MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jMyles | 2025-08-27 20:56:18+00:00
There are two important lenses here:

1) As we saw clearly in the Nixon years, uncovered by the investigation that is the topic of this thread, the political parties are (or at least were, but I assert still are) invested in ratfucking at the local level, and especially at the level of student governments, in part because the stakes are so low. And from this, we see a natural selection of the best ratfuckers to run party operations in state, national, and international domains.

2) Decisions made in Washington, DC receive proportionally enormous media coverage compared to the actual economic and policy impact on everyday lives. Student governments are situated in exactly the opposite posture. They make decisions that have enormous impact on local communities (particularly their campuses, but often their municipalities as well), on present and future academic funding, on the tone and personnel of committees which determine the outcomes of funding and curricular deliberations which impact whole generations of knowledge, and on the matter of access to higher education itself (and the degrees of debt in which different classes of students find themselves after the fact).

As a way of mollifying student protests in the 1960s and 1970s, Student Governments were often the recipients of power and money. Student Governments at large state universities have budgets of millions or tens of millions of dollars, and more importantly the authority to appoint personnel to many of the most important decision making bodies. These powers have naturally drawn major party ratfucking into student politics (as Segretti and others have acknowledged) and become a vector for control of educational systems.

I believe that many student elections and governments continue to be ratfucked. At SUNY New Paltz, when I was elected President in 2006, elections on campus were operated and overseen by the county elections commission (as was the case at all 13 SUNY Colleges and 4 University Centers), and were conducted using the same mechanical voting machines, with the same audit trails, as local, state, and national elections.

Since that time, due in large part to persuasion from SUNY (and, it would not surprise me to learn, under-the-table money changing hands), these elections have are now conducted by unaccountable third-party contractors, and the election machines are closed-source, unauditable web and mobile apps.

I think that a significant part of pulling the USA out of our current political mire will come from paying comparatively less attention to the children in Washington DC and more attention to the young adults at campuses in our communities.
by mxuribe | 2025-08-27 20:56:24+00:00
IANAL, but if the actual legislation did not either recommend or dictate which method would be either good or even considered valid for purposes of enactment of the law, would it then be subject to interpretation?

Also, for the enforcement agency who is/will be tasked with checking things out here...do they know whether geo-blocking is valid method or not? Its a silly law, don't get me wrong...but if its enforcement validation mechanisms are not up to snuff, i wonder how things will play out - both here in dreamwidth's case and other folks in a similar boat?
by vjvjvjvjghv | 2025-08-27 20:56:26+00:00
“ This way, the work done by a "low quality" software developer (this includes almost all of us at some point in time), is always taken into account by the process”

That’s a horrible take. There is no amount of reviews, guidelines and documentation that can compensate for low quality devs. You can’t throw garbage into the pipeline and then somehow process it to gold.
Show HN: I built UptimeBuddy after getting frustrated with complex monitors
by grhayk | 2025-08-27 20:57:00+00:00
Hey everyone,

I'm a developer who's been burned by unexpected website downtime one too many times. I tried the big-name monitoring tools but found them overwhelming for my small projects.

So, I built UptimeBuddy – a dead-simple monitoring tool that does one thing well: it checks your site and alerts you (via SMS/Email) the moment it goes down. No complex dashboards, no credit card required for the basic plan.

It's just an MVP right now, but I've put up a landing page to gauge interest.

· Landing Page: https://uptimebuddy-contact.vercel.app/

I'd love your honest feedback:

1. Does the landing page clearly explain what it does? 2. Is this a problem you've faced? 3. Would you use something like this?

Thanks for looking! Any thoughts are hugely appreciated."
by sindriava | 2025-08-27 20:57:00+00:00
Huh, my search is also turning up nothing. I could swear I heard a story about cauliflower originally being yellow and getting replaced with the white cultivar due to the guy who grew it marketing it as "arsenic-free" cauliflower despite the fact that the yellow one had no arsenic to begin with. Either I'm getting Mandela effected or I'm hallucinating -- which of course only AI models are capable of ;)
by kylemacomber | 2025-08-27 20:57:06+00:00
There's a lot I want to do to improve the prompting experience. As I mentioned in the original post, it's very simple right now.

