MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bsimpson | 2025-08-25 20:23:34+00:00
Two things are happening at the same time.

On the one hand, government is broken writ large. It's been dominated by politicians who care more about power than improvement for as long as I've been alive. The problem becomes worse and feels more intractable every year. I'm not convinced there's anything individuals can practically do to help resolve it. (Those in power would ruin your life if you actually did a good job at making the world better in a way that impinged on their power.)

On the other hand, technology is enabling rules to be enforced in a more automated way. You see this with speed cameras, and now also with these stricter shipping requirements.

These rules were written to have an exhaust valve: for speed limits, that's police discretion. For imports, that's the de minimus exemption. Nobody cares what individuals do; they care what markets do (which is part of why bans are usually bans on selling, not on owning).

I touched on this a little bit about self-driving cars the other day too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44987516

The ratcheting of rules into automated policy is dystopian.
by JohnFen | 2025-08-25 20:23:49+00:00
If we really wanted to be that heavy-handed, a body camera could do all that while being far less expensive and far less intrusive. I'm still not seeing the benefit of AR here. What perceptual augmentation do you see as being helpful?

But AR system or something short of that, it can't replace imprisoning everybody because it can't stop instantaneous wrongdoing such as many kinds of homicide.

Home confinement seems like it would be equally as effective as this sort of thing (and arguably less cruel), without burning all that cash or invading the privacy of all the people the criminal may get near.
by Night_Thastus | 2025-08-25 20:24:19+00:00
>it just wants the user to like it

It uses words and phrases most commonly associated with other text that humans have labeled as "helpful", "friendly", etc. That sort of thing.

That's different than wanting. It's text probabilities in a box. It can't want anything.

I am normally not a stickler, but in this case the distinction matters.
by mattofak | 2025-08-25 20:24:55+00:00
It's possible it never made it into production; but when I was helping to commission a 4 rack "supercomputer" circa 2010 we used APC's in-row cooling (which did glycol exchange to the outside but still maintains the hot/cold aisle) and I distinctly remember reading a whitepaper about racks with built in water cooling and the problems with pressure loss, dripless connectors, and corrosion. I no longer recall if the direct cooling loop exited the building or just cycled in the rack to an adjacent secondary heat exchanger. (And I don't remember if it was an APC whitepaper or some other integrator.)

There's also all the fun experiments with dunking the whole server into oil, but I'll give you that again I've only seen setups described with secondary cooling loops - probably because of corrosion and wanting to avoid contaminants.
by FreakLegion | 2025-08-25 20:25:09+00:00
dsign's callout of the minutiae of comma placement is a useful starting point because it's largely rhythmic, and monotony, you could say, is the enemy of rhythm. My go-to example here would probably be the comma splice, which is inflicted on people learning to write in English (while at the same time being ignored by more sophisticated writers) but doesn't exist in e.g. French.
by m463 | 2025-08-25 20:25:16+00:00
There are so many simple solutions, just like phone privacy is fixable (firewall your phone)

I just don't think anyone wants to fix it. Why can't apple let us send "spam risk" to voicemail?

Like adding extensions, possibly with passwords to your phone line.

It would be good to give an extension or password to friends, or one for each business, which can be automated to input with a pause after answering, and it gets through (or further) if possible.

we should have phone rules just like mail rules.
by BoredPositron | 2025-08-25 20:25:19+00:00
He wants to be called a good boy, so the LLM calls him a good boy. Since the LLM is a machine that does what you want, he's essentially doing it to himself. It might not be a conscious choice, but there's still intention behind it. Kein Herr im eigenen Haus. (No master in one's own house.) - Sigmund Freud. He was wrong about a lot of stuff but this is one thing that still stands.

It's called unconscious intention, and here's a pretty interesting paper that'll bring you up to speed: https://irl.umsl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1206&contex...
by kube-system | 2025-08-25 20:25:29+00:00
Well, any group that owns more of an asset class will experience more of whatever swing in value it experiences, right? Isn't it as simple as that? 80% of boomers have a house, and only 55% of millennials do. If all homes go up by 100%, the average boomer will have 80% more wealth, and the average millennial will only have 55% more wealth. The gap in their wealth will increase.
by kazinator | 2025-08-25 20:25:32+00:00
> Today's

This is false. The observation that being too nice and trying to please people is counterproductive, and putting it into self-help or pop-psych books, goes back to at least the 1970's.

