MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fuzzfactor | 2025-08-26 05:20:24+00:00
Methanol is pretty good on its own in gasoline-capable engines if the firmware was right and there were no components in the fuel system sensitive to "pure" alcohol.

It just physically gives the lowest mileage per gallon compared to other alcohols, which still all give shorter range per tank compared to plain hydrocarbons. This is not really that big a deal on the road but for aviation it can make all the difference, so that would have to be where it makes sense to process all the way to a synthetic hydrocarbon fuel. Or if there was actually surplus energy, more energy could be stored by processing the alcohols into lower-oxygen-content higher-energy-density liquids. On a per-tank storage basis too.

Regardless of less energy per gallon, methanol and ethanol do burn with higher octane ratings than most premium gasolines.

Plus in case of fire, alcohols burn with a blue flame too faint to see in sunlight so 15% hydrocarbons are added which would result in a yellow flame instead. That's why the M85 and E85 are only 85% alcohol.

I have seen some renewable naphtha that smelled pretty sweet but like ordinary petroleum naphtha, is not a drop-in replacement for finished gasoline since the antiknock rating is way too low. But naphtha of some kind still makes up the bulk of gasoline blendstocks which are then enhanced with more costly higher-octane hydrocarbons and often 10% ethanol too to barely meet specifications for consumer gasoline. After running it through the analytical lab this renewable stuff was clean clean and I would have to estimate as a liquid it was way less toxic than the natural organic virgin straight-run naphtha obtained from crude oil. And the virgin sweet petroleum naphtha is concentrated from "sweet" crude by distillation without depending on any chemical reactions, and it gags you a lot less than the catalytic naphtha which has been chemically or physically "cracked" into different nasty-smelling hydrocarbons that did not exist naturally within the crude oil to begin with.
by anenefan | 2025-08-26 05:20:51+00:00
This article does not reflect the situation accurately.

Australia's over the top knee jerk action in the 90s is not a gold standard for gun control.

Almost immediately a black market in gun trade started up via importation (or worse theft) - thus since modern hand guns were not very common amongst the criminal elements up my was (North Qld - Australia) - they soon were - also since not a great proportion of the population sought to get a gun licence, there was a shift to where the criminal element though having an illegal gun (pistol) would give them an upper hand - this IMO soon changed though after a few years, since having such when they were finally busted by the police was probably going to be jumped on harder than any other petty crime they might have endeavoured in.

What mattered most was giving the police the power to remove guns from and prosecute repeat mishandling tools. Scarring the wannabe crime lord / drug king / big time tough guy for what happened in the courts to the few unfortunate examples who mishandled a gun in public. Locking up any loose guns (this is somewhat painful if one needs quick access to a gun but ... it means to stop angry drunks and malignant narcissists having a temper tantrum doing something impulsive.) Controlling the sale of ammunition so that the criminal element has difficulty using any guns they do happen to have.

I miss the weekend gun culture that used to exist in my locale - but it's a different world now - short on common sense.
by idle_zealot | 2025-08-26 05:21:07+00:00
That's not what it's ever actually about. You're buying a disingenuous framing that pins blame on the bottom when all these harmful trends come from the top. This isn't to protect grandma, it's to protect Google. This is always what happens when you allow pockets of power with interests misaligned from those of most people. The pockets of power get their way, and people are worse off.
by jitl | 2025-08-26 05:22:11+00:00
I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a command line tool that makes this mistake, hooray for me. On the other hand lots more today support XDG_CONFIG_* and don’t litter ~ with random .dir stuff. I really like the new era of CLI tools that’s trying to be excellent in every dimension. Hopefully whoever needs to see this does and gets with the program! Although if it puts this much bee in your bonnet you can always open a pr
by quotemstr | 2025-08-26 05:22:54+00:00
> You're buying a disingenuous framing

Of course it's a disingenuous framing. A certain kind of person is both attracted to power and deathly afraid of people voicing unapproved opinions "outside their kitchens".

Things can have multiple justifications, some public, some not: some conscious, some not. Central control and a feeling that a parental figure is in control of the tribe primes, at a primal level, a certain kind of person to like an idea. The specific post-hoc justification is almost incidental.

That said, such things need a semblance of legitimacy to work. It'd be much harder to crack down on general purpose computing under the guise of safety if we had cultural antibodies agains safetyism in general.
by user568439 | 2025-08-26 05:23:28+00:00
I have 3 oversized air purifiers in my home.

I don't really know if they help to prevent infections but my wife has Long Covid and every time there is too much dust, pollen or smoke around us she gets pretty bad.

So we decided to buy them with little proof after she noticed she feels somewhat better when staying in a room with one. It could even be partially placebo but for the days with too much particles from outside I think it really helps.

