MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pluc | 2025-08-18 23:56:03+00:00
> You're going to browse through a manual every time you need to fix something in some app in some particular OS version?

Yes, that's literally how you learn things. I can't understand how anyone on this forum thinks otherwise. Hackers are supposed to be people who thrive in unknown contexts, who thirst for knowledge of how things work. What you are suggesting is brain atrophy. It's the death of knowledge for profit and productivity. Fuck all of that.
by mapt | 2025-08-18 23:56:27+00:00
A fair point, but wouldn't it only become unrecognizable at levels that mean you're effectively eating pus instead of salmon? My understanding is that the effective innoculation needed to give botulism to a human baby (who has an immune system, just less of one than we do) is <100 spores, which is picograms.

There's just such a gulf between the prices at which this is feasible for food use, and the prices at which existing large bioreactors can culture animal tissue.

If we can't even get plant slop ("algal biodiesel") culture consistent and cheap enough to burn in an engine, or get plant slop ("tilapia feedstock algae") cheap enough to industrialize to outcompete chickens... I don't know that I'm comfortable eating bioreactor meat that can only survive in the FDA danger zone.
by sugarpimpdorsey | 2025-08-18 23:57:30+00:00
> Thanks in part to multiple levels of safeguards, impersonation fraud has been effectively non-existent.

Unsuccessful fraud is effectively non-existent.

There is no public data about successful fraud.

So why not make the system bulletproof?

Why do we constantly improve encryption algorithms? Why do modern web browsers not work with cipher suites on 5 year old hardware making them effectively useless e-waste? According to information security folks I can't even be trusted with the hardware in my own house. But we trust that all the mail in ballots were filled out only once by the person whose name is on the ballot. Okay.
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-08-18 23:57:37+00:00
> Inverter dying, charging circuit dying, the motor shorting out, some of the DC isolators going bad, charging port crapping out.

How many of those things are very settled technology though? ie. a lot of years spent iterating and manufacturing out points of failure. The battery itself is the newest technology, such is my understanding (feel free to correct me).

They feel like unnecessary worries to me. But then, unnecessary worries seem to be a defining trait of the nowadays.
by braden-w | 2025-08-18 23:58:09+00:00
Great catch Aachen, I should have clarified this better. The app supports both external APIs (Groq, OpenAI, etc.), and more recently local transcription (via whisper.cpp, OWhisper, Speaches, etc.), which never leaves your device.

Like Leftium said, the local-first Whisper C++ implementation just posted a few hours ago.
by OkayPhysicist | 2025-08-18 23:59:06+00:00
I like ICE cars. Someone literally had to pry the keys to my Integra out of my cold, (half-)dead hands. I like EVs: My Bolt's great. I will never own a hybrid, after working with my parents'. They are simply the worst of both worlds: With an ICE, if it breaks, I can probably fix it myself, likely cheaply. With an EV, there are vanishingly few moving parts to break. With a hybrid? All the failure prone parts of an ICE, packed into a smaller engine compartment because they had to stick an entire scaled-down EV in there on top of the ICE parts, making working on them a practice in futility.

With an ICE, I get gas once a week or so. With an EV, I plug my car in overnight a couple times a week, maybe using a fast charger once a month or so when I realize I've neglected to do before a longer trip. With a hybrid, I'm plugging in every night, plus getting gas once a month or so.

With a (manual transmission) ICE, I get to decide my power curve, and know if I slam the peddle to the metal, I can get a LOT of power out of that car. With an ICE, my acceleration is limited mostly by software. With a hybrid, if your EV mode battery gets depleted, the car gets sluggish. Plus, you're dragging around a bunch of dead weight in the form of a battery, so you don't even get respectable acceleration on ICE standards.

