MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ajross | 2025-07-24 14:30:36+00:00
> It is easy to make transistors as small as on silicon on most other semiconductors

Yikes, [citation needed] here. No, it absolutely is not. All the etch and litho chemistry is highly specific to the substrate and dopants. You can't just feed a germanium crystal through an etcher tool in a TSMC fab and get anything but a brick out the other side.

I'm not aware of anyone anywhere doing low-nm lithography on anything but silicon (even in a demo context, or even announcing plans for the capacity), but I'm willing to be educated.
by bpt3 | 2025-07-24 14:31:49+00:00
I work to make money. My obligation there is to ethically make as much money as possible for my company, myself, and my employees.

I build community/commons/etc. in my personal time (which also includes some overlap since I do have some social relationships with work colleagues).

The amount of money I make at my job allows me dedicate more resources to those efforts, rather than intentionally docking my own pay to benefit some random person who happens to be performing a similar job to me much less effectively and would stand to benefit from being in a union.
by mindslight | 2025-07-24 14:31:53+00:00
One has to wonder if the entire point of killing CHIPS act is so that when some of the results finally come to fruition, CHIPS seems like yesterday's news and Trump gets the credit by default with his attention-span-of-a-fly cheerleaders. Similar shape but different direction from the dynamic Republicans have been playing with inflation for the past several decades - running up the debt with profligate spending, and then when the monetary inflation finally trickles down into consumer price inflation several years later their propaganda machine goes to work pinning it on the Democrat in office.
What if a paper appeared tomorrow unifying General Relativity and Quantum
by pajuhaan | 2025-07-24 14:31:53+00:00
Imagine waking up tomorrow to a scientific paper that's exactly what physicists have been searching for over the past 100 years: a unified framework seamlessly connecting quantum mechanics and general relativity.

What would your reaction be if this theory, rather shockingly, abandons the familiar 4-dimensional spacetime structure of General Relativity, and instead derives all phenomena of special and general relativity from one extremely simple, elegant, and almost unbelievable equation?

What if this theory needs no Dirac or relativistic Schrödinger equations, yet naturally explains the quantum predictions of spin and entanglement--even elegantly deriving Bell's inequalities?

I'm genuinely not joking or posting just for fun--I truly care and want to know your honest reactions.

How would you feel?
by sgc | 2025-07-24 14:32:23+00:00
Given the conversations in this thread about the annoying package management that leads to so much use of curl | bash, I have a question: Which Linux distro is the least annoying in this regard? Specifically, I mean 1) packages are installed in a predictable location (not one of 3-5 legacy locations, or split between directories); 2) configuration files are installed in a predictable location; 3) Packages are up to date; 4) There is a a large selection of software in the repositories; 5) Security is a priority for the distro maintainers; 6) It's not like pulling teeth if I want/need to customize my setup away from the defaults.

I have always used Debian / Ubuntu because I started with my server using them and have wanted to keep the same tech stack between server and desktop - and they have a large repository ecosystem. But the fragmentation and often times byzantine layout is really starting to grind my gears. I sometimes find a couple overlapping packages installed, and it requires research and testing to figure out which one has priority (mainly networking...).

Certainly, there is no perfect answer. I am just trying to discover which ones come close.
by qzw | 2025-07-24 14:32:59+00:00
Maybe not, but if the entire country doesn’t have the ability to manufacture it, then it’s still going to be a strategic weakness when push comes to shove. The entire exercise of doing more chip manufacturing in the U.S. is about maintaining national competitiveness and independence. It’s certainly not about cost. So I think it’s a good point that investments should made to be able to onshore the entire stack rather than just the top end.
by mystraline | 2025-07-24 14:33:10+00:00
Bigger question: why isn't Firefox and Tor Browser modifying the JavaScript reporting calls to lie?

All machines would have 16 cores and 32GB ram, running windows 10, and 1 point-touch or mouse. And the resolution would also be fixed as reporting, and only on client would change.

