MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JohnBooty | 2025-06-26 21:03:00+00:00
That requires transitioning from the suburb layout style we use

That sounds good in the abstract, but this is a major metro area. You physically cannot cram all of the population and economic activity from the suburbs (major pharma companies, etc) into the city limits.

Even if you could -- like if you could just fire up a time machine and move stuff around like a Sim City hacked save game editor -- you'd have a very large condensed urban area (comparable to NYC proper) that would still require robust public transport.

You want to link adjacent population/economic centers with affordable transportation.
by hayst4ck | 2025-06-26 21:03:28+00:00
One of the most upsetting things about our current state of governance is gamed metrics and lack of a national metrics "dashboard."

Metrics are gamed as marketing tools rather than assessment tools. There's a clear conflict of interest in the government presenting the metrics that it says to judge them by.

Unemployment is another gamed metric. If you want to get a sense of unemployment, a graph of % employed tells you more than some gamed number like "unemployment" since "unemployment" is a direct measure of political success.

Consumer spending/GDP are also directly used to measure political success, and a metric like "aggregate Visa/Mastercard purchases" is going to give a much better sense of how much people are spending.

During COVID, all cause mortality is a superior metric than COVID attributed deaths because any death attributed to COVID represented a failure of public health policy. We even saw direct attacks on public health monitoring in Florida.

It seems like the only ways to combat this are either states presenting their own metrics to imply national trends based on their own. I definitely wonder what kind of information we could get that is accurate and not gamed to create our own dashboards. Geohot's use of national energy consumption to estimate national productivity was sharp and the type of thing I wish journalists would do.
by Matticus_Rex | 2025-06-26 21:03:52+00:00
In the quoted statement, they're reasoning from an accounting identity because they don't understand the underlying measure. There's a kernel of truth, but it's much more complicated than that.

Imports are subtracted from the GDP calculation, BUT, that's only because they're added in the equation as well as part of consumption/investment/government spending. So to capture only the domestic production, since it's hard to measure consumption/investment/government spending only on domestic inputs, you just measure them overall, add exports, and subtract imports.

So people see that in the equation imports are literally subtracted as a variable, and reason that if imports go up $X, that means GDP literally goes down by that amount. In reality — ignoring for a moment that we sometimes mismeasure consumption/investment/government spending, the net effect in the equation is 0.

ON THE OTHER HAND, in one way part of the GDP drop here is because of imports. It's not something you can cleanly calculate the way journalists often try to, because there's a lot we don't know, but picture this simplified example:

I'm a factory owner, and my factory uses a lot of inputs that we import from China. We normally spend $50k/quarter on investment (maintenance, new machines, etc.). But next quarter my short-term cost of Chinese inputs may double. It may make sense for me to front-load imports ahead of tariffs and defer as much investment as possible. I can't do that forever, so eventually the money will show up in the equation more-or-less where it would have otherwise.

And on top of that, there are a bunch of confounding factors. Over time, imports also make domestic production more efficient, so shifting to less-efficient US inputs (or simply paying the tariff) will slow the rate of overall growth. And some costs are passed on as higher prices, which reduces demand, and therefore reduces growth. And importing goods also means exporting dollars, which affects exchange rates, and therefore affects exports as well. It's all interconnected.

Calling it out when they reason from an accounting identity is really important, because it's a lot of what drives the misconceptions of Trump's protectionist advisors — they use the same reasoning in reverse to say that anything that reduces the trade deficit therefore increases GDP. But that's only true in an accounting sense! Reality takes more complex modeling, and has to account for all the interconnected pieces.
by zaphar | 2025-06-26 21:03:55+00:00
Languages with unsafe don't just change where the security boundary lies. It shrinks the size of the area that the boundary surrounds.

C++ has artificially limited how much it can improve the memory safety picture because of their quite valid dedication to backwards compatibility. This is a totally valid choice on their part but it does mean that C++ is largely out of the running for the kinds of table stakes memory safety stuff the article talks about.

