MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by like_any_other | 2025-08-17 16:01:06+00:00
A study limited to organized religious institutions, in a country where, of all religions, Christians are the overwhelming majority, found that most of the abuse occurred in Christian institutions? What a shock. It even omits how many of the respondents were from which religion (despite including such a breakdown for respondent age), so we can't work out per-capita numbers.

But despite trying very hard to work backwards from a conclusion, the study is not entirely useless - it contains two pieces of actual information: it reported that 0.4% were sexually abused by an adult or leader in a religious institution, and that boys were 8x more likely to be abused than girls.

So we can conclude that children are 10x more likely to be abused by a public school teacher [1], and that homosexuals are 8x more likely to abuse than heterosexuals.

[1] An earlier survey of 4,340 adults examining sexual attitudes and experiences reported that 4.1 percent of respondents had a physical sexual experience with a teacher. - https://www.ed.gov/sites/ed/files/rschstat/research/pubs/mis... page 18
by robwwilliams | 2025-08-17 16:01:12+00:00
Geneticist use the word “ancestry” to refer to summarize the historical geographic origins of genetic variants that we are inherit. Ancestry can be reliably estimated by genome analysis.

Race, like the gender, is now considered a social construct.

The meanings of words are defined by a community of users who find them useful in communicating. Race and ancestry are both useful words.
by Krssst | 2025-08-17 16:01:20+00:00
That's too bad, I wonder what's so triggering about it.

OSS projects are mostly done by people on their free time, they can do whatever they want with their mascots/branding/project. And those OSS projects tend to be significantly more respectful of users than the average modern software so on my side I tend to see those kind of harmless personal touches quite positively, sign of software that is made with the user in mind.
by ebiester | 2025-08-17 16:01:41+00:00
It is part of why I think there's a future in tools that adjust with you. I've always thought about a tool like Microsoft Access or retool that will only handle simple cases. Then, it will allow ejecting into an app that uses industry standard tools with prebuilt tests. It's effectively a generator.

The goal would be internal tools. It could even start with a spreadsheet view that can "eject" to a simple app as things get more complex.

The same can be spoken about with any of the above technologies. If we can build limited small tools that can generate larger tools, we can solve many of these problems.
by logicchains | 2025-08-17 16:02:02+00:00
>The feedback loop needs to produce useful results. And Genie 3 can still hallucinate or produce implausible responses

The solution to this is giving the model a physical body and actually letting it interact with the real world and learn from it. But no lab dares to try this because allowing a model to learn from experience would mean allowing it to potentially change its views/alignment.
by jlokier | 2025-08-17 16:02:04+00:00
ext4 or btrfs won't save you either.

Although that bug report is for ZFS on the same SSD as the Windows article (WD SN770), the faults described in the Linux bug report look like would also happen with ext4 or btrfs.

So I searched for reported problems with SN770 and ext4, and found enough results to convince me.

That particular SSD fails with Linux and ext4 too.
by troelsarvin | 2025-08-17 16:02:45+00:00
Surprisingly often, I find myself needing to find the n most "something" files. Examples:

In a large and deep directory structure of configuration files, where has the most recent change activity happened?

In a nested directory of (many) uploaded files, where are the 10 oldest files?

There doesn't seem to be a good, existing command line tool for this. One can chain together six unix tools: https://troelsarvin.blogspot.com/2024/09/find-recently-updat...

But the chained method is not as fast and light-weight as I'd like, especially when dealing with a file system that has a huge amount of files.

So I have written a little tool that you may also find useful. I've called it "topnfiles".
by Henchman21 | 2025-08-17 16:03:17+00:00
I took it to mean my take an implied lack of agency when evaluating advertisements in one's life and if one should act on it.

My take would be that one does indeed lack the agency to be able to evaluate ads that way. The environment itself makes it impossible. SNR is way too low to find valid signals to evaluate. The number being purely honest and informative with zero spin must be close to zero.
by massysett | 2025-08-17 16:03:36+00:00
I think that's the idea with deregulated electricity. Where I live (Maryland USA) I can pick who generates my electricity. I have no choice in who delivers it and that is still regulated.

