MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by apimade | 2025-08-24 23:08:55+00:00
Warning the below comment comes from someone who has no formal science degree, and just enjoys reading articles on the topic.

Similar for physicists, I think there’s a very confusing/unconventional antenna called the “evolved antenna” which was used on a NASA spacecraft. The idea behind it was supported from genetic programming. The science or understanding “why” the way the antenna bends at different areas supporting increased gain is not well understood by us today.

This all boils down to empirical reasoning, which underlies the vast majority of science (or science adjacent fields like software engineering, social sciences etc).

The question I guess is; does LLMs, “AI”, ML give us better hypothesis or tests to run to support empirical evidence-based science breakthroughs? The answer is yes.

Will these be substantial, meaningful or create significant improvements on today’s approaches?

I can’t wait to find out!
by maxwellg | 2025-08-24 23:09:17+00:00
Refresh tokens are only really required if a client is accessing an API on behalf of a user. The refresh token tracks the specific user grant, and there needs to be one refresh token per user of the client.

If a client is accessing an API on behalf of itself (which is a more natural fit for an API Key replacement) then we can use client_credentials with either client secret authentication or JWT bearer authentication instead.
by godelski | 2025-08-24 23:09:33+00:00
> if your company is profitable post expansion funding then you will profit share with the federal government.

Not to mention... taxes...

I mean I agree with you but even that article is talking about how it's not a free handout. It never could have been. A government could hand out money unconditionally and they'd still get a return as long as taxes exist. Intel's (or any company's) success results in them paying more taxes. Not just corporate taxes either.
by sytringy05 | 2025-08-24 23:10:17+00:00
Java applets were terrible in all possible ways that something can be terrible and it took no less than Steve Jobs to kill off Flash.

This stuff was foundational to the modern web and it's clear the maintainers, who probably are not Steve Jobs, have no idea what will break as a result. If it's removed, it will just get added back in after the outrage
by aspenmayer | 2025-08-24 23:10:22+00:00
This complaint largely lands on the same points as the ones against Mr. Robot, and it has some merit, but the shows are made for cable TV audiences, so they're a bit more niche than broadcast shows, but they're mass market vehicles. They're nearly pushing a rope to make this content entertaining at all. If people cared, they'd already know the history and the social implications of the technology, as well as the personalities involved. These kinds of shows are meant to bring more folks into the industry and help folks see the humanity in each other and in themselves if they're in it. Most folks don't watch tv for anything but storylines and personalities, so historical or current relevance in entertainment is something I'll take where and when I can get it.

What are some tech shows that you like, or dramas, for context?
by inportb | 2025-08-24 23:10:27+00:00
Interesting, but you should probably use a control. Two phones, same hardware, same software. One inside the faraday cage, one outside, both in the same room with the same conditions otherwise.

Repeat the experiment a few times. Then cross over: liberate the caged phone, cage the free phone, and repeat the experiment a few more times. Or alternate the phones' positions between experiments. This mitigates hardware and software differences that might've been overlooked (such as a faulty battery, etc).

Analyze the results, draw your conclusions, publish, and encourage others to reproduce.
by smj-edison | 2025-08-24 23:10:31+00:00
> Every integration with your API begins life as a simple script, and using an API key is the easiest way to get a simple script working. You want to make it as easy as possible for engineers to get started.

> ...You’re building it for a very wide cross-section of people, many of whom are not comfortable writing or reading code. If your API requires users to do anything difficult - like performing an OAuth handshake - many of those users will struggle.

Sounds like they're talking about onboarding specifically. I actually really like this idea, because I've certainly had my fair share of difficulty just trying to get the dang thing to work.

Security wise perhaps not the best, but mitigations like staging only or rate limiting seem sufficient to me.
by brandonb | 2025-08-24 23:11:38+00:00
This study followed 5,294 people for 20 years. People in the highest third of inflammation (hs-CRP > 5) had 32% higher chance of heart disease and 25% higher mortality from any cause.

Inflammation was a predictor even when you take cholesterol, blood pressure, BMI, etc into account. (The researchers trained various models to test this.)

Inflammation is pretty easy to measure in a blood test. Lots of places online: https://www.empirical.health/product/comprehensive-health-pa...
by lelandbatey | 2025-08-24 23:12:35+00:00
Watch out, some tree roots may be stronger than the rooter used to clear them, in which case the rooter company may end up with a rooter trapped in your pipe, as happened to my parents. Ultimately they had to get the sewer line excavated and replaced where it met the city sewer, 15 feet down in the middle of the road. Cost like $30k.

Maybe ask the rooter company what happens if they end up with equipment trapped jammed down your pipe is all I'm saying.
by wat10000 | 2025-08-24 23:13:19+00:00
The “secure” system with unknown bugs can fix them once they become known. The system that’s insecure by design and tries to mitigate it can’t be fixed, by design.

