MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ivewonyoung | 2025-08-23 04:00:12+00:00
The difference is that those companies eventually fail. The govt has essentially limitless taxpayer money behind it(till a currency crisis like Argentina, Greece etc. happens taking down the entire economy) because paying it is enforced by threat of violence and it can borrow and print money as much as it wants with deficit spending.

Also Theranos was aiming for something very innovative that still does not exist, whereas the govt IT systems are essentially glorified CRUD apps(no doubt complicated and with tricky integrations and need for reliability and security). It's an example where VCs could've exerted more scrutiny but chose not to and wasted their own money, hopefully a lesson learnt. As taxpayers, we have far fewer options, we cannot just pass on paying out hard earned money if we don't want to "invest".

Another example, the Queensland payroll system cost $1.2 billion over 8 years to develop, repair and maintain, to pay just 87K people. The initial estimated budget? $6.9 million.
by opello | 2025-08-23 04:01:56+00:00
I think I did understand that, specifically contrasting real property and intellectual property, but maybe wrongfully implied that theft could only apply to real property.

However, is there any argument for security camera footage like this instance to be considered a trade secret? Isn't that the only type of intellectual property it might be? It seems like if the business wasn't planning to derive economic value from the sale of the security camera footage (which seems like a generally safe assumption) it would fail to acquire trade secret protections.
by hluska | 2025-08-23 04:02:00+00:00
That’s unclear.

Mr. Mbengue plead no contest to a trespass charge. He was represented by an attorney with some prosecutorial experience so I think we can assume he received qualified legal advice based upon the facts of the matter. Under terms of his no contest plea, if he stays out of trouble for a year he can have his record expunged.

It sure looks like a plea bargain, in which case we’ll likely never know the actual charges the prosecution was prepared to proceed with. But there’s a clue in the article - when the report was provided to the Intercept, the locations of the security cameras were redacted. When CNN aired the clip, they apparently aired information that identified where that camera was located.

We’ll most likely never know the original charge the prosecution was prepared to proceed with, but the US takes airport security very seriously (as every country should). If taking a no contest on a trespass was considered an out, I wonder if the other charge started with a vowel like ‘e’.
by acaloiar | 2025-08-23 04:04:18+00:00
A mature CEO would characterize the "not good reasons" engineers had for not onboarding.

I think most people would agree that engineers outright refusing to comply with what was asked of them would be a "not good" reason for not onboarding.

But Brian Armstrong is playing Strong CEO for the podcast circuit. So he can't admit that engineers were let go for potentially justifiable reasons. He has to leave room for speculation. Speculation that maybe some engineers were let go for trivial reasons, because Brian is tough, and tough Brian demands complaint employees.

The people who didn't comply because they were on vacation and then had to go to a Saturday meeting to explain themselves think Brian is something -- but I guarantee it's not that he's tough.

We've all seen this playbook before. This is the incredibly dumb, Idiocracy-emulating world in which we now live.
by brendoelfrendo | 2025-08-23 04:04:47+00:00
Based on the install base and the level of access it could theoretically provide, I think a 0-day has a good shot at being worth more than $100k. Definitely worth more than that if you happen to know your high-value target plays League.

Fair competition is all well and good, but there are other ways to do it and I can already tell you that the war on kernel-level anti cheat is well under way. There are already people cheating in Valorant, and that will not slow down. If anything, it's going to get more common because cheaters and cheat creators are some of the most diligent people out there.
by nine_k | 2025-08-23 04:05:09+00:00
The backlash against systemd was twofold. On one hand, when released and thrust upon distros via Gnome, it was quite rough around the edges, which caused both real problems and just understandable irritation. Fifteen years after, the kinks are ironed out, but it was sort of a long time. (Btrfs, released at about the same time, took even longer to stop being imprudent to use in production.)