I found that in practice the non-default options do not wind up being any cheaper so after trying it for a few years I switched back to the default option, where the price is not regulated but is set through a prescribed auction process.

I suppose the deregulation might still put downward pressure on prices in theory.
by amanaplanacanal | 2025-08-17 16:04:02+00:00
It's hard.

Take global warming as an example: this is a real thing that's happening. We have measurements of CO2 concentrations and global temperatures. Most people accept that this is a real thing. And still getting anybody to do anything about it is nearly impossible.

Now you have a hypothetical risk of something that may happen sometime in the distant future, but may not. I don't see how you would be able to get anybody to care about that.
by cluckindan | 2025-08-17 16:04:08+00:00
I would hazard a guess that a lot of the so-called wealth is not actual, directly owned material wealth, but immaterial numbers: indirect, abstract proof of ownership — in Baudrillard jargon, simulacra of ownership. Numbers, which, due to their illiquid nature and their disconnect from material ownership, cannot be instantly and fully redeemed without sacrificing most of their purported value.
by elif | 2025-08-17 16:04:31+00:00
As someone who has tried to go through blender tutorials for multiple days, I can tell you, there is no chance I can get close to any of these examples.

I think you might be projecting your abilities a bit too much.

As someone who wants to make and use 3d models, not someone who wants to be a 3d model artist, this tech is insanely useful.
by ndriscoll | 2025-08-17 16:04:47+00:00
A perhaps nicer way to look at things[0] is to hold onto your base points explicitly and say Df:: a -> (b, a -o b) = (f(p),A(p)) where f(p+v)≈f(p)+A(p)v. Then you retain the information you need to define composition Dg∘Df=D(g∘f)=(Dg._1∘Df._1, Dg(Df._1)_.2∘Df._2). i.e the chain rule.

[0] which I learned from this talk https://youtube.com/watch?v=17gfCTnw6uE
by wa2flq | 2025-08-17 16:05:11+00:00
The Lafayette HA460 6M AM transmitter used a 6CW4 Nuvistor as a preamp. Mine survived a lightning strike to my 6M beam, which melted the Gamma Match and destroyed the front end harmonics filter. All tube, expect for a set of DC inverter transistors that allowed for mobile operation. Relatively good RF sensitivity for an AM rig of the era.

Gingerly repaired it served me many years in the late 1960's and still sits in the shack. Sporatic-E was strong in those days, to the extent you could easily DX low channel TV channels cross country. I turn it on every few months for 10-15 minutes in an attempt to keep the electrolytic capacitors polarized.
by thoughtstheseus | 2025-08-17 16:06:15+00:00
$30B over ten years to reduce blackouts and grid instability is a good deal. For reference, the 2021 Texas blackout caused ~$100b in damage.

Very very few people in the power industry want to run coal plants- but they cannot in good conscience turn them off. The whole “turn off the lights” mantra is not funny. It’s unfortunate the grid is fragile and facing increased demand. Operating coal plants, preferably at zero or super low utilization rates, for another ten years or so until the grid is more resilient seems reasonable.
by logicchains | 2025-08-17 16:06:19+00:00
>a language with often comparable performance that is ALSO much safer

There are domains where performance is critical and safety isn't so important (e.g. video games). Zig has an advantage in such domains because of the pervasive support for passing around allocators in the standard library (avoiding hidden allocations, and allowing efficient memory reuse via block allocators), while in the Rust stdlib custom allocators are relatively cumbersome to use (and not easy to prove safe to the compiler).
Show HN: NovaAccess – Alternative SSH client for tailscale network with o VPN
by mintflow | 2025-08-17 16:06:55+00:00
I love Tailscale, but I needed to connect to multiple VPN endpoints simultaneously, so I built MintFlow NetStack to solve this issue. However, I still wanted to use Tailscale for easily connecting to my infrastructure servers and homelabs, which created some challenges:

iOS doesn't allow running multiple VPN applications at once Integrating Tailscale into MintFlow NetStack wasn't feasible because the Go runtime consumes too much memory

