MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by margalabargala | 2025-07-25 17:38:58+00:00
This is a great example because it strengthens the original one I was making; that despite pearl-clutching about what something "could allow", the actual bad thing that they're concerned about never happens. It's just a distraction tactic.

Plenty of states, like Alaska and Oregon, already allow abortion right up to the moment of birth. They don't happen, ever, zero times, except in cases where somebody is going to die otherwise.

The handwringing over "omg they're killing children" actually just kills both children and mothers by making lifesaving procedures illegal. People don't carry unwanted babies to term unless forced to do so.

Thus making it illegal to abort a full-term baby does nothing but score political points, at the expense of the deaths of some mothers who desperately wanted a child and then had some complications.
by strcat | 2025-07-25 17:39:09+00:00
Hardware identifiers aren't accessible to user installed apps. ANDROID_ID is a per-app-per-profile random ID. Apps don't need ANDROID_ID to identify that it's the same install due to immense fingerprint surface. If you installed the app in another profile, it would have a different ANDROID_ID, but it would still potentially be able to fingerprint it as the same device based on many things like settings. GrapheneOS does have planned features to improve these things but it's not nearly as simple as making ANDROID_ID per-app-install or making the MediaDRM ID more randomized than the current per-app random value (it was meant to be like ANDROID_ID but they make a mistake that's hard to fix without breaking compatibility so we need a toggle).
by SoftTalker | 2025-07-25 17:40:31+00:00
The sad part is that your government ID is about as likely to be leaked by the government agency itself than it is by any third party that has an scan of it.

My driver's license is scanned every time I buy beer. I'm under no illusions that it's not quite readily available in any number of leaks or disclosures.

If that sounds defeatist, maybe it is. Nothing online is private. Once it's in a database, it's only a matter of time before it's exposed. History has proven this again and again.
by renewiltord | 2025-07-25 17:40:35+00:00
> Violence and dehumanization of women should not be acceptable outcomes of free speech. We also have to consider whose voices are being heard, and whose are being silenced. Does free speech apply to women, to survivors of rape and sexual assault? Do we have a right to object to speech that promotes and normalizes violence against us?

Every time someone insists on an escape hatch, it is immediately abused. One could have seen this coming.
by mirashii | 2025-07-25 17:40:42+00:00
I strongly disagree about this being a recent thing, this has been happening for decades at this point.

2015 article that starts "For nearly a decade, PayPal, JPMorgan Chase, Visa/MasterCard, and now Square, have systematically denied or closed accounts of small businesses, artists and independent contractors whose business happens to be about sex."

https://www.engadget.com/2015-12-02-paypal-square-and-big-ba...
by dboreham | 2025-07-25 17:40:56+00:00
Waving from the Livingston side. There's quite a bit of cool stuff going on at MSU but you have to keep a look out for talks at MoR and on campus (typically in the winter/spring) to see it. Also the local IEEE chapter, although shamefully I think I've only made it to a couple of meetings in 25 years.
by Twey | 2025-07-25 17:41:09+00:00
Rather than a compiled blob generated from a language propped up by Google (a company famed for killing beloved projects) that is compiled and therefore unmodifiable and unrecoverable if the source or toolchain is lost, it feels like these goals would have been better served by writing it as some POSIX-compatible sh scripts, or even a (pre-packaged/no-build) JavaScript bundle — we've been trying to kill that thing for decades, and it's still kicking!
by zozbot234 | 2025-07-25 17:41:50+00:00
> misleading terminology and framing that suggests these are security issues

Could you quote where exactly OP has misleadingly "suggested" that these concerns lead to security issues in the typical case?

> attacker control of the data, and attacker ability to place controlled data somewhere advantageous to the attacker

Under this definition the Rowhammer problem with hardware DRAM does not qualify as a genuine security concern since it inherently relies on fiddly non-determinism that cannot possibly be "controlled" by any attacker. (The problem with possible torn writes in concurrent Go code is quite similar in spirit; it's understood that an actually observed torn write might only occur rarely.) Needless to say there is a fairly strong case for addressing these problems anyway, as a matter of defence in depth.

