MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rdm_blackhole | 2025-08-25 17:49:30+00:00
> Privacy is a fundamental right in the EU (GDPR, Charter of Fundamental Rights)

A fundamental right that is being challenged every 6 month or so for the last 3 years with the push for Chat Control.

> In practice, it’s far costlier to push mass privacy infringements in Europe than in the U.S.

Absolutely false. With the way the EU commissions work, all you need is to buy or lobby your way in single one place and then you can push for any agenda that you want.
by nickjj | 2025-08-25 17:49:31+00:00
Windows still has advantages for certain use cases, as much as I want to like Hyprland for everything.

For example, imagine this screencast recording set up:

- You have a 4k monitor - You only want to record a 1920x1080 section of your screen (OBS can do this in both set ups) - You only want certain windows to appear in that 1920x1080 zone - You want other adhoc windows (notepad, etc.) floating around that recording zone - You want to easily be able to pick and flip between the apps in that 1920x1080 zone

On Windows this is quite possible and requires almost nothing to be done. You could install a tool like Sizer to resize and position windows into a specific spot and just drag / drop everything else around as needed. You could also optimize things with AHK to make it easier to only open apps in that zone.

With Hyprland this isn't as easy to pull off. A maintainer mentioned to me that I'd likely have to write a Hyprland plugin which would be C++. I'm not a C++ developer though.

I guess you could probably make a workable but not as good solution by hyprctl dispatching commands in a shell script to position specific windows into the zone and then have a notepad like app dedicated to always floating, but when you record hundreds of videos you want an optimized solution to the highest degree.

In Hyprland's defense I've only been using it for a few days but I saw nothing in their docs or the internet that would indicate there's features built into the tool to make this less painful.

If I could find a solution for this, I'd install it on my main machine.
by Normal_gaussian | 2025-08-25 17:49:36+00:00
Initially I needed a lab to practice deploying & upgrading & disrupting on-prem talos linux for k8s, and design benchmarks around it. So 4 machines does that. The zimaboard in front with pfsense (which is a PITA by itself) and nginx is a good way to make it pick-up-and move (ie. internal networking config). For <£2k the set up is very cheap for what is being tested. It meant I didn't have to go and sit on the other side of a security checkpoint for most of the work. It was cool to keep around as its trivial to make the lab guests unable to see my home network and vice-versa.

Now I often have the 4 k8s hosts off. But use them maybe once a month.
by Veedrac | 2025-08-25 17:49:51+00:00
500x should be conceptualized as the bare minimum, not evidence of massive low-hanging fruit.

A battery that cycles daily makes revenue on its capacity about 350 times in a year. A seasonal energy store makes revenue on its capacity about once in a year.

A battery arbitrages between the most expensive and least expensive energy generators in the system. A seasonal energy store arbitrages between seasonal price averages.

A battery smoothing out solar production is operating on the difference between how much sun there is in the day, and how much sun there is at night. A seasonal energy store in the same role averages between summer and winter.

A factor 500 cheaper plus a significant quantity of solar energy production is about where you'd expect this kind of thermal storage to start making economic sense.
by kace91 | 2025-08-25 17:50:01+00:00
My only problem with tiling is that I usually have 2-3 apps tiled that are stable and a “gap” where I quickly pop things I only need momentarily (slack, an extra terminal, postman, whatever). I never managed that quick readjustment in tiling managers, maybe it was just lack of practice.

Also some seemed to interact badly with software that brought pop up windows/dialogs.
by tgtweak | 2025-08-25 17:50:06+00:00
I'm sure you meant it to be edgy and offensive but it's quite flat in substance - you can't reasonably reduce the population and any means you'd employ to do so would be equally destructive to the environment - you can't change the capitalistic paradigm of energy generation and consumption, without some effort and resources drastically beyond what you've demonstrated here, and you can't ignore economy of scale that is demonstrated particularly with energy generation to insinuate that these solutions must be collocated on premise for them to be viable.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-08-25 17:50:08+00:00
> But that power is not more dangerous than having guns, right?

