MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by owenversteeg | 2025-08-25 22:47:10+00:00
It is true that Denmark has a large district heating system - their national system is nearly as big as that of, say, St. Petersburg. But I think the Danes should be honest with themselves about the reality. The heat comes from burning stuff (wood/biomass, trash, and fossil fuels), the overwhelming majority of biomass is imported - and about 40% of those imports are from non-EU countries. If Denmark burns a tree, that is considered to be zero emissions, because - they argue - those emissions have already been accounted for in a change in _Danish_ land use and forestry. If you are deforesting a foreign country to warm your house, that’s a) not accounted for in your national emissions statistics and b) often not accounted for in the foreign country’s emissions either. So you get heat for free. Of course, if you forget to replant the trees, or they fail to grow back, then the emissions are worse than coal, because coal is underground, trees are not, and thus the surface albedo changes are significant.

The steel-man case for Denmark is that trees usually do grow back, and indeed, global _tree_ cover is substantially higher than it was 35 years ago. But global _forest_ cover is still shrinking, and much of the wood entering Denmark comes from forests. Forest cover is more important than tree cover - for the aforementioned reason of albedo changes, but also biodiversity.

Where things really get absurd is when you begin to calculate the area of land you have to turn into a tree farm to keep your homes warm. Or when you calculate the market effects of buying a huge amount of trees - even if all _your_ trees were good ethical trees from a farm, you have just consumed a large amount of the supply and thus financially incentivized cutting down old-growth forests elsewhere - for example look at the history of Ikea’s wood use. If there were more Denmarks, and it was not just a small country with the population of the Chicago area, there would be massive worldwide devastation.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not an absolute opponent of biomass. It is true that burning things is a great source of high-grade heat. It can play a small role in a sustainable energy mix. But it is not the free lunch Danes think it is, and certainly not at the scale they consume it.
by pentamassiv | 2025-08-25 22:48:07+00:00
I think an important factor is also how long you had the same number. I switch numbers every couple of years because I get a new contract and moving the number to the new company is such a hassle. Over time you share your number with more and more companies and people who sell it or get breached.

My parents had their number for ~30 years. I never get spam calls or texts. They get one once a week or so (this is in Germany, we get a lot fewer of these calls).
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-08-25 22:49:08+00:00
<< we will be confirming who the developer is, not reviewing the content of their app or where it came from

To be honest, it almost makes me wonder if the issue here is not related to security at all. I am not being sarcastic. What I mean is, maybe the issue revolves around some of the issue MS had with github ( sanctions and KYC checks ).
by autoexec | 2025-08-25 22:49:14+00:00
> Microsoft has way too much of legacy software people use, banning it all overnight will not go well at all.

A lot of legacy software was killed off with the move to 64-bit Windows. Consumers survived that and for businesses registering their software with MS isn't a problem. They're already handing Microsoft all of their company email, their documents, their spreadsheets, etc. and paying Microsoft for the privilege. MS doesn't care at all about consumers.
by guywithahat | 2025-08-25 22:50:04+00:00
The secret: they do pay taxes, enormous amounts. A small handful of people pay billions in taxes a year. A wealth tax is not only deeply immoral, but it's a bad idea, and every country that's tried it has watched it fail. If someone with billions in assets doesn't take home a salary, then they don't pay income tax on a salary that year. Get them when they sell stock, like they did when Elon paid ~12 billion in taxes, or when the companies they run pay corporate taxes, like when Berkshire Hathaway paid ~26.8 billion.

It's frustrating because I suspect billionaire taxes are deeply interesting, but that's not what this article is about. The article reads like someone who's 5'9 complaining about NBA players
by aborsy | 2025-08-25 22:50:18+00:00
But a two bay NAS is typically maxed out at 16 GB of RAM, see UGREEN or QNAP. The CPUs are also dog slow for non-NAS tasks, like running VMs and containers.

Zimaboards come close. Two sata ports and 1-2 NVMe via PCIe. I heard the board may not be able to power all these drives. RAM is limited to 8-16 GB.

