MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Doxin | 2025-07-11 12:28:02+00:00
> Apart from being a complete dunce

Or growing complacent.

I think we largely agree on the dangers of a bandsaw to be honest. The only disagreement seems to be how likely it is for a skilled operator to fuck up. Which is for sure debatable unless someone drags in statistics, but given the context I still feel like calling a bandsaw safe in the context of a childrens toy is reckless at best.

> If you want to see something truly terrifying, the ones they use to cut up foam are big enough to cut a massive block of foam, and the blade is just a big, continuous band of razor blade.

Yikes, that does sound like the sort of machine I'd not even want to be in the same building with. I sure hope they don't ship those blades coiled up like they do with regular bandsaw blades. You'd need a bomb difusal robot to unpack that safely!
by perching_aix | 2025-07-11 12:28:15+00:00
Is that not an idiom? https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/introduce+me+to

The keyword may be the same, but it's really not the same intended meaning.

> It doesn’t need to be done by a person.

Not entirely what I was trying to suggest, but that it's usually an organization, a project, or a specific person who introduces things, and that I'm not sure how to pin this semantic category down. In the example sentence, "RedHat" or "the OpenShift project" would have been much better choices I'd say for example. Consider:

> The OpenShift project introduces the Developer Center, a new section to the OpenShift website dedicated to reference materials and other resources.
by throw_m239339 | 2025-07-11 12:28:57+00:00
What a horrible story.

What can you do when you know you are innocent but the court trusts the software more than it trusts people? And you are asked to repay something you never stole which off course leads to your financial ruin/divorce/... your kids bullied because you as a parent were deemed a thief... Imagine your spouse leaving you because of something you didn't even do...

Someone absolutely needs to go to jail over this. This kind of software is supposed to go through a lengthy compliance and certification process, so clearly whatever person put their signature on that "certified" document is responsible for these death.
by pron | 2025-07-11 12:29:03+00:00
> Offloading some of that to AI lets one free some mental capacity for work that actually benefits from that.

Maybe, but I don't feel (of course, I could be wrong) that doing boring tasks take away any mental capacity; they feel more like fidgeting while I think. If a tool could do the boring things it may free my time to do other boring work that allows me to think - like doing the dishes - provided I don't have to carefully review the code.

Another issue (that I asked about yesterday [1]) is that seemingly boring tasks may end up being more subtle once you start coding them, and while I don't care too much about the quality of the code in the early iterations of the project, I have to be able to trust that whatever does the coding for me will come back and report any difficulties I hadn't anticipated.

> Reviewing such code is, thus, easier (and less demoralizing) than writing it.

That might well be true, but since writing it doesn't cost me much to begin with, the benefit might not be large. Don't get me wrong, I would still take it, but only if I could fully trust the agent to tell me what subtleties it encountered.

> there's too much unavoidable but trivial bullshit involved in software these days (build scripts, Dockerfies, IaaS). Preventing deep context switching on those is a big time saver.

If work is truly trivial, I'd like it to be automated by something that I can trust to do trivial work well and/or tell me when things aren't as trivial and I should pay attention to some detail I overlooked.

We can generally trust machines to either work reliably or fail with some clear indication. People might not be fully reliable, but we can generally trust them to report back with important questions they have or information they've learnt while doing the job. From the reports I've seen about using coding agents, they work like neither. You can neither trust them to succeed or fail reliably, nor can you trust them to come back with pertinent questions or information. Without either kind of trust, I don't think that "offloading" work to them would truly feel like offloading. I'm sure some people can work with that, but I think I'll wait until I can trust the agents.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44526048
by cout | 2025-07-11 12:29:04+00:00
As a long-time compulsive Internet user, I am aware of the emotional and psychological risks of this new technology. For now, the ability to find information faster (with certain caveats) means I actually spend less time on the internet than before.

But chatgpt for example showers the user with compliments. I'm sure this encourages user engagement, but it is eerily similar to the "love bombing" of cults from the 70s and 80s. I don't know how to reconcile the long-term risks with the huge short-term gains in productivity.

