MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Propelloni | 2025-06-04 09:45:34+00:00
Thank you for giving me an opportunity to research this stuff again.

> Not the power plants problem, as per law the government is responsible for it and the utilities have to pay them. The govt is in breach of this by not opening Yucca Mountain.

Strange, we assigned blame, yet the problem persists. What are they going to do with nuclear waste until the government acts? [1] I guess you wouldn't be willing to put a barrel or two into your garage, would you?

> Thats what insurance pools like the "American Nuclear Insurers" are for

I have heard of those. Let's check how much they disbursed for Fukushima. Apparently Fukushima was insured by the German Nuclear Reactor Insurance Association. And apparently the Association did pay out... nothing [2]. Furthermore, liability is often capped for those insurance associations, just like in the USA [3]. In the end the public will pay anyway.

> German commercial nuclear power plants for example never received ANY subsidies and they still made a lot of money.

The science service of the German Bundestag seems to disagree [4]. A more comprehensive study is here [5].

[1] And "act" could just mean to revoke the law and institute something like in Finland. Proper compensation of risk could certainly speed up finding suited locations. I'm all for it.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Nuclear_Reactor_Insuran...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...

[4] https://www.bundestag.de/resource/blob/877586/4e4dce913c3d88...

[5] https://foes.de/publikationen/2020/2020-09_FOES_Kosten_Atome...

EDIT: typos, grammar
by myrmidon | 2025-06-04 09:46:07+00:00
I think this example illustrates the biggest problem with carbon credits very clearly: Basically, Meta subsidises all the electricity consumers near that plant to take the blame for the emissions that their datacenters cause.

This achieves almost nothing: Emissions stay the same, no additional clean power is generated and there is no reduction in power consumption either.

The only notable result is that Meta is now "blameless" on paper.

As long as you can get carbon credits cheaply from peers that don't really need/profit/care about them, the whole scheme is rather useless.
by 8-prime | 2025-06-04 09:46:24+00:00
When the message you push out through that websocket are something that server knows about intrinsically, as in, the message contents are produced by the server there is nothing wrong with the approach.

When your server facilitates a communication between two clients and just acts as the infrastructure E2EE can become relevant. If the clients want to be able to exchange information withouth the server being able to snoop in on what is being sent, then you'd want to use E2EE. With that the server won't be able to read what is being sent.
by al_borland | 2025-06-04 09:46:30+00:00
This was probably my issue as well. I grew up seeing my grandma crochet. She’d do it while watching TV (though I’m not sure if she was actually watching or just in proximity to others watching), and she was quick. I have a couple afghans she made. She probably made a couple dozen.

The learning curve was higher than I expected, especially without someone to be there showing me stuff. I just tried watching some YouTube videos. I got frustrated and quit rather quickly.

I’ve heard knitting is easier, but I like the idea of crochet better.
by piva00 | 2025-06-04 09:46:36+00:00
> The tech is amazing, let's build it in a nice way.

We tried that before, during the early 2000s there was huge optimism about tech, democratisation of information, people would be more well informed, with access to all the knowledge in the world.

In the end it wasn't built in a nice way, moneyed interests took over, social media exploded, fewer companies captured a lot of different markets after getting extremely well capitalised, buying competitors to stamp them out, or buying them to integrate into their own ecosystems and control new markets (e.g.: social media again).

The tech is amazing, the corporations behind it not so much, the capital investments required are absurdly large which gives even more power to already capitalised entities which, generally speaking, do not behave in moral and ethical ways.

There's no opportunity to build it in a nice way, that's not where the incentives are so inevitably that's not where it will go, hence the pessimism about it founded on historical facts.
by DonHopkins | 2025-06-04 09:46:45+00:00
Even though the parent comment is useless and off-topic, I am vouching and unflagging it, so my response is visible. Please give MyPasswordSucks a chance to respond and attempt to redeem himself by trying to post something useful and interesting instead of whining. (Although I don't expect he's capable of doing that, so I feel sorry for him, but he deserves a chance to try to do better, or prove he can't by not responding.)