There's a lot of inspiration we could (and probably will) draw from other products (e.g. Cline's Plan vs Act modes) to build what you're describing.

It can also be really fun and productive to just rapidly iterate on what the AI gives back, without having to take the time to describe it all up front. Sometimes this approach can lead to a new directions you might not have thought of.
by sarchertech | 2025-08-27 20:57:15+00:00
OpenAI openly has a goal to build AGI.

We don't know if AGI without consciousness is possible. Some people think that it's not. Many people certainly think that consciousness might be an emergent property that comes along with AGI.

>AI industry doesn't push for "consciousness" in any way. What AI industry is trying to build is more capable systems.

If you're being completely literal, no one wants slaves. They want what the slaves give them. Cheap labor, wealth, power etc...
by runjake | 2025-08-27 20:57:29+00:00
You know an argument is going to be strong when it starts off by citing a Teen Vogue article and uses phrases like:

"[AI] is at its core a fascist technology rooted in the ideology of supremacy"

and

"The people who build it are vapid shit-eating cannibals glorifying ignorance."

tl;dr: This person professes to hate AI. They repeat the same arguments as others who hate AI, ignoring that it is an emerging technology with lots of work to do. Regardless of AI's existence, power infrastructure needs to improve and become more environmentally friendly.

Finally, AI is not going away, and we cannot make it away. That cat is out of the bag.
by guywithahat | 2025-08-27 20:57:54+00:00
Here's what I found after asking chatgpt:

In the US, Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998, Section 512

In the EU, E-Commerce Directive (2000/31/EC), Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive (2019/790/EU, “DSM Directive”), Digital Services Act (DSA).

Additionally specific countries each have their own laws on the matter.
by munchlax | 2025-08-27 20:58:01+00:00
Oof. From what I've glanced, a CPU there costs nearly $70 and less performant models are actually costlier. Not sure what to do about that, so here's some general advice:

An AMD APU paired with a microATX motherboard is the cheapest way to get reasonable computing performance. The best thing I ever did was to buy only a motherboard, CPU, and RAM. For €90, I was blown away.

See if you can salvage any parts, there's no need for a case, SSD, and PSU every time. AMD has a nice upgrade path for this. A motherboard with AM2+ socket will fit an AM3 CPU. You can then later upgrade to an AM3+ motherboard and wait for a reasonably priced AM4 CPU, and so on. My gripe with this, however, is that it used to be possible to have different (scavenged) DDR RAM parts as long as it was the same number of pins. A quick glance at the notches would tell you if it fits and that was that. Nowadays you often have to have either just one bank or a few of exactly the same part.

Sometimes it's possible to get lucky, like buying a cheaper model CPU and succesfully unlocking an extra core. And a boxed CPU may be more expensive than a loose tray, but comes with an adequate cooler that'll fit just fine.

Neither of us have any contact details in the profile, although I'm not sure if I can be of much help to you anyway.

One more tip. If you see your box increasingly use swap during normal workload, adding RAM can significantly improve performance. Even if it's lower spec RAM.
by etler | 2025-08-27 20:58:07+00:00
For the Linear example, I would argue that adding too much flexibility would make the tool worse. Rigid workflows are consistent making them more robust and scalable. They work consistently needing less guidance or intervention.

When you find a rigid workflow that is both widely applicable and useful, that's how the most valuable companies are made. Those workflows can scale up with little intervention giving them incredibly high yield.

I think the new challenge is introducing flexibility in a controlled manner so we can minimize the added inconsistency needed to achieve broader goals. That way the workflow can find the right balance between robustness and flexiblity for the task at hand.
by utyop22 | 2025-08-27 20:58:54+00:00
"There are legitimate uses for which AI (or any other technology to be clear) would relieve everyone. Chores that people HAVE to do but nobody WANTS to do."