> correctness advantages of Rust

Memory safety in OP's sense is not exclusive to Rust. Swift has it. Even Java/C# cannot access arbitrary memory as a result of torn writes. It would be more accurate to say that OP has identified a correctness issue that's apparently exclusive to Go.
by pentagrama | 2025-07-25 17:42:07+00:00
Thank you for that information!

I wanted to help and did that using VMware.

For curious people, here is what the UI looks like, you have a list of projects to choose, I choose the goo.gl project, and a "Current project" tab which shows the project activity.

Project list: https://imgur.com/a/peTVzyw

Current project: https://imgur.com/a/QVuWWIj
by carlosjobim | 2025-07-25 17:42:19+00:00
It's a cloudy day here and I'm within my rather dimly lit office. If I look out the window, it is no problem to see clouds in all their details, and I don't loose any details within the darker environment in the room. A camera will either blow out the entire sky outside the window to capture the details in the room - or make the room entirely black to capture the details of the sky through the window.

I mean, most people reading our comment thread here have their smart phone by their side and can instantly verify that eyes do not blow out whites or compress blacks like a camera. The dynamic range of our eyes is vastly superior to cameras. So aiming to imitate cameras is a mistake by game developers.

Of course, staring straight into the sun or a very bright light or reflection is a different matter.
by webdevver | 2025-07-25 17:42:22+00:00
so true.

certain 'social media figures' have been advocating for a so-called 'unplugging' of onself from a certain 'matrix', which always seemed absurd to me.

surely the more sensible route, is to plug yourself even further into the 'matrix'? become plugged into it to the end that you have a voice in its running.

all these calls for 'leaving' technology, is just admitting a slow and inevitable defeat. we should be telling the youth, join big tech; join big pharma; join the gigacorps, the massive insurance companies - is that not where real power lies? is it not in those very boardrooms that the future of the world is crafted? we should be in them - or else, it'll be someone else advocating for their own interests.

i really hate so much some online voices who advocate for 'trades', or 'blue collar work' (no offence) - so insidious. especially when virtually all of them have white collar degrees from elite institutions.
by strcat | 2025-07-25 17:42:51+00:00
NFC payments work on GrapheneOS. Curve Pay works with GrapheneOS and is available in the UK And European Economic Area (EEA). PayPal launched tap-to-pay which works with GrapheneOS but has very limited regional availability. Many European banks provide working tap-to-pay with GrapheneOS.

The issue is apps banning using a device not licensing Google Mobile Services or a non-stock OS via the Play Integrity API. Google Pay does this and a lot of banks outsource tap-to-pay to Google Pay instead of providing their own like many European banks. GrapheneOS users in Europe have multiple options. Users in the US often use a smartwatch for this purpose which includes the option of Garmin Pay rather than only Apple Pay and Google Pay.

The choices depend on the region. It would be nice if the Play Integrity API was forced to permit GrapheneOS via hardware attestation verification by regulators. We're pushing for it in Europe.
by whalesalad | 2025-07-25 17:42:54+00:00
I can't really agree with this at all. I am a very design-heavy person who has been using a Mac professionally since the x86 transition, and have very strong opinions about font rendering, color accuracy, etc. About 2 years ago, I built a beast of a Linux workstation and use it with a 5K Apple Studio Display. Everything looks flawless and pixel perfect.
by TheCraiggers | 2025-07-25 17:44:01+00:00
> The US government can break up the duopoly and open up payments processing federally.

Between that and someone actually creating a viable Steam competitor, I will say the government breaking them up and rolling out their own solution would be even less likely. You'd have fights on both sides of the isle and from privacy groups. Not that we have much privacy now under the current scheme, but there's at least a tiny bit of separation between V/MC and the government.

What should happen instead is regulation. They should be held to the same standards as legal tender since they're used in place as such. They shouldn't get to decide how it's used, and that should be enforced.
by SR2Z | 2025-07-25 17:44:13+00:00
I find it amusing that you are complaining about not having a computer to click a link while glossing over the fact that you need a computer to use a link at all.

