MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AdmiralAsshat | 2025-07-21 19:47:27+00:00
Amazon sent me a recall notice about this one, indicating they had it from my purchase history, but oddly I couldn't find it in my own collection of power banks, or in the ones I gave to my wife. I'm worried I might have purchased one for another family member as a gift and not remembered who.

The recall is concerning, especially since once they started with the one, they quickly added several more to the list. I've ordered at least 17 Anker products over the last ten years (not all of them power banks). I pay the premium over cheaper external batteries, and I have advised my family in the past to do the same. This is ostensibly because they are supposed to be the guys that don't explode. If I can't even take that for granted, then there's really no reason to maintain customer loyalty. There are countless other, cheaper brands available online from no-name Chinese companies.
by hvb2 | 2025-07-21 19:47:33+00:00
It's hard to define 'better'

Nuclear has significant downsides besides the waste and proliferation risks.

You wouldn't want to build a grid on just nuclear.

Let's assume that city takes 1.2MWh at its peak every day. That would mean you need to be able to supply that. So you build a nuclear plant producing 1.2MWh of energy.

Now you have the argument against renewables (the sun doesn't always shine) in reverse. The city doesn't always need that peak power. And nuclear is the slowest of all power sources to tune up and down in terms of output.

Nuclear for base load makes a lot of sense as it'll always be fully utilized. But nuclear to power a grid 100% doesn't exist anywhere for a reason either.
by lucianbr | 2025-07-21 19:47:38+00:00
> Needless to say, a human accountant would never behave in these ways. In fact, we explicitly prompt against this behavior in no uncertain terms, but the instructions – and the entire spirit of the task – are lost in the interest of making forward progress. Claude and Grok keep trying until they find some way to get past the checks, even if it explicitly violates their instructions and the core goal.

I recently read a similar thing here on HN. There the model was making commits with some problem like tests failing, then the human added a pre-commit hook, then the model started editing the hook to make forward progress, then the hook was made read-only, then the model was trying to make it writeable...

To me it feels like the model clearly does not have an understanding of what is happening, what the goal is and if it is really making progress towards the goal. And this lack of understanding is an actual problem. You can paper over it for a short while, but as here and in the other article, over a longer experiment it results in failure.
by stillpointlab | 2025-07-21 19:47:39+00:00
> you can take action against the human

I think that will depend on a case-by-case. I don't have any recent examples but I recall someone trying to sue one of those strip-mall tax preparation franchises over incorrect filings. My understanding is that the documents that you sign when you enroll in those services are pretty strictly in the favor of the company. I doubt you could ever go after the specific "human" that made the error even if it was maliciously done.

In the same way, if you pay for a tax service that uses AI agents, what you can and cannot "take action" for will probably be outlined in the terms of service that you accept when you sign up.

I would guess millions of people already use software based tax filing services (e.g. turbo tax) where no human at all is in the loop. I don't understand how swapping in an LLM significantly changes the liability in those cases. The contract will be between you and the entity (probably a corporation), not you and "computers".

Worth stating I am NOT a lawyer.
by jact | 2025-07-21 19:47:41+00:00
We certainly sanction hate speech because of the psychological and physical damage it causes to its victims. Pornography is harmful to everyone involved, from producer to consumer. In the case of video games that don’t depict real people this is attenuated somewhat, but not in the way that counts. By consuming or producing pornography, you are blowing your own human dignity to bits.

If you would prefer, I’d say it’s an “affront” to human dignity.

My opinion is that sexuality is something that shouldn’t be commodified in any way, shape, or form. When we package it and promote it as a commodity or for entertainment, that practice as such is harmful. There’s simply no such thing as “healthy” pornography because the very preconditions for pornography to come into existence are rooted in an unhealthy and disordered understanding of human sexuality. I think MacKinnon and Dworkin were absolutely right on this front.

