MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bko | 2025-08-22 19:06:21+00:00
I heard things about UK arresting people for social media posts but thought it was just a few cases cherry picked. But I recently looked up the scale of arrests and it's really insane.

Police are arresting over 12,000 people each year for social media posts and other online communications deemed “grossly offensive,” “indecent,” “obscene,” or “menacing.” This averages to around 33 arrests per day.

These arrests are primarily made under Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and Section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988, laws which criminalize causing “annoyance,” “inconvenience,” or “anxiety” to others through digital messages.

Utterly insane.

https://nypost.com/2025/08/19/world-news/uk-free-speech-stru...
Show HN: Any-LLM chat demo – switch between ChatGPT, Claude, Ollama, in one chat
by AMeckes | 2025-08-22 19:06:22+00:00
any-llm is a library that provides unified access to multiple LLM providers. switching between providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral, and even Ollama is just a string change. This demo makes it easy to look at and compare responses from different models. Interesting to see how ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and local models each reason through the same problems. Let us know what you think!
by metalman | 2025-08-22 19:06:40+00:00
truth. I have been off grid for a long time, my motivation to do so was founded in a grade school science project with the wreckage of a camera light meter, conclusion sunlight=electricity, blink, blink, blink! and one day after getting my first decent silcone pv panel leaned up against my no power hook up farm house, a guy pulls in on his harley, and after a bit starts raving about banning solar about 15 years ago, and now I have a realy visible array, and there is solar everywhere you care to look they tryin to turn back the tide, and have zero chance with that. the first pannel still runs and cost me more than $2.50 /watt, current prices hover around $0.20/watt......retail

also that first panel provided minimum lights and water for a house, then was installed on.the hood of a truck that got destroyed by bieng rear ended, and is now moumted on.another building providing lighting and power for small tools, chargers, etc. ie: the stuff is tough
by bsoles | 2025-08-22 19:06:43+00:00
I did it by moving to the Proton ecosystem: Proton Mail, Proton Calendar, and Proton Pass, with the added bonus of Proton VPN.

As much as I don't necessarily like it, I think we have to put a price on our privacy and personal data. And for me, paying for the Proton family plan seems like a good trade-off, at least for now. So far, I haven't got any emails to bounce when using the @pm.me or @proton.me email addresses, except once (I forgot which web site).
by skipkey | 2025-08-22 19:06:43+00:00
But that’s just it-as a design aid it can really go off the rails, but as a testing strategy it’s really useful in one domain. Defect fixing. If I can convince a junior engineer that when he gets a bug report to first write a test that shows the problem and then fix it, using the test to prove it’s fixed, it provides immense benefits.
by kubectl_h | 2025-08-22 19:06:44+00:00
I think a well designed winter specific FSD system is probably more safe in snow and ice than a human. For instance downshifting to ensure wheels continue to spin on slippery surfaces, subtle corrective steering to keep the vehicle within its lane, etc. should be easier for a FSD car since it won't panic and over-correct like most people do in those situations.

And if the car reduces speed when appropriate and some assholes start tailgating it, it won't suffer the anxiety of holding up 10 cars that want to drive beyond the safe, reasonable speed for the snowy/icy conditions.
by J_McQuade | 2025-08-22 19:06:45+00:00
Was going to post this on a now-deleted comment about anticheat being a hard problem, so popping it here because it might be relevant:

Anticheat is only hard because people are looking for a technical solution to a social problem. The actual way to get a good game in most things is to only play with people you trust and, if you think someone is cheating, stop trusting them and stop playing with them.

This doesn't scale to massive matchmaking scenarios of course - and so many modern games don't even offer it as an option - so companies would have to give up the automatic ranking of all players and the promise of dopamine that can be weaponised against them, but it works for sports in the real world and it worked for the likes of Quake, UT, etc. so I don't think it's a necessarily bad idea. Social ostracism is an incredibly powerful force.

However, it does mean that the big publishers wouldn't have control over everything a player does. Getting them to agree to that is probably the real hard problem.
by Scoundreller | 2025-08-22 19:06:48+00:00
It’s also expensive training and on-going cost when you add it all up.

