MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by abeppu | 2025-09-08 19:08:29+00:00
I think we can't actually know this unless Meta tries it. I think there are two main open questions:

1. With aggressive, noisy referrals to prosecution, and banning people who report others in bad faith, can you get these people to stop approaching kids on the platform? Can you get the human review burden to a tractable level b/c the rate of real issues and the rate of false reports is sufficiently low?

2. Can better moderation / safety measures _facilitate_ growth b/c people won't be scared or disgusted away from your product? We have plenty of people whose advice is "don't let your kids use their products unsupervised" and assuming you don't have the free time to _watch_ your kids use their product that quickly turns into "don't let your kids use their products". A safe platform that people _believe_ is safe might experience faster growth.
by marcosdumay | 2025-09-08 19:08:30+00:00
You could reasonably want to evaluate data in those relations, to compose data to use at the top level. You could also reasonably run queries within the internal relations.

You could probably be able to promote those relations up on the hierarchy by using them in joins. But I don't think it's reasonable to mix queries of several levels. (I can't even imagine how the syntax for that would look like.)
by wtallis | 2025-09-08 19:08:41+00:00
GPU vendors have come to the realization that the in-kernel driver needs to be open-source, but the userspace portion can be closed-source. There's just really no good reason to accept a design where outdated closed-source drivers could keep you from running a current kernel. WiFi NIC vendors have for generations been moving more complexity into the closed-source firmware blob that runs on the NIC's own processor core(s), so there's no good reason for the kernel driver to remain closed-source.
by maqp | 2025-09-08 19:09:16+00:00
>"Telegram is not fully e2ee but it's way more convenient here."

Yeah convenient way to hand your data to a Russian oligarch.

PGP has no forward secrecy and OTR in XMPP lacks future secrecy, multi-device support etc.

Signal introducing end-to-end encrypted backups is exactly how Telegram should've done it decade ago.
by const_cast | 2025-09-08 19:09:28+00:00
Yeah most enterprise software barely works and is an absolute maintenance nightmare because they're sprawling distrivuted systems.

Ask yourself: how does an enterprise with 1000 engineers manage to push a feature out 1000x slower than two dudes in a garage? Well, processes, but also architecture.

Distributed systems slow down your development velocity by many orders of magnitude, because they create extremely fragile systems and maintenance becomes extremely high risk.

We're all just so used to the fragility and risk we might think it's normal. But no, it's really not, it's just bad. Don't do that.
by janalsncm | 2025-09-08 19:09:33+00:00
S3 vectors has a topK limit of 30, and if you add filters it may be less than that. So if you need something with higher topK you’ll need to 1) look elsewhere or 2) shard your dataset into N shards to get NxK results, which you query in parallel and merge afterwards.

I also didn’t see any latency info on their docs page https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/API/API_S3Vector...
by fluoridation | 2025-09-08 19:10:00+00:00
>A computer with 64 GB of memory is 4 times more likely to encounter memory errors than one with 16 GB of memory.

No. Or well, not exactly. More bits will flip randomly, but if between the two systems only the total installed memory changed, both systems will see the same amount of memory errors, because bit flips on the additional 48 GB will not result in errors, because they will not be used. Memory errors scale with memory used not with memory installed.
by roxolotl | 2025-09-08 19:10:06+00:00
> It’s common to rack up 4 hours or more of screen time a day on your phone. Here’s one way to see the cost of that: every 20 years, you lose 5 years of your waking time looking at your phone.

This is interesting because I suspect most people use their phone while doing other things. I’m in a meeting commenting on this article with my phone. I’ve got maybe 15min a day of “I’m only paying attention to my phone” but I have 4-5 hours of phone screen time. Maybe I’m unusual though.
by gnabgib | 2025-09-08 19:10:20+00:00
This story is 2 months old: ICEBlock, an app for anonymously reporting ICE sightings, goes viral (535 points, 886 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44445646

Related: ICEBlock handled my vulnerability report in the worst possible way (106 poins, 7 hours ago, 60 comments) ICEBlock handled my vulnerability report in the worst possible way
by robin_reala | 2025-09-08 19:10:30+00:00
In an emailed statement to The Verge, Google spokesperson Jackie Berté said the statement is “one cherry-picked line that misrepresents” the company’s legal filing. “It’s clear from the preceding sentence that we’re referring to ‘open-web display advertising’ and not the open web as a whole,” Berté said. “We are pointing out the obvious: that investments in non-open web display advertising like connected TV and retail media are growing at the expense of those in open web display advertising.”

https://www.theverge.com/news/773928/google-open-web-rapid-d...