Maybe we should rather have a full control of air flows in our home but that would be a huge investment for a very old house, also having air flowing with windows partially open on dry days also seems to help. Humidity ( and certainly mold) also has a clear negative effect so I had to buy a dehumidifier too
by dendrite9 | 2025-08-26 05:23:32+00:00
Coffee and chocolate are not domestically produced, nor are bananas which are like the potatoes of the fruit world in terms of how productive they are.

There are lots of nondiscretionary products that take a while to flow through to the point you notice them. The parts to repair the machines that make things for example. Or at a low level, the inserts used in mills to make things out of metal. There are other inserts available, but they aren't as good so they need replacement more often.
by throwaway2037 | 2025-08-26 05:23:57+00:00
I had to do some light research on Wiki, but it looks like Firefox OS was supposed to fill part of this void. Sadly, it was not successful, and the project lost funding and support from Mozilla. I think if Mozilla could not do it, it seems hard to imagine there is an open source org with more talent and money than Mozilla who can make it work.
by achierius | 2025-08-26 05:24:01+00:00
But that's the key point: these people weren't insiders, not before gaining their positions, and they didn't even really accumulate wealth. They gained benefits from their position, sure, but little of that was attached to their position -- rather, to their office, and when that office lapsed, so did those privileges. When Khrushchev was removed from office, he got a small pension (500 rubles/mo.) and a house + cottage in which to spend his retirement, and even that was considered relatively comfortable.

So what did they accumulate? Few acquired power for life; none acquired significant wealth, or a power base independent from the party-state. Even after the end of the union, it was not the former nomenklatura who became new oligarchs: by and large it was the security services and their affiliates who were able to feed on the corpse.

You're right to critique how I described class in the previous message, but what I was trying to accumulate was essentially the above. It's not perfect, but I think this is very much a situation where it's important to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I would far rather live in a society where my leaders were once workers like me, raised in the same way, and all men were subject to the same basic economic guarantees. What we live in today is the rule of oligarchs, and it'd be a big step up to merely suffer the rule of bureaucrats.
by wpm | 2025-08-26 05:25:22+00:00
Both options are wrong on macOS.

My configurations are preferences, stored in ~/Library/Preferences.

Even better if you store those as property lists and hook into CFPreferences so I can manage them with configuration profiles and use the defaults command to query and modify my preferences without having to open the app or read some 4000 line long JSONC file with 20 lines of settings and ~4000 lines of bad documentation.
by gchadwick | 2025-08-26 05:25:42+00:00
I'd disagree as the K, Q and V have distinct functions within the attention calculation. In particular when you're considering decode (next token calculation during inference which follows the initial prefill stage that processes the prompt). For decode you have a single Q vector (relating to the in progress token) and multiple K and V vectors (your context, i.e. all tokens that have already been computed).

> you can represent all of the transformer as wide single layer perceptron sequences

This isn't correct, again because of attention. The classic perceptron has static weights, they are not an input. The same mathematical function can be used to compute attention however there are no static weights. You've got your attention scores on one side and the V matrix on the other side.

Indeed I wonder if it's actually possible for a bunch of perceptrons to even 'discover' the attention mechanism given they inherently have static weights and they can't directly multiply two inputs (or directly multiply two internal activations). Given an MLP is a general function approximater I guess a sufficiently large number of them could get close enough?
by re | 2025-08-26 05:26:36+00:00
I doubt anyone running Unix-style command-line/TUI tools where the config files are expected to be edited by hand by the user is expecting to find it in the Application Support directory; that directory is not a directory that Apple intends for users to ever interact with directly:

> Put app-created support files in the Library/Application support/ directory. In general, this directory includes files that the app uses to run but that should remain hidden from the user. [emphasis added]
by bapak | 2025-08-26 05:29:34+00:00
Call me when macOS Tahoe is out of beta. Nobody is paying attention because the post is judging a beta product that literally has not completed the QA cycle.

By all means there are plenty of things to judge in macOS and there have been for a very long time. These for icons today are not it. The canary has left a very long time ago.
by tux3 | 2025-08-26 05:30:01+00:00
It seems like the roadblock is that most cli tools don't want to think too hard about XDG in the slightest, and they delegate to standard directory libraries.

Those libraries aren't normally in the business of creating symlinks, and if previous discussions are any indications, convincing them to add XDG support at all - let alone by default - seems on the same level as pleading Vim/Emacs users to just try Emacs/Vim
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-08-26 05:30:05+00:00
> How do you design a progressive consumption tax? Tax only private jets and yachts?

There are lots of ways to design a progressive consumption tax, but yes, one way is to tax luxury goods at a higher rate than essentials. This is already done in many states, for example, where groceries (or at least "basic" groceries like bread, milk and produce but not prepared foods) are exempt from sales tax.