On the other hand, systemd replaces Unix (sort of like Hurd, but differently). It grabs system init, logging, authentication, DNS, session management, cron, daemon monitoring, socket activation, running containers, etc. In an ideal Red Hat world, I suppose, a bare-metal box should contain a kernel, systemd, podman, IP tools, and maybe sshd and busybox. This is a very anti-Unix, mainframe-like approach, but for a big consulting firm, like Red Hat / IBM, it is very attractive.
by adonese | 2025-08-23 04:05:28+00:00
> I would adore to see obtaining a drivers license ratchet up in difficulty in order to remove dangerous human drivers from the road.

I'd like to challenge this part. I don't see the value of increasing the driving license tests. Reckless drivers can be reckless regardless of their initial driving license tests. You just need drivers with sense of responsibilities. they will get to know road norms as they go, which often is far more valuable than the driving license quizzes.

Context: I moved to a new place where acquiring a license can take more than a year. It turns into a game where driving license companies deliberately fail you just to get you to pay more.
by mtalantikite | 2025-08-23 04:05:36+00:00
Yeah it’ll be interesting to see how it deals with our pedestrian traffic. I’m sure they’ll figure it out, but pedestrians are a whole different sort of thing here than on the west coast. I notice I don’t really jaywalk in LA, and do less in SF, but here in NYC it’s just what everyone does at every intersection in the entire city.
by mappu | 2025-08-23 04:05:47+00:00
Trixie now has go1.24 - including the upstream default GOTOOLCHAIN value to automatically download new compiler versions straight from go.dev if the go.mod wants them.

I was a bit surprised this is not a Debian Policy violation (and any Debian patches for security support may no longer apply), but at least the user experience will "just work". Cross-reference https://bugs.debian.org/1040507 .
by balamatom | 2025-08-23 04:06:03+00:00
Well yeah. English is a terrible language for thinking even simple thoughts in. The compulsive editing thing though? Yeah, and still can't catch all typos.

Gotta make the AI write these things for me. Then I will be able to post only ever things that make you feel comfortable and want to give me money.

Meanwhile it's telling how you consider it acceptable in public to faux-disengage on technicalities; is it adaptive behavior under your circumstances?
by sarchertech | 2025-08-23 04:06:24+00:00
There’s some massive hyperbole there. “Turning an entire generation into police informants.” Sure there’s some stories about that happening but it didn’t happen enough to move the needle in terms of things that actively harmed adults.

It was harmful because it was ineffective as a mechanism to help Children not because of some nefarious motives against adults.

The same with abstinence only education. Virtually all of the harm was because it was an ineffective policy to help children, not because of some tiny second order effect on adults because children werent educating parents.

Video game regulation was primarily about adding ratings to games which again only harms adults insomuch as children are a big market so developers are less likely to make mature games.

2 of the 3 examples you gave were definitely ineffective at protecting children, but in terms of harming adults, the effects were so minuscule that if that was the goal, the supporters failed severely.

As far as age checks. We have age checks for brick and mortar stores I’m fine with age checks for websites. You also can’t display pornography in public for kids to see.

There’s nothing about “but it’s on the internet” that makes me think it’s inherently ok to treat it differently.

I think there are probably better ways to do it than this Mississippi law, and a law in a single state will probably prove ineffective in general.
by perryizgr8 | 2025-08-23 04:06:47+00:00
This is an absolute failure of free market capitalism. The company which was at the forefront of the entire stack for decades (hardware design, chip design, chip fabrication, software design), headquartered in the freest modern country, slowly turned into a husk unable to compete with upstarts on the other side of the world.

Why is it that a fab is so much more exorbitantly expensive to run in US than in Taiwan? Wasn't higher labour cost supposed to bring disproportionately higher productivity? Why did Intel not build ultra advanced fully robotic fabs? Where's the innovation? Why did no other competitor crop up in the US when it has been clear for a decade that Intel is lost?
by hluska | 2025-08-23 04:07:58+00:00
Section A of 18.2-152.4 reads:

“A. It is unlawful for any person, with malicious intent, or through intentionally deceptive means and without authority, to:”

And Mr. Mbengue plead no contest to this charge, so he did not admit guilt but agreed to be punished as if he was guilty. He had an attorney with prosecutorial experience retained for his criminal proceeding so we can assume he entered that plea upon receiving qualified legal advice. Under terms of his plea, if he keeps his nose clean for a year, he can apply to have the charge expunged from his record.