I guess I should separate HDD storage in a proper NAS and use a miniPC for VMs and containers only.
by bit1993 | 2025-08-25 22:50:59+00:00
The issue is only developers know the benefits of those features. Most people just want to view content or post and get their likes. That is why they use social media rather than post on their own website.

I don't think this is a technology problem, its more of a socioeconomic problem. People tend to choose the centralized option and projects that start out decentralized tend to end up centralized WWW-Social media, Email-Gmail, Git-Github, Bitcoin-Coinbase etc
by fluoridation | 2025-08-25 22:51:31+00:00
Fewer people use custom ROMs not necessarily because they don't want to, but because manufacturers began putting hardware on the phones that only they have the firmware for. I have a Samsung phone that I replaced as my daily driver because the phone speaker broke from sweat. Other than the speaker it works literally perfectly. I'd love to use it to try different alternative OSs, but AFAIK, even though it's only from 2021, not a single project supports it.
by engineeringwoke | 2025-08-25 22:51:54+00:00
Okay here's a secret that you probably won't hear other than in some books that are hard to find.

The youth desire a strong executive. They don't yet understand why it can be a bad thing, because they have little experience with people having power over them that aren't their parents or teachers.

The middle aged desire a strong legislative branch, the most fair branch of government. They have enough life experience to understand why. They are not quite old enough to be set in their ways just yet.

The elderly desire a strong judicial branch. Judges are almost always old, and biased towards the opinions of the elderly, left or right.

There is nothing wrong with a strong executive. It is just completely at odds with those who still control the vast majority of the money and power, and of course, mainstream media: the Boomers. JFK, Great Society, these are marked by a desire for a strong executive. Ironic, of course.

A strong executive can stop them, and the Boomers have never been told 'no' in their entire lives. Really truly, everybody was young in the 1960's. They warped society to their will, just like the people in every baby boom in history. You misinterpret their tantrum as something substantive.
by quickthrowman | 2025-08-25 22:52:27+00:00
Airports do solicit competitive bids for concessions, they just end up awarding it to a single concessionaire. My local international airport is owned by a regional governmental entity, one of two in the United States (Metropolitan Airport Commission in MN and MSP Airport, part of the Metropolitan Council which encompasses a 7-county region. Portland, OR has a similar regional government org but I am unsure if theirs owns PDX) and all RFPs for contracts over I believe $100,000.00 are visible online. [0]

Keep in mind that the venue owner has overhead for each and every vendor, awarding a concessions contract to a single entity simplifies things for the organization that owns the airport. There’s also a limited amount of space in an airport and having one concessions company storing food for all of their ‘restaurants’ in one location instead of having a dozen or more tiny food storage areas simplifies things for the airport yet again.

[0] https://www.mspairport.com/business-at-msp/business-opportun...
by kennywinker | 2025-08-25 22:52:36+00:00
> Still, at least this project let me avoid some e-waste.

A few paragraphs later:

> PCBWay to manufacture the boards for my project (I ended up ordering 10 so I had spares).

No hate, it’s ok to have hobbies, but i think 9 pcbs in a drawer somewhere forever cancels out any e-waste benefits you gained from not buying a new mouse XD
by zeta0134 | 2025-08-25 22:53:06+00:00
True for PayPal though. I just recently had to jump through seven different hoops to verify my ID (with creepy, creepy face scans) and they absolutely refused to even start the process on desktop. Eventually got the stupid thing to work on my iPad; Android+Firefox was a no go, and it's stock Pixel 5a with Google OS.

Thankfully I don't actually rely on PayPal for anything serious, but there are artists whose commission I like to pay, and being able to actually pay them would be nice. :/
by cesarb | 2025-08-25 22:53:07+00:00
> There's no reason a competitive Linux-based smartphone can't exist

There is; it's the "phone" part of "smartphone". Being a phone makes the device subject to a lot more requirements (for an obvious example, emergency dialing must always be available and work, and at the same time the phone must never accidentally dial the emergency number).

