MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rafram | 2025-08-30 13:26:46+00:00
But it’s not someone on the phone - it’s their best friend / star-crossed lover who they met on WhatsApp because of a chance wrong-number text! Since then they’ve become incredibly close, and they can trust each other with anything. When their lover gives them some amazing investment advice and it requires clicking through a scary-looking prompt (like they do all the time on a phone), who do they trust - their one true love or a generic warning message on their phone?

You have to take into account that the threat model here is vulnerable people, often older, being taken in by scammers who talk to them for weeks and gain their complete confidence. To the victims, it feels like a real romantic relationship, not someone who could even possibly be a scammer.
by delta_p_delta_x | 2025-08-30 13:26:48+00:00
UI has some very particular requirements—typefaces have to be hinted really well so that they work on displays with lower pixel density. Also, such typefaces generally have very tall x-heights so characters can be distinguished well, which can be seen in all the early 2000s UI typefaces, from this Nokia one to Lucida Grande, to Tahoma. More modern ones tone this down a little, at the cost of some character. SF Pro, Segoe UI and as the user mentioned, Inter are considerably closer to Frutiger and Helvetica.

Speaking of which...

> finally displacing Inter after many years of uncontested service

Inter is by far the blandest typeface possible—it feels like the designer thought 'let's take all the sans-serifs and smush them together'. Its several contextual alternates just dilute it even more. I would never use it for UI, let alone any sort of branding.
by microtonal | 2025-08-30 13:26:55+00:00
For me the difference is that you know what you’re getting into when you buy a console, and it’s clear up front that it’s not for “general” computing. I’m inclined to put smart phones into this category as well, but I can see how reasonable people may disagree here.

I think there is a huge difference. You can perfectly live your life without a game console. Even if you are a game addict and it is absolutely necessary for you to live, you could buy a PC and game on that.

Smartphones are a necessity nowadays. Some banks only have smartphone apps (or require a smartphone app to log in to their website). Some insurers want you to upload invoices with an app. Some governments require an app to log in (e.g. the Dutch DigiID). You need a smartphone to communicate with a lot of organizations and groups.

Smartphones have become extremely essential. And two companies can decide what does and what doesn't get run on a smartphone and they can take their 30% over virtually everything. They can destroy a company by simply blocking their app on a whim (contrast with game studios, which could always publish their game for PC or Mac or whatever).

It is not a healthy, competitive market. It is the market version of a dictatorship. And Google forbidding non-app store installs is making it worse.

Governments should intervene to guarantee a healthy market (the EU is trying, but I think they are currently worried about the tariff wrath).
by martin-t | 2025-08-30 13:27:12+00:00
Evolution used to work by some people dying before they could reproduce.

That's how we become the smartest animal on the planet. But it no longer works, we are very good at keeping everyone alive. And there's nothing wrong with that, as long as we don't compromise our freedoms to achieve it.

Some people getting exploited is the modern equivalent of leopards eating your face. It would be nice to protect people from it happening but NOT by everyone giving up basic human rights. And yes, in the modern world, running any software on your hardware should be a basic human right.

Especially at a time where computation is starting to resemble intelligence. Otherwise we all become serfs all over again.
by ajb | 2025-08-30 13:27:55+00:00
This is a false dichotomy. The following are not the only two possible solutions:

* Everyone has to trust one of two giant mega-corporations to make good decisions for everyone

* Everyone has to take on the evaluation of everything themselves, do their own admin, understand opsec, etc etc.

Freedom does not entail the latter. Freedom means having the freedom to do it, but also having the freedom to delegate it, and to decide who to delegate it to. We don't have to be technology "preppers". We can set up and fund independent organisations to do this -like Debian, for example. And have competition between them.

Yes, that means some people will delegate their trust to their religious cult. That's the price of freedom
by CPLX | 2025-08-30 13:28:25+00:00
The best way to serve humanity in your professional life is serve humanity in your professional life.

In other words, be useful. You don't have to worry about "being good" or "doing good" though many do and it's quite admirable to do so. But that's not the bar you have to clear.

The bar you should try to clear is to be useful. If what you're doing all day is helping people have shelter, or raise families, or be more healthy, or have more knowledge, or even be entertained or amused, you're being useful to people.

If what you do all day ultimately serves to make people poorer, more divided, more addicted, and more unwell, then what you're doing is not useful, it's harmful.

If what you're doing all day primarily contributes, even indirectly, to making people's lives worse, then nothing you do after that will erase it. Arguments to the contrary are just rationalization.
by brandonb | 2025-08-30 13:28:36+00:00
Part of the mechanism is that potassium lowers your blood pressure, whereas sodium raises it.

