MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by D13Fd | 2025-05-28 16:28:46+00:00
A proof-of-work system intentionally wastes energy as a means of doing a distributed spreadsheet. That's it.

When you use scale that spreadsheet to track currency, a proof-of-work system wastes massive amounts of energy, by design, all to keep the distributed spreadsheet honest.

Energy is scarce and expensive. Wasting huge amounts of it for a proof-of-work crypto systems drives up the cost of electricity for everyone.

Beyond that, all electricity generation has negative external effects, including carbon release, pollution, or even just wasting space. We are all impacted by those effects. It doesn't matter if the proof-of-work system uses "green" electricity, it's still intentionally wasting massive amounts of electricity and other resources that could be used elsewhere, all just to change values on a spreadsheet.
by anonzzzies | 2025-05-28 16:29:01+00:00
As I said before here recently; I am replacing all my tooling by stuff I built and that includes chat. I own my company so my colleagues can leave or use it too (they help me build so yes, they will use) and family will come on board if they have a side access to people who won't, which we do: we integrate other chats and for those we losen the rules. I have no interest, when I die in 40 years, to depend on even one line of software not inspected by me.
by short_sells_poo | 2025-05-28 16:29:04+00:00
Sadly this is true. 150k a year is "only" about 80-85k net, good luck buying a tiny Victorian row house for >1mln quid without your parents sponsoring the down payment. Or you can buy a crappy apartment built to "UK Standards" where everything is done by people who truly don't give even a shred of effort to quality and you are in the hilarious position that you don't even own your own walls.

And that is all on a very-very good salary in the UK (90th %ile is 60k).

Moving out to the suburbs or to satellite town is not a solution either. If you want to be on a main train line, the prices will be just as bad as in the city. If you compromise on the transport, prepare for your life to become an unmitigated misery as the terrible, dysfunctional, unreliable and at the same time extremely expensive UK train system bends you over the barrel.

There are a few lucky people who manage to pull off a London level salary and work remotely from a LCOL area, but this is not possible if your job physically requires your presence (e.g. you are a dental hygienist).
by sceptic123 | 2025-05-28 16:29:14+00:00
> Hanif marveled at the budget, time, and effort that went into crafting the two-part 90 minute podcast and how, today, there's no way it would have happened

Meanwhile, from Pineapple Street Studios in 2024: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-wonder-of-stevie/i...
by Aunche | 2025-05-28 16:29:45+00:00
> Fatal Recklessness at Boeing Traces Back to Long-Standing C-Suite Greed

I suspect this is true to a certain extent, but IMO this narrative has been exaggerated to the point where it is completely useless. If Boeing execs were only focused on "short term profits," how did commercial aviation deaths decrease despite there being significantly more flights?

https://www.statista.com/chart/4854/commercial-aviation-deat...
by zomg | 2025-05-28 16:29:56+00:00
more relevant for this audience is the digital health platform and wearable apnimed has developed to support their clinical trials. i saw their presentation "Sensor-Based Digital Health Technology Enables Digital Medicine for Sleep-Related Breathing Diseases" recently at ATS 2025 in san francisco.

* https://www.healio.com/news/pulmonology/20250518/platform-li...

* https://x.com/atscommunity/status/1923417506460455360

* https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1083591
by stuxnet79 | 2025-05-28 16:30:28+00:00
> That said, I do think it's got the brightest future of any coin besides BTC for the very reason.

Brightest future in terms of what? Traction? Market cap? This is what I thought 7 years ago, and I beefed up my XMR position as a result. Meanwhile, Bitcoin an objectively inferior technology, has 25x since then.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-05-28 16:30:38+00:00
> Works until it doesn't.

