MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by woadwarrior01 | 2025-08-25 18:52:25+00:00
> At least tariffs tax consumption rather than production. Taxing production/income is horribly evil and in better times (such as when the country was founded) people who insisted on it would have been shot.

Not true. Producing almost anything in the material world requires raw materials. If any of them are imported, they suffer from tariffs.

IMO, if a consumption tax is what you're looking for, then value added tax (VAT) is a more suitable solution.
by jcheng | 2025-08-25 18:52:26+00:00
Here's my attempt at explaining tool calling:

https://youtu.be/owDd1CJ17uQ?si=Z2bldI8IssG7rGON&t=1330

It's an _incredibly_ important concept to understand if you have even a passing interest in LLMs. You need to understand it if you want to have any kind of mental model for how LLM-powered agents are even possible.
by schoen | 2025-08-25 18:52:42+00:00
There's a potential family of cryptographic methods where people prove that they paid for things without revealing who they are.

https://www.eff.org/files/eff-locational-privacy.pdf (2009)

The technical paper mentioned is now at

https://web.ma.utexas.edu/users/blumberg/vpriv.pdf

(I guess Andrew Blumberg moved from Stanford to the University of Texas.)

There might be an inherent tradeoff where you need at least one of {tamper-resistant trusted meters, at least slightly noisy measurements, potential deanonymization}. For example, the short paper mentions that "point tolls" are easy to make anonymous using any form of anonymous digital cash (or blinded tokens issued by the tolling authority!), but the exact usage billing you mention people wanting is much more detailed than a point toll like that. It might indeed be inherently impossible to get all the way there without detailed surveillance.
by vips7L | 2025-08-25 18:53:03+00:00
> A common and popular crate in Rust for this is DashMap which doesn’t use locks and is a concurrency safe hashmap.

Still not in the standard library. The only way in Rust is to use a global lock around map. Seems to be worse than the situation in Java. You could implement the same thing and use a third party library in Java too. So your original point of "everything uses a global lock" is "overly strong"
by fknorangesite | 2025-08-25 18:53:10+00:00
Today? No, maybe not yet. But you'd be a fool to look at the actions of the current admin and not see that that's where they're headed.

But here's something from today: "A lot of people are saying maybe we'd like a dictator." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koruWF1cfyc
by elmerfud | 2025-08-25 18:53:31+00:00
The some people "lie in the middle" argumentation doesn't hold up to scrutiny. It's not that there are no people who have mutations It's that the numbers are so infinitesimally small that they do not account, and cannot account, for the current trends in society today. Those with the mutations also tend to have other effects from those mutations or from additional mutations that cause them to not live what we would categorize as a normal life.

Dawkins has written a very rational essay on a very emotionally charged subject. Nowhere in his essay does he discount genetic mutations as a factor. It's that these are so exceedingly rare and we acknowledge that these seem to be mutations and not the norm that those rare subjects with them should deserve some sort of treatment (in which gene therapy is now becoming a reality) instead of redefining all of medicine that your self-perception means you've taken upon a genetic mutation.
by CursedSilicon | 2025-08-25 18:53:34+00:00
On the low-end. Ever shopped at Costco? It's all IBM AS/400's handling the back-end. That's why all their Windows 11 PC's have big black and green terminal apps running front and center

On the high-end? Banks, airports, hospitals, research labs. There's a lot of places that need the kind of fault tolerance that specifically IBM POWER systems provide

EDIT: Okay, IBM POWER "systems". They've been described as mainframes to me so I went with that terminology
by dgacmu | 2025-08-25 18:53:36+00:00
Dirt has an r-value of between 0.25 and 1 per inch according to some quick googling, so 10ft would be maybe R-60.

Surprisingly, that's only equivalent to about 10" of polyiso rigid foam.

What this project is really taking advantage of is the super cheap thermal mass. Dirt has about a quarter of the specific heat of water, but it is, literally, dirt cheap, and much easier to keep in place than a liquid.
by delusional | 2025-08-25 18:54:38+00:00
> They're afraid that this ossified, stunted system of power that's been built over 800 years will break

And give way to what? You're making a lot of noise that sounds like you want liberation and freedom, but freedom from what? What is it you think the current system of democracy (which has always included intrusions into absolute personal freedom by the way) will give way to? An anarcho-capitalist state? A communist utopia? A breakdown in law and order?