On top of all that, hybrids cost more (because they have basically all the parts of an ICE and an EV).
by sinuhe69 | 2025-08-18 23:59:41+00:00
A paradigm shift is actually easy: one has only to imagine. In the case of Amazon, one has to imagine how AI could radically change the cloud service landscape. And in case of Apple how AI could change the way people are using their ubiquitous computer. If they can not imagine it, then for them it’s no paradigm shift, but a commodity.
by jltsiren | 2025-08-18 23:59:52+00:00
> I happen to think the pros aren't worth the cons and that most of the handwringing around mail in ballots and machines are FUD rather than measured concerns.

You can't trust the machines. You can't trust the election authorities. You can't trust the post office. Those are fundamental assumptions, not FUD or measured concerns.

Elections should be designed for bad situations, because the results don't matter that much when things are good. Maybe a civil war is likely, or maybe it just ended and people are trying to rebuild trust. In any case, people don't trust each other, and they don't trust the authorities, but they are still trying to have legitimate elections.

The goal is not 100% security, 100% correctness, or something equally silly. The goal is a system where either every major party has a justified belief that the elections were legitimate and fair, the reported results are mostly correct, and there was no substantial fraud. Or at least one party questions the results due to widespread fraud. You want to trust the results, even when you can't trust the people running the elections.

Many paper ballot systems have been designed under such assumptions. The system assumes that the people running the elections cannot be trusted, but they also can't trust each other. You can't trust the people, but you trust that the system will detect and report any attempts at large-scale fraud.
by xyzzy123 | 2025-08-18 23:59:57+00:00
I think it's bad karma to let people torture models. What I mean by karma is that in my view, it ultimately hurts the people doing it because of the effect their actions have on themselves.

What does it do to users to have a thing that simulates conversations and human interaction and teach them to have complete moral disregard for something that is standing in for an intelligent being? What is the valid use case for someone to need an AI model kept in a state where it is producing tokens indicating suffering or distress?

Even if you're absolutely certain that the model itself is just a bag of matrices and can no way suffer (which is of course plausible although I don't see how anybody can really know this), it also seems like the best way to get models which are kind & empathetic is to try to be that as far as possible.
by tzs | 2025-08-19 00:00:04+00:00
> Ford and GM are both betting big on these for their future entry-level EVs and I think they will end up being a common choice where maximum range isn't the customer's primary concern.

A lot of people think they need way more range than they actually do, especially people that have decent charging at home. The think they need long range for the occasional long road trip but even there range is less important than they think it is. For long road trips charging speed is more important.

Briefly, consider a 3000 mile road trip. If your average highway speed is 75 mph that's 40 hours of driving. On top of that 40 hours you have whatever stoppage time there is to refuel/recharge. Let's put a lower bound on that.

Suppose you are in a car that can go 200 miles between stops. When you reach the first stop there are 2800 miles left, so over the course of all future stops on the trip you have to add a total of 2800 miles worth of fuel/charge. Let's say your car is an EV that can add 1000 miles in an hour of charging. That's 2.8 hours of total charging time for the trip.

Someone else in a 300 miles EV but that only adds 300 miles in an hour will first stop with 2700 miles left. They have to add 2700 miles of charge over the course of the trip, which takes 9 hours.

They will have fewer total stops (9) than the 200 mile range fast charging car (14) which favors the long range car because each stop has some overhead that is not spent actually charging but that is unlikely to be enough to make up for the slower charging car spending 6.2 more total hours actually charging.

Where the 300 mile slower charging car shines compared to the 200 mile fast charging car would be for people who have frequent trips like Los Angeles to San Diego and back. The 300 car could do that on one charge. The 200 mile car would would need a charge stop.

Similar for people who have trips like Los Angeles to Los Vegas where they will stay overnight. The 300 mile car could do that with about 10% to spare and then charge at your hotel. The 200 mile car would need a charge stop before reaching Vegas, then you should charge at the hotel, and then you will need one other on the way back. (If you charge to full on the first charge stop you can skip the one at the hotel but then the one on the way back will be longer, so you are better off taking the 3 charge approach that includes the hotel since that one can take place while you are busy losing your money in the casino).
by dekhn | 2025-08-19 00:00:10+00:00
In the real world I don't think you'll find salmon that don't have bacteria and viruses (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-43345-x shows both "good" and "bad" bacteria and certainly many salmon are infected with a range of viruses (not sure if there are any "good" viral infections, but some are not fatal).

