MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by raffael_de | 2025-08-25 12:32:47+00:00
The relevance of beer with regard to water conservation and safe consumption is _not_ because the alcohol sterilizes the fluid. It's because successfully brewed and unfiltered beer forms a relatively stable ecosystem of unproblematic yeasts and lactic acid bacteria which prevent other unsafe micro organisms to take over and multiply. The hop is actually contributing to chemical conservation, though.
by adinhitlore | 2025-08-25 12:33:04+00:00
in addition: do you actually need like...10 files for <500 loc, isn't it confusing to separate low loc into so many files? i once had over 30 000 loc in one c file and, get ready: over 100 000 loc in one c# file. It's very easy to navigate with control plus f. But anyway, given the license/free: it's great!
by Treegarden | 2025-08-25 12:33:35+00:00
I mean, just as the phrase goes "your terrorist is my rebel," one could say "your propaganda is my information." That's exactly why a decentralized system matters. It doesn't just resist capture by a single authority, it allows competing narratives to exist side by side. What one group sees as misinformation, another might see as essential context. The goal shouldn't be to eliminate bias entirely, but to prevent any one group from controlling the flow of all information.
by Y-bar | 2025-08-25 12:33:49+00:00
People are free to buy Apple (or an Android flavour, or no smartphone at all). But there are many many things which goes into a buying decision than what manner of software delivery is available.

This duopoly does not truly offer a lot of choice, so any criticism must happen from within the confines of the current reality.

I’m not going to tell a pedestrian who wants safer roads to stop being a participant in traffic, I accept that they have very little real choice.

Having to uncritically accept anything and everything the manufacturer of your device does is not really viable and is a recipe for a worse future.
by rbanffy | 2025-08-25 12:34:01+00:00
We often fail to realize how cutthroat the chip business is and how many bad decisions away from oblivion all players are. It’s just that Intel is more exposed to those risks because it’s both design and foundry making risky bets.

OTOH, if TSMC makes a couple bad bets in a row, all their 500 clients will be in deep trouble.
by seanwilson | 2025-08-25 12:34:21+00:00
I'm not following. These examples are using the WCAG2 contrast algorithm which is well known to be flawed for people interested in this stuff, especially for dark themes so there should be lots of bad examples here? APCA is supposed to improve on this (see the example graphic comparing WCAG2 and APCA): https://git.apcacontrast.com/documentation/WhyAPCA.html

> But as @c-blake has rightly pointed out, this doesn't take into account the ratio of visible background pixels to foreground pixels. For example the contrast required for a single fullstop character, ".", is goting to be diffrent from a capital, "B".

So APCA includes more guidance on font weight and font size for more contexts (e.g. headings, body text, shorter text, copyright notices), but it's still going to be an approximation for edge cases like displaying a single fullstop character. If this case is common, you'd want to increase the contrast value instead of going with the minimum passing value, so the contrast algorithms can still help you.

There's a tradeoff with having guidelines that are very accurate (e.g. a contrast algorithm that counts pixels) vs simpler to follow (e.g. recommended font weight and size). People already find WCAG2 hard to follow as it is.
by randomtoast | 2025-08-25 12:35:15+00:00
You think that law enforcement should enjoy privacy in the course of their duty and in public, so I guess you are against body cameras then.

Also you say that my information about filming law enforcement is misleading, but then you make a legal analysis and conclude that even when you consider all these facts, you can still be charged for illegally obtained evidence. For me, what you describe is very much the same as it is not allowed to film law enforcement by de facto.
by infecto | 2025-08-25 12:35:28+00:00
I am not sure what you are trying to say? That the US can simply press a button and end a conflict with China? China has been posturing forever on Taiwan being a part of China. They love to show of bridges and boats that would be able to facilitate a land invasion. We have already seen how quick China integrated HK. It is not a nonzero chance that China makes a move on the US. If that happens, where are the chips coming from. It’s smart to want to increase geographical diversification for something that is used in almost all tech products.
by nucleardog | 2025-08-25 12:35:32+00:00
Not OP, but as far as I know that's how it works, yeah.

