MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mempko | 2025-05-28 16:47:58+00:00
Tesla was almost bankrupt when Musk went to the Department of Energy Loan Office and said he had an investment from Mercedes to get $465 million dollar loan to save the company. That singular act was why you even hear about Elon today. Without the loan, he would not have gotten the Fremont factory and project WhiteStar would have been dead.

Without that loan, Musk couldn't use his wealth to reinvest into SpaceX and also would have had a damaged reputation and credibility. SpaceX would have survived, but it's development would have been much much slower. You wouldn't have Falcon Heavy and Starlink, and Starship today.

So thank your government folks for creating both the electric vehicle market and private space market! Without the government creating these markets, there would be no richest man Musk today. So thank the ATVM program authored by Senator Stabenow and NASA's COTS program. The point here is to illustrate the huge amount of power the government has to pick winners and losers. That it is the government that creates markets to play in and money to play with.
by emptysongglass | 2025-05-28 16:48:04+00:00
Again, this is incorrect. I have cited direct sources of Buddhist scripture that unequivocally denounce and condemn violence in all forms. Encourages is far too weak a word to describe Buddhist scripture on the topic, which uses strong language in every case. Prohibitions against violence are enforced by the Vinaya, which is the code of ethics all monks must follow.
by amiga386 | 2025-05-28 16:48:09+00:00
https://killedbygoogle.com/

> Google Go Links (2010–2021)

> Killed about 4 years ago, (also known as Google Short Links) was a URL shortening service. It also supported custom domain for customers of Google Workspace (formerly G Suite (formerly Google Apps)). It was about 11 years old.
by StackRanker3000 | 2025-05-28 16:48:20+00:00
> you're describing a level of control that the US government can already exercise using the current banking system

You’re handwaving this away. Just because something is theoretically possible, it doesn’t mean that it’s as likely to happen as something else that is order of magnitudes less complex (imposing the level of fine-grained control discussed in this thread on the existing system, versus building it in from the beginning in a new one). Friction and inertia matters in the context of preventing government overreach

> Why would anyone use it?

Because the government mandates it. Because the only employers that will hire you pay out wages in it. You can imagine many scenarios where individuals don’t have much of a choice. Which could be a reason for someone to want this idea to not catch on, lest the current system gets replaced by something worse. Cheerleaders and enthusiasts may take the opposite view

> if you can exchange your dystopian stablecoins for USD

Yes, if. And for how long?

I’m not saying a motivated totalitarian regime controlling all levers of powers could necessarily be prevented from implementing their dystopia anyway, but we also don’t have to expedite technology that would make it significantly easier for them
by yieldcrv | 2025-05-28 16:48:54+00:00
> Might as well call it money-laundering coin

The state's concept of money is private and it has just enjoyed help in getting data about electronic ledgers for the last 55 years, by deputizing banks. And for the last 18 it has also enjoyed public ledgers of crypto currencies.

But the successful stigma of financial privacy doesn't invent its right to having data. This is just a privilege, and private money is a reversion to the mean.
by ggdhdj | 2025-05-28 16:49:08+00:00
I think my brain works the exact opposite of what he describes. I can only think about code, while I write it. Interpreted languages are a blessing for me. I was taught the approach described in the post in school (it's the Pascal way after all) and I never understood, how people can actually work like this. There really seem to be (at least) two types of programmer brains.
by pixl97 | 2025-05-28 16:49:28+00:00
>You don't need a lawyer to go to a courtroom

You need money and free time to go to a courtroom.

>They're very unlikely to sue for damages because the cost of their lawyers far exceed whatever 'damages' are in place here,

This is a not a smart thing to do without legal console. There are plenty of very large, very wealthy companies that love to play SLAPP.

Your suggestion of FAFO isn't a great idea.
by komali2 | 2025-05-28 16:49:36+00:00
> Like, we're not worried about the great economic debate of capitalism or communism. We know which works better.

Do we? https://www.nokidhungry.org/who-we-are/hunger-facts "According to the latest estimates, as many as nearly 14 million children in the United States live in "food insecure" homes."