There are dozens of memory safe languages that already exist: Java, Go, Python, C#, Rust, ... And a whole host of other ones I'm not going to bother listing here.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-06-26 21:04:23+00:00
> Do you hold the position that a thing is bad because it is possible to do harm, or that it is predominantly causing harm?

Mere moments later...

> Even if the current impact of a field is predominantly harmful

So let's just skip the first part then, you conceded it's predominantly harmful. On this we agree.

> it does not stand that the problem is with the what is being attempted.

Well, it's not a logical 1-to-1, no. But I would say if the current impact of a field is predominantly harmful, then revisiting what is being attempted isn't the worst idea.

> Consider healthcare, a few hundred years ago much of healthcare did more harm than good, charlatans and frauds were commonplace. Was that because healthcare itself was a bad thing? Was it a mistake to even go down that path?

If OpenAI and company were still pure research projects, this would hold some amount of water, even if I would still disagree with it. However that exempts the context that OpenAI is actively (and under threat of financial ruin) turning itself into a for-profit business, and is actively selling it's products, as are it's competitors, to firms in the market with the explicit notion of reducing headcount for the same productivity. This doesn't need a citation, look at any AI product marketing and you see a consistent theme is the removal of human labor and/or interaction.
by 1659447091 | 2025-06-26 21:04:53+00:00
That article is a spun version from what appears to be the source article from reuters[0]. Being that they lifted quotes from there and then added a clickbait title by forgetting to add that Google is also compelled by governments to give them the data.

The only "ulterior priorities" I could pick up on was that Apple was most likely following the Government restrictions in a more discerning way than Google by not breaking out the push notifications in their aggregated data for request disclosures. Once it was made public by a Senator, Apple updated their policy and started to break it out to its own section. How long Google did this before Apple is not stated and the DOJ declined to comment on the push notification surveillance or whether it had prevented Apple or Google from talking about it.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/technology/cybersecurity/governments...
by mac-attack | 2025-06-26 21:05:10+00:00
With all due respect, I don't think customer service interaction are a meaningful rebuttal when discussing the decline in social relations, empathy and care.

The former is an admittedly frustrating aspect in our transactional relationships with companies, while the others are the foundations of a functioning society throughout our civilization. Conflating business interactions with society needs is a familiar trope on HN IMO
by ceronman | 2025-06-26 21:05:35+00:00
I bet that if you take those 278k lines of code and rewrite them in simple Rust, without using generics, or macros, and using a single crate, without dependencies, you could achieve very similar compile times. The Rust compiler can be very fast if the code is simple. It's when you have dependencies and heavy abstractions (macros, generics, traits, deep dependency trees) that things become slow.
by Lerc | 2025-06-26 21:05:49+00:00
AI has the capacity to deflect accountability. That must be addressed. That does not mean that the intent, goal, or even primary result is dehumanisation.

Address the concerns specifically, suggest solutions for those concerns.

I have made a submission to a government investigation highlighting the need for explicitly identifying when an AI makes a determination involving an individual, and the need for mechanisms that need to be in place for individuals to be aware when that has happened along with a method to challenge the determination of they feel it was incorrect.

I have seen a lot of blanket judgements vilifying an entire field of research and industry and all those who participate in it. It has become commonplace use the term techbros as a pejorative to declare people as others.

There is a word for behaviour like that. That is what dehumanisation is.
by steveklabnik | 2025-06-26 21:06:25+00:00
Rust and C have differences around compilation units: Rust's already tend to be much larger than C on average, because the entire crate (aka tree of modules) is the compilation unit in Rust, as opposed to the file-based (okay not if you're on some weird architecture) compilation unit of C.

Unity builds are useful for C programs because they tend to reduce header processing overhead, whereas Rust does not have the preprocessor or header files at all.

They also can help with reducing the number of object files (down to one from many), so that the linker has less work to do, this is already sort of done (though not to literally one) due to what I mentioned above.