So, this looks like a plea bargain. But since he plead no contest, the prosecution doesn’t have to prove anything.
by umanwizard | 2025-08-23 04:08:09+00:00
So what? That at most means they’re slightly different flavors of the abstraction we call “property”.

And owning property — even physical property — entails having the right to prevent other people from using it, even in ways that don’t deprive you of it. You can’t drive my car without permission, even if you bring it back in perfect condition and I wasn’t planning on using it that day.
by MengerSponge | 2025-08-23 04:08:26+00:00
Some answers are more subtle than a smartphone map.

My man, what on earth are you talking about w.r.t. Covid? There was substantial pushback. From early days. People ate horse paste. Entire states tried their best to let it rip. Even now wearing a mask has become political signaling, and vaccines are being targeted by the US executive.

I was talking about the link between carbon emissions and climate. I thought I'd do you the courtesy of a direct example that does ask people to fundamentally change their lives.

And I fear you've built a sizeable and unfortunate filter bubble for yourself. America had mild inconveniences, but we never had lockdowns. Nobody was ticketed for walking outside of their house. We closed schools (a good idea, because kids get sick and spread disease), and tried to stop people from gathering indoors unnecessarily (also unsuccessfully, mind you).

The US also fared terribly as a result of our ineffective and largely unsuccessful policies. It should be still another source of ongoing national shame. We did worse than Sweden, which is humiliating.
by E-Reverance | 2025-08-23 04:08:49+00:00
A lot of the styling looks very similar to some default choices popular llm's make; a default which I had never seen prior to their existence.

Also the ai-generated textures make it all the more likely that the rest of site is vibe-coded.

I'm not anti-ai per se, but using the defaults does affect my (and presumably others) impression of the quality of the site
by pas | 2025-08-23 04:08:52+00:00
but why priviligize XML? there's WASM and sites can have any kinds of codecs they want.

unfortunately(?) modern browsers are turning more into these sandbox and state managers with a few lower-level rendering engines bolted together (JS driving the DOM, plus CSS and SVG and audio and video and font and various image codecs and ...)

and if people want to copy the raw data URL the site can show them, plus HTTP provides the Accept and other headers for content negotiation so in theory the URL can be the same.
by mgr86 | 2025-08-23 04:09:48+00:00
A small comment for anyone new to xslt. The author references a wildcard rule in the comments [0]. While that is true, they are calling an identity transformation [1]. Identity transformations are very common in xslt.

[0] https://github.com/Evidlo/xsl-website/blob/0dda1d82ce1eb01b7... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_transform
by perryizgr8 | 2025-08-23 04:10:48+00:00
> impossible to comply with all of them simultaneously and still have a unified internet

We'll have 2 kinds of apps and websites.

One will be super nice products that only work in your country and you can't use it to communicate with outside people.

The other kind will work worldwide but because they would be spending so much more on compliance their product would be a bare minimum ad riddled crap.
by pyuser583 | 2025-08-23 04:10:54+00:00
Regarding containerization, XML wouldn’t just be a noun, but a verb (like in XSLT). You would define your remote procedures in XML.

Imagine if instead of the current Dockerfile format, we used XML, which was dynamically generated from lists of packages, and filtered and updates according to RSS feeds describing CSVs and package updates.

I’m not saying this is anything other than strange fantasy. And not a particularly nice fantasy either.

XML failed because it forced devs to spend tons of unproductive time on it
by Telaneo | 2025-08-23 04:10:54+00:00
> but folks outside of U.S. are perfectly cool with all manner of different TLS.

Users in other countries are very likely to be more familiar with both their own local domain, and have probably also experienced websites from neighbouring countries, while your average American has never even seen a website with a .us domain (never even seen it used myself), and are a lot less likely to have needed to go to a .ca or .mx website.

That said, I'd expect to get a similar reaction from people in other countries if you said your email was firstname.lastname@mydomain.christmas, or whatever other funny top level domain.
by sMarsIntruder | 2025-08-23 04:11:53+00:00
The observation about smartphone addiction is certainly valid, with studies showing average daily screen time exceeding 7 hours for many users, driven by algorithmic engagement.

