MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fiatpandas | 2025-09-15 05:48:53+00:00
I highly recommend the documentary Plastic Wars (Frontline). It’s about how the plastics industry made a major marketing push for recycling starting in the 80s, in order to avoid plastic bans and ensure production continued to increase. It shifted the burden of plastic waste from producers to consumers, and we are essentially still in that conceptual space (at least in the US).
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-09-15 05:49:22+00:00
>I really hate the “end of the empire” or “late stage capitalism” attitudes. They’re ignorant and self-fulfilling

When you put down all the dots and they form a line that trends in one direction, it's just reality. Ignoring it and calling it "self fulfilling" as if it's a thing that you personally have control of, IS what's ignorant.

>If you really believe it then please go out in the world and engage people in a positive way. Go do some volunteering. Not to make a change in the world but in yourself.

Being a decent human being does not undo the politically induced global economic issues related to the "late stage capitalism" you mentioned. It's two orthogonal things that are unrelated.
by testdelacc1 | 2025-09-15 05:49:50+00:00
It’s stunning how poor all the replies on this thread have been. Not even an attempt to read what I’m saying.

No, I don’t disagree with the need for probable cause. I was asking, how do you build the case for probable cause against someone you’ve never seen and whose communication is completely encrypted? You can’t. I don’t have a solution for that, and I don’t think anyone does. I am merely pointing out that it’s a problem, and that the police’s suggested solution is surveillance.
by dwohnitmok | 2025-09-15 05:50:46+00:00
These set of intuitions and the Johnson-Lindenstrauss lemma in particular are what power a lot of the research effort behind SAEs (Sparse Autoencoders) in the field of mechanistic interpretability in AI safety.

A lot of the ideas are explored in more detail in Anthropic's 2022 paper that's one of the foundational papers in SAE research: https://transformer-circuits.pub/2022/toy_model/index.html
by h4ch1 | 2025-09-15 05:50:53+00:00
I have been seeing a lot of so-called self proclaimed vibe-coders swearing by LLMs making them 10x or 100x devs, but I've yet to see actual vibe coded projects hitting the markets.

Whenever I see said projects, on Github or non-technical friends vibe coding their next new startups asking for a code review, all I can see is boilerplate hell, 100s of lines of redundancies, problems that could've been solved using 5-6 procedures being blown out to 4-5 directories with 20-30 procedures, basically over-engineered beyond belief.

The positive part of this is people who would've never thought of programming/writing code are beginning to do so but their confidence is highly misplaced because they simply don't understand what's going on to a certain degree and don't possess the necessary knowledge nor skillset to review the generated code. A successful compile or output on the web browser is not a very good metric for projects.

Great writeup that captures the current state of affairs.

----

Tangential, but hi Nommy :) glad to see you out there, remember competing against you back in school; those web dev comps used to be the shit. Think Exun 2013 was when we went head to head making that fake currency haha.
by 8f2ab37a-ed6c | 2025-09-15 05:51:16+00:00
It's reasonably modular and you get access to the full source, so if you wanted to drop many chunks of it that aren't relevant to you, you could, in theory. Of course it's still a 20M+ LOC codebase and all future version updates integration are going to suck big time, but a large enough team can likely power through the suffering here.
by testfrequency | 2025-09-15 05:51:49+00:00
Waiting for the inevitable HN comment that explains to us why this is “actually great” news, and how this isn’t what it “appears to be”.

I have two close friends who used to work at the EPA, and they used to vent to me during his first administration that most of them were kept from making any meaningful progress on anything, so most career people felt like they had to leave the group to continue pushing for change from elsewhere.

I have no context on how things went during the Biden years for the agency, but it sounded to me like maybe it never recovered.
by ehnto | 2025-09-15 05:52:05+00:00
It's possible I'm blocking the AI widget as I don't see it, is it Grok replying with a fact check of the claim?

I think that is good in general, I do, I am just weary that it is still shakey ground. The company behind Grok has clear incentives to influence the output of those fact checks as one example. I am also weary of it always eventually conforming to the vox populi as it ingests the internet firehouse. Leading to the loudest, most prolific voices thus views always being more represented.
by winrid | 2025-09-15 05:52:20+00:00
What's the benefit of promises like this here?