In general, the conventional advice is to do the exact opposite: breaking large Rust projects into more, smaller compilation units can help do less "spurious" rebuilding, so smaller changes have less overall impact.

Basically, Rust's compile time issues lie elsewhere.
The Wheel (Direction)
by santiviquez | 2025-06-26 21:06:43+00:00
In the beginning, you’re not meant to steer. You’re meant to learn. To follow. To explore with curiosity.

Control isn’t the goal. It’s the lesson.

Later, when you’ve tasted enough of the unknown, when you’ve seen what’s out there, you’ll have to take the wheel.

Your direction will appear. Not all at once. But angle by angle. Each one an opportunity.

Eventually, what was once infinite, what was once wide, begins to narrow, begins to belong to you.

Still, be careful.

If too many hands touch your wheel, you forget where you’re going. You lose your sense of purpose. The past feels like lost time. You drift.

Let others show you the path. But don’t let them walk it for you.

Own what is yours. Find your range. Hold the wheel. Drive.

source: https://www.santiviquez.com/blog/direction
by MobileVet | 2025-06-26 21:06:51+00:00
> You'd swear the process of getting diagnosed + treated for ADHD was deliberately designed to filter out anyone who actually has it. It's maddening.

You aren't kidding... and the US's ridiculous controlled substance policies that mean people with it are forced to reach out to their doctor EACH MONTH for a new prescription. That feels like a sick joke for those who struggle to keep organized and focused... and often leads to lack of consistent treatment.
by reaperducer | 2025-06-26 21:07:02+00:00
if these projects all integrated LLMs into their chatbots for just a few bucks and let them take on the brunt of the interactions, all participants on either side would be left with much more capacity to maintain and express empathy and care

Maybe. But only if the LLMs are correct. Which they too frequently aren't.

So the result is that the tech industry has figured out how to not only automate making people angry and frustrated, they've managed to do it at scale.

Yay.
by cyrux004 | 2025-06-26 21:07:20+00:00
Agree ; got excited too soon.

was listening to Kyle Vogt about his new bot company and he described that folding laundry is sort of a frontier problem for robotics and we are still many ways out from there. There's solution from physical intelligence and probably other companies; but they are still fairly complex and not as easily reproducible https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXbrt_2Fvgk

Still looking for the LLM moment in robotics
by mexicocitinluez | 2025-06-26 21:07:26+00:00
> So is the "These tools are game changers and are going to make all work obsolete soon" sentiment

Except we aren't talking about those people, are we? The blog post wans't about that.

> Don't start pretending that AI boosters aren't everywhere in tech right now

PLEASE tell me what I said that made you feel like you need to put words in my mouth. Seriously.

> I think the major difference I'm noticing is that many of the Boosters are not people who write any code

I write code every day. I just asked Claude to convert a Medicare mandated 30 page assessment to a printable version with CSS using Cottle in C# and it did it. I'd love to know why that sort of thing isn't useful.
by munificent | 2025-06-26 21:07:47+00:00
> I'm not saying those things aren't valuable, or that humans can't express social and spiritual value in those ways, but that human value doesn't only exist there.

This sounds sort of like a "God of the gaps" argument.

Yes, we could say that humanity is left to express itself in the margins between the things machines have automated away. As automation increases its capabilities, we just wander around looking for some untouched back-alley or dark corner the robots haven't swept through yet and do our dancing and poetry slams there until the machines arrive forcing us to again scurry away.

But at that point, who is the master, us or the machines?
by numpad0 | 2025-06-26 21:08:32+00:00
https://coloradomtn.edu/news/cmc-news/new-solar-array-and-ba...

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/sci-tech/mountaintop-solar-farm...

www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/photo/birds-eye-view-of-the-solar-power-plant-and-lush-royalty-free-image/1338844539

www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/photo/aerial-view-of-solar-power-station-royalty-free-image/1045649830

https://www.ecoportal.net/en/carpeting-mountains-with-solar-...

