MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by LordAtlas | 2025-07-21 17:25:18+00:00
No, India has draconian laws about search and seizure (and one could argue, about a whole lot of other legal issues) when it comes to the Income Tax department. It doesn't require a judicial warrant, merely authorisation from a senior official in the Income Tax department (the list is given in the link posted below by another person.)

In practice, Income Tax "raids" have been used as instruments of oppression by governments of the day against political rivals, media outlets critical of the government, or pretty much any person they didn't like following a "the process is the punishment" philosophy. You have to justify every last thing. It's "guilty until proven innocent" when it comes the to Income Tax department in India.

They already could seize all your electronic equipment - phones, computers, etc. - as part of a raid and go through all your files to check if you were "evading income". These new amendments allow them to get even more draconian by compelling you to provide access to your email and social media accounts, which means you have absolutely zero privacy and evidence could even be planted on your accounts if needed. Of course, that would never happen because there is zero corruption in India. /s
by billy99k | 2025-07-21 17:25:40+00:00
"Sadly, the US is hitting a hiccup as the current administration is going out of their way to make solar installs harder and more expensive"

The other group has been trying to tax solar for years: https://solarrights.org/blog/2025/05/06/solartax2024/

Why no outcry on HN?
by 9rx | 2025-07-21 17:25:49+00:00
> That doesn't mean there is no unmet demand.

Right, it doesn't tell us much of anything, but there does need to be some external mechanism that is getting in the way from transaction completion in order for demand to be unmet. A shortage is one example of such a mechanism, but there clearly isn't a shortage[1] in the housing market. Prices have risen just fine. There is probably some unmet demand in the fact that builders simply can't build fast enough — where people have the money in hand to buy and have a seller theoretically willing to sell, but can't do so because the place is not yet finished — however, there isn't a lot of evidence to suggest that is a big problem and it is definitely not the problem being discussed.

"I really want to buy a house but I cannot afford it" is not unmet demand. That is what we call dreaming. As before, demand is comprised of desire _and willingness_.

[1] Speaking in terms of a "shortage" in the technical sense. I recognize that, colloquially, it has become popular to use "shortage" to mean "The price is higher than I like", but that definition, while certainly appealing to emotion, is nonsensical when you really think about it. Literally everything is in "shortage" by that definition, making it a useless term (as useless as demand = everyone who wishes to have something). The technical definitions are actually useful, though.
by js8 | 2025-07-21 17:25:55+00:00
I don't understand what position you're arguing for. In case of prostitution, there has to be lot more consent given, unlike in media (where it might not be required at all, in case of drawn or generated content). More consent => more risk of it not being given properly.

In any case, my question and argument wasn't about consent at all, but harm. I can see a world with brothel on every corner being easily more harmful than a world with access to pornography, even if the consent is 100% in both worlds.
by some_random | 2025-07-21 17:26:16+00:00
Visa/Mastercard are, like you said, ambivalent at best when it comes to pornography in general but there's more nuance to it. Content widely accepted to be immoral and/or illegal such as non-consensual pornography (that is explicit content posted without the consent of those filmed) and child sexual abuse material is forbidden. This is what the pornhub thing was about, allegedly, and why verified content is still allowed. Furthermore, material considered a brand risk is also not allowed but payment processors a step down are the ones who make the guidelines on what that means in practice. Depending on the processor this can include "extreme pornography" that is not in any way illegal and is only distasteful to most. A good example is that many payment processors do not porn featuring blood which is a big problem for women who menstruate.
by no_wizard | 2025-07-21 17:26:27+00:00
this is nothing more than FUD. Waste can be repurposed, sometimes decades after the fact, as reactor technology improves. In fact, the latest reactors in service elsewhere in the world can recycle a portion of the waste as fuel, further minimizing it.

We also know its dangers and how to store it properly, and compared to the waste that simply oil and gas extraction creates, its significantly less (up to 90% less), and its exceedingly predictable.
by dragonwriter | 2025-07-21 17:26:39+00:00
> I see, so it was the jury that was responsible for the ridiculous ruling, not the judge

No, a jury verdict that is not reflected in the trial judgement is not a ruling at all.

