MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by _Algernon_ | 2025-07-28 09:51:29+00:00
How does solid solve the social problem of what happens to copied data once it leaves the user's control?

>Users can specify who has access to what data with granular precision, using simple statements like “Alice can read this document” or “Bob can write to this folder.”

After this Alice and Bob have a copy of the data, and you end up still having to solve the social problem of preventing Alice and Bob from abusing their copy of the data by selling it to data brokers.

Solid would only work to centralize the attack surface. You now have one centralized data store with all the information about a person, and all tech giants would employ every dark pattern to extract this data. This is not an improvement, considering that every digital citizen has undergone years of conditioning to ignore permission requests.
by snorlaxmorlax | 2025-07-28 09:53:03+00:00
Hi, I'm part of the MDN team. That doesn’t sound quite right, MDN has never replaced example links with AI-generated answers. While we’ve introduced an AI-powered helper to assist with common questions, it’s a supplementary tool, not part of our core documentation experience.

All MDN content remains human-written, maintained by our team and contributors, and based on real browser implementations. You can always view the source and track changes on our GitHub repository for content.

https://github.com/mdn/content
by jiggawatts | 2025-07-28 09:53:27+00:00
I've flipped this around, and now write the "document I want to be handed", which is precisely that condensed into just one or two pages with nothing but network paths, DNS names, service account names, Git repo names, required tooling to install, etc...

No fluff, no descriptions other than simple labels, no ten paragraph intro blurb, no index, nothing that I would normally skip over when reading someone else's document.

I call these "cheat sheets" and send them out to colleagues on their first day on a project. I've heard feedback along the lines of "I got 10x more value from that one page than three weeks of 'handover' from other people."
by malcontented | 2025-07-28 09:53:47+00:00
Agreed, regarding the computational simplicity of CoT LLMs, and that this solution certainly has much more flexibility. But is there a reason to believe that this architecture (and training method) is as applicable to the development of generally-capable models as it is to the solution of individual puzzles?

Don't get me wrong, this is a cool development, and I would love to see how this architecture behaves on a constraint-based problem that's not easily tractable via traditional algorithm.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-07-28 09:55:21+00:00
This is the first time I have ever signed up for a newsletter and I did it without reading the HN comments or the fact that you wrote it or it took so long to write.

I really appreciate such deep dives, though I admittedly knew some of them because I was also obsessed much like you with the edge/ js engine space but still I learned a lot

I really liked reading through the blog. Please, take your time, rest and create such beautiful masterpieces in the future too, I would be waiting for them patiently!

Have a nice day.
by jlouis | 2025-07-28 09:55:55+00:00
It's also that whenever an hour is poured into Haskell, Scheme, or OCaml, there's hundreds of hours poured into Javascript, Python, C, Java, ...

Eventually that lets you optimize things more at the compiler level because you have the extra time to maintain it as well.

My primary argument is that a more restrictive language, if designed correctly, has programs which are resistant against bit-rot over time. You can take a program from 15 years ago and compile it. It'll run faster due to optimizations, and hardware improvements. And the program will still be the "right thing to do."

In contrast, if you take C code that's older, you'd shudder and immediately begin identifying things left and right which needs to be redone because the modern machine is different from the aged machine. Part of the efficiency comes from the fact we are building the C code such that it has affordance on current hardware for efficient execution. But when the hardware updates, then the code needs amendment to keep up. Meanwhile, your SQL statement is the same because it's written declaratively.
by jerryjappinen | 2025-07-28 09:56:23+00:00
Kindof. It's impressive and definitely a worthwhile endeavour.

But they did need to attract a large amount of investment and sponsorships.

The lead developer has worked on browsers at Apple and there is probably only a handful of people on the planet who can do what he's doing.

If you follow his updates and listen to his interviews, you get a sense of what a massive undertaking this is and how much expectation management is involved.