It actually is.

Free computers are intolerably subversive. They can literally wipe out entire sectors of the economy just by copying artificially scarce things. They can defeat police, judges, militaries, governments by democratizing access to strong cryprography.

They want to control our computers at all costs. We must resist. Computers are too important for us to allow them to be controlled and limited.
by SkyPuncher | 2025-08-25 17:50:13+00:00
McDonald's main menu items aren't actually called "cheeseburgers"; they're called "burgers with cheese". To me, this reads that "cheese" is a "topping" on the burger.

Further, they _only_ showcase the "burger with cheese variant" in their combos and special. This further drives home that you should be thinking about cheese in the same way as toppings.
Ask HN: What is your source for answers?
by Haeuserschlucht | 2025-08-25 17:50:18+00:00
I'm curious, is this just me or are other people also doing this?

So whenever I used to not know something, and it could be everything, I would turn to other people for advice. And if there wasn't an answer, I would turn to the internet. And I noticed that a lot of my beliefs about the world come from the outside. Also in part it was books. But it was often like, "Alright, so I have this really specific problem, I just need a quick info on how to do it."

And of course on forums there's malicious people, so I built a lot of malicious and disempowering beliefs into my psyche at those places where I had the questions.

So I have a question, there's basically an opening in my mind to take in the answer, I turn to the internet, or to other people, or to books even, and they gave me limiting beliefs and I built them into my brain.

And up to this day I have a hard time figuring out the truth from lies. I know when people are lying, I know when something is off, but I cannot really pinpoint what it is.

And by the way, if you are hinting at autism and whatever, this is not helpful. Not for me, not for you, not for anybody.

The question is if you can relate. And what you did yourself, if you can or could relate, to get out of this. And only speak from experience, I don't want some "ten rules on how to do whatever" by some guru, but I want your real experience, how you handled this, how you got out of it, and how you started trusting your own opinion more, or how you found truth outside that made you so secure in a solution for problem or gave you a lot of answers at once like an avalanche.

Just in general, what is your source for answers?

PS: Currently AI fills this void for me. It's much better than internet trolls but it's still biased.
by wat10000 | 2025-08-25 17:50:28+00:00
I've lost track of how many times I've seen people say something like, "I gave them something so they would go away, but they keep calling me." So yes, bothering people until you get some money from them is probably viable. Keep in mind that it doesn't have to work on everyone. If it works on 1% of their victims it's probably still profitable.
by potato3732842 | 2025-08-25 17:50:43+00:00
It's hilarious how opposite of the east this is. Water is a massive liability. You can't (legally) even put up a garden shed within 100ft of "wetlands" (yes, that seasonal wet spot in the forest qualifies, better tip your surveyor generously lest it show up on a map, because once it shows up it never goes away) without state officials crawling up your ass in a manner befitting large industrial developments. Whereas if you've got water in the west you land is incredibly valuable.
by vorpalhex | 2025-08-25 17:51:50+00:00
Power consumption matters.

You can also run a single storage box and then just pop over network (10gbe, thunderbolt, etc). One big box of spinning rust and tons of cheap compute.

Most folks are running proxmox and your OS installs are automated. Use ansible. I like docker swarm on top of a fleet of cattle vms on proxmox.
by shawnz | 2025-08-25 17:52:20+00:00
If you are looking for a vertical mouse with USB-C charging, a high-DPI sensor, robust switches, high polling rate, etc., consider this mouse that recently launched on Kickstarter: https://www.hansker.design/

I got one recently due to some persistent wrist issues I've been having because it is the first ergo mouse I've had that ticks every box for me. It's not flawless but I still strongly recommend considering it if you're looking for something in this category.

The designer previously posted about it on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35613630
by tensor | 2025-08-25 17:52:29+00:00
Given the current situation in the US, it's a huge cautionary tale for how not to do democracy. To non-ironically hold it up as an example at this point of time is truly amazing. No, the rest of us don't want current US style dictatorship in our countries.

