MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by immibis | 2025-09-15 13:29:03+00:00
It's both? They have a ridiculous approvals process considering the approvals process doesn't even work. They say they have to block all these legitimate apps as an accident of having tight security, but then they don't actually have tight security. Half the time it seems like the criteria for approving an app is how much ad revenue it brings the app store owner. Everyone who makes a legitimate app has stories of having updates denied after 3-4 weeks for no reason or a stupid reason, then resubmitting, and having it approved after another 3-4 weeks. And then they claim they need a 30% cut of all your income in order to pay for this process there's no possible way to eliminate even though it doesn't achieve its stated goals at all. Their stock price says they're not spending very much of it on that process.

I bet Apple's and Google's own apps don't have to wait 6-8 weeks. Maybe it's purely anticompetitive.

Edit: Oh, and the fact they get away telling such obvious lies without constantly being called out 24/7 by millions of people speaks to the power dynamic in play.
by alephnerd | 2025-09-15 13:29:03+00:00
European, Japanese, and Taiwanese companies have not done the same shenanigans that Hyundai Group and LG Group are doing with VWP and B1/2 visas.

If they can build battery factories, semiconductor fabs, and various other factories in the US without having to resort to the above visa abuses, why can't Korea Inc?

Heck, Daimler built a similar sized factory to Hyundai-LG's in MS relying only on American labor [0]

[0] - https://www.daimlertruck.com/en/newsroom/pressrelease/accele...
by const_cast | 2025-09-15 13:29:16+00:00
To be completely fair, AI really does use more water than other typical compute tasks, because AI takes A LOT of compute.

No, it's not like email, or a web server. I can run an email server or apache on my rinky dink computer and get hundreds of requests per second.

I can't run chatgpt, that requires a super computer. And of the stuff I can run, like deepseek, I'm getting very few tokens/s. Not requests! Tokens!

Yes, inference has an energy cost that is significantly more than other compute tasks.
by HWR_14 | 2025-09-15 13:29:47+00:00
This doesn't seem hard to do. Messaging apps exist in app stores, transmit data through one of a few ISPs often past national boundaries to a couple of data centers. It's not hard for a national government to see the communication and stop it or punish those attempting it. It could be done by technical means, putting pressure of the stores, or anywhere along the chain. Countries block all social media by fiat. It seems easy enough.
by Aurornis | 2025-09-15 13:29:59+00:00
The difference doesn’t come down to one single factor.

Comments that try to reduce population-scale differences to a single factor, like access to healthcare, are overly reductive. When it comes to obesity (not using being overweight, but truly past the obese threshold) you don’t need a doctor to inform you that it’s unhealthy.

The reductive claims about access to healthcare are also ignoring the fact that people in the US do actually use a lot of healthcare. The rate of GLP-1 use in America for weight loss is around 1 in 8 people, which is significantly higher than anywhere in Europe last time I checked. Obviously the higher obesity rate contributes to higher usage, but it demonstrates that many obese people in the United States are not lacking access to health care.
by peepee1982 | 2025-09-15 13:30:15+00:00
My experience as well. I was able to mask my ADHD with my high IQ, but I always felt like everyone else got a memo that I had missed, even when I was able to perform at a high level for short amounts of time.

Been diagnosed last year at age 42 and started taking medication. I think both quicker and faster because I don't get side-tracked and lost constantly. I can participate and even lead complicated discussions now when previously I would drift off because of something someone said that reminded me of something that has nothing to do with the discussion at hand.

If someone feels mentally sluggish it's worth looking into getting checked out.
by bux93 | 2025-09-15 13:30:30+00:00
Egyptian inscriptions used alternate hieroglyphics to hide meaning. Substitution ciphers were known to the Romans. Those involve mathing, although only a bit of addition. The Vigenère cipher is only hundreds, rather than thousands of years old - at least, as far as we know; the Greeks or Romans certainly had the requisite math skills to pull that one off. More broadly, confidential communications existed. Mesopotamian clay tablets (ca. 2000 BCE) had envelopes with seals. You'd imagine breaking a seal would be punishable. The hippocratic oath (3rd century BCE) mentions keeping medical secrets.