BUT While the Metaverse could theoretically extend that immersion, historical execution suggests caution: initiatives like Horizon Worlds have struggled with user adoption and technical hurdles, indicating it might not seamlessly evolve from current devices as envisioned.

On the superintelligence front, focusing on empathetic LLMs for companionship taps into real societal issues like rising loneliness (e.g. reports from the WHO highlight it as a global health threat). This approach risks exacerbating dependency rather than alleviating it, potentially creating echo chambers of artificial interaction over genuine human bonds.

So yes, Meta shows some promise in these areas, but success is anything but assured. Their previous massive investments have largely failed to deliver the transformative changes they hyped.
by mukul767 | 2025-08-23 04:12:20+00:00
Thanks! Yes, betterAEO does both:

It checks structured data, schema, snippets, and trust signals since those heavily influence AI engines.

But it also analyzes content formatting, topical coverage, and answer structure to see how likely your page is to be picked up in ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, etc.

You’ll get specific AI-powered recommendations — for example, if missing FAQs, lacking citations, or not matching the dominant “answer patterns” AI prefers.

The goal is to give actionable insights, not just scores, so even a small blog can see exactly what to improve for better AI visibility.
by MantisShrimp90 | 2025-08-23 04:13:01+00:00
Remember, in other countries, especially eastern ones, the recommendation of even your local city means allot. There is a deeper trust of government bodies so this will likely have an impact.

And starting small is probably good, lets the idea iterate before rolling it out wider and this often comes down to making a choice, this city just thought this would be best and I suspect unless this goes horribly wrong it will help
by techpineapple | 2025-08-23 04:13:21+00:00
How do they reject DEI? I would be skeptical of any school so deep in the culture war it was one of the two ways you could describe them. Focus on academics.

Also how do they reject inclusion? Do they teachers tell the kids “you don’t belong here” as they pass them in the hallways?

For equity they must make the tests harder for some kids than for others. Intentionally hand out different grades for the same results.
by MengerSponge | 2025-08-23 04:13:47+00:00
And how that particular person felt on that particular day was in part a function of how well they slept, whether they read your application before or after lunch (c.f. Hungry judge effect), and any uncountable other things. Random.

Some people's world views aren't robust enough to handle the idea that some of what they got they didn't deserve. It's unfair in the best way. It's luck. It's grace. Every person with access to this website has been granted things well beyond what is "fair".
by westurner | 2025-08-23 04:14:10+00:00
> One of the most exciting aspects of this research is that magnetohydrodynamics, the theory of magnetized plasmas, turns out to be fantastically scalable.

"Magnetic Double Helix" (2025) https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/sz9k-6l22 :

> Magnetic flux ropes

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43603048 .. From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43044159 :

>>> Would helical polarization like quasar astrophysical jets be more stable than other methods for entanglement at astronomical distances?

"Deterministic remote entanglement using a chiral quantum interconnect" (2025) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-025-02811-1

"Magnetohydrodynamics" ... supermagnetohydrodynamics; supergravitomagnetohydrodynamics because what about gravity too

Marco Fedi's SQR; SQR predicts superfluids (Bose-Einstein Condensates) and also predicts Mercury's perihelion.

A Gross-Pitaevskii model of the solar system predicts the orbits of the planets including the perihelion of Mercury.

SQR incorporates Gross-Pitaevskii.

/? drodyn , pitaev , gravito https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42067233#42082690

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31383784 :

> "Gravity as a fluid dynamic phenomenon in a superfluid quantum space. Fluid quantum gravity and relativity." (2017)

>> Due to non-zero, positive viscosity of the SQS, and to Bernoulli pressure, these vortices attract the surrounding quanta, pressure decreases and the consequent incoming flow of quanta lets arise a gravitational potential. This is called superfluid quantum gravity. In this model we don't resort to gravitons. Once comparing superfluid quantum gravity with general relativity, it is evident how a hydrodynamic gravity could fully account for the relativistic effects attributed to spacetime distortion, where the space curvature is substituted by flows of quanta. Also special relativity can be merged in the hydrodynamics of a SQS and we obtain a general simplification of Einstein's relativity under the single effect of superfluid quantum gravity.

