MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dvdkon | 2025-08-31 15:23:42+00:00
I'd say that's a spurious correlation, if it exists at all. Just look at all the Android phone makers who don't allow bootloader unlocks and those who do. Personally I'd say Google Pixel or Sony Xperia phones last longer than Huawei ones, though I wouldn't dare say reprogrammability has anything to do with it.

Besides, when the options on the market range from "impossible" to "damn hard to reprogram", can you blame the market for not taking advantage of that? I'm certain a law that would allow waste recycling companies to unlock any phone, even without password or receipt, would lead to phones or phone motherboards being reused in a variety of lower-volume products.
by crazygringo | 2025-08-31 15:23:42+00:00
> You can argue that good PMs translate requirements perfectly, but this is a rare skill and I’m just saying I’ve never seen it

You can also argue that good devs translate requirements into code perfectly with zero bugs, but it's also a rare skill and I've never seen that.

Because in the real world, nobody's perfect. The good news is you don't need to be perfect to still add lots of value.

Demanding a standard of perfection from others, that I would hazard to guess you do not meet yourself, is rather uncharitable.
by comprev | 2025-08-31 15:23:55+00:00
A soft fork would still be able to merge changes in the upstream project and then add their own changes on top. The most basic example would be a soft fork that only changes the default search engine - everything else is the same.

A hard fork - as I understand it - means the development takes a new direction and integrating the original upstream code becomes more difficult as projects diverge, to the point where they are basically incompatible with each other.
by ben_w | 2025-08-31 15:24:47+00:00
Heaven and hell, souls, they're just examples sampled from the set of things called "religious".

Radical life extension has been demonstrated… in mice.

If you don't like my chosen examples, take any other religious statement and demonstrate it in a mouse. Have Anubis weigh their heart against a feather, pay Charon to cross the Styx, whatever.

Point isn't the specific it's compared against, it's the entire set that longevity definitely isn't in, because unlike those things it has been demonstrated (in mice).
by ceh123 | 2025-08-31 15:24:48+00:00
Even one of these topics I would say it would take most PhDs at least 2-3 years to “master”. I feel like at the end of my math PhD (5 years, 3 focused solely on my research area) I had just scratched the surface of mastery in my sub field, and that’s with 3 published papers.

I guess you’re right though, defining “mastery” is the key missing point here.
by koverstreet | 2025-08-31 15:24:56+00:00
That's because it is my project, and my responsibility.

I can't be bowing to the demands of any one person; I have to balance the wants and needs of everyone and prioritize shipping something that works above all else.

Repeatedly we've seen that those priorities are not shared, unfortunately.

Arguments are just as heated as they ever were, but now instead of arguing over the actual issues - does this work, are we doing this right - people jump to arguing over language and conduct and demanding apologies or calling for people to be expelled.

But my core mission is just shipping a reliable trustworthy filesystem, and that's what I'm going to stick to.
by anonym29 | 2025-08-31 15:25:24+00:00
And the mob really does honor their protection racket, too. If some punk comes and tries messing with a store protected by the mob, the mob deals with the problem.

Yet nobody goes around looking to purchase protection from the mob either, do they? The key problem with the arrangement isn't that the protection isn't provisioned, it's that the entire arrangement is involuntary and forced upon the business owner through threat of violence, whether by the mob or the state.
by docmars | 2025-08-31 15:25:54+00:00
I think a lot of the dysfunction we see in the world can be attributed to people feeling positive emotions towards deeply problematic logical decisions, so they favor them for whatever perceived benefit they'll get from that decision, often overlooking the long-term impacts or how it affects others around them.

We walk a dangerous line when feelings are the executive decision maker, even when we know what we should do (what's right) doesn't give us the same emotional response.

It's like working out. Nobody really wants to do it, but it only stands to benefit the body in the most logical, tangible sense.
by dfxm12 | 2025-08-31 15:26:27+00:00
public health dollars at the very least might be better spent on quality of life as much as quantity.