> The gender and color barriers are broken.

Are they? https://www.plannedparenthoodaction.org/issues/abortion/roe-...

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/report-black-people-are-...

> All the rivers are mapped

Not really, plenty of unmapped rivers in jungles, also the ocean, and also, you could always FOSS map it: https://www.mapillary.com/app

> Like, what could the future hold that is worth actual suffering for, per the tweet?

Maybe a world like this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkaway_(Doctorow_novel)

Or this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_Like_the_Lightning

Or this? https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41637112-a-half-built-ga...

Maybe? https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13651.The_Dispossessed

This? https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41824495-fall-or-dodge-i...
by DrillShopper | 2025-05-28 16:49:58+00:00
> You don't need a lawyer to go to a courtroom

You don't need one, but it is incredibly ill-advised and reckless to go into a case like this without a lawyer.

> They're very unlikely to sue for damages

Lawyer's fees are very often moved for in IP infringement cases, so even if they don't sue for damages, you're going to end up paying their lawyers.

> Please don't fold immediately to this tired legal tactic.

If you feel so confident about this, why not put up a replacement site and try this strategy when you get the inevitable C&D? Keep us informed. I'm interested to see how that plays out.
by lazyninja987 | 2025-05-28 16:50:04+00:00
Is it a pre-requisute for the agents to have access to the source code to generate attack strategies?

How about pen-testing a black box?

Does the potential vulnerabilities list is generated by matching list of vulnerabilities that are publicly disclosed for the framework version of target software stack constituents?

I am new to LLMs or any ML for that matter. Congrats on your launch.
by taylodl | 2025-05-28 16:50:15+00:00
Trump is an idiot who surrounded himself with idiots in his administration. 30% of Americans are idiots who voted for Trump in 2024.

That list bit is the encouraging part - only 30% of American adults voted for Trump in 2024. The discouraging part is the majority of the remaining 70% couldn't be bothered to vote, which is idiotic in and of itself.
by codingdave | 2025-05-28 16:50:56+00:00
Hm. OK, I did as the author asked and tried some of the bigger AIs. They identified 9 different logical fallacies in the article, and concluded that the article in whole uses accurate data but falls almost 100% into bad logic, in an attempt to overwhelm the reader and promote the author's desired viewpoint instead of honest analysis.

I'm not going to re-post the AI slop that told me those conclusions, but I do wonder if the author took their own advice and asked an AI to critique their thinking.
by JulianPGough | 2025-05-28 16:51:02+00:00
Currently, Cold Dark Matter, as used in simulations etc, usually has six free parameters. Most simulations of structure formation at the level of the universe as a whole ONLY model Cold Dark Matter (i.e., they treat baryonic matter as a rounding error, and leave it out: that's partly understandable, as baryonic matter is much harder to model than Cold Dark Matter, and trying to model it eats compute.) And when they DO add baryonic matter to simulations (usually of smaller-scale structure formation), that usually has four free parameters, which are also not based on observation, but can be tuned to fit. So you can end up with 10 free parameters in the simulations.

As von Neumann once said, "With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk."

At this point, with ten, it's basically CGI.

And the model gets tweaked afresh to suit each new observational anomaly. So you can tweak it to fit, say, large galaxies, but then it doesn't fit small galaxies. (The cusp/core problem.) But that's OK, because you can tweak it to fit small galaxies! (But then it won't fit large galaxies.) And on it goes.

A key problem is that, after 50 years of tweaking, it still didn't predict the rapid, efficient structure formation of the early universe as revealed by the James Webb Space Telescope.

Three-stage cosmological natural selection (the parent to Blowtorch Theory) did.

https://theeggandtherock.substack.com/p/predictions-what-the...
by nyarlathotep_ | 2025-05-28 16:51:37+00:00
> In the UK at least I suspect it's at least partially a generational thing. When I was in school back in the 90's it was deeply uncool to be in to anything academic. It's also not a surprise it was the height of lads mags and a very heavy drinking culture. These days that social pressure is entirely different for kids.