Just go look at it if you were looking for shocking images. Notice how suspiciously flat patches appear in the mountains just for the PVs and notice how panels often seem recessed below top of existing trees. The process of solar farm construction in such areas begins by clearing out existing life. That's how it's done. It doesn't go like, you just pick a dead land on map and giving out a free nice shed for local scorpions.

I mean, look at even East Coast of the US on Google Maps. Pick any areas just off a city and zoom in. There would be towns, farmlands, forests, mountains, or combinations thereof. If you do the same in the West Coast, you are more likely to hit such suitable flats that can host mega electricity farms and benefit from it, sure, but that's not even universally American thing.

Then you'd ask, can't those deserts like Gobi or Sahara or whatever provide enough land for PVs and PVs be good for those? Maybe, but that's terraforming scale of projects. Not microgrids.

It's not like skyscraper residential buildings exist solely because it's convenient to confine workers near factory sites or because the laborers own nothing - it starts appearing when it becomes impossible to simply distribute immediately available lands and land had become a contested resource. Think why they don't just expand cities outward or build new city cores. They don't because those buildings are solution to that becoming impossible. And with that, think again why they just go out and build those microgrids in cheap unused flat areas outside the city. Because there is no cheap unused flat areas outside the city.
by JohnBooty | 2025-06-26 21:08:35+00:00
Definitely propaganda, but they were so laughable I'm not sure who they were fooling.

You had a hilariously large F-35 in one picture, like 5x normal size. In another picture, you had a downed F-35 was blown to pieces yet somehow the afterburners were still lit.

I guess they convinced some of the very lowest-information members of the populace, but damn.
by dfabulich | 2025-06-26 21:08:54+00:00
You can use Swift on Android today with Skip Tools. https://skip.tools/ The Skip devs are founding members of the Swift on Android working group.

When using Skip Fuse, your Swift code compiles to 100% native Android ARM code.

They've also reimplemented ~60% of SwiftUI on Android, in an open-source library, SkipUI. https://github.com/skiptools/skip-ui SkipUI works way better than you'd think, and anyway, it's totally optional.

You can just write Swift against native Android APIs and it works fine.
by xg15 | 2025-06-26 21:09:25+00:00
> Drones also operate in a cluttered segment of the electromagnetic spectrum. First-person view drones use unencrypted analog radio signals, and in hot parts of the front, as many as a dozen drone teams may be competing for use of a handful of frequencies (a consequence of using cheaper components). This results in the need for sophisticated de-confliction procedures that, quite simply, do not always work. Even when de-confliction works, sometimes a team must wait as long as half an hour for a frequency to become available before takeoff. If it does not work and two drones find themselves in the air on the same channel at the same time, they will interfere with each other’s signals, usually resulting in a crash. On top of that, the enemy’s drones also fly on the same frequencies, which can also result in interference and a crash.

This gave me the somewhat macabre image of Ukrainian and Russian drones doing automated frequency coordination with each other, so they can orderly proceed in bombing each other's soldiers.

I don't think that's what happens though. But I'm surprised flying drones in the same area as enemy operators is even possible. Wouldn't both sides try to jam or take over each other's signals, deliberately blocking channels, etc - so that in the end, no one could control anything?

Or, if the signals are really unencrypted, what keeps anyone from setting up a radio beacon that just spams the "detonate now" signal on all channels at maximum power. Instant drone-free zone?
by whatevertrevor | 2025-06-26 21:09:54+00:00
I think the solution is neither AI nor human in this case.

While direct human support is invaluable in many cases, I find it really hard to believe how our industry has completely forgotten the value of public support forums. Here are some pure advantages over Discord/Slack/<Insert private chat platform of your liking>

- Much much better search functionality out of the box, because you can leverage existing search engines.

- From the above it follows that high value contributors do not need to spend their valuable time repeatedly answering the same basic questions over and over.