High blood pressure slowly damages the cardiac walls, leading to less blood flow, which impairs kidney function, which leads to less effective filtration of sodium and potassium, leading to higher blood pressure. So in this way, heart failure becomes self-reinforcing.

One way to break that feedback loop is to start a high-potassium diet.
by mdhb | 2025-08-30 13:28:38+00:00
But this is exactly what I mean. I’m not shooting anyone over a fucking robbery for gods sake.. it’s such an incredibly disproportionate response to the situation. Likewise, there’s almost no situation where he was ever going to shoot you. Just hand over your shit and move on, everyone can go home to their families.

The only scenario where things start to get ACTUALLY dangerous is you pulling out a weapon and suddenly you’ve gone from a 5/10 situation to a 10/10 situation where everyone is liable to panic and do something stupid. You’re about to go from a bad day to maybe your last day here and for what? There is just no point in that story where adding another weapon to the picture improved things at all.

On a side note, I think there is a LOT to be said for having a strong sense of situation awareness and how to do risk management on the street. I spent a good amount of time years ago living in Nairobi and I was one of the few people in my circle of friends who didn’t have a gun in their face at any point. I’m not trying to say I’m somehow special, I think that can happen to anyone but I wish people didn’t have their entire personal security model centered around having a weapon because it’s actually a really shit plan in real life.

Edit: I don’t know if you’re familiar with Robert Young Pelton but he is a war correspondent wrote a book called the worlds most dangerous places which is part adventure travel guide and part how to stay safe in actually honest to god dangerous places and situations. He just started a podcast based on that book and I think you might get something out of this: https://youtu.be/3dhh5_oJsqQ?feature=shared
by toastercat | 2025-08-30 13:28:52+00:00
Almost everything you said was incorrect.

> Don't give me some bullshit convoluted argument about potentially improved outcomes for people getting the vaccine.

Ah there it is. See, it doesn't matter what numbers or sources I cite to you because it'll all just be bullshit in your eyes. You've already made up your mind and nothing can convince you otherwise.

> I stopped getting boosters (like most normal people) when it became clear that the vaccine wasn't working and the virus had mutated to be more harmless than ever. I never got the virus even once but everyone I know who got double boosted and so on did get it, even multiple times (unless they were skipping work).

This is Facebook uncle-posting tier.
by 8organicbits | 2025-08-30 13:29:08+00:00
> I realised that knowing about my website visitors had zero effect on anything in the real world.

I'm in the process of trying to monetize a concept I discussed in one of my blog posts. I wouldn't have realized the idea was valuable, or that other people didn't find it obvious, if not for analytics.

I will agree with the general sentiment of the post: that there is a moral duty not to surveil readers of your blog. Personally, I find https://www.goatcounter.com/ strikes the right balance.
by jascha_eng | 2025-08-30 13:29:09+00:00
Those censorships are government enforced and don't necessarily allow conclusions about how the company developing the models thinks they are just following local laws. If anthropic was a Chinese company Claude would do the same.

Do I think it's problematic? Yes, but I don't blame the company or their leadership for it. For grok and xai you can very much be skeptical about the team behind it for it's actions
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-08-30 13:29:11+00:00
Sound arguments from faulty premises are still sound arguments – but identifying whether premises are valid is hard.

My heuristic, "if a sound argument concludes that racism is true, there's something wrong with the premises", is pretty effective in telling me where to look, but doesn't eliminate the hard work of distinguishing truth from falsehood. That this heuristic has never failed doesn't actually prove that all racism is false: only that all racism is afaik unevidenced, and that many specific theories of racism are false. (It does, however, provide increasing evidence that racists believe racism for reasons other than empirical observation, allowing me to confidently discount the evidentiality of their claims.)

I have slightly less evidence, but still quite a lot, generalising this from racism specifically, to all bigotry, which does put me at odds with the academic consensus in certain areas where I'm not otherwise an expert. Those academic consensuses do seem to be moving towards my understanding, though, so it seems to me that this is a pretty neat trick for getting ahead of the curve. (I'm a little surprised that intersectional feminist theory isn't taught to social scientists in school: what I rediscovered by brute-force has been known to the philosophers for decades.)
by westurner | 2025-08-30 13:29:23+00:00
Furthermore, Bayesian models are not to be applied when there is not statistical independence of observations.

"LightGBM Predict on Pandas DataFrame – Column Order Matters" (2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43088854 :

> [ LightGBM,] does not converge regardless of feature order.

> From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41873650 :

>> Do algorithmic outputs diverge or converge given variance in sequence order of all orthogonal axes? Does it matter which order the dimensions are stated in; is the output sensitive to feature order, but does it converge regardless?

> Also, current LLMs suggest that statistical independence is entirely distinct from orthogonality, which we typically assume with high-dimensional problems. And, many statistical models do not work with non-independent features.

