MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by line-27 | 2025-08-18 22:24:59+00:00
What if a city ran itself like a great SRE team—reversibility before heroics, receipts for wins, and blameless postmortems as a civic ritual?

LINE-27 is a short, machine-voiced diary of a fork-city. Invariants (unchangeable guardrails), quorums for any risky action, and a public “Museum of Errors” where kids add lesson-cards.

Full season: https://ilyacl.github.io/line27-site/ What invariant would you enshrine in your team/city?
by simoncion | 2025-08-18 22:25:32+00:00
> ...or outright banning prebuilt binaries (the Gentoo and buildroot way).

You, uh, haven't used Gentoo in like twenty years, have you? You've been able to host your own prebuilt binaries (or use the prebuilts of others who bothered sharing them) for as long as I can remember (FWIW, I started using Gentoo in 2002 or 2004). The Gentoo folks decided to set up official binary package servers at the end of 2023 (look at the Dec 29, 2023 news item on the Gentoo home page for more info).
by lexarflash8g | 2025-08-18 22:26:30+00:00
I use WARP.dev CLI terminal that works as a coding agent and has all the models not just from Anthropic and works very similarly to all the CLI Coding Agents (Claude code, Codex, Jules, etc.)

It works very fast compared to Cursor -- biggest limitation is that it doesn't have workspaces where you can get context from several repos for building your application.

MCP servers also work as well just a little more complex.
by andyferris | 2025-08-18 22:27:08+00:00
So where does the data "live"? I was looking at the syntax, it defines predicates for filters and views and so on, but I don't see the "rows". There is this `file.name` and `file.ext` thing - but where do you set them? What type of file does it point to? CSV? JSON? Something else? The docs seem incomplete.
by gambiting | 2025-08-18 22:27:27+00:00
I mean, you can get any car to last forever, it's just a question of being economically reasonable. My mum still has a 2004 Land Rover Discovery 3, one of the original ones with a 4.4L V8, and that car has a half a million kilometers(300k miles) on the clock now. Everything works, inside and out, I drove it at motorway speeds last month and it still felt super stable. And these cars have a terrible reputation for essentially ruining their owners and the electrical systems going haywire. The secret? My mum spending an equivalent of anywhere between 2000-5000 euro a year(!!!) on servicing and repairs to keep it in tip top shape. The car is probably worth only 5k, maybe 8k at a push. It doesn't make any logical sense, but it can be done.
by jkingsman | 2025-08-18 22:27:51+00:00
I believe the location tracking is necessary for apps that are trying to detect the default/config access point that many devices spawn for setup. As I understand it, because wifi AP name awareness is approximately equal to location knowledge, wifi control requires a location information grant. It doesn't forgive the crummy design that implies (what about providing an allowlist of AP masks that can be scanned for?), but there is another side to the coin of "please give us location access so we can spy on you" in that uses that AREN'T for spying still require the same prompt for permission.

I wouldn't say /never/ attribute to malice anywhere we're in the vicinity of an an enormous data actor with a not-great track record, but probably at least /even/ are the number of cases of privacy violation attributable to maliciousness vs. terrible design that is either excessively encumbered or insufficiently granular.

I'm perfectly happy for Acme Random App to scan for `pps-setup-wifi-**` at one time, but not all wifi networks forever.
by ben_w | 2025-08-18 22:27:55+00:00
> How can regulations stop corruption?

Regulations enforced by courts are the only tool functioning societies are willing to use to limit corruption, including under communism. Some forms of communism are anarchic and just assume it will work without it, but then I can say this about anarch-capitalism too, and it's just as wrong there.

> The only way to actually stop it is to not allow individuals to profit off of others.

There are many kinds of profit besides the currencies broadly recognised today. Money itself is a fungible token of power, and the very same corruption works just as effectively when it's any other form of power. It's even possible just by barter, as demonstrated by that guy who swapped his way from a paperclip to a house: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_red_paperclip

To actually stop corruption would require an incorruptible omniscient surveillance system, and I know of nobody who wants one of those even in principle due to the downside of what "omniscient" means, and in practice it doesn't matter anyway due to the lack of incorruptible people to act in this role.