The system WE built over the last 800 years is the most prosperous free society we have ever known. There is no absolute monarch, no forced labor. What do you want to replace it with?

You live in a society of surveillance. Google surveils every single action you take on the internet, as does Facebook, X, and whatever partners they share that information with. That's not a system built by the government "elites" that was built by for profit enterprise in a "free-market". Now the populous at large wants to make use of those same levers of power, and you make it sound like they're responsible for all of it.
by frozenseven | 2025-08-25 18:54:48+00:00
>What's the point?

What's the point of your comment? To suck the joy out of everything?

Turing machines are a fundamental object of study within the theory of computation. The complexity and wild behavior that arises from even the simplest machines is a cool discovery. BB(6) was thought to be a lot smaller, but it turns out to be really huge. The Busy Beaver game is also interesting to those who work on combinatorics and theorem provers. And of course many many people in the space of recreational math & volunteer computing love this challenge.

You don't like it? Ok, then. You don't have to.
by taylodl | 2025-08-25 18:55:13+00:00
Delphi was brilliant at the time it was created in 1995. Niklaus Wirth had created Pascal in the late 60s. When the PC revolution happened in the late 70s/early 80s, Turbo Pascal had become the first IDE (of sorts) and top-selling development tool. Apple famously adopted Pascal in the 1980s for its new Mac platform and extended it, creating Object Pascal. Borland was inspired by Apple's Object Pascal and created its own Object Pascal they called Delphi.

For a while in the 90s there was intense competition between Delphi and Visual Basic as to which was easier to develop modern GUI applications and had more power. I'd say Delphi was the better alternative, but that's another story.

The thing is, Delphi never stopped. You can build desktop apps, web apps, mobile apps, APIs - all kinds of stuff. But to programmers in the 70s, 80s, and 90s? Pascal was a very familiar language.
by danielvinson | 2025-08-25 18:55:16+00:00
I felt this way for a long time and used a heavy mouse for daily use then switched to my lightweight mouse for gaming. I changed my mind very fast when I started developing carpel tunnel symptoms from the heavy mouse - using your wrist to move a heavy object in the same pattern for 6+ hours a day is just not healthy for you and when your job involves doing that, its 100% worth it to just use the lightweight mouse for everything. I actually found that my wrist felt better with the 55g mouse than with a trackball or a touchpad.
by ndriscoll | 2025-08-25 18:55:37+00:00
The thing is, this is like saying lots of mechanical engineers have no need, interest, or time to learn derivatives; they just want to get on with "forces" and "momentum" and cool stuff like "resonance". Saying you have no interest in learning limits and asymptotes but you want to know what people are talking about when they mention asymptotic analysis doesn't make sense.

If you want know what calculus-y words mean, you're going to need to learn calculus. People use calculus-y words to quickly convey things professionally. That's why it's a "topic" for you to learn. The thing under discussion is a limit.
by ohdeargodno | 2025-08-25 18:55:45+00:00
Additionally, this kills apps like Revanced, NewPipe, SmartTube that will now be required to give out ID to Google, surely that's something they really want to do. All Open source development is at threat, Google's absolute dogshit procedures already imposed for the play store now imposed to the entire ecosystem. All for a shitty system that breaks down to "registering package names". Cool then, guess it's time to typo squat on every variant of com.faceboook.app, because users definitely check the package name and not "oh the icon is right and so is the title".

More and more locked down devices, Android source releases only being published once a year, device drivers for reference devices disappearing, and now, verification of all your software for your "security". The war on general computing is well and truly on.

What the absolute fuck.
by jleyank | 2025-08-25 18:55:45+00:00
Canada does, and the population has grown due to immigration. Google says Germany does this. You can probably find what other g20 countries do this. There are also supplemental pensions and/or tax credits or deductions based on age and income.

