MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jandrewrogers | 2025-07-12 19:21:55+00:00
This isn't an explanation that can be offered, at least politically. It invites questions that governments in several developed countries have clearly decided they don't want as part of the public narrative influencing policy. This is the default choice when the real explanation is more complicated, obscure, or technical than will fit in a soundbite, which would be the case in the scenario I hypothesized.

Governments rarely give genuine explanations for their actions and rarely need to. Much easier to use a plausible soundbite related to the current thing. Most people aren't paying attention anyway.
by pyman | 2025-07-12 19:22:05+00:00
Facts matter:

- Inequality: Research from 2025 has found that the popularity and application of cryptocurrencies have not only promoted financial innovation, but also exacerbated wealth inequality. In other words, blockchain developers have made the gap between rich and poor even worse. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/391506544_Cryptocur...

- As banks buy up bitcoins, who else are the 'Bitcoin whales'? https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-68434579.amp

- A quote from Satoshi's forum message that he posted on Feb. 11, 2009. It explains the goal of creating Bitcoin and why using banks demands too much trust with no guaranteed positive outcome. https://u.today/did-satoshi-nakamoto-foresee-current-bank-cr...

- Prior to May 2021 Bitcoin miners were hugely concentrated, with around 60% to 70% located in China. https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/bitcoin-who-ow...

- Bitcoin ownership is concentrated among the rich. Research showed that at the end of 2020, there were 1,000 “clusters” controlling 2 million bitcoins. https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/bitcoin-who-ow...

- Between February 2011 and July 2013, drug dealers operating on Silk Road facilitated sales amounting to 9,519,664 bitcoins. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road_(marketplace)

As I said before, the banks won.
by bugglebeetle | 2025-07-12 19:22:11+00:00
We’re watching the fire sale of America, like was imposed on Russia in the 90s, and resulted in one of the largest declines in life expectancy in the country’s history. I expect the same to happen here, including its eventual culmination in the rise of a Putin-like figure from the security state apparatus, after we similarly suffer a decade or more of internal collapse and humiliation.
by owenversteeg | 2025-07-12 19:22:13+00:00
I could be wrong, but that looks like autoroute to me just based on the aesthetics of it, autoroute has a bit of a "smell" that you can recognize if you pay attention. For example see the via and traces to the left of SW2. No human I know, even a total noob designing their first ever PCB, would do that.

Also, it certainly wasn't the LLM; atopile doesn't allow you to specify routing as far as I'm aware, their docs seem to tell you to route in KiCad.
by da_chicken | 2025-07-12 19:23:02+00:00
Again, you are explaining the specifications to defend why the specifications are what they are. That's circular reasoning. Describing the behavior doesn't defend it, and invoking convention doesn't work because different languages have different conventions (which is how we got here).

You know what you do when you can't handle an exceptional case? You throw an exception! Emitting errors is not undesirable behavior! It just means the computer says, "I don't know what to do so I better stop." You're never going to design all possible exceptions away, and that's not a flaw.

The question you should be asking is: why does it ever make sense to silently compare a character string to anything other than a character string? Semanticly, it's nonsense to compare different types. The only way you can do it is when the other type has a canonical string representation, neverminding issues of culture or language.

This is why, for example, C# has String.IsNullOrWhitespace() and String.IsNullOrEmpty(). It's partly to cover common combinations, but also to idiomatically determine if a meaningful value is present, which is what `StringVal == True` and `if (StringVal)` are trying to express and failing at.
by perihelions | 2025-07-12 19:23:10+00:00
But that is US law, as of literally just this week!

> "In fact, under the laws that the Supreme Court just upheld, prosecutors in Tennessee and South Dakota can even reach across state lines and prosecute writers on FELONY charges for a single paragraph of sexually-explicit writing on my site that they think "harmed" kids in their states, facing up to FIFTEEN years in prison, for failing to implement ID-checks on my dinky little free WordPress site."
by mrandish | 2025-07-12 19:23:32+00:00
I've been into 'retro computing' continuously since the 80s and there have been a variety of interesting retro focused machines like this launched over the last 15 years. They are mostly hobby projects but some have scaled up through crowd funding to be marginally successful. A big success in this market would be shipping a thousand units but few reach that level. I think the reason is that despite quite a bit of interest the market is fragmented into different groups with differing primary goals:

* Capture "the spirit" of an all-in-one, simple computer that boots to an accessible language.

