MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zarzavat | 2025-08-12 15:45:17+00:00
> our privacy policy says "for longer than 14 days," as mentioned elsewhere in this thread — we don't actually store them at all, but the 14 day legal guarantee is to make sure that if someone accidentally commits a log statement, we have a little bit of time to catch it and revert without being in breach of policy

I'd recommend to rephrase your marketing, because not storing prompts is a huge selling point compared to deleting after 14 days (a lot of things can happen in 14 days)
by morkalork | 2025-08-12 15:45:19+00:00
I remember there was a blog by someone who implemented their own url-shortener and it turned into a huge amount of work fighting spam, scams and malicious actors abusing the system to the point of their domain was being threatened with blacklisting. But then again, if anyone has the transferable skills to handle that, it would be google since they're already battling the same bad people on all their other services.
by JohnMakin | 2025-08-12 15:45:44+00:00
One of a few issues I have with groups like these, is that they often confidently and aggressively spew a set of beliefs that on their face logically follow from one another, until you realize they are built on a set of axioms that are either entirely untested or outright nonsense. This is common everywhere, but I feel especially pronounced in communities like this. It also involves quite a bit of navel gazing that makes me feel a little sick participating in.

The smartest people I have ever known have been profoundly unsure of their beliefs and what they know. I immediately become suspicious of anyone who is very certain of something, especially if they derived it on their own.
by Nihilartikel | 2025-08-12 15:45:50+00:00
I'm entertaining sending my kiddo to a Waldorf School, because it genuinely seems pretty good.

But looking into the underlying Western Esoteric Spirit Science, 'Anthroposophy' (because Theosophy wouldn't let him get weird enough) by Rudolph Steiner, has been quite a ride. The point being that.. humans have a pretty endless capacity to go ALL IN on REALLY WEIRD shit, as long as it promises to fix their lives if they do everything they're told. Naturally if their lives aren't fixed, then they did it wrong or have karmic debt to pay down, so YMMV.

In any case, I'm considering the latent woo-cult atmosphere as a test of the skeptical inoculation that I've tried to raise my child with.
by gpderetta | 2025-08-12 15:45:53+00:00
I think you have a non-standard definition. An escaping pointer is an address that the compiler cannot fully track (directly or indirectly). It could be to a syscall, it could be a separately compiled function (without LTO), it could even be to a function in the same translation unit if the compiler cannot inline that function nor do sufficient intraprocedural analysis.

Again, I'm not a compiler writer, but my understanding is that non escaping variables can be optimized in SSA form, escaped variables are otherwise treated as memory and the compiler must be significantly more conservative.

In any case, whether a pointer escapes or not depends purely on the compiler capabilities and optimization level, so it would not be sane making a code well defined or UB depending on the compiler or optimization level.

edit: to be more concrete, do you think that in my example the constant folding of the return into return 1 should be allowed? And if so, which variant of this code would prevent the optimization and why?
by animal_spirits | 2025-08-12 15:46:01+00:00
> If someone is in a group that is heading towards dysfunctionality, try to maintain your relationship with them; don’t attack them or make them defend the group. Let them have normal conversations with you.

This is such an important skill we should all have. I learned this best from watching the documentary Behind the Curve, about flat earthers, and have applied it to my best friend diving into the Tartarian conspiracy theory.
by rayiner | 2025-08-12 15:46:02+00:00
> DEI can be done badly, of course

DEI in practice means racial preferences and quotas. That’s why the term arose around the same time as a renewed push for explicit racial quotas: https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2025/01/12/fifth-circuit-vac...

> and in an ideal world would be unnecessary

It’s not only unnecessary, it’s illegal. If you think historic discrimination had negative effects, just target the negative effects among all people similarly situated.

