MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by triceratops | 2025-06-17 17:35:11+00:00
France developed a nuclear program immediately after WW2 in order to not depend on America for nuclear security. For obvious reasons Germany didn't do that.

Germany didn't need expeditionary capability after the war. It probably doesn't need to project force beyond its continent even today. France regularly had military entanglements in its former colonies, and probably still does. Capability is a function of necessity.
by xp84 | 2025-06-17 17:35:17+00:00
> doesn’t have to cost more than the ad-supported ARPU

I'll state up front that I'm not much of a socialist, so I realize opinions will vary, but it seems crazy to regulate something so frivolous as a social media site to the point of setting its prices. If people don't like Facebook, their ads, or their pricing, simply not using it is not a life-crippling suggestion the way "don't use the Internet" is.

So I'd support you on regulating broadband ISPs waaaaay before setting the prices X or FB can charge for meme-related services.
by jeroenhd | 2025-06-17 17:35:21+00:00
Web browsers tried that. Then spam sites started saying "press allow to prove you're not a robot". Android showed a whole list of permissions for years whenever you installed an app. Nobody ever read them, phones were full of malware, and Google started nuking APIs and replacing pre-install permission prompts with real-time permission prompts.

If letting the application ask nicely is a good enough security measure, then you never needed to ask in the first place. When a user wants to use an application (or, what they think an application does), and the application just says "for the app to work" when the OS queries it for a reason why it needs permissions, the user is going to click permit every time. From a practical security standpoint, the application could just as easily say "I'm going to take control of your mouse OK/cancel". Which is what happens on X11, except applications just take control of your mouse whether you want to or not.
by abalashov | 2025-06-17 17:36:03+00:00
I'm not sure if I agree with every aspect of the framing here; specifically, I don't think the efficiency gains are anywhere on par with a combine harvester.

However, I do agree that the premium shifts from mere "coding" ability -- we already had a big look into this with the offshoring wave two decades ago -- to domain expertise, comprehension of the business logic, ability to translate fluidly between different kinds of technical and nontechnical stakeholders, and original problem-solving ability.
by jjbinx007 | 2025-06-17 17:36:16+00:00
I discovered a bug when I was a kid and I don't think I've seen anyone else mention it before. Do you have any idea what's going on?

Write a simple program to make the Spectrum display the "Scroll?" message and then press Capslock and symbol shift together, then press any letter.

The screen fills up with various words. Any insights?
by baq | 2025-06-17 17:36:19+00:00
I'd love this to be possible. We're analyzing projections from the solution space to the understandability plane when discussing systems - but going the other way, from all existing projections to the solution space, is what we do when we actually build software. If you're saying you want to synthesize systems from projections, LLMs are the closest thing we've got and... it maybe sometimes works.
by footlose_3815 | 2025-06-17 17:36:48+00:00
Not enough has been done to clamp-down on engineered obsolescence. Also, the customer's right to choose a product they already purchased. You get a mix of 3 years, 5 years, 10 years of support on any given OS now. Sometimes buying the hardware right before upgrade time, and having to deal with the crapware they load when they upgrade.

They use legalese now to say you are leasing the software, using with conditions, etc, but they love pulling the rug from under users now, and replacing it with an often-inferior product. This user-hostile mentality has been this way for consumer computers since they were created.

And managing Microsoft's hand of greed at the IT level sucks, too. Don't get me started on how "Microsoft Copilot" magically appeared on every windows machine in the world and starting using CPU cycles.

And the OP is right to install working software on old hardware as a reaction. It's a natural reaction. Ubuntu freed a lot of my old hardware. Gaming still sucks on Linux though.

If we mandated keeping things around a baseline OS a little longer, the need for foreign electronics could reduce in the short-term. Maybe it could offset those dumb tariff we're all paying for a little. Just mandate support for current OSes we have for the next four years at least while we wait for the economic tantrum to leave office.
by Spooky23 | 2025-06-17 17:36:54+00:00
That's an argument that's ultimately based on whataboutism.