̀However aaron695's sister comment is so comically wrong and off base that it's not worth vouching for, since it adds nothing to the discussion, and only goes to show what kind of a horrible person they are. It's amusing just how wrong they are, but insulting and offensive to most people, so please set showdead=true if you want to see it. We all know very well by now how Team MAGA sees empathy as a weakness, and has a sick fetish with mocking and abusing people with disabilities.

Trump mocks reporter with disability:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PX9reO3QnUA

>Donald Trump is under fire again, this time for mocking a New York Times reporter that suffers from a chronic condition. CNN's John Berman reports

Here's a low-effort ChatGPT generated TL;DR summary, to satisfy MyPasswordSucks who had trouble reading my other post:

Here’s the straight-up rundown of the Dasher thread:

DonHopkins jumped in to rave about Dasher—calling it a miracle for people who can’t type. He dropped links to videos, papers, GitHub, and even shared his personal emails with Ada Majorek, who uses Dasher because ALS stole her voice and hands. He made it clear he’d dug deep—watched hours of videos, pored over source code, talked to experts. He went all in to explain why Dasher deserves more love: it’s based on solid info theory, it learns your patterns, it’s openly extensible, and it works across languages and platforms—even VR.

Someone named novosel chimed in asking why Don’s comment was downvoted, saying Dasher really is worth knowing. But then MyPasswordSucks blasted it as “barely-parsable copy-paste diarrhea” and declared Dasher awful, claiming the whole thing was off-topic. He sneered at Don’s effort, calling it useless. aaron695 piled on, arguing Dasher isn’t the answer for someone with a short-term injury and criticizing Don’s wall of text even more harshly.

DonHopkins didn’t back down. He defended his post, pointed out how much final work he put in—no copying or pasting. He reminded people Ada had replied personally, highlighting how essential Dasher is for her. He got indignant about people whining instead of appreciating the depth of his write-up. In short, DonHopkins delivered a massive, heartfelt case for Dasher. Critics flamed him for style and focus. The result: a messy, heated debate between someone who’s poured years into accessibility work and anonymous commenters who can’t be bothered to look beyond a giant block of text.
by sam_goody | 2025-06-04 09:46:49+00:00
The only time I purchased on Temu, there were unauthorized purchases on my card shortly after (and cancelling and reissuing my card cost both in cash and aggravation).

I mentioned it to a friend, who complained about the same thing happening, and said there are many such stories online.

I am fully aware that it could entirely be a coincidence. I am aware that there may be confirmation bias for the friend, though in my case I made the observation without having heard anything prior. But I am also conscious that it may by Temu has a source of income that is not dependent upon people actually making purchases.
by xorcist | 2025-06-04 09:46:50+00:00
I don't think that was intended as an argument that Starlink or Tesla doesn't exist but that there has been many not entirely truthful promises made when building the brands. Tesla exists, but some investors really believed it was to be taken private, or perhaps even that Full Self Driving would be capable of earning money while you sleep, or any other of a thousand more or less realistic promises that has been publicly made.

I do wish that the Paypal statement would be a bit more nuanced though. Yes, Musk made a lot of money on the dot-com hype by way of Paypal. And he seems to have built strong friendships from that, weirdly with the same people that fired him. But his involvement in Paypal was that he let it buy the startup he was in and demanded to be CEO. He then only showed interest in throwing out the FreeBSD it was built on and replace it with NT (which was the hottest fad at the time) and to rename the company to "X". Neither happened, and he was quickly let go before the company risked bankruptcy. It's rather far fetched to go from that to "changing the Internet". Paypal won and X didn't.
by skissane | 2025-06-04 09:46:58+00:00
You seem to be using the word “computability” to mean “computable by an abstract machine of Turing degree 0”, whereas I am using it in the broader sense of “computable by an abstract machine of specified type”. As I said, in that broader sense, computability is non-trivial for finite machines.