I'm very interested in the concept of new browsers that are not intended to browse modern HTML+CSS+JS spec, but maybe something completely different. Web content varies so wildly from one context to another and I wonder if all of the spec is really needed for certain use cases: if I just want to read news, or if I just want to tell the audience what services I provide and what my phone number is, do we really need to involve WASM and canvas and web workers?
by SirHumphrey | 2025-07-28 09:56:24+00:00
To quote Yes, Minister:

> Hacker: One of your officials pays farmers to produce surplus food, while on the same floor, the next office is paying them to destroy the surpluses.

> Maurice: That is not true!

> Hacker: No?

> Maurice: He is not in the next office, not even on the same floor!
by Doxin | 2025-07-28 09:57:38+00:00
Not who you're replying to, but I use cast iron and steel on my induction stove and I've not had any warping over a period of 4 years now. One thing might be using the stove on the maximum setting? max power on an induction stove is going to be heating your pan MUCH quicker than on gas. Personally I only use settings over 8 (out of 10) for pots with water in them, not for skillets etc.
by Phemist | 2025-07-28 09:58:07+00:00
JavaScript's weak typing and implicit type conversions get in the way of reasonability though:

>>> '13' % 2 0 >>> 'nan' % 2 NaN >>> NaN % 2 NaN >>> null % 2 0

this package ensures that you have a sane complement to is-odd, e.g. `!isOdd(someVar)` is always even (in the domain of natural numbers). A naive implementation of is-odd: `(some_var % 2 === 1)`, does not have a sane complement.

Anyway, to include this package as a dependency is indeed overkill. I would most likely opt for vendoring this package into the project (including licenses and acknowledgement), as the code is unlikely to change and is MIT licensed.
by ben_w | 2025-07-28 09:58:09+00:00
That goes too far in the opposite direction.

Humans come with a broad range of skills and performance; LLMs are inside this range.

The fact LLMs are not human, and the fact that the best humans beat them, is as economically relevant as the fact that a ride-on lawnmower isn't human and (typically) an athlete can outrace them — i.e. it resolves to what you're actually using them for.
by snorlaxmorlax | 2025-07-28 09:58:11+00:00
Hi, thank you so much for the kind words and thoughtful feedback, I really appreciate it! I’ll be sure to bring this to the team so we can explore how to improve things further.

Would you mind creating an issue for this page using the link below? It helps us track and prioritize updates more effectively: https://github.com/mdn/content/issues/new?template=page-repo...

We actively monitor feedback on GitHub, so if you have more detailed suggestions or broader ideas, feel free to start a conversation on GitHub Discussions → https://github.com/orgs/mdn/discussions

We’d love to hear more from you and identify areas we can improve together.
by mettamage | 2025-07-28 09:58:16+00:00
> We grab a framework because we lack the discipline to keep something simple.

I grab a framework to also keep my skills relevant, especially if I'm not practicing them in my day job. If I didn't have that impulse, I'd keep it simple all the time. I'm really good at it, because I really dislike complexity as it requires me to remember more things and I don't really like that feeling.

I'll optimize if I absolutely have to.

Not that businesses ever cared about this attitude. I mean, I've seen it work. The work that I do with LLMs is quick and pragmatic. No need to put stuff into production when it's just a prototype. No need to use a framework if gluing an LLM with some Python code and a well crafted prompt produces the result we need. It allows me to ship in days, not weeks. Obviously, if one then wants it productionized, additional work needs to be put into it and possibly the code needs to be refactored. But, in my opinion, that's the time and place where that type of stuff should happen.
by npteljes | 2025-07-28 09:58:18+00:00
I see the assault, but the results are very different from what we can see with Steam and itch.io - I think maybe because of how much M/V matter in the West vs. Japan. Whereas these western companies gave in to pressure, the same pressure in Japan didn't work, the stores just seemed to restrict the card usage, and call it a day.

I wish other payment processors spread in the West. With a much more even distribution of power, they could not abuse it like this (and others could not use them to abuse it like this).
by saidinesh5 | 2025-07-28 09:59:05+00:00
Pixel stopped providing device trees, kernel history,

Samsung has been doing this for a while now.

