MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by msabalau | 2025-08-25 14:42:06+00:00
Taiwan benefits from the US having access to some additional chip manufacturing to support a war effort and reduce the economic cost of intervening. At the end of the day, Taiwan can resist, slow down China, and make them pay an absurdly heavy price for trying to invade, but US participation is needed to break a blockade and end the conflict.

None of this was ever being done because there an expectation that chips were going to be exported to Taiwan in the middle of a conflict.

Yes, like every other security partner, Trump's immature and inconsistence isolationism makes things worse and unstable. But it was hardly the case that intervention would have be 100% assured under any other President, and it's not the case that that its at 0% under Trump. Improving the odds of intervention, slightly, regardless of who is in office, benefits Taiwan.

Moreover, Putin didn't attack US forces when he invaded Ukraine. There is a significant chance that the PRC would launch a Pearl Harbor style attack on the US and Japan at the outset of a campaign against Taiwan. That dramatically increases the odds of the US being involved in the conflict over the long term. Sure, it's also likely (probably more likely) that the PRC might try more limited form of coercion instead, but one ought to be prepare for the range of possible options.

It is worth observing that one of the major reasons why US conservative China hawks give for not wanting to support Ukraine is because it's not a vital US interest, and they want to focus on preparing for war with China and hopefully deterring it.

It is really unclear you should say why that the Ukraine is being treated "poorly", it is being treated how you'd expect an more isolationist administration who thinks it is a strategic distraction would treat it. The current US administration may well be wrong about this--there's definitely a case to be made that further increasing the cost to Putin for aggression increases deterrence in Asia. But the current administration was very clear in the election about how they felt about Ukraine, and they won.

The argument that unless Trump treats Ukraine "not poorly" no one, anywhere, ever, ought to anything to bend the curve to increase the odds the the US intervening on their behalf seems rather sentimental and unpragmatic.

It seems likely that Taiwan leaders have a better grasp than you do of the strategic choices they are making, and that random feelings about how "poorly Ukraine has been treated" don't enter into it.

If you just hate Trump, it would be easier and more direct to say that, rather than seeming to claim that other people in the world are acting irrationally.
by b3lvedere | 2025-08-25 14:42:33+00:00
It's mentioned in the article as well

"Another good use for nuclear batteries is to supply power in remote locations on Earth. Beginning in the 1970s, for example, the Soviet Union deployed over 1,000 RTGs in northwestern Russia to power its uncrewed lighthouses, radio beacons, and weather stations. Most of these batteries ran on strontium-90, and each weighed about 2,000 kg. The United States has deployed hundreds of similar systems for remote power both on land and on the ocean floor, particularly for remote monitoring sites in the Arctic."
Show HN: Encyfr – post-quantum encryption for all
by theyoungsir | 2025-08-25 14:43:29+00:00
I wanted proper post-quantum crypto tools on my phone, so I built encyfr. There’s no telemetry, no accounts, and everything runs locally.

It supports key generation/management, file encryption, and signing with the NIST pqc choices (Kyber, Dilithium, AES256) as well as password modes. Normally I haven't bothered circulating my work, but several recent concerns about phone compromise can be resolved with proper encryption utilities like these (e.g. any agency with a GrayKey).

I’m curious if others here find this kind of thing useful/interesting, and what features would make it genuinely useful to you. Not available in France.
by maxloh | 2025-08-25 14:43:58+00:00
Adobe Reader (or Acrobat Reader) is still the industry standard for PDF documents, though.

I once found that a PDF file created with OnlyOffice displayed as intended on Chrome, but its embedded font couldn't be recognized or rendered correctly on Acrobat.

I keep Acrobat installed only for verifying the integrity of the PDF files I've created.
by chrisweekly | 2025-08-25 14:44:20+00:00
"Compared to unit tests, a test harness is a [usually] simple standalone application that incorporates the system under test, and presents a user interface. Since it is for testing, it may expose internal metrics and allow the user to access parts of the code that are usually hidden."