In my country, only cell phones certified by the government telecommunications agency (Anatel) can be imported, so I can't for instance go to the Jolla or PinePhone store and buy a Linux-based smartphone; if I tried, it would be sent back the moment the package entered the country. (See https://www.gov.br/anatel/pt-br/regulado/certificacao-de-pro... for details.)
by wan23 | 2025-08-25 22:53:08+00:00
Grey markets aren't the same black markets. Ideally the government would be omniscient, efficient, and benevolent so that it could properly regulate things to the benefit of the masses, but in practice it government isn't very responsive and in many cases has to consider different viewpoints on an issue. Even worse, regulations usually create winners and losers in a way where even if it's beneficial to change the regulation, whoever would lose out will automatically be opposed to the change. Americans - mostly working and middle class, not wealthy - bought 50+ billions of dollars of goods imported this way last year. The American people have voted with their wallets but the government is not responsive to their desires in this case.
by ungreased0675 | 2025-08-25 22:53:22+00:00
Fair argument, but let’s not forget that indoor air quality, HEPA filters, and upper air UV systems weren’t even allowed to be discussed as solutions to airborne transmission of viruses not that long ago. It was all about masks/no masks, remember? It’s a little unfair to say that things haven’t been studied, when it would have been career damaging to do so until very recently.
by LinchZhang | 2025-08-25 22:53:53+00:00
If you like explorations of the deep impacts of parallel universes which have bridges that lets you transport bits (but not matter), you might enjoy https://brainchip.thecomicseries.com/

I like some of Yudkowsky's shorter fiction but I could never get into HPMOR. The writing style just comes across as too smarmy. I know it's intentional but I still can't get past it (I had trouble with Thomas Covenant) as well.
by error503 | 2025-08-25 22:54:16+00:00
That was intended to be a generic 'device manufacturer', not calling out Google and Apple specifically. It's my device. I should control it, full stop. It should simply not be legal for a device manufacturer to lock me out of a device I own, post sale. In the past it wasn't _possible_, so we didn't need to worry about it. But now the tech is at the point where manufacturers can create digital locks which simply cannot be broken, and give them full control of devices they sell (ie. which they no longer own), which are being used in anti-consumer ways.

Considering market forces are against it, I believe the only practical way to accomplish this in the long term is for this to be a right that is enforced by legislation. I don't think it is even far from precedent surrounding first sale doctrine and things like Magnuson-Moss, that the user should be the ultimate one in control post-purchase, it just takes a different shape when we're talking about computing technology.
by kldg | 2025-08-25 22:54:37+00:00
What is the commonality between websites severely affected by bots? I run web server from home for years on .com TLD, is high-ish in Google site index for relevant keywords, and do not have any exotic protections against bots either on router or server (though I did make an attempt at counting bots, for curiosity). I get very frequent port scans, and they usually grab the index page, but only rarely follow dynamically-loaded links. I don't even really think about bots because there is no noticeable impact either when I ran server on Apache 2, and now with multiple websites run using Axum.

I would guess directory listing? -But I'm an idiot, so any elucidation would be appreciated.
by micah94 | 2025-08-25 22:55:14+00:00
I don't think we will ever understand what you saw if we continue to cling to our view of what reality actually is. I think it's unlikely whatever it is originated in some distant galaxy far far away (aliens, little-green men, spacecraft, etc). I think it's something fundamental and it's here on this planet and I don't think that sits well with people. Like many things, we have to look within rather than what's out there.
by DaveZale | 2025-08-25 22:55:35+00:00
Don't leave the UK out of your criticism. Free speech there can be rewarded with jail time. And don't leave out the dystopian Big Tech surveillance ... here come the downvotes. Sure you guys are all making six figures or more, but what is the price? Guilty until proven innocent surveillance, unreasonable search and seizure. Unconstitutional, anti-American theft of communications.
by makeitdouble | 2025-08-25 22:55:41+00:00
There is the fundamental question of how much that number matters (if someone spends more time fly fishing than reading fanfics, should it be "fixed" ?).