While the EU certainly has its issues, its protection of democracy is still one of the best in the world. Democracy is something we need to keep working towards. There is not one simple set of rules that will keep it healthy, at least as far as recently history shows.
by HankStallone | 2025-08-25 17:53:01+00:00
I don't lament my lack of a vote; I understand that it's an imperfect system.

As for whether I pay town taxes, it depends which ones you mean. Nothing on my property tax bill goes directly to the town's coffers for things like the parks and garbage pickup. But I pay the town sales tax every time I go shopping. I pay the town's sizable hotel and restaurant tax every time I go out to eat. I'm pretty sure the town gets some downstream fraction of the gas tax I pay every time I fill up.

Of course, all those taxes are voluntary in the sense that I could drive further to a different town. So does that qualify as "taxation without representation"? The Founders would probably say so, but it doesn't bother me enough to get chuffed about; I'm just explaining it for people who haven't experienced it.
by mountainb | 2025-08-25 17:53:23+00:00
I think it has more to do with the various new meanings that have been attached to the word "agent" and the concept of "agency" by software and some parts of west coast culture. Those concepts do not really have much to do with the law of agency.

Lawyers don't come up with good ideas; their role is to explain why your good ideas are illegal. There's a good argument that AI agents cannot exercise legal agency. At the end of the day, corporations and partnerships are just piles of "natural persons" (you know, the type that mostly has two hands, two feet, a head, etc.).

The fact that corporate persons can have agency relationships does not necessarily mean that hypothetical computer persons can have agency relationships for this reason.
by klabb3 | 2025-08-25 17:53:50+00:00
I didnt know there are dozens of us! When I saw the lack of native support i decided to use binary blobs. I mean, why waste many bytes if few bytes do trick? In the SQLite studio app im using its garbled and annoying to browse.

Too bad this is mac only. I mean, im a mac user (among other things) but i don't want to depend on platform specific tooling.
by moron4hire | 2025-08-25 17:54:05+00:00
I actually like a heavier mouse. A lot of modern devices feel inconsequential and cheap (well, because they are). I've gone so far as to open my mice and glue in a few pennies to increase the weight. Makes it feel much better. At first it seemed kind of silly, but then I realized it doesn't matter. All that matters is how I feel about the devices I use for hours a day, every day.
by VonGuard | 2025-08-25 17:54:07+00:00
Hacker News users now profit from extensive invasion of privacy, from Facebook to LinkedIn, to every ad network, VPN, ISP, etc... They all trade in our private info daily. 20 years ago, the battle cry was around privacy and government monitoring of all traffic and how bad that was. Now people climb over one another to give away their data for free in exchange for mind-altering social media platforms and AI driven nonsense.

I am convinced Libertarians do not exist. The current state of the US should drive them to utter insanity, and yet, they tend to be mostly silent on all of these corporate over reach issues. People who say they are Libertarian just don't want to pay parking tickets. If the real techno Libertarians existed, they'd be burning our current Valley to the ground. Anyone who cared about the 2nd amendment should be losing their minds over military deployments on US soil. Constitution huggers should be screaming bloody murder, daily. Instead, those types are super happy with their new dictator. Funny how all the performative anger goes away when it's their side that is performing the authoritarian actions. The NRA seems to LOVE this willing take over of the well armed militias by the federal government... But I digress.

Instead, the reigning philosophy here is now greed. Privacy, sovereignty, ownership, open source, all those things are forgotten in the backseat of the crypto and VC cash car.

It surprises me how little the newer generations care about ethics, morality, principles. Call them whatever you want, but it really feels like everyone screams about how righteous they are, how wrong everyone else is, and then they take the cash and stand up for nothing when the chips are down.

Remember when the big thing we were worried about was the NSA recording our phone calls? Now large corporations harvest our call info, chat texts, social media posts, and even the raw microphone input on our phones to strip every last piece of information about us and mine it for data to influence our lives, purchases, and even out thoughts. And what did we do in the last election? We put in the party that will remove even more roadblocks from this type of thing, and has deregulated crypto. Victory!