I'm reasonably acquainted with history in all of those places. What happened in Africa happened. The results are speak for themselves.

In no way did I say that the depredations of past tyrants and conquerers didn't take place or were insignificant. If Ceasar's accounts of Gaul are even partially true, his armies probably butchered a sizable percentage of the human race in that campaign and the years to follow. The Spanish conquest, subjugation and genocide of Latin America utterly obliterated mesoamerican culture and was sweeping in the size and scope of it's brutality.

So why is Africa different? Well, for the most part it took place in the immediate pre-modern and "modern" era. There were coastal outposts previously, but the colonialists really exploded in the latter half of the 19th century. Disease wasn't a factor as it was in the Americas, but technology had a far greater impact -- tribesman vs. machine guns and steam engines ends the way it ends. You also had a different focus, private interests were interested soley in raw material extraction. Cultural imposition wasn't a priority -- it was extract value above all.

I would encourage you to read about the Congo. "The Rest is History" podcast did a series a few months back that is a good introduction. Nasty business.
by HeyLaughingBoy | 2025-06-17 17:37:10+00:00
Great article!!!

I'm kind of a connector geek. Never heard of the MDB1 type before, here's a pic: https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/itt-cannon-llc/MD...

Cannon is famous for their metal-shell circular connectors to the point that it's like Kleenex. "Everyone" knows what a "Cannon connector" looks like, so I was not expecting a D-sub form factor!
by Tiberium | 2025-06-17 17:37:12+00:00
It might be a bit confusing, but there's no "only thinking flash" - it's a single model, and you can turn off thinking if you set thinking budget to 0 in the API request. Previously 2.5 Flash Preview was much cheaper with the thinking budget set to 0, now the price is the same. Of course, with thinking enabled the model will still use far more output tokens than the non-thinking mode.
by vondur | 2025-06-17 17:37:16+00:00
This is a huge e-waste issue. I work as a Sysadmin in a large public university, and I've been spending the last year or so removing and replacing large amounts of computers that can no longer run a supported version of Windows. I just recently sent around 50 computers to a company that supposedly donates/resales them, but I'm going to guess most will end up as E-waste prematurely. Yes, we can purchase an extended support contract to continue using Windows 10, but unless it's for specific equipment that has a PC connected to it we've been told to get rid of them.
by codingdave | 2025-06-17 17:37:29+00:00
> Contracts are connection points. They allow companies to transact with one another and create economic growth. But while every aspect of business has sped up, the way we negotiate contracts hasn’t changed in 50 years. It still takes weeks, and sometimes months.

Even putting aside the lack of wisdom of AI-generated legal docs, I find this an odd take. Companies can and do regularly transact with each other without separately negotiating one-off contracts. SaaS apps have absolutely changed how contracts are enacted, and whether or not people even negotiate at all, or just accept "we used the app, so the terms page is the contract". Boilerplate NDAs and other contracts have sped up the process in all kinds of business relationships.

Not that the additional speed is wise from a legal liability perspective... it probably isn't. But contract negotiation is definitively not the same today as it was 50 years ago. The only reason someone would think so is if they are an attorney who only deals with the exceptions that fall through the cracks of the standard boilerplate people regularly sign these days.

None of that means this product is off-track. It might be decent...or it might be AI slop. But either way, as with many other new products, I don't think they've nailed their marketing materials yet.
by hosh | 2025-06-17 17:37:35+00:00
I think that depends on the scope of the risk someone is trying to mitigate.

As an example, Hundred Rabbits is living in a situation with extremely iffy internet. They live on a sailbot and work in computing out there. They have had to build their own tools that were not dependent on a reliable internet, or even reliable power sources.

- https://100r.co/site/tools_ecosystem.html

- https://100r.co/site/off_the_grid.html#internet

Collapse OS and Dusk OS are projects that are building tools to mitigate against the risk of society collapse. These are scenarios where, not only is there no internet, there is no longer any capability to fabricate any more silicon chips, and people start scavenging existing systems.