Just spin up a loop of 50 call chains. When one completes you just do the next on next tick. It's like 3 lines of code. No libraries needed. Then you're always doing 50 at a time. You can still use await.

async work() { await thing(); nextTick(work); }

for(to 50) { work(); }

then maybe a separate timer to check how many tasks are active I guess.
by Ayesh | 2025-09-15 05:52:27+00:00
I don't think so.

- Let's Encrypt: doesn't support it since May 7 this year

- Buy Pass: No longer offers free certificates, probably didn't have must-staple either

- Zero SSL, I didn't find any public links to check if they sign CSRs with it.

- Google Trust Services: Same as above

- Amazon Trust: Same as above, but it probably does.
by blamazon | 2025-09-15 05:52:27+00:00
If you are in the US, generic breakfast cereals have come a long way. They come in larger boxes or bags and are basically identical. In the past they didn't have Cinnamon Toast Crunch figured out but there's been some kind of a breakthrough and they're a great copy now. Amazingly in some feat of copyright the one I now buy is called Cinnamon Crunch.
by alexchamberlain | 2025-09-15 05:53:14+00:00
I think banning plastic completely in packaging is a much harder ask, as whether it is needed is rather nuanced (if I understand it correctly). For example, it's perfectly possible to deliver cucumbers to an end customer without them being shrinkwrapped. However, to deliver enough cucumbers to enough customers for a supermarket scale, I understand from several documentaries that plastic is still required in that case. (For those outside the UK, plastic covered cucumber is the social barometer for plastic packaging.) Banning plastic bags was easy and simple, and our laws don't tend to deal with nuance very well...
by catlifeonmars | 2025-09-15 05:54:13+00:00
> You've done nothing but be personal, complaining that it's being returned is hypocritical. You started making personal comments, not me.

I’m genuinely sorry you feel that way. It wasn’t my intention.

> complaining that it's being returned is hypocritical

I was just responding to your complaint about the downvoting.
by thayne | 2025-09-15 05:54:19+00:00
I don't think any browsers still support OCSP.

The problem with OCSP stapling is that it either the client has to fall back to doing OCSP checking itself if the server doesn't staple the signature, which has its own problems[1], or enough servers need to support ocsp stapling that the client can just reject connections that don't include it. And unfortunately, there was never a significant uptake for servers, partly because there wasn't really any incentive to implement OCSP stapling. Maybe if there was a TLS 2.0 (or some other standard) that required OCSP stapling and had other benefits as well, it could work.

[1]: the biggest problem with non-stapled OCSP is what to do if you don't get a response for the ocsp request. If you fail open, an attacker can intercept the request to prevent you from knowing the cert is revoked, but if you fail closed, then any issue with the connection to the ocsp server results in loss of service. And then there are also issues with additional latency to wait for the ocsp response, privacy leaks from the ocsp requests, etc.
by Jolter | 2025-09-15 05:54:20+00:00
And you breezed right over the concept of self-rising flour! That’s an American thing if I’m not misinformed - at least we don’t have it in my country.

You want to bake something here,, you get all-purpose flour and baking powder or yeast, depending on what you’re trying to make. One flour in the cupboard instead of two means less waste and less space.
by testdelacc1 | 2025-09-15 05:55:03+00:00
> you can already tell from the metadata who is talking to whom, which is everything a government needs to get warrants, seize devices, and install surveillance devices.

The standard for probable cause has sharply declined in this scenario you’ve constructed.

And you’re assuming that the government will seize the device, install surveillance software and the criminals will continue to use those devices? I don’t see how.

Even if the government has access to remote takeovers using unpatched zero days, those are not used on local investigations.
by dalyons | 2025-09-15 05:55:04+00:00
Read this and weep https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/china-energy-transi...

In 2024 china created $1.9 trillion USD (!!) of new GDP from solar/battery/wind tech, and it will likely reach $3t in 2025.