I’m far more afraid of the world we currently live in, where we treat sex/sexuality as something that exists for entertainment value and can be commodified — than I am of this form of censorship. At least our overlords are making the ethical call here.
by int_19h | 2025-07-21 19:47:50+00:00
The irony is that WPF itself never went away, and receives support and even occasional minor new features even to this day on .NET Core.

Much like WinForms, there are still many internal line-of-business apps written in it decades ago that are just happily chugging along, ignoring all the post-Silverlight churn in Microsoft dev story.
by tyzoid | 2025-07-21 19:47:52+00:00
The problem is there's not really a good way to subscribe to these things. I'd gladly pay a nominal fee (~$6 USD/mo) for access to media, but I'm not about to subscribe individually to each site. Ideally, I'd subscribe to a single service and payment is split across the various sites in proportion to how many articles I read from each site.

There was a service that promised this a while back, but IIRC mozilla bought and killed it.
by einrealist | 2025-07-21 19:47:54+00:00
I wonder by how much Musk and Bezos are driven by science fiction and how this materializes in the real world. Its okay to have dreams and goals. However, as soon as real resources (as in energy, materials, environmental impact) are spent, we better be sure that things are viable from a grounded scientific perspective.

For example, Musk's obsession with colonising on Mars is troubling when you hear what scientists have to say about it. Musk tends to talk about it as if Earth is already lost.

So, how many decisions by the wealthy and gullible (or downright stupid, orange) politicians are driven by science fiction and vibes?
by giraffe_lady | 2025-07-21 19:48:03+00:00
"But I don't want to cure cancer. I want to turn people into dinosaurs."

Capital owners don't want healthier, more satisfied workers. They want to maximize the surplus labor from which their wealth is built.

Someone will probably come in with "happier workers will be more optimal for that" and maybe I guess but it doesn't seem that way to me. Doesn't seem that way to the owners either or it would already be like that.

We'll need a labor movement to fight for this, just like our predecessors had to fight and sometimes die for things like the weekend and the eight hour workday.

https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/125/992/944...
by bryanlarsen | 2025-07-21 19:48:10+00:00
There are several 50 year old solar installations that are still working fine. They've only degraded 10%-20% or so. The reason that they are typically replaced after ~20 years is that the technology has gotten so much better that you can replace the old panels with new ones and get 4X the power in the same space. The wires and the mounts are worth more than the panels, so reuse those with modern panels.
by jermaustin1 | 2025-07-21 19:48:28+00:00
> The kid is spoiled.

I can't tell if you are being sarcastic or not, so I will default to: I hope you are.

The kid isn't spoiled for wanting to play a game with his dad... and he isn't spoiled for watching and waiting for his dad to input "play with son" in his phone.

If anything the father is spoiled. He is a high-earner, who choses to spend more time working than necessary for the advancement of a career. And his family has spoiled him to the fact that he can get away with spending less time on them than they want.

If they were to then prioritize their want to spend time with someone willfully spending extra time at work, that also wouldn't be spoiled.

Spoiled is asking for something, getting it, and asking for more, getting it, and asking for more, getting it, ask... you get it.

The child asking for his father to spend time with him (even if he was demanding NOW!), isn't spoiled, because obviously, as the father has admitted, he has to schedule time for his child.
by andybak | 2025-07-21 19:48:30+00:00
AI seems to elicit a different response from people than any other debate I can remember. It's different to blockchain (which had a similar level of "will you all just shut the fuck up about it?")

It's different to culture war stuff (which was very toxic and hard to have sensible discussions about - but in a different way).

It's the only topic in my lifetime where I have to remember not to even mention it to several close friends. And these are geeky people I have a lot of shared interests in common with.

I'm over 50 and I remember a lot of controversial topics - but this one is weird in a different way.
by anthk | 2025-07-21 19:48:35+00:00
The Chapter on compiling Emacs from the Unix Haters' Handbook says otherwise... and I am an OpenBSD user.