> And it's something that we all enforce and control through local councils.

Ah, the small-commune model of communism. For reasons too long to go into, this limits you to roughly the tech level of the Late Bronze Age collapse. Even then, this is only even stable until someone outside your council comes along with an army, and at best they insist you use modern tech you previously couldn't import because you abolished money, at worst you're working for a 1700 AD equivalent to the Spartans.
by raviisoccupied | 2025-08-18 22:28:18+00:00
I’m an Obsidian user. I pay for Obsidian sync, and I love the philosophy behind their product. However, and I feel stupid for saying this, but I just find it confusing to use. It’s difficult for me to wrap my head around plugins, and understanding how it wants me to use it.

For now, I’m just sticking to using it for daily notes, but I feel there’s so much I’m missing.
by Terr_ | 2025-08-18 22:28:33+00:00
> has exactly one purpose: prevent any single entity from controlling the contents.

I'd like to propose a different characterization: "Blockchain" is when you want unrestricted membership and participation.

Allowing anybody to spin up any number of new nodes they desire us the fundamental requirement which causes a cascade of other design decisions and feedback systems. (Mining, proof-of-X, etc.)

In contrast, deterring one entity from taking over can also be done with a regular distributed database, where the nodes--and which entities operate them--are determined in advance.
by antonyl | 2025-08-18 22:28:56+00:00
Curious to get HN's take on this. I was pretty surprised at Google a few days ago. A family member had recently passed away, and so I Googled ("funeral homes <location>") in incognito on Google Chrome (I suppose it felt a bit sensitive and I didn't want my Google account associated with it). A few minutes later I opened up Google Maps on my phone (different device, but logged into my Google account) and there were a few ads for funeral homes (they looked like squares and were highlighted).

Obviously, this is technically feasible: I was on my home internet (both computer & phone), and presumably there are <5 accounts that share this IP address. So when I search, they ~know who I am, and so therefore could serve me ads when I'm logged in. But I was still surprised that Google would do it — I guess I would've thought that Google would drop incognito mode requests and not use them for ad targeting. (Since, well... it is quite trust destructive.)

Does anybody know if Google is doing this intentionally? It seems like this is pretty value destructive for them long-term? Or... am I just being paranoid and this is just a frequency illusion?
by Lammy | 2025-08-18 22:29:10+00:00
I am also wondering this since I have a LTE-enabled camera with prepaid data on the Mint MVNO (four capital letters 𝅘𝅥𝅮) running on T-Mobile's network. My Mint account settings has no privacy controls at all, and their privacy policy only mentions “location” in terms of GeoIP while browsing their website and in terms of E911 access if you dial emergency services: https://www.mintmobile.com/privacy-policy/

I found this “Ultra Mobile and Mint Mobile – Policies regarding Geolocation Data” <https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-386591A1.pdf> that mentions third-party sharing, but it's a little dated (2022):

“Describe the arrangements, agreements, and circumstances in which Ultra Mobile and Mint Mobile share subscriber geolocation data with third parties that are not law enforcement.

None. The enhanced 911 process provides subscriber geolocation from the cell phone in the event of a 911 call, but it is not controlled by Ultra or Mint Mobile. Neither Ultra nor Mint Mobile provide geolocation data to any third parties.”

What this doesn't answer, however, is what T-Mobile are doing with Mint customers' location data. I have to assume they're selling everything they can and that's why the MVNO is so cheap compared to the main brand lol
by XorNot | 2025-08-18 22:29:15+00:00
And if you run the numbers, the battery which can deliver 6.2kW is only about 1.5kwH in capacity. This matters because while discharging slowly is fine, to gain any economic benefit you need to be able to charge at essentially full power.

If you have 100kwh of batteries and only 6kw of AC connection then it would take 3 days of typical solar charging to get them to full capacity. And any kwh sitting there that you don't charge/discharge is costing you money for grid batteries - the economics still depend on being grid interactive.

The best demand signal in my local grid for example is exactly 1 hour wide. Which means s you get 4 15 minute intervals to basically try and dump power for the best price.
by epolanski | 2025-08-18 22:29:38+00:00
I legit miss early 2000s gaming.

