MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-07-17 19:08:29+00:00
>Couldn't we have a similar thing for cold air in the summer? Send the same temperature to everybody, and allow people to choose how much of that air they allow in their units.

No. AC does not work like this. In fact, you're not supposed to change vents in individual rooms to control temperature or you risk causing problems for the AC unit.
Ask HN: What should we do about state ID legislation?
by VerdisQuo5678 | 2025-07-17 19:09:20+00:00
On July 25th the UK government will start enforcing ID checks to access porn sites. Any site which allows UK residents to connect to is forced to comply, or face major fines. Ofcom, the regulator, has ordered both large (like Reddit which no longer allows anonymous access to NSFW subreddits in the UK) and niche sites (Certain dating apps, grindr, etc) to comply. Somewhat interestingly this law only effects "user-to-user" content instead of all porn sites. Additionally US courts now uphold state ID laws https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44397799 and the EU is planning to roll out ID verification infrastructure aswell.

Even if you could not care less, or hate porn, you can clearly see the direction the first world is going in. The aforementioned US ruling already includes anything sexual, even text, naturally including LGBT topics and sex education. Is there anything we can do to combat this and hold out the open internet a little longer?

The best I can think of is a neocities but for tor, making it easy to transition some useful content to somewhere with less prying eyes. I am also dismayed about the lack of coverage on this issue, a few years ago when states started rolling out ID verification it was news worthy, even in other countries. Now not even a blip on the radar, its somewhat surreal.
by nemo | 2025-07-17 19:09:37+00:00
The Romans mostly used oil lamps rather than candles, the use of candles as a popular light source developed among early medieval Christians who started to use them in their churches after the olive oil supplies dried up in the late/post Western Roman empire. These were too early to be tied to candle use (and strangely distributed geographically). Also the Romans had no kind of industrial standardization or production, every candle was hand made and unique, all the wax/tallow was valuable, so the later Romans who would have used candles would have used a candle holder designed to capture any lost fuel to reuse.
by LorenPechtel | 2025-07-17 19:10:24+00:00
Text messages used to be limited in size to IIRC 140 characters. (And I still have that limit on my Garmin inReach--about an abysmal a texting device as you can get, but it works off Iridium, not the cell net. I can be on the back side of nowhere and still talk to emergency services.)
by vickychijwani | 2025-07-17 19:10:33+00:00
It’s ironic the way you put it - the US has also invaded many countries, is responsible for a lot of cyber crime, and uses misinformation to sow chaos in other countries [1]. Should we all stop “funding“ the US? Somehow Ukranian lives are precious, but Iraqi and Bangladeshi lives are not?

I have no horse in this race - I’m neither American nor Russian, nor do I particularly love either country. But I am tired of US hypocrisy. I don’t understand how you all don’t see it - you’re all holed up in your cocoons and have no idea what’s actually going on in the world.

[1]: https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/bangladesh-coup-seems-stra...
by LinuxAmbulance | 2025-07-17 19:11:12+00:00
The fact that for profit medicine is holding up some of the most advanced medical treatments in history is really disturbing. As a society, there will be a significant benefit, especially once it's cost optimized. But we'll never get there if beancounters hold it up, preferring short term profits above all else.

I'd love to know if anyone knows what a solution to this problem might look like.
by stillpointlab | 2025-07-17 19:11:31+00:00
> I'm telling you that if we merely "contribute" to safe co-existence, we all die.

I hear you. I believe you are wrong.

> it really is the standard in any other field, is proving safe coexistence to a reasonable standard

No it isn't. It often becomes the standard after the fact. But pretty much every invention by man didn't go through a committee. Can you provide some counter-examples? Did the Wright brothers prove flight was safe before they got on the first plane? Did the inventors of CRISPR technology "prove" it is safe? Or human cloning? Or nuclear fission? Your very argument rests on the mistakes humans made in the past and the out-sized consequences of making the same kinds of mistakes with AI. Your argument must be: we have to do things differently this time with AI because the stakes are higher.

These are old and boring arguments. I've been watching the less wrong space since it was overcoming bias (and frankly, from before). I've heard all of the arguments they have to make.

But the content of this discussion was on inevitability and how to respond to it. The person I replied to suggested that it was a mistake to see the future as something that happens to us. It was a call to agency. I was pointing out that not all agency is equal, and hubris can lead us to actions that are not productive.

It is also the case that fear, just like hubris, can lead us to actions that aren't productive. But perhaps we should just move on from this discussion.
by wahnfrieden | 2025-07-17 19:11:39+00:00
This is HN, we are not all wage workers here

For wage workers, not learning the latest productivity tools will result in job loss. By the time it is expected of your role, if you have not learned already, you won't be given the leniency to catch up on company time. There is no impactful resistance to this through individual protest, only by organizing your peers in industry
by ryandvm | 2025-07-17 19:11:52+00:00
This is an underrated take. Free markets don't work in information war zones.