^ from https://littlegreenviper.com/testing-harness-vs-unit/
by slowhadoken | 2025-08-25 14:44:21+00:00
I’m not a Democrat either. I’m thinking in terms of a timeline. COVID was from roughly 2020 to 2023 so Biden would have gotten 2/3 COVID vaccinations and lockdowns. Biden and Democrats were criticized by Republicans for keeping lockdowns going too long, that Biden bungled things (as you put it).

What’s your criteria for “bungled it as bad as the US”? The US didn’t start COVID so that’s something to keep in mind too.
by lan321 | 2025-08-25 14:44:51+00:00
You paid extra for the large, experienced corporation to do it. If it failed, it was outside of your power since they have a reputation and resources, but it just did not work out.

Startups have no reputation. If they fail, you'll be asked why you picked them, and any answer you give is based on your judgment of their abilities, which was wrong since they failed. If you say it was to get X done cheaper, you're the cheapskate who wasted X$ trying to save Y$.

There are also very often situations where your corpo has used corpo X for 5 prior/current projects and is satisfied, so picking them also gives you the backing of those other projects, should something go wrong.

It partially makes sense, but it's also largely office politics. You really don't want to have a complex explanation when you're in the crosshairs of some angry bossman 2 tiers above your boss.
by gethly | 2025-08-25 14:44:52+00:00
> the refresh tokens should theoretically not expire

That is subjective. In essence, they should last long enough so the client can use them to get new access token without the user(resource owner) having to authorise a new grant. Each client is different with different needs and the scopes might be too sensitive to provide a long lasting access. So as usual, it depends.

In my server implementation, access tokens are valid for one hour and refresh tokens for 30 days. I also return refresh tokens with each access token request, so as long as the client makes at least one request per month, they do not have to bother the user for a new grant.

I just wish the spec would have a dedicated "refresh_expires_in" field in addition to "expires_in" for refresh tokens, so the client would be better informed about this. As refresh tokens are part of the spec, though optional, their life span information is lacking here.
by pessimizer | 2025-08-25 14:44:59+00:00
Why, pray tell, would a similar series of events be relevant to a completely different series of events except as analogy? Let me use an extremely close analogy to illustrate:

Imagine someone shot a basketball, and it didn't go into the hoop. Why would telling a story about somebody else who once shot a basketball which failed to go into the hoop be helpful or relevant?
by ewhanley | 2025-08-25 14:45:59+00:00
That's sort of the tradeoff, though. You get the convenience of having tp show up without having to to through the steps of shopping for it. Except in extreme cases, it seems likely your roommate will pick something that is effectively a commodity at a reasonable price. If you want granular control over brand, features, and pricing, you'll have to pay for it in time and/or money.
by znpy | 2025-08-25 14:46:32+00:00
> Ah so the coding was done locally but run remotely?

Both, depending on the case and how much you were inclined to fiddle with your setup. And on what kind of software you were writing (most software had a lot of linux-specific code, so running that on a macbook was not really an option).

A lot of colleagues were using either IntelliJ or VScode with proprietary extensions.

A lot of my work revolved around writing scripts and automating stuff, so IntelliJ was an absolutely overkill for me, not to mention that the custom proprietary extensions created more issues than they solved ("I just need to change five lines in a script for christ's sake, i don't need 20GB of stuff to do that")... So ended up investing some time in improving my GNU Emacs skills and reading the GNU Screen documentation, and did all of my work in Emacs running in screen for a few years.

It was very cool to almost never have to actually "stop working". Even if you had to reboot your laptop, your work session was still there uninterrupted. Most updates were applied automatically without needing a full system reboot. And I could still add my systemd units to the OS to start the things i needed.

Also, building onto that, I later integrated stuff like treemacs and eglot mode (along with the language servers for specific languages) and frankly I did not miss much from the usual IDEs.

> I nearly went insane when I was forced to code using Citrix.

Yeah I can see that.

In my case I was doing most of my work in a screen session, so I was using the shell for "actual work" (engineering) and the work macbook for everything else (email, meetings, we browsing etc).

I think that the ergonomics of gnu emacs are largely unchanged if you're using a gui program locally, remotely or a shell session (again, locally or remotely), so for me the user experience was largely unchanged.