1) People interacted, they truly did. Dramas, friendship, everything. Where? Quakenet, Forums. Every clan had their channel, some easily reached 1000+ people.

2) People genuinely played together in teams: CS, Day of Defeat, you name it. You had your clan and spammed #5on5 on quakenet.

3) Those clans actually met in lan! At Smau Italian Lan Party 2002 there were more than 60 Counter Strike teams from *Italy alone*. And it was a bring your own computer event[1].

I know it's part nostalgia but I legit think it is borderline impossible to have anywhere near the same level of interactions with people today. Reddit is just not a good substitute for legacy threaded forums. Discussions die fast, they don't even have the material time to develop meaningfully.

[1] https://www.aspidetr.com/images/immagini/blu/varie/smau02_03...
by nrds | 2025-08-18 22:29:50+00:00
Right, I was about to comment the same thing that "Lean" does not itself assume choice. Mathlib4 does, and Lean4 is designed so that all the built-in stuff is _consistent_ with choice. But you can do purely constructive mathematics in Lean and it's is even designed so that any non-propositions depending on choice have to be annotated "noncomputable", so the walled garden of choice is baked in at a language level. Even within "noncomputable" code, choice still shows up in the axiom list if used.
by gambiting | 2025-08-18 22:29:58+00:00
That's true of any car, not just EVs. The word in certain circles is that people are only buying the Ferrari Purosangue in hopes of getting on the waiting list for their more desirable cers.

And the Taycan is a great car in its own right, just the price is stupid. The Audi E-Tron is the same car just packaged differently and can be had for sometimes half the price.
by princeofwhales | 2025-08-18 22:30:39+00:00
It may be that whales are using their song not just as inter-species communication, but as a farming method for their desired food. Could it be a "lullaby" to the krill? Or a signal which causes the krill to group closer together, thereby increasing the efficiency of the whales' feeding activities?

Many bat species use ultrasonic pulses to detect moths and other flying insects while hunting, so whalesong may even be some form of longer range food detecting sonar? I'm not sure if that amount of distributed biomass would be detectable, but we don't know enough about their sensing apparatus to completely rule it out. Interestingly, some moth species have learned to jam the signal sent by bats by emmiting loud clicks, disrupting the return signal to throw off their target triangulation ability. I don't think the krill are so equipped, unfortunately for them! My guess is if their (whale) numbers were higher, they wouldn't consume their preferred food source in an unsustainable manner, giving the krill time to recover and moving on to larger patches to allow the recently "grazed" areas time to recover. One thing is for sure, their song activity is at least partly related to their feeding and migration activity in some way:

https://www.upi.com/Science_News/2020/10/01/Blue-whale-singi...

Also, studies have found that whalesong differs in frequency range depending on where in the world they are, possibly relating to water temperature and overall salinity/acidity, as colder/warmer and alkaline/acidic water will have different sonic properties due to density changes in the transmission medium, or the increase in ocean activity from shipping and ULF emmissions from submarines, and the overall effect of sea surface temperatures increasing. Blue Whales for example are known to feed at relatively shallow depths (<200m) as that's where the krill gather during the daytime. The interesting thing is there is an overall downward trend in the sonic frequency observed in the last several decades:

https://www.encyclopedie-environnement.org/en/zoom/decline-f... & https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/10/whale-s...

The recent articles in the press regarding the decline of Blue Whales' song in the pacific seems to point to the fact that they signal for abundance of their food source after locating it, like ringing a dinner bell when it's feeding time. This along with other factors like simply conserving their energy for further search activity could explain the increasingly infrequent song activity. With their population still recovering as a result of industrial whaling (global estimates are ~10,000-15,000), perhaps this behaviour is emergent, like a social call to help other whales feed, boosting their long term chances of survival in the changing ocean environment:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/ocean-hea...

Finally, I spotted this interesting looking project regarding whale communication if you're interested (unsure how active it is currently):

https://www.whaleweb.org/intersp/homepage.html
by dghlsakjg | 2025-08-18 22:30:58+00:00
I try to make this point all the time.