Which are the devices/vendors that still allow / encourage this?

Even Graphene OS reported that they're in talks with some vendor... Have there been any updates towards that?

The main reason i used to root devices are:

* Get longer support/OS updates than what the vendor provided

* System level adblock using adaway

* Titanium backup

These days firefox/brave browser gets me half way through adblocking and i lost interest in the ad filled apps..

Syncing gets me good level of syncing for backup on my NAS etc .
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-07-28 09:59:08+00:00
It doesn't sound reasonable for any language tbh, tests don't run that fast and running after each keystroke instead of on save or after a debouncing delay is just wasteful. If you amortize / ignore run times, load, and ignore the annoyance of tests blinking red/green at every keystroke then I suppose it would be alright.
by derriz | 2025-07-28 09:59:29+00:00
Yes - but this was decades ago so my memory is hazy. It was with an early Haskell variant called Gofer - which had a nice feature which allowed using list comprehension notation with arbitrary monads - which for simple grammars produced very readable - even beautiful - parser code. But like with parser generators, once the grammar became complex, the beauty and simplicity disappeared.

Actually I wish this generalization of list comprehensions had been taken up by Haskell or other languages. Haskell decided on the do notation while Python users these days seem to shun the feature.
by alias_neo | 2025-07-28 09:59:32+00:00
Because what is right and wrong can be subjective, I could argue that if you said Strawberry is better than Kiwi, that's hate, and suddenly you find yourself on the wrong side of it.

Don't dare say anything with the remotest chance of being controversial or that could have a hint of upsetting someone, don't even think about expressing an opinion that someone might not agree with.

The problem in your ideal digital world isn't that the bad abuse the freedom they have now, it's that the bad will also abuse the lack of freedom everyone else will have then, and suddenly everyone with no ill intent is on the wrong side of the enforcement.

The comment you just replied to would probably find itself on the receiving end of it because of the wording and tone.
by rini17 | 2025-07-28 09:59:54+00:00
In practice we want forest soil not eroded away after clear cut logging, but also not depleted nutrients like phosphorus, nor prone to wildfires[note], nor trees damaged by acid rain etc. Definition of "sustainable" in the law alone is not sufficient to cover all this and never will be, some discretion and responsibility is required.

[note] depends on the biome, part of said discretion
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-07-28 10:02:49+00:00
The only real life usage of any kind of HUD I can imagine at the moment is navigation, and I have only ever used that (or other car related things) as something I selectively look at, never felt like it's something I need to have in sight at all times.

That said, the best GUI is the one you don't notice, so uh... I can't actually name anything else, it's probably deeply engrained in my computer usage.
by abxyz | 2025-07-28 10:03:42+00:00
I lived in the U.K. for decades and I have lived in many other countries. I’ll criticise the U.K. government and society endlessly but to describe these changes as notable or remarkable relative to most other countries is nonsense.

From a U.S. internet libertarian freedom-at-all-costs perspective, sure, it’s a draconian nightmare, but for normal people from the U.K. or any other country, it’s barely a blip on their radar.

The U.K. is a flawed place going to hell in a hand basket that many U.K. citizens have strong opinions on but outside of us, the freedom loving nerds on the internet, this identity verification law is not a part of the conversation. “Draconian” and “authoritarian” aren’t in the vocabulary of most U.K. citizens. They’re far more concerned about immigration and the economy.

The long-standing “the U.K. has the most cctv cameras per person” meme is further evidence of this. A well-loved fact carted out by freedom-loving anti-surveillance types… that the mainstream of the U.K. could not care less about.
by TrackerFF | 2025-07-28 10:04:23+00:00
At least in Norway, the user -facing state services are good. They used to suck, but are now good.

I can do most anything online, haven’t had to physically visit an gov office for years, outside voting and getting a new passport photo. And everything just works.