Are there any technologies or apps that are worse than others, particularly for people with obsessive/compulsive tendencies?
by oc1 | 2025-07-11 12:29:10+00:00
''' Do I ever use AI applications to quickly check something and then discover that hours have passed? Do I ever swear off or set limits around my use of AI, and then break my commitments? Do I have binges on AI applications that last all day or late into the night? Do I turn to AI whenever I have a free moment? Does my use of AI lead me to neglect my personal hygiene, nutritional needs, or physical health? Do I feel isolated, emotionally absent, distracted, or anxious when I’m not using my AI applications? Does my use of AI contribute to conflict or avoidance in personal relationships? Have my digital behaviors jeopardized my studies, finances, or career? Do I hide or lie about the amount of time I spend using AI or the kinds of AI-generated content I consume? Do I feel guilt or shame around my use of AI? '''

Hmm i answered almost all of them with Yes, but i'm also a developer using AI and developing AI apps. So not sure what to make out of it.
by akoboldfrying | 2025-07-11 12:29:18+00:00
This looks interesting, but I'm having a lot of trouble understanding the section "A Simple Key Hierarchy".

> Everything starts with base-level keys, like user device keys, backup keys, or YubiKeys. Device keys are generated on user devices and never leave the machine they are generated on.

These base-level keys are private keys, no? The previous paragraph introduces symmetric keys, and doesn't discuss private/public keypairs.

> Every user of the system has a sequence of per-user-keys (PUKs) at the next level up the hierarchy. The secrets seeds for these keys are encrypted for all available base-level keys.

Is the idea that, if user Joe is a member of group Sales (I know, I know, how boring this example is), and Sales is a member of group Employees, if Joe wants to write something that all Employees can read, he first decrypts a symmetric key for Sales using one of his personal base-level private keys, uses that to decrypt a symmetric key for Employees, and then stores his data encrypted data with that Employees symmetric key?

> In FOKS, there are two types of parties: users and teams. In both cases, there is a rotating list of constituents (be they devices or team members), and as these constituents change, so to does the corresponding active PUK or PTK.

Does "rotating" here mean simply "potentially changing [over time]"?

Also, do I understand correctly that "rotate keys" means "choose a new key, decrypt everything that was encrypted with the original key, and then reencrypt it all with the new key"? If so, then since servers do not have access to keys (needed for decryption), I think this means that, whenever someone leaves a group or a device is lost, some client must download all data available to that group, decrypt, reencrypt and reupload it -- is that right? This suggests it would be expensive to have frequently-changing groups with access to a lot of data. (I'm certainly not suggesting I know a better way -- just checking my understanding.)
by v5v3 | 2025-07-11 12:29:52+00:00
>How can this happen over a thousand times without raising eyebrows?

No one ever holds the legal community to account.

All the finger pointing is at Royal Mail and Fujitsu. None at the lawyers and judges involved.

The judicicial system is a mess and incompetence and bias is systemic, but the mainstream UK press know better than to challenge it.
by demiters | 2025-07-11 12:29:52+00:00
I can only speak for my own circle that I know about where test kits are the norm. Anecdata isn't ideal but it does seem to be valuable as long as the reader considers both positive and negative reports equally and understands the risks rather than just yoloing. I still consider Erowid a great harm reduction resource, TripSit wiki is also fantastic, and I very much support the approach taken by the Subjective Effect Index website.
by octopoc | 2025-07-11 12:30:01+00:00
The burden of proof rests on the people having a moral panic, trying to convince everyone not to use what may be the new SOTA.

I don’t think Twitter has more hate, than other websites in AI training data. But if you disagree, and you think we should collectively agree to not use xAI, feel free to bring some facts to the table.

Until then, I’m going to use Grok and you can use whatever you think is an acceptable substitute. Or you can not use AI.