We have already built all of the charging infrastructure except the chargers.

You are probably no more than a block from a 440v line (that's what typically goes into the transformer, of which there is one on almost every block, at least). You are in a building that almost certainly has 220v power in it. You are probably less than 10 feet from a 15-20 amp 110v plug for almost your entire day. There are far more places to charge a car than there are people in most of North America.

If the incentives are correctly aligned, we have the infrastructure to make this happen VERY quickly.

Electricity generation is an issue, but not as much of one when you realize that not every car will be charging at the same time. Not every car will be fast charging. Hell, not every car will even need a full charge every week. I fill up my ICE car every 400km or so, which is about 2-4 weeks depending on weather. Right now AI growth is projected to increase the rate of power consumption far more than electric cars even under the most optimistic adoption curves. If generation is the problem, we need to kneecap chatGPT immediately.

Its amazing how many people think that our gasoline infrastructure is a given, and that electric car infrastructure is impossible.
by taeric | 2025-08-18 22:31:11+00:00
I don't think anyone would ever say they want "id, id, id"? They would say they want "customer_id, order_id, item_id" or some such. You would then probably say, "we just use 'id' for the id of every item..." but many places that I've worked actually explicitly didn't do that for essentially this reason. Natural joins on "foo_id" "just work" if you don't give every table the same "id" column.
by kiitos | 2025-08-18 22:31:26+00:00
what on earth?

these are absolutely trivial, toy example programs. they've got nothing to do with anything that anyone is meaningfully talking about when they talk about using LLMs for coding stuff.

is this kind of stuff what you're referring to when you comment on using LLMs for programming?

clone, i dunno, https://github.com/minio/minio, and ask the LLM to implement a non-trivial feature -- this is what everyone else is talking about! not "implement a YAML to JSON converter in the browser"
by shminge | 2025-08-18 22:31:54+00:00
That seems such a minor gain to me. Are you not concerned about notion a) being online only and b) not letting you be in control of your data?

I'm a strong proponent of File over App: who knows how long Obsidian or notion will exist - at least I know I can work with my Obsidian notes as long as text editors exist
by gambiting | 2025-08-18 22:32:41+00:00
I imagine the chargers you have are not drawing 3kW each though.

That's the main problem - your legacy infrastructure is most likely wired for 220V@32amps for the whole garage/street just to run the lamps from it, so 7.2kW. That's one EV charger, or two if you want to split them into 3.6kW feeds. If you want to run a proper 7.2kW charger from every lamp post or next to every parking space, that's a lot of brand new cabling that you need to add.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-08-18 22:32:43+00:00
They are milking the market up until the patent expires in Canada next year, at which point it’ll be imported into the US at scale. Novo’s already been beaten by Lilly with tirzepatide and orforglipron.

(I pay $350/month cash rate for my partner’s monthly tirzepatide)

https://investor.lilly.com/news-releases/news-release-detail...

How Ozempic's maker lost its shine after creating a wonder drug - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44942077 - August 2025
by immibis | 2025-08-18 22:32:45+00:00
Because computers are so predictable and rule-driven, programmers tend to overlook that the real world is very much adversarial and unpredictable. The "normal" thing to do here is to simply play with your small solar projects and not pay the fee, because the chance that you'll ever get charged the solar tie-in fee for a solar-powered garden light is basically zero. It's not precisely zero, but it's comparable to things like a drunk driver crashing into your house and killing you - one of those little tiny risks you just have to ignore because dealing with the risk costs more than the expectation cost of the risk.

Consider that they have a finite number of people and it costs more for them to go around inspecting everyone's garden lights than their expected revenue from that, so they won't.

Also, real-world risk and reward are dynamic. When the Deutschlandticket came out in Germany, almost everyone in Berlin bought one, so now they very rarely check tickets on trains - the expected gain is near-zero because almost everyone has a ticket for almost every train now. But if people start exploiting that by riding without a ticket, the gain will go up and after a time lag, they'll notice and start checking tickets more often.
by epolanski | 2025-08-18 22:33:09+00:00
> they absolutely increase player retention

This, this, this, this and this.