There was some rush-to-publish reporting of the jury verdict prior to the ruling which is the source of the whole popular perception of the case, because the misunderstanding of the case has deliberately magnified ao it can be weaponized by people wanting to limit perfectly warranted recovery from actually-at-fault corporatiojs by spinning false tales of out-of-control judgements.
by sxp | 2025-07-21 17:27:11+00:00
Related news:

- OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44613840

- "According to a friend, the IMO asked AI companies not to steal the spotlight from kids and to wait a week after the closing ceremony to announce results. OpenAI announced the results BEFORE the closing ceremony.

According to a Coordinator on Problem 6, the one problem OpenAI couldn't solve, "the general sense of the IMO Jury and Coordinators is that it was rude and inappropriate" for OpenAI to do this.

OpenAI wasn't one of the AI companies that cooperated with the IMO on testing their models, so unlike the likely upcoming Google DeepMind results, we can't even be sure OpenAI's "gold medal" is legit. Still, the IMO organizers directly asked OpenAI not to announce their results immediately after the olympiad.

Sadly, OpenAI desires hype and clout a lot more than it cares about letting these incredibly smart kids celebrate their achievement, and so they announced the results yesterday." https://x.com/mihonarium/status/1946880931723194389
by Silhouette | 2025-07-21 17:27:16+00:00
Again - extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

It's no secret that there are groups actively looking for new exploits and that sometimes vulnerabilities are discovered that become zero days. It's a good bet that police and security services take an active interest in those vulnerabilities when they are found.

But that's very different to claiming the police can easily unlock any device any time they want to and there is a range of private companies around who provide that service to them.
by jandrese | 2025-07-21 17:27:34+00:00
You can trace out the circuits on a traditional solar panel. They aren't complex devices. If someone managed to hide some kind of control chip in there and also some sort of connectivity to trigger it then my hat is off to them.

I would worry more about the inverters, including microinverters.

Also consider that if someone is doing industrial sabotage on that scale it would be much easier to attack the fossil fuel and nuclear power plants and their enormous computer controlled generators. Even hydroelectric would be susceptible. Or maybe attack the substations. There is nothing unique or special about solar panels that makes them a good target, and their highly distributed and diverse nature actually makes them more difficult.
by rattus_rattus | 2025-07-21 17:27:47+00:00
I find it super helpful! I get the emails for both my personal mail box on my street (nice to know if I should check it today or if it’s just junk and I can check it tomorrow or the next day) and for a PO Box.

I am the treasurer for an organization related to my job. We don’t usually get mail and the PO Box is located a few towns over. I rely on the emails to know when I need to visit the PO Box. It saves me gas and time, so I love it. Even if the PO Box was nearby, the emails would still save me time and hassle.
by ekojs | 2025-07-21 17:28:06+00:00
> Btw as an aside, we didn’t announce on Friday because we respected the IMO Board's original request that all AI labs share their results only after the official results had been verified by independent experts & the students had rightly received the acclamation they deserved

> We've now been given permission to share our results and are pleased to have been part of the inaugural cohort to have our model results officially graded and certified by IMO coordinators and experts, receiving the first official gold-level performance grading for an AI system!

From https://x.com/demishassabis/status/1947337620226240803

Was OpenAI simply not coordinating with the IMO Board then?
by kypro | 2025-07-21 17:28:16+00:00
I thought this too, but I think we misunderstood the extent to which various calls for censoring and regulating the internet where driven by a lack of understanding of the technology...

The scary thing about the UK regulators is that they seem to understand the stupidity of what they're doing, but believe it's worth it. You see this attitude everywhere in the UK – in our hate speech laws, our blasphemy laws, mass surveillance – the argument isn't that these things don't limit freedom and personal privacy. They'll agree that they do, their argument is that you shouldn't care.

With this encryption backdoor most wouldn't deny that it could be compromised, they just didn't think you should worry about it because they thought the benefits were worth it.