Regardless, we had an open web before algorithmic search engines, we had an open web before targeted advertising, and we had an open web before AI. The joy of the web is that anyone can write anything they want on it, regardless of corporate sponsorship or not.
by rmason | 2025-09-08 19:10:32+00:00
John King books is a major Detroit attraction. His brag about not being computerized is crazy. Can you imagine how many books he could sell online? He does have a website but it looks like it was built in the nineties - https://www.johnkingbooksdetroit.com/

But as Jay Leno learned if you need the repair manual to a ninety year old car this is the place to look. Can't order it by phone, you have to come to Detroit and wander the stacks yourself. Pack a lunch cause there's no in store cafe.
by ppeetteerr | 2025-09-08 19:10:44+00:00
This is not unique to the age of LLMs. PR reviews are often shallow because the reviewer is not giving the contribution the amount of attention and understanding it deserves.

With LLMs, the volume of code has only gotten larger but those same LLMs can help review the code being written. The current code review agents are surprisingly good at catching errors. Better than most reviewers.

We'll soon get to a point where it's no longer necessary to review code, either by the LLM prompter, or by a second reviewer (the volume of generate code will be too great). Instead, we'll need to create new tools and guardrails to ensure that whatever is written is done in a sustainable way.
by pomian | 2025-09-08 19:10:46+00:00
I just replaced my screen background with a photo from Mars with a big granitic(?)/ granodiorite(?) Boulder, surrounded by volcanic rocks. It is an amazing quandary! Fun to look at, and think - ok, how was this made!? To simplify: the Boulder: is a white rock with black crystals, whereas all the surrounding rocks are dark grey or black(look like lava.) The Boulder is somewhat round(let's say 1 meter across +-100%), has been broken at some of the edges, and rounded at others. How was it broken? Rounded, and the fact it isn't in the Chevy place judging by the surrounding rocks, HOW, did it get there? So we are looking at various igneous processes at work here. Deep and surface. Plus, transport, by water? Ice? Liquid CO2? Unknown.

https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/P...
by TheSoftwareGuy | 2025-09-08 19:10:47+00:00
>It's not like there's some secret sauce here in most of these implementation details. If there was, I'd understand not telling us. This is probably less an Apple-style culture of secrecy and more laziness and a belief that important details have been abstracted away from us users because "The Cloud" when in fact, these details do really matter for performance and other design decisions we have to make.

Having worked inside AWS I can tell you one big reason is the attitude/fear that anything we put in out public docs may end up getting relied on by customers. If customers rely on the implementation to work in a specific way, then changing that detail requires a LOT more work to prevent breaking customer's workloads. If it is even possible at that point.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-09-08 19:10:53+00:00
>And if you’re using a 20 year old system for non-hobby stuff, you already know there’s a lot of things that don’t work anymore.

Mate, 20 year old system means a Pentium 4 Prescott and Athlon 64, both of which had 64 bit support. And in another year after we already had dual core 64 bit CPUs.

So if you're stuck on 32 bit CPUs then your system is even older than 20 years.
by sigotirandolas | 2025-09-08 19:10:56+00:00
> - How do the end user protect themselves at this point? Especially the average user?

- Install as little software as possible, use websites if possible.

- Keep important stuff (especially cryptocurrency) on a separate device.

- If you are working on a project that pulls 100s of dependencies from a package registry, put that project on a VM or container.
by triceratops | 2025-09-08 19:11:34+00:00
> The failure mode of non-capitalism is literally mass starvation.

Why does any criticism of how businesses are run today, no matter how mild, always come back to the Holodomor? Is there a communism equivalent of Godwin's law?

> It would be impossible for capitalism to work if investors took on unlimited liability for what employees of the company did

I'm asking for executives i.e. high-ranking employees to take more responsibility for their shitty decisions.

Why can't we do capitalism better?
by pdntspa | 2025-09-08 19:11:43+00:00
May have been 2018. Definitely not that long before covid. Suppliers in the embedded space will stockpile EOL parts for desperate integrators such as ourselves, and can continue to supply new units for years after they're discontinued. The product needed a custom linux kernel compile and it took a while to get that working on 64-bit and we had to ship new units. Yes the COGS get ridiculous.
by numpad0 | 2025-09-08 19:11:59+00:00
There do seem to be some of young brilliant minds today taking "with AI you can be xxx" too literally, thinking the sole remaining distinction between them and all the rich geniuses in the world is willingness to prompt something. They're not incentivized to fix that skewed perceptions because they have nothing else to reinforce their self esteem and "LLM is AGI" is giving them the crutch they desperately need. They'll be hard to de-program when the time comes...
by jay-barronville | 2025-09-08 19:12:09+00:00
> Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard

> Zuck: Just ask.

> Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS

> [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?

> Zuck: People just submitted it.

> Zuck: I don't know why.

> Zuck: They "trust me"

> Zuck: Dumb fucks.

> Mark Zuckerberg, 2004

The sad thing is, he was totally right. The Zuck gets none of my data.
by dsego | 2025-09-08 19:12:15+00:00
A few years ago I made a small tuner that mimicked the strobe effect by resampling the signal with interpolation to match the wave period (similar to an untriggered oscilloscope) and applying an IIR bandpass filter to get a clean sinewave, then showing the sinewave as a color gradient instead of an oscilloscope view. I tried a few different variations but couldn't figure out how to control the speed (sensitivity) of the movement and make it independent of the input frequency/period (apart from showing more or fewer periods in the pattern) and also it required a strong biquad filter to remove harmonics that would bleed into the strobe pattern (a similar effect can be seen in the turbo tuner (*) guitar pedal that uses LEDs to show a spinning pattern and sometimes the pattern smears or flickers), but this introduced unwanted lag. Here is a screen recording of my old app: https://youtu.be/IjYv1fDEopY

(*) I'm not affiliated in any way, I was just researching this a lot.
by EthanHeilman | 2025-09-08 19:12:29+00:00
> The slowing pace of improvement at the bleeding edge of generative AI is one sign that LLMs are not living up to their hype. Arguably a more important indication is the rise of smaller, nimbler alternatives, which are finding favour in the corporate world.

This seems to be saying that SLM (Small Language Models) are a sign that improvement in LLM (Large Language Models) is slowing. I don't know that improvements in LLM are slowing, I really mean it, what is the data one way or the other. I've been trying to investigate this question and I don't have a clear answer. The rise of SLM doesn't seem like evidence either way.
by sixtyj | 2025-09-08 19:12:32+00:00
There was K9 Web Protection but it was ended in 2019 by Symantec. It was perfect because after setting up password you had to wait one week to unblock it back again :)

You can try LeechBlock. It works as plugin in all browsers.

First thirty seconds are the worst for will :)

So it is better to ask a relative/friend/parent/spouse to set up a password for you - then you cannot unblock the sites back again without them.
by chrisjeffries24 | 2025-09-08 19:12:32+00:00
From the dawn of civilization to the modern globalized world, humans have built their societies on the backs, hides, and lives of animals. In An Animal’s History of Humanity, Chris Jeffries traces the often-overlooked story of animal exploitation through time, revealing how the fate of nonhuman creatures has been intimately intertwined with human progress, power, and profit.

From prehistoric kinship turned conquest, to the rise of agriculture, the weight of beasts in medieval life, and the mechanized horrors of the Industrial Revolution, Jeffries paints a sweeping narrative of domination and cruelty. He examines colonial plunder, the paradoxes of Renaissance thought, and the industrial-scale suffering that continues into the present day, ultimately asking what the future holds for the voiceless members of our world.

Deeply researched yet accessible, this book challenges readers to confront the ethical cost of human civilization, offering a provocative reflection on morality, progress, and the shape of exploitation yet to come. An Animal’s History of Humanity is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the hidden history of our species through the lives of those who suffered for our sake.
by grep_name | 2025-09-08 19:13:05+00:00
I don't think self control works that way. Every decision you make causes decision fatigue, which means that the things that you encounter constantly that nag at you and take your attention have a serious impact on your day-to-day. Like, say you have the energy to make 1000 decisions throughout the day. That includes dressing well, remembering to do things, eating well, making time for side projects, etc. Say your phone provides 100 times when you have to say 'no, I'm going to make the more difficult decision and not give in to this' each day. Well, that adds up.

I have type 1 diabetes, and there's studies about this on diabetics actually. There's a huge hit to quality of life and specific kinds of burnout attributed to the thousand or so extra decisions we have to make every day to manage our blood sugar. I'd love to get rid of those, but since I can't, I'm particularly sensitive to bullshit that takes my attention or willpower like that. In my experience, people don't live on a spectrum where "I have self control" = Everything that happens to me I make the right decision even if its hard or "I have no self control" = I always make the bad decision. There's always a pool of decisions, and the further you get into the onslaught of decisions the more you're beaten down and the worse your self-control is.

It is perhaps possible to attain a monk-like state where your will is absolute and you never make any compromises (although I doubt it), but since 99.99% of us will never get there, I think there's a lot to be said for cutting out things that nudge us in the wrong direction constantly
by twistedpair | 2025-09-08 19:13:09+00:00
Identical, highly obfuscated (and thus suspicious looking) payload was inserted into 22+ packages from the same author (many dormant for a while) simultaneously and published.