The basis of the free market ideology is that rational actors with perfect information will result in competition that produces high-value trades.

AI based information warfare between buyers and sellers is going to have a Darwinian effect on marketplaces that evolves sellers that are primarily skilled in adversarial and highly targeted pricing tactics.
by neodymiumm | 2025-07-17 19:12:29+00:00
Love it, just ordered two of the flashback models! To me, the killer feature is the whitelist for incoming and outgoing calls. Is anyone aware of a VoIP provider that offers this? Ooma has a contacts-only calling feature, but 1) only on their Premier plan that costs $10/month plus taxes and fees, and 2) it’s not clear that it also restricts outgoing calls. I have not found any such feature listed for Vonage or Verizon’s digital voice, to name a few.
by cowpig | 2025-07-17 19:12:35+00:00
Weird that you're being downvoted for stating a fact.

All of the major labs are innovating and copying one another.

Anthropic has all of the other labs trying to come up with an "agentic" protocol of their own. They also seem to be way ahead on interpretability research

Deepseek came up with multi-headed latent attention, and publishing an open-source model that's huge and SOTA.

Deepmind's way ahead on world models

...
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-07-17 19:13:00+00:00
Residency slots are not capped. Common misconception.

Private parties are welcome to create and fund residency slots if they want. They typically don’t because it’s a totally nonsense investment — perfect example of a problem that private investment markets would fail to solve.

The “cap” refers to the fact that CMS doesn’t fund an infinite number of residency slots.

So you and I are saying similar things, which is that the government needs to fund more MD training.
by guptadeepak | 2025-07-17 19:13:12+00:00
I wrote this article to highlight how tightly API security and IAM must be integrated at the architectural level for modern organizations. A few core points: -Implementing OAuth 2.0/OpenID Connect for token-based auth is now baseline, but RBAC/ABAC and API gateway-enforced policies are essential for granular authorization at scale -Key technical challenges include securing internal microservices APIs (not just public endpoints), applying uniform rate limits at both the user and endpoint levels, and establishing SIEM-integrated monitoring for real-time detection of anomalous API usage

For teams tackling these issues: what strategies have proven most effective for enforcing least privilege and dynamic access controls across heterogeneous API environments?
by jorvi | 2025-07-17 19:13:42+00:00
The Russian government is evil. Would you describe every person within its borders as evil? Every company?

Besides, if you spent some time on the kagifeedback forums you'd know that there is a particular brand of weird user there that wants to force Kagi to exclude or rejigger certain search results to be (effectively) more woke, which falls pretty much under the same umbrella as excluding whole indexes.

With Kagi you get the results as-is, and you get to personally ignore, downrank or block any of them you don't like. Much better than having a minority of users force all of us into their bubble.
by floundy | 2025-07-17 19:14:04+00:00
>like Reddit which no longer allows anonymous access to NSFW subreddits in the UK

I haven't heard of this. Is Reddit enforcing ID verification or are you meaning UK residents simply need to be logged into Reddit to access this content?

>Is there anything we can do to combat this and hold out the open internet a little longer?

The internet is on its deathbed anyway. Generative AI is administering the fatal injection. This experiment has nearly reached its conclusion.
by pat64 | 2025-07-17 19:14:05+00:00
As someone who has built an app that detects calls and meetings, this isn’t as nefarious as you’re making it out to be.

You can detect patterns of hardware use that suggest you’re in a meeting without actually eavesdropping on an actual audio stream of any kind.

Basically is some app using the mic hardware for something?? Likely a meeting so.
by RamblingCTO | 2025-07-17 19:14:27+00:00
Him, Thiel, Musk, Yarvin and all the yes men (e/acc for example) can piss right off. It's just about power based on the idea that they deserve success and power because they are better than anyone else. That there was no random chance. That they have insights no one else has, that they are infallible. "Paperbelt on fire" is a good example of this thinking ("their education sucks, ours is better"). Absolutely not capable of self-critique these people (totally not musk shadow banning people who criticize him). Destroying democracy and our world because they have the self regulation of a ten year old. Everyone of those people really should go to therapy to learn that making money and having power is not the path towards a good life in any way. And it's sad to see people never get out of this groove their entire lives, no matter the money.

I'm wondering if the "old silicon valley" was also just about power and never about making the world a better place. Was it all just a bunch of narcissists with domination fantasies or did anyone actually care at all?

PS: doesn't help that the opposition is a bunch of cat girl avatars with funny pronouns.
by TuringTourist | 2025-07-17 19:14:29+00:00
What is your definition of processed food? Are potatoes processed because they are cleaned? Is chicken breast processed because the chicken is plucked? Is vinegar processed because it has undergone a chemical transformation via fermentation? Are potato chips processed because they are sliced potatoes fried in oil? Are fried plantains processed because they are sliced plantains fried in oil?