There might be a zero-day bug in my browser which allows an attacker to steal my banking info and steal my money. I’m not very worried about this because I know that if such a thing is discovered, Apple is going to fix it quickly. And it’s going to be such a big deal that it’s going to make the news, so I’ll know about it and I can make an informed decision about what to do while I wait for that fix.

Computer security is fundamentally about separating code from data. Security vulnerabilities are almost always bugs that break through that separation. It may be direct, like with a buffer overflow into executable memory or a SQL injection, or it may be indirect with ROP and such. But one way or another, it comes down to getting the target to run code it’s not supposed to.

LLMs are fundamentally designed such that there is no barrier between the two. There’s no code over here and data over there. The instructions are inherently part of the data.
by o11c | 2025-08-24 23:14:40+00:00
> The way to fight it without coming off that way is by advocating for a form of age check that doesn't require personal information, which I haven't heard any really water-tight suggestions yet.

Given the spread of explicit "give us our pedo games" and "let kids watch porn" voices, I don't think there's any demand for a moderate solution.

And when the moderate solution is actively rejected for a very real problem, nobody has a right to complain when the problem eventually is addressed using extreme solutions.
by cyberax | 2025-08-24 23:18:32+00:00
> This truly is getting sad. Coal is already being phased out. It is very telling that you don't dare to look forward.

We'll see if it actually happens. It probably will, but I can say for certain that it WILL be phased out in favor of imported natural gas. Not renewables. Not hydrogen. Not power-to-gas.

This is completely locked-in right now, with new replacement natural gas plants already in the process of bidding.

> Maybe you can explain why 50% of the Spanish nuclear fleet was either offline or withdrawn from the market when the blackout happened?

Because the useless renewable strategy incentivizes only dirt-grade generation. It priced out reliable power, resulting in an unreliable grid. It's like the McDonalds of energy generation: fast food results in obesity because it's so cheap.

Once stability requirements are taken into account, solar and wind stop being so cheap. You suddenly need storage and grid-forming inverters that require a part of the capacity go unused.

To be fair, for Spain, solar and wind are still likely going to be cheaper than nuclear even when the grid investments are considered. For Germany? Not a chance.

> The figure you quote is from a settlement 6 years prior to the plant being finished while construction costs and interest kept accumulating.

No. I took the figures from 2023. The levelized cost of energy from Oikiluoto Unit 3 is 5 cents per kWh, according to the recent report from Finland.

> No one knows the final cost for OL3, but we do know that it bankrupted Areva and that the French paid for the majority of the costs.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. How about we take the cost for the Rooppur power plant then? Or maybe Shin-Hanul Unit 2? They work out to about 2-3 times _less_ than OL3. I specifically took the numbers that are overly conservative to demonstrate the utter failure of Energiewende.

> Getting stingy now. Annoying dealing with someone who has seen all your talking points and lies you usually shield yourself behind before?

Want a bet? In 10 years Germany will de-facto abandon Energiewende and will increase reliance on fossil fuels. The turning point will be the phaseout of coal which will increase the rates past the limits of affordability for the industry. This will result in stalled transport electrification and further cause the industry to lose its edge.
by josephg | 2025-08-24 23:18:49+00:00
The problem is really hard. But I think bringing it up is useful, because it motivates people to think about how they would solve it better. It’s certainly a question I’ve asked myself a bunch of times.

If we all stopped complaining about memory safety in C and C++, we would never have gotten rust in the first place. Rob pike would never have let generics make it into Go if people didn’t spend years pestering him about it.

I think I fail by taking for granted all the work that’s gone into languages like rust. Lots of smart people have poured themselves into these discussions and designs. Thankyou. I don’t say that enough.

But yeah, async rust seems like one of those places where people arguing it out on github didn’t converge at a great design. It’s a really hard problem - really, combining a borrow checker with stack suspension is a CS research problem. I think it’s interesting and important to acknowledge that committees don’t always do great research. Sometimes you need a bunch of iterations of an idea. And a bright cookie or two who can work without justifying their designs.

So no, I don’t think I’ll stop talking about it. Making async rust v1 was an incredible amount of work and I’m very grateful. But I also really want to seed the idea space so some bright sparks can think about what async rust v2 might look like.
by FireBeyond | 2025-08-24 23:19:29+00:00
That to me seems like something that should be covered by the company's insurance.

Any services company that comes out, ens up with breaking their tools because they used inadequate tooling, and causing more damage? I don't know how they managed to foist that on to your parents.