But even setting that aside, while YouTube, TikTok and Instagram are the mainstream, Threads and Bluesky came up as new platforms and are text first. They could have let the Twitter paradigm die but chose to heavily invest in that market instead, and it seems to be working, so at least the idea still has legs ?

Interestingly, with current LLM limitations I'd assume text in - text out usage will keep being the focus for a while as well.
by gerdesj | 2025-08-25 22:55:58+00:00
Ooh go on, what do they say about Germans?

I lived in West Germany for some years back in the day and I don't recall the locals being too shy. Frankly the Germans and the Dutch seemed to have had a rather more ribald sense of humour than the "oo err Missus" efforts we Brits fielded back then.

To be fair we could robustly swear on telly after 2100, provided it didn't involve too many rude bits and you could not misspell one variant of King Canute's name or Matron would be jolly upset.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure someone called this the "dog's arse" (it has to go somewhere!)
by mvdtnz | 2025-08-25 22:56:26+00:00
What an asshole way of explaining it. For practical purposes (don't @ me if this is technically wrong, I don't give a shit) it's a description of how the cost of an algorithm grows with the size of the input. For example if the cost doubles every time the input increments then it's O(n^2). If the cost increases in step with the input size then it's O(n). Simples.
by adinhitlore | 2025-08-25 22:56:34+00:00
I like bluesky like...a lot but too busy recently to post there and of course, lack of engagement from my part = lack of people to actually give a f@@@ about me.

I'm worried though if it gets too big and their CEO Jay (sorry forgot the last name) turns into another evildoer Marvel villain like Zuck? I hope i won't live long enough to witness her replying with "concerning!!!" under a post "my neighbor speaks spanish".
by ChiefNotAClue | 2025-08-25 22:57:18+00:00
Motorcycles only seem cheap. Factor in a proper set of gear, like helmet, jacket, pants, and gloves, and you're up another $1k. Also note that maintenance intervals are more frequent. Consumables, such as tires, will be more expensive in the long run.

Why choose that over a used car for $5k? It's not cheaper, nor is it more practical. But I'll agree, on the nice days, it's definitely more enjoyable.
by shusaku | 2025-08-25 22:58:27+00:00
From the linked actual journal article I thought this part should be limited to e-readers

> ATUS asked participants to recall all their activities over 24 h, beginning at 4 a.m. on the day prior to the interview and ending at 4 a.m. on the day of the interview (Figure 1). Activities were coded using a standard lexicon, verified by two coders. We focused on two reading outcomes: (1) daily reading for pleasure, classified by ATUS as reading for personal interest (e.g., reading a magazine/book/newspaper, listening to audiobooks, reading on a Kindle or other e-reader; Table S1); and (2) daily reading with children (e.g., reading to or with household or non-household children, listening to child read, helping child read; Table S1).
by sidewndr46 | 2025-08-25 22:58:37+00:00
I guess my position it was comparatively well behaved? There were bots that would full speed blitz the website, for absolutely no reason. You just scraped this page 27 seconds ago, do you really need to check it for an update again? Also it hasn't had a new post in the past 3 years, is it really going to start being lively again?
by contravariant | 2025-08-25 22:58:52+00:00
No you see chatgpt is doing the thinking for us now, instead of using your own brain to struggle with a puzzle that is trivial to solve for a simple algorithm you can let a language model struggle with it for you! You get all of the enjoyment from solving a puzzle with an inefficient overly complicated general purpose solver, without needing to put in any work yourself!
by daemonologist | 2025-08-25 23:00:10+00:00
I think this is partially down to Framework being a very small and new company that doesn't have the resources to make the best use of every last coulomb, rather than an inherent deficiency of x86. The larger companies like Asus and Lenovo are able to build more efficient laptops (at least under Windows), while Apple (having very few product SKUs and full vertical integration) can push things even further.

notebookcheck.com does pretty comprehensive battery and power efficiency testing - not of every single device, but they usually include a pretty good sample of the popular options.
by lemonberry | 2025-08-25 23:00:18+00:00
Cool! I had to look "Uncle Al catalogs" up. I remember seeing ads for Car Wars, but never played it myself. There were so many neat games back then.