The US is being left behind, by its own self sabotage. They are going to be left grasping at the last fossil fuel straws while the world leaves them behind. Nevermind the trillions and trillions of new energy $ and additive economic growth that the US will never see now.
by nathanhammond | 2025-09-15 05:55:53+00:00
Seeing your handle I am at risk of explaining something you may already know, but, this exists! And it was standardized in 1993, though I don't know when Unicode picked it up.

Ideographic Description Characters: https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2FF0.pdf

The fine people over at Wenlin actually have a renderer that generates characters based on this sort of programmatic definition, their Character Description Language: https://guide.wenlininstitute.org/wenlin4.3/Character_Descri... ... in many cases, they are the first digital renderer for new characters that don't yet have font support.

Another interesting bit, the Cantonese linguist community I regularly interface with generally doesn't mind unification. It's treated the same as a "single-storey a" (the one you write by hand) and a "two-storey a" (the one in this font). Sinitic languages fractured into families in part because the graphemes don't explicitly encode the phonetics + physical distance, and the graphemes themselves fractured because somebody's uncle had terrible handwriting.

I'm in Hong Kong, so we use 説 (8AAC, normalized to 8AAA) while Taiwan would use 說 (8AAA). This is a case my linguist friends consider a mistake, but it happened early enough that it was only retroactively normalized. Same word, same meaning, grapheme distinct by regional divergence. (I think we actually have three codepoints that normalize to 8AAA because of radical variations.)

The argument basically reduces "should we encode distinct graphemes, or distinct meanings." Unicode has never been fully-consistent on either side of that. The latest example, we're getting ready to do Seal Script as a separate non-unified code point. https://www.unicode.org/roadmaps/tip/

In Hong Kong, some old government files just don't work unless you have the font that has the specific author's Private Use Area mapping (or happen to know the source encoding and can re-encode it). I've regularly had to pull up old Windows in a VM to grab data about old code pages.

In short: it's a beautiful mess.
by chokominto | 2025-09-15 05:55:57+00:00
I wonder how one can slow down as a fast thinker. In school I used to be very fast with algebra and physics. But the hardest part was to get the numbers right. Just because my brain was too fast to think it through properly. Now when I'm writing code I still sometimes miss this "calculation parts" - some edge cases, maybe syntax, getting the general idea correctly. I did learn to deal with it somehow, but still I wonder how other people deal with it.
by Pooge | 2025-09-15 05:57:37+00:00
> LASIK/SMILE/etc were never and are not safe. At least ICL is fully reversible.

Citation needed.

All people I know and feedback I've heard that took LASIK or LASEK have said that it was a live-changing surgery. I myself underwent LASEK and have nothing bad to say.

I've never heard that it was unsafe. Quite the opposite, actually.

Then again, when I hear feedback from Americans it sounds like a different world. I live in a wealthy and medically-respected European country, though.
by frm88 | 2025-09-15 05:57:59+00:00
For people looking for a new phone it could be either Jolla [0] or Fairphone 6 [1]. Both come with their own OS.

[0] https://jolla-devices.com/sailfish_devices/

[1] https://shop.fairphone.com/de/the-fairphone-gen-6-e-operatin...
Show HN: Wollebol a Simple Dependency Visualizer
by denshadeds | 2025-09-15 05:58:28+00:00
The Wollebol app lets you visualize dependencies between classes in your project's package structure. It is language-agnostic, but you need to generate the dependency data yourself. For Java projects, a helpful Python script (wollebol.py) is provided. github: https://github.com/denshade/wollebol/ demo: https://thelaboflieven.info/wollebol/
by whilenot-dev | 2025-09-15 06:00:07+00:00
Promise.all waits for all 50 promises to resolve, so if one of these promises takes 3s, while the other 49 are taking 0.5s, you're waisting 2.5s awaiting each batch.

The implementation is rather simple, but more than 3 LoC: https://github.com/whilenot-dev/promises-batched/blob/main/s...
by Theodores | 2025-09-15 06:00:31+00:00
My dad passed away about three weeks after being fully pig-butchered, losing all of his money and reputation with family/friends. We all tried to talk him out of it, but it was like he joined a cult, for he cut us off and lost his mind. The whole sorry saga is very hard to live with. The sums of money were vast, cocaine addiction would have been a more cost effective way to go.