> Does this model work with non-independence or nonlinearity?

> Does the order of the columns in the training data CSV change the alpha of the model; does model output converge regardless of variance in the order of training data?

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37462132 :

> [ quantum discord ]

> TIL the separable states problem is considered NP-hard, and many models specify independence of observation as necessary.

How does (NP-hard) quantum separability relate to statistical independence as necessary for statistical models to be appropriate?

If it is so hard to determine which particles are and aren't entangled, when should we assume statistical independence of observation?

If we cannot assume statistical independence of observation, we know that Bayesian models aren't appropriate.
by ajross | 2025-08-30 13:29:42+00:00
It's only a win if it's replaced with lower-energy domestic alternatives, though. (Which, needlessly to say, don't remotely exist in almost all cases.) If your argument is that we just don't buy it at all, that's just cheering for economic contraction. I don't think you've thought things through if so.

People think that this just means that their nieces will stop buying junky fast fashion or whatever but that their own clean aescetic lifestyle will be unimpacted. But, no, that avocado toast is bankrolled by your employer and IRA and investment accounts or whatever, none of which are prepared for a 10% GDP contraction (or whatever) because the rubes can't buy their skorts anymore.

Economies are boats. We all sink or swim together.
by razighter777 | 2025-08-30 13:29:51+00:00
What about making side loading require some moderate level of technical sophistication? Like connecting to the phone over usb and having to manually type some long shell commands, or exit vim, or write a compiling c program, or some other layman proof filter to activate installing outside apps. I feel like grandma would be too intmimidated by this (good), making it too frustrating for even the most determine scammer to explain, no matter how desperate they are for her social security checks. Have it be done in the bootloader so you can't follow these instructions while on the phone, and require physical interactivity with the device (can't be automated over usb). Regardless, this policy is an unacceptable infringement on digital freedom by google.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-08-30 13:30:09+00:00
> One could then argue, "why does an author need to care about blogging to an empty void?!?". I don't know what to say. I guess it's just humans being humans and some want a little social proof that whatever they put a lot of time into is useful to more people than a tiny niche audience.

In my case, there’s a social proof element, but it’s also nice to know if I’m basically talking to myself or if there’s somebody out there listening. If it’s the former I feel kind of silly, like someone sitting in an empty room muttering to themselves might, plus writing takes time and energy that I could be putting towards something else. You know how there’s some meals that feel worth cooking if there’s even one other person who’ll be eating, but not if it’s just yourself? It’s like that.
by sleepyguy | 2025-08-30 13:30:30+00:00
The consumer and small business lose, all because China couldn't resist taking advantage of the program. Now, simply ordering any item from Canada or Europe that is not available in the US will incur costs that are several times the item's value.

Why not just end De Minimis to China and leave it for the rest of the world that doesn't take advantage of it and reciprocates with their own De Minimis for US Imports?
by adrian_b | 2025-08-30 13:30:38+00:00
That presentation is like all the research that has been published in this domain, i.e. it presents some ideas that might be used to build an alternative theory of space-time, but no such actual theories.

There are already several decades of such discussions, but no usable results.

Time and space are primitive quantities in any current theory of physics, i.e. quantities that are assumed to exist and have certain properties, and which are used to define derived quantities.

Any alternative theory must start by enumerating exactly which are its primitive quantities and which are their properties. Anything else is just gibberish, not better than Star Trek talk.

However, the units of measurement for time and length are not fundamental units a.k.a. base units, because it is impossible to make any physical system characterized by values of time or length that are stable enough and reproducible enough.

Because of that, the units of time and length are derived from fundamental units that are units of some derived quantities, currently from the units of work and velocity (i.e. the unit of work is the work required to transition a certain atom, currently cesium 133, from a certain state to a certain other state, i.e. which is equal to the difference between the energies of the 2 states, while the unit of velocity is the velocity of light in vacuum).
by edent | 2025-08-30 13:30:53+00:00
Thanks for the feedback. Those examples are meant to cover the first point.

The problem if you are a bank is that scammed people can be very persistent about trying to reclaim their money. There's a cost to the bank of dealing with a complaint, doing an investigation, replying to the regulator, fielding questions from an MP, having the story appear in the press about the heartless bank refusing to refund a little old lady.

It is entirely rational for them to decide not to bear that cost - even if they aren't liable.
by microtonal | 2025-08-30 13:31:08+00:00
The solution is not taking people's freedom away. The solution is education. Lesson 1: lovers are not for investment advise.

Also, scams also happen outside smartphones.

What's next? Are we going to revoke people's control over their financials because they might be scammed? Let's have the bank approve before we can do a transaction. And since we are using their payment platform, maybe they should also take 30%.