This use case of "I have a paper journal and no PDF but a computer with a web browser" seems extraordinarily contrived. I have literally held a single-digit number of printed papers in my entire life while looking at thousands as PDFs. If we cared, we'd use a QR code.

This kind of luddite behavior sometimes makes using this site exhausting.
by JackFr | 2025-07-25 17:45:07+00:00
I spent years knowing nothing but C and I’d say it handicapped me in many ways. (I recall insisting that it would be impossible to do anything without assignment.)

After getting my eyes opened a little bit, I read SICP and it was mind blowing. I read a little Haskell, wrote a little Clojure and a lot of Scala. And even though the day job now is Java and Python, I’m much better off for having bothered to learn it.
by pjdesno | 2025-07-25 17:45:16+00:00
It appears to be about as efficient as a pumped storage hydro facility (e.g. here's one in Massachusetts, built in 1970 or so - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bear_Swamp_Hydroelectric_Power...)

A gas-based design seems like it would be better at a small scale - e.g. the facility in the link has a reservoir the better part of a mile away from the turbines, and has a max output of 600 MW or so.

CO2 may actually be a good working fluid for the purpose - cheap, non-toxic except for suffocation hazard, and liquid at room temperature at semi-reasonable pressures. I'm not an expert on that sort of thing, though.
by benlivengood | 2025-07-25 17:45:30+00:00
I think using LLMs/AI for pure mathematics is one of the very least ethically fraught use-cases. Creative works aren't being imitated, people aren't being deceived by hallucinations (literally by design; formal proof systems prevent it), from a safety perspective even a superintelligent agent that was truly limited to producing true theorems would be dramatically safer than other kinds of interactions with the world, etc.
by ralfj | 2025-07-25 17:45:50+00:00
> The rest is your bug; the variable values coming out of sync with each other, not maintaining the invariant among their values.

If the language and its runtime let me break their invariant, then that's their bug, not mine. This is the fundamental promise of type-safe languages: you can't accidentally break the language abstraction.

> It could be the case that a thread-unsafe program breaks a managed run-time, but not an unvarnished truth.

I demonstrated that the Go runtime is such a case, and I think that should be considered a memory safety violation. Not sure which part of that you disagree with...
by Jtsummers | 2025-07-25 17:45:51+00:00
The quoted portion is a reference to an XKCD strip from earlier this century, https://xkcd.com/297/, which is a reference to Star Wars.

Their use of L1 and L2 should be read as "L" as "level" L1 is lower level, L2 is higher level. They're suggesting using Ada (or some other well-suited language) for the lower level trusted systems language and Lisp for the application language.

What it has to do with AI, I don't know. People want AI everywhere now.
by numlocked | 2025-07-25 17:45:53+00:00
(I work at OpenRouter)

We have solved this problem by working with the providers to implement a prices and models API that we scrape, which is how we keep our marketplace up to date. It's been a journey; a year ago it was all happening through conversations in shared Slack channels!

The pricing landscape has become more complex as providers have introduced e.g. different prices for tokens depending on prompt length, caching, etc.

I do believe the right lens on this is actually the price per token by endpoint, not by model; there are fast/slow versions, thinking/non-thinking, etc. that can sometimes also vary by price.

The point of this comment is not to self promote, but we have put a huge amount of work into figuring all of this out, and have it all publicly available on OpenRouter (admittedly not in such a compact, pricing-focused format though!)
by lutusp | 2025-07-25 17:46:02+00:00
> I just saw a video on Reddit where a woman still managed to take a selfie while being literally face to face with a black bear.

This is not uncommon. Bears aren't always tearing people apart, that's a movie trope with little connection to reality. Black bears in particular are smart and social enough to befriend their food sources.

But a hungry bear, or a bear with cubs, that's a different story. Even then bears may surprise you. Once in Alaska, a mama bear got me to babysit her cubs while she went fishing -- link: https://arachnoid.com/alaska2018/bears.html .
by remexre | 2025-07-25 17:46:39+00:00
Formal reasoning about functional programs in terms of their (denotational) semantics is normal in a functional programming class (e.g. it's about a quarter of our mandatory-for-undergrads FP course).