The issue wasn't the tree roots, it was the rooter company's poor investigation. Video scoping a sewer line is trivial these days.
by Flere-Imsaho | 2025-08-24 23:19:43+00:00
What do people think about email as an ever-lasting censorship resistant protocol? It's federated and encrypted at source (in some cases - see Protonmail, etc). I can run my own email server on my own domain, so for example I could have my news letter be an email subscription. Any attempt to censor me would require blocking my domain and/or blocking my email server - both of which could be moving targets.

I've always thought email is under-utilized as a distributed, censorship-resistant technology.
Ask HN: What's the current state of ethical hacking culture?
by kace91 | 2025-08-24 23:21:45+00:00
I'm a 35 year old engineer who started getting into tech by being curious about hacking and hacker culture. At the time there were dozens of zines, IRC channels and message boards discussing everything from wifi hacking with alpha antennas to basic tutorials on SQL injection, and a lot of philosophising and activism.

After stumbling on a recent link to Phrack here, I went to check the old sites and found a pretty desolate picture: everything's either dead or became corporate sites selling expensive courses for certificates under a fake anime/hacking design.

I'm curious about what the current state of the community is. Where do people share content nowadays? Discords, telegram channels, nothing remaining...? If you were pointing a sharp 16-year-old somewhere today (or a curious nostalgic millenial), where would you send them?
by aspenmayer | 2025-08-24 23:22:03+00:00
> That and when most governments "nationalise" corporations they seize them and don't give the owners/shareholders anything.

First you get the money, then you get the power.

Money is fungible, but power isn't. Arguably, taking away my power is an affront to my human rights. Taking my money is an affront, but it never was my money to begin with, as I don't control the value or creation of it. My rights are inalienable.
by Spooky23 | 2025-08-24 23:23:15+00:00
There’s also the time to market and bureaucracy cost. I took over a place where there was a team of people devoted making sure you had exactly what PC you need.

Configuring devices more generously often lets you get some extra life out of it for people who don’t care about performance. If the beancounters make the choice, you’ll buy last years hardware at a discount and get jammed up when there’s a Windows or application update. Saving money costs money because of the faster refresh cycle.

My standard for sizing this in huge orgs is: count how many distinct applications launch per day. If it’s greater than 5-7, go big. If it’s less, cost optimize with a cheaper config or get the function on RDS.
by hnlmorg | 2025-08-24 23:25:18+00:00
I’m not suggesting the show should be factually accurate. I’m saying it doesn’t need pyrotechnics to be engaging.

Mr Robot was a different beast because that was literally about criminal and hacker culture. So you’d expect a little action in that regard.

To put it another way: you have shows that have strong enough writers where they don’t need gimmicks to keep your attention. And you have shows that are intentionally about the gimmicks. Then you have shows that aren’t about the gimmicks but the writers don’t have enough confidence in their work to avoid putting them in anyway.

Shows like The West Wing, House of Cards etc aren’t about gimmicks and don’t need them.

Shows like Stargate are about the gimmicks. And that’s ok too because you know it’s meant to be silly drama.

But shows like HCF feel like they should be executed like HoCs, yet they’re written like Mr Robot, Stargate, etc. So it’s very jarring to watch every time another gimmick gets thrown in. Maybe I expected too much from that show? But it just felt like they didn’t have any confidence in people’s attention spans.
by rossdavidh | 2025-08-24 23:26:00+00:00
to be honest I don't know, I don't use Spotify much, but apparently for my wife it was a dealbreaker so I gritted my teeth and dived in, but then as I recall it was actually not hard to install at all. HOWEVER, IIRC, it involved typing something into a terminal¸ and for a lot of people that is also a complete dealbreaker for whatever reason.
by okanat | 2025-08-24 23:26:14+00:00
I don't see this as the Windows being default on a laptop problem. It is a problem of letting companies grow too big. Google equally abuses their position with Android. We need to force big tech into splitting. No way around it.

Adtech, IT infrastructure, operating system development, office software and browser development should never belong to the same business. It is not Windows on the laptops that makes Microsoft at the center of IT, it is all the software ecosystem around it which Microsoft also owns a huge slice of it. Throughout the 90s and 00s they were let to buy all of their competition that released software on various platforms. Everything from finance software, reporting software, Microsoft Office suite, Azure Active Directory all belongs to Microsoft. There is no competing with such behemoths. They are guaranteed to be abusive.

Breaking this kind of monopoly first requires encouraging open standards. Got a government contract? You have to release every single detail of the output formats with all the features you support on them. Delivery of all sorts of software to public institutions can only be made with the full copyright assignment to public as well.

This doesn't absolve Linux or any other third party OS developers from being competitive. Linux currently isn't competitive. It is 2 decades behind in many areas. However, a fair market economy will actively break behemoths like Microsoft and let other developers to compete with them. It should encourage actual competition and prevent cheap buyouts of competitive products.