Boeing 737 Max: The troubled history of fatal crashes and 346 deaths in 7 years - https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/busi... - July 8th, 2024

As Boeing looks to buy a key 737 supplier [Spirit AeroSystems], a whistleblower says the problems run deep - https://www.npr.org/2024/06/16/nx-s1-4998520/boeing-737-spir... - June 16th, 2024

Boeing’s Decline Traced to Decades of Catering to Shareholders Above All Others - https://bhr.stern.nyu.edu/quick-take/boeings-decline-traced-... - April 8th, 2024

Boeing’s long fall, and how it might recover - https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boein... - April 7th, 2024
by IshKebab | 2025-05-28 16:30:51+00:00
No, because 3D printing was never going to replace all manufacturing. Anyone who said that didn't even have a basic understanding of manufacturing, and I don't recall any serious claims like that.

3D printing has definitely replaced some manufacturing, and it has had a huge effect on product design.

These anti-AI articles are getting more tedious than the vibe coding articles.
by pixl97 | 2025-05-28 16:30:59+00:00
But if you understand the problem, you'll also understand why the bureaucracy exist...

The problem is complexity of our systems, of modern society, has grown beyond the capacity for people in view of the problems to understand them.

I've seen systems with incompatible configurations cause issues like this. An application needs a security related setting turned on to ensure it doesn't pass bad data to an upstream server. This security related setting causes another problem with a necessary application on the server causing connection problems with it.

The upstream application put the bad data issue as a low priority issue because there is a workaround. The vendor application also has it as low priority with about a 5 month lead time because they also have a workaround. Both teams see the issue as fixed for now in their eyes because they cannot grasp the use of the tools in a system that interacts with an immense number of other applications. All of these issues get bundled up to management groups that argue back and forth about priorities because they have 100 other fires burning to, many of them serious issues like exploits in software and such.

And this is just software, something that is inherently flexible. Now imagine things like infrastructure where you have all kinds of critical systems stacked on top of each other, for example beside a new building or a new road. You can set schedules on working on the stuff in order, but these schedules break all the time because when you start digging you find even more issues. Suddenly projects are being pushed back months while drivers are screaming in frustration because the road is down to one lane forever.
by Snowfield9571 | 2025-05-28 16:32:27+00:00
One can memorize a piano piece, write out the notes on a grand staff and tell you all the different musical patterns in it, but if they never put there hands on the keys they won’t be able to play it. Rote learning is part of learning. This trope that’s gotten popular that if you teach concepts the rest will follow is just false. You need both.
by JohnMakin | 2025-05-28 16:32:50+00:00
Cease and desists are the equivalent of asking firmly but nicely in the legal world. They don't hold any legal bearing or obligate you to any sort of response. They are usually hoping you get intimidated into doing what they ask. You can always call their bluff and say 'no,' although I see in comments the OP neglected to mention they also patched/fixed the technique used to get this data so it probably was more of this, I hope.
by tomxor | 2025-05-28 16:33:38+00:00
I had to switch to iVPN last year (similar ethos), because Mullvad became pretty much unusable due to blacklisting and laggy DNS servers.

I'm assuming it has something to do with the push in recent years to expand their userbase, but they don't seem to be able to keep a clean enough pool of IPs like the big popular ones to cope. I know all VPNs struggle with this but it was getting ridiculous, where every single server in a country would receive infinite re-captcha.
by constantcrying | 2025-05-28 16:34:04+00:00
>Not exactly, but a parallel observation, that a lot of people are just kind of shit at their jobs.

I do not think that's it. I think that many people are very capable of delivering decent work, but they choose not to.

This begs two questions, why are people not interesting in delivering high quality work and why are people accepting low standards of work quality?

>There's a culture of indifference, an embrace of mediocrity.

Let's not be too kind here. This is not mediocrity. A mediocre worker would be someone who performs his work satisfactorily, but does not ever go beyond his duties. The person you described certainly is not that, corrupt, lazy and lecherous would describe her behavior.
by andrepd | 2025-05-28 16:34:05+00:00
And I wish for flying cars that are affordable, don't make noise or pollute, are safe, supersonic, and magically disappear into a bag of holding so they don't need space to park.