Improving quality of life often leads to improving quantity of life. Life expectancy is, in part, a policy choice. Be wary of those who are outright against these things.

https://thehill.com/policy/equilibrium-sustainability/570293...
by andyjohnson0 | 2025-08-31 15:26:34+00:00
This is a really nice guide. Its also timely for me as I'm looking to move away from my over-priced and under-specced web host.

Anyone have any comments on Vultr as a vps provider - positive or negative? As far as I can tell they provide 2TB of egress bandwidth and uncapped ingress: is that right?
by nullc | 2025-08-31 15:27:23+00:00
> It's a fireable offense in most companies.

In a company there are other employees who have your success as part of their job function. People to train you, to talk you down off a ledge, people to step in and guard you against misunderstanding or criticisms. People to advocate for you or send you home before a dispute crosses a point of no return. You're also paid to be there, to put up with the companies BS, .. the project isn't yours, it's not usually your reputation that's hurt when the company wants to make a decision you don't agree with and it goes poorly.

The context is so different, I don't think it's really comparable.
Show HN: I built a web UI for Gemini 2.5 Flash to solve AI image consistency
by jackson_mile | 2025-08-31 15:27:41+00:00
Hi HN,

I wanted to share a project I've been working on, Flash Image.

Like many here, I've been fascinated by AI image generation but consistently frustrated with the 're-roll' loop. Getting consistent characters or making small tweaks without the whole image changing was a huge pain point for me.

When I saw the examples from Google's new Gemini 2.5 Flash model and its potential for multi-turn, conversational editing, I wanted a simple way to test it without code. So, I built this interface on top of it.

The idea is to move beyond a single prompt. You can start with an image and then have a back-and-forth chat to refine it – "make the sky darker," "change his shirt to red," etc. – while trying to preserve the core subject.

It's still early, and not always perfect, but I think this conversational approach is a big step towards more intuitive and controllable AI image generation. I'd love to get your feedback and see what you create.
by JeffJor | 2025-08-31 15:27:42+00:00
I am not making an assumption about the data-generating process in any of these questions. The only “assumptions” I make are that the information is true (so yes, the envelope in Q3 matches the family), that the information (whether or not it is sealed) is about one gender, and that information WILL NOT be sufficient to determine the complete makeup of the family. Suggesting otherwise is usually a sign that you have reached your answer first, and are trying to justify it by assertion.

Your error is that you seem to be deciding the answer is 1/3 first, forcing you to assume whatever makes that so. You literally said that when you said the probability must become 1/3.

I do look at this problem from the beginning with no assumptions. If you want to be pedantic, the probability space comprises the sample space (the set of possible outcomes), an event space (a set of subsets of the sample space with certain properties), and a probability function Pr(*) that maps each event in the event space to a number in [0,1]. The complete sample space is {BBb, BBg, BGb, BGg, GBb, GBg, GGb, GGg}, which I assume is what you want (B,G)^3 to mean. We then need the events {BBb, BBg}, {BGb, BGg}, {GBb, GBg}, and {GGb, GGg} to all have probability 1/4.

Since we make no assumptions about the how the lower-case letter is “generated” other than IT MUST MATCH ONE OF THE UPPER CASE ONES, we get that Pr({BBb} = Pr(GGg} = 1/4 and Pr({BBg}) = Pr({GGb}) = 0. What we need to determine is how we get Pr({BGb})+Pr({BGg}) = Pr({GBb})+Pr({GBg}) = 1/4.

In order to make the answer become 1/3 in Q1 and Q2, as you assert, we must assume that we do know how the lower-case letter is generated. In Q1 and Q2 we must assume it is an answer to “is there a girl/boy.” This makes one half of each pair 1/4, and the other 0. If we make no assumption, then the Principle of Indifference (literally, that we make no assumptions to distinguish functionally equivalent outcomes) says Pr({BGb}) = Pr({BGg} = Pr({GBb}) = Pr({GBg}} = 1/8. This makes one answer:

A1 = Pr({GGg}) / [Pr({BGg}) + Pr({GBg}) + Pr({GGg})] = (1/4) / [1/8 + 1/8 + 1/4] = 1/2