How did we get here? Where are the Cypherpunks? Where are the high ideals we used to have?

All burned alive at the altar of money.
by twoodfin | 2025-08-25 17:54:26+00:00
Almost all the major ways in which NT deviates from UNIX have strong cases as being architectural wins:

- A well-defined HAL for portability

- An object manager for unified resource lifecycle and governance

- Asynchronous I/O by default

- User-facing APIs bundled into independent “personalities” and decoupled from the kernel

The only real black mark I’m aware of is the move of the graphics subsystem into the kernel for performance, which I don’t think was Cutler’s idea.
by const_cast | 2025-08-25 17:55:17+00:00
> To play devils advocate, isn’t any security approach fundamentally statistical because we exist in the real world, not the abstract world of security models, programming language specifications, and abstract machines?

IMO no, most security modeling is pretty absolute and we just don't notice because maybe it's obvious.

But, for example, it's impossible to leak SSNs if you don't store SSNs. That's why the first rule of data storage is only store what you need, and for the least amount of time as possible.

As soon as you get into what modern software does, store as much as possible for as long as possible, then yes, breeches become a statistical inevitability.

We do this type of thing all the time. Can't get stuff stolen out of my car if I don't keep stuff in my car. Can't get my phone hacked and read through at the airport if I don't take it to the airport. Can't get sensitive data stolen over email if I don't send sensitive data over email. And on and on.
by numpy-thagoras | 2025-08-25 17:55:31+00:00
Yep, and if that really is the case, and if they really do intend on 'preserving knowledge' in their own inner circles and special getaways, then they will be setting themselves up for a dark age. A popular backlash against all elite things will always be bad, but throwing in knowledge, liberty, and freedom into that mix will guarantee something even more terrible.
by HocusLocus | 2025-08-25 17:56:02+00:00
Used a trackball since 1994. Desktop publishing and photo editing, if you've ever needed to position precisely and lift finger off the ball and click or mousedown without moving the focus again you'll just know.

Kensignton makes a good one with a scrollwheel ring around it, the ball XY is perfect though the clickers are so-so in longevity. Working without a physical middle click and two button software middle click emulation is frustrating sometimes.
by altruios | 2025-08-25 17:56:03+00:00
Tree(n) is considered computable.

BB(n) surpasses Tree(n) by - at most - when n=2645.

And likely shortly after BB(100).

Now consider the following definition for an exponentially faster growing number:

HyperTree(n) is where the Tree function is nested x times, where x is the result of tree(n).

HyperTree(3) = Tree(Tree(Tree..{Tree(3) long}...Tree(3))))...)

BB(X) would (should) still outpace HyperTree(x) at some value of x.

I don't know where to begin even to give an upper or lower bound of when BB(x) is larger than HyperTree(x).
by jjk166 | 2025-08-25 17:56:09+00:00
They aren't a replacement for chemical batteries, more a complement. They're good for battery topping. Basically even when a device is completely off, its battery is still slowly losing power. This loss can be quite small, but if you leave a phone or something in a box for weeks, it'll be dead. This is not really an issue for consumer electronics, just charge it again. However there are applications where you want battery powered electronic devices that are ready to go when you need them and stored away from the electrical grid, like an emergency phone in a box on a remote hiking trail, or equipment in an emergency kit stored in a lifeboat, or a medical device in a first aid kit. By adding a nuclear battery, it can pump power in at roughly the same rate the battery would deplete itself when off, so even after years of sitting unused, your device still has a full battery the moment you turn it on.