This was in the US too--there was a "Gen-X slacker" ethos that persisted into mid-millenial "culture". Radically different for people born even 5 years later, I think it largely reflects the relative (perceived) security back then.

Under-explored topic perhaps.
by haiku2077 | 2025-05-28 16:51:39+00:00
Leta is the supported search engine of Mullvad Browser which is a privacy-centric version of Firefox that integrates with Mullvad VPN. Think Mullvad Browser:Regular Internet as Tor Browser:Onion websites. So this is part of an ecosystem for their VPN subscribers.

(I'm a Mullvad customer, not Mullvad directly, but that's how I use their browser and Leta.)
by dmurray | 2025-05-28 16:51:45+00:00
> But he was using a variation of the Waffle House logo that their lawyers would argue would "confuse the average consumer", and he was using the "Waffle House" name in a domain. In something that was actually directly related to the real Waffle House. Unfortunately, their lawyers would have an easy time with that lawsuit

For this to be trademark infringement, wouldn't he need to be selling products or services that compete with Waffle House? I don't think this is an obvious easy win for the WH lawyers at all, apart from the fact that they would have much greater legal resources.
by saubeidl | 2025-05-28 16:51:54+00:00
> Despite facing numerous challenges, including political instability and external pressures, the Yugoslav economy achieved significant growth and modernization during its existence, with a particularly strong emphasis on education, health care, and social welfare

I'm not sure we're reading the same article then.

Here's some archive footage from 60's Yugoslavia for your reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXr5aKZ8mps

Sure doesn't look like people living in squalor in their mud huts.
by short_sells_poo | 2025-05-28 16:52:28+00:00
Mindshare and hype tend to be self reinforcing and create their own gravity. BTC has the largest market share because it has the largest market share. The moment it got derivatives and ETFs listed and traded on major US exchanges (e.g. CME futures), it became the clear winner because if you are a hedge fund and want to get on the crypto bandwagon, it's easily accessible, liquid and doesn't require extra paperwork. So you trade that instead of going on some unregulated exchange where you might end up as a news headline of "Hedge Fund loses money in crypto exchange exit scam".
by pmg101 | 2025-05-28 16:53:06+00:00
Not sure why you get down voted for this.

Seems self evident that increasing pace of change of society tilts the rational strategy towards short-term over long-term gain.

Do people disagree that the pace of change is increasing? Do people disagree that short termism is rationally appropriate in a highly changeable situation? Long term planning requires a stable backdrop. I agree with you.
Show HN: I rewrote my Mac Electron app in Rust
by katrinarodri | 2025-05-28 16:53:11+00:00
A year ago, my co-founder launched Desktop Docs here on HN. It's a Mac app we built with Electron that uses CLIP embeddings to search photos and videos locally with natural language. We got positive feedback from HN and our first paying customers, but the app was almost 1GB and clunky to use.

TLDR; rebuilding in Rust was the right move.

So we rewrote the app with Rust and Tauri and here are the results:

- App size is 83% smaller: 1GB → 172MB - DMG Installer is 70% smaller: 232MB → 69.5MB - Indexing files is faster: A 38-minute video now indexes in ~3 minutes instead of 10-14 minutes - Overall more stability (old app used to randomly crash)

The original version worked, but it didn't perform well when you tried indexing thousands of images or large videos. We lost a lot of time struggling to optimize Electron’s main-renderer process communication and ended up with a complex worker system to process large batches of media files.

For months we wrestled with indecision about continuing to optimize the Electron app vs. starting a full rebuild in Swift or Rust. The main thing holding us back was that we hadn’t coded in Swift in almost 10 years and we didn’t know Rust very well.

What finally broke us was when users complained the app crashed their video calls just running in background. I guess that’s what happens when you ship an app with Chromium that takes up 200mb before any application code.

Today the app still uses CLIP for embeddings and Redis for vector storage and search, except Rust now handles the image and video processing pipeline and all the file I/O to let users browse their entire machine, not just indexed files.