Ok but what are these? People keep saying right now they are trying to figure out where LLM's fit. Someone, somwhere would've figured it out by now - the world is more interconnected than ever before.

I think the approach with all that is going on is all entirely wrong - you cannot start with the technology and figure out where to put it. You have got to start with the experience - Steve Jobs famously quipped this and his track record speaks for itself. All I'm seeing is experimentation with the first approach which is costly in explicit and implicit form. Nobody from what I see seems to have a visionary approach.
by secureblue | 2025-08-27 20:58:57+00:00
secureblue creator here :)

some corrections:

> last I heard it wasn't out of Beta or whatever yet

It is

> But it uses containers rather than VMs

It doesn't use plain containers for app isolation. We ship the OS itself as a bootable container (https://github.com/bootc-dev/bootc). That doesn't mean we use or recommend using containers for application isolation. Container support is actually disabled by default via our selinux policy restricting userns usage (this can be toggled though, of course). Containers on their own don't provide sandboxing. The syscall filtering for them is extremely weak. Flatpak (which sandboxes via bubblewrap: https://github.com/containers/bubblewrap) can be configured to be reasonably good, but we still encourage the use of VMs if needed. We provide one-click tooling for easily installing virt-manager (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virt-manager) if desired.

In short though, secureblue and Qubes aren't really analogous. We have different goals and target use cases. There is even an open issue on Qubes to add a template to use secureblue as a guest: https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/9755
by RichardCA | 2025-08-27 20:59:00+00:00
Begging the Question.

Step 1: Assume your claim is already true, e.g. "Microsoft is a still good corporate actor in spite of doing X".

Step 2: Manufacture circular logic to support your claim from Step 1.

In other words, the poster is begging the question to be self-evident, rather than producing evidence to support their claim.
by the_other | 2025-08-27 20:59:09+00:00
The article doesn’t say that. The article says the author wont do the work of explaining their position to the reader. It doesn’t say they havn’t done that work for themselves. I read it as saying they had done some undisclosed amount of work informing themselves such that they could reach to their position: thinking, reading articles, etc.

Also, I think their lean towards a political viewpoint is worth some attention. The point is a bit lost in the emotional ranting, which is a shame.

(To be fair, I liked the ranting. I appreciated their enjiyment of the position they have reached. I use LLMs but I worry about the energy usage and I’m still not convinced by the productivity argument. Their writing echoed my anxiety and then ran with it into glee, which I found endearing.)
by whstl | 2025-08-27 20:59:23+00:00
What's that, a Github employee? Not really, I'm in an YC startup.

But I guess the problem is that every single development position has been converging into this.

The only times in my career as a developer where I was 100% happy was when there was no career PM. Sales, customers, end-users, an engineering manager, another manager, a business owner, a random employee, some rando right out the street... All of those were way better product owners than career PMs in my 25 years of experience.

This is not exactly about competence of the category, it's just about what fits and doesn't. Software development ONLY work when there is a balance of power. PMs have leverage that developers rarely have.

I come from Electrical Engineering. Engineering requires responsibility, but responsibility requires the ability to say "no". PMs, when part of a multi-disciplinary team, make this borderline impossible, and make "being an engineer" synonymous with putting a target on your back.
by VPenkov | 2025-08-27 20:59:25+00:00
Not a package manager, but Renovate bot has a setting like that (minimumReleaseAge). Dependabot does not (Edit: does now).

So while your package manager will install whatever is newest, there are free solutions to keep your dependencies up to date in a reasonable manner.

Also, the javascript ecosystem seems to slowly be going in the direction of consolidation, and supply chain attacks are (again, slowly) getting tools to get addressed.