But that's not to say a human right should not spring into existence as new technology becomes available. For instance, the freedom to receive information (especially radio stations, such as Voice of America) got some attention post WW II.
by DiabloD3 | 2025-09-15 13:30:44+00:00
(given the context of LLMs) Unless you're doing CPU-side inference for corner cases where GPU inference is worse, lack of SIMD isn't a huge issue.

There are libraries to write SIMD in Go now, but I think the better fix is being able to autovectorize during the LLVM IR optimization stage, so its available with multiple languages.

I think LLVM has it now, its just not super great yet.
by CarpeQueso | 2025-09-15 13:30:49+00:00
I think it's great to play to one's strengths, but it's also true that what people perceive as "quick thinking" is often the result of very large amounts of practice. More specifically, people I know who are good at the types of skills described at the beginning of the article (mental math, witty responses, remembering facts, playing badminton to a high level) probably have a knack for them, but there are also types of underlying skills that aren't obvious to someone who hasn't spent a lot of time practicing the activity in question. I'll take two skills that I'm familiar with as cases in point: mental math and tennis (adjacent to badminton).

For mental math, there are all sorts of tricks that allow one to transform the problem into one with fewer values to hold in memory (for instance [1]). There are also lots of different patterns that allow shortcuts in calculation. The more of these one knows (kind of like facts in a trivia contest), the simpler many sorts of mental math problems become. And the more one has practiced, the faster one is at applying them. This is not to say that there aren't people who are exceptionally gifted, but it's also possible to be perceived as "quick-witted" by actually doing a lot of slow thinking ahead of time.

With tennis, sometimes it seems like players have exceptional reaction times (At the highest level, they certainly do!), but one learns over time to move to different areas of the court preemptively based on what the opponent is likely to do. This often shortens the distance one has to run by a step or two, which makes a pretty big difference in reaching difficult balls. Also, time spent practicing with better players who hit harder gradually changes one's perception of ball speed and one's ability to follow the ball all the way to the racket. It's like one's eyes get better, somehow. None of these perceptual changes or positioning habits happen overnight, but with enough stacked skills practiced over time, a person's reaction time appears to get faster even if their absolute reaction time hasn't improved.

Of course there are people with a higher skill ceiling than others, but I also think people write themselves off as being hopeless at something, choose not to practice, and then conclude that they are unsuited to the skill without having better understood what the road to "good" actually looks like.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trachtenberg_system
by leo_researchly | 2025-09-15 13:31:08+00:00
While building our startups, it's important for me to think about moats—ways to protect us from "AI".

There are many guides on building moats, such as this one Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42620994).

But for me, these guides list moats and do not explain why they work. As such I wanted a framework for assessing assets that contribute to network effects.
by ruszki | 2025-09-15 13:31:26+00:00
I don’t think that you need to know anything about the drama to know that there is no context in which responses showed in the video are fine. Did strcat apologise for it?

I don’t understand these GitHub links either. None of them which I’ve seen bad at all. I don’t understand the one with strcat’s post history either. The comments which are one the first two pages are completely fine.
by andrewmcwatters | 2025-09-15 13:31:44+00:00
From: Philip Schiller Subject: Urgent: Temple Jump !!!! Date: Fri, 03 Feb 2012 10:23:15 - 0800

What the hell is this????

Remember our talking about finding bad apps with low ratings?

Remember our talk about becoming the "Nordstroms" of stores in quality of service?

How does an obvious rip off of the super popular Temple Run, with no screen shots, garbage marketing text, and almost all 1-star ratings become the #1 free app on the store?

Can anyone see a rip off of a top selling game? Any anyone see an app that is cheating the system?

Is no one reviewing these apps? Is no one minding the store?

This is insane!!!!!!