The pig-butchers had some type of bot/AI/wage slaves for the backend and they used Zendesk for the frontend. I am not happy that Zendesk is being used to basically rob people and I am minded to write up the whole sorry saga here just to inspire developers to steer their companies away from the Zendesk product. They didn't shoot my dad, they just sold the gun.
by pjmlp | 2025-09-15 06:00:36+00:00
I have experience across Xenix, DG/UX, Solaris, Aix, HP-UX, Tru64, NeXTSTEP, OS X, FreeBSD and all major Linux distributions starting with Slackware 2.0.

So I might know a thing or two about portable UNIX code, and getting it to run on a non-UNIX system like Windows.

Here is a reminder for you as well, one of those follows the same dynamic linking model as Windows.
by rustystump | 2025-09-15 06:01:32+00:00
The level of food moral superiority by people here is off the charts.

Yes we know it isnt that hard to bake/cook, a skill anyone can learn but that completely misses the point of the article.

Also, dont food shame those of us who like box baked food. Is my cheesecake not from scratch enough if i dont make the graham cracker crust from scratch? Give me a break.
by GuestFAUniverse | 2025-09-15 06:02:14+00:00
Brown paper, from recycled fibers are often contaminated with mineral oil residue (e.g. from ink on paper) and other unhealthy chemicals, sadly.

There was a report in Germany, years ago, of a range of organic products that failed during testing. They discovered the packaging (recycled paper) was the issue, not the crops and the supply chain before packaging.

So, a _really_ biodegradable cellulose bag is desirable. Even if only to use it I side a brown bag (to stabilise it).
by catlifeonmars | 2025-09-15 06:02:50+00:00
> What it means is that it takes more work (Computational Power) to properly model what's happening.

The issue isn’t computation. It’s measurement. It’s not possible to measure all of the factors that go into weather it will rain on a Tuesday at 3 pm 3 months from now (sorry for the terrible pun). It’s small perturbations in initial conditions.
by crinkly | 2025-09-15 06:03:09+00:00
I’m currently enjoying a competitor in our market make a wonderful mistake in this area. They want all in on vibe coding and AI and announced to their customers that they’d rewrite their 25 year old rotting platform using it in 12 months.

6 months late and I know a clean up contractor who is making bank there with no hope of recovering it apparently.

They saw it as a way out from their cheap assery, lack of talent and lowest bidding outsourcer over the years and it’s a dead end. I wonder how many other projects are in this situation.
by testdelacc1 | 2025-09-15 06:03:25+00:00
Sigh. It is possible for both things to be true.

That wiretaps allowed them to build a meaningful case against the entire drug organisation, with nearly all the drug dealers in jail or dead or out of the game. That’s not nothing. Without wiretaps they would just have been harassing easily replaced corner pawns.

But what you’re saying is partly true as well. Even after taking whole drug organisations down, it is possible to replace them. As long as the demand existed, and the wholesaler existed, new drug organisations would be formed.

I’m surprised that people came out of it thinking that there was no point to any of the police work. Do you really think it would have been better to not touch the drug organisations in any way?
by ip26 | 2025-09-15 06:03:38+00:00
I’m not an expert… but it seems like it could be even simpler than program design. They note false sharing occurs due to data not being cacheline aligned. Yet when compiling for ARM, that’s not a big deal due to WO. When targeting x86, you would hope the compiler would work hard to align them! So the out of the box compiler behavior could be crucial. Are there extra flags that should be used when targeting ARM-TSO?
by perlgeek | 2025-09-15 06:04:22+00:00
> Repetitive negative thinking (RNT) is a core symptom of a number of common psychological disorders and may be a modifiable process shared by many psychological risk factors that contribute to the development of cognitive impairment.

The core assumption (or insight?) of Cognitive Therapy (and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) is that our thoughts shape the way we feel. In this model, repetitive negative thoughts are actually a main cause of depression, not a symptom.

If you're interested in this approach, I'd recommend the works of David Burns, for example his book "Feeling Great" or the Feeling Good Podcast.
by qnleigh | 2025-09-15 06:05:01+00:00
I got sucked into reading this paper, and it has completely changed my perception of these scams. They are incredibly thorough and realistic. Here are some quotes that drove this home for me.