I do not mean to come across as antagonistic, I just haven't been able to find a line that everyone agrees with and felt it was useful to demonstrate that by asking a bunch of questions.
by duxup | 2025-07-17 19:15:04+00:00
It's funny how personal a connection brands try to make and they want to associate it with good things. Wallmart gives you good prices, and so on.

And here we are a VERY personal connection that has real consequences, it's explicitly the most direct connection that brand tries to make to you ... and it's potentially hugely negative.

"Delta hates me and charges me more than everyone else..."

There's no recovery from that for many people I think.
by MostlyStable | 2025-07-17 19:15:16+00:00
I've been learning German and, among other tools (dictionaries, LLMs, etc), I often use google translate for a sentence or two. I have _constantly_ been frustrated at the inability, when going from English to German, to force it to use a particular gender or formality level. I'm willing to give up at least some accuracy to get those knobs. This is an immediate switch for me.
by toast0 | 2025-07-17 19:15:18+00:00
Air conditioning is common, but at least in some regions, it would be a tremendous expense for the the school to condition their buildings for occupation during the summer. And many buildings were designed around the summer break, so they may not have capacity to condition the buildings for occupation during the summer; this is not without its problems as some buildings end up being unfit for occupation during the school year, especially as the climate gets less consistent. There's probably some opportunity for savings in places where increasing hours during the summer could result in decreasing hours in the winter, though.

I think there's some cultural value in having a shared experience of summer vacation. But I agree, breaking up the breaks throughout the year, where possible, would make a lot of sense. There's a benefit of less crowding when school districts have different weeks off; although it's harder for extended families to meet up when their school schedules are drastically different.
by seabass | 2025-07-17 19:15:26+00:00
Yep, they had me check my proximity to the nearest Google Cloud region. The ping was ~30ms, so that was pretty unlikely to be the cause. In my screen recordings that compared the exact same searches, despite the low ping, Kagi results wouldn’t appear for around 2s. A search I did just now shows “39 relevant results in 1.7s”. Otoh with Google it feels instant—0.29s for that same search. With their support team we never did end up finding the cause.
by jaredhansen | 2025-07-17 19:15:26+00:00
> A union carpenter with one year of on the job training will run circles around a veteran carpenter from the south with 15-20 years of experience who never had access to such training.

Can you elaborate on this point? What is it about the union that makes their on the job training so effective? Veteran carpenters with 15-20 yrs of exp have, in general, a very strong skill set -- what is the union doing that makes people catch up so fast? And if that's true, why do more people not defect from the union?
by IshKebab | 2025-07-17 19:15:54+00:00
Firmware is a good point!

I think relying on "we have a big set of components" is never going to work though. There are literally millions of components, often with unique footprints. You'll never cover even them all or even close to it. It needs to be easy to make your own.

Anyway good luck. PCB EDA could definitely do with some modernisation.
by colechristensen | 2025-07-17 19:15:58+00:00
One of the sort of strange things about gene therapy is how cheap a custom solution really is. You can arbitrarily genetically modify a plant or bacteria for a few hundred dollars to the level of arbitrarily picking the letters of a gene sequence (or you know, doing some research and doing something real) and getting the gene modifying tools manufactured very very cheaply.

If you have a slightly different form of a much more common ailment, there probably is good hope that eventually patient specific gene therapy for you will be something of a routine. You may be taking extra risks because of the lack of available research, but I'm sure any patient can become well informed enough to make the choice for themselves. I'm not saying it's commonplace or anything yet, but the tools are there or almost there to fix a slightly incorrect single gene issue (like a single point deletion or letter swap, etc).

Like just look

https://www.idtdna.com/pages/products/crispr-genome-editing/...

obviously this is for research and not in vivo human treatment which takes quite a bit more care and specifics to target whatever tissues / organs / whatever is broken in you...

but the reagents for doing custom sequence edits are priced for research in the hundreds of dollars. sure once an established research program finished and got approved they'd spend tens or hundreds of millions and charge each patient millions

but it's not insane to imagine a biohacker curing you in their garage for $5,000 while only maybe killing you

Given that, I think there's a lot of hope that custom gene therapy will become commonplace and relatively affordable.
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-07-17 19:16:27+00:00
“The door refused to open. It said, “Our evaluation of your ability to pay indicates that you can in fact give me 5 cents. ”

He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. “What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.”

“I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.”

In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting would be evaluated on a case by case basis by the door's AI, the door was not obligated to extract the maximum amount of value from each exit or entrance of the apartment, according to the contract, but Joe wasn't fooled, obviously the door would try to do exactly that. At any rate there was no getting out of it.