For the UI, we decided to rebuild it from scratch instead of porting over the old UI. This turned out well because it resulted in a cleaner, simpler UI after living with the complexity of the old version.

The trickiest part of the migration was learning Rust. LLMs definitely help, but the Rust/Tauri community just isn’t as mature compared to Electron. Bundling Redis into the app was a permissioning nightmare, but I think our solution with Rust handles this better than what we had with Electron.

All in, the rebuild took about two months and still needs some more work to be at total parity with its Electron version, but the core functionality of indexing and searching files is way more performant than before and that made it worth the time. Sometimes you gotta throw away working code to build the right thing.

AMA about Rust/Tauri migration, Redis bundling nightmares, how CLIP embeddings work for local semantic search, or why Electron isn't always the answer.
by e1g | 2025-05-28 16:53:38+00:00
+1 to this concern from our Very Large customers in the EU.

Today, AWS, GCP, etc. are omnipresent, so there are plenty of counterexamples; however, the growing concern is, "How do we become less reliant on AWS in the next decade?" There is no answer to that today, but this adds growing friction for any USA-based B2B vendors who implicitly say "we will increase your ties to the USA forever". This concern about hyperscalers predates recent counter-USA movements, and feels like a one-way road.
by dragonwriter | 2025-05-28 16:54:26+00:00
> You don't need a lawyer to go to a courtroom

That...depends on how much you care about the outcome.

> 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.

If they "take you to court" to force a takedown, they are already suing you (for an equitable remedy.) The marginal cost of adding a claim for damages and, on top of that, lawyers fees and costs (which, as you note, may well exceed the actual damages), is very close to $0 once they are already doing that. So, you may choose not to pay for a lawyer for yourself, but that won't stop you from paying for lawyers for the firm suing you.
by simoncion | 2025-05-28 16:54:27+00:00
"OS continues to boot when you tell it to make failure to load a driver a warning, rather than a catastrophic error." seems to me to be the system working as intended.

Triply so if you have to be on the other side of the airtight hatchway (as it were) to instruct the OS to do this. What am I missing? [0]

[0] NOTE: "It shouldn't permit a full computer administrator to let this happen!" is not a valid argument. Full admins have full control (and -often- physical access) to the machines they administer. If you don't trust your full admins, you've already lost.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-05-28 16:54:27+00:00
I think that the problem may be that people no longer believe in a future worth having.

If society is going to fall apart anyway, because of nuclear war/climate change/Trump/demographic collapse/soil depletion/microplastics/forever chemicals/peak oil/whatever, why should I care about trying to build a future? It won't come anyway. Why should I care about the quality of my work? Why should I care about having kids? Marriage, even? Why should I care about anything? "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die" (bad advice in any era, but seductive to those fighting against apathy).
by ivm | 2025-05-28 16:54:32+00:00
You won't be able to cite anything from Pali Canon that justifies it.

The Five Precepts, starting with "I undertake the training-precept to abstain from onslaught on breathing beings," make no exceptions, under any circumstances.

Here’s a verse from the Dhammapada, the short poetic summary of the Buddha’s teachings:

All tremble at the rod, all are fearful of death. Drawing the parallel to yourself, neither kill nor get others to kill. All tremble at the rod, all hold their life dear. Drawing the parallel to yourself, neither kill nor get others to kill.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-05-28 16:54:36+00:00
May be worth cooperating with ArchiveTeam’s project[1] on Goo.gl?

> url shortening was a fucking awful idea[2]

[1] https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Goo.gl

[2] https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/URLTeam
by itishappy | 2025-05-28 16:55:01+00:00
Agreed, but my interpretation here is that Blowtorch Theory does just that. It just predicts that direct collapse supermassive blackholes determine the large scale structure of the universe using existing physics.

The parent theory leans on Cosmological Natural Selection to explain away the anthropic principle, but it's a separate theory not required by Blowtorch Theory.