Yes, this is a variation of the Monty Hall Problem. Most "solutions" to it are really just explanations for how it can make sense. The mathematical solution follows the outline I used above. It is based on the probability, if the door you choose has the prize (compare to a mixed-gender family), that Monty will open door X or door Y (i.e., the other two) as determined PRIOR TO it happening. If you assume it is 100% for the door he did open, which is only determined AFTER HAVING SEEN IT, like you want to assume in Q1 and Q2 that only a girl/boy can be mentioned, then the answer is that switching does not matter. It is only if you use the Principle of Indifference – meaning each has a 50% chance – that the answer is that switching wins 2/3 of the time.
by liampulles | 2025-08-31 15:28:17+00:00
I think the Java stream API is amazing, and I do like that.

Not having the equivalent of hibernate level ORMs is not a disadvantage for me personally, just because I don't like ORMs - Asking chatgpt to spit out some SQL and mapping code for me and being able to tweak the actual SQL over time is preferable (but again that is just my preference).

I don't really agree with the idea that Go has an underdeveloped type system, I think its contraints lend itself to productivity in other ways. Of the various languages I've worked with, Go programs I expand have the highest chance of working the first time I run them, because the compiler and language server A) give meaningful indications of mismatched usages and B) older Go projects have a very good chance of just working, without me having to worry about getting them going with my IDE again. B is a product of the fact that they have been very conservative with the language.
by cdrini | 2025-08-31 15:28:26+00:00
The best research I've seen on this is:

- Threatening or tipping a model generally has no significant effect on benchmark performance.

- Prompt variations can significantly affect performance on a per-question level. However, it is hard to know in advance whether a particular prompting approach will help or harm the LLM's ability to answer any particular question.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00614
by TeaBrain | 2025-08-31 15:29:06+00:00
I've recently eaten at several restaurants where the menus were only available via a link reachable from a QR code. At the last place, I asked if the 13 page menus were available in physical form and the waiter explained that they didn't have any. Technically, a phone doesn't need to be that "smart" to reach a QR code and access a web page, but it's just one more way that people are being locked into using phones for tasks that previously didn't require them.
by Fargren | 2025-08-31 15:29:26+00:00
I made two comments in this thread. The one you replied to, and this one I'm using now to respond to you. Do you have me confused with someone else?

But yeah, I think "within our lifetime" is a critical qualifier, and most people who are not writing it down are implicitly assuming that the qualifier is obvious. I have very limited interest in technologies that will not exist until centuries after I'm born, other than as entertainment.

Without that qualifier, almost any practical discussion about technology is moot. It's fun to talk about FTL or whatever, but we certainly should not be investing heavily into it... It might be possible, but most research on that direction would be wasteful.
by wredcoll | 2025-08-31 15:30:09+00:00
Wow, yeah man, referring to an attempt to exterminate a population as a genocide is definitely just as bad as calling for the extermination of minorities. That's definitely the same level of morally wrong.

Like, this is literally my point, "abolishing the police" may not be the most effective way to build a better society, but there's absolutely nothing morally or ethically wrong with saying it. If you don't get this, I'm genuinely not sure how to explain it, but here's a short attempt:

A police force/buildings/cars/employees are an artificial construct created by a series of laws passed by a (in this case) democratic government. Repealing/passing new laws that removes the police system is just a neutral action in the same way that creating them in the first place was.

People say "abolish the police" because they genuinely believe it will help everyone. People do not say "deport brown people" because they think it will help everyone. You get how this is different, right?

Also, lol, you said "cancelling people" like it was a real thing. What happened, did someone have an invitation rescinded because they said something offensive? Wow, yeah, uninviting someone is definitely some kind of awful moral hazard. That person was entitled by his existence to give that speech, dammit!
by numpad0 | 2025-08-31 15:31:17+00:00
There was a multiple years of gap between rollout of voice call specification on LTE(VoLTE) and launches of first featurephone operating system supporting it. Android and iOS were only implementation available for a while. For this reason, practically all "featurephone" style phones that supports voice call, except very few, runs AOSP. At the point where your product runs AOSP, you might as well launch it as a low end smartphone, which is what a lot of vendor do.
by dvdkon | 2025-08-31 15:31:24+00:00
IoT sensors, thermostats, dashcams, home intercoms, mobile data modems, smart TV dongles... I could name a dozen more products that could have an old phone as their heart, if they were cheap, unlocked, and easier to develop for.