- - -

Don’t publish on app stores. They’re software ghettos that take your money and shove you right next to shovelware rip-offs.

Would you willingly set up your business in a strip mall next to scammers and broken windows?

https://github.com/andrewmcwattersandco/app-store-rejections
by MisterTea | 2025-09-15 13:31:57+00:00
Funny enough, in my family we never used boxed mix. My grandmother did everything using a measuring cup and raw ingredients. My mother thought boxed mixes were full of chemicals and not as natural as using individual ingredients.

Though Betty Crocker also made cook books that did not rely on boxes. A recipe my parents used to make crepes came from a BC cook book. Another one was the Nestle tollhouse cookies that was listed on their bag of chocolate chips.
by chimprich | 2025-09-15 13:32:05+00:00
I'm a big Culture fan, and I don't know what to make of this article.

Many of the points seem to be hallucinated. Either the author has a poor memory and an active imagination or there has been some poor-quality LLM input.

Examples

> There are apparently no sociopaths – Culture has to recruit an outsider when they need one

Banks describes several ways how such individuals are managed - such as offering full immersion level VR to satisfy extreme megalomania.

> We also see that there are a number of Eccentrics, Minds that don’t fully share the values of Culture. They’re not that rare, about 1% of the population.

I don't believe that 1% figure is mentioned anywhere. I'd be surprised if it was. Eccentrics seem to be much rarer than that.

> We even see GSV Absconding with Style stockpile resources without general knowledge of the other Minds.

This name is made up, and not by Banks. A Google search for "absconding with style" has only a few hits - mainly this article.

I could go on...
by dangoodmanUT | 2025-09-15 13:32:06+00:00
"lightweight sandboxing" isn't far enough for agents, you really need _full sandboxing_.

For example, can you instruct it to open file:// from the local os, or download some colossal 100TB file?

prompt injection isn't going away anytime soon, so we have to treat the agent like arbitrary code. Wrapping in something like Firecracker, and giving the agent extremely scoped access is crucial.

One achillies heel of browser use agents is that you often can't filter permissions like you can with API keys, which is shown in this demo by having the agent make an api key.
by mallowdram | 2025-09-15 13:32:08+00:00
Basil Bernstein's 1973 studies comparing English and math comprehension differences in class. Halliday's Language and Society Vol 10 Primate Psychology Mastripietri Apes and Evolution Tuttle Symbolic Species Deacon Origin of Speech MacNeilage

That's the tip of the iceberg

edit: As CS doesn't understand the parasitic or viral aspects of language and simply idealizes it, it can't access it. It's more of a black box than the coding of these. I can't understand how CS assumed this would ever work. It makes no sense to exclude the very thing that language is and then automate it.
by phkamp | 2025-09-15 13:32:10+00:00
Somehow you overlooked that Article 8 has a second clause, even though it comes right after the bit you quoted ?

2. There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.
by Herring | 2025-09-15 13:32:40+00:00
Yeah well my experience is a lot of conservatives seem completely normal until you start dating a black girl. That's when you see how racism/tribalism works.

Try a fun experiment: ask your guy friend about ARPA-E https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPA-E They usually love that government program after learning about it. Then ask him about government investment into education, and watch his tune change. Education is one of the highest ROI govt programs, just below like roads and plumbing. Way higher than ARPA-E. But no, they only see poor black people using it.

Hope I'm wrong about your male friend specifically, but overall there's a reason Trump is the president. Your female friend's perspective is usually how it goes in my experience.
by Someone1234 | 2025-09-15 13:32:42+00:00
Most support this (e.g. AWS's free tier, Microsoft's Monthly Student Credit), but intentionally won't let customers manually set it. It isn't an oversight that they don't offer this, it is an intentional choice.

I think this bad-choice backfires though. I spend less time learning Cloud Services because the risks without a hard-limit are too high.
by crazygringo | 2025-09-15 13:32:45+00:00
> If they can get ice cream to just about anywhere and still have it be the right texture

Which it frequently doesn't? Nothing more fun than grabbing a pint of ice cream and then discovering it's full of ice crystals at home, because it thawed and refroze somewhere in the shipping chain or at the supermarket.