Edit: at least, I think that’s what you and gp are trying to say. If not, apologies and I’m open to you explaining what your goals are.
by FerkiHN | 2025-07-11 12:30:03+00:00
Nice work! I totally get the pain of manually submitting products to tons of directories — especially with so many new ones popping up. Automating that sounds super helpful, especially for solo devs or indie hackers trying to gain visibility.

Did you build Boringlaunch entirely solo, or with a team? Curious how you keep up with the ever-changing list of platforms.
by llm_nerd | 2025-07-11 12:31:09+00:00
>Start-ups avoid them like the plague because they're so damn expensive

While in a way it's just a corollary on the expensive bit, the license compliance of the same becomes such a monumental hassle as well, and is just an enormous time waste for everyone involved. For everything you want to do there's a probing Microsoft or Oracle salesperson trying to shake you down a little harder.

Go with Postgres et al and you can be geographically distributing, horizontally and vertically scaling in a million ways, making whatever warm of cold standby or recovery system you want, and so on. Even when the pricing of the enterprise offerings were tolerable, the system around constantly extracting a pound of flesh is so overbearing it induces opposition.
Show HN: AWS create_bucket API is BAD
by furkansahin | 2025-07-11 12:31:18+00:00
This post is created to show the best example of a bad API design. AWS S3 is probably one of the most used services globally. Say you want to create a bucket in us-east-2, the way to do it is basically to send `us-east-2` as a location_constraint as part of your `create_bucket` payload. You want to do the same for `us-east-1`? You cannot send it as part of `location_constraint`, it will fail with the following message!

Aws::S3::Errors::InvalidLocationConstraint: The specified location-constraint is not valid

You must not send anything to get it in `us-east-1`.

Source: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/API/API_CreateBu...
by throw0101c | 2025-07-11 12:31:33+00:00
The four-part mini-series Mr Bates vs The Post Office is worth checking out:

> A faulty IT system called Horizon, developed by Fujitsu, creates apparent cash shortfalls that cause Post Office Limited to pursue prosecutions for fraud, theft and false accounting against a number of subpostmasters across the UK. In 2009, a group of these, led by Alan Bates, forms the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance. The prosecutions and convictions are later ruled a miscarriage of justice at the conclusion of the Bates & Others v Post Office Ltd judicial case in 2019.[4][5]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr_Bates_vs_The_Post_Office
by aziaziazi | 2025-07-11 12:31:44+00:00
My personal 2 cents on the "ethical producer" solution:

1. I don't need honey or other animals products to live an healthy and happy life but there's many people that think the opposite. Some of those honey consumers care too about bee condition and satisfy a part of their consumption with the "ethical" products. Not buying those products will let them have access the market with more ease by not putting more pressure on the price and the quantity available. I understand one person choice has a very small impact, but it's the same as with voting.

2. I recognize many small beekeeper treat their bees way nicer than the industrial one, and that they genuinely love their hives. However love isn't the question when you think about ethics: culture, habits and customs have very important weights in our actions. There's absolutely not doubt more than 13% of Egyptian parents deeply love their child, however most of them practice a very questionable and invasive tradition on their girl [0]. I think small-shop honey production is still an exploitation of another species: the bees didn't come by themselves and sometimes the queen is captive in a special room. harvesting their honey is a theft: they didn't produce it for us humans. It's not always very natural either: some beekeeper give them white sugar during winter - which helps keeping them alive - but they would probably have chosen to keep the honey instead. The smoke usage attest of the not-so-cooperative process, it's at most a forced-symbiosis.

I too feel like it's the same for other animal products.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/female-genital-mutilation...
by Bender | 2025-07-11 12:31:55+00:00
I believe you are referring to Ayurvedic Medications mostly in India but the practice has spread to other regions. People that use Ayurvedic supplements have been doing so for thousands of years out of beliefs that heavy metals heal the body. Never use supplements someone made and distributed in zip-lock bags.