An iPhone doesn't have to be an iPhone forever, and end-users don't have to be the ones doing the conversion. All we need is a law that would stop phones from going to a landfill and instead actually get them recycled as general computing devices.

The market can figure out the rest. If manufacturers today are willing to deal with antique toolchains and expensive programmer gear to save a few cents on microcontrollers, imagine what they could do with cheap boards running Android or iOS.
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-08-31 15:31:45+00:00
Fractions are under any modulus are actually representable as whole numbers (provided they don’t share factors with the modulus).

For example under mod 21 a half can actually be represented by 11. Try it. Times any even number by 11 and you’ll see you halved it.

Take any number that’s a multiple of 4 and times it by 16 under mod 21. You now have that number divided by 4.

Etc.

Absolutely nothing to do with quantum computers.
by berdayev24 | 2025-08-31 15:32:29+00:00
I built this after I saw some stuff about how AI paradoxes are entering the mainstream. Also wanted to test replit.

The quiz shows 6 headlines, some real from Reuters/Bloomberg, others completely AI-generated.

The disturbing part: humans are scoring 34% on average. That's worse than random guessing (50%).

The AI uses sophisticated tactics: - Fake "leaked memos" that sound plausible - Specific but fabricated statistics - Mixing real companies with fictional events

No framework, just vanilla JS and minimalist CSS. No ads, no email capture, just wanted to raise awareness about AI deception capabilities.

Curious if the HN crowd beats the average, whats yer score?
by locusofself | 2025-08-31 15:33:04+00:00
I could probably live without iMessage (though I wouldn't love it), but the one thing I really cannot live without is a great camera. My child is still young, my wife and I are still enjoying ourselves (when we have time), and I really do cherish the photos. I know I could get a separate camera, but it's not the as being able to snap photos spontaneously.

What I really want is a super reliable way to block social media from my iPhone, only allowing a short window per day.

I use "Freedom", but it doesn't reliably block things, and I end up cheating.
AI and Games
by shehabyasser | 2025-08-31 15:33:08+00:00
I have been working on Reinforcement Learning for years, on and off. I decided to dedicate some time in July and August to working on it, a couple of hours a day on average. I implemented several RL algorithms, including DQN and Policy Gradient (REINFORCE), by hand across multiple Atari games, and utilized Stable Baselines for standardized benchmarking. I aim to expand the number of games and algorithms, creating a unified model to play them all, similar to previous publications. Additionally, I plan to extend this to board games, enabling the creation of customized agents. Some rely on well-known planning algorithms like Monte Carlo Tree Search, while others can clone the behavior of famous players. This requires a smart storage solution to index and serve all the games, which is a fun engineering challenge nonetheless. Stay tuned!

https://github.com/shehio/rl

Scroll down for the videos!
by ayaros | 2025-08-31 15:33:23+00:00
Both Apple and Google should just bite the fucking bullet and let people install whatever they want.

Apple, for their part, should have just buried the option to "sideload" deep in the settings. They could have put up a dialog, or maybe 5 dialogs in a row, each one scarier than the last, warning the user that if someone told them to do this, they are being scammed. They could have done it every time someone installs an app from outside the App Store. Make the user wait 10 seconds or a minute between each dialog. Put the option behind their passcode, or their Apple ID password. Void AppleCare if they do it, for all I care. They could have done any of this. Anyone actually concerned about their security would have avoided it anyway.

This is what they should have done. Now it looks like regulators are going force their hand. Why Google is doing this now, of all times, is beyond me. Have they read the news lately?

The regulation should be for phones, computers, and game consoles too.

I know this isn't an unpopular opinion... whatever. I gotta vent somewhere.
by blfr | 2025-08-31 15:33:47+00:00
It's weird because "sideloading" accurately captures that you're doing something ad hoc outside of the main channel. You install software with your package manager, from the app repository, and you sideload it with `curl | bash` or manually moving an .exe/.msi/.apk.