Another way is a sales tax rebate, e.g. where everyone can file for a rebate of sales tax of, say, the first $10000 of goods in a year. So poorer people with lower expenditures end up having a much lower effective tax rate.
by jplusequalt | 2025-08-26 05:30:19+00:00
>Embrace it.

Embracing it means the software we all rely on becomes progressively worse, and our ability to understand and fix that software will decrease as well.

Embracing this also likely means we accept that our salaries will decrease, while others will lose their jobs outright.

Finally, it means we accept a world where people are now all reliant on AI trained and deployed by a select few companies to do our thinking. This is especially irksome when these companies are ran by the same people who previously ruined public discourse through social media apps, and gave a generation of children mental health issues and insecurities.
by jader201 | 2025-08-26 05:30:30+00:00
You’re applying a literal definition, but in practice, it can be different.

For (a simplified) example, if there’s a 30% tariff on a $100 item, all else equal, the price is now $130, and the customer that originally would have paid $100 is now paying $130.

But what can — and I’ve experienced firsthand — happen, is that the US retailer will eat some/all of the tariff in order to not lose the customers business (or even just out of goodwill).

Also, the foreign supplier can do the same thing. Rather than lose the business of the US retailer, they may, in turn, eat some/all of the tariff.

I’ve seen both of these happen with products I’ve purchased over the past few months.

I’m not saying this happens a lot, but I don’t know that it doesn’t, either.

I’m just saying that it’s not as clear cut as the definition.
by Incipient | 2025-08-26 05:31:44+00:00
If you have two competing providers, technically one could reduce margins to wear some of the tariff to out compete their competitor. Even if that DID happen, chances are wallmart etc would STILL put up prices, blame the tariffs, and just enjoy a higher profit margin.

Essentially even in an unrealistically optimistic position, the consumer will STILL get stuck with higher prices.
by anenefan | 2025-08-26 05:32:06+00:00
It's most unfortunate and sad when shootings happen esp where fatalities are involved.

However it all depends on how situations are handled. Sending unsuspecting police to do a welfare check - for instance when another state's police had already sensitised / inflamed someone who wanted to be left alone ... nutters need to be handled with care and / or special tactics used to subdue.
by microtonal | 2025-08-26 05:32:41+00:00
I am from 82 (Dutch) and I still remember vividly visiting the border/iron curtain in 89 (just before the wall came down). My mom would jokingly put her arm through the fence and say 'my arm is in communist East Germany' (technically DMZ I guess) and my parents would tell that they would shoot people trying to cross from the other side.

We often go to Germany, but this summer we went to Rügen. To get there we have to travel directly east, those trips just make you realize how close we were to the border and thus to an authoritarian regime.

Many of the buildings still had bullet holes and it felt like you could touch history.

When you know where to look, you can still find the scars everywhere. Our church tower still has bullet holes from WWII.
by quotemstr | 2025-08-26 05:33:19+00:00
> they refuse to see it this way

That's why the long-term future of app development is containers. It is not possible, on a human level, to convince people to lift even the lightest of fingers for the common good.

Consider https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/latest/

The XDG specification has been around for 22 years. It has real benefits for users. It's trivial to implement. Yet even in the year of our lord two thousand and twenty five I still see TypeScript developers complain that it's "too hard" to comply with "this BS" and just stick files in $HOME.

I've long given up on solving technical coordination problems by appealing to the universal goodness of humanity. The only thing that works is to sandbox applications at tightly as possible and direct all their access to the external world through narrow interfaces that do their best to limit shenanigans.
by DuckConference | 2025-08-26 05:33:30+00:00
They're big, expensive chips with a focus on power efficiency. AMD and Intel's chips that are on the big and expensive side tend toward being optimized for higher power ranges, so they don't compete well on efficiency, while their more power efficient chips tend toward being optimized for size/cost.

If you're willing to spend a bunch of die area (which directly translates into cost) you can get good numbers on the other two legs of the Power-Performance-Area triangle. The issue is that the market position of Apple's competitors is such that it doesn't make as much sense for them to make such big and expensive chips (particularly CPU cores) in a mobile-friendly power envelope.
by TkTech | 2025-08-26 05:33:30+00:00
Canadians who identify as religious are overwhelmingly Christian (53.5%)[1], with most of that being Catholic. The next most common religion is Islam at just 4% and Judaism is a paltry 0.9%. You're simply more likely to get anecdotes from the religion that is the vast majority.

In general, even the religious in Canada aren't very religious, so those who actively identify as it are likely to be _very_ religious. I have not a clue what religion any of our close friends are.

Canada becomes about 10% more agnostic/atheist every 10 years, which is a fun pattern[2].