The user-agent should be acting on our behalf. So, why isn't it (Firefox, TBB) utterly lying and acting in our interest? We know why Chrome wouldn't.

Tor also gave up this web fingerprinting fight without even really trying. Editing the JavaScript calls to consistently lie the same way was "too hard". https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3wlNemFwbwE
by JohnBooty | 2025-07-24 14:33:17+00:00
By inserting themselves as moral arbiters

While this is effectively what is happening, and I agree with everything you said, I would like to add the primary reason why I've always heard that payment processors don't want to deal with adult content.

The primary reason is because adult content has a very high percentage of disputed charges.

Typically, it's because some person's partner notices some kind of porn on the credit card statement, and the purchaser claims they were "hacked" or something and then disputes the charge. This doesn't necessarily happen a large percentage of the time, but going from e.g. 0.1% disputes (or whatever the industry norm is) to 0.2% really torpedos profit margins.

There is also some skittishness about local laws regarding morality. Credit card payments cross a lot of boundaries and various localities have wildly differing laws about adult content and so the payment processors simply don't want to risk it.

I guess what I'm saying is: the payment processors seem like the symptom of a larger problem, not the root cause.

Source: I've never worked in payment processing, but I used to run an online business with spicy content, and had to navigate this to an extent.
by wmeredith | 2025-07-24 14:33:37+00:00
This is not the future. It's already a thing. The content_marketing subreddit has been talking about this for months: https://www.reddit.com/r/content_marketing/

There isn't a clever new acronym for it yet, but I'm sure it's coming. Right now people are just calling it LLM SEO. I assume the discipline will someday be shortened to AIO or similar.

Here's a relevant post from 22 days ago with some good methodology and results: https://www.reddit.com/r/content_marketing/comments/1lq04yd/...

Here's one from 2 months ago with methodology of findings and action items for executing LLM SEO: https://www.reddit.com/r/content_marketing/comments/1kzafm9/...
by WHA8m | 2025-07-24 14:33:58+00:00
Be specific. "Well just look at <general direction>" is a horrible way of discussing.

And about your thought: I disagree. When I look at those online places, I see echo chambers, trolls and a lack of critical thinking (on how to properly discuss a topic). Some parts might be artificially accelerated, but I don't see propaganda couldn't be fought. People are just coasting, lazy, group thinking, being entertained and angry.
by rconstant1 | 2025-07-24 14:35:33+00:00
That kind of radical theory would resonate deeply with my own research direction.

My work with the entropic_measurement library is all about re-examining the foundations of measurement and bias—using entropy and information theory rather than just classical statistical concepts. The central idea is that many of our most familiar frameworks (even in physics and data science) might only be special cases or projections of deeper informational principles.

If a new physical theory replaced 4D spacetime with a more fundamental description and still recovered the predictions of relativity and quantum mechanics, it would bolster the intuition that foundational “stretch points” in our theories—where anomalies or measurement ambiguities show up—are clues pointing us to deeper structures. My library’s approach, which explicitly quantifies and corrects informational bias, would fit naturally into this kind of paradigm shift:

Measurement would no longer be “just” about experimental manipulation in spacetime, but about managing and correcting fundamental information dynamics.

Bias correction based on entropy could become a bridge between experimental data and the predictions of radically new theoretical models.

The need for rigorous, transparent, and universal measurement tools would be even greater if the concepts of space and time themselves are revisited.

In a world where basic assumptions can be replaced by simpler or more abstract equations, approaches that foreground information theory and entropy—like mine—could become essential not just for practical analysis, but for interpreting the very nature of physical reality itself.

If anyone’s interested in how these ideas translate into real-world measurement and data science, or wants to discuss the overlap between foundational physics and informational bias, I’d be glad to chat!
by dangus | 2025-07-24 14:35:57+00:00
I have to imagine that someone at Tesla who isn’t sniffing Elon’s glue is in emergency crisis mode. The company has so many things going against them:

- Alienating just about all of their politically-conscious customer base.