For instance, see the book Creative Aggression, The Art Of Assertive Living George Robert Bach, Herb Goldberg [1974]

That stream of thought was probably the foundation of the whole "me" decade of the 1980s and all that followed.

Oh yeah, and then of course there is material like the writings of Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness [1964]

If we go centuries back we have Machiavelli's The Prince and whatnot.
by pbronez | 2025-08-25 20:25:43+00:00
Yeah, the big video platforms are constantly working on better ways to store and deliver video. If this stuff is applying to some workflow that automatically generates Shorts from real videos... whatever. Very similar to experimenting with different compression schemes. Video compression can differ on a per-shot basis now!

If you want to make pristine originals available to the masses, seed a torrent.
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-08-25 20:25:55+00:00
You're acting like human nature, wanting the easy way out, is something that can be overcome by education.

It can't. Full stop. It needs to be a choice of the people involved, to do the hard good thing, unless it is otherwise imposed on them. We enjoy "freedom" in the sense that the good choice is often not imposed, because enough people make the good decision regardless. If AI successfully convinces enough people to not make that choice, despite all the lecturing on why you should make the proper choice, we're screwed unless we clamp down hard.

I do know that a society with the level of cognitive dependency that AI risks introducing, and is already introducing, literally cannot function without collapse. Do you want a society intellectually dependent on advanced manufacturing techniques in one of the most geopolitically at-risk regions of the world?
by tialaramex | 2025-08-25 20:26:21+00:00
Stroustrup's description saya that "The idea of providing an output operator rather than a named output function was suggested by Doug McIlroy" but doesn't specify that Doug asked for this weird operator re-use which is the part I object to.

I agree that the manipulators are awful. I don't think you could "scope" the manipulators in the way you want without changing C++ because the compiler would need to tell the stream "Hey, I'm done now" and that's not how expressions work in C++, there's no "done" step when the expression's result isn't further used.

Because it has compile time reflection C++ 26 will probably make it practical for more C++ libraries to grant their types interesting formatting (with std::format and related modern stuff, not I/O Streams), and it will be educational to find out whether the result is a Cambrian explosion of interesting new ideas nobody can live without by 2040 or a sprawling disaster that is regretted in similar threads to this ten years from now.

This is a trick Rust doesn't get to do - unlike std::format, Rust's formatting rules are carved in stone, your type can be formatted only in pre-determined ways, if in a few years every C++ Goose type provides {:honk} and {:flap} which every Goose user intuitively understands then too bad the Rust Goose libraries can't do that, they're reduced to abusing existing features such as {:#} (Rust's alternate display flag) and hoping that's enough. To "fix" that the Rust language itself would need to revise the entire Rust formatter feature, whereas to do it in C++ just took writing some hairy constexpr code, expert mode for sure but hardly beyond possibility for the library maintainer.
by lenerdenator | 2025-08-25 20:26:37+00:00
There's precious little value for those types to read stuff like "Snow Crash".

It's like the people saying "It's obvious these STEM people didn't take humanities courses". Well, yeah. The dream for the incoming freshman at Stanford's CS program isn't to graduate with a degree. The dream is to have some VC come onto campus, see some BS project the freshman cooked up, tell the freshman "You're literally Jesus Christ, and I want to fund your startup" and drop out with access to millions in funding and a network of people who can give more funding when the original round dries up.

Humanities courses and reading humanistic conceptions of how tech could go wrong doesn't get you millions of dollars. Reckless abandon does.
by Night_Thastus | 2025-08-25 20:26:44+00:00
Because unlike a human who can identify that some lines of reasoning are flawed or unhealthy, an LLM will very happily be a self-contained echo chamber that will write whatever you want with some nudging.

It can drive people further and further into their own personal delusions or mental health problems.