I personally will stick with supplements made by the same laboratories that make prescription drugs and get tested for heavy metals which are most of the popular supplements found on Amazon. The tests are labelled on the bottles.
by lordswork | 2025-07-11 12:32:24+00:00
This comment got me wondering whether loss of farmland in the US is a serious issue.

It looks like there's about 800 million acres of farmland in the US and we're losing about 2 million acres per year to the land being repurposed. Despite that, crop production has more than tripled in the past 70 years due to technological advances.

That said, economic effects, loss of farmland, and climate change have contributed to slower growth and higher variability of crop yields recently.

In the past decade there's been a modest 0.8% annual increase in crop production despite losing about 2 million acres per year.
by Etheryte | 2025-07-11 12:32:37+00:00
I'm of very two minds on this topic. On one hand, it's widely accepted that most (not to say all) drugs leave a permanent mark on brains that are not yet fully developed, so teenagers who are often most curious about these things. Gated access is highly desirable in this context, especially as you can't take self regulation for granted. On the other hand, many of these substances show great promise in many clinical trials for a wide variety of issues, and decades of hostile legislation has kept all of that on the back foot. Openly sharing information about these topics can help people make more informed choices whereas those who came before them often had to go it blind.
by samsolomon | 2025-07-11 12:32:49+00:00
As an aside—my therapist encouraged me to go pretty deep into twelve step literature. The core of it is dealing with fears and resentments. So many damaging behaviors start as coping mechanisms for dealing with these issues.

I was pretty skeptical initially, but it turns out I also have a ton of fear and resentment that I never thought existed. My stubbornness strikes again! But if you're able to deal with and process your fears and resentments and then switch bad coping mechanisms to good ones—that will improve your life substantially.

A lot of it has been surprisingly eye-opening to me.
by throw_m239339 | 2025-07-11 12:33:30+00:00
It's the euphemism treadmill in action. It's like how "undocumented residents", which replaced "illegal aliens" in the media, now has a negative connotation anyway, so mainstream media are now trying to find a new word that doesn't sound "offensive"... but the very concept is loaded by definition, so no amount of euphemism is going to change that.
by whynotmaybe | 2025-07-11 12:34:59+00:00
Next-generation computing clusters require ultra-high-bandwidth optical interconnects to support large-scale artificial-intelligence applications. In this context, microring modulators (MRMs) emerge as a promising solution. Nevertheless, their potential is curtailed by inherent challenges, such as pronounced frequency chirp and dynamic non-linearity. Moreover, a comprehensive understanding of their coherent dynamics is still lacking, which further constrains their applicability and efficiency. Consequently, these constraints have confined their use to spectrally inefficient intensity-modulation direct-detection links. In this work, we present a thorough study of MRM coherent dynamics, unlocking phase as a new dimension for MRM-based high-speed data transmission in advanced modulation formats. We demonstrate that the phase and intensity modulations of MRMs exhibit distinct yet coupled dynamics, limiting their direct application in higher-order modulation formats. This challenge can be addressed by embedding a pair of MRMs within a Mach-Zehnder interferometer in a push-pull configuration, enabling a bistable phase response and unchirped amplitude modulation. Furthermore, we show that its amplitude frequency response exhibits a distinct dependency on frequency detuning compared to phase and intensity modulations of MRMs, without strong peaking near resonance. Harnessing the ultra-fast coherent dynamics, we designed and experimentally demonstrated an ultra-compact, ultra-wide-bandwidth in-phase/quadrature (I/Q) modulator on a silicon chip fabricated using a CMOS-compatible photonic process. Achieving a record on-chip shoreline bandwidth density exceeding 5Tb/s/mm, our device enabled coherent transmission for symbol rates up to 180Gbaud and a net bit rate surpassing 1Tb/s over an 80km span, with modulation energy consumption as low as 10.4fJ/bit.
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-11 12:35:08+00:00
Frequently early adopters speak more clearly than their followers becaause they have to.