Gamma World was really neat and timely given how fearful we all were of nuclear war. I remember watching Road Warrior at the time and thinking that Gamma World could actually be the world we live in.

Dragon Magazine would occasionally have articles on Gamma World too. So much food for the young imagination.
by godelski | 2025-08-25 23:00:24+00:00
It's a great line. I think our current tech industry has forgotten this. You can't make a product for everyone but you can make an environment for everyone. Something that can be adapted for (almost) anyone.

Take the phone industry. They're happily gouging developers, taking large sums of app sales. But at the same time, a smart phone isn't a smart phone without apps. Everyone has different ones installed and ones they highly depend on that aren't from Apple/Google. It's the program that makes the tool.

But this kind of thing is happening more and more and can only happen because consolidation. It maximizes profits for today but at the cost of higher future profits and better products. It's funny how there was a strong counter culture early on but it feels like that was lost.
by danroth27 | 2025-08-25 23:00:52+00:00
Blazor has come a long way since 2021 and is still going strong. Blazor Web Apps can now be rendered server-side, using either static or interactive server-side rendering, as well as client-side via WebAssembly. You can also host your Blazor components in native mobile and desktop apps using Blazor Hybrid. Because of this flexibility, Blazor is now the recommended .NET web UI framework in ASP.NET Core. It can handle traditional server-side rendering (like you could do with MVC or Razor Pages) as well as fully interactive scenarios that would otherwise require JavaScript.
by wishfish | 2025-08-25 23:01:07+00:00
I've been keeping an eye on FuriLabs (Furiphone). They maintain FuriOS - Debian with an Android kernel. Has a container for running Android apps. Price is reasonable though I don't know how it'll be affected by tariffs in the US. It's tempting.

https://furilabs.com/shop/flx1/
by anyconversation | 2025-08-25 23:01:13+00:00
Most AI chat apps forget everything once you leave. I built AnyConversation around a different idea: you can create your own AI companions, give them backstories and traits, and then watch them grow with you over time through memory.

Instead of starting fresh every session, companions recall past conversations, build on important details, and develop more consistent personalities the more you interact with them. They do not just echo back text, they evolve alongside you.

We already have over 300 users and a few paying users, but this is still early. I would love feedback from the HN community: • What makes long-term AI companions genuinely useful instead of just a novelty? • How much should come from the backstory you create vs what develops through interaction? • If you have tried other AI companions, what was missing for you?

This started as a side project and is slowly turning into something bigger. My goal is to make sure it is heading in the right direction.
by LexiMax | 2025-08-25 23:01:21+00:00
You are 100% correct.

Such a shame that the Free Software Foundation has been such an awful steward of the GPL. The fact that the GPLv3 didn't close the network hole is a decision made either out of myopia or abject cowardice, you shouldn't need a separate license (AGPLv3) to ensure true freedom of the codebase.
by coastalpuma | 2025-08-25 23:01:30+00:00
From the announcement

> our recent analysis found over 50 times more malware from internet-sideloaded sources than on apps available through Google Play.

I will believe this when we stop seeing brazen malware in marquee app store apps, e.g. https://www.tracesecurity.com/blog/articles/meta-pixel-and-t...
by peterashford | 2025-08-25 23:01:53+00:00
"The problem is not the use of AI but the people who think they can, arbitrarily, criticize the work from someone else because he used or not AI in the name of “ethics”. But speaking about ethics for a so young technology is useless, in my humble opinions because today, i guess, we have to build ethics standards in AI and as you can see if you do some research, this field is at the beginning of the exploratory phase."

This is appalling reasoning, IMO.

Imagine: 'Sure, the robot delivery dog ate your cat, but we can't criticise the "ethics" of that action because the field of cat eating robot dogs is so new.'

We don't apply this ad-hoc standard of ethics to any other field. Yes we refine our standards as we go, but we sure as hell have ethics that we apply to tech right from the get-go.