Canada budgeted the cost of arming its border officers at ~$1 billion.

In the first 10 years, they fired them 18 times. 11 were accidents and the rest were against animal, usually to euthanize it rather than defend.

Works out to ~$55 million per bullet.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/cbsa-border-guards-guns-1.4...
by FollowingTheDao | 2025-08-22 19:06:49+00:00
That always meant mass. Message just means a large group. It doesn’t specify the amount.

221 positions across its Milpitas and San Francisco offices. WARN documents are generally required by the state in the event of mass layoffs.

And this might be important if you were looking for a job as a software engineer in the area.

“The most cuts, affecting 157 jobs, largely in software engineering roles, were at Cisco’s Milpitas office”

“I don’t want to get rid of a bunch of people right now. I don’t want to get rid of engineers,” Robbins said. “I just want our engineers we have today to innovate faster and be more productive and that gives us a competitive advantage.” Robbins said if AI keeps advancing at Cisco, the company could possibly hire fewer employees. Cisco did not respond to SFGATE’s request for comment on the latest round of layoffs.
by Sohazur | 2025-08-22 19:07:22+00:00
Yes, we are tracking for specific prompts and for general related keywords too. We show exactly how many times you are getting mentioned across 6 different LLMs, and where your competitors are. Moreover, with our GEO audits, we help you find your strengths and weaknesses, so you can optimize them right from the platform. Lastly, there are the visual graphs to show the progress after you make the changes.
by estimator7292 | 2025-08-22 19:07:55+00:00
Stuff like this makes me so glad that in my world strings are ALWAYS ASCII and one char is always one byte. Unicode simply doesn't exist and all string manipulation can be done with a straightforward for loop or whatever.

Dealing with wide strings sounds like hell to me. Right up there with timezones. I'm perfectly happy with plain C in the embedded world.
by jkaplowitz | 2025-08-22 19:08:00+00:00
If you focus only on healthcare, I agree completely. But then look at the rest of the system. I don't know about Sweden specifically, so I'll stick with Germany as the example I know better: free university education for everyone, strong unemployment benefits and worker rights, heavily subsidized mass transportation, lots of social housing even if still inadequate for the demand, the list goes on and on... Definitely not a cheap bill, and definitely more affordable when not having to spend that money on the military.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-08-22 19:08:13+00:00
> and I commonly see programmers saying thing like "you shouldn't use a debugger"

Sorry, but who TF says that? This is actually not something I hear commonly, and if it were, I would just discount this person's opinion outright unless there were some other special context here. I do a lot of web programming (Node, Java, Python primarily) and if someone told me "you shouldn't use a debugger" in those domains I would question their competence.
by dvdkon | 2025-08-22 19:08:28+00:00
Fine, then let's not bother with anti-cheat at all, since an aimbot can work by just filming the screen and sending HID events over USB. Anti-cheat is like DRM: You have to make do with a compromise.

Hundreds of thousands of raycasts per second sounds doable to me, but couldn't you just use a GPU and some simplified level geometry? That ought to scale well enough. It's not free or perfect (knowing the position of a hand a cheat will be able to estimate where the head is anyway), but that's not the goal, right?
by tomjakubowski | 2025-08-22 19:08:35+00:00
"We had a good thing, you stupid son of a bitch! We had the King. We had a tea port. We had everything we needed, and it all ran like clockwork. You could've shut your mouth, smuggled tea and made as much money as you ever needed. It was perfect. But, no, you just had to blow it up. You and your pride and your ego! You just had to be the man. If you'd done your job, known your place, we'd all be fine right now."
by setgree | 2025-08-22 19:08:58+00:00
Great! and if enforcement were consistent, rule-breaking behavior would probably decline:

> Quick, clear and consistent also works in controlling crime. It’s not a coincidence that the same approach works for parenting and crime control because the problems are largely the same. Moreover, in both domains quick, clear and consistent punishment need not be severe.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/09/wh...
by benreesman | 2025-08-22 19:09:47+00:00
TLDR: Broken builds are the default in everything, only exceptional effort and resources get you anything else, in Python, the people with those resources have unclear incentives for anything to improve.