When I was in China, using a Chinese SIM had half the internet inaccessible (because China). As I was flying out I swapped my SIM back to my North American one... and even within China I had fully unrestricted (though expensive) access to the entire internet.

I looked into it at the time (now that I had access to non-Chinese internet sites!) and forgot the technical details, but seems that this was how the mobile network works by design. Your provider is responsible for your traffic.
by naikrovek | 2025-08-25 12:35:50+00:00
Go programmers (and `range`) assume that string is always valid UTF-8 but there is no guarantee by the language that a string is valid UTF-8. The string itself is still a []byte. `range` sees the `string` type and has special handling for strings that it does not have when it ranges over []byte. Recall that aliased types are not viewed as the same type at any time.

A couple quotes from the Go Blog by Rob Pike:

> It’s important to state right up front that a string holds arbitrary bytes. It is not required to hold Unicode text, UTF-8 text, or any other predefined format. As far as the content of a string is concerned, it is exactly equivalent to a slice of bytes.

> Besides the axiomatic detail that Go source code is UTF-8, there’s really only one way that Go treats UTF-8 specially, and that is when using a for range loop on a string.

Both from https://go.dev/blog/strings

If you want UTF-8 in a guaranteed way, use the functions available in unicode/utf8 for that. Using `string` is not sufficient unless you make sure you only put UTF-8 into those strings.

If you put valid UTF-8 into a string, you can be sure that the string holds valid UTF-8, but if someone else puts data into a string, and you assume that it is valid UTF-8, you may have a problem because of that assumption.
by dndvr | 2025-08-25 12:36:23+00:00
Can't have the populace heating the voice of the guy who was never proven to be a member of the ra, better they listen to the sexy husband of convicted provo bomber Dolours Price instead.

Dolours being the sister of Marian Price who is currently suiting Disney over being depicted shooting Jean McConville in the back of the head in Say Nothing.
by Joker_vD | 2025-08-25 12:36:26+00:00
See David R. Hanson's "A Portable File Directory System" [0][1], for example: a 700 lines long implementation of early UNIX's filesystem API that piggy-backs on some sort of pre-existing (block-oriented) I/O primitives, which means you can do it entirely in-memory, with about another 300 lines of code or so.

I suspect that with OSes becoming much more UNIX-like the demand for such abstraction layers shrank almost to nothing.

[0] https://drh.github.io/documents/pds-spe.pdf

[1] https://drh.github.io/documents/pds.pdf
by Lerc | 2025-08-25 12:36:51+00:00
From 2019 but a decent overview by Leland McInnes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iol3Lk6kyU

There's a newer thing called PacMap which is an interesting thing that handles difference cases better. Not as robustly tested as UMAP but that could be said of any new thing. I'm a little wary that it might be overfitted to common test cases. To my mind it feels like PacMap seems like a partial solution of a better way of doing it.

The three stage process of PacMap is either asking to be developed into either a continuous system or finding a analytical reason/way to conduct a phase change.
by ta8645 | 2025-08-25 12:37:24+00:00
My guess is that guys being replaced by the steam shovel said the same thing about the quality of holes being dug into the ground. "No machine is ever going to be able to dig a hole as lovingly or as accurately as a man with a shovel". "The digging machines consume way too much energy" etc.

I'm pretty sure all the hand wringing about A.I. is going to fade into the past in the same way as every other strand of technophobia has before.
by lazide | 2025-08-25 12:37:45+00:00
They think (like many Americans right now) that it will only be done against ‘those other people’. When they realize it’s been applied to them, it’s too late (they’ve been ‘othered’ now) and people will ignore them - or they’ll have to blame themselves or cover it up in order to fit in.

It’s classic.

Eventually, enough people will have been fucked by it that the numbers will shift back the other way - and then the opposite end of the pathology (not being able to recognize the main groups own needs enough to defend them or pull together as a coherent group) starts building.

Lather, rinse, repeat.
by Waterluvian | 2025-08-25 12:37:55+00:00
Last week I went to buy a Philip K Dick eBook while on vacation. It was only $2 and my immediate thought was, “what are the odds this is some weird pirated version that’s full of errors? What if it’s some American version that’s been self-censored by Amazon to be approved by the government? What if it’s been AI enhanced in some way?”