Editing as I can’t reply to reply below. Births are drains on the system for 18-28 years. Canadian immigrants must pass a points based system that biases towards needs. such people can pay their taxes from arrival. Refugees aren’t quite the same, but I don’t know the correct labels for the difference.
by lotharcable | 2025-08-25 18:56:11+00:00
There was a similar situation going on with Craigslist and a couple other websites. I don't remember the details.

But the basic gist is that people were selling illicit sex services on these websites, much of which was very unsavory. So there was a big push to make these websites liable for users engaging in that sort of communications.

It succeeded and these websites shutdown the services these people were using, which in turn destroyed or otherwise undermined numerous investigations going on all around the country to prosecute these criminals.

On a side note when people operate privaty-ran "to catch a predator" sting operations in the USA... One particularly successful group was asked why all their targets tend to be from more conservative leaning parts of the country. The non-obvious answer to that is that in many other places around they country they don't bother because they can't get the police to show up and arrest the people they find.

So when you have certain governments refusing to even investigate sexual crimes involving minors that they have happening in their own communities it seems to be a bit disingenuous when they claim they need to eliminate privacy to go after much more difficult targets on the internet.
by skaul | 2025-08-25 18:56:36+00:00
> Even if you know the source of the text before you feed it to the model you still need to solve the problem of how to send untrusted text from a user through a model without that untrusted text being able to trigger additional tool calls or actions.

We're exploring taking the action plan that a reasoning model (which sees both trusted and untrusted text) comes up with and passing it to a second model, which doesn't see the untrusted text and which then evaluates it.

> The most credible pattern I've seen for that comes from the DeepMind CaMeL paper

Yeah we're aware of the CaMeL paper and are looking into it, but it's definitely challenging from an implementation pov.

Also, I see that we said "The browser should clearly separate the user’s instructions from the website’s contents when sending them as context to the model" in the blog post. That should have been "backend", not "model". Agreed that once you feed both trusted and untrusted tokens into the LLM the output must be considered unsafe.
by timr | 2025-08-25 18:56:53+00:00
> No it won't lol, that's not how international logistics work. You don't just flick a switch overnight.

I didn't say "overnight". But if you don't think it would happen, you haven't been paying attention: it has been happening for decades. It's not a crazy thing to consider when establishing a tariff policy.

> Penguin island was stupid because it reflected how lazy the policies they applied are. It clearly showed that the Trump administration doesn't fundamentally understand what trade deficits are nor does it have an actual, well thought out plan. The only thing Penguin island has in common with this is that both actions are incredibly lazy and superficial. The Trump admin needs to get serious.

Flinging names ("lazy", "superficial") is not an argument. You've obviously decided that these actions are stupid -- maybe they are! [1] -- and nobody is going to convince you otherwise, but I just gave you a plausible reason that you'd choose to do it this way.

[1] I don't personally like these policies, but I'm willing to admit when something I don't like as a whole makes sense in part.
by bendbro | 2025-08-25 18:57:13+00:00
> These are the sort of things the poor and middle class voted for. To make the rich, richer.

Experts show saving 7.1337% at Walmart is worth losing your job to offshoring!

I haven't seen meaningful change for poor or workers with a decade of Democrat policy, so pardon me while I ignore that and vote for some tariffs.
by jimmies | 2025-08-25 18:57:31+00:00
Alternative way to see it: The author had either a $50 solution, or a $50 solution that comes with a discounted hotair rework station for $150…

I learned it from Superfastmatt. He needed a piece of plastic that retails for $1500 for his van, so he said: “either I have a $1500 solution or I have a $1500 solution but I get a free fancy 3D printer in the end…” that stuck with me.
by ozim | 2025-08-25 18:57:37+00:00
They were not happy otherwise we would not have new requirements.

Well maybe they were happy but software needs to be updated to new business processes their company was rolling out.

Managers wanted the changes ASAP - their employees not so much, but they had to learn that hard way.

Not so fun part was that we got the blame. Just like I got down vote :), not my first rodeo.
by mmh0000 | 2025-08-25 18:58:13+00:00
For me, I'll always choose a device with standard, user-replaceable batteries over a built-in battery.