I think it's a combination of historical factors and contemporary misaligned incentives both in the small and the large. There are also some technical reasons why Python is sort of an "attractive nuisance" for really problematic builds.

The easy one that shouldn't be too controversial is that it has a massive C/C++ (and increasingly Rust) native code library ecosystem. That's hard to do under the best of circumstances, but it's especially tough in Python (paradoxically because Python is so good at this: when wrapping the fast library that's proven is really easy you do it all the time). In the absence of really organized central planning and real "SAT Solver Class" package managers (like `uv`, not like `pip`), a mess is more or less just nature taking it's course. That's kinda how we got here (or how we got to 2016 maybe).

But lots of language ecosystems predate serious solvers and other modern versioning, why is Python such a conspicuous mess on this in 2025? How can friggin Javascript have it together about 100x better?

That's where the bad incentives kick in. In the small, there is a lingering prestige attached to "AI Researcher" that makes about zero sense in a world where we're tweaking the same dozen architectures and the whole game is scaling it, but that's the way the history went. So people who need it to work once to write a paper and then move on? `pip freeze` baby, works on my box. Docker amplifies this "socialize the costs" thing because now you can `pip freeze` your clanky shit, spin it up on 10k Hopper cards, and move on. So the highest paid, most regarded, most clout-having people don't directly experience the pain, it's an abstraction to them.

In the large? If this shit worked then (hopefully useful oversimplification alert) FLOPs would be FLOPs. The LAPACK primitives and even more modern GEMM instructions can be spelled some fast way on pretty much any vendor's stuff. NVIDIA is usually ahead a word-shrink or two, but ROCm in principle supports training at FP8 and on CDNA (expensive) cards it does, on RNDA (cheap) cards, it says it does on the label but crashes under load so you can't use it if your time is worth anything.

The big labs and FAANGs are the kind of dark horse here. In principle you'd assume Meta would want all their Torch code to run on AMD, but their incentives are complicated, they do a lot of really dumb shit that's presumably good for influential executives because it's bad for shareholders. It's also possible that they've just lost the ability to do that level of engineering, it's hard and can't be solved by numbers or money alone.
by m-s-y | 2025-08-22 19:09:58+00:00
>It's a huge stretch to call the existence of 4chan in anyone's best interests.

Absolutely, 100% incorrect. You obviously don't approve of 4chan's content or mission, but that's not the point. It benefits everyone when anyone takes a stand because their legal rights are under attack.

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

>This is not a slippery slope

Again, incorrect.

Any type of punishment for 4chan due to their legal content is damn close to the definition of "slippery slope". You're familiar with the "anti-slippery slope" argument already ("First they came for 4chan and I said nothing, because good riddance!"), so you're obviously cogent enough to understand what you're saying.

>The sheer anarchy of the libertarian mindset that much of this site supports is not a good thing.

This is not for you to decide. Your mindset is why free speech laws must exist in the first place.
by floren | 2025-08-22 19:10:03+00:00
You should be fine on the big providers. There's a weird horseshoe situation where anti-Google doomposting looks a lot like pro-Google FUD that I think leads people to believe only Google and maybe Microsoft are capable of sending mail any more.

Something like mailbox.org should be fine. Even a carefully-chosen VPS running your own email server should be fine (works for me, no delivery problems in ~2 years)
by Asooka | 2025-08-22 19:10:24+00:00
The cat and mouse game between cheat devs and anti-cheat devs is quite interesting. I saw a nice video [1] a year ago about the state of the art in cheat development, which at that point was having a PCIe device that can issue DMA requests to read the RAM at any time and stream the data to a second PC to analyse. Vanguard did end up banning those people eventually, since it can see what devices you have plugged in. I can't help but wonder if the next level would be some kind of shim on the physical RAM sticks; or maybe custom UEFI firmware.