Somehow, in the 90's, the reverse with libre software happened: Rxvt, xvt, fvwm... were far lighter and featureful than plain TWM, XTerm's and whatnot.
by pjmlp | 2025-07-21 19:49:03+00:00
Success in a relative kind of way.

Valve has failed to convince studios already targeting POSIX like environments like Android NDK and Orbis OS (PlayStation), to port their games to GNU/Linux.

Had to switch translating Windows games, as plan B kind of solution.

It remains to be seen for how long Microsoft will tolerate Proton, or just like it happened with netbooks, will drive other handheld OEMs to use Windows and thus in a decade from now people will foundly remember Steam Deck.
by sharpfuryz | 2025-07-21 19:49:13+00:00
Hi, ntstr! I am the author of the parent post, and it is not LLM Slop (you can use gpt detectors like zerogpt.com to check text); in fact, only the "call to action" (the last sentence) part was written by LLM, just because I thought that something was missing.

> Is this satire? or trolling? it is concerning that everyone replies to it as if there had been human thought behind this drivel. No satire, no trolling from me. Even if an evil robot wrote this comment, what's wrong with responding to it?
by yesfitz | 2025-07-21 19:49:15+00:00
If you're in the United States, your local public library will have newspaper and magazine subscriptions, both digital and print. If your local library doesn't have what you want, you can check larger libraries in your state to see if you qualify for a library card.

Some libraries offer non-resident library cards for a fee (e.g. $50 annually for the New Orleans Public Library).

Your library will also have a wide variety of other media in its catalog, like books, DVDs, Blu-Rays, CDs, video games, maybe even art. If they don't have a piece of physical media that you want, you can request it via interlibrary loan.

It's astounding how radical the public library system is, and it exists to solve the problem you've identified.
by ArnavAgrawal03 | 2025-07-21 19:49:25+00:00
That's an interesting point. We've found that for most use cases, over 5 pages of context is overkill. Having a small LLM conversion layer on top of images also ends up working pretty well (i.e. instead of direct OCR, passing batches of 5 images - if you really need that many - to smaller vision models and having them extract the most important points from the document).

We're currently researching surgery on the cache or attention maps for LLMs to have larger batches of images work better. Seems like Sliding window or Infinite Retrieval might be promising directions to go into.

Also - and this is speculation - I think that the jump in multimodal capabilities that we're seeing from models is only going to increase, meaning long-context for images is probably not going to be a huge blocker as models improve.
by IAmBroom | 2025-07-21 19:49:31+00:00
If you want to talk about competent governance, look to William II, the "Hammer of the Scots" villainized in Braveheart. He made it law that legally binding contracts must be written in plain English, so that both parties would (most likely) be able to understand what they were agreeing to...

Even though he did not speak it, himself.
by vonneumannstan | 2025-07-21 19:49:33+00:00
To me it reads like anesthesia in the MRI shouldn't be allowed or needs better supervision.

>he's really grateful if someone's there to assist with basic moves while he's trying to control the more pressing matters.

I think they were saying theres literally no one there to help.

>Yeah, can happen. That doesn't mean you did something wrong. Sometimes (very rarely), shit happens even though you've planned it all according to guidelines.

Emblematic of the broken US healthcare system. The guideline creates an easily preventable scenario where the patient is highly likely to die for no real reason.
by constantcrying | 2025-07-21 19:50:00+00:00
>The fact is that if you’re worried about privacy, you should be far, far more concerned about all the data that various companies are hoovering up about you based on your online activity.

The risk for privacy is not that one piece of your data is out there, but that companies can recreate a very sophisticated model of you by aggregating many pieces.

The idea that one small breach of privacy is equivalent to the vast amounts of informations 23andme has getting correlated with hundreds of other small pieces, is absurd.

It is a total lie that you should not be concerned about your privacy, because total privacy is impossible. The author also does not understand incognito mode.
by pphysch | 2025-07-21 19:50:20+00:00
Always interesting to read these highly-selective histories of the CIA, where the most powerful clandestine organization in the world is presented as largely above-board and under-resourced.