Look at Einstein’s Relativity or the works of Sigmund Freud who does not at all come across as a ‘Freudian’. As a system ‘Freudianism’ is a bit discredited, I think of Otto Kernberg railing against homosexuality, but Freud himself refused to do conversion therapy because psychoanalysis could only increase the capacity for love, not diminish it. Therapy has moved on (Rogers, Bowlby, Kohut, Beck) but in Freud you often find zingers (his analysis of sadism) that seem valid outside of his system. With Freud (and even more so Marx) people’s objections are often to the content not the style.

When a group becomes hermetic though it can degenerate to people hearing dog whistles and barking, which makes you a dog.

‘Truth’ is a dangerous concept in rhetoric and logic because of how it works with negation. I was told by a science teacher to never say “to tell the truth…” because it presupposes that I lie. A 9/11 truther is a lunatic’s lunatic. Kurt Gödel shows how much trouble you could get into with a function T(x) which determines the logical truth of a logical statement.
by 627467 | 2025-07-11 12:36:12+00:00
Do most people even care about this question/topic? Maybe that's part of the answer.

Culturally, fertility topic has gone through "we will never be able to feed everyone in the world" to "we should have absolute control over when/how many kids to have" and "I can't afford having kids and keep my lifestyle" and "why kids?"

Even when in economic discussions around labour availability, retirement sustainability, the topic just essentially focuses on migration policy.

Societies have moved towards a group of "empowered individuals" model, leaving behind families as a fundamental unit model
by account42 | 2025-07-11 12:37:25+00:00
> As a software developer fixing stuff like this is only possible if you can reproduce it or otherwise get logs, telemetry and similar things, otherwise it is pretty much just guesswork.

As a software developer you should be able to reason about your code and work backwards from the observed result to investigate possible causes.

When a plane crashes or bridge collapses the engineers tasked with finding the cause don't just throw up their hands if they can't make it happen again.
by maigret | 2025-07-11 12:38:17+00:00
Transport is heavily dependent on infrastructure. If you have a train between city A and city B but you can get to and from the train station without a car, this is not going to work.

But markets are far from the only mover here. Regulation, lobbying, habits... Also I guess the US would feel ashamed for not building their trains themselves in the first place, they would probably have to buy them abroad... So "proudness" is probably a factor here too.

High speed trains in the part of Europe I know are very well utilized and even a bit too crowded to my taste (still way better than planes - allow working easily with table, walking, no absurd wait times waiting in line at the airports, arrive much nearer to my actual goals...).
by somenameforme | 2025-07-11 12:38:44+00:00
But we are? The article describes an extremely significant effect because dementia rates are already very high at, for instance, ~10% in the 70+ age group. So twice as likely to develop dementia is an extreme effect, as opposed to e.g. twice as likely for something that occurs at a rate of 1 in 10,000 or whatever.

The bigger question would be causality. Observational studies are generally trash, especially with dementia, because it correlates with practically everything in one way or the other. So is it the drug, or is there a common confounding variable among people who use the drug?

That's the problem that makes proving causality so hard for many drugs. Long-term effects are subject to practically endless possible confounders. Like the National Academy of Sciences is rather fond of saying, you end up with endless scenarios where there is neither enough evidence to accept nor reject a possible causality. People that want to spin things one way then claim there's no evidence, which is plainly false - as there is, but its insufficient to confidently claim causality. In the same way that there's insufficient evidence to reject causality.
by techpineapple | 2025-07-11 12:39:14+00:00
I have a tool that I vibe coded. Pretty basic, it pulls data from a bunch of different tools, and writes that data to a spreadsheet. I’m too busy to really invest in it(which is why I vibe coded it) and now I’m stuck. Not impenetrably so, I’m sure I could debug it with “relative” ease. But the vibe coding is going in loops, keeps undoing things and one of the integrations just fundamentally doesn’t work.

For all the “AI will be writing 100% of code by the end of this year claims”. Man I’m bought into the dream, I just wish it wasn’t so disappointing.