Just the consideration of these possibilities was enough to shake the authenticity of my reality.

Even more unsettling is when I contemplate what could be done about data authenticity. There are some fairly useful practical answers such as an author sharing the official checksum for a book. But, ultimately, authenticity is a fleeting quality and I can’t stop time.
by legitster | 2025-08-25 12:40:03+00:00
This isn't really a slam dunk debunking. I get that medieval people knew about good and bad water, and that they had other reasons to prefer small drinks. But it doesn't change the facts that:

- Medieval people DID drink constantly (mostly in the form of small drinks)

- SOME medieval didn't have access to consistently good water.

- Even good water supplies can be tainted

There are cases were it was noted that a disease would outbreak from the local water supply, but no one from the brewery next door would get sick. This was not lost on most people, so water was drunk but with some risks assumed.

And most notably, we still see this exact dichotomy today in the third world where dysentery and diarrea are still common causes of death. And people with the means or preference towards prepared drinks often fare better.
by SebFender | 2025-08-25 12:42:00+00:00
I'm not against governments helping out companies per se in different forms but the question remains "Why are they there and what's the impact if they fall?"

It's been done many times in the past decades from financial institutions, manufacturing, others and in different ways.

Remember Harley-Davidson and tarifs on imported motorcycles?

I think the real question becomes how will get done and for how long.
by ralferoo | 2025-08-25 12:43:54+00:00
> ... when diluted 1:2 water:wine. it was a true show of wealth to serve wine that was less than 1:1.

Did you mean 2:1 water:wine? If you meant 1:2 water:wine, then 1:1 would be weaker and I'm not sure how that would show wealth more than stronger wine.
by morcus | 2025-08-25 12:44:11+00:00
In about 2021 I set up dual boot on my Windows PC and slowly ended up using Linux more over time. In 2023 I built a new PC and this time didn't even bother getting Windows.

the only things that didn't run natively were a few video games, and even for these it seems there is a good emulation (?) layer now in Steam (I forgot the details as I didn't game often).
by rollcat | 2025-08-25 12:44:13+00:00
The way to handle a password:

plaintextPassword = POST["password"] ok = bcryptCompare(hashedPassword, plaintextPassword) // (now throw away POST and plaintextPassword) if (ok) { ... }

Bonus points: on user lookup, when no user is found, fetch a dummy hashedPassword, compare, and ignore the result. This will partially mitigate username enumeration via timing attacks.
$10k in volume per month but still no virality
by cesargstn | 2025-08-25 12:45:20+00:00
A few months ago, I launched https://unzipme.xyz/, a solution for selling photos/documents via a payment link! You set a price for your content, your content is blurred, and the generated link gives access to your content, which is blurred until the amount is paid.

In 3 months, we have 3,000 users, creators who generate a few thousand euros in volume, but still no virality!

I feel like I'm stuck, guys! How did they manage to scale up and make this viral? I'm considering a big TikTok strategy?
by dcminter | 2025-08-25 12:45:44+00:00
Yeah, I'm vaguely aware of this - jsut because of the "S" in SD standing for "Secure" as a euphemism for DRM stuff. From your link it seems likely that most cards probably don't even support it nowadays, but I'm still kind of curious about how exactly it was intended to be accessed - for example what extended commands might have been available. Presumably there's a spec somewhere for it, and presumably one can at the bare minimum ask a card "do you have a protected area available?"
Show HN: Sidekick – AI Coding Assistant
by bharath11 | 2025-08-25 12:46:03+00:00
Hi HN! I'm the maker of Sidekick.

Sidekick is an AI coding tool. It is currently available for Mac, with Windows support coming soon. I started with Mac to get the native experience right before expanding to other platforms.

I know there are many AI coding tools out there, but I always felt strongly about building this.

Looking for feedback on: • Any bugs or performance issues • Features that would improve your workflow • How you currently use AI coding tools

Still iterating based on user feedback. Happy to answer questions about the technical approach or design decisions.