Edit: and before anyone points out that we’re not in EU, yes - but we’re in the EEA.
by rubyAce | 2025-07-28 10:04:32+00:00
> This view (“the Bourgeois’, etc.) seems to imply there’s a group of very clever manipulators somewhere, overtly planning and executing this (presumably in a dark room with armchairs and cigars). But I just can’t imagine this, in the UK’s example.

If you read any history about any daring military action during WW2, a lot of it was done by men thinking up of stuff in dark rooms while smoking cigars. Why is this so unbelievable now?

BTW, The UK ran the world's largest empire and until recently this was in living memory.

> What I see instead is the other side of Hanlon’s razor —incompetence— coupled with a political class riven with pockets of self-interest, and very few seemingly with an intellectual hypothesis to explain the UK’s current predicament, or to chart a path out of it.

Hanlon's razor IMO is nonsense. It is honestly believe it was invented so people could explain away their malice.

Anyone who is relatively intelligent will work at out some point, that if they don't want to do something they can passively aggressively work against the authority while working withing the rules. My father (who builds luxury yachts and is near retirement) was telling me how he maliciously complies with various companies rules to make his superior's life more difficult, this is a way to get back at them for their poor planning.

Even if you accept that Hanlon's razor is mostly true. It cannot be applied when you are dealing with political actors. Political actors, the media and anything related are literally trying to manipulate you. In fact it is a good rule that whatever they tell you that it is, assume the opposite and that is typically true.
by duckerduck | 2025-07-28 10:04:34+00:00
I think semcheck has a different use-case. AI is inherently imprecise, if you need formal mathematical verification, AI isn't suitable for that. What semcheck does give you is a very simple way to start verifying specifications, and it's best used in combination with AI-assisted development workflows where you're already spending a lot of time writing specifications (i.e. prompts).
by iudqnolq | 2025-07-28 10:05:02+00:00
So far each big, unpopular decision by Bezos has led to significant cancellations of paid subscriptions. Since it's happened more than once I don't think it's safe to assume the remaining subscribers are happy either.

Bezos cancels planned endorsement of Harris: 300,000 paid subscribers cancel in period up to election. (400,000 new paid subscribers over the period, but they offered significant promotional discounts)

Bezos tweets change to opinion policy: 75,000 paid subscribers cancel within four days

With in the order of 2.5 million paid subscribers before all this started that's significant losses.

Edit: Source is https://www.npr.org/2025/02/28/nx-s1-5312819/washington-post...
by jbstack | 2025-07-28 10:05:12+00:00
"People aren't going to starve to fill their gas tank so you need to grow more corn to offset that used for biofuel. To do that can require destroying other carbon sinks (wetlands are the example given, sometimes dried and then burned) to turn them into fields"

This doesn't make any sense to me. With petrol, you are transferring carbon from a store to the atmosphere every time you use it for energy. With a wetland, you only destroy it once (thus releasing carbon from the store) the first time you use it to produce corn. Every time after that you're capturing carbon (in corn) and then releasing it again (when burning the biofuel).

Yes, it's an oversimplified analogy (there are many more subtleties such as the amount of carbon in wetland vs corn, the carbon requirements of the production and retail process of petrol vs biofuel, etc.). But even if we made the model more complex, it's still fundamentally two entirely different scenarios. One is just a continuous release from carbon stores while the other aims to restructure a carbon store so that it can release and capture in a cycle.
by jjbinx007 | 2025-07-28 10:05:25+00:00
I decided to part with my Huawei Mate 20 X after about 7 years of ownership not because it was a bad phone - on the contrary, it has a nice big screen, decent enough camera, is still plenty fast enough etc - but because the OS hadn't received any updates in a long time.

Rather than see it go to landfill I donated it to a friend who's happy to use it but what an absolute waste.

Bought a Pixel purely because they are committed to updating their phones for a long time.
by BiteCode_dev | 2025-07-28 10:06:08+00:00
In the 1930s, the Dutch government conducted a census that included religion. The Netherlands, after all, had a comprehensive population registry system (Bevolkingsregister) established in the 19th century. This registry was centralized, continuously updated, and included religion, addresses, family connections, and occupations.