And that broader sense is very standard, you’ll find heaps of papers/etc containing variations of the phrase “computable by a Turing machine with an oracle”… but if that oracle is e.g. for the standard (Turing degree 0) halting problem, then that halting problem is computable by such a machine.

You were earlier claiming I wasn’t familiar with the definitions, but you are giving me the impression you aren’t familiar with “computable” as a relative term
by aboringusername | 2025-06-04 09:47:13+00:00
Phone calling is great and all, however, for complaince, safety and monitoring purposes having things in writing as a direct evidence trail is, sadly, something that is essential.

Too many people like to use phone calls as a way of bypassing GDPR (especially around consent to record calls). I know businesses that rely on phone calls as a primary method of communication as they know it's easier to bypass some degree of record keeping.

So I'll take my emails/letters/writing over phone calls any day.
by whitehexagon | 2025-06-04 09:48:33+00:00
I found the data on attention span really interesting and quite shocking.

I'm also driving a 'dumbphone' but disappointed with HMD's / Nokia's definition. It still has a fb app, yuk! and tries to do things with data connection (I had to get a sim with data disabled, not so easy these days). The few games on there trigger some kind of billing charge if you play them a few times. Oh and no developer SDK.

What is nice is the peace and silence it has brought me. I was quite unsure at first, especially having been an App developer for many years. But now I am very happy to have escaped notification hell.

I also dont want to live in a world where I have to carry a 'smart' tracking device around to be able to partake in society. When my bank insisted on an App I waved my dumb phone, and suddenly I was able to continue without.

I am hoping it will be enough to avoid being forced into a digital-euro tracking currency. But too many people take the easy option, and so I am sure I fight a losing battle. But I wonder at what point carrying a smartphone will become a legal requirement? provided by the government? or appear in public libraries for us odd-balls that value privacy. Probably they just make the dumbphones smarter, or illegal, like cash seems to be heading.
by ivanbakel | 2025-06-04 09:49:17+00:00
> As it is, Go is massively successful and most active Go programmers don’t mind the error handling situation. The complaints are mostly from folks who didn’t choose it themselves or don’t even actually use it.

This is a case of massive selection bias. How do you know that Go’s error problem isn’t so great that it drives away all of these programmers? It certainly made me not ever want to reach for Go again after using it for one project.
by card_zero | 2025-06-04 09:49:28+00:00
Where does the unattributed, axis-doesn't-start-at-zero chart of declining attention span come from? It looks like there were five sample years since 2000, but who was sampled, and "attention span" was measured how? "As the chart shows, attention spans are plummeting" is not very impressive when the chart is just a line that goes down and some mysterious times in seconds. Tineye had nothing.
by bachmeier | 2025-06-04 09:49:55+00:00
> Do I program any faster? Not really. But it feels like I've gained 30% more time in my day because the machine is doing the work. I alternate between giving it instructions, reading a book, and reviewing the changes. If you would have told me even just six months ago that I'd prefer being an engineering lead to a virtual programmer intern over hitting the keys myself, I would not have believed it. I can go can make a coffee, and progress still happens. I can be at the playground with my youngest while work continues in the background.

By this description, the economic case for AI is quite limited. I use AI all the time and for some things it is incredible. It has real downsides (getting things wrong, wasting time due to communication, size of prompt, context limits, etc.) that mean everything needs a thorough review. It also has financial costs.

Benefits? Sure. A big shift for "everything"? Not remotely close to email or internet search. Let's keep some perspective. It's massive speculation to call AI a revolution based on current LLMs.
by hrudham | 2025-06-04 09:50:24+00:00
Many dumbphones only support technologies (2G, 3G, etc.) that are actively being deprecated at the moment. If you are using a modern one, you still get rid of many useful things like maps, Signal and WhatsApp (the latter I've found is sometimes critical for interacting with some companies that have migrated their support there, like my ISP). Are there dumbphones that support just those two features? If not, then I don't feel like moving over to one is realistic.