- Having no new product answers to the barrage of competing products that are often superior vehicles. Where is their EV9 competitor? Where is their Kia Niro/Equinox EV low cost competitor? Where are their competitors to Cadillac’s 5 electric SUV models?

- The CCS charging infrastructure situation in the US dramatically improving in the last year. Competing EVs are finally getting NACS but the irony there is that NACS is less of an asset than it has ever been before.

- Wasting an entire product development cycle on the Cybertruck, which is an especially alarming failure considering that it’s an extremely popular segment in the US. An American company being unable to sell an F-150 competitor is an embarrassment.

- The company is blowing resources on robots and robotaxis that are obviously going to result in business failures.

- The overall EV market is not shrinking so there’s not much excuse for Tesla to be shrinking and stagnating.

- Tesla’s inability to keep up with China despite having a factory there is also an embarrassment. They have years of head start.
by jasonmarks_ | 2025-07-24 14:36:02+00:00
I do not have an opinion on if Kotlin is great as a backend for every project. Kotlin does excel as a pick for projects where you are also compiling for native mobile front ends.

Write a Kotlin multiplatform client side business logic module in tandem with your Kotlin backend. The multiplatform module compiles for both your Android and Apple environments and for extra flexibility you are able to quickly port code from the client business logic module to the backend (or vice versa).
by streptomycin | 2025-07-24 14:36:06+00:00
Google also killed the display ad market by monopolizing it with Adsense and then killed Adsense revenue sharing with creators to take all the money for themselves by turning their 10 blue links into 5 blue ads at the top of the search results.

Adsense is just for little hobby websites, no actual businesses use it. They all use header bidding, which is (mostly) not controlled by Google.
by piva00 | 2025-07-24 14:36:33+00:00
Fair share? Why don't you focus on understanding why you pay so much, where the money goes, and other aspects that allow companies to absolutely fleece you?

After the data collection you can figure out how you are being exploited. You are being abused, fight that, not trying to force others to patch up the abuse you suffer, we have done the work to not be abused through political will, don't try to fuck with that because you got fucked.
by einrealist | 2025-07-24 14:36:41+00:00
Aside from the onboard computing required to power the AI model controlling the robot, which also consumes energy, it is important to be as efficient as possible. However, if an Optimus is intended to replace human labour, such as lifting objects and wander around with it, the energy efficiency of the platform becomes negligible.

The platform in the video and the robot dogs from Boston Dynamics are ideal for tasks where they are only limited by their own weight and the amount of computing power required to navigate, such as exploration.

I suppose that's why we mostly see autonomous delivery robots on wheels.

Or maybe I am being too pessimistic about other platforms...
by kingnothing | 2025-07-24 14:36:44+00:00
I'm not advocating to use limited release bourbons, but when 90% of your drink is the base spirit, you'll get a lot of value out of using a traditional top shelf bourbon vs well like Jim. Try a $40 bottle like Eagle Rare or Angel's Envy. There's not much syrup in a good old fashioned -- go with 2oz bourbon, a teaspoon of simple or good maple syrup, and a couple dashes of Angostura. Maybe a dash of black walnut bitters, too. The higher quality whiskey should be apparent.
by imtringued | 2025-07-24 14:37:17+00:00
The thing about them being moral arbiters isn't even imagined. They have had plenty of time to figure out a business model that serves these specific markets without cutting them off altogether. Instead, the payment processors are always threatening to cut off all access even to content that does not infringe upon their terms if there is even a single violation by mistake that gets remediated quickly or the payment method is disabled for the high risk content to begin with.
by stego-tech | 2025-07-24 14:37:40+00:00
Straight up, if your AI company requires 996 scheduling to succeed, then your AI that’s supposed to eliminate every job forever, sucks.

Any AI startup demanding such onerous work schedules should be a huge red flag to investors and workers, since the whole sales pitch of AI is to reduce the need for work.