* Recreate an actual 80s computer via software, FPGA emulation or compatible CPU. A major sub-group is those wanting support for physical 80s media which can include disks, cartridges and even tape.

Within these major groups are a variety of different requirements. A big one is whether the machine must support modern displays (HDMI) or authentic retro displays (CRTs). If you don't have a CRT then HDMI is a requirement, however inserting what was originally low-res analog composite video into a hi-res digital container involves some significant trade-offs and design complexity. It's not trivial or cheap to do well with high-quality and high-compatibility. Then there are those who split on whether modern connectivity and conveniences like Wifi, Ethernet and SD card media are mandatory, nice-to-haves or definite should-not-haves. Of course, those conveniences aren't much use without sufficient CPU power and resolution to support a modern browser and OS capable of reading modern media which involve more cost and potential compatibility issues.

The great thing is that those who are retro-interested now have a lot of good options ranging from OG hardware to software emulation, FPGA systems and all-new designs. My advice is to be clear on what experience you really want, the specific traits you care about and the various trade-offs and challenges those entail before diving in.
by infogulch | 2025-07-12 19:23:32+00:00
Cool! This article and thread has already been referenced on the mailing list, maybe its worth mentioning this benchmark and experiment.

https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/CAM527d_s8coiXDA4...

https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/175222328116.3157...
by danaris | 2025-07-12 19:23:36+00:00
> If these laws move forward (and I don’t think they should), there needs to be a way to authenticate as over 18 without sending picture of your ID off to random 3rd parties, or giving actual personal details.

But there won't be.

Because the ultimate purpose of laws like this isn't really to prevent minors from accessing porn. Ultimately, it's to

1) outlaw porn for everyone, because it's "sinful", and

2) outlaw discussions and depictions of queer—and more specifically, nowadays, especially trans—issues, because according to them, anything queer is automatically pornographic, no matter how tame the actual content is.
by its-kostya | 2025-07-12 19:23:48+00:00
It's been a few years since I've rolled up my sleeves and did some reverse engineering with Ghirda. The skill is very "use it or lose it" so I wonder if this will help me get back into it quicker. Or... a ton of hallucinations leading down dead end rabbit holes.

Curious if anyone has given it a shot an can speak to the experience.
by tiahura | 2025-07-12 19:24:24+00:00
The "chilling effect" argument here is pretty weak. You're basically saying that because some small publishers might get confused about legal requirements, the whole system is unconstitutional. That's not how First Amendment analysis works. Courts don't strike down laws just because some people might overreact to them.

If this really created such massive chilling effects, we'd see data showing widespread site shutdowns or self-censorship. (Checks pornhub). Instead, we mostly see compliance.
by sneak | 2025-07-12 19:24:28+00:00
3 is untrue. Discord blocks or requires tons more verification steps for most VPNs and blocks VoIP numbers.

I have been trying to use Discord anonymously for a long time. Antispam and anti-logging are high priorities of theirs, and they invest significant resources into ensuring you can’t easily make disposable accounts.

Not only is it not “so easy”, it’s not easy at all - it’s extremely difficult and becoming moreso all of the time.
by Teever | 2025-07-12 19:24:39+00:00
The current president has payed lip service to reshoring and revitalizing domestic industry but what have the results been?

There's been no significant antitrust actions or a focus on white-collar crimes. These are critical in stopping bad actors in American society from accruing more resources and power.

There's been no real investment in education or industrial capacity that would enable the US begin to compete with China in green technology and manufacturing automation.

There's no cohesive and consistent plan to encourage domestic manufacturing, it's just these nonsensical on again, off again tariff announcements that absolutely destroy the ability for anyone in industry to make long-term plans.