Additionally, current versions of all major package managers (NPM, PNPM, Bun, I don't know about Yarn) don't automatically run postinstall scripts - although you are likely to run them anyway because they will be suggested to you - and ultimately you're running someone else's code, postinstall scripts or not.
by tchalla | 2025-08-27 20:59:38+00:00
This comment is not towards you but there's always an excuse with the big German banks.

For example, during Covid when interest rates where negative - some major German banks like Commerzbank charged interest from customers when their balance exceeded an amount like 50000€. Now that the interest rates have gone up - they are not even close to passing on those high interest rates. The same Commerzbank now asks for 50000€ in assets otherwise they charge a 4.90€ subscription charge from their customers.

So yeah there might be technicalities but nothing stops those technicalities being addressed until the law does.
by colinmorelli | 2025-08-27 20:59:58+00:00
I'll take a shot at rationale for this perspective, which is similar to a peer comment:

The tech is undoubtedly impressive, and I'm sure has a ton of headroom to grow (although I have no direct knowledge of this, but I'd take you at your word, because I'm sure it's true).

But at least my perception of the idea that this is a "bubble" presently is rooted in the businesses that are created using the technology. Tons of money spent to power AI agents to conduct tasks that would be 99% less expensive to conduct via a simple API call, or because the actual unstructured work is 2 or 3 levels higher in the value chain, and given enough time, there will be new vertically integrated companies that use AI to solve the problem at the root and eliminate the need for entire categories of companies at the level below.

In other words: the root of the bubble (to me) is not that the value will never be realized, but that many (if not most) of this crop of companies, given the amount of time the workflows and technology have had to take hold in organizations, will almost certainly not be able to survive long enough to be the ones to realize it.

This also seems to be why folks draw comparison to the dot com bubble, because it was quite similar. The tech was undoubtedly world changing. But the world needed time to adapt, and most of those companies no longer exist, even though many of the problems were solved a decade later by a new startup who achieved incredible scale.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-08-27 21:00:06+00:00
One other major factor I'd throw on the heap: traits / implementation traits. They act as both an interface system and as a sort of Extension Method system (as seen in c#).

But where-as with interfaces, typically they require you early define what your class implements. Rust gives you a late-bound-ish (still compile time but not defined in the original type) / Inversion of Control way to take whatever you've got and define new things for it. In most languages what types a thing has are defined by the library, but Rust not just allows but is built entirely around taking very simple abstract thing and constructing bigger and bigger toolkits of stuff around them. Very Non-zero sum in ways that languages rarely are.

There's a ton of similarity to Extension Methods, where more can get added to the type. But traits / impls are built much more deeply into rust, are how everything works. Extension Methods are also, afaik, just methods, where-as with Rust you really adding new types that an existing defined-elsewhere thing can express.

I find it super shocking (and not because duh) that Rust's borrow checking gets all the focus. Because the type system is such a refreshing open ended late-defined reversal of type system dogma, of defining everything ahead of time. It seems like such a superpower of Rust that you can keep adding typiness to a thing, keep expanding what a thing can do. The inversion here is, imo, one of the real largely unseen sources of glory for why Rust keeps succeeding: you don't need to fully consider the entire type system of your program ahead of time, you can layer in typing onto existing types as you please, as fits, as makes sense, and that is a far more dynamic static type system than the same old highly constrained static type dreck we've suffered for decades. Massive break forward: static, but still rather dynamic (at compile time).
by danso | 2025-08-27 21:00:43+00:00
> Im uneducated here, honestly. I don't ask a lot of race-based questions to my LLMS I guess

You're not uneducated, but this is a common and fundamental misunderstanding of how racial inequity can afflict computational systems, and the source of the problem is not (usually) something as explicit as "the creators are Nazis".

For example, early face-detection/recognition cameras and software in Western countries often had a hard time detecting the eyes on East Asian faces [0], denying East Asians and other people with "non-normal" eyes streamlined experiences for whatever automated approval system they were beholden to. It's self-evident that accurately detecting a higher variety of eye shapes would require more training complexity and cost. If you were a Western operator, would it be racist for you to accept the tradeoff for cheaper face detection capability if it meant inconveniencing a minority of your overall userbase?