Had i had to do my coding in some gui IDE on a remote desktop session I would probably have gone insane as well.
by Arnavion | 2025-08-25 14:47:03+00:00
If enough websites block the entire ISP / city in this way, *and* enough users get annoyed by being blocked and switch ISPs, then the ISPs will be motivated to stay in business and police their customers' traffic harder.

Alas, the "enough users get annoyed by being blocked and switch ISPs" step will never happen. Most users only care about the big web properties, and those have the resources to absorb such crawler traffic so they won't get in on the ISP-blocking scheme.
by thomascgalvin | 2025-08-25 14:47:05+00:00
For me, an important distinction is whether or not a human is reviewing the edits suggested by an AI.

I toss all of my work into Apple Pages and Google Docs, and use them both for spelling and grammar check. I don't just blindly accept whatever they tell me, though; sometimes they're wrong, and sometimes my "mistakes" are intentional.

I also make a distinction between generating content and editing content. Spelling and grammar checkers are fine. Having an AI generate your outline is questionable. Having AI generate your content is unacceptable.
by PunchTunnel | 2025-08-25 14:47:44+00:00
And those exceptions largely prove the rule - the default expectation (not just desire) is that those things not happen. They still do, but it's not something that occurs to most off the tops of their heads. When you educate people on civil forfeiture you get a lot of shocked Pikachu; somewhat fewer with severe water quality issues, but I think that's mostly due to broad publication of Flint's situation in particular raising general awareness.
by lproven | 2025-08-25 14:47:54+00:00
I'd argue 2017: that was the year Chromebooks first outsold Macs in the USA.

(I know, the fanboys and penguin Taliban will rage that ChromeOS is not the True Linux, etc., but ignore them.)

Two things are non-obvious about this info.

1. The numbers are by value not by units. An average Mac is about 5x the cost of the average Chromebook.

2. This is long pre-COVID. The pandemic was very good for Chromebook sales and they've slackened off since, but the boom began well before.
by crazygringo | 2025-08-25 14:47:57+00:00
You don't. That's not something graphic designers ever do as compensation for perceptual uniformity.

I looked into it a bit more, and it turns out it's a result of OKLCH easily producing colors out of gamut, and then choosing to sacrifice hue accuracy for better saturation accuracy.

That's a fundamental design flaw if you ask me. Changing hue is completely unacceptable in my book.
by oliwarner | 2025-08-25 14:49:23+00:00
That isn't how this came to be.

Small-c conservatism, think-of-the-children Think Tanks™ have long been a part of British politics and we go barely a week between legitimate studies and idle thought pieces where we introspect modern parenting and despair.

Like it or not, kids have access to the internet in a way that wasn't true 20, 25 years ago. Parents of teens are just realising the horrors of targeted online bullying, diet clubs, porn sharing (Snapchat and worse) and the many other small things that can just destroy kids before they've had a chance.

"But Oli," I hear you say... Yes. Parents should do better but criminalising parenting methods is hard and expensive and leaves you with a bunch of state-orphaned kids. So if we are to assume parents gonna parent, systems like this look tempting to people who don't understand the Internet.

I'm not defending the law, I just don't think this one has its roots in surveillance. It's a shitty reaction to a shitty situation.
by iggldiggl | 2025-08-25 14:49:43+00:00
One problem I've run into with that approach is that Akamai uses DNS for steering you to the correct portion of its CDN and the default servers you get from public DNS have abysmal peering with my ISP. So simply switching the default DNS in my router isn't enough, I'd actually have to run my own custom DNS resolver in order to special case Akamai there.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-08-25 14:49:43+00:00
> If there were a compelling rationale, [I] would expect NPR to downplay it.

Exactly – Given your editorial stance, I expect that you would expect that, and yet the evidence here shows that you were wrong to: There was no compelling rationale for this action, thus NPR could not have reported one, thus they did not report one.
by travisgriggs | 2025-08-25 14:49:53+00:00
If you see code itself as state… then isn’t any program long lived state.