Talk is cheap. What's needed is a systemic, sustained effort and we’re not seeing it in America.
by BrendanEich | 2025-07-12 19:25:08+00:00
I grew Mozilla and then Firefox from zero (not 2005 CTO title, from 1998 public [late 1997 inside Netscape] in tech leader role for Mozilla, rainmaker and exec sponsor in 2001 for mozilla/browser which became Firefox) to their heights.

Now I'm growing Brave to 100M MAU (we will pass Firefox as it falls and we rise, likely this October). Take care!
by TimorousBestie | 2025-07-12 19:26:00+00:00
> There is no longer a political home for Reagan/Bush-style conservatives.

There is, they just don’t like it for aesthetic and/or historical reasons.

The faction that currently runs the Democratic party is the centrist, deficit-reducing, foreign-intervention-when-necessary party of Reagan/Bush.

If the centrists and moderate conservatives could make common cause, they would easily shut out both the far left and far right wings of American politics. The demographics are there.

I think the main wedge preventing this unification is still abortion, and to a lesser extent LGBTQ rights. But it’s so weird to see two political factions that agree on 90% of policy get shellacked and overruled by their respective extreme wings. Real tail wagging the dog stuff.
by kfajdsl | 2025-07-12 19:26:02+00:00
If an state AG tries to prosecute an entity that has no ties to the state other than content being passively accessible, that's probably another supreme court case if it doesn't get immediately decided in favor of the defendant in the lower courts. You open a big can of worms if entities are required to proactively comply with regulations in states they have zero presence in.

If Texas wants to block content from entities that have nothing to do with Texas, they can build their own great firewall.
by seveibar | 2025-07-12 19:26:50+00:00
Awesome to see more people experimenting with AI-generated electronics. The main thing holding back physical world innovation is the labor cost of design- I’m always blown away that someone needs to raise $50m just to design a hardware AI-assistant or new robotics

Frameworks like atopile, tscircuit (disclaimer: I’m a tscircuit lead maintainer) and JITX are critical here because they enable the LLM to output the deep knowledge it already has. The author is missing a couple pieces to really get great output: 1) Context-friendly datasheets 2) DRC/Semantic review 3) LLM-compatible layout methods

The hardest to build is (3) and what I spend 90% of my time on. AI knows how do do spatial layout for things like flex or css grid but doesn’t have a layout method for PCBs. Our approach w/ tscircuit is to develop new layout systems that either match templates, new heuristic layouts (we are developing one called “pack”), or solve simple spatial constraints.

But tldr; it is only a matter of time before AI can output PCBs. It is not simple but we know what works with LLMs from witnessing the evolution of AI for website generation
by leptons | 2025-07-12 19:26:50+00:00
The traces for the power lines are extremely thin, this device may suffer issues related to that. These devices pull a lot of power when Wifi is on, and too-thin traces aren't going to help that. Depending on the device, those traces might act like a fuse (and go poof), and I can imagine there could be plenty of other issues that could lead to fires from a "vibe coded" PCB.
by browningstreet | 2025-07-12 19:27:26+00:00
I earnestly believe the midterms are a significant barometer of how the next 20 years of America goes. We need change in the midterms and then the next Presidential election. They’re still going to work hard to bend that further to their advantage. Cue the “we’re barely 6 months in” violins…

What’s especially alarming is that they’ve learned they don’t have to do anything in the dark. Epstein may be a small blip in that, but we’ll see how the story goes in the coming weeks.
by JoshTriplett | 2025-07-12 19:27:32+00:00
There are many, many, many examples of every previous round of censorship in the name of "Think of the Children" being used against anything disliked by people in power, and filtered through the lens of the most conservative backwards puritans. Take a look at any banned book list.