Similarly enforcing ownership rights is critical. If you cannot change software on a device you have, you don't own it. In a properly competitive environment you don't need the knowledge to install OSes. A competitive business would handle that for you or other smaller businesses providing such IT support would also pop up.
by alephnerd | 2025-08-24 23:27:26+00:00
Personally, I felt HCF was a much better reflection of the tech industry compared to Silicon Valley.

While I love both shows to death, I feel HCF really nailed a lot of the emotional and interpersonal aspects that come with entrepreneurship, venture capital, and engineering leadership.

It was also great watching HCF with my dad who started his career during the tail end of the show, and could call out a number of the technical aspects (eg. PBXes, the COBOL vs OOP wars, the search engine wars, etc).
by kemotep | 2025-08-24 23:28:21+00:00
What numbers work specifically?

Because we haven’t seen a single re-use of a starship yet nor any significant payload brought to orbit, or the orbital refueling turn around and launch cadence necessary to even achieve 1/10th of what Musk suggests is “possible on paper”.

Super-heavy is being wasted on a potential dead end 2nd stage in my opinion.
by whartung | 2025-08-24 23:28:39+00:00
Are satellite phones under the same microscope as cell phones? Are they broadcasting on all the different cell/wifi/bt frequencies or do they just connect to a satellite? Are they GPS tagged?

Also if you want one-way “location less” communication, the old alphanumeric pager network is still available.

I think those messages are simply broadcast across the network (which at least in the US is national). There’s evidence of a message being sent, none about whether it was received or where it was received.
by rainsford | 2025-08-24 23:29:05+00:00
> ...and utility scale solar + storage only became less expensive than nuclear power a couple of years ago.

That's an awkward way to try to frame "solar is cheaper than nuclear" as a negative for solar power. Why should anyone care when solar became cheaper than nuclear? If you're looking at different alternatives in the year 2025, the relevant fact is which is cheaper now. All the more so since the cost for solar power, even counting the cost of storage, has been dramatically decreasing over time so the advantage is likely to be even better in the future.

> Nuclear is only expensive because of the way it's built in the US...

I honestly like the idea of nuclear power, but it seems goofy to do cost comparisons between solar and wind power being deployed right now and some hypothetical version of nuclear power we don't and might never have. I imagine nuclear power probably could be cheaper if we changed everything about how we designed, built, and maintained nuclear plants.

I also imagine that level of investment and tolerance for policy change with other power generation sources could produce equally significant cost decreases. China's growing lead in the renewable power supply chain, material recycling, rare earth materials, etc, are all examples of challenges with renewable power than can probably be solved with time and money. Shouldn't our utopian future version of nuclear power be compared against a future where we make similar investments in changing how we approach renewable power to solve all those problems?
by taftster | 2025-08-24 23:29:25+00:00
> neither can tell you if your game is actually fun

I think this is the core insight. An AI will not be able to experience a game (or anything else for that matter) remotely in the same way that a human can experience it. It might be able to guess, based on human rankings of other similar games. But AI will never be able to actually have fun playing your game.

This concept will define the workforce that comes out of this AI boom. Maybe an AI can write a document or code like a human, only based on past samples of similar behavior, but it won't be able to synthesize exactly what it means to be a human. The human element will still need to be traded on. Your value as a human cannot be replaced, you might just have to think differently about that value.
by jongjong | 2025-08-24 23:29:34+00:00
It's interesting because my wife has been using Ibuprofen for headache relief, whereas I use Paracetamol. I usually got Paracetamol growing up but recent studies showing adverse effects of Ibuprofen on male fertility solidified my resolve and consistency in choosing Paracetamol. My wife's reason for using Ibuprofen was simply because it worked better for her. Now it's kind of surprising to learn that Paracetamol has negative effect on women's fertility... I guess this means that both drugs are harmful to a different gender? What a coincidence? We were both using the optimal one for ourselves for reasons beyond our understanding... Until more data comes out.

Anyway, I understand arguments for avoiding drugs, medicines and chemicals altogether. Clearly, everything is more complex than it seems and side effects can never be fully known or understood; especially on a case-by-base basis given that everyone's DNA is different and responds differently to chemicals. I only take Paracetamol if I have a migraine with visual aura which is quite rare. I don't take it for standard headaches.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-24 23:30:25+00:00
> which is that the voters themselves have a deep antipathy towards each other

They don’t. The only solutions to deep-rooted antipathy are forgiveness and annihilation. We aren’t anywhere close to that, despite what idiots want to manufacture.

> I'm hard pressed for a solution short of starting over from scratch

This is meaningless at best, stupid at worst.