Richard Gabriel made some statement to that effect in his 50 languages talk, the debate between Lisp and Smalltalk being “is code state or is state code?”, both circling the same drain.

How is a docker container not a modern realization, in part, of what both camps were yammering on about years ago?
by j_w | 2025-08-25 14:50:00+00:00
Swap is really interesting. The idea of swap sounds super useful - you get more RAM than you have. The reality is that RAM speeds are so important to fast computing that once you start to need swap, what you really need is more RAM on your machine.

If somebody told me they were running into issues with swap on linux I would ask them why they don't just get more RAM. I'm currently running 32GB and have never used swap on this machine. That includes gaming and local LLM usage (which my GPU does not have enough VRAM for, so normal RAM gets involved).
by bachmeier | 2025-08-25 14:50:19+00:00
> people think when the AI bubble bursts, LLMs, diffusion models etc. will just vanish, and they will absolutely not vanish

I don't care if they vanish. I just want the hype to die. The last few months this site would more truthfully have been titled LLM News. I use LLMs but for the most part I find discussions about them boring.
by camgunz | 2025-08-25 14:50:30+00:00
I can use those processes to understand things at a high level, but when those processes become detailed enough to give me the same level of understanding as coding, they're functionally code. I used to work in aerospace, and this is the work systems engineers are doing, and their output is extremely detailed--practically to the level of code. There's downsides of course, but the division of labor is nice because they don't need to like, decide algorithms or factoring exactly, and I don't need to be like, "hmm this... might fail? should there be a retry? what about watchdog blah blah".
by DonaldFisk | 2025-08-25 14:50:33+00:00
This isn't a new issue, and it predates the internet. There were publishers of magazines containing pornography (or anything else unsuitable for children). These were sold in shops. A publisher had to ensure that the material in the magazines was legal to print, but it wasn't their responsibility to prevent children from looking at their magazines, and it's difficult to see how that would even be possible. That was the responsibility of the people working in the shops: they had to put the magazines on the top shelf, and weren't allowed to sell them to children.

On the internet, people don't get porn videos directly from pornographic web sites, just as in the past they didn't buy porn directly from the publishers. The videos are split up into packets, and transmitted through an ad hoc chain of servers until it arrives, via their ISP, on their computer. The web sites are the equivalent of the publishers, and ISPs are the equivalent of the shops. So it would make a lot more sense to apply controls at the ISPs. And British ISPs are within the UK's jurisdiction.

And before anyone points out that there are workarounds that children could use to bypass controls, this was also the case with printed magazines.
by FuriouslyAdrift | 2025-08-25 14:50:36+00:00
Welcome to "Japan's No. 1 Mole Station"

-The staircase is 338 meters long and has 462 steps.

Climb the stairs to the top of the 143m (24 steps)

Go through the connecting passage and you will reach the ticket gate.

The elevation of the down platform is 583 meters above sea level, and the elevation of the station building is 653.7 meters, meaning the difference in elevation between the station building and the down platform is 70.7 meters.

It takes about 10 minutes to get to the ticket gate.

Please be careful of your step when climbing.

Doai Station
by speerer | 2025-08-25 14:50:39+00:00
Autotranslate below. The 'unclear' was added by me and originally read "Welcome to Japan's No.1 Google", which seems like it might be ab error.

Welcome to "Japan's No.1 [unclear]"

・This staircase is 338 meters long and has 462 steps. Climb up the steps and go through a 143 meter (24 step) connecting passage to reach the ticket gate.

Also, the altitude of this downhill platform is 583 meters above sea level, and the altitude is 653.7 meters, and there is a difference in elevation of 70.7 meters between this and the downhill platform.

It takes approximately 10 minutes to reach the ticket gate.

Please be careful where you step.
by adrian_b | 2025-08-25 14:50:57+00:00
This has nothing to do with tetrachromatism.

The border of the color space corresponding to monochromatic colors is convex, so any triangle inscribed in that curve border will leave parts of the color space that cannot be reproduced on a display.