I think people on the internet in the 90s and early 00s were just weird people to be honest. We're very libertarian for whatever reason, and we wrongly assumed people our age were all as pro-freedom as us.
by OutOfHere | 2025-07-21 17:28:19+00:00
It's pretty much going to move people to self-custodied crypto, whether to stablecoins or privacycoins or otherwise. Couple this with actual encrypted communications apps, well beyond WhatsApp, also encrypted containers. Let them search all they want.

Disclaimer: I strongly and truly believe that everyone should pay a reasonable percentage of tax on their entire income.
by crazygringo | 2025-07-21 17:30:08+00:00
That definitely happens, I don't think it's intentionally nefarious though.

They tend to package and label orders as they come in, that's the only thing you can do to be efficient -- you can't let them build up.

But then they only drop off (or get pickup) 2x/week, e.g. Tues and Fri. Which might be fine if that's what their shipping times indicate.

But then the buyer gets confused because they assume it was mailed immediately, which it wasn't. But there's no way for a seller to print shipping labels from eBay in advance without eBay marking it as "shipped".

It gets even more confusing because with bulk pickups or dropoffs, they often don't even get scanned when the carrier receives them. They won't show as actually in the carrier's hands until they reach the first major hub, which can easily be a day or even two later.
by sofixa | 2025-07-21 17:30:10+00:00
I'm not sure I like the concept.

Realistically, why would your different environments have different ways of consuming secrets from different locations? Yes, you wouldn't use AWS Secrets Manager in your local testing, maybe... but giving each developer control and management of their own secrets, in their own locations, is just begging for trouble. How do you handle sharing of common secrets? How do you handle scenarios where some parts are shared (e.g. a shared api key for a dev third party API) but others aren't (local instance of test db)? How do you make sure that api key that everyone uses in dev is actually rotated from times to times, and nobody has stored it in clear text .env because once they had issues with OnePassword's service being down, and left it at that? How do you make sure that nobody is using an insecure secrets manager (e.g. LastPass)?

It's just adding the risk of having the impression that there is proper secrets management, but actually having a mess of everyone doing whatever they feel like with secrets, with no control over who has access to what, and what secret is used where and by whom and why. Which is kind of like a good ~70% of the point of secrets management.

Centralised secrets management or bust, IMO. Ideally with a secrets scanner checking your code doesn't have a secret in clear text left by mistake/lazyness. Vault/OpenBao isn't that complicated to set up, but if really is, your platform probably has something already.

Disclaimer: I work at HashiCorp, but opinions my own, I've been a part of the team implementing Vault at my past job for centralised secrets management and 100% believe it's the way things should be done to minimise the risk of mishandling secrets.
by esafak | 2025-07-21 17:30:13+00:00
> A spreadsheet containing the personal information of about 18,700 Afghans and their relatives – a total of about 33,000 people – was accidentally forwarded to the wrong recipients by email in February 2022, Healey told lawmakers in the House of Commons.

This is why authorization matters. Don't send the spreadsheet; send a link to it, because e-mail doesn't implement authorization. Then you can revoke access at any time, and even prevent accidents by setting up access rules and monitoring at the org level.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/7/17/how-were-identities...
by Guid_NewGuid | 2025-07-21 17:30:45+00:00
A funny thing that I notice on this site, as a foreign, is apparently everywhere in the US that isn't the place in whichever article is under discussion has weather such as to be effectively uninhabitable.

I realise there is extreme weather in the US but every discussion on renewables, cars, trains, cycling, construction standards or whatever else has comments along the lines of "good for Utah (or wherever) but this couldn't possibly work in the 95% of the US that is constantly inundated by biblical plagues".