Apparently the CIA was struggling to find a place in the early 90s while its former director was the sitting POTUS and the USA was renewing its grand campaign to covertly and overtly reshape the Middle East. Sure buddy, totally believable.

And no mention of the CIA's protection of 9/11 attackers from FBI persecution prior to the attacks.
by ianbutler | 2025-07-21 19:50:49+00:00
Okay but like, I'm not planning on committing a crime and nothing I do now is considered criminal, but let's play out the worst case scenario and a fascist government comes to power and something I do now is considered criminal and they can place me doing it with this DNA that as the author describes can narrow down if it was me pretty easily.

You can tell me I'm paranoid or something, but I can also just not give them my DNA for no effort and be all the more better off if something like this happens OR if I do commit a crime under current laws I haven't given up the ghost immediately.

This feels like short term little gain for catastrophic effects in the worst case scenario.

The author also makes this like a weird dichotomy with online tracking, I ALSO care about being tracked on the internet and my personal privacy is pretty important to me in general.

I want all of my privacy, or better worded I want privacy to be my choice such as here on HN where I use my real name intentionally. :)
by happytoexplain | 2025-07-21 19:51:17+00:00
Sure - the Luddites were correct.

Unless you're defining "correct" as "stopped the development of a disruptive technology", which would be, of course, ignorant.

Edit: The post I'm replying to was edited to redefine the context to be the defense of Luddites specifically for destroying machines. I may have used different words/tone in that case, but my opinion is still qualitatively the same. Just know I am speaking holistically.

Edit: To be more specific (and less snide): Inevitability does not making something universally good, and people negatively affected are correct and justified to react negatively.
by nfriedly | 2025-07-21 19:51:31+00:00
My bill is currently split between generation and distribution, and the two halves are roughly equal. (I don't have any solar at the moment.)

The interesting bit is that the distribution charge is a mix of fixed-fees and per-kWh fees. Obviously the fixed fees will remain if I added solar, but I'm not certain what would happen to the per-kWh fees if I started exporting power to the grid.
by ericmcer | 2025-07-21 19:51:33+00:00
Seriously watching Cursor (backed by Claude) go off the rails sometimes can be... frustrating. If it misses the intention behind a fix it can spin out and all of a sudden you have hundreds of lines of changes across 10 different files when you just wanted it to do a simple find/replace of a single line. If you don't watch it spin out and stop it immediately you will be manually rejecting a bunch of files.
by scheeseman486 | 2025-07-21 19:52:28+00:00
From a usability perspective all the popular desktop Linux distros are barely different from each other, the things I do and the way I did them in Arch were basically the same things I was doing in Ubuntu, only with pacman instead of apt. Any operating system that requires the user actively maintain it's system stack will, at some point, likely require diving into a terminal and messing with configuration files.

The people who run into that wall and bounce off of it wouldn't be better served by Ubuntu, but an immutable OS. Fedora Silverblue, Bazzite et al.

Like the Steam Deck, too; though you're wrong about the OS's scope for hardware compatibility. SteamOS supports the Legion Go S officially, but also contains specific patches to support the ROG Ally which they have no affiliation with. Their intent for SteamOS isn't for it to stay on Valve hardware forever.
by 9rx | 2025-07-21 19:52:44+00:00
> When 98% of available homes are used that is a shortage.

I anticipate that 98% of available jets are used. And I certainly can't afford one. Does that mean there is a shortage of jets? What isn't there a shortage of?

> Your definition of shortage seems very different to mine so there's no point in continuing.

What, then, was the point of continuing earlier? We have been discussing the technical definition since the onset.