> Posit a merit-based test where any appointees of this administration would score better than their corresponding appointee of the previous administration

Aggressively pursuing the President’s agenda: https://www.donaldjtrump.com/platform. Political appointees are just that—political. The relevant standard of merit isn’t who is the best nerd, but who will best carry out the agenda the President campaigned on. The whole point is that voters can change the direction of the executive branch through electing the President, who in turn appoints like-minded cabinet secretaries.
by tonymet | 2025-08-12 15:46:19+00:00
Self hosting is a great idea. I’m curious which web features you find most useful? Is it primarily about PRs and code review?

I’m trying to think of what a bare minimum SSH remote experience would look like. Could you do code reviews with a terminal instead.

I love the git SSH experience for speed, but I find myself using GitHub for the PRs & code review. It would be nice to have a self hosted , terminal-based solution
by fbjork | 2025-08-12 15:46:24+00:00
Founder of Grafbase here.

Here are a few key differentiators vs LiteLLM today:

- Nexus does MCP server aggregation and LLM routing - LiteLLM only does LLM routing

- The Nexus router is a standalone binary that can run with minimal TOML configuration and optionally Redis - LiteLLM is a whole package with dashboard, database etc.

- Nexus is written in Rust - LiteLLM is written in Python

That said, LiteLLM is an impressive project, but we're just getting started with Nexus so stay tuned for a steady barrage of feature launches the coming months:)
by jl6 | 2025-08-12 15:46:28+00:00
Data centers don't really "use" water; it gets released back into the environment one way or another. What matters is whether the data center is in a water-stressed region. According to the article:

> The remaining areas are normal: Hertfordshire, London, Kent, Devon and Cornwall.

So maybe the advice should be to migrate your workloads from regional data centers into London data centers.
by xscott | 2025-08-12 15:46:30+00:00
> Perhaps you think it's fine if I took a copy of ChatGPT model without permission [...]

There are laws about copyright and trade secret.

> They haven't lost anything - just took a copy.....

Correct. This is why it's a copyright violation and not a theft.

> [...] fair use....

Fair use is also a legal term, and it has some (reasonably) specific meanings. It's noteworthy that the large copyright protection industries don't respect those terms and have automated DMCA takedowns to abuse people for things which age legal:

"the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use
by throw0101a | 2025-08-12 15:46:54+00:00
> My overall point is that profits that at one time would require a town, or be a major part of a city's economy, can be made with a small office's worth of staff.

This has been true for most industries even 'with-in themselves': it's called productivity growth.

The number of employees (or man-hours) needed to create (say) a tonne of steel has dropped a lot, so where previously you had 'steel towns', now a plant may just have a very few (and produce more tonnage than they've ever done).
by dkarl | 2025-08-12 15:47:10+00:00
Isn't this entirely to be expected? The people who dominate groups like these are the ones who put the most time and effort into them, and no sane person who appreciates both the value and the limitations of rational thinking is going to see as much value in a rationalist group, and devote as much time to it, as the kind of people who are attracted to the cultish aspect of achieving truth and power through pure thought. There's way more value there if you're looking to indulge in, or exploit, a cult-like spiral into shared fantasy than if you're just looking to sharpen your logical reasoning.
by ameliaquining | 2025-08-12 15:47:14+00:00
IIUC the name in its current sense was sort of an accident. Yudkowsky originally used the term to mean "someone who succeeds at thinking and acting rationally" (so "correctism" or "winsargumentism" would have been about equally good), and then talked about the idea of "aspiring rationalists" as a community narrowly focused on developing a sort of engineering discipline that would study the scientific principles of how to be right in full generality and put them into practice. Then the community grew and mutated into a broader social milieu that was only sort of about that, and people needed a name for it, and "rationalists" was already there, so that became the name through common usage. It definitely has certain awkwardnesses.
by lukebrandon | 2025-08-12 15:47:34+00:00
Hey Community!

This week on React Native Rewind, iOS finally learns Android’s favourite party trick with precompiled React Native builds, Rozenite turns DevTools into your personal debugging cockpit, and FlashList v2 makes scrolling so smooth it’s basically ASMR. Also: on-device speech transcription that leaves Whisper in the dust, and an iOS-only Liquid Glass effect that’s all shimmer, no shame.