For early 100 users, there's a 70% discount for the first month.
by wat10000 | 2025-08-25 12:46:05+00:00
Mass surveillance doesn’t seem very difficult to build if you have power. If you don’t build it, it seems like step 4 hit becomes “they build it and use it against you.” That’s not to say it’s a good idea to build such a thing, but the “your enemies will use it against you” argument doesn’t make much sense to me. The only real solution to bad guys gaining power is to either prevent them from gaining power or remove them if they already have.
by M95D | 2025-08-25 12:46:45+00:00
> Privacy Tips for All Phones:

> Keep device & OS as updated as possible

I don't think so! Cloud rot also affects tracking servers, ad-serving servers and pre-installed apps. A phone that is never updated will, in a few years, be affected by the cloud rot and most of it's tracking will stop working.

The best burner phone is the oldest second-hand phone from a flea market that can still connect to the phone network.

> SIM rotation: Rotating SIMs manually or using PGPP eSIMs changes your IMSI, though your IMEI stays constant.

So then, why rotate them? If one phone is known to be yours, then each SIM inserted into it is known to be yours, and any other (burner) phone that SIM gets inserted into will also be known to be yours.

Pair each SIM with only one burner phone and there will be no record of a connection between them, unless they're connected to the same tower and moving at the same time.

> Do not share your email, phone number, or ID with carriers or clerks when activating service

Not possible in Europe. Buying a SIM card requires an ID.
by iteria | 2025-08-25 12:47:05+00:00
As a parent who using family link, I don't find it bad or inadequate. What is bad about it. How is it unfit for purpose? My child literally has no access to anything I don't want her to. If I had a complaint, it's that tracking her media consumption on YouTube is a PITA.

The whole "my kid will be left out" thing is so bizarre to me. So what? My kid is already banned from Roblox and that means of her whole circle, she's the only one who doesn't play and oh well. When I was a child it wasn't uncommon for a child to be without something their peer group had usually for money reasons. I don't see technology as any different. Kid has stuff their friends don't and vice versa.

That's why I get mad about age restriction laws on the internet. I do want to introduce my child to some of these things in a supervised way so I can teach her about them. Something I can't do if it's literally illegal because other parents decided to shove a phone/tablet in their kid's face and walk away.

I know way too many parents who never bother to use parental controls and learn that they're not actually will to live through their kid's whining about their restrictions.
by OtherShrezzing | 2025-08-25 12:47:45+00:00
> so that if the video stream gets jammed they can finish off the mission autonomously.

The streams mostly don't get jammed anymore, because the low-cost FPV drones are physically connected to the ground by a long optical cable. The extent of their autonomous dangers are limited by the amount of fibre-optic cable left in the spool when they take off.
by eru | 2025-08-25 12:47:57+00:00
The rules are presumably also gleanable from looking at the small speck of dust.

I don't know why you want to know T_zero. I assume T means time here, not temperature or so?

If you have eg randomness as your non-determinism, you can still build probability distributions of the rest of the universe and the rest of time. (And honestly, even if you have determinism in the laws, you always have measurement errors. Even in classical mechanics.)
by octodoctor | 2025-08-25 12:47:59+00:00
Yeah, I’ve run into that too. When you let the AI "drive" completely, it tends to patch symptoms instead of reasoning about the system. I wouldn’t trust it to autonomously fix production code either.

Where it does shine for me is in the grindy parts: refactoring, writing boilerplate, scaffolding new components, or even surfacing edge cases I hadn’t thought about. I’m building FreeDevTools, and I still do the design + final decision-making myself. The AI just helps me move faster across SEO, styling, bug-fixing, backend/frontend glue code, etc.

Basically, I treat it more like a junior pair programmer, useful for speed, but absolutely not a replacement for review, testing, or architectural thinking.

https://github.com/HexmosTech/FreeDevTools
by bpt3 | 2025-08-25 12:48:08+00:00
What happens if the PRC annexes Taiwan without bloodshed?

The options available to the US are: attack the PRC to blow up the chip manufacturers and probably start WW3, or frantically try to replicate the capabilities of the Taiwanese fabs before the PRC decides to cut the US off.