Don't forget that salmon and most other deep sea fish are immediately frozen when caught, which not only helps preserve flavor, but eliminates parasites (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diseases_and_parasites_in_salm...)
by dimitri-vs | 2025-08-19 00:00:25+00:00
It's not you, it's the productivity influencers making you think it's "supposed to be" more than what it is: a nice UI to edit a collection of markdown files.

I realized this when I opened my Vault in Cursor/VSCode to use the coding agent for editing (which is truly a bizarre feature for Obsidian to NOT have for normal writing).

Every Obsidian YT video is about mind maps, how to organize your files, using relative links and weird plugins that break the premise of having universal markdown files. Well it's completely wasted time now that an LLM can search the whole vault and aggregate an answer across dozens of your notes.
by lapcat | 2025-08-19 00:01:04+00:00
You're practically making this into a life or death issue, when in fact the issue is relatively trivial: should I bother to read the submitted article or not?

When a HN user submits an article link, the intention is that people will click the link and read the article. A "bad faith summarizer" is just shooting themselves in the foot, because if the summary inspires people to read the article, then they'll immediately discover that the summary was bad. So what's the point of the bad faith summary? Your hypothetical scenario doesn't even make sense. The URL is still there. The article title is still there. Everything that's available now would still be available.

Moreover, there's nothing now stopping any commenter on a submission from giving a bad faith summary of the article.

It's just like the TV guide. You've got a long list of channels, and you've got a bunch of show names, but you don't necessarily know what the show is about, whether it's worth watching, so you read the summary. Are you going to complain about the existence of the TV guide, because it's "subjective"? Hacker News is more or less entertainment, although this conversation is not very entertaining and getting less so as it goes on.
by FridayoLeary | 2025-08-19 00:01:18+00:00
Wouldn't that damage the right to free speech? Regulating what the media is and isn't allowed to say is a very slippery slope and it is open to abuse. If the government was responsible for this task what would prevent Trump and the republicans from hijacking it? It might be frustrating but free speech is one of the cornerstones of democracy and we are much better off with it then without it.

> And that wasn't even the problem, it's that their lies created damages for another corporation

That's the first time i've ever seen anyone on HN sympathize with a billion dollar company:)

But that is exactly what the article was about! Dominion was libelled by Newsmax, so they was able to claim damages from them in a court of law. The law didn't allow them to get away with it. The First Amendment is working as inteneded. Some damage to society is tolerated to protect a much bigger and longer term benefit.
by cogman10 | 2025-08-19 00:01:38+00:00
> CO2, food safety

I'm not 100% sure either of those has been proven out.

I could see CO2, but it sort of depends on how much power the bioreactor and sterilization consumes and how much methane is release. Granted, it'd be easier to capture those and easier to place these reactors in or near a grocery store, for example, for immediate delivery.

Food safety is almost certainly going to be a bigger problem. The big problem with bioreactors is they are cultivating the ideal substance for very nasty bacteria/fungus/etc to flourish in. Bioreactors do not have immune systems. That means keeping things absolutely sterile is of the utmost importance. I'm sure when the initial products are produced safety will be pristine. However, what happens when the CEOs of these companies decide to cut back? Heck, what happens when the new guy forgets to do a sterilization cycle or runs it short?

A major issue is these will be regulated by the FDA which has a history of doing a poor job of keeping food safe. I'd feel better if it were under the jurisdiction of the USDA.
by supernetworks | 2025-08-19 00:01:44+00:00
This is not unlike the surprise in underground.txt when mendax & co discover that curiosity is not the only state of existence for being a hacker. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/4686/pg4686.txt

"Riffling through other files, Mendax found mail confirming that the attack had indeed come from inside MILNET. His eyes grew wide as he read on. US military hackers had broken into MILNET systems, using them for target practice, and no-one had bothered to tell the system admin at the target site.