Meanwhile in the real world, you need to make compromises. Having everyone use a 3000kg vehicle to carry their 70kg selves, spends 95% of its time parked, and is the leading cause of preventable deaths in the developed world, is a terrible compromise, so instead: Bikes for moving in dense cities, trains for intercity travel, cars for rural areas, and bridges between these modes: transport bikes in trains or rent them at station, park+ride at the edges of cities, etc.

Transportation is complicated.
by everfree | 2025-05-28 16:34:08+00:00
Bitcoin is not currently mined by "people", it is mined by large specialized companies with razor-thin margins in warehouses with access to bulk ASIC purchase agreements and incredibly cheap electricity.

The last time a "person" was able to mine Bitcoin at breakeven was around 2017 or so. Maybe 2020 or 2022, if you threw the dice on buying ASICs from shady companies, hired an electrician to install a new circuit, then filled your home office with 10,000W of equipment.

In contrast to stake as an individual, you don't need special access to electricity or agreements or anything. Just buy tokens and run them on a mini-PC that costs less than a grand. The minimums are low due to DVT.

> Try that with slashing and stake lockups

I don't see how slashing is relevant to the conversation.

As for lockups, it's much easier to wait a few days for stake to unlock than to try to sell a bitcoin mining ASIC. It's also less counterparty risk and a much more liquid market.
by greenavocado | 2025-05-28 16:34:27+00:00
The Weimar hyperinflation wasn't caused by gold's limitations - it was the inevitable result of political cowardice and monetary arson. After WWI, Germany made the fatal decision to abandon gold convertibility and fund reparations through the printing press, transforming the mark from 4.2 to $1 in 1914 to 4.2 trillion to $1 by 1923. This wasn't some unavoidable monetary phenomenon but a deliberate policy choice to avoid fiscal responsibility. The Great Depression tells a similar story of government malpractice rather than gold standard failure. During the Roaring Twenties, the Federal Reserve artificially suppressed interest rates, creating massive distortions in credit markets and fueling the stock bubble. When the inevitable correction came, instead of allowing the market to clear, Hoover's administration compounded the crisis through disastrous interventions - hiking interest rates during a liquidity crunch, imposing Smoot-Hawley tariffs that strangled global trade, and strong-arming businesses into maintaining unsustainably high wages. The resulting deflationary spiral wasn't gold's fault but the direct consequence of central planning arrogance. The Bretton Woods system's collapse in 1971 followed the same pattern of political expediency overriding monetary integrity. The U.S. promised dollar convertibility at $35/oz gold but only to foreign governments while banning domestic ownership. When LBJ's simultaneous Vietnam War and Great Society spending spree drained U.S. gold reserves, Nixon simply severed the dollar's last tether to reality rather than confront fiscal discipline. The post-Bretton Woods era of pure fiat has created the illusion of stability while systematically eroding purchasing power - the dollar has lost 87% of its value since 1971, with the Fed responding to every crisis by printing trillions to bail out financial elites while main street struggles under crushing inflation. Weimar, the Depression, and Bretton Woods all share the same root cause: governments refusing to accept that money must be anchored to something beyond political whims. Gold doesn't cause collapses. It reveals them. Fiat doesn't prevent crises , it merely delays them while making the eventual reckoning worse. The historical record is clear: when governments treat money as a policy tool rather than a sacred trust, the result is always catastrophe dressed in different eras' clothing. Today's $35 trillion debt and monetary debasement suggest we've learned nothing from these lessons.
by JohnMakin | 2025-05-28 16:34:54+00:00
You ignore the cease and desist, they take you to court (still unlikely because they also incur cost they dont want). You don't need a lawyer to go to a courtroom, they will order you to take it down and then you do. They're very unlikely to sue for damages because the cost of their lawyers far exceed whatever 'damages' are in place here, which I would assume are close to zero.

Please don't fold immediately to this tired legal tactic.
by mjburgess | 2025-05-28 16:35:27+00:00
You're not wrong. When I'm confronted by a certain attitude on certain topics, I begin a little irascible myself because I'm not confronting it for the first time --- but a very long and annoying series of interactions, of which this new on the margin, is of the same type.