“You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug.

From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt’s money-gulping door.

“I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out.

Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.”

"You won't just be sued by me" said the door, I am a fully autonomous subsidiary corporation of Fetcherr, you'll be hearing from their lawyers as well."

Joe didn't recognize the name, but it sounded like some dinky IT firm set up back when cute names were common because everyone wanted a .com domain, and that meant names had to be unique and often creatively misspelled.

"My dad used to have a saying, he would say - You can't squeeze blood from a turnip"

"You would be surprised, Fetcherr has other subsidiaries in the biochemical field. We're squeezing blood from all sorts of things!"

Joe was getting tired of hearing all the good news about Fetcherr, the bolt assembly fell apart and he exited, behind him the door yelled after him "rebate offered - 2 cents. Don't make us squeeze blood out of you!"
by Uehreka | 2025-07-17 19:16:40+00:00
When ChatGPT, then Llama, then Alpaca came out in rapid succession, I decided to hold off a year before diving in. This was definitely the right choice at the time, it’s becoming less-the-right-choice all the time.

In particular it’s important to get past the whole need-to-self-host thing. Like, I used to be holding out for when this stuff would plateau, but that keeps not happening, and the things we’re starting to be able to build in 2025 now that we have fairly capable models like Claude 4 are super exciting.

If you just want locally runnable commodity “boring technology that just works” stuff, sure, cool, keep waiting. If you’re interested in hacking on interesting new technology (glances at the title of the site) now is an excellent time to do so.
by chinathrow | 2025-07-17 19:16:42+00:00
Your new feature is privacy invading. It's none of your business to detect if someones mic is on unless they invite you to do that.

What is so hard about that?

> Our PMs don't like making things opt-in.

Lamest excuse ever.

I wouldn't be surprised if you phoned back home about that mic activation - do you?

I recently joined an org where Notion is in use - I will actively lobby them to not install the desktop app, at all or to quit Notion alltogether.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-07-17 19:16:44+00:00
We started off with SSL/TLS being used for payments systems and logins where its absence is very important to not ignore. Then we said we should use it for everything, which is good, but now it's showing up in different contexts.

If it says the certificate for your bank is expired, you need to stop. If it says the certificate for the 10 year old public blog post that was linked by a 5 year old Reddit post as describing the solution to your problem, that should not matter, and you just want to read the non-secret contents of whatever is on that page regardless of whether the site's maintainer turned on HTTP to HTTPS redirects and then neglected to renew the certificate.

And people understand this, and people are rightfully going to devise workarounds for the second case, and it's ridiculous to expect them to not.
by louthy | 2025-07-17 19:16:54+00:00
> With formally-educated software engineers, so long as the school they got their degree at is a reputable one with a decent program, you can be reasonably confident that they'll have a solid foundation

Based on the 100s of candidates that I've interviewed over the years, I disagree. In fact I often wonder what on earth people are doing at these university courses, because they rarely seem to have even a basic grasp of computer science. I've had to personally mentor many (academic route) engineers over the years on what I would consider absolute basics.

Frankly, I don't consider a degree a useful barometer of quality at all. They're only useful if the candidate is applying for their first job out of university. After that, experience is much more important and I basically ignore the education part of a CV.
by leptons | 2025-07-17 19:17:03+00:00
Maybe you haven't heard, but Samsung has been making folding phones that fold up to be very small. The Galazy Flip 7 is pretty much what you describe as far as easily being able to fit in a pants pocket, has plenty of battery life, high-res screen, and it even flips out to have a large screen. No, folding phones are not a gimmick, been using a fold 4 for a few years and it's been amazing.

https://www.samsung.com/us/smartphones/galaxy-z-flip7/buy/ga...
by 2oMg3YWV26eKIs | 2025-07-17 19:17:14+00:00
The security risks with this sound scary. Let's say you give it access to your email and calendar. Now it knows all of your deepest secrets. The linked article acknowledges that prompt injection is a risk for the agent:

> Prompt injections are attempts by third parties to manipulate its behavior through malicious instructions that ChatGPT agent may encounter on the web while completing a task. For example, a malicious prompt hidden in a webpage, such as in invisible elements or metadata, could trick the agent into taking unintended actions, like sharing private data from a connector with the attacker, or taking a harmful action on a site the user has logged into.

A malicious website could trick the agent into divulging your deepest secrets!

I am curious about one thing -- the article mentions the agent will ask for permission before doing consequential actions:

> Explicit user confirmation: ChatGPT is trained to explicitly ask for your permission before taking actions with real-world consequences, like making a purchase.

How does the agent know a task is consequential? Could it mistakenly make a purchase without first asking for permission? I assume it's AI all the way down, so I assume mistakes like this are possible.