You may think it's being critical of you, but it's not. It's ultimately interacting you on your terms, saying what you want to hear when you want to hear it. That's not how therapy works.
by ChuckMcM | 2025-08-25 20:26:45+00:00
As a systems architecture dilettante I really like the Power architecture. It is old school super computer / mainframe architecture on a chip. Parallel processing architecture that makes cross domain inferences impossible etc etc.

A crazy friend of mine had a workstation with a Power10 main board in it running Redhat Linux. Other than the fact that it used what was essentially a rack server main board so had these 8 fans that blew through the chassis like a 747 on take off it was pretty neat.
by ronsor | 2025-08-25 20:27:06+00:00
> The latest was a slow loris approach where it takes forever for robots.txt to download.

I'd treat this in a client the same way as I do in a server application. If the peer is behaving maliciously or improperly, I silently drop the TCP connection without notifying the other party. They can waste their resources by continuing to send bytes for the next few minutes until their own TCP stack realizes what happens.
by rideontime | 2025-08-25 20:27:16+00:00
Neither this article nor Wired's links directly to the complaint, leaving me wondering what, if any, evidence there is to support the claim that Grok would be ranked highest if not for deliberate suppression.

e: Searching for the complaint specifically brought me to this Reuters article that links to it; not linking the PDF directly because it's hosted by Reuters themselves. https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/elon-musks-xai-sues...
by diego | 2025-08-25 20:27:20+00:00
Meta has extremely opaque account policies. For example, I bought the Meta Raybans a month ago. It kept telling me the AI features were not available in my region, even though I am in San Francisco. I joined Facebook in 2006, and I have used my account for the Oculus headset without a problem. But no matter what I did, the AI function of the Raybans wouldn't work.

I ended up creating a brand new account just for that, and it worked fine. No idea why it would work with a brand new account and not with my old account in good standing, never suspended or warned about anything.
by pessimizer | 2025-08-25 20:27:45+00:00
It's always convenient to decide that the weak deserve to be exploited because they were too lazy or stupid to be strong. Then we can do the thing that makes the least sense, which is to design society to protect the strong.

Or rather, to justify what the strong were already doing and didn't have to ask anybody's permission to do, and that nobody else ever had a say about that mattered.
by teekert | 2025-08-25 20:28:03+00:00
It's just a dude that fell in love with an OS, let him enjoy it. Many people went through this phase, except he is very influential and high energy, so we hear a lot about his particular honeymoon. I for one am really enjoying his journey. Reminds me of myself when I first discovered Linux. I don't evangelize anymore, I helped to many people onto Linux only to have to watch them completely hate it, it's too painful ;)

Sure, a nice configuration.nix to try Ohmanix would be great, and much more convenient, easier to maintain and evolve than DHH's scripts. But that is not the point. Maybe he will try NixOS in a year, maybe he will land on some bootc distro. I don't care, I love his enthusiasm. Btw, on the Linux Unplugged podcast the hosts are following DHH closely and indeed experimenting with more modern ways of creating similar experiences. Partly fueled just by DHH's enthusiasm.
by bsimpson | 2025-08-25 20:28:15+00:00
If motorcyclists had the power to demand common sense policy improvements, filtering would be legal everywhere, and cities would start adding PTW (powered two-wheels: motorbikes and e-bikes) lanes alongside the current acoustic bike lanes.

It's a relatively small constituency. Most politicians don't want to upset the status quo to advocate for them. A lot of non-riders have enough negative experience (hearing scary stories or being startled by delivery drivers working within the current system) to actively add friction to the conversation.

For instance, NYC's current chief-of-police is a nepobaby. Her mom is a high society type who is afraid of bicycles, so the police have been actively abd specifically harassing cyclists this year.
by Scoundreller | 2025-08-25 20:28:39+00:00
> But a 15%+ price hike is going to be an uncomfortable narrative for those in power who insist tariffs won't raise prices... so I'm not betting that conversation goes logically.

As someone selling on eBay from notUSA, the cost increases won’t just be the tariff, but some additional fixed and variable fee for the privilege of determining the tariff and potential loss of the cheapest shipping options.