- https://collapseos.org/

- https://collapseos.org/civ.html

- https://duskos.org/
by arghwhat | 2025-06-17 17:37:40+00:00
It's actually a lot more difficult than that.

Working with existing applications as is requires a ditect mapping, and any restrictions or asynchronous prompts would break any existing assumptions in platform agnostic code, so it wouldn't solve things completely.

If you make something possible to do something with a permission or configuration, app developers just tell users to accept or configure to not ask, and then we're worse off than if there was no permission at all: the security is bypassed and only the inconvenience remains.

It takes a surprising amount of thought and work to do this in any meaningful way, and it cannot be done in a way that isn't somewhat disruptive.
by Clamchop | 2025-06-17 17:37:58+00:00
Price sensitivity re: children and breaking things is going to depend on financial situation and intention. This is a person that shoots a $10k Leica, so I'm going to guess there's more than enough money and a strong intent to share an "authentic" photography experience (a camera of traditional form) with their kids. The latter appears to be this camera's gimmick.

They describe this camera as "cheap" even!
by zzleeper | 2025-06-17 17:38:40+00:00
Good luck using 2.5 for anything non-trivial.

I have about 500,000 news articles I am parsing. OpenAI models work well but found Gemini had fewer mistakes.

Problem is; they give me a terrible 10k RPD limit. To increase to the next tier, they then require a minimum amount of spending but I can't reach that amount even when maxing the RPD limit for multiple days in a row.

I emailed them twice and completed their forms but everyone knows how this works. So now I'm back at OpenAI, with a model with a bit more mistakes but that won't 403 me after half an hour of using it due to their limits.
Ask HN: Does Starlink Violate Antitrust?
by caycep | 2025-06-17 17:38:55+00:00
Given the geopolitical and also commercial concerns re Starlink, its widespread use and growing importance both in commercial and military fields, vs its monopolistic position and control by a small number of individuals without oversight - does it qualify for antitrust review and possible action?

Should it be broken off from the SpaceX parent, and launch availability be made available to other orbital telecom competitors?

For that matter, should SpaceX launch technologies be designated of some importance to national security, and the technologies turned into some open source or some other library of technologies to foster a healthier ecosystem of low cost reusable launch providers?
by jeroenhd | 2025-06-17 17:39:06+00:00
It's a UI pattern that I thought died in the 90s. When it works well, you don't notice the pattern is even there. When it doesn't, it looks janky as hell.

There are shortcomings to the current/recent state of Wayland (KDE hasn't had support for storing window positions until Plasma 6.4! HDR and VRR are missing from many compositors (and X11 DEs to be fair)! Fractional scaling doesn't even work right in many Linux applications!) but when it comes to design decisions, I'm mostly on Wayland's side.
by potato3732842 | 2025-06-17 17:39:32+00:00
Publicly they'll wring their hands and tell us a bunch of BS about how violence outside of the state is bad and whatnot but behind the scenes they'll go back to their research people and their focus groups and try and get to the bottom of whether it was just one crazy or an outlier who's of an existing trend in opinion they ought to care about. Same as they did when that CEO got shot.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-06-17 17:39:38+00:00
> However there are loads that were comprised.

There are a lot of interactive systems that have attacks on their key exchange or authentication. And there are hashes that have collision attacks.

But compromises that let you figure out a key that's no longer in use have not been common for a while. And even md5 can't be reversed.

I agree with you about being wary, but I think encryption itself can be one of the stronger links in the chain, even going out 30 years.
by 0x457 | 2025-06-17 17:39:47+00:00
> If you put in lazy problem definitions, provide the bare minimum context and review the code cursorily then the output is equally lackluster.