Besides emergencies, there are also situations where the device has a low duty cycle, and thus its average power requirements are very low. For example a remote sensor that only activates for a few seconds per day may consume thousands of times more power for those few seconds than a nuclear battery could put out, but the rest of the time it could be recharging such that it has as much energy available the next time it turns on.
by sometimes_all | 2025-08-25 17:56:20+00:00
What happens if I do everything the author did, but somehow failed at it? Now I'm overweight, have no idea what a good diet is (the guy "outsourced" grocery shopping), am probably penniless and with no friends or a clue how to enjoy myself.

The author assumes success will come if they just work hard. There is no guarantee of success. The author also assumes that they'll figure out how to enjoy a life in their thirties, when the twenties are likely the best time to get to know yourself. The author, from reading the text, has also made a few bad lifestyle choices which will take a lot of time and effort to reverse.

There is no doubt you need to work hard - not just in the twenties, but throughout life - but if one do not take out the time to take care of themselves or to touch grass, it will pass them by while they're too busy hustling.
by coldpie | 2025-08-25 17:57:13+00:00
This seems solvable. Put the person most closely traceable to the source of the spam in jail, like a form of KYC laws. If you can't identify the actual human who is causing you to put spam into the network, or that person is outside of your country's jurisdiction, then you are the one who goes to jail. If you don't want to go to jail, then don't accept calls from someone you can't point the finger at.
by tgtweak | 2025-08-25 17:57:43+00:00
The cost-prohibitive portion of this, which is greatly glossed over in the article and which I showed in my other reply - is that the steam generator required to recover this heat as electricity, is a massive part of the capex - more than half of the entire system end-to-end, including the solar and dirt storage. That makes the economy of it far less viable even with nearly free solar, which we're still quite far from.
by zippyman55 | 2025-08-25 17:57:44+00:00
My thoughts: I'm expecting the LLM-driven bubble to burst. Not AI in general, but it seems LLM has been soaking up all the investment dollars and LLM will eventually hit a wall in critical fields where an expert can poke holes at the results. The data centers go poof! Now, the contracted land rights, water rights, and electricity rights, highly discounted will be of value. Kind of like the defunct railroad rights in your community that can't easily be repurposed into a bike path as the city does not have the rights. So, I wonder if there will be companies formed to buy up the infrastructure rights (the contracted cheap power and water) and re-sell them to the city and counties that originally generated the contracts. Its too easy to see the naïve city and county officials succumbing to the hookers and other marketing techniques when these contracts were issued. Now they can be sold back at a profit.
by wrs | 2025-08-25 17:57:54+00:00
Let me just put in a plug here for not trying to fill all of your so-called "dead time" with so-called "productive activity". Mind-wandering times like driving, showering, laundry, coffee-making, etc. can produce some of your most creative moments and may even be essential to your mental health. [0]

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089662732...
by milesvp | 2025-08-25 17:58:00+00:00
What I find fascinating, is how much this concept scales to places it seems like it shouldn't. I had taken the idea to heart early in my life for anything that require dexterity. But it wasn't until mid career that I saw it work at an organizational level. At one point the team I was on stopped promising so much. We essentially decided to slow down. I don't quite remember what lead us to this mindset, though I know our weekly retrospectives were part of it (we had some really good retros, like I cry at the thought that I will likely never have that level of mutual trust in a team again). And, what was sort of unexpected, was that our velocity basically went up. We knew we wanted to make sure we focused on higher value items, and push back on low quality requests, but the amount of requests we could accommodate also went up along with the average value. I still don't fully understand the theory behind it, certainly we were using a lot of cycles on low value things, but just promising fewer deliverables allowed us to deliver more. I know that brains are bad at time slicing, but this seems to also expand to the organizational level too...
by tensor | 2025-08-25 17:58:11+00:00
Currently speaking in the US will get you deported, or thrown in jail, or attacked by the government. The supposed checks and balances in the US system have all failed completely, either being overruled or simply ignored. You are at the point where your government is actively censoring your museums to tell a story that fits their propaganda.

It's genuinely hard to see a way out of complete degradation to a failed democracy at this point. None of this is hypothetical either. Sometimes I wonder if people on this site read the news at all, or are just willfully ignoring the reality of the situation.