I respect your freedom to make up definitions on the spot as you see fit, but there is nothing that can be discussed about such definitions. Clearly you saw value in discussing what surrounds the technical definition earlier, as demonstrated by multiple replies. Why the change of tune now?
by Aachen | 2025-07-21 19:52:47+00:00
I'm not sure it's spoiled. From what I hear of colleagues with kids, they would wish you came home riding a new pony about 12 minutes after you left to work. Another colleague was "gone" too much from the daughter's life and she wished that wasn't the case (he works from home besides like two weeks of the year). They're just not grown ups, not realistic, and (I'd assume) that's normal. Which is to say, I don't think you're at all off in that the kid's wish is to be taken as a loose suggestion at best, but I wouldn't say that they're spoiled just because there exists someone else has it worse
by ArnavAgrawal03 | 2025-07-21 19:53:02+00:00
This would depend on the exact use case. Feeding in the invoice directly to the model is - in my opinion - the best way to approach this. If you need to search over them, then directly embedding them as images is definitely a strong approach. Here's something we wrote explaining the process: https://www.morphik.ai/docs/concepts/colpali
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-07-21 19:53:16+00:00
> Paywalls on everything seems fair, but it means that only some people will see things that everyone should read.

The thing is that was status quo for a long time, the paywall being either you sitting down at a restaurant/barber/some other business that already bought papers, or you buying the paper yourself. And this was a worse arrangement for newspapers; distribution costs for a physical paper are catastrophically high compared to web hosting.

I think the major issue is two-fold:

1) Papers early adoption of the Internet, putting all their content online for free, was ridiculous and unsustainable from minute one. While this is our cultural expectation, that does not mean it is remotely good business and continuing to indulge the consumer that this can be free, for even one or three or whatever arbitrary amount of articles you're willing to "give away" each month is doing nothing but devaluing your product further.

2) In conjunction with the above, if papers are to charge for their reporting again, the quality needs to go up substantially. I don't recall the last time I read an article on even a mainstream, big news organization, and didn't find just like... completely avoidable issues. Typos. Poor grammar. Lack of cited sources or even just outright incorrect information. The pace of news must be allowed to slow because good product takes time to make, and being first if your reporting is shit needs to be derided more directly.

To put it short: News needs to be comfortable to take time to dig into issues, not simply be in a mad rush to cover everything first no matter how shitty the cited information is, and it has to be ready to stand behind a paywall and just... be real with people. If you want quality news, you need to be willing to pay for it, full stop.

The only other solution I can picture is independent news organizations that are funded by the taxpayer but not beholden to the government, as an American looking at my own government right now... I mean I think it's likelier we'll cure all forms of cancer by Thursday.
by moritzwarhier | 2025-07-21 19:53:28+00:00
I was born in Germany, and while I have heard of it, I probably wouldn't have been able to tell where it is until my early twenties, or that it's even in Germany.

In Western Germany, this never came up anywhere and it also wasn't a major part of history education or things like that.

I've still never been there.

And when the UNESCO thing came up, I had to refresh my knowledge to differentiate the French "Sun King" Louis from the Bavarian king who ordered the building of this castle.

My first introduction to it was that it's a place where foreigners like to go and a popular tourist attraction.

No sure why this incited so many downvotes, but nevermind.

I think it's a common phenomenon with "trademark" things that countries are known for around the world.

This is particularly extreme because it's very specific to Bavaria.

There are many castles in Germany, most of them older than this famous one. Lots of castles in my vicinity too, although they're not as famous.
by Fluorescence | 2025-07-21 19:53:38+00:00
It's mostly far-right shit-stirring because it's a much broader set of crimes than you are being led to believe. It's basically every possible crime "by communication":

"A spokeswoman for Leicestershire police said crimes under Section 127 and Section 1 include “any form of communication” such as phone calls, letters, emails and hoax calls to emergency services."

I expect it's mostly domestic abuse cases because what was once screamed through a closed door is now messaged online.

When a family member starts threatening others, an arrest is probably the necessary intervention to prevent actual violence. It's a similar story in cases like e.g. community racial tensions and gang violence. Once the threats are happening online, real violence is imminent and action warranted.