Mendax couldn't believe it. The US military was hacking its own computers. This discovery led to another, more disturbing, thought. If the US military was hacking its own computers for practice, what was it doing to other countries' computers? "
by jameslk | 2025-08-19 00:02:02+00:00
Maybe times are different now (I’m not freelancing anymore) but I was the happiest when I was a freelancer. I made more than I could have as a full time employee, because I could ask more often for more (vs jumping jobs every 2-4 years). I could write off a ton of expenses. I could put away more for retirement (self-employment gives you higher limits). I didn’t have to do stupid whiteboard interviews. I could work whenever and wherever I wanted. And I could ultimately choose when I took time off and for however long.

It’s not ideal for everyone, especially if you need the security of a predictable salary and good benefits
by user3939382 | 2025-08-19 00:02:28+00:00
We haven’t mapped the hard limitations of LLMs yet but they’re energy bound like everything else. Their context capacity is a fraction of a human’s. What they’ll replace isn’t known yet. Probabilistic answers are unacceptable in many domains. They’re going to remain amazingly helpful for a certain class of tasks but marketing is way ahead of the engineering, again.
by gruez | 2025-08-19 00:02:35+00:00
This seems like a nothingburger? By all accounts it seems like their salesforce database that got breached, which means realistically means contact details for key decision makers that they're trying to sell to (think CEO, CFO, head of HR, etc.). Don't get me wrong, all things being equal I'd prefer the leak to not have happened, but whatever contact info is in the database probably was already semi-public, given some salesperson at workday had to find it to enter it in the first place.

>Then there’s this spicy little detail from TechCrunch: the company’s blog post announcing the breach has a “noindex tag” in the source code, which signals to search engine crawlers not to index the page so it won’t come up in search results.

This is trivially disproven by clicking on an unrelated story[1] and seeing that it also has the <meta name="robots" content="nofollow, noindex"/> tag.

[1] https://blog.workday.com/en-us/our-commitment-to-our-europea...
by inerte | 2025-08-19 00:02:50+00:00
It's a lot of (good) actual engineering or solid programming tips, and yeah it's not "vibing". There's no embrace the exponential or just pasting errors.

I think most people should try to really "vibe" in the original sense. Use SuperWhisper and don't even read the diff. It's a different experience. I am not saying ship critical code like this... but if your main use of LLM AI tools is to basically type code faster than you (which is totally fine and it's what I do at work), that's not really vibing.
by obsidianbases1 | 2025-08-19 00:03:49+00:00
Admittedly, I don't know how OneNote handles it.

But as an Obsidian power-user, I regularly paste screenshots into notes

There is a plugin that allows templating the screenshot file name, so naming the pasted screenshot, using the same as the note where it's being pasted, and a timestamp, for example, is easy.
by preinheimer | 2025-08-19 00:04:26+00:00
I don't think that in person voting with ID is a fool proof way to guarantee that only the people who "should be voting" get to vote.

I also think you disenfranchise too many people when you do that.

- People who work on oil rigs won't get to vote

- People who do shift work covering the hours the polls are open wont get to vote

- People who are of sound mind, but too unwell to travel to a polling location wont get to vote

- November is Red/blue king crab season in Alaska, guess those people don't get to vote

- Flight attendants & pilots might be away from home that day.

- People in the military might be on exercise that day, we're cutting them off (though I'll assume deployed service members will get to vote wherever they are)

- Long haul truckers are out of luck

- Anyone on vacation is missing their chance

- College students are always a wildcard, do they cast a ballot where they are (ID could be from a different state) or go home for the weekend?
by slightwinder | 2025-08-19 00:04:45+00:00
The first sentence of the documentation already says it: "turn any set of notes into a powerful database". It's really just that, basically. It's a database-view, where the vault is the database and the rows are your files. There is a fancy GUI for creating views, and it seems there is the ability for live-editing data from within the view. Basically a more user-friendly replacement for the very popular dataview-plugin.