Rather, just don't install whatever application is distracting you, and try simply turning notifications off. I still can't believe how many people simply don't have the willpower to do this.

On the battery life point, when you remove a lot of this cruft, you'd be surprised how much gain back as well, since you're also not staring at the thing with the screen on all the time. I'm on a 5 year old iPhone mini that I'm still regularly getting two days out of.

Another pet peeve: graphs should have axes that start at zero, or clearly point out why they are zoomed in. It's to easy to mislead readers otherwise, and great for making something sensational.
by _petronius | 2025-06-04 09:50:26+00:00
I have been thinking a lot about this parable (introduced to me by Bluey) in relation to the current surge of GenAI https://btribble.com/well-see/

> A conviction that the future is bright isn't enough to actually make the future bright.

Well said.

We have to be curious, open, and ready to use the benefits of technological change, but also skeptical, concerned, and willing to defend social and political norms, too. Wild optimism is potentially very dangerous; hardline pessimism would leave us insufficiently ready to face the moment when we do need to act proactively.
by hmry | 2025-06-04 09:50:54+00:00
Thank you for the breakdown.

Since we're on the topic of having to trust X, is there any reason to believe X wouldn't insert some code into the client JS (behind some per-account flag) to exfiltrate your key or PIN, if they were ordered to do so?

I wouldn't rely on a website as a secure communication client, that seems like a job for an open-source native application. But I'm no expert.
by _pdp_ | 2025-06-04 09:51:46+00:00
> Do I program any faster? Not really. But it feels like I've gained 30% more time in my day because the machine is doing the work.

This makes no sense.

Besides, this is sort of written confession / admission that AI in this instance is as good as the OP's skills and the obvious outcome will follow soon.

Personally I don't see AI as means to cut work by 30% but to do more with less.
by ben_w | 2025-06-04 09:52:27+00:00
"with artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon." - Musk

He then invested in OpenAI, is still trying to make FSD a thing, wants humans and AI to merge via Neuralink, made humanoid robots, and made grok because he parted ways with OpenAI.

If he knows what he's talking about in general, this combination makes him a demonolater.

Given how often (and for how long) he keeps saying FSD is just around the corner — and how poorly recieved have been TBC's tunnels, Neuralink's research, grok, Twitter's changes under Musk, Optimus, Cybertruck, his comments when sharing a video of him attempting to play high-leveled characters in some video games — I have every reason to think he doesn't know much outside of rockets and sales/motivational speeches.

I don't even need to reference the salutes, supporting AfD, DOGE etc. as examples here.
by lrvick | 2025-06-04 09:53:54+00:00
In a home emergency I pick up one of many DECT wireless phones around the house

In an emergency in public, I yell "Help!" and 20 phones come out.

In a major emergency when cell phone lines are down I can tune to the frequency of my local police and yell at them all to come to me. They never deploy any useful encryption on those things.

So far so good. Even when I totaled a vehicle. Always reliably other people around with emergency phones so I do not need one.
by matltc | 2025-06-04 09:54:12+00:00
There is a good chance this creates greater wealth disparity, and it seems certain that the white-collar job market will contract in the near-term. I am not sure that earning potential will necessarily be limited by this, however; the bar to do things has drastically been lowered for anyone with a computer and $200 a year to spend on a subscription to Claude or the like.

Earning potential may increase, even for the displaced, in the long run. Still early
by hobofan | 2025-06-04 09:54:12+00:00
I'm struggling to understand how the numbers make sense. The One Army patreon alone shows 1600 paid members, with the minimum paid tier being $7/month. With ~10% fee for Patreon, this should come out to: 1600 * 7 * 0.9 = $10080/month.

That alone should sunstain them according to the numbers they are giving out themselves. Do the other non-Precious-Placstic parts of their Patreon make up such a big share that not a lot of that goes to Precious Plastics?