I thought so too, but sometimes I had better results with one sentence prompt (+README.md) where it delivered the exact thing I wanted. I also had a very detailed prompt with multiple subtasks, all were very detailed +README.md +AGENTS.md and results were very poor.
by varjag | 2025-06-17 17:40:22+00:00
Such an evergreen observation:

Nowadays one often encounters the opinion that in the sixties programming has been an overpaid profession, and that in the coming years programmer salaries may be expected to go down. Usually this opinion is expressed in connection with the recession, but it could be a symptom of something different and quite healthy, viz. that perhaps the programmers of the past decade have not done so good a job as they should have done. Society is getting dissatisfied with the performance of programmers and of their products.
by mdavid626 | 2025-06-17 17:40:35+00:00
AI is like a factory, which produces goods. People are happy: they have the goods and can improve their lifes. These people see only the goods and are really surprised why some people talk about AI being not useful for them or even having a negative effect.

The reality is, that this factory is also leaking toxic waste into the nature. There are people who already see this, and try to warn the rest. Of course, the factory doesn’t care, unless it’s forced to.

The toxic waste started to accumulate. People start to get sick… but nobody cares.
by nopelynopington | 2025-06-17 17:40:42+00:00
A lot to unpack here.

I have children. I work from home. I don't look after them at the same time. This is true for every parent in my company who works from home.

> A company can't demand a remote worker pay for child care so the kid isn't at home like in an office.

A company can't demand an in office worker pay for childcare either. But if they don't have arrangements, they can't come to work.

You seem to be implying that every parent who works from home is only doing so in order to secretly mind their kids and not pay childcare which is a very unfair and unrealistic generalisation.
by bachmeier | 2025-06-17 17:40:55+00:00
That's good to hear. Back when I got married there were some real jerks in the wedding photography business, and they weren't worried about running out of customers. Here's an actual conversation I had with one of them:

Me: "I'm getting married on [date] and I'm looking for a photographer."

Them, in the voice of Nick Burns: "We're already filling up for next year. Good luck finding a photographer this year."

Me: "I just got engaged. You never have anything open up?"

Them: "No" and hang up the phone.

The faster guys like that struggle to make a living, the better.
by turnsout | 2025-06-17 17:40:58+00:00
Thinking of re-upping my put options on $TSLA. This launch is destined to be a fiasco. It's unbelievable to me that they doubled down on vision-only at the expense of lidar. Google/Waymo is going to eat their lunch on the self-driving side, and the Tesla brand is dying with consumers. This company is cooked.
by hwillis | 2025-06-17 17:41:22+00:00
The DC-X was 9.1 tonnes empty and 19 tonnes full- meaning landing thrust was ~half of takeoff thrust. The Falcon 9 was 400 tonnes full and 26 tonnes empty, so takeoff thrust was >20x higher than landing thrust.

That's a huge engineering difference, roughly like the difference between a car and a helicopter. The Falcon 9 was also 4x taller, meaning 16x more force to correct a lean. A little burp would send the rocket right back up in the air.
by ryandrake | 2025-06-17 17:41:35+00:00
> You either serve, or you don't. If your business model requires you to ignore 20% of potential customers because they're not on the latest tech, then your business model is broken and you shouldn't be in business.

Or, at least the business needs to recognize that their ending support for Y is literally cutting off potential customers, and affirmatively decide that's good for their business. Ask your company's sales team if they'd be willing to answer 10% of their inbound sales calls with "fuck off, customer" and hang up. I don't think any of them would! But these very same companies think nothing of ending support for 'old' phones or supporting only Chrome browser, or programming for a single OS platform, which is effectively doing the same thing: Telling potential customers to fuck off.
by Ajedi32 | 2025-06-17 17:41:40+00:00
> Why no reverse it though? First, look out for people, then figure out efficiency.

Because the empirical result of that sort of thinking every time it's been tried on a national scale is widespread poverty where nobody is able to help anyone because everyone is starving. You need to have wealth in the first place in order to give it out to the needy.

> What is wrong with being a little inefficient if it means that people aren't even 'temporarily' in inhumane conditions.