So I built NovaAccess to solve this pain point for myself and others facing the same issue. It leverages Tailscale's open-source code and integrates a native SwiftUI SSH terminal into the app. Users can connect to their Tailscale network (tailnet) without running the official Tailscale app – it even works alongside other running VPN applications. I started considering this idea 10 months ago and decided to build it a month ago. Development went surprisingly well and Apple approved it quickly. AI helped tremendously with the UI work – I never imagined I could complete this app in just one month.
by blindriver | 2025-08-17 16:08:16+00:00
I live in the SF Bay Area. My rates have roughly doubled in about 5-6 years. I'm paying almost $0.50/kWh or more depending on what tier I'm in at the time. PG&E does NOT reward conservation or solar power usage. They say "We aren't make enough money! We need to raise your rates! We need to charge solar users to connect to the grid!" The exact same thing happens with water utility companies, when they first preach water conservation, and then complain they aren't making enough money so they have to raise rates.

PG&E wants to charge solar power users $80+/month just for the privilege of connecting to the grid even if they are fully self-powers through solar, and give new users $0 to return energy back to the grid.

The entire system is a scam, and every politician involved is a corrupt.
by parineum | 2025-08-17 16:08:38+00:00
> Generative technology has already made artists begin to question and radically redefine the nature of art,

Everyone else still knows what art is. The only reason artists grapple with it is because it's existential for them. Artists think of themselves as the gatekeepers of art but the only thing that qualified them for that (in their minds) was the ability to produce it.

Now that everyone is producing generic entry level art (what most artists do anyway), they are losing their identity. The "What is art?" conversation isn't about art, it's about gatekeeping.
by bevr1337 | 2025-08-17 16:09:45+00:00
> In an ideal world this should incentivise...

> An ideal world...

> We don't live in an ideal world though...

Yes. That was thoroughly established in the original comment and my reply. Have you come to look for an argument? Or to show off how pragmatic you are? What's your point besides "shit sucks?" If that's your point, I'm glad to commiserate. Shit sucks.
by klelatti | 2025-08-17 16:10:13+00:00
I can remember attending a meeting of the Cambridge University Computer Society (in 1985?) when a presenter from Acorn (Steve Furber?) talked about the new CPU they had developed.

I think the right adjective for the reaction of those present was 'incredulous'. A small team with no previous experience had created a powerful 32-bit design from scratch when 8-bit architectures were still commonly used.

Had anyone told us that 40 years later we'd all be carrying around the 'descendants' of that first Acorn RISC Machine in our pockets then we'd have been utterly astonished.
by RestlessMind | 2025-08-17 16:10:28+00:00
> Me and 80% of the people on the plane can’t stand the selfishness

neither can I. But most of the people also understand that when a kid is crying, it is not out of parents' selfishness but rather helplessness.

> But if there were an airline that charged double for rejecting kids under the “shut up” age, I’d pay double for my seat and I bet I’m not alone.

The fact that no parent wants their child to keep crying is something that eludes you means you have very little social skills and you are amongst a tiny minority. If any airline ever proposes something like that, the backlash will be swift and massive.

EDIT: aha found this through your comment history: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38205960

"Children irritate me and I want to block them out to the maximum degree that I am able" - I'll pray for you.
by codeaether | 2025-08-17 16:10:36+00:00
Actually, to fully utilize NVME performance, one really need to try to avoid OS overhead by leveraging AsyncIO such as IO_Uring. In fact, 4KB page works quite well if you can issue enough outstanding requests. See a paper from the link below by the TUM folks.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.14778/3598581.3598584
by Supermancho | 2025-08-17 16:11:07+00:00
This is an excellent talk explaining how procedural (imperative) came to be OO - which are abstractions over procedural statements:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrY6xrWp3Gs To summarize: Block scope is procedural. Wrapping that up in other abstractions like objects, which are fancy closures, eventually ends up in OO.