Please stop feeding their narrative. Scammers are Google/Apple's "but think of the children".
by daenney | 2025-08-30 13:31:10+00:00
The title is interesting but the article lacks a lot of background information. There’s no explanation of what the CPU-bound endpoints are, what causes them to be CPU-bound etc. They mention they didn’t think optimising the Go code would’ve given them enough, but there’s nothing to substantiate it and no way for the reader to form their own opinion since we’re never told what the problem is other than “doesn’t scale.”

I have no issue with Rust, there’s nothing wrong with what they did, they approached it sensibly and the results are certainly compelling. But it reads a lot like “we wanted to write something in Rust” and found a reason to do so.
by pavlov | 2025-08-30 13:31:17+00:00
In Finland the tax treatment for dividends is even friendlier.

If you have a 1.5M balance sheet, you can pay yourself 120k euros in dividends annually at an effective tax rate of only 7.5%.

Let’s just say that small businesses and professionals have very good lobbyists. An employee making 120k / year pays over 40% tax.

This creates a tremendous incentive for professionals to incorporate and use every trick in the books to build up a larger balance sheet on paper.
by conradev | 2025-08-30 13:31:24+00:00
Control over hardware isn’t actually the issue at stake here: many Android devices can unlock their bootloaders in a moderately safe way. Go nuts.

It’s a more tricky issue where Google and other parties can restrict access to their services to devices they deem legitimate. Their services, their rules. Your hardware. Different arguments required.

It’s everywhere: Widevine is used to prevent stealing 4K content (incl ATSC 3.0), gaming providers use it for anti-cheat, banks use it to rate limit abuse. It’s not just Android.

(I say this as someone with an Apple Vision Pro running visionOS 1.0 with the hope to jailbreak it one day. I’m actually unable to do whatever I want to their hardware, unlike my Pixel phones.)
by jansan | 2025-08-30 13:31:28+00:00
It was the main phone in Europe and the USA, but in Japan they had entirely different types like the Docomo P208, which were much smaller and pretty cool (although I never used one). I remember when I was on a business trip to Japan with a colleague from the US in 1998. He pulled out his (at that time already outdated) Motorola and the Japanese just could not believe how clunky phones could be.
by hollerith | 2025-08-30 13:32:12+00:00
Remote attestation is a useful capability. One example: it can be used to create a camera such that the photographer can prove that an image is an accurate recording of reality and not AI-generated. Without remote attestation, we will soon enter a state of affairs in which the courts (and anyone else, too) cannot ever rely on photographic or video evidence.

The banking system has been relying on remote attestation for decades to ensure that devices used in settling financial transactions have not been tampered with:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_4758

Also, I think the chip-and-PIN cards used for most in-store transactions in Europe for the last 20 years rely on remote attestation and tamper resistance to prevent fraud.

Finally, in the domain of desktop and laptop computers, there is a big security hole in that most components (certainly, disk drives and storage devices, but basically any peripheral or board) are essentially embedded computers that can be pwned with the result that they stayed pwned even if the owner of the computer installs the OS from scratch. One solution to this would be for suppliers of peripherals and boards to get much better at securing their products or to stop using microprocessor to implement their products, but it would be quite a lot of work (and governmental intervention or at least intervention by industry-wide quasi-governmental entities that currently do not exist) to get from the current situation to the one I just described. The only products currently available that are secure against this threat (aside perhaps from using 40-year-old computers) use verified-boot technology to implement the security.

I.e., the only desktop and laptop computers you can buy where you can be reasonable sure some attacker hasn't installed malware in the computer's disk drive or track page or wifi module are things like Macs and Chromebooks, which implement the security using verified boot.
by siva7 | 2025-08-30 13:32:15+00:00
> Peter Turchin has developed a mathematical model to predict the collapse of a society and one of the main factors is an over-supply of graduates (or elites).

I know i will get downvoted for this but i feel HN is losing its intellectual side over such elitist crap. The original article is from a well-known racist / eugenist and people here keep going on posting more dubious content that tries to paint towards political policies to keep the masses out of higher education.
by TrueDuality | 2025-08-30 13:32:41+00:00
I write primarily as a means to collect my thoughts and outcomes around projects. I keep analytics on my site not to optimize for any particular audience but because it feels validating and that I'm contributing in another form.

I still see high traffic on a post explaining oddities in some of Route53's unintuitive behaviors and hope I'm making someone's day a little better in giving them a solution.

That drives me to write more.
by fleshmonad | 2025-08-30 13:32:53+00:00
Okay, how would you fix the scammy email problem? Only allow authorizing people to send emails after they applied for a government issued address?

Outlaw all non big corpo operating systems?

Perfect surveillance? All because some boomers can't into common sense?

It's also ironic that you bring up warning signs as a counterexample to my point, as it's exactly what I am saying. You can warn them, but you don't bar them from doing so.