This is a fine distinction. And it will happen and should happen because there are always gaps. Without a way to fill them, you're left with a subpar experience.

And while many people are fine with it on their iPhones, I can't really imagine not having ReVanced apps, Molly, or a dozen other little fixes.
by conradludgate | 2025-08-31 15:34:05+00:00
It's not only the nonce. The nonce helps to ensure that the message re-encrypted doesn't have the same ciphertext, but the known plaintext can still be used to forge messages. What stops message forgery is the message tag that TLS has (using the AEADs like AES-GCM or ChaCha20Poly1305).

That said, the nonce is still very important to avoid most key recovery attacks
by dfxm12 | 2025-08-31 15:34:57+00:00
around a third of senior developers with more than a decade of experience are using AI code-generation tools such as Copilot, Claude, and Gemini to produce over half of their finished software, compared to 13 percent for those devs who've only been on the job for up to two years.

A third? I would expect at least a majority based on the headline and tone of the article... Isn't this saying 66% are down on vibe coding?
by cyanydeez | 2025-08-31 15:35:15+00:00
Ok, so ignore your goveenment paranoia. Sure theyre out to get you.

But ask yourself, would business do this anyway? The answer is yes. Google needs a growth target and modeling app store lockin and fees is there.

Youre free to live in paranoid government land, but its an unnecessary abstraction. Its actually the EU and US rulings against their monopoly thats driving it.

Again, the paranoia is just drivel.
by api | 2025-08-31 15:35:19+00:00
It’s worth noting that the reason we are deploying PQ crypto is not that we are 100% convinced QC is coming soon. It may or may not depending on how development goes.

The goal of cryptography is to make something as close to theoretically unbreakable as possible. That means even theoretical vulnerabilities are taken seriously.

For ECC and RSA and related algorithms we have a theoretical and physically plausible pathway toward a practical machine that could break them. That means many cryptographers consider them theoretically broken even if such a machine does not exist and may not exist for a long time. The math works even if we can’t build it yet.

So it’s considered prudent to go ahead and upgrade now while no QC exists. That way if some major advance does arrive we are ready.

Nobody’s talking seriously about replacing SHA2, AES, ChaCha, etc because there is no physically plausible theoretically valid path to a machine that can break these in, say, less than many millions of years. AFAIK there is no proof that such a path does not exist but nobody has found one, hence they are considered unbroken.

Note that cryptography is not the only or even the most useful application of QC. Things like physical stimulation of quantum systems, protein folding, machine learning, etc. could be more useful. Like digital computers there’s probably a ton of uses we don’t know about because we need to tinker with the machine to figure them out.
by solaire_oa | 2025-08-31 15:35:24+00:00
This happened for me as well. It adds insult to injury that lying awake, unable to sleep properly for months straight, doomscrolling (or just being online too much) further saps your mental health in an already drained and depressed state.

It's a pretty messed up negative feedback loop. If you find yourself in this state, audiobooks are a good alternative.
by sevenart | 2025-08-31 15:35:39+00:00
This is propaganda from "co2coalition" - an organization that states:

Currently atmospheric CO2 is near historically low levels, and recent increases from human CO2 emissions have been beneficial to both our ecosystems and to humanity. By any scientific measure, CO2 is not a pollutant.

The CO2 Coalition is primarily funded by donations from individuals, conservative foundations, and corporations. Major donors have included the Charles Koch Foundation and other conservative and energy-sector-related donors.
Ask HN: Would this idea combat the population decline problem in many countries?
by amichail | 2025-08-31 15:36:02+00:00
What if the government ran a weekly lottery where only people who have a baby and/or raise a child are eligible? You’d be automatically entered every week for free.

For each baby you have or raise, you’d get one lifetime ticket. So, for example, a couple who has three babies, puts one up for adoption, and raises two would end up with 3 + 2 = 5 tickets in the weekly lottery for life.

Do you think this idea would be effective in combating the population decline problem that many countries face?