This is not a slippery slope fallacy, it's basic pattern recognition.
by Bender | 2025-07-12 19:28:35+00:00
Sure. Trumpkins is trolling the media who are in turn amplifying the trolling and causing everyone even more emotional turmoil. With exception of those that enjoy rage-bait everyone else should just roll their eyes and not give him the attention he is seeking. In the old internet days the phrase was, "Don't feed the trolls." Negative attention is still attention. Trolls feed off all forms of attention. Social media algorithms reward and amplify this bad behavior thus giving him even more attention.
by ossopite | 2025-07-12 19:29:13+00:00
I see that you've found an example of how recursive descent parsing actually can be implemented with the visitor pattern, which I've never come across before, and I didn't read it carefully enough to understand the motivation - but that doesn't mean they are the same thing - the recursive descent parsers I've seen before just inspect which tokens are seen and directly construct AST nodes

as an adendum, the reason I don't understand the motivation is that the visitor pattern in the way I described it is useful when you have many different operations to perform on your AST. If you have only one operation on tokens - parsing into an AST - I'm not sure why you need dynamic dispatch on a second thing, the first thing being the token type. Maybe the construction is that different operations correspond to different 'grammar rules'?
by torginus | 2025-07-12 19:29:31+00:00
The “everyone should code” idea has been done and shown to fail for the past 15 years - I pretty much completely agree, and this idea shows the outsized importance on programming as some kind of inherently superior activity, and bringing the ability to program to the masses as some kind of ultimate good.

If you've worked long enough and had interacted with people with varied skillsets, people who don't code aren't only there for show, in fact, depending on the type of company you work at, their jobs might be genuinely more important for the company's success than yours.
by arp242 | 2025-07-12 19:29:37+00:00
Also there's a big difference between a general "children's room" and strictly enforced "adults only" and "for children" section, with risk of costly lawsuits if some extremist parent thinks the kid saw something "obscene". My library had a children's section and even some toys, but I could walk in and go anywhere.

Since I'm not American I don't have a good idea of what 1024 sq feet is: it's about 95m². I laughed out loud when I realised just how small it is. To suggest this is large enough for a strictly separated adult and children section is profoundly unserious.
by aquariusDue | 2025-07-12 19:31:54+00:00
Gemini of course! /s

Personally I've had mixed experience when I let Sonnet 3.7 document my (and its) code and write commit messages, for some wip stuff it's alright but it soon gets out of hand and because it doesn't really have a direct view in my mind it ends up documenting what it sees instead of the intention behind it, which is totally fair but eh.

So yeah, mileage varies and agentic tools usually spit out more code and redundant comments than I'd like to review. I'm still waiting for a company to develop some sanity check for this somehow but snapshot testing and manual review aren't enough sadly.
by dmix | 2025-07-12 19:32:21+00:00
It existed only on the edges, usually in softer pragmatic forms, and stopped a lot of bad ideas as a pressure group.

Characterizing the entire development of software and the internet in 90s-2000s as based on libertarian techno-utopinanism is largely manufactured narrative though. One I keep seeing pop up more and more. Largely by people trying to push poorly though out authoritarian gov-controlled internet by spinning the present internet (and parenting) as a product of some ideological radicalism.
by notahacker | 2025-07-12 19:32:49+00:00
Well yes, when Grok starts bringing up completely off topic references to South Africa or blaming Jews, this does tend to result in a lot more people asking it a lot more questions on those particular subjects (whether out of horror, amusement or wholehearted agreement). That's how the internet works.

How the internet doesn't work is that days after the CEO of a website has promises an overt racist tweeting complaints at him that he will "deal with" responses which aren't to their liking, the internet as a whole as opposed to Grok's system prompts suddenly becomes organically more inclined to share the racists' obsessions.
by kragen | 2025-07-12 19:32:52+00:00
I feel like those restrictions don't violate the OSD (or the FSF's Free Software Definition, or Debian's); there are similar restrictions in the GPLv2, the GPLv3, the 4-clause BSD license, and so on. They just don't have user or revenue thresholds. The GPLv2, for example, says:

> c) If the modified program normally reads commands interactively when run, you must cause it, when started running for such interactive use in the most ordinary way, to print or display an announcement including an appropriate copyright notice and a notice that there is no warranty (or else, saying that you provide a warranty) and that users may redistribute the program under these conditions, and telling the user how to view a copy of this License. (Exception: if the Program itself is interactive but does not normally print such an announcement, your work based on the Program is not required to print an announcement.)