You're misinterpreting my comment. You'd obviously step in to help people before conditions become temporarily inhumane. All else being equal, the more efficient (read: less wasteful) solution is the better one.

> This Pigovian tax

Taxes and markets aren't mutually exclusive. Carbon credits, for example, are another type of market-based tax.

> > Markets are based on the collective decisions of millions of people taking billions of factors into account to create the most efficient outcome for everyone.

> So what?

So read the rest of the paragraph after that sentence.
by observationist | 2025-06-17 17:41:43+00:00
It's justification for surveillance and adtech on the software side, and planned obsolescence on the hardware side. There's no disincentive that prioritizes sustainability, (actual) security, or function on the user side. The user is just a net input of data. The money comes from brokers (marketing firms and advertisers indirectly) and advertising buys. The product is the user data. The customers are companies and occasionally individuals acting as middlemen. Devices are increasingly tools to acquire data, with features being driven to the bare minimum a user will accept and still use.

Nobody in tech seems to be serious except for the people driving the adtech and surveillance models. Nothing else makes as much profit, and it financially justifies enshittifying every other aspect of every other piece of hardware or software.

Legislate protections of user data, and start nuking brokers and data collectors from orbit, and everything gets better. Until then, the only space that isn't continually and totally enshittified is open source, and/or markets and products new enough that quality still matters.

Our choices are end adtech, or suffer.
by sjsdaiuasgdia | 2025-06-17 17:41:47+00:00
TBH, I want such reps to be loud about that. We need to stop pretending that the right is not leveraging stochastic terrorism. The problem doesn't go away by ignoring it.

Yes, that's risky. Some people might get hurt. A lot of people are being hurt, and will continue to be hurt, by the current situation. We all have to make our own choices about when principles and long-term outcomes outweigh our instinct for self preservation.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-06-17 17:41:59+00:00
Firefox has its problems but it's the least bad of all, and I've tried them all. Chromium-based browsers are a non-starter, Brave messed up that one big time. On the other hand, Firefox-derived browsers are used by VPNs that know how to do web privacy and security - this is the way, get Firefox, configure it properly, make a few minor changes and give your users a better option.
by kens | 2025-06-17 17:42:29+00:00
This isn't as "CPU-based" as I had hoped, just metaphorically taking the idea of Performance and Efficiency cores from the Core i5. The simulated warehouse has a Performance zone, with ground-level storage for items that are needed frequently, an Efficiency Zone, with high-density racks for low-frequency items, and a Shared Zone for mid-frequency items and overflow. The simulation showed that this idea worked best, but the paper doesn't investigate why.
by deadbabe | 2025-06-17 17:42:29+00:00
The point of LLMs is to not spend a lot of effort. Zero-shot prompts is the ideal we have to work toward. There comes a point where you have to do so much work just to get a good output, that LLMs cease to be more productive than just writing something out yourself.

If it cannot give you a good output with very little prompting, it’s a sign your problem probably isn’t something well known and it probably needs a human touch.
by immibis | 2025-06-17 17:42:44+00:00
The world wide web is one particular network. If you decide to copy stuff from the world wide web and use it for your own purposes, and the world wide web changes and your stuff breaks, that's on you.

Does the world wide web still work? If so, the change was fine.

See also the removal of the client certificate bit from Let's Encrypt certificates. Let's Encrypt issues certificates for web servers. What are you doing using one on a client? You should either do your own thing, or have an actual contract with Let's Encrypt for them to support whatever you're doing. Otherwise you have no right to complain about that.
by amanaplanacanal | 2025-06-17 17:42:53+00:00
I can think of a couple of factors that lead to this state. One is: what is the cost of trying to collect those lost fares, will it even pay for itself? The same reason library fines are sometimes stopped, it costs more to collect than they will get.

The other is that transportation money comes out of the same big bucket, it will cost too much to add lanes for cars, so they try to incentivize more people to take transit instead.