- Your high value contributors don't have to be employees of the company, as many enthusiastic power users often participate and contribute in such places.

- Conversations are _much_ easier to follow without having to resort to hidden threads and forums posts on Discord that no one will ever read or search.

- Over time you build a living library of supporting documentation instead of useful information being strewn in many tiny conversations over months.

- No user expectation to be helped immediately. A forum sets the expectation that this is an async method of communication, so you're less likely to see entitled aggravating behavior (though you won't see many users giving you good questions with relevant information attached even on forums).
by baby | 2025-06-26 21:10:03+00:00
you know everything is made up right? And yet it just works. I too use a confidence score in an bug finder app, Github seems to use them in copilot reviews, people will use them until it is shown not to work anymore.

on the other hand this post https://www.greptile.com/blog/make-llms-shut-up says that it didn't work in their case:

> Sadly, this also failed. The LLMs judgment of its own output was nearly random. This also made the bot extremely slow because there was now a whole new inference call in the workflow.
by yupitsme123 | 2025-06-26 21:10:07+00:00
Most of the things in this list are pretty innocuous and were never weaponized. Two exceptions, social media and cell phones, have been weaponized and after a certain point, I would say that we'd be better off without them.

I would put AI into that same group. It is and will continue to be weaponized against you by people with more power than you.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-06-26 21:10:13+00:00
I could hardly get past this paragraph:

Thiel (on the Antichrist): I have a lot of thoughts on this topic, but one question is -- and this was a plot hole in all these Antichrist books people wrote -- how does the Antichrist take over the world? He gives these demonic, hypnotic speeches and people just fall for it. And so it’s this plot hole. ... It’s totally implausible.

In another timeline, the interviewer from the New York Times would respond, "Peter, as a Trump supporter ... seriously?"

But no, that's not our timeline. In this one, absurdities grow unquestioned until they turn into atrocities.
Show HN: Window Expander – Mostly maximize your windows
by evanem | 2025-06-26 21:10:27+00:00
Hi HN, I developed Window Expander for my own use and decided to put it out there for free.

I'm particular about how I like my desktop windows to appear. I don't like to fully maximize them because I want to see a little bit of the beautiful mountain, desert, or forest scene behind them. I found myself manually expanding them, but that's cumbersome. I run so many apps on so many VMs and I frequently switch monitors. It was time consuming. With Window Expander, I just have to click on the tray icon, select the "Resize Windows" menu item, and it takes care of everything.

It's currently available for Windows and Mac and it's free. There's no signup or paid features or anything. I also have a Linux version for private use. I haven't packaged it for public consumption yet, but if you want to see it, let me know.
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-06-26 21:10:33+00:00
Finasteride alone won't reverse that much, it stops the path for testosterone becoming DHT (the cause of androgenic alopecia). Taken orally, it stops or slows all hair loss.

Minoxadil increases blood flow and restores the natural growth cycle lengths of weakened follicles. This is applied topically, and promotes hair growth pretty much anywhere - beard, crown, temples. You can take it orally, and it will promote hair growth everywhere (more body hair). However, it can't fix follicles already dormant or scarred over. So if things are already bald, it may not give the results you want.

A word of warning that about 5% of those who take Minoxadil experience a shedding period where it gets worse. Because it restores normal hair follicles growth cycles, this includes the process of pushing out old hairs. This is not permanent and will last, at most, a month. This is why most providers like "Keeps" will try to sell in batches of 3 months.

In 2026, a new drug will finish phase 3 human trials. That one targets (IIRC) stem cells and can restore even advanced hair loss where the follicles are dormant or dead. Very exciting!
by tptacek | 2025-06-26 21:11:24+00:00
I think it's important to keep the scope of the debate well-defined, because memory-safe languages completely stomped out memory-unsafe languages more than 20 years ago; almost all new code is written in languages that are unshowily memory safe (like Java and Python).

We're really talking about resistance to memory safety in the last redoubts of unsafety: browsers and operating systems.