I'm less skeptical about Precious Plastic than a lot of people here from an idea standpoint (I think even if it doesn't make a huge impact ecologically, I think its a nice project for educational purposes). However I've become quite weary over the years of projects that don't have a good financial track record asking for many AND are not being transparent enough about their financials to allow potential backers to make sound judgments. If they present as a non-profit (no matter if they are registered as one or not), they should also aim to fulfill best practices about being a non-profit.
by metalman | 2025-06-04 09:55:06+00:00
There is no Universal Saftey Insitute where they test crash Galaxis , and we have no idea if the indivual stars in a galactic collision will line up such as there mutual gravitational atractions leads to head on collisions. Both galaxis are rotating and presumably there are sections ,unknown and unknowable, that will interact much like gears meching, where the chances of collision are much higher over time. Reducing the whole thing to a simple probability of something like two fields of dots, pushed strait through each other may not be valid, and I am absolutly cetain that no one has the compute needed to run a simulation on billions of varied gravitational singularities moving and interacting with another set......... which is of course all my lead up to do a pitch for a mega intraferametric space telescope to observe actual coliding galaxies and other phenominon, to be built sooner, rather that later. would also be good for looking at details on exo planets.....give it a realy wide focul length and it could also zoom in on asteroids and comets for research, early warning of impacts and determining potential space mining candidates. current work in space navigation is focused on providing ultra high precision data links between different satelite units in an array that will alow introfermetry to work without a physical conection between the sensors, making for larger, cheaper telescopes, that are orders of magnitude more powerfull than anything built yet
by dagw | 2025-06-04 09:55:11+00:00
Knitting has the advantage that you can do it anywhere and at any time without 'bothering' anybody else. Sitting on the bus, watching TV, having a conversation. Most people I know who knit use it almost as a 'fidget toy' that they're subconsciously playing with while simultaneously doing something else. Only looking down every few minutes or so to make sure they're on the right track or to make some change
by montebicyclelo | 2025-06-04 09:56:02+00:00
Reason Cloud Run is so nice compared to other providers is that it has autoscaling, with scaling to 0. Meaning it can cost basically 0 if it's not being used. Also can set a cap on the scaling, e.g. 5 instances max, which caps the max cost of the service too. - Note, I only have experience with the CPU version of Cloud Run, (which is very reliable / easy).
by oliwarner | 2025-06-04 09:56:34+00:00
This took me a minute too.

The opening graph is from the Office for National Statistics. The ONS is a UK govt department. So there is some UK data in the article but this is first-year mortality, not first month.

The author does say:

> The precise birth data needed to produce these comparable rates is not available for all countries, so only a selection of OECD countries is shown.

Perhaps this is the reason.

I do agree though, it's mighty strange to have not included an interpretation of you're going to mention them in the text. Perhaps they were excluded after the text was written?
by the_mitsuhiko | 2025-06-04 09:57:07+00:00
> I don't think it's ever a good idea to be totally optimistic or pessimistic about a new technology, because then we're liable to ignore anything that goes against our narrative.

A healthy dose of skepticism is always necessary, that goes for anything in life. That is obviously also true for AI.

The backdrop of this post is what I believe to be an disproportionate amount of skepticism right now in my circles that is largely based on things you can already refute. There for sure will be knock-on effects from this we cannot anticipate yet, and when we see inklings of that we will need to deal with that.

Facebook and social media is a good example of this, because we did miss the effects it had or we dismissed them. However if you go back to what the original skepticism of Facebook was (mostly privacy), it mostly missed the actual dramatic effects social media had on the psyche of children years later.
by r24y | 2025-06-04 09:57:18+00:00
I use a Moonlander keyboard: https://www.zsa.io/moonlander It's very easy to change the layout on these boards since you can do it directly from their website.

One of the left thumb keys "flips" the board so that the left half behaves like the right half. In my experience it's not hard to learn to type like this. Here's my layout: https://configure.zsa.io/moonlander/layouts/oLyWr/latest/0

Bonus of using a Moonlander in this case is that you can unplug the unused right half and put it away if you don't need it.