Hope you enjoy the mix of speed, shine, and just enough over-engineering to keep things interesting.

If you enjoy this newsletter, your feedback and support are always welcome
by conductr | 2025-08-12 15:47:36+00:00
There was no tone. It was just concise. The problem is people online read things so literally they'd rather take offense than consider they're reading it wrongly. Such a lack of critical thinking in a world that is so heavily text based, lacking in context of body language and actual tone.

> This is the sort of language that makes many people feel unwelcome on HN

Really? How do you navigate as a functional person IRL if your sensibilities are so easily disrupted? I feel like if that's the case, you need to work on yourself first. Expecting the world to alter their stance and sugarcoat every word or POV is insanity. You're literally living life in hard mode by choice. I'm not a big fan of appeasing fragile people, I'm sure this is a generational thing but here's the thing, that cohort is going to live a majority of their life alongside my cohort and they're choosing to bring friction into the mix.

I think HN is a place for adults to talk maturely and generally "we" read past this stuff. Places like Reddit are places for kids (or immature adults) to talk, they would gladly turn the entire conversation into a dissection of word choice based on whatever is trending in the offends-me-today cult. This is a what keeps HN community, and our discourse, high quality.
by qcnguy | 2025-08-12 15:48:01+00:00
The UK didn't want unlimited immigration from the EU, and the EU refused to even consider the possibility of an exception, so the UK left.

It's not complicated, it's old history, and the fact that people are still describing this as "brits dumb hurhur" is racist and abusive. The idea that it could have got an exception, by the way, is yet more federalist lying. Cameron did a tour around Europe directly visiting member states, begging them to grant such an exception, and they refused. He returned with his "deal", presented it to the country and never mentioned it again during his campaign because it was an insult to the concerns of the voters.
by lenerdenator | 2025-08-12 15:48:09+00:00
Given that emails could contain adult material, and that you need to register yourself to view adult materials in the UK, what is one to do if they want to delete emails in their web-based email service of choice but hasn't registered?

"Oi oi, stop right there, in the name of His Majesty the King. 'ave you a deleting loicence?"
by Mountain_Skies | 2025-08-12 15:48:15+00:00
False positives undermine support for tools, LLM or not. I suspect that's what's going to kill off lots of these products, as humans endlessly chase after LLM hallucinations like the very early days of virus scanners that flagged every disk write as something that needed human approval. While it's possible AI security tools can discover patterns of infiltration behavior that a humans would overlook, it doesn't go much good if the reports are buried in mountains of intrusion fantasies. But lots of money will be made before the decision makers realize that the vendor promises don't come to fruition and headcount has to increase to manage use of the tools.
by Wurdan | 2025-08-12 15:48:26+00:00
I went through an acquisition by Microsoft (the Skype one) and I feel that independent leadership isn't all it's cracked up to be in such scenarios.

We were indeed left as our own division (other than the fact that Lync got merged into us in 2012) for quite some time, but the Microsoft culture seeped in via middle management anyway.

Skypers would leave on the ~2 year cycle that is common in tech and would get replaced by life-long Microsofters. They saw opportunities to have a bigger remit in a less mature division and applied internally. And they brought the company culture along with them much more than any decisions made by Satya.
by jhp123 | 2025-08-12 15:48:59+00:00
there are many indirect effects. Imagine a factory employing 80 low-wage "takers" (line workers etc) and 20 high-wage "makers" (managers etc). The owners of the factory make $1 million in profit every month as a taxable dividend. Well if you get rid of the line workers: no more factory, no more managers, no more dividend. This is why honest analyses go beyond simple tax balance accounting.