When talking about OO, people often conflate the data design with the program abstractions. Ofc you program differently in languages that have dedicated data structures and idioms around domain driven design^1, which take advantage of imperative execution within those mechanisms as well.

eg Java Spring - Spring has a lifecycle. It's imperative. Beans and other annotations have a lifecycle. It's also imperative.

^1 Domain driven design is still the norm and any efficiency observed from circumventing (or ignoring) the design is considered novel, which should inform the industry that there might be a better way. Good enough wins out again.
by latexr | 2025-08-17 16:11:31+00:00
> almost all worthwhile software and technology has gotten better over the years

You only know if it was worthwhile in hindsight. We aren’t there yet. And “better” is definitely debatable. We certainly do more things with software these days, but it’s a hard sell to unambiguously say it is better. Subscriptions everywhere, required internet access, invasions of privacy left and right, automated rejections, lingering bugs which are never fixed…

Your exact argument was given by everyone selling every tech grift ever. Which is not to say this specific case is another grift, only that you cannot truly judge the long-term impact of something while it is being invented.

> Any objection to that is shitty gatekeeping.

If gatekeeping is what you took from my comment, you haven’t understood it. Which could certainly mean my explanation wasn’t thorough enough. My objection is to the hand-wavy “this will only improve” commentary which doesn’t truly say anything and never advances the discussion, yet is always there. See the “low-hanging fruit” section of my other comment.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44932526
by sbarre | 2025-08-17 16:12:29+00:00
I am in no way implying that these advancements should/would make me better than a skilled professional, nor do I believe they will ever replace true expertise or craft.

These kinds of advancements lower the bar for entry and reduce the effort required to achieve better results, and so make the tools more accessible to more people.

And that is a good thing. The scenario you are implying is laying the choices of people at the feet of the tools, rather than holding the people accountable.

Also: history has, so far, mostly proven that the end result of better tools is better experts, not less experts.
by robwwilliams | 2025-08-17 16:12:58+00:00
Yes. The smartest kid in my elementary school in Blankenese, Hamburg, Germany (a filthy-rich neighborhood) was an asthmatic son of the stable master of Alex Springer. By far the smartest kid.

But he did NOT go to gymnasium. He was my best friend and I was furious at this social injustice. I was 10 and this was my first exposure to rigid class injustice. It still makes me mad. All of the other dumb rich kids from Blankenese went to gymnasium, me included.
by cootsnuck | 2025-08-17 16:13:17+00:00
I mean I don't disagree. One of my favorite quotes I've been saying for years is "Advertising shits in your brain."

But at the same time I think only relying on word of mouth is a bit biased against people who aren't starting with an advantage of a pre-existing network for whatever worthwhile service they could be offering.

That being said, plenty of successful service based freelancers will tell you most of their business is from referrals at a certain point. It's just hard to get to that point. (I say this as someone who only gets business from referrals right now, but wants that to not be the case.)

Yea idk, I totally agree with you in spirit. But I care about practicality and I have found worthwhile services from solo-freelancers via marketing.

Good marketing doesn't have to equal garbage. But I feel ya. Most marketing is mind numbing.
by seniorsassycat | 2025-08-17 16:14:01+00:00
Anecdotally Ive noticed a lot of packages failing to build when updating from node 20 to 22.18.0 that weren't failing with earlier node 22 versions. .18 unflagged typescript support.

These are packages using ts-node or tsx to run typescript in node, and with node 22.18 they seem to be using nodes native typescript support instead, and failing due to its limited feature set, or subtly different module resolution.
by ohdeargodno | 2025-08-17 16:15:04+00:00
Why do you accuse me of things I've not said, and drift away from the extremely stupid thing you said ? Value creation is not the only thing that matters, and has extremely harmful results if taken to its extremes. Trying to put the blame on "people" and their "agency" is such a destructive behavior that it shouldn't be tolerated. People buying things does not absolve you of the responsibility of creating said product, or of the process used to make them buy your crap. If your marketing process actively makes society worse, you're responsible for it. If your product has consequences for centuries, you're responsible for it. If your advertisement for a gun is "hey it makes really nice holes in your shooting target. And the neighbor you don't like", you're not off the hook when it gets used to shoot someone. In the same way, if your advertisement technique results in hundreds of thousands of people reading your shitty content that actively makes them dumber, you're not off the hook for making society dumber, even if it "creates value"
by skybrian | 2025-08-17 16:16:01+00:00
This is because California has so much solar that it can’t use it all during the day:

https://www.gridstatus.io/charts/curtailment?iso=caiso

From here on out, batteries are where it’s at. Overprovisioning solar helps, but the demand isn’t there and they aren’t going to pay much for it. (More utility-scale batteries would increase demand for solar somewhat, for charging them.)

Meanwhile, California needs to maintain and improve the electrical grid to lower the risk of wildfires, but more solar in the wrong places doesn’t help much with that.
by kragen | 2025-08-17 16:16:17+00:00
400 years ago China was a literate society with mass printing of pornographic novels written in the vernacular and literacy rates probably approaching 50%. Parts of Europe were similar.

As I understand it, no mainstream scholar is suggesting that Inka society was that literate. Rather, the debate is whether any khipu literacy was confined to a narrow, specialist scribe class associated with the imperial administrative order or whether nonspecialists could also read and write, and whether a khipu written by one person to be read by another was limited to calendrical and numerical data or whether it could express a wider range of concepts: bills of goods, ancestries, perhaps even love letters.
by vbezhenar | 2025-08-17 16:16:34+00:00
> So if you need 1000 random numbers, generate from 1 to 1 million.

If you don't check for clashes, the 50% chance of failure is too much. Probably even 0.1% is too much, so you'd need more elaborate approach.

If you do check for clashes, you can generate from 1 to 2000 with little overhead.
by itsdesmond | 2025-08-17 16:16:42+00:00
Presale pricing is weird, or at least unclear. I am totally fine with pricing strategies where you buy a perpetual license for the current major version only but this seems like less than that. It appears that for $10 we can have something available for free that may be updated some unknown amount, but probably without any significant new behavior, and then we’ll get a discount that could very well be less than the $10 we put in.

You could improve the situation by presenting some kind of roadmap and indicating the limit of presale or stating clearly the amount, or a minimum amount, of discount on V1 offered to presale purchasers.

I haven’t yet tried the thing but it looks interesting. It also looks reminiscent of quickly implemented Whisper or GPT-3 front ends released a couple years ago. I’d like to better understand the value you’re providing over Apple Intelligence provided APIs.
by grep_name | 2025-08-17 16:17:15+00:00
It's frustrating. As someone who is into self-hosting, I was hoping to find answers in the comments to questions like:

- How self-hosted is it? Is it on somebody's computer at home? A colo? One of those university linux servers that runs for decades? Hetzner? Is there any redundancy?

- How are the costs and responsibilities for the hardware broken down?

- How is admin and patching handled?

I'm actually very curious about that stuff, but nobody's really talking about it here
by walterbell | 2025-08-17 16:18:00+00:00
"US utilities plot big rise in electricity rates as data centre demand booms", 90 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44523686

"AI Data Centers May Consume More Electricity Than [Residents of] Entire Cities" (2024), 80 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42221756

"Meta data center electricity consumption hits 14,975 GWh" (2024), 60 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41421627
by ohdeargodno | 2025-08-17 16:18:17+00:00
>Why not let the customers decide what is good and bad - they have agency.

They can't. Your shit blogspam is all over the internet. You've been using LLMs to advertise it everywhere. You've been using bots to post fake reviews online. You've been selling them on platforms that don't give a shit about customers and will never take returns. Either by being first or having more money, or time to blow into it, you can easily drown out any potential threats. The only way another product comes out on top is by doing the same things as you are.

Which is fun and all, but there's external consequences to this behavior. The internet is worse, product reviews are worse, and overall, you're destroying trust in society.

But sure, "agency".