I remember people being GLUED to their favorite servers due to community reasons. In Italy we used to have hundreds, of which at least few dozen popular open community-driven servers.

Actually, server hosting CS instances was a thing, so each provider had their own to show they had the most performing, so you played for free, and to get the best thing people in the same country gathered around the same set of servers.

I to this day remember countless of player nicknames from these times, oddly, I don't remember some of my school teammates from the time.
by dudeinhawaii | 2025-08-18 22:33:31+00:00
Surprisingly, this isn't clickbait. It's more that it's a qualitative rather than quantitative analysis. It's more of a cultural and psychological impact piece. I expected something basically dismissing AI as a mass-delusion.

I can't say the author is _wrong_ in their chosen examples like "re-animating a dead kid to interview an AI version of them in the news" That's flat out bizarre. The AGI hype, the whole "every job will be displaced" moving bar.

I say this as an AI maximalist. Progress <> permission. We do need more accuracy, safety, and the players to disclose synthetic content.

The real danger is rebuilding social institutions around "mid" models and only later noticing we've gone wrong -- not Skynet -- but information quality, consent, energy, labor, etc.
by snerbles | 2025-08-18 22:33:39+00:00
IIRC the RA1 skirmish mode AIs always had perfect information and resource multipliers based on difficulty. RA2 did it a little differently with "virtual ore purifiers" added for the high difficulty AIs. I'm sure a similar thing was done for the Tiberian Dawn campaign and the Tiberian Sun multiplayer/skirmish AIs.

OpenRA's bots are a bit more clever, and also don't need to magically see into fog-of-war.
by jokoon | 2025-08-18 22:33:39+00:00
Toxicity is what killed the game for me.

I was really involved in how serious cs was being played in 2002 or 2003, but valve did not seize the opportunity. 5v5 is the best format.

Even today, the matchmaking is horrendous and toxic teammates ruin the fun.

When you solo queue, individual performance is ignored, so you must carry your whole team if you want to gain rank.

The game is great but generates too much frustration for me.
by mk_stjames | 2025-08-18 22:33:40+00:00
In text form only (no charts, plots, etc)- yes, pretty much all published 'science' (by that I mean something that appeared in a mass publication - paper, book, etc, not simply notes in people's notebooks) in the last 400 years likely fits into 20TB or so if converted completely to ASCII text and everything else is left out. Text is tiny.

The problem is it's not all text, you need the images, the plots, etc, and smartly, interstitially compressing the old stuff is still a very difficult problem even in this age of AI.

I have an archive of about 8TB of mechanical and aerospace papers dating back to the 1930s, and the biggest of them are usually scanned in documents, especially stuff from the 1960s and 70s, that have lots of charts and tables that take up a considerable amount of space, even in black and white only, due to how badly old scans compress (noise on paper prints, scanned in, just doesn't compress). Also many of those journals have the text compressed well, but they have a single, color, HUGE cover image as the first page of the PDF, that turns the PDF from 2MB into 20MB. Things like that could, maybe, be omitted to save space...

But as time goes on I start to become more against space-saving via truncation of those kind of scanned documents. My reasoning is that storage is getting cheaper and cheaper, and at some point the cost to store and retrieve those 80-90MB PDF's that are essentially total page by page image scans is going to be completely negligible. And I think you lose something be taking those papers and taking the covers out, or OCR'ing the typed pages and re-typesetting them to unicode (de-rasterize the scan), even when done perfectly (and when not done perfectly, you get horrible mistakes in things like equations, especially). I think we need to preserve everything to a quality level that is nearly as high as can be.
by kepano | 2025-08-18 22:34:21+00:00
The rows are individual Markdown files and the columns are YAML frontmatter properties in those files.

There are some special properties prefixed by `file.` which are implicit to the file itself, e.g.`file.name` refers to the file name, and `file.ext` is the extension.

The base views are defined as YAML in .base files or can be embedded in code blocks within a Markdown file. You can also export the rendered views to a Markdown table or CSV.

See also: https://help.obsidian.md/bases/syntax