Friction begets friction!
by crazygringo | 2025-08-25 20:28:50+00:00
Well I'll be damned, you're right -- I'm playing with it in Photoshop now, and it seems to be exclusive to hue values of 233-270, in the transition from blue to purple, and nowhere else. Matches what [0] says -- "This is particularly obvious for deep blue and purple colors."

So first, thank you for the correction. It's fantastic to learn something new. And second, do you have any idea why the OKLCH example on the page is so atrociously bad? The way blue changes to cyan is even worse than the HSL/HSV difference of blue-purple. It's like the cure is worse than the disease. If they were so concerned with hue fidelity in the first place, I'm surprised they wound up producing an end result just as bad.
by liquidgecka | 2025-08-25 20:29:17+00:00
[I am not a current Google Employee so my understanding of this is based on externally written articles and “leap of faith” guestimation]

Yes. A supply and return line along with power. Though if I had to guess how its setup this would be done with some super slick “it just works” kind of mount that lets them just slide the case in and lock it in place. When I was there almost all hardware replacement was made downright trivial so it could just be more or less slide in place and walk away.
by chenxiaolong | 2025-08-25 20:29:19+00:00
If this is enforced via Play Protect, then the whole mechanism can likely be disabled with:

adb shell settings put global package_verifier_user_consent -1

This does not require root access and prevents Android from invoking Play Protect in the first place. (This is what AOSP's own test suite does, along with other test suites in eg. Unreal Engine, etc.)

I personally won't be doing this verification for my open-source apps. I have no interest in any kind of business relationship with anyone just to publish an .apk. If that limits those who can install it to people who disable Play Protect globally, then oh well.
by narmiouh | 2025-08-25 20:29:59+00:00
The problem with simple prompts it it gives AI the most leeway to do what it thinks is important, which may work in case of just convert from one language to another (even in those cases it took its own liberties - good or bad). This won't work when devising a new application from scratch or where you are expecting consistent agentic output to be usable in a predictable situation.
by jmcphers | 2025-08-25 20:30:19+00:00
Buying an album from e.g. Bandcamp is a better way to support a band than streaming their music on Spotify by literal orders of magnitude: https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/how-much-more-money-artists-e...

These days I listen to virtually all of my music from a Plex server containing all the music I've bought over the last few decades of my life. They have an app called Plexamp that brings almost all of the conveniences of Spotify to your local music collection (searching, streaming, offline downloads, smart playlists, auto artist mixes, etc.)

On the first Friday of every month (sometimes, but not always, "Bandcamp Friday") I buy a few more albums for the collection. I wind up spending more on music monthly than I would for a Spotify subscription, but not by a whole lot.
by _benj | 2025-08-25 20:30:56+00:00
It seems that it was only about time… it just feels like the pace of enshittification with big tech being able to get away with anything is crazy!

I’m hoping that projects like Precursor can take off because we’ve buried ourselves in such mountain of complexity that seems like only a billion/trillion dollar big tech company can make an OS.

But then again, some body called BS on browsers and we might have a good option soon in Ladybug!

https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor
by aborsy | 2025-08-25 20:31:00+00:00
Yeah I know, like Beelink 6 NVMe. But NVMe storage is not affordable at high capacities. So, I want two +14 TB HDDs for cold slow storage, and two 4 TB for fast warm storage for VMs, containers, databases, and applications.

I also need a lot of RAM for proxmox VMs and containers. The CPU in my experience need not have many cores. I mean truenas itself virtualized demands 8GB of RAM.
by hagbard_c | 2025-08-25 20:31:22+00:00
> Why even run Android at that point anymore? iOS devices get security updates for longer and have much less data collection than stock Android.

Because Google-free AOSP-derived Android distributions are far more versatile, offer far more freedom, impose far fewer restrictions and tend to end up being far less expensive than whatever the fruit factory decides their dedicants have to use today. If Google goes the way of the fruit folks and AOSP no longer offers these freedoms the next step is not to surrender to the Church of Apple but to find a way to evade those restrictions.
by theYipster | 2025-08-25 20:31:30+00:00
Hyprland is delightful, and the exposure DHH is giving both to it, Arch, and Linux is great.