In the meantime, the PRC will have immense leverage over the rest of the world, and there is no scenario where they don't extract as much as they can from that advantage.
by kalinrangelov | 2025-08-25 12:48:44+00:00
I'm hitting input token limit. Using Claude Max Subscription. Is there a method to "/clear" context? Or some other way to minimize / reset input tokens?

API Error: 400 {"type":"error","error":{"type":"invalid_request_error","message":"input length and max_tokens exceed context limit: 196778 + 21333 > 200000, decrease input length or max_tokens and try again"},"request_id":"req_011CSUSAvG3cTgFStKLtDKp8"}
by viraptor | 2025-08-25 12:48:51+00:00
This is an offshore farm. The wind on those of way more consistent and much faster than inland. You get some seasonal variations, but no quiet days really.

This is from a very different area, but you can see there's close to no 0 level downtime. https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S29503604240000...
by coderatlarge | 2025-08-25 12:48:57+00:00
“When you have four or five layers between the client and the actual worker, each taking a cut, it becomes impossible to track where influence ends and legitimate business begins."

wow i would think that for all the money paid to ERP vendors tracking five layers of contracts would not be a major issue.

but i guess unless people in positions of authority subject themselves to some sort of financial audit then it’s almost impossible to detect corruption related payments.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-08-25 12:49:04+00:00
Seems pretty clearly explained here.

>Technology executives with authority over contractor requisitions and interview processes can direct substantial volume toward "preferred" staffing shops. In exchange, these vendors provide kickbacks that, in Walmart's case, generated what sources estimate as millions in illicit payments over multiple years.

For more info:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal–agent_problem
by op00to | 2025-08-25 12:49:14+00:00
I like systemd too. After working with it for a long time, a lot of the "wtf" moments eventually are made clear as having at least some semblance of a good reason behind the decision.

1. systemctl is the controller. Its job is to change and report on the state of units. journalctl is the query engine. Merging the query engine into the systemctl controller would make the controller bloated and complex, so a dedicated tool is the cleaner approach. I think you can also rip out the journal and use other tools if you so decide, making building logs into systemctl a bad idea.

2. systemd is a system manager, not just a service manager. It replaced not only the old init system but also a collection of other tools that managed the machine's core state

3. A service runs a process, which can fail for many transient reasons. Trying again is a sensible and effective recovery strategy. A mount defines a state in the kernel. If it fails, it's almost always for a "hard" reason that an immediate retry won't fix. Retrying a failed mount would just waste time and spam logs during boot.
by westmeal | 2025-08-25 12:49:19+00:00
A kickback is money you take for a favor that isn't legal or allowed or for being in charge of a project, organization etc. Waste management contracting from the sopranos refers to a TV show about new jersey mobsters entitled the sopranos. In the show, they use a garbage disposal corporation to launder the money they make from their racketeering schemes. Whenever the boss is asked about what job he does, he just replies with 'waste management'.
by bgwalter | 2025-08-25 12:49:28+00:00
DDT has been banned, nuclear reactors have been banned in Germany, many people want to ban internal combustion engines, supersonic flight has been banned.

Moreover, most people have more attachment to their own thoughts or to reading the unaltered, genuine thoughts of other humans than to a hole in the ground. The comment you respond to literally talks about the Orwellian aspects of altering someone's works.
by andsoitis | 2025-08-25 12:50:20+00:00
TV platforms are designed for a remote-controlled, sit-back-and-watch user experience, which is ill-suited for reading long legal documents.

The user is experience is poor for long-form reading:

- reading at a distance: key design principle for a TV user experience is that the interface is viewed from 10". Trying to read a lengthy legal document on a television screen from across the room would be frustrating and cause eye strain

- inefficient navigation: TV user interfaces are optimized for media playback and navigating visual content, not for scrolling through pages of text. Focus-based LRUD interfaces make it difficult to read a continuous block of text and quickly find specific clauses
by dmesg | 2025-08-25 12:50:33+00:00
Does an attacking bot know your webserver is not a misconfigured router exposing its web interface to the net? I often am baffled what conclusions people come up with from half reading posts. I had bots attack me with SSH 2.0 login attempts on port 80 and 443. Some people underestimate how bad at computer science some skids are.