1) If the device battery is dead, I can swap it out in seconds and be up and running immediately.

2) Built-in batteries fail, and replacing them ranges from difficult to near-impossible and often involves damaging the device's casing to get the built-in battery out.

When I'm spending $100 on a computer mouse, I'd really like it to last longer than the life of the battery and not have to destroy the casing to get to the battery to replace it.
by adinhitlore | 2025-08-25 18:58:21+00:00
Musk definitely fits in "top 10 things a human should hate", it looks something like (from worst possible, to least worse): 1. Hitler 2. Rabies 3. Netanyahu 4.Musk 5. java 6. kim jong un 7. rust 8. the russian language 9. adam smith 10. ayn rand. ^ Sure the ranking is not ideal but it's a very good guideline.
by cuuupid | 2025-08-25 18:58:38+00:00
We will definitely see but it's still a theory at this point, and one that has not played out the other way in the past with a reduction on corporate tax _across the board_

> Fixed prices are a bet on TACO

Having been part of some of these conversations it's mostly a bet that democrats will win back control sometime in the next decade and do a full reversal. When that happens, you don't want to be caught out with less market share because you adjusted your prices to maintain your bottom line. Same logic as startups burning VC cash on offering free compute, 80% discounts on tokens, etc. to grab market share.

If you're in an elastic market, your priority is not to maximize profit, it's to make the market inelastic.
by jonathaneunice | 2025-08-25 18:58:42+00:00
It’s very odd when mainframes (S/3x0, Cray, yadda yadda) have been extensively water-cooled for over 50 years, and super-dense HPC data centers have used liquid cooling for at least 20, to hear Google-scale data center design compared to PC hobbyist rigs. Selective amnesia + laughably off-target point of comparison.
by doublerabbit | 2025-08-25 18:58:43+00:00
Is there anyway to secure a POST request at the backend, without client side encryption?

The server processing the POST is still receiving the information posted regardless if the client is HTTPS or not.

Say, you're attempting login, the password is still received by the server and which you do with whatever when processing.

What's not stopping someone from injecting a trace on that receiving function?

In other-words, How would you secure the server processing the POST request information?
by mzajc | 2025-08-25 18:58:53+00:00
> Every app store that exists would classify this as malware

Considering Facebook ([0] and [1] to name a few) is still available, I think that's a pretty high bar to clear.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44401406

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44169115
by bitwize | 2025-08-25 18:59:21+00:00
The efficacy to weight ratio of meat vs. rocks and metal is freakin' absurd. We don't know how to build a robot that's as strong and damage-resistant as a human body and weighs only as much as one. Similarly we don't know how to build something as energy-efficient as a human brain that thinks anywhere near as well. Artificial superintelligence may well be a thing in the coming decades, but it will be profoundly energy-greedy; I fear the first thing it will resolve to do is secure fuel for itself by stealing our energy supplies like out of Superman III.
by jleyank | 2025-08-25 18:59:24+00:00
Wealthy people of any age have most of the money…. Check the prices of assisted care to see where home equity will go for the old. And ignore the yowls of the kids looking for the inter generational transfer of wealth.

As far as stocks and bonds go, I thought the HN readership was into that. Can’t penalize somebody who has the advantage of time re equity growth on the basis of age. If you want to be fair, again, tax wealth.
by Nash0x7e2 | 2025-08-25 18:59:31+00:00
Looks awesome! I downloaded the app and was able to get it connected to my accounts, and it is working.

However, I did notice that connect took around a minute to a minute and a half before the agent was in the call and able to speak. Is this a byproduct of the underlying calling service you're using or the traffic?

Regardless, awesome app, curious to see how it continues to improve!
by tguvot | 2025-08-25 18:59:47+00:00
in desert storm 17% of USA casualties (and 35% of fatal) were due to friendly fire

usa famously bombed MSF hospital and canadian troops in afganistan.

france bombed wedding

idf in gaza also has a lot of casualties due to friendly fire. i think at some point of time it was around 30%

the bottom line: combat/war at enemy territory it's not same as shopping in costco at weekend.
by doctorshady | 2025-08-25 19:00:03+00:00
Raptor Systems makes a bunch of ATX compatible POWER motherboards. As to who buys them, it's not entirely clear. If they were a little cheaper, I'd pick one up in a heartbeat. $3,000 for a CPU and motherboard is a bit hard to rationalize for what's effectively just nerding out though: https://www.raptorcs.com/content/base/products.html .