After the German occupation in 1940, the Nazis accessed and exploited the Dutch population registry, including religious affiliation.

About 75–80% of the ~140,000 Jews in the Netherlands were killed.

This is the highest percentage in Western Europe.

Compare that to France, which had a more fragmented administrative system, and less complete central records and 25% of Jews in France were deported and killed — a much lower percentage than the Netherlands.

As usual, when reaching the Godwin point, the idea is not for you to take it at face value, but to extrapolate to your situation.

The concentration of power and centralized people tracking are eventually always abused, and once your system becomes less free (which has historically eventually happened on a long enough timescale), you will pay the price for it.

In our case, having a full history of all opinions, interactions, locations, and behavior linked to full identity of people is what we are ultimately talking about here. It's already well on its way, but it will make it worse.

The more you concentrate power and feed data about people, the greater the potential damage.

And of course, it doesn't need to be a full-on dictatorship to get problems with those.

It's a spectrum of increasing problems you will get, the more you lean into it.
by elygre | 2025-07-28 10:06:52+00:00
So, maybe. And also maybe not.

https://www.forskning.no/forbruk-ntnu-partner/er-vaskemaskin... (in Norwegian) quotes research from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

The article says that a washing machine used to last 20 years, and now only lasts 10 years. However, it also says that machine usage has doubled, from four to eight times a week. So, the new machine lasts the same number of cycles, but the number of cycles is reached much faster.
by easyThrowaway | 2025-07-28 10:06:57+00:00
I can't find the link, but there was a Stackoverflow question about ripping a cdrom by using a flatbed scanner, the conclusion was that the scanner would've required 2-3X the DPI currently available on a commercial device to correctly parse the gaps, given that a cdrom laser size is roughly 800nm.

On the other hand I'm still puzzled why there are no homebrew projects for a dumb dumping device that simply reads all the data on a cdrom, error correction, subchannels completely raw. There are a lot of CDs with a very weird data structure (Console Games, Early Copy Protected pc games, AKAI sample discs, some Hybrid Macintosh discs, in other words anything not using the iso9660 standard) which are at risk of Disc Rot[1], and simply storing them as Iso or Bin/Cue files (including proprietary variants like Alcohol 120%/Daemon Tools mdf files) is basically useless both for archival and real world usage purposes.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_rot
by warangal | 2025-07-28 10:07:39+00:00
Nice write up! It is about speeding up underlying hash-table for a `cuckoo filter` , as in false-positives are allowed, unlike data-structure like dictionary, which makes sure that false-positive rate is 0.

Whenever i need to use dictionary/hash-table in a hot loop where maximum possible iterations are known, i use a custom hash-table initialized with that value, and in some cases, standard library implementation may store `hash` along with `key` and `value` in case it needs to `resize`, in my case i don't store the `hash` which leads to speed up about 15-20% due to less cache misses, as there would be no resize possible!

Also `cuckoo filters` seems to use `robinhood hashing` like strategy, using in a hot-loop it would lead to a higher insert cost ?
by de_huit | 2025-07-28 10:08:19+00:00
Predict the exact traffic situation 32 minutes in the future? Where would the information come from? The actual system in Flanders predicts about 1 minute, and that only for the main arteries. And the system barely uses the info from the vehicles, the main source is induction loops. Only a small percentage of the vehicles send their location, and hardly any cyclist and pedestrians. Vehicles don't send their destination, only the 'turn-intention' on the next intersection. But even that is unreliable, so typically not used.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-07-28 10:08:22+00:00
>You mean France and Italy where the parties which blame open border policies are governing?

Is Le Pen governing in France and I'm not aware of? Because I've never seen Macron do that.

And people are the ones blaming open borders, then some parties choose to capitalize on that (even if they ultimately do nothing), while some other parties choose to suppress that viewpoint as being right wing propaganda and that in reality there are no issue with open borders, that all the crime is imaginary, which is why they push for online censorship and anti-encryption laws, to make sure only their viewpoint becomes the only legally allowed one.