Well, thanks to global market realities, we didn't have to debate that for very long, as any hardware/software maker putting out products inherently hostile to 25% of the world's population (who make up the racial majority in the fastest growing economies) weren't going to last long in the 21st century. But you can easily imagine an alternate timeline in which Western media isn't dominant, and China & Japan dominate the face-detection camera/tech industry. Would it be racist if their products had high rates of false negatives for anyone who had too fair of skin or hair color? Of course it would be.

Being auto-rejected as "not normal" isn't as "racist" as being lynched, obviously. But as such AI-powered systems and algorithms have increasing control in the bureaucracies and workflows of our day to day lives, I don't think you can say that "racist output", in the form of certain races enjoying superior treatment versus others, is a trivial concern.

[0] https://www.cnn.com/2016/12/07/asia/new-zealand-passport-rob...
by iLoveOncall | 2025-08-27 21:01:04+00:00
> Ok but what are these?

Throwing the trash?

I agree with all the rest of your comment. I'm not saying that AI is the solution to any problem, just that the article is not about hating AI, it's about hating the fact that people want you to use AI for specific stuff that you don't want to use it on.
by bayindirh | 2025-08-27 21:01:04+00:00
HPC admin here.

A "small" 7 rack, SOTA CPU cluster uses ~700KW of energy for computing, plus there's the energy requirements of cooling. GPUs use much more in the same rack space.

In DLC settings you supply 20-ish degree C water from primary circuit to heat exchanger, and get it back at 40-ish degree C, and then you pump this heat to environment, plus the thermodynamic losses.

This is a "micro" system when compared to big boys.

How there can be no environmental harm when you need to run a power plant on-premises and pump that much heat in much bigger scale 24/7 to environment.

Who are we kidding here?

When this is done for science and intermittently, both the grid and the environment can tolerate this. When you run "normal" compute systems (e.g. serving GMail or standard cloud loads), both the grid and environment can tolerate this.

But running at full power and pumping this much energy in and heat out to train AI and run inference is a completely different load profile, and it is not harmless.

> the cognitive harms and AI supported suicides

Extensive use of AI is shown to change brain's neural connections and makes some areas of brain lazy. There are a couple of papers.

There was a 16 year old boy's ChatGPT fueled death on the front page today, BTW.

> This is the best argument on the page imo, and even that is highly debated.

My blog is strictly licensed with a non-commercial and no-derivatives license. AI companies gets my text, derives it and sells it. No consent, no questions asked.

Same models consume GPL and Source Available code the same and offer their derivations to anyone who pays. Again, infringing both licenses in the process.

Consent & Copyright is a big problem in AI, where the companies wants us to believe otherwise.
by BrandoElFollito | 2025-08-27 21:01:07+00:00
I need to have Outlook, Zoom and zScaler working seamlessly. Not with wine or whatever but right there bam it works. Otherwise I cannot use the OS in my company.

I can install them if this is easy.

Now, I've been using Linux since 1994, wrote a small bit of the kernel at that time (you may have ran it, it was for a well known NIC) and I use it daily on my systems. Via ssh or remote dev in vscode.

I have no idea what the graphical interface is today and how to configure it. I could learn if this is easy.

One thing I know is that the sound did not work on my Thinkpad last time Ininstalled Ubuntu and the second screen would not wake up (the third did). Surely googling and chatgpting would help but in Windows 11 it just works.
by trebligdivad | 2025-08-27 21:01:13+00:00
They don't say what temperature the CPU was reporting which seems like an odd omission. Whatever the specs of your cooler etc check the temperature it's actually running at. Go by what the CPU is saying! I've got the older 3950x, and the first one died after a few months (still in warranty) with a cooler in spec, but it would go into the 90s at full load just doing big builds. I replaced the heatsink with a basic watercooler when the replacement chip arrived and it's running at least 20c cooler at full load.