Perhaps I should more proactively split the interaction in my head, "is this a political expression?" or "is this, say, an academic expression?" (here, I'm def., politics: concerned with the who-and-why of belief, over its content). The problem for people like me is that they're often closely related, and we're in positions in which we're surrounded by a kind of politics we didn't consent to.

In particular, the discursive environment of, say computer science, is pathological to the literal and honest use of language. I find the "politics of computer science" qua the people, attitudes, approaches, etc. of the discourse to be basically dishonest. This, i think, is a case very easily made today especially. I used to think it was merely corporate hype, but it actually runs all the way down to fantasist researchers whose preference for fantastical metaphor grossly exceeds their capacity for good faith communication.

So Babbage in having peddled his ideas for money back then, and gualling quoted in his oblivious tone, is a totem for this issue. He was not so extreme as we see today, for sure; but did not hesitate to use the misapprehensions of his benefactors for money. I dislike how readily he is quoted on this.

In any case, I am not always well composed in a climate I find basically dishonest, that's for sure. I'll censor myself more in the future on this. And perhaps I should just finally give up caring about this issue, and consign this disappointment as one more in the bin of nihilism: the "science" of computers is a schizophrenic hall of mirrors where people play bad-faith games with language and incredulous onlookers take up these games and proceed sincerely. What content there is to the innovation is buried, what might be said honestly about it, nearly impossible to discern -- and so on. Very well.

I'd say I thought physicists and philosophers were above it, but string theorists did play similar games in the 90s -- and I was angry all the way through the popsci of that too.
by lesuorac | 2025-05-28 16:35:33+00:00
This is seems largely expected from Dunning and Kruger's paper.

The true Dunning-Kruger effect is not that low-skill individuals believe they're better than high-skill individuals but that low-skill individuals do not know what skill looks like. (Hence the title "Unskilled and unaware of it: how difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments").

When you cannot evaluate the output of something then _any_ output looks good.
by 0cf8612b2e1e | 2025-05-28 16:35:41+00:00
On the gripping hand, if you do put in the hard work, you are likely to be exploited. I can think of several examples of excellent workers: they come in, do great work, do not play politics, are known for being dependable, etc. Management ignores them and promotes the mouth breather who does nothing but cheerlead themselves at every opportunity for accomplishing the most basic of tasks.
by nyc_data_geek1 | 2025-05-28 16:35:46+00:00
Might want to tag that as /s, because in these idiotic times, people might read it as stated sincerely.

We'll all recollect, very soon and very clearly, exactly why managing risks such as these is very much worth it, and necessitates a degree of centralized government capability to do so, methinks.
by tuckerman | 2025-05-28 16:35:48+00:00
The issue is you think pyenv has solved everything, someone else thinks poetry solves everything, I think uv solves everything, and someone else is apt installing things. And then there is installing torch and cuda...

I think having a very widely accepted and supported default would let the community rally around it and improve the experience and documentation (though I am not a fan of the centralized hosting that npm and cargo push, I much prefer the go approach, but we are already there with PyPI)
Show HN: GetZen.news – A news app that only shows what affects you
by alexcloudstar | 2025-05-28 16:36:56+00:00
Hey HN,

I’ve been building GetZen.news, a minimalist news app that cuts out 99% of the noise and only shows you what actually affects your life based on your job, city, and interests.

You can even ask it:

“Why does this matter to me?” And it’ll explain why it showed you that article.

It’s early just a waitlist for now but the idea is to replace doomscrolling with context-aware news you actually care about.

Live here → https://getzen.news

Would love feedback, questions, or concerns especially around trust, filtering logic, and how to avoid building another “black box” feed.

Thanks for checking it out!
by hn_acker | 2025-05-28 16:36:56+00:00
S.B. 1 had a UI problem that I'm surprised the legislators didn't notice (or ignored):

> S.B. 1 required voters to provide their partial Social Security number or state identification number (essentially a state SSN) on mail ballot applications and again on mail ballots. The number they provided had to match the number used when they registered to vote. In other words, if a voter registered using only their Social Security number but later provided their state ID number on their mail ballot, their ballot would be rejected — even if their state ID number was valid.