Ultimately the OS should be providing a service that can verify a program is running in a secure environment and hasn't been tampered with. That's something that's useful for things far beyond games. I kind of hope the cheaters win this war for now, to create the incentive for building a better, proper, standardized, cross-platform solution.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzVYgg9nQis
by toomuchtodo | 2025-08-22 19:10:24+00:00
I accounted for that in the comment you replied to. Texas has a voracious appetite for power due to data centers, manufacturing, and air conditioning, and impairing new renewables will hurt Texas more than California. Energy policy is in direct opposition to Texas' need for inexpensive, low carbon power due to their higher per capita consumption. Texas should be doing everything in its power to support the deployment of renewables, but out of ideology at the federal and state levels, they are not.

California is ahead of the curve by having built renewables and batteries before this policy change, while other states will be stuck with suboptimal energy policy for at least the next half decade, increasing their cost of power. California is also the world's fourth largest economy with the energy system they have built.

https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/US-CAL-CISO/12mo/monthl...

https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/us-electricity-2025...

https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...

https://www.gov.ca.gov/2025/04/23/california-is-now-the-4th-...
by carlosjobim | 2025-08-22 19:10:28+00:00
If you're not allowing the machines to be tested in space (no environmental factors) nor on earth (environmental factors), then there's nowhere allowed to test or make such a machine. So a perpetual motion machine becomes impossible because there is nowhere in the universe where they are accepted.

Is it possible for a man to run 100m in less than 10 seconds? If he's not allowed to run on any kind of surface. So now we've proven that it's impossible to run 100m in less than 10 seconds?
by kbelder | 2025-08-22 19:10:37+00:00
"Traditionally, ⟨ß⟩ did not have a capital form, and was capitalized as ⟨SS⟩. Some type designers introduced capitalized variants. In 2017, the Council for German Orthography officially adopted a capital form ⟨ẞ⟩ as an acceptable variant, ending a long debate."

Thanks, that is interesting!
by k310 | 2025-08-22 19:10:46+00:00
Because Microsoft tried that and (many) people hated it.

Monoliths tend to suck, especially when bureaucracy kills great ideas. And then people implement great ideas on their own.

Now, since they tend to be unconnected, one can go back to the "mother ship" or innovate a system of inteconnects or API's to get them to work together.

"In suckage, there's opportunity."

In fact Linux and open source in general grew from dissatisfaction with monoliths, and compare the good they've done compared to the dinosaurs in the computer history museum.

Many companies gravitate towards monoliths as growth opportunities, and IT managers like "one throat to choke" (heard that WAY too many times. ) but flowers, people, and apps are different for good reason.
by sunnyps | 2025-08-22 19:10:50+00:00
Would the interface nil example be clearer if checking for `nil` didn't use the `==` operator? For example, with a hypothetical `is` operator:

package main import "fmt" type I interface{} type S struct{} func main() { var i I var s *S fmt.Println(s, i) // nil nil fmt.Println(s is nil, i is nil, s == i) // t,t,f: Not confusing anymore? i = s fmt.Println(s, i) // nil nil fmt.Println(s is nil, i is nil, s == i) // t,f,t: Still not confusing? }

Of course, this means you have to precisely define the semantics of `is` and `==`:

- `is` for interfaces checks both value and interface type.

- `==` for interfaces uses only the value and not the interface type.

- For structs/value, `is` and `==` are obvious since there's only a value to check.
by couchdb_ouchdb | 2025-08-22 19:11:32+00:00
I've tried do this a couple of times in the last year, but it always seems to backfire, specifically with Gen Z. After I apologize, they seem to think of it as an opening to continue to shit on me and bring up more of my shortcomings -- which is just bizarre to me. Because of this, it's made me really second guess acknowledging when I think I've made a mistake.
by jpollock | 2025-08-22 19:11:35+00:00
I've just spent the better part of two weeks trying to convince a LLM to automate some programming for me.

We use feature flags. However, cleaning them up is something rarely done. It typically takes me ~3minutes to clean one up.

To clean up the flag:

1) delete the test where the flag is off

2) delete all the code setting the flag to on

3) anything getting the value of the flag is set to true

4) resolve all "true" expressions, cleaning up if's and now constant parameters.