The other big impact is on price level. When you have an inverted population pyramid, fewer workers need to support more retirees and this shows up as inflation concentrated in labor-intensive industries like healthcare. So even if a program like Medicare really had more tax receipts per beneficiary after reducing immigration, it would also be spending much more per beneficiary under a labor shortage.
by kentonv | 2025-08-12 15:48:59+00:00
Yes, particularly when considering they stopped accepting new links six years ago. It's a read-only data set and the total storage backing it is probably trivial by Google standards.

But they actually backtracked and said they'll keep the "active" links working.

Why even spend the effort to remove the "inactive" links? They must feel they represent some sort of liability?

Or would it have been too embarrassing to just cancel the whole turn-down plan?
by bddicken | 2025-08-12 15:49:11+00:00
In the database world, serverless/autoscaling pricing is almost always more expensive for real workloads. The % of workloads where it makes sense is small. Ones where 90% of the time there's little small traffic and 10% of the time the DB sees large traffic spikes. Otherwise, just pay a fixed cost for the hardware you need.
by SkiFire13 | 2025-08-12 15:49:21+00:00
> I have an execution environment, Wasm, where doing this is pretty well defined, in fact. So if I want to read the memory at address 12345, which is within bounds of the linear memory (and there's a builtin to make sure), why should it be undefined behavior?

How would you define it? Especially in a way that is consistent with the rest of the language and allows common optimizations (remember that C supports variables, which may or may not be stored in memory)?
by bee_rider | 2025-08-12 15:49:47+00:00
I don’t think this is true, but I also don’t know anybody way to verify it either way. Enthusiast forums were always a better source, although native ads can mess that up.

But, even if ads are a necessary evil, they are definitely overhead (in the sense that they don’t actually accomplish anything, just influence the decision as to what should be done). Maybe we can define some sort of ad-efficiency metric for an economy; what percentage of the money is spent influencing decisions, what percentage is spent actually implementing the decisions…
by bobajeff | 2025-08-12 15:50:00+00:00
I wonder if the future positioning for RISC-V will be better support from manufacturers of SBCs than their ARM counterparts. Right now they are barely useable outside of Raspberry Pi, which unfortunately has had supply issues.

I know ARM chip makers can just rely on the smartphone, tablets and Roku market but since there is no such market for RISC-V they sort of have to be good as SBCs.
by hexis | 2025-08-12 15:50:45+00:00
Albert Ellis wrote a book, "Is Objectivism a Religion" as far back as 1968. Murray Rothbard wrote "Mozart Was a Red", a play satirizing Rand's circle, in the early 60's. Ayn Rand was calling her own circle of friends, in "jest", "The Collective" in the 50's. The dynamics were there from almost the beginning.
by runsWphotons | 2025-08-12 15:50:50+00:00
I will add that in addition to my longer comment, I doubt that "wealth gap" has much at all to do with these differences in criminality.

Yes, the US has a high gini coefficient. But the median income is very similar to the netherlands, with NL being maybe 5000$ higher. Median wealth per capita is very similar between the two and Americans have slightly higher purchasing power, although again pretty similar. I don't think crime is higher in the US because rich people are sending the poor into a murderous rage, and if it is so then it just indicates there really is a culture problem.
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-08-12 15:50:58+00:00
… however, even that is up for debate. Maybe the TV actor in your own example is Al Gore filming An Inconvenient Truth and the environmental scientist was in the minority which isn’t so afraid of climate change. Fast forward to 2025, the scientist’s minority position was wrong, while Al Gore’s documentary was legally ruled to have 9 major errors; so you were stupid on both sides, with the TV actor being closer.
by glenstein | 2025-08-12 15:51:46+00:00
I was wondering about this too. You could also say it's a sturgeon's law question.