The convexity of the border means that if you compute the 3 coefficients of RGB colors that match a desired color, there will always be some colors that need one negative coefficient, regardless of the choice for the RGB primary colors. On any display, it is impossible to realize a negative brightness of a color, so on a RGB display there will always be some colors whose hue and brightness can be reproduced, but their saturation cannot be reproduced.

The only way to make smaller the parts of the color space that cannot be reproduced is to take more points on the monochromatic border, replacing the triangle of reproducible colors with a polygon that fits more closely the curved border.

The entire color space perceived by humans could be reproduced on a display only with tunable lasers, not with fixed-frequency primary colors. One could use fixed-frequency primary colors only if they would stimulate directly the photoreceptors in the eye, to enable workarounds for the overlapping filter characteristics of the cones and for the signal processing done in the retina.
by HankStallone | 2025-08-25 14:50:59+00:00
Yeah, portrait photos aren't as narrow as that. I just measured some of mine, and they're 5x7, 8x10, and 11x16. By comparison, 9x16 feels claustrophobic.

I suspect that a still image is also different from video because, without motion, there's no feeling that if the person might move a few inches to one side and go out of frame.
by like_any_other | 2025-08-25 14:51:12+00:00
> Suggesting water was never drank.

Sounds like a straw man, or at least a weak man [1], debunked, and then the debunking is falsely applied to the whole category.

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweap...
by chrisweekly | 2025-08-25 14:51:21+00:00
Great examples, thanks for sharing links to a real project. But I'm confused by your assertion, > "In the days of old, we often called them "Unit Tests."

My understanding is, test harnesses are standalone wrapper apps dedicated to testing, vs more granular unit tests which are traditionally colocated with (eg, files alongside) app src code in a given project. Care to elucidate?
Show HN: Aikeedo – Your complete AI workspace (hosted and self-hosted)
by vusalorujov | 2025-08-25 14:51:28+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m Vusal, a software engineer who’s been building and selling SaaS-ready, source-available software for a while. My product is called Aikeedo. Until now, I’ve been selling licenses to other developers and companies who wanted to run it under their own brand and domain.

Recently I thought: why not “dogfood” it? So I’ve launched Aikeedo as a hosted SaaS, while continuing to sell the self-hosted version.

What it does: Aikeedo is a platform that lets anyone run AI tools (chat, content generation, etc.) with a simple API and web interface. Buyers of the licensed version get the full source code to self-host. Now, the hosted version means you can just sign up and start using it without setup.

Why I built it: While selling licenses, I noticed many small teams and individuals didn’t want to deal with hosting, deployment, or maintenance—they just wanted to use the software. At the same time, some companies wanted the opposite: complete control, source access, and branding. I decided to support both.

How it works (hosted version):

- Free plan: try smaller/legacy models with 100 credits/month. - Paid plan: $10/month for all features and models (1000 credits/month). - Extras: buy permanent, non-renewing credits anytime ($1 = 100 credits).

Teams & workspaces: Paid plans can create workspaces and invite up to 10 users to share the same subscription (planning to increase this limit). Teams can share AI generations and credits across the workspace.

What’s different:

- Source-available and self-hostable if you need control (we keep selling licenses). - Or use the hosted version if you want zero setup. - Simple pricing; no hidden tiers.

What I’d love from HN:

I’d love feedback from this community. What do you think about supporting both hosted and self-hosted models for the same product? Are there gaps you’d see as a user? Anything about pricing or usability that feels off?

You can try it here: https://aikeedo.com/

I’ll be around all day to answer questions.
by smelendez | 2025-08-25 14:51:46+00:00
Yeah, it’s implementing it well that’s the issue. And securely: Now the laptops have Bluetooth and WiFi, and you can assume some talented and obsessive CS students have access and are regularly finding ways to jailbreak them.

Also, having classrooms full of laptops full of tests assume classrooms are secure and at many colleges they’re unlocked by default. There could be a 9am class and exam, then the room is empty until 11, then the same thing until a class at 2 and a night class at 6, and at 8 the PenTesting and Lockpicking Club meets in the room.

Keeping dozens or hundreds of laptops in every classroom also dramatically shifts the reward for burglars which colleges will not like.