Of course it's more of an issue with Haagen-Dazs since it doesn't use the stabilizers like guar gum. And more of an issue with smaller supermarkets and shops with less staff where they're more likely to leave the ice cream sitting around for hours between delivery and loading into the freezer.
by saghm | 2025-09-15 13:33:27+00:00
To be fair, as someone who has a similar view of physics that you have to math, some things in physics have a similar "deus ex machina" vibe to me. Potential energy and conservation of energy are the immediate one that spring to mind; it kinda feels like the only reason energy is "conserved" is because we defined a term to be exactly equal to the amount we need to have conservation of energy. It's extremely useful, and I imagine there might be some deeper truth to it that's apparent to an expert, but as a novice, it looks a lot like we just came to with a convenient way to do calculations, slapped a name on it, and declared it a scientific law.
by heresie-dabord | 2025-09-15 13:33:33+00:00
A house might use 20 to 30 kWh each day. Modern EVs have enough battery capacity to power some appliances for many days.

Vehicle-to-load ("V2L") is currently offered in vehicles made by Hyundai, Ford, GM, Volkswagen, Volvo, Mitsubishi and Nissan (the new LEAF).

Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) is more ambitious.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid
by afavour | 2025-09-15 13:33:34+00:00
A perfect example.

> Install it by downloading the appropriate version for your system from the release page

> Install with winget install -e --id WinDirStat.WinDirStat (or use winget upgrade subsequently)

> Alternatively install with scoop install extras/windirstat (requires scoop bucket add extras)

The what what now? The average user is going to be able to do none of these things.
by sanitycheck | 2025-09-15 13:34:35+00:00
1 Is easy enough for trivial tasks but in a complex (typically horrible) production codebase nearly all the work is investigation and debugging. However good the initial prompt is, soon the context becomes flooded with log output and code and the LLM goes off the rails quite quickly.

Doing 2 well is the AI babysitting mentioned in the article. Of course you can stop it every minute and tell it to do something else, then watch it like a hawk to make sure it does it right, then clear context when it ignores you and makes the mistake you told it not to make. But that is often then slower than just doing the work yourself to begin with, probably leading to the findings we've all seen that LLM use is actually reducing productivity.

I think living with crappy AI code is the price we currently have to pay for getting development done quicker. Maybe in a year it'll have improved enough that we can ask it to clean up all the mess it made.

(Possibly I just have higher standards than most, other humans can be quite bad too.)
by phatskat | 2025-09-15 13:34:46+00:00
I’m very disconnected from the C/++ world, so when I was reading about profiles in another comment here (the one about the committee essentially saying “Safe C++ is off the table”), profiles sounded like something that was in an early phase of planning and implementation. Then the linked Reddit thread mentioned them being a thing in 2015 and I thought “oof they’ve been on profiles for a minute and it’s this underdeveloped?” and now your comment - yikes!

There was a time when I was learning programming where my options were what the library offered: books on C/++, Java, obscure X extensions, Assembly, and BASIC. I quickly found that C just didn’t “click” for me and the JRE/JDK was a real pain to work with on a slow internet connection and no guidance.

The only thing that’s made me want to go back to trying systems programming is the existence of Rust - I like the concept of the borrow checker and the added safety in general, and the community I’ve seen online seems a lot more inviting and friendly than I ever felt trying to find C++ resources.

All that said, the conversation around core safety in C++ and the community’s reaction to “workarounds” (like offloading functionality to Rust) makes me want to just never step back in to that particular world. There’s no appeal I can see about loading a footgun and putting on a blindfold unless you need to work in that world.
by kccqzy | 2025-09-15 13:34:51+00:00
ApplicativeDo can be thought of as a compile-time transformation that turns sequential code into possibly parallel* code just by analyzing the way variables are used. Once I've had that realization I really appreciated it more.