Just don’t work for those companies. They’re lying to someone - you, the investors, or themselves - and you’re better off elsewhere.
Show HN: CSV Convertor – Handle US/UK Dates and Bank Balances
by etothepii | 2025-07-24 14:38:04+00:00
My wife and I are trying to get a better handle on our personal finances and having settled on a tool to use I found that my bank statements couldn't be uploaded as my bank uses d MMM yyyy format when dd/MM/yyyy format was required. There was also no option to support the very standard credits in one column and debits in another column that exists widely.

While editing the file in Excel was on option I ultimately plan to delegate the task and so wanted something simple, clean and easy to use.

As there is no state, and no cookies, hosting on GitHub pages felt like an easy solution. The solution is vibe coded with Kiro and the source code is available at https://github.com/cactus-bm/csvprocessor/ and pull requests are welcome.

The project is hosted on my company's Github and licensed under MIT
by uponasmile | 2025-07-24 14:38:50+00:00
For good reason. Loveable removed the barrier to entry for programming. I know someone with zero technical background who built a full CRM for his property management business in just a few days.

I’ve been using it for months as a better way to collaborate with our designer, and I know several founders using it to bring ideas to life much faster. Personally, I think the biggest shift is how easy it makes it to create a working mockup. Instead of showing up with just slides and Figma links, you’re showing a functional version of your idea. That starting point changes everything.
by vel0city | 2025-07-24 14:38:51+00:00
> IPv6s get constantly rotated by most ISPs

I've had the same prefix for five years now.

And yeah, sure, my device cycles through ephemeral IPv6 addresses often, but always within the same prefix.

Group IPs somewhere between /64s and /56 and you'll essentially get a household identity, at least for a few days to a few years.
by qualeed | 2025-07-24 14:39:03+00:00
Is/will there be any discussion on how initial triage of potential security issues will be handled in the future?

It was disappointing to see the responses in the post. A curt "It's a feature" to a valid security concern & disclosure, and not replying to a request to publish.

Jitsi says "We encourage responsible disclosure for the sake of our users, so please reach out before posting in a public space.". But if no one bothers to reply, why bother to reach out to Jitsi in the first place?

https://jitsi.org/ says, literally in the hero image banner, "More secure" as the first thing you see. The handling of this raises some concerns about that. (If you don't want to be scrutinized as much about privacy & security stuff, I would recommend not advertising "more secure" as the first thing people see on the site)
by JohnFen | 2025-07-24 14:39:07+00:00
The death of technical books (they're not entirely dead -- I still buy some -- but the field is a pale memory of what it used to be) is one of the larger losses to our field.

Those books did things that simply can't be replicated in other forms of media. Being able to drill deep into complicated issues and take the time/space to talk about them with clarity is valuable. Nothing online really does this, and I think it's because the medium doesn't really allow for it.
by palata | 2025-07-24 14:39:36+00:00
Doesn't "wrong unit" or "wrong decimal" count as "obviously wrong"?

> No reviewer can guarantee that there are no mistakes.

Of course not. But I would assume that the goal is to kind of understand the work. If you review my code by saying "it does compile and the name of the variables suggests that it is relevant for the project", that's not enough. You're suppose to get an understanding of it.

I am not saying you should catch every bug, but if I do "int fraction = 3/5" or "val dist_in_meters = dist_in_kilometers * 100", I would expect that you see it. And for an academic paper, there are more than 1 reviewer, right?
by troyvit | 2025-07-24 14:40:01+00:00
Seconding the Kagi thing. You don't even need an LLM. If you search something like the term 'camping gear' search results pop up right away, no LLM response. However by each site's link is a little shield warning you about how many trackers and ads there will be on the page. Next to that is a lil kebob menu that lets you either boost the site or remove it from your search. That's also where their AI functionality is hidden. You can get a page summary or ask questions about that page.

If you'd rather the quick AI-summaries a la google you can put a question mark at the end of your search term. 'lawsuits regarding ferrets?'

And yeah as the sibling commenter pointed out, you can go into Kagi's preferences and explicitly rule out pinterest (or whatever site you want) from any of your searches for ever.
by coffeefirst | 2025-07-24 14:40:42+00:00
Yeah, this is a scale problem.