5) prep a pull request and send it for review

This is all fully supported by the indexing and refactoring tooling in my IDE.

However, when I prompted the LLM with those steps (and examples), it failed. Over and over again. It would delete tests where the value was true, forget to resolve the expressions, and try to run grep/find across a ginormous codebase.

If this was an intern, I would only have to correct them once. I would correct the LLM, and then it would make a different mistake. It wouldn't follow the instructions, and it would use tools I told it to not use.

It took 5-10 minutes to make the change, and then would require me to spend a couple of minutes fixing things. It was at the point of not saving me any time.

I've got a TONNE of low-hanging fruit that I can't give to an intern, but could easily sick a tool as capable as an intern on. This was not that.
by manveerc | 2025-08-22 19:11:56+00:00
I wasn't aware that Bihar, Mizoram and Nagaland were dry states too. Growing up I lived in Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra (border states to Gujarat), so was mostly aware of them. My friends who lived and worked in Ahmedabad would frequently leverage the 30 day loophole or go to neighboring states. It was never a big deal, like the way it is portrayed in the article.
by bko | 2025-08-22 19:12:03+00:00
I don't know if that's really it. In the US, sure, there was a direct line of communication between all the large social media companies and the federal government. It was used to censor what was deemed "conspiracy theories" around covid and election interference. That could be seen as protecting politicians.

But in the UK, what I read about is cases where it offended someone, like the case of a an autistic teenage girl who was arrested after she made a comment to a police officer, reportedly saying the officer looked like her "lesbian nana." Obviously this doesn't threaten government control or politicians, so it doesn't exactly fit the same mold.

https://mleverything.substack.com/p/what-would-government-ce...

https://www.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/15nddel/autisti...
by spankalee | 2025-08-22 19:12:06+00:00
Brian's comment here is really important for bystanders to be able to understand the process: https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/11582#issuecomment-320...

Removals sometimes take a decade or more, or sometimes don't happen at all. Just because the vendors would like to remove something, doesn't mean they can.

For example, MutationEvents were deprecated in 2011 and just removed last year.

So this is just the beginning of the process. Even the PR to remove XLST from the spec: it doesn't mean it's being merged soon. Removal from the spec is different from remove from engines.
by hurubaw | 2025-08-22 19:12:14+00:00
True, for now... but we already have pretty robust EV charging infrastructure going and getting built. There are already up to 600kw chargers available in some of our gas stations (mainly Neste), 50-250kw chargers in rows in basicly all other gas stations, supermarkets, malls, trains stations, airports. And a law that forced all businesses with physical locations, public buildings, churches etc. to have at least one min. 11-22kw regular charging station per location and a clear policy for its use and maintenance. Added with the fact that almost all residential parking stuctures built in the last ten years have been either wired ready or provided with a 11-22kw charger to each parking space. In my street here in the suburbs, 50% plus of the homes here have chargers cables hanging in their carports. Owning an EV in Finland is basicly as easy and convenient as owning a gas car. And due to overbuilding of renewables and smart charging based on hourly electricity prices, driving an EV is a lot cheaper per kilometer than a gas car. The other thing that is very enticing to people about EVs is being able to warm and defrost your car anywhere. Only thing slowing down EV sales in here is the price of new EV vehicles compared to our tendency to drive around in cheap old beaters. I understand however that our electric grid and lines to homes were already built pretty sturdy and high capacity due to our harsh winters and very high energy use of residential houses for heating in low temperature months and also simultaneus use of saunas (7-22kw per sauna) which see high simultaneus use in the weekend evenings.
by JeremyNT | 2025-08-22 19:12:17+00:00
> I registered a Bluesky account not too long ago and noticed shortly after a regular appearance of gay and furry nsfw content. The NSFW setting was turned off, so these accounts are for whatever reason neglecting to tag their content properly.

What... are you doing with the app exactly??? Do you not curate a list of accounts you follow?

To counter your anecdote: I've literally never seen anything like what you describe. I follow the people I'm interested in who post things I find of interest. I've occasionally (only occasionally) clicked on the "discover" tab, but it also does not show the sorts of things you described.