Formal reasoning about imperative programs in terms of their (e.g. axiomatic) semantics is only in a grad-level course, and the programs you can reason about are really, really limited compared to the functional ones. (The last time I TA'd the FP class, one of the homeworks involved proving a simple compiler correct. When I took the grad course, I think the most complicated program we proved correct was selection sort.)

I think "reasoning about programs" is more computer-science than "writing programs," and choosing an imperative language signals that you're not emphasizing the former.
by drew_lytle | 2025-07-25 17:46:39+00:00
Thanks for your comment! Yes, I ignored the VPS angle simply for ease of narrative, but you're right. I also updated the shared album example to hopefully better explain why this is hard from a technical and UX perspective.

As to the "convince people to switch" angle, I think the benefits of data interoperability would be pretty significant and eventually lead people to switch to providers that have that or would likely incentivize providers like Apple to implement that into their products.

Ideally, no one would have to switch and everything would just get better.
by namibj | 2025-07-25 17:46:56+00:00
Some tech has notably separate $/kW and $/kWh pricing.

Such as for example the awfully-often mentioned seasonal Europe setup of green summer hydrogen injected into former methane caverns, to be fed to gas turbines in winter.

Though I guess it's hard to measure $/kWh due to usage of natural formations.

Then there's the up-and-coming opportunity for green iron refining (ore to metal), which becomes financially practical when fed with curtailed summer surplus from integrated PV/battery deployments who's entire AC and grid side is undersized vs. PV generation capacity, using day/night shifting with local storage and peak shaving into iron electrolyzers (which would use some of the day/night shifting battery's capacity to increase over-the-year duty cycle of the iron electrolyzers).

For reference we're looking at capex for the electrolyzers (assuming 30% duty cycle average over a year, and zero discount rate over 20 years expected lifespan) around 0.1$/kg iron (metal) and electricity usage around 3 kWh/kg iron (metal).
by palata | 2025-07-25 17:47:20+00:00
> You can apparently encrypt your Nextcloud data at rest at Hetzner.

Doesn't it mean that they can still access your data while the server is running? I mean, they run the server, they must have access to it, right?

> pCloud provides good encryption support

You mean e2ee? If it's about sending files to an untrusted server, I use restic. Works with pretty much everything (including pCloud) :-).

> BTW, keeping a Nextcloud instance is really easy

Sure, but what I was saying is that either you do it at home and it makes it harder (you want your home LAN to be secure :-) ) or you do it on a VPS, and someone else has access to your data.
by some_random | 2025-07-25 17:47:36+00:00
I agree completely that they align with the religious right in this aspect, but you can't pretend that sex-negativity isn't a huge school of thought in feminism. Vague calls to "stop the sexualization of women in media (aimed at hetrosexual men)" have been a huge part of the casual feminist suite of views for at least a decade.
by stillsut | 2025-07-25 17:48:01+00:00
I can share my own ai-generated codebase:

- there's a devlog showing all the prompts and accepted outputs: https://github.com/sutt/agro/blob/master/docs/dev-summary-v1...

- and you can look at the ai-generated tests (as is being discussed above) and see they aren't very well thought out for the behavior, but are syntactically impressive: https://github.com/sutt/agro/tree/master/tests

- check out the case-studies in the docs if you're interested in more ideas.
by ggreer | 2025-07-25 17:48:03+00:00
They built a small plant in Sardinia, but I can't find any information on what it cost to build or operate.[1]

I'm skeptical of their cost claims. Turbines aren't cheap and compared to batteries, they require significant maintenance. And while you can increase energy storage by increasing the size/number of CO2 tanks, the only way to increase power output (or "charging" speed) is to add more/bigger compressors and turbines.