*: By "possibly parallel" I mean the blocks of code are known to be independent from each other. They could be actually executed in parallel if the Applicative instance does so.
by shadowgovt | 2025-09-15 13:35:15+00:00
Yes. Because it will decrease the legitimate traffic online that is encrypted, which makes it easier to pick out encrypted channels from the noise. A few listeners at key nodes in the country's communications network to flag encrypted signals for investigation or simple disruption and you're G2G.

It's the "If you ban guns, only criminals will have guns" theory, except the other side of that coin is "It's real easy to see who the criminals are if guns are banned: they're the folks carrying guns."
by bob1029 | 2025-09-15 13:35:22+00:00
> Best is to have some type of long term storage like a Diesel generator

LNG or propane would be far superior fuel types for long term standby generators. Periodically exercising a machine that runs on CH4 results in very minimal buildup on internal components. Liquid fuels are much dirtier and can also go bad.

Diesel is used in situations where you can afford all of the crazy maintenance. It's worth the trade off if you can.
by isaacremuant | 2025-09-15 13:35:26+00:00
That corrupt man doesn't disclose his entire life nor has cameras in his home exposing how he acts at every second. He doesn't show how shady he is because he wants no privacy for others but transparency for himself.

The funniest thing is how this authoritarian excuse of a human being wants to make his 1984 world a thing worldwide, because he doesn't even care about the pretense of EU agreements. Not only is there no sovereignty but we should all follow his whims.
by robwwilliams | 2025-09-15 13:35:40+00:00
Small sample size of about 1500 Amish men divided across 4 cohorts, all exposed to the great depression. Entry age minimum of 25 years.

Sorry, but this is really marginal science. There are much stronger demographic and statistical studies of aging and mortality in humans. Here are some alternative examples of stronger studies to explore from PubMed. I keyed my search using the surnames of two well respected longevity demographers (Vaupel and Christensen):

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=%20vaupel%20christense...
by 9rx | 2025-09-15 13:35:48+00:00
That's not really true, but we're talking about a Python replacement for scripting tasks, not core compute tasks, anyway. It is not like Python is the paragon of SIMD support. Any real Python workloads end up being written in C for good reason, using Python only as the glue. Go can also interface with C code, and despite all the flack it gets for its C call overhead it is still significantly faster at calling C code than Python is.
by epistasis | 2025-09-15 13:35:56+00:00
Of course then you have the collective action problem, and convincing your neighbors that grid storage is actually a real thing that exists. And that grid storage is not of the wrong political partisanship. The box of what's considered "politically incorrect" is getting fairly large these days:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/sep/10/south-da...
by dzaima | 2025-09-15 13:36:34+00:00
The decompressed output needn't be in-memory (or even on-disk; it could be directly streamed to analysis) all at the same time, at which point resource limits aren't a problem at all. And I believe --long already is a "grater than or equal to" value, and should also be effectively a memory limit (or pretty close to one at least).

Seeking back in the input might theoretically work, but I feel like that could easily get very bad (aka exponential runtime); never mind needing actual seeking.
by lupusreal | 2025-09-15 13:36:36+00:00
Just this weekend I used fzf (and a bit of python glue) to create my own TUI wrapper around OpenSUSE's package manager, zypper. With fzf's multi-selection mode I can select multiple packages at once to install or remove. Using fzf's preview command feature I can use zypper info (with a little bit of my own caching wrapping it) to display package info as I go through the list. A custom header shows the shortcuts for installing, removing, etc.
by dabeeeenster | 2025-09-15 13:36:43+00:00
Several years ago the UK government started being defacto run via Whatsapp. I was absolutely furious about this, but seemed to be in a tiny minority of people who cared about it!

Our PM at the time of covid "lost" his Whatsapp backups, and his replacement also had problems getting access to Whatsapp messages. How convenient.

If you worked in a regulated industry this would be instant dismissal. For the UK govt its business as usual.