"The bond phase showed that scammers had tremendous patience; this phase lasted anywhere from 3 to 11 months before the scammer moved on to the next stage of the scam."

"When I spoke to her on a video call, it was the same person from the photos. She was even wearing the dress that matched a photo she had sent earlier in the day."

“She did not push me to invest, or ask for money. She seemed genuinely interested in me and we spoke for nearly 6 months before she even brought up investments; it all seemed so real and organic."

"It seemed legitimate, there was no reason to think that it could be fake – if she could be a scammer, so could any of my actual friends."

"[the site] was similar to what you would expect on an investment portfolio website; in fact, the prices of stocks and bitcoin also matched..."

"According to recent research [23], these scams have resulted in losses of nearly 75 billion dollars since 2020."
by jncfhnb | 2025-09-15 06:05:24+00:00
> Yes environment is a factor but given a prime environment to foster intelligence, you can see that among races there are still differences in intelligence.

You cannot. And the smoking gun is, again, that we have seen massive rises in intelligence scores within racial subgroups over time correlating with environmental changes that are much larger than current spreads and still unevenly distributed.
by yznovyak | 2025-09-15 06:05:27+00:00
I don't think so. For n=3 you can have 000, 001, 010, 100. All 4 (n+1) are pairwise orthogonal. However, I don't think js8 is correct as it looks like in 2^n you can't have more than n+1 mutually orthogonal vectors, as if any vector has 1 in some place, no other vector can have 1 in the same place.
by komali2 | 2025-09-15 06:07:30+00:00
> It may or may not be healthier, but the subjective taste preferences of the masses is pretty much settled fact at this point.

The masses sustain Hostess by buying enough of their atrocious boxed "cakes" and cookies. I really wouldn't trust their taste buds.

If your argument is, "if making cakes for the masses, boxed is fine," sure, I don't disagree. My argument is that I hang out with folks that do care about that kind of thing and basically never go to the middle aisles of a grocery store - that crowd will appreciate baked with straightforward ingredients. Flour, sugar, actual cocoa powder, yeast, whatever.
by pjmlp | 2025-09-15 06:07:56+00:00
In which country, again?

Because in Iberian Penisula, it was full of green phosphor terminals into timesharing systems, and random 16 bit computers from all brands on the more creative side.

In 1990 it wasn't certain that PC would really take over, everyone was mostly on MS-DOS, and not everyone was still buying into Windows, which only got 3.0 released in the middle of the year and demanded too expensive hardware for most business.
by lastdong | 2025-09-15 06:08:05+00:00
It will require someone like LEGO (others) to fully adopt it and prove its effectiveness, and for the governments to mandate its usage while providing incentives for adoption. However, the plastics industry will likely resist this change strongly. There’s also the issue of monoculture, the ideal is reduction (such as re-use durable cotton bags) — I wonder if plastics bags disappeared overnight wouldn’t people adapt? Probably a few extra trips to the supermarket at the start but shortly after a reusable container wouldn’t be forgotten. There’s more to plastics pollution than plastic bags though, water bottles, fast fashion and synthetic fibers, etc.
by joecool1029 | 2025-09-15 06:08:07+00:00
It isn't though. This is just noise. It's a good conversation thread for HN, but it has absolutely zero influence on Gentoo policy.

The only way it'll be revisited is if active Gentoo developers and/or contributors really start to push with a justification to get it changed and they agree to revisit discussing it again. I can tell you every maintainer has heard the line: 'I would have contributed if you did X thing'.
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-09-15 06:08:11+00:00
Banana Republic is an interesting term to use:

> In the early 20th century, the United Fruit Company, a multinational corporation, was instrumental in the creation of the banana republic phenomenon.[6][7] Together with other American corporations, such as the Cuyamel Fruit Company, and leveraging the power of the U.S. government, the corporations created the political, economic, and social circumstances that led to a coup of the locally elected democratic government that established banana republics in Central American countries such as Honduras and Guatemala;[8] No official apology has ever been done by any banana company or the U.S. with only the C.I.A. backed dictator of Guatemala apologizing in 2011.[9]

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