Sure the performance of whatever technology might be suboptimal but I struggle to believe vast swathes of the US experience weather so extreme as to be uninhabitable. If I'm wrong y'all really need to leave that country for your own safety.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-07-21 17:31:03+00:00
Thiel and Andreesen are popular in the sense of "they are wealthy, so they must be smart|good|etc." Think of it as tech bro prosperity gospel. With regards to your inquiry "Who is going to die for Thiel and Andreesen or some tool builder/wealth accumulator?" look no further to the startup/tech/VC ecosystem, where everyone grinds for a lottery ticket most know will never pay out. The people who will follow them either believe them to be right or don't believe they're right but know they have to play the game to get a chance at adjacent or similar outcomes to them.

https://blog.samaltman.com/successful-people

> "Successful people create companies. More successful people create countries. The most successful people create religions."

(if we're talking "who will provide these people physical security and care until death while they continue to preach their religion," that is what the wealth is for)
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-07-21 17:31:16+00:00
Well, I don't doubt that they did get those results, but it is clear now that it was not an official collaboration. It was heavily implied in a statement by IMO's president a few days ago (the one where they said they'd prefer AI companies wait a week before announcing, so that the focus is first on the human competitors).

Goog had an official colab with IMO, and we can be sure they got those results under the imposed constraints (last year they allocated ~48h for silver IIRC) and an official grading by the IMO graders.
by goku12 | 2025-07-21 17:31:17+00:00
Apparently, oxygenated hemoglobin and blood plasma are diamagnetic, while deoxygenated hemoglobin is paramagnetic. Meaning, magnetic properties are determined by the molecules, not its elements. I assume that whatever attraction or repulsion caused by even the MRI magnets are weak compared to the forces involved in Brownian motion. So don't expect anything substantial.
by kbuck | 2025-07-21 17:31:21+00:00
I was very happy to find that there are similar libraries for Mitsubishi units as well:

1: https://github.com/SwiCago/HeatPump

2: https://github.com/echavet/MitsubishiCN105Esphome

I've got this running on several units and it works great. If you buy ESP32 development boards with pre-soldered pins, you can even build the boards without soldering.
by tialaramex | 2025-07-21 17:31:33+00:00
One of the Minecraft mods makes you actually do the video game equivalent (thus not over the correct time period) of how we actually get milk. Instead of just right click on any cow with a bucket (like vanilla Minecraft) that mod requires you to find a boy cow and a girl cow, ensure they're both happy (well fed, no nearby predators etc.), and after a short period nature takes its course and you get a baby cow. Next, steal the baby cow, you can kill it for food or just move it to somewhere mum can't reach it. She's recently given birth so her body will make milk but now there's no baby to drink it, so you can steal the milk.
by skydhash | 2025-07-21 17:32:22+00:00
The point I was making was against conflating optimizing tooling and wasting time not solving problems. Not about going with an IDE or not.

Everyone works differently. For most tasks, I prefer Emacs. But for pairing, VS code may be more familiar to others. And it’s hard to get rid of Android Studio and XCode if you’re doing mobile development.

No one can judge workflow and tooling choices as long as the results are in.
by palata | 2025-07-21 17:32:27+00:00
Are you serious? The 70cm zipper takes pretty much exactly the same space as the 60cm one. It's not like they store 2 millions of them: all of them are on the rack. The 70cm just go 10cm lower on the ground. Same space.

You'll have to do better if you want to justify that those 10cm are worth 2$.
by grues-dinner | 2025-07-21 17:32:27+00:00
Neither of the hypergolics described in Command and Control seem chill either: the fuel reacts with atmospheric water and oxygen, the oxidizer is in the highest category of poison (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.co.za/extracts/command-and-co...).

Indeed there's no such thing as a free launch, and that is rocket science.
by sherr | 2025-07-21 17:32:30+00:00
This article in The Economist recently would tend to agree : "Why all Indians are rule-breakers [1]

"IF YOU HAVE ever relaxed with a cold Kingfisher beer at the end of a long, sweaty day in Mumbai, the party capital of India, you have almost certainly broken the law. Specifically, you violated section 40 of the Bombay Prohibition Act of 1949, under which you must hold a permit to drink booze. A first offence is punishable by a fine of 10,000 rupees ($115) and up to six months in prison. Welcome to India, where everything is against the law."