They do note at the beginning of the article that many, if not most such groups have reasonably normal dynamics, for what it's worth. But I think there's a legitimate question of whether we ought to expect groups centered on rational thinking to be better able to escape group dynamics we associate with irrationality.
by gpm | 2025-08-12 15:51:48+00:00
I strongly doubt that US-Australia trade relationships played any role in the judges decision on this case (and, of course, everything else in this case occurred before Trump was even re-elected). Judges aren't in a role where they are negotiating, or particularly care about, international trade at all. Judges are intentionally separated from the political wing of the state in just about every western democracy.
by uecker | 2025-08-12 15:52:09+00:00
Language standards have much less power than people think and compiler-vendors are of course present in the standard working groups. Ultimately, the users need to put pressure on the compiler vendors. Please file bugs - even if this often has no effect, it takes away the argument "this is what our users want". Also please support compilers based on how they deal with UB and not on the latest benchmark posted somewhere.
by dylan604 | 2025-08-12 15:52:10+00:00
If the drives are spinning, they generate heat. The drives spin regardless if they are empty or full. In an array setup in large storage pools, there's no spinning down the drives either. Sadly, there's no countering these suggestions to those making them, as they clearly have no understanding of what they are talking about. They're just trying to make their 15 minutes.

It's one thing if they want to raise awareness of how much water is being used by data centers, but it crosses into absurdity with suggestions like "delete your data from the cloud".
by tonymet | 2025-08-12 15:52:21+00:00
git SSH remotes are easy, complete and practically free to host, with many features that GitHub doesn’t offer (like reflog, backup, updateOnPush, rebase & subtree), though you have to get comfortable with PR & code review via email or text file.

Sourcehut aka sr.ht is a free email-driven GitHub alternative. If you like email patches flows instead, check that out.

SSH unleashes the true distributed nature of git. With confidence you can move commits across instances , pushing to various repos. You can build some very flexible publishing and archiving patterns with git alone.
by bko | 2025-08-12 15:52:34+00:00
This is all just so exhausting. Why can't we ask why we just treat this as an engineering issue. If there is some issue with public water supplies, how can the government build infrastructure to mitigate those issues? You see the same thing with energy generation, as though energy is some God given finite resource that we have to cherish and allocate carefully. Rather they should treat it like any other good, allow prices to encourage additional supply and build around actual needs rather than judging whats a valid use of the resource
by qcnguy | 2025-08-12 15:52:57+00:00
If you define the US as the federal government then yes it has rolled back its powers several times:

- The Prohibition was implemented and then ended, i.e. the state gave up its power to ban alcohol.

- The Bill of Rights itself post-dates the founding of the USA. Those amendments were limiting the power of the state!

- Income tax rates were once much higher than they are today. Of course you could argue that this isn't a reduction of its power given that once upon a time there was no income tax. But it has nonetheless fallen from its once great heights.

- The federal government gave up its power to regulate abortion quite recently.

- In the 60s (or 70s I forget) the US government deregulated the airline industry and has never gone back.

- The War Powers veto. One could argue that it's not been effective because POTUSes have ignored it, but in theory Congress took away the ability for Presidents to declare war.
by alphazard | 2025-08-12 15:53:11+00:00
It would seem like the quintessential Rationalist institution to congregate around is the prediction market. Status in the community has to be derived from a history of making good bets (PnL as a %, not in absolute terms). And the sense of community would come from (measurably) more rational people teaching (measurably) less rational people how to be more rational.
by js2 | 2025-08-12 15:53:35+00:00
She was familiar with CDs for music but not with CD-ROMs for distributing software.

I also just double-checked this with my 24 y/o daughter and much to my chagrin, she also wasn't familiar with CD-ROMs. So that lead to a conversation about CD-ROM drives, ripping music, Napster, ... all things she was unfamiliar with.
by yndoendo | 2025-08-12 15:53:38+00:00
It is 2025 and the best spell checker is a search engine. Numerous time an application will not provide the correct word. Only solution is to try the word in a search engine and try using in a sentence if that fails.

In my opinion, this is where ML/AL local model, no internet required, would be the most beneficial today.

Even had to use a search engine with, "thoughts and opi" because I forgot how to spell opinion before posting this. In application spell checker was 100% useless with assisting me.