You can hop on a plane and go from a driving-city to a walking city, look around and see the difference. I can't accept that this doesn't matter.

But if you take the common American diet where the bread of your sandwich is shelf-stable because it's packed with sugar and oil, and that's before we even talk about portion size, "more running than most people want to do" quickly becomes "recreate the scene from Forest Gump."
by epistasis | 2025-07-24 14:40:56+00:00
What is the alternative, except dependence on foreign countries for key economic inputs?

Betting some on Intel is very wise when the alternatives are, as I see it: 1) investing in TSMC building fabs and creating more of an employee knowledge base and skill base on shore, 2) hoping a US-based startup gets enough traction to grow.

Agreed on leadership. But selecting leadership teams, especially technically-grounded leadership teams is extremely difficult. Which is why companies revert to non-technical leadership so often.
by derdi | 2025-07-24 14:41:04+00:00
The wait for the next train is one factor, the overcrowding is another one. I'm usually not in such a hurry that a minute's wait would make a difference. But the next train is very likely to be much less crowded and much more comfortable to ride on. From my point of view the decision is clear, in isolation, just from my own selfish point of view. And I think many others are making a choice that makes them unhappy. (Train systems differ, the one where I live has sufficient capacity that you rarely get two overcrowded ones back to back. I know there are places where this does not apply.)
by hypeatei | 2025-07-24 14:41:19+00:00
Or we could strengthen alliances with our neighbors and potentially shift some of that burden to them. Trying to move everything here is not feasible. We simply do not have the human capital or willingness to manufacture every low level widget in the world.

What this administration is doing is not a recipe for success: trade wars with everyone, immigration crackdowns, and unpredictable tariff policy.

EDIT: Oh and hinting at invasion (Greenland, Canada) doesn't help either
by lukevp | 2025-07-24 14:41:53+00:00
Intel is more than just fabs. AMD spun off digital foundry forever ago and just uses TSMC, no reason Intel couldn’t do the same. At this point their fabs are a liability. They have a new leader who’s from a semiconductor manufacturing background so I have some faith they’ll give up on the pursuit of next gen fabs and focus instead on their IP. There’s a huge opportunity in their GPU segment. They’ve gone from a joke to competitive in a couple years, and they offer more VRAM for the dollar. They could tailor towards AI and really get some traction there.
by Beijinger | 2025-07-24 14:42:58+00:00
Underrated Quality of Life Indicator: Reliability of Postal Services

https://expatcircle.com/cms/underrated-quality-of-life-indic...

They’re actually doing alright on that list — and Belgium isn’t doing too badly either, especially considering it used to rank below Moldova a few years ago. That said, Belgium’s postal service is awful in every possible way. I once had packet losses of 50%, and the ping was miserable too.

During COVID, I needed stamps. The local post office? Closed. So I tried buying them online — and yes, you can order stamps online. But guess how they deliver them? By snail mail. Classic.

Now compare that to Germany. While Germany isn’t exactly a digital pioneer, its postal system has consistently performed well. I think they even offered a letter-scanning service at some point. And for years now, you’ve been able to print stamps at home. No printer? No problem — just write a code on the envelope with a pen. Every stamp includes a tracking code. As for those Amazon parcel lockers? Germany had them ages ago. And if I’m not mistaken, the idea was borrowed from former East Germany.

USPS is actually fairly reliable, but the post offices themselves feel run-down and neglected. Sometimes the solutions are simple. If I were running USPS, I’d tour post offices around the world to see what unique services they offer. What can we adopt, license, or copy? How are they staying profitable? There’s so much to learn.
by pmg101 | 2025-07-24 14:43:03+00:00
I was comparing a Hyundai Ioniq EV with a Hyundai Ioniq PHEV and was surprised to find more problems reported by the owners of the Ioniq EV.

Mostly issues with 12V battery, it seemed like.

In the end I bought a Stellantis EV so I probably deserve everything I get - but they are cheap!