[1] https://archive.is/ONfHw
by snapetom | 2025-07-21 17:32:39+00:00
I looked at solar and battery set up for an off-grid RV system about 3 years ago and revisited again just a few weeks ago. There's been some impressive strides in terms of wattage produced and battery AH.

It's still a long, long way from where it needs to be to live fully off solar, though. Want solar powered AC and a fridge? One or the other. You can't have both. It still needs help from the consumption end and energy production end. For example, mini-split AC systems these past few years have at least made solar-powered ACs in RVs possible.
by 1-more | 2025-07-21 17:32:42+00:00
This is roughly how records and extensible record arguments work in Elm. A `type alias` is a structural type, and a function argument specified as an extensible record `{ a | … }` can be read as "any record a having at least the fields …"

type alias Furniture = { name : String, length : Float, width : Float, height : Float} type alias Room = { name : String, length : Float, width : Float} floorArea : { a | length : Float, width : Float} -> Float floorArea {length, width} = length * width

This is just an example for brevity. In practice, I'd probably recommend the dimensions be stored as `Length.Length` from the package elm-units. I'd modify the extensible record argument of `floorArea` to expect the same, and I'd have `floorArea` return an `Area.Area`.

You can also use nominal typing to prohibit this via opacity. You can then wrap up construction in a function that fails for invalid states. Here we export the type Furniture but not its only constructor Furniture1.

module Furniture exposing (Furniture, width, length, height, name) type Furniture = Furniture1 { name : String, length : Float, width : Float, height : Float} name : Furniture -> String name (Furniture1 {name}) = name -- etc for width, length, height type Dimension = Width | Length | Height type Error = NameCannotBeBlank | DimensionMustBePositive Dimension safeConstruct : {width, height, name, length} -> Result Error Furniture safeConstruct params = if params.name == "" then Err NameCannotBeBlank else if (params.width <= 0) then Err (DimensionsMustBePositive Width) -- repeat for length and height else Ok (Furniture1 input)

then in a different module (i.e. a different file) (assume I also wrote safe constructors and accessors)

module Room exposing (Room, width, length, name) type Room = Room1 { name : String, length : Float, width : Float}

Finally, your floor area function would not be able to inspect values of these types because we did not expose the Floor1 and Room1 constructors (in practice those would be named Floor and Room but that's confusing in this example). It would need accessors for the properties.

floorArea : { toWidth : a -> Float, toLength : a -> Float } -> a -> Float floorArea {toWidth, toLength} = (toWidth a) * (toLength a) floorAreaRoom : Room -> Float floorAreaRoom = floorArea { toWidth = Room.width, length = Room.length } floorAreaFurniture : Furniture -> Float floorAreaFurniture = floorArea { toWidth = Furniture.width, length = Furniture.length }

Also in practice I'd maybe have `safeConstruct` have a shorter name and return a non-empty list of errors rather than just the first error, but that would cloud this example.
by snarf21 | 2025-07-21 17:34:02+00:00
I think the ironic thing is that although everyone uses powerful technology on a practically constant basis, it is sooooo much more complicated that less and less people have even a clue. How many adults would know how to change their oil today versus back in the 70s? Changing spark plugs used to be a 30 minute task but now you have to take apart half the engine just to even gain access. Even though of us who make our living in tech are not immune. How would we verify that there isn't spyware or similar in the firmware or hardware on the computer we use daily?
by jabroni_salad | 2025-07-21 17:34:21+00:00
Every now and then I return-to-sender something that looks important to my address's previous resident and sharpie out the barcode along the bottom. If you don't do this your RTS items will come back to you regardless of what you stamp it with. Even still I receive an informed delivery photo of it.

My belief is that the informed delivery system is using optical recognition while the sorters are using the barcodes.
by crop_rotation | 2025-07-21 17:34:28+00:00
One golden piece of wisdom from the above article

> The state of Uttarakhand, to pick one, requires couples in live-in relationships to register (and pay a fee) within 30 days of shacking up. Failure to comply attracts a fine and up to three months in prison. What of love lost? The unhappy couple must de-register (and pay another fee).