What kind of crazy AI could possible have noticed that on the NPM side?

This is frustrating as someone that has built/published apps and extensions to other software providers for years and must wait days or weeks for a release to be approved while it's scanned and analyzed.

For all the security wares that MS and GitHub sell, NPM has seen practically no investment over the years (e.g. just go review the NPM security page... oh, wait, where?).
by const_cast | 2025-09-08 19:13:14+00:00
Um... yes? If you built your app around COM+, you're fucked. I would know, I worked on an application like that. Perpetually stuck in decades long gone.

Or NextSTEP. Or DX 9. Or whatever the fuck.

That shit sucked when it came out and it's only gotten worse. The cherry on top is the companies that promised they're the bees knees actually know that, which is why they left them to die. And, unfortunately, your applications along with them.
by messe | 2025-09-08 19:13:21+00:00
> because AWS doesn't truly understand their own systems due to the culture of the company.

This. There's a lot of freedom in how teams operate. Some teams have great internal documentation, others don't, and a lot of it is scattered across the internal Amazon wiki. I recall having to reach out on slack on multiple occasions to figure out how certain systems worked after diving through docs and the relevant issue trackers didn't make it clear.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-09-08 19:13:23+00:00
When the CIA does something, we at the time don't know that the CIA is doing it (if they're doing it competently). That is true.

But run the experiment the other way. A friend of mine once said that if a light bulb burns out on Tierra Del Fuego, somebody claims that it's a CIA conspiracy. Of all the public claims (gated by some level of seriousness or authority) of CIA involvement, what fraction turned out to be true?
by toast0 | 2025-09-08 19:13:38+00:00
If you have enough money, the specific amount doesn't make a huge difference. Yes, maybe at some point in your life having more would make a major difference, and things you could have done may have resulted with you having enough more to make the difference. That's unavoidable.

If you have enough money and you can stop worrying about it, that seems like a healthy relationship with money. When you don't have much, it's a good thing to focus on, but prioritizing other things is great, if you can.
by whartung | 2025-09-08 19:13:58+00:00
My singular problem with visual programming is simply the amount of detail necessary in modern programming.

Code is flat out complicated, with lots and lots and lots of steps, each with perhaps even more detail.

And it's hard to do that efficiently with visual editors. Imagine a display with instead of thousands of lines of code, you have thousands of symbols.

Or, the visual editors break things down in to components that are so small they do not convey the "big picture" well.

It's a personal complaint with the way Smalltalk works. Lots of methods, small (ideally) snippets of code, all viewed in isolation.

It's common (at least for me) to put related code together in the source file. It's useful to scan the whole file to get a feel for the flow of the code, and the system. Looking at isolated code, out of context, has always been a struggle for me. There's a reason my code is not sorted alphabetically by function name.

Maybe if you organized code visually, that is, perhaps the upper left is the start up code, the lower right is some core math all collected together like beads in a pot. "All red ones go here, all the 1" ones go there".

Granted I have not worked on such a tool or such a project. But the linear presentation of code as structured text has worked well for me, even when I bounce around between modules in the IDE.
by MomsAVoxell | 2025-09-08 19:14:21+00:00
Awesome, thanks for sharing!

There are many modern games being developed for these 40-something year old computing platforms, which - incidentally - still work great as a gaming/hacking/fun platform, and therefore are attracting all kinds of interesting hacks and devs.

My favourite recent endeavour, is DBugs' EncounterHD - a reboot of an early text adventure game, but given the modern UI and tooling treatment (by a world-class AAA-title developer, it has to be said) ..

https://defenceforce.itch.io/encounter

This is essentially, a text adventure game for a somewhat obscure 80's-era UK-based 8-bit computer, the Oric-1/Atmos, but now in the 21st Century, DBug has done an outstanding job of adding graphics and realtime dynamics/sound to it, some ~30 years after the fact...

It has become a delightful thing to play - on a Steam Deck, for instance, it is quite comfortable!

The game ships within its own build of an Oric-1/Atmos emulator, which you can escape to and use as if it were an Oric Atmos - if you want an Oric-1/Atmos emulator to further play with - and there are other delightful treats in EncounterHD among the lives of the characters in the game... watch out for the Game & Watch, for instance, which features a familiar grumpy monkey in fully playable form ..
by hunter2_ | 2025-09-08 19:14:51+00:00
I agree: any of the potential indicators of phishing (whether it's poor presentation, incorrect grammar, tight deadlines, unusual "from" addresses, unusual domains in links, etc.) can easily have false positives which unfortunately dull people's senses. That doesn't mean they can't continue to be promulgated as indicators of possible (not definite) phishing, though.

I used the word "often" rather than "always" for this reason.