For the embedded market, NXP makes a bunch of QorIQ chips based around the POWER ISA - mostly for telecom products. These are actually reasonably common in certain devices, but not really what you'd want in a desktop.
by ohdeargodno | 2025-08-25 19:00:34+00:00
The only promises on the announcement are:

> Verify your identity

> * You will need to provide and verify your personal details, like your legal name, address, email address, and phone number. > * If you're registering as an organization, you'll also need to provide a D-U-N-S number and verify your organization's website. > * You may also need to upload official government ID.

Only one of those three applies to organizations.

>A note for student and hobbyist developers: we know your needs are different from commercial developers, so we’re creating a separate type of Android Developer Console account for you.

Nothing about it says anything about having lighter requirements, just not going through a Play Console link. Even if the requirements end up being "lighter", the minimum will always be at least "link a Google account", which is already a massive privacy breach.

> It also doesn't prevent you from side loading.

It absolutely does. Quoting from Google:

>Starting next year, Android will require all apps to be registered by verified developers in order to be installed by users on certified Android devices.

certified Android devices being... 99.9% of all Android devices in existence.

https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/08/elevating-...
by BizarroLand | 2025-08-25 19:01:13+00:00
If you keep an eye out you can sometimes find 4tb nvme drives for ~$200, so you could build an eye watering 24tb raid0 array in one of those that would saturate a 25gb nic for less than $1,500.

Or make it a 5x1 parity for a smidge of redundancy.
by rubycollect4812 | 2025-08-25 19:01:29+00:00
>”He bought it from Edgar Banks, a diplomat, antiquities dealer and flamboyant amateur archaeologist said to have inspired the character of Indiana Jones – his feats included climbing Mount Ararat in an unsuccessful attempt to find Noah’s Ark – who had excavated it in southern Iraq in the early 20th century.”

A little off-topic, but as a non native English speaker this sentence in the article made me look up whether there’s scientific consensus that Noah’s Ark has been found and I’d just never heard about it. Turns out there isn’t, and the end of the sentence actually refers to the tablet. Was still a fun rabbit hole to go down.
by Scoundreller | 2025-08-25 19:01:58+00:00
In theory, most countries are signatories to the Universal Postal Union and World Customs Organization (branches of the UN) to keep the post/customs system humming along.

I tried to read up on their “rules” on this topic and it’s a bunch of wishy-washy hot air other than some standardization of customs declaration forms, and I guess HS codes.

Otherwise the only way you get everyone to agree on something: by getting them to agree on nothing during their junket meetings.
by sfn42 | 2025-08-25 19:01:58+00:00
Yeah, I don't like the split second spinners. And I work on company internal apps so every user is generally on a good connection.

What I might do is just add a global spinner using tanstack query, what I don't like is having 50 different spinners for every little component. Makes the site feel janky and weird.

I just don't see the point unless it's loading for 5+ seconds. If it's faster than that then the user won't have time to wonder if it's stuck anyway. And I prefer to have one or very few requests, rather than 10+ different ones for a single page.
by hnlmorg | 2025-08-25 19:02:21+00:00
You’ve got my point backwards. I’m not talking about the technology. I’m talking about how those stories keep getting overshadowed by nonsensical episodic cliffhangers.

It’s dramatic. But it doesn’t mean it’s a particularly good drama.

If they’d replaced the backdrop with any other normal drama setting and almost nobody on here would watch it because they’d think the show was stupid.

Stuff like setting fire to a truck, and then never talking about it again afterwards, has absolutely nothing to do with tech nor stories about people. It’s just a dumb gimmick thrown in because the network doesn’t believe their audience has enough of an attention span to watch the show otherwise.