And the 4-clause BSD license says:

> 3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software must display the following acknowledgement: This product includes software developed by the organization.

Both of these licenses are not just non-controversially open-source licenses; they're such central open-source licenses that IIRC much of the debate on the adoption of the OSD was centered on ensuring that they, or the more difficult Artistic license, were not excluded.

It's sort of nonsense to talk about neural networks being "open source" or "not open source", because there isn't source code that they could be built from. The nearest equivalent would be the training materials and training procedure, which isn't provided, but running that is not very similar to recompilation: it costs millions of dollars and doesn't produce the same results every time.

But that's not a question about the license.
by ben_w | 2025-07-12 19:33:25+00:00
As with everything, an upper bound on the energy cost, how many n-kWh does it take to produce a battery that stores 1-kWh-per-cycle-times-m-cycles, is the $ cost of that {1 kWH, m cycles} battery divided by the $ cost of 1 kWh of energy.

E.g. if a {1 kWh, 1000 cycles} battery costs USD 50 to make, and it's made using electricity that costs USD 0.1/kWh, (USD 50)/(USD 0.1/kWh) = 500 kWh. If it needed more energy than that, they would be getting sold at a loss. As a bonus point, this upper bound naturally includes the entire supply chain including the personal purchases of the people working in the factories that make the batteries, all the way up to any waste from e.g. unnecessary private jet flights made by unwise billionaire owners of the battery companies.

This example battery then allows you to time-shift 1000 kWh of electricity from day to night before it needs replacement or refurbishment.

But note the difference between "energy" and "electricity". This kind of calculation is made more complicated by the actual energies used being quite diverse in cost and type, e.g. Pacific-crossing cargo ships are mostly fossil fuelled, the stuff the mining company uses could be any mix of electric or fossil, the aluminium is extracted from ore electrically but any steel probably isn't, etc.

The ecological cost is also strongly dependent on how far the world has gone in greening itself before that battery was made. The first Li-Ion batteries were made in an industrial base that was mostly fossil powered, new ones in China are made in an industrial base that gets 35% of its electricity from renewables.
by sensanaty | 2025-07-12 19:33:27+00:00
> 1 product manager to 0.5 engineers

I would love to have access to whatever this guy is smoking, cause that is some grade-A mind rotted insanity right there. I can count on half of 1 hand the number of good PMs I've had trough my career who weren't a net negative on the projects/companies, and even they most definitely cannot build jackshit by throwing a bunch of LLM-hallucinated crap at the wall and seeing what sticks.

But sure, the devs are the ones that are going to be replaced by the clueless middle managers who only exist to waste everyone's time.
by kurthr | 2025-07-12 19:34:13+00:00
I think that's the point of the article. The Supreme Court has Ruled:

"prosecutors in Tennessee and South Dakota can even reach across state lines and prosecute writers on FELONY charges for a single paragraph of sexually- explicit writing on my site that they think "harmed" kids in their states, facing up to FIFTEEN years in prison, for failing to implement ID-checks on my dinky little free WordPress site."
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-07-12 19:34:33+00:00
The problem stems form new built western nuclear power costing $190/MWh if it can sell its power 24/7 all year around.

Adding that as a base input cost too all storage technology just makes the entire enterprise unfeasible.

You also have to answer why this P2G infrastructure should buy your extremely expensive nuclear electricity when renewables and storage delivers way cheaper electricity.
by ai-christianson | 2025-07-12 19:34:36+00:00
> It’s amazing that this worked at all, but to be clear this layout is actually very bad. Just look at that minimum width trace used to carry power across the entire board and into the ESP32. Using min width traces and wrapping them and min clearance to components is a classic mistake of people (or LLMs?) that have zero understanding of PCB layout techniques beyond “draw lines until everything is connected”

Is it really so implausible that these constraints could be built into the process/algorithm/agentic workflow?