Since Hyprland is composable and customizable by design, building out a functional workspace from scratch is an undertaking. On the other hand, there are number of other pre-configured dot-file "spins" worth trying that produce a nice Hyprland setup.

I like Omarchy, but ultimately settled on a Cachyos + Hyprland setup using Ml4W dotfiles. Like Omarchy, ML4W builds a very nice setup that isn't too garish and with sensible defaults. However, I benefit from Cachyos kernel optimizations and I'll admit I've become a convert to Fish. (Omarchy is the only Hyprland spin I've seen that keeps to Bash as the default interactive shell for Kitty/Alacritty.)

As I do like keeping up with Omarchy's evolution, it would be great if DHH could separate the Hyprland stuff from the rest of what he packages into his quasi-distro and make it available to folks who already have an Arch or Arch-derived setup they like. Personally, I'd like to revisit Omarchy from time to time without having to install another OS (Hyprland doesn't work well with VMs.)
by VincentEvans | 2025-08-25 20:31:46+00:00
Last time meta blocked my account was because I gave away free framing lumber after demolishing my poorly framed basement. Somehow it got flagged and that was that. Thankfully I don’t give a damn, and now never will.

Ps: some couple happily picked up 100 or so 2x4 studs of various lengths to build a greenhouse for their garden with.
by unsignedint | 2025-08-25 20:32:14+00:00
Maybe shutting down the entire phone system would be too disruptive, but perhaps we could start by rethinking incoming calls for individuals—or at least shift the social norm around them. In a sense, that trend has already begun, since most people won’t pick up if the number is unfamiliar. And in circles where multi-modal communication is the default, how often do you actually get a legitimate call over PSTN anymore?

Legitimacy aside, the only people who still call me without prior arrangement tend to be those who assume they’re entitled to my time and attention on demand. The phone has always been a disruptive form of communication—even if every single call were legitimate (which is far from reality)—because it disregards the boundaries of the recipient’s time.

That’s why I stopped giving anyone real-time PSTN access. For me, it’s voicemail-only now, and honestly, it’s the best decision I’ve made for cutting down on annoyances.
by leni536 | 2025-08-25 20:33:04+00:00
A function f(x) is said to be O(g(x)) if f(x)/g(x) is bounded, that is there is some C so that for every x, f(x)/g(x) < C .

In computer science f(x) is often some complexity function, like number of some specific operations when running an algorithm to completion.
by Kranar | 2025-08-25 20:34:25+00:00
The objection, which I agree with, is to the statement "Any method that works for some programs will fail for others, and in some cases, no method will work."

There is no case where no method whatsoever will work. It's true that for any method, there are cases where it fails but it's not true that there exist cases for which every method fails.
by 3036e4 | 2025-08-25 20:34:27+00:00
Android also allows apps that can run arbitrary code, like emulators and various other runtimes. I think iOS still doesn't? I have not written an Android app in ages, other than at work, but I often write silly little things running in the Löve 2D Loader, or TIC-80, or DOSBox, or just command-line tools running in Termux (I hear there is an X-server as well to run GUI applications from Termux?).

As long as they still allow running stuff inside of apps like that I will probably not abandon ship yet.
by jcalx | 2025-08-25 20:34:32+00:00
This article and its associated HN comment section continue in the long tradition of Big O Notation explainers [0] and getting into a comment kerfuffle over the finer, technical points of such notation versus its practical usage [1]. The wheel turns...

[0] https://nedbatchelder.com/text/bigo.html

[1] https://nedbatchelder.com/blog/201711/toxic_experts.html
by zer00eyz | 2025-08-25 20:34:42+00:00
> cooling is moving the heat completely outside of the building while it’s still liquid.

We have been doing this for decades, it's how refrigerants work.

The part that is new is not having an air-interface in the middle of the cycle.

Water isn't the only material being looked at, mostly because high pressure PtC (Push to Connect) fittings, and monitoring/sensor hardware has evolved. If a coolant is more expensive but leaks don't destroy equipment, and can be quickly isolated then it becomes a cost/accounting question.