> Blowtorch theory works, and can be explored, independently of its parent theory: however, three-stage cosmological natural selection gives an important and useful framework for more deeply understanding blowtorch theory and its implications.
by dylan604 | 2025-05-28 16:55:01+00:00
If the WH legal dogs needed this as an the impetus for that change in 2020s, then they aren't very good legal dogs. ToS updates are pretty common, and if some one didn't like scraping, you'd think that unauthorized text would be added some time ago. It's not like scraping is a new thing. If they are savvy legal teams, this should pretty much be boiler plate language. Only neophyte legal teams would not expect scraping as something to expend ink.
by hu3 | 2025-05-28 16:55:19+00:00
Could you share a source for the OpenAI deal?

What I could find is that iPhone users get it for free regardless:

https://openai.com/index/openai-and-apple-announce-partnersh...

> The ChatGPT integration, powered by GPT‑4o, will come to iOS, iPadOS, and macOS later this year. Users can access it for free without creating an account, and ChatGPT subscribers can connect their accounts and access paid features right from these experiences.
by yieldcrv | 2025-05-28 16:55:33+00:00
> Conclusion: Monero’s Privacy Remains Resilient

tl;dr every method from the private sector and the state has resulted in nothing, or an upgrade to the Monero network

for anyone interested in using Monero, consider using Feather Wallet. This wallet implements some better best practices than the community's wallet.

Feather Wallet does initial syncing over clearnet for speed, and then connects to TOR and then only connects to other nodes hosted over Onion network. So you aren't even needing to connect to exit nodes.

It also hides the root address which starts with 4, and only shows you subaddresses that starts with 8. I always felt it was important that nobody ever could distinguish between a root address and subaddress.

It ensures you don't re-use addresses, which is an ancient and still relevant best practice that most cryptocurrencies and wallet have avoided for user experience. Feather Wallet makes it easy though.

Timing attacks are still relevant. For anyone aiming to use Monero as merely a conduit, wait 1 week or 2 before moving funds out, and move them out in different denominations than you put in. (In comparison, if you put $50,000 of XMR in, and a couple ours later moved $50,000 of XMR out in one transaction, this could realistically deanonymize you.)

The more people using Monero for benign but equally as private purposes, the more it improves the utility of Monero for everyone.
by TimorousBestie | 2025-05-28 16:55:38+00:00
> Gab wasn't isolated by all servers, just those who prefer certain rules.

That’s the sentence I’m referencing. I understand how Mastodon works theoretically, but I have no idea why Gab was partially excluded. I haven’t been on Mastodon in years.

This apparently plays into why OP thinks Bluesky is a dead end, so.
by shepmaster | 2025-05-28 16:56:32+00:00
As we all know, Cool URIs don't change [1]. I greatly appreciate the care taken to keep these Compiler Explorer links working as long as possible.

The Rust playground uses GitHub Gists as the primary storage location for shared data. I'm dreading the day that I need to migrate everything away from there to something self-maintained.

[1]: https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI
by phkahler | 2025-05-28 16:56:39+00:00
>> they mostly just made it feasible to carve up the job of e.g. secretary among everybody, adding to the number of things and processes each worker has to understand and deal with.

A previous generations old guy told me about this. He worked in the defense industry 50 years ago. You know, they had secretaries or admins that would handle all sorts of things for the engineers. Then the government changed the way they did contracts and companies couldn't bill for "overhead" any more. So the engineers (who bill to the project) had to start handling all those other things themselves and most of the support staff went away.

It's not that hard to handle any one thing, but if you do get the chance to work somewhere with a person that can "just handle that for you" it's really kind of amazing how much mental energy that frees up for your main tasks.
by nyarlathotep_ | 2025-05-28 16:56:41+00:00
> the age of tech we are living in now is not the one any of us thought we were working to create

The emergence of the smartphone and The Internet (as a cultural phenomenon) was such an exciting time.

I came of age during the dawn of the smartphone (graduated right as the iPhone was released) and watched all of these nascent markets emerge, connecting people in exciting and novel ways.

Seemed like it went downhill so fast.