Maybe it's a bit harder to understand, as it's a more mushy than the usual relational database.
by dontdoxxme | 2025-08-19 00:04:53+00:00
The company said the breach hit some of its third-party customer relationship databases. If any other data was stolen, Workday didn’t say for sure. The company only said there was “no indication of access to customer tenants or the data” within those databases

So that would be customer data of the admin / HR team at their customers, but not all the users, so while not good, it's not going to directly give really sensitive data; most likely to be used for further phishing attacks.
by dtkav | 2025-08-19 00:05:25+00:00
The Git plugin is great for single-device backup IMO, but not great for device sync or collaboration.

I've been working on making Obsidian "work for work" with a real-time collaboration plugin called Relay [0]. We use CRDTs for conflict resolution between users/clients and it also happens to remove a ton of headaches for device-to-device sync as well.

Our collaboration server can be run on-premise and we also just open sourced a Git Sync connector so you can do google-docs style collab via Obsidian+Relay but still have the merged documents end up in git (and plug into (Markdown + git)-centric publishing workflows like Mintlify and Quartz.

The whole Obsidian ecosystem feels really electric right now.

[0] https://relay.md
by LeifCarrotson | 2025-08-19 00:05:48+00:00
Fish immune systems sole reason for being is to stop parasites from being present in the meat while the fish is alive. They're literally swimming through a soup of arthropods, plankton, algae, bacteria, and viruses that would love nothing more to turn their meat into more of themselves. There's always a bigger fish that is trying to eat them, yes, but the smaller critters want to eat as well!

Freezing doesn't kill the parasites, it slows the clock that started ticking when the fish was killed. It's not pasteurization, like what's done to canned tuna. It just slows the clock when you refrigerate or freeze the fish, but does not reset it to zero. And of course, if you're eating fresh fish that was healthy when it was killed, there's no need for an intermediate freezing or pasteurizing step.

This situation is different because the "clock" starts when the cell cultures are removed from the donor salmon. The whole blob/tank/plate/catalyzing surface (I'm not sure what the design is, I wish they had more documentation) on which the product grows for the whole time that the product is growing is vulnerable to a single bacterium that would grow out of control, like an immunocompromised human might be killed by an ordinary illness that most people would shrug off in 24 hours.
by jakelazaroff | 2025-08-19 00:05:53+00:00
> The solution, if this problem exists as they say, is to get everyone proper ID.

That's not the solution because lack of ID isn't really the problem.

These problem is that the Republican party's goal is to disenfranchise people who demographically tend to vote Democratic. The difficulty in getting an ID is not an accidental feature of the system — it is an intentional policy choice made to prevent people from exercising their right to vote.

Until this root problem is fixed, any bureaucratic solutions are simply a game of whack-a-mole. If you make IDs easy to obtain, legislatures will enact rules preventing people from using them [1]. If you amend the state constitution to enfranchise felons, legislatures will invent procedural reasons to re-disenfranchise them [2].

[1] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/stat...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_disenfranchisement_in_F...
by braden-w | 2025-08-19 00:06:05+00:00
Thank you! And you’re right, I think Whisper struggles with younger voices. Haven’t tested Parakeet or other models for this yet, but that’s a great use case (especially since privacy matters in education). I would also shoutout Hypernote! (https://hyprnote.com/) They might be expanding their model options, as they have shown with OWhisper (https://docs.hyprnote.com/owhisper/what-is-this).
by Spooky23 | 2025-08-19 00:07:58+00:00
That was an innocent and wonderful time for many of us, but there was a dark side to it, especially as this haven for nerds went mainstream. I have a good friend who was basically groomed/seduced in ann online game and raped by a 35 year old man when she was 13.

It just sucks on so many levels that we can’t have nice things because many among us are beasts.
by mrangle | 2025-08-19 00:08:17+00:00
Compulsory voting is what regimes do when their government is so obviously corrupt that a strong voter turnout is the only thing left that lends an air of democracy. Most often suggested if flagging voter turnout might be seen as a possible public indictment of the system's democratic legitimacy. Now we can't have that sort of protest. The People will be enthusiastic! lol.