But take the causal claims in the article with a grain of salt.
by RamblingCTO | 2025-05-28 16:37:19+00:00
Yup, and even that is way harder nowadays. I feel like the VC backed startup thing is dead and there are no big moonshots anymore from underdogs having a big idea.

Everything capitalism, especially of the American variation, promised us isn't being delivered anymore. The numbers are pretty clear, so I don't understand how anyone in their right mind can argue against that.
by voytec | 2025-05-28 16:37:19+00:00
> Mods: Consider adding to the title: A privacy focused search engine

@dang No - please don't do it. This request is plain stupid.

Apple and Google being "privacy-focused" is a silly buzz-phrase at this point. Mullvad is tied to Alphabet/Google.

EDIT (2025 05 28 16:45 UTC): great to see how my recent comments were raided <3

Who the fuck have I annoyed? :)
by ryandrake | 2025-05-28 16:37:20+00:00
Every year, the 22nd century looks more and more like the movie Elysium: With a small, ultra rich segment of society living in luxury, physically isolated from the remaining N billion living basically peasant/subsistence lives, working for the ultra rich if they are lucky. That's how things are trending, anyway. I don't think anyone wants to think about the year 2125. They see themselves as increasingly economically irrelevant cast offs.
by JSchneider321 | 2025-05-28 16:37:47+00:00
Oh man, if you like math, you should check out this paper by Gardner and Conlon: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cplx.21446 where they did the math for CNS. I'll admit, it's beyond me.

There's also this research (cited by the author of Blowtorch Theory, if I'm not mistaken) supporting direct-collapse SMBH in the early cosmos here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1504.04042
by thecrumb | 2025-05-28 16:38:23+00:00
After scribbling down notes in paper notebooks for years I finally decided I didn't want to kill any more trees to take notes I seldom referenced.

Now I have a digital tablet (Supernote) on which I scribble down all the meaningless stuff throughout the day. Then I review that and anything useful or important goes into Obsidian where I can tag/search it later.
by lesuorac | 2025-05-28 16:39:05+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance

The article literally writes "Meanwhile, the public was seeing news reports of mass firings that seemed cruel and heartless, many assuming DOGE was directly responsible. In reality, DOGE had no direct authority." as well as "Built org chart tools: Interactive visualizations to aid RIF execution for 473,000 employees".

The guy assisted in firing 1/2 million people but thinks that DOGE had nothing to do with it.
by atoav | 2025-05-28 16:39:09+00:00
I am not worried about bathroom noise privacy, but if I was I have old kitchen radio there that plays music/news with one dial for the volume (doubling as an off switch) and changes music/news with a dial. I need to swap batteries once every few years.

Now every digital radio I ever had is worse in terms of the simplicity of the interface. A radio like this one simply asks two questions: (1) How loud? (2) Should it be something else?

And this is your direct competitor. Your devices interface looks more complicated than that so getting people to grok it is motion activated is probably the key piece of information you need to deliver. The weather and time is a nice touch, but may be a thing most people don't need/want while driving the price up.

If we go to the question style of object-human interaction let me impersonate your device from the perspective of a guest:

O: Oh hi, it looks like you plan to shit, here is some music you didn't ask for [plays music] H: Thsts weird I want to switch you off O: Let's play a game where you need to find which of my 12 button-look-alikes switch me off, oh and by the way did I tell you I am battery powered?

(This is ofc humourous exaggeration, but there is some truth in there)
by SirHumphrey | 2025-05-28 16:39:11+00:00
I don’t actually. I have read far too many AI summaries where the llm combines data about two different people with the same name creating a biography of someone that doesn’t exist.

And once the use of chatbots in this role becomes widespread- don’t think for a second that companies won’t sso the thing until it’s about as useful as current search.