[1] https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2021/dp-pd/pr... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreligion_in_Canada
by tastyfreeze | 2025-08-26 05:33:33+00:00
What a wonderful success the Federal Reserve redefinition of "inflation" has been. We will never get anywhere if everything that causes price increases is called inflation. Inflation is an increase in the money supply which also happens to increases prices.

Everything has trade offs. Diluting the dollar increases prices for nothing in return. Pretty much all downside for everybody but the top. Tariffs increase prices to the benefit of domestic producers and benefits everybody.

What we will see is if prices are more important than building skills and wealth of our fellow citizens.
by sema4hacker | 2025-08-26 05:33:47+00:00
I spent a dozen years working with the Pick system, both programming and helping produce the publications listed at https://sites.google.com/site/masteraddressfile/misc/ppp and even making a number of the original edits to the referenced wiki page.

In a 1985 critique of a rather poorly written book about the Pick OS I mentioned that some of Pick's most obvious characteristics were a good spooler but a lousy editor, that ordered files could only be traversed in one direction and only after a sort, and that there was no application-style input processor.

The system had many great features, but also many flaws and omissions. The biggest problem is stated in the wiki: Pick Systems was too focused and licensing and litigation, and devoted relatively little effort to marketing and improving its software.
by somenameforme | 2025-08-26 05:34:07+00:00
There actually are already domestically produced coffees in America! And if other coffees end up forced to significantly raise costs, that would increase the market share and production of these coffees. It could end up being a major economic boon to places like Puerto Rico. The link I mentioned also covered non-domestic inputs, and not just final products. It's about 4.7%.

The lion's share of imports are going to be alcohol and purchasing produce outside of season.
by kulahan | 2025-08-26 05:34:18+00:00
Thanks - that's a hell of a lot better than the original comment. I disagree, though. Officials are elected based on projects they want to undertake. Nobody is saying "I'm beating the national average cost of building a bridge by 17%!!" in their campaigns, they're saying they're gonna build a bridge. And it'll be damn impressive. A legacy, even. Might put my own name on it.
by closewith | 2025-08-26 05:35:58+00:00
> Visiting the website" is the method. It's nonsense to say that visiting from a different location is a different method.

This is a naive view of the internet that does not stand the test of legislative reality. It's perfectly reasonable (and in our case was only path to compliance) to limit access to certain geographic locations.

> I don't care if you won those disputes, you did a bad thing and screwed over your customers.

In our case, our customers were trying to commit friendly fraud by requesting a chargeback because they didn't like a geoblock, which is also what the GP was suggesting.

Using chargebacks this way is nearly unique to the US and thankfully EU banks will deny such frivolous claims.
by King-Aaron | 2025-08-26 05:35:59+00:00
The supplier absorbing the tariff isn't sustainable, they will always ultimately pass the cost on to the consumer one way or another. And your $130 example still demonstrates that the consumer just ends up paying more.

The whole idea is to dissuade the consumer from buying a foreign product, and choosing a domestic one instead. But if there is no domestic alternative, then it is always just going to be a case of "pay more or don't have it".

Anyway I just think everyone in the US are very silly for allowing this to happen. Very silly indeed.
by missedthecue | 2025-08-26 05:37:00+00:00
Yeah I was with Comodo before and it's like you said. I thought Azure signing was going to be a breeze because I've had my Azure account for years. I submitted with both EIN and DUNS and then they said I can't submit any more validation requests for this "property", so that's why I went the $100/mo support plan to get a human somewhere to click a button and approve this thing.
by tgma | 2025-08-26 05:37:09+00:00
The funny thing is Stallman started his fight like half a century ago and on regular days Hacker News shits on him eating something off of his foot and not being polished and diplomatic, and loves practical aspects of Corporate Open Source and gratis goodies and doesn't particularly care about Free Software.

On this day suddenly folks come out of the woodwork advocating for half baked measures to achieve what Stallman portrayed but they still hardly recognize this was EXACTLY his concern when he started the Free Software movement.
Show HN: PDF Barber – Edit PDFs in the browser, no uploads, full privacy
by mohdejaz | 2025-08-26 05:37:27+00:00
I built this because I didn't want to upload personal documents to random websites just to split or sign a PDF.

So I made PDF Barber (https://pdfbarber.com). Everything runs 100% in the browser, with no server involved. The only server call is for the contact form.

It is free to use, and I also offer a Chrome extension for convenience. I have already gotten a few paying users and lots of helpful feedback, which has pushed me to improve it further.

Would love to hear your thoughts or feedback.

Thanks!
by palmfacehn | 2025-08-26 05:37:35+00:00
The attempts to roll out digital ID are similar to the perennial efforts to backdoor encryption. When one push fails, the proponents regroup and formulate a new approach. The recent successes with "age verification" have encouraged digital ID proponents. Expect further encroachments, scaremongering and trial balloons.

Natural incentives exist for tech majors to capture this space.