last week

Would love any feedback! We have a lot of data available to query but our coverage can be better. If there's anything in particular you'd want added let me know!
by looofooo0 | 2025-05-28 16:21:08+00:00
Torvald claimed:

"So that was one of the issues. But one of the issues really was, I knew I needed it to be distributed, but it needed to be really, really stable. And people kind of think that using the SHA-1 hashes was a huge mistake. But to me, SHA-1 hashes were never about the security. It was about finding corruption.

Because we’d actually had some of that during the BitKeeper things, where BitKeeper used CRCs and MD5s, right, but didn’t use it for everything. So one of the early designs for me was absolutely everything was protected by a really good hash."

https://github.blog/open-source/git/git-turns-20-a-qa-with-l...
by azemetre | 2025-05-28 16:21:10+00:00
Because you won't be rewarded with money and influence while still having the same risks of layoffs.

At this point you're better off working on your own thing because the company is usually, always with few exceptions mind you, a dishonest actor that is openly hostile.

The elites can't blame the state of the world on workers when they've created out hellscape of treadmills to delusion and abandonment.
by InvisibleUp | 2025-05-28 16:21:29+00:00
It’s Blackstone that’s investing in single-family homes, not BlackRock. They also only own 0.06% of US single-family housing stock. Easy mistake to make.

Also, there was absolutely inflation before Bretton Woods, and significantly worse inflation at that. See, for example, the hyperinflation during Weimar Germany which led to WWII. Or the nearly 10% deflation in the US during the Great Depression, which just exacerbated the effects by severely discouraging investment that would have helped kickstart the economy again. Post-Bretton Woods, major currencies are generally substantially more stable and predictable.
by consumer451 | 2025-05-28 16:26:59+00:00
The best deep-dive series in the SpaceX realm is CSI Starbase.

If you are interested in highly informed speculation on the resonance issues that Starship is facing, this episode is very long and nerdy, but somehow flies by.

"POGO: The 63-Year-Old Problem Threatening Starship's Success"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkqWhHvfAXY
by belorn | 2025-05-28 16:27:24+00:00
US has had periods of wild spread moral panic around satanic worshipping, including murder trials where such ideas became central to the cases.

Scrutinizing belifs generally don't lead to anything but misery for everyone involved. This is very different from scrutinize crime that has happened.

The only grey area is the role of secret police. Some people, possible a majority, do want the government to scrutinize belifs and political views in order to determen risk. I am less sure, but I also know that human rights and protected classes has less protection against risk assessments conducted by the secret police.
by idlip | 2025-05-28 16:27:33+00:00
> What are Emacs really good at?

Emacs is the most open software you will see. I'd say it has good community, extension (packages) and legacy of staying maintained. You can craft emacs as you want, more than an editor. You can interface with various tools. Heck the main USP you would realize is the god-tier documentation on everything and discovering tiny features.

Since you mentioned only note-taking, I'd say in that area, emacs excels. But note that note-taking system is not everything, emacs will allow you to craft and build workflow as you require.

> Where do they shine compared to Obsidian?

emacs is: Editor + Note taking + Code editor + Integrate with tools ++ Extend more

> Where are they worse?

You might feel like packages or community is not that fast paced compared to other popular, trendy tools.

Emacs is a investment and journey, its not so I know emacs, its like I grow with emacs. You need lot of time to learn and understand to grasp it.

You can try two routes, 1. Replicate same workflow as obsidian in emacs, or 2. use emacs from scratch (minimal config) and understand the essence of it to build your own workflow.