There's also the issue of volumetric energy density. Wikipedia says that compressed CO2 storage has an energy density of 66.7 watt-hours per liter, though it's unclear if that's before or after turbine inefficiencies.[2] And that's the density in a compressed tank. It doesn't count the volume of the low pressure dome, which is many times larger. For comparison, lithium batteries are 250–700Wh per liter depending on the chemistry. Specific energy (energy per unit mass) is better than lithium ion, but since these are fixed installations, mass isn't a major concern.

Considering their claims are for a theoretical full scale plant, and that the numbers are already worse than batteries (75% efficiency, lower volumetric energy density, $200/kWh), I'm not optimistic. This technology might have niche uses, but I don't see it competing with most lithium battery installations.

That said, I hope I'm wrong. The more energy storage solutions we have, the better our future will be.

1. https://www.energy-storage.news/energy-dome-launches-4mwh-de...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_carbon_dioxide_ener...
by thomas-st | 2025-07-25 17:48:23+00:00
That's just the JSON equivalent of "we have data, and it's null" vs "data is missing", and consistency could be enforced using a constraint or by making it non-NULL in the first place.

It's more common in string fields, which in many cases just get rendered on a web form that doesn't differentiate blank (empty string) from null state, therefore in the database we should in most cases set it up as follows:

- Value required: field should be non-NULL + at least length 1 (via check constraint)

- Value optional: either field is non-NULL, or field is nullable + at least length 1

I'm curious if you prefer to store optional strings as non-NULL and rely on the length, or as nullable and have a length constraint.
by raverbashing | 2025-07-25 17:48:28+00:00
Lambda Calculus is one of those things that look good on paper as a theory construct but in practice it's not a great abstraction.

And honestly you could go your whole career without touching it, maybe only for the naming of an anonymous function.

Boolean logic, graphs, FSMs, set theory, mathematical proofs, pretty much all user here or there. Lambda calculus? Unless you're one of those Haskell fans, meh.
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-25 17:48:30+00:00
I am an HTMX enthusiast, I'm not so worried about privacy and such, it's just a barrier to a good demo. I should click that link and see something that knocks my socks off -- that's a good demo. Providing an email and password to log in for the demo would be one way to grease those skids, but I really should see something on the first page that makes me interested.
by mort96 | 2025-07-25 17:48:49+00:00
As far as I'm concerned, a technology being "ready" (for mainstream adoption or whatever) means that it works better than or equally well as what it's replacing for most people and at least "well enough" for a significant majority. As far as I can tell, we've been there for a while with Wayland. The vast majority of people don't have to care that they're on Wayland.
by hungmung | 2025-07-25 17:49:34+00:00
If we don't get a section 230 for payment processors we're looking at serious consequences for 1A because everything will be a civil suit away from getting blacklisted. Economist reported that adult performers are having trouble keeping bank accounts open -- as soon as a bank or payment processor finds out it's porn-related it gets nuked. Now that this is established practice, what's going to happen when Visa/MC gets sued for handling payments to do with disagreeable political speech? Our right to freedom of speech is currently only as strong as what Visa/MC are willing to defend in court, or you'd better be willing to live without any access to the banking system -- even if you're a gazillionaire who doesn't have to work, you've got to keep your money somewhere (and satisfy KYC).

Even if somebody thinks certain speech should be censored, I doubt they'd want what they consider unsavory speech being driven to use a payment system like Bitcoin, and for that to become the norm, it would open up much more potential for abuse.
by xphos | 2025-07-25 17:49:46+00:00
I think the problem you have is they are clearly supporting one side or other which is accurate but I think they have censorship fear. There is no reason why they can't be called pornographic and lose access to payment systems.

I think there is credibility in saying that hiding behind the banner of stopping abuse as thin veneer of enforcing political or religious ideology. An argument is often made in the same vein for outlawing encryption. Clearly we must be against crime so we need to destroy encryption and if you don't destroy encryption you like crime. This type of argumentation is pretty similar to targeting distributors rather than content directly. Its definitely more effective but it seems like you just want to enforce your ideology rather than anything else.

Maybe you don't feel that argument was made after all it was a little bit all over the place but I saw it and there were a lot of links to organizations and achieve links and bills for you to continue research from. I am trying to balance here though because i see both yours's and the others perspective