But what are the limits of scale invariance in these fields?

Re: unification of QG with QFT and the Standard Model: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40478219 :

> But the Standard Model Lagrangian doesn't describe n-body gravity, n-body quantum gravity, photons in Bose-Einstein Condensates; liquid light in superfluids and superconductors, black hole thermodynamics and external or internal topology, unreversibility or not, or even fluids with vortices or curl that certainly affect particles interacting in multiple fields.

Are magnetic flux ropes similar to helically polarized astrophysical jets like solar CMEs and the quasar jet that is pointed at earth? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39132365

Do helical or double-helical plasmas effectively beam energy?

How is a magsail different from a light sail?

Are there any deployed magsails? Are there combo solar+magsails?

A magsail could be built out of a superconducting loop.
by gwern | 2025-08-23 04:15:01+00:00
That is unintentional and a bug in the dark-mode.

For dark-mode, we rely on https://invertornot.com/ to dynamically decide whether to fade or negate/invert. (Background: https://gwern.net/invertornot ) The service uses a small NN and is not always correct, as in these cases. Sorry.

I have filed them as errors with InvertOrNot, and will manually set them to invert.
by musicale | 2025-08-23 04:15:32+00:00
Apple made one concession to consumer protection law and the FTC by changing the "free" button to "get", but I'm sure they know how those slot machines work, and where the money comes from.

At one point in-app purchases were listed clearly and prominently so they were easy to inspect (and hopefully embarrassing for nonsense like $99 wheelbarrows of smurfberries[1].) Now it seems like IAP rates are hidden below the fold, unfortunately.

[1] https://www.pipelinecomics.com/smurfberries-apple-app-store-...
by mastercheif | 2025-08-23 04:16:09+00:00
Samsung microLED required professional installation until a year or two ago. It’s essentially a mini-JumboTron made of individual panels. They’ve managed to reduce down to four panels on brackets.

If you want to install your $200,000 143” TV yourself here’s a video: https://youtu.be/oSpX2aZDPng
by benreesman | 2025-08-23 04:16:12+00:00
ASUD ProArt P16. I never want another machine. Slender, stiff, machined out of something expensive feeling. Everything works on 6.16, 4k OLED display, wonderful keyboard. Solid RDNA unit, NVIDIA card alongside.

With a clean hyprland setup, light as a feather, battery lasts forever unless you run it hard.

Makes M4 Macs feel bloated and cheap.
by kingstnap | 2025-08-23 04:16:40+00:00
If you have a market for it, the hardware industry will aggressively dig in to try to deliver. Maximum performance and maximum efficiency. So I can imagine there is still more to go.

I'm sure the relatively clean directed computational graph + massively parallel + massively hungry workload of AI is a breath of fresh air to the industry.

Hardware gains were for the longest time doing very little for consumers because the bottlenecks were not in the hardware but instead in extremely poorly written software running in very poorly designed layers of abstraction that nothing could be done about.
by perryizgr8 | 2025-08-23 04:16:48+00:00
> What if the file name is not valid UTF-8, though?

Then make it valid UTF-8. If you try to solve the long tail of issues in a commonly used function of the library its going to cause a lot of pain. This approach is better. If someone has a weird problem like file names with invalid characters, they can solve it themselves, even publish a package. Why complicate 100% of uses for solving 0.01% of issues?
by mdaniel | 2025-08-23 04:19:55+00:00
For consideration, one can pretty objectively determine a programmer who is not qualified. Secretary. CFO. Sysadmin. How would one judge a product manager? That there's no product? That it sucks balls? "We're soliciting feedback and finding product market fit, iterating, A/B testing, we'll be better next quarter, goto 1"

I wouldn't want that job, but I also don't currently know how to bring demonstrable evidence that they're incompetent, either

I have roughly the same opinion about UX folks, but they don't jam up my day to day nearly as much as PMs