MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by theptip | 2025-09-13 17:21:14+00:00
I get your point and would be much more inclined to agree if we were talking about trying to hit a 3x risk increase. But we are talking about huge risk margins here, many OOMs.

My problem with your argument is that as framed it’s a fully generic argument against doing anything; there is always a risk of bad outcomes for any action. What we must do in practice is look at risk/reward and try our best to estimate each.

Data breaches are a bad analogy because you are presenting this as “I get to make a bit more money by lowering security”. A better analogy would be something like colonoscopy; some people will die from cancer if you advise nobody has this procedure. Some people will die from complications if people do get this procedure. How do we as a society choose how many people should die and from what? This is a trolley problem, there is no choice where people don’t die as a result of the decision. The answer is that we must do our best to estimate the risks and minimize them.

This is not what we are doing with nuclear right now. We are simply trying to reduce the risk of nuclear, without making any attempt to model the harms that are being introduced.
by gretch | 2025-09-13 17:21:56+00:00
I agree that any future expected event is uncertain. For example, I think there’s a small chance a black hole traveling at 0.1c smashes our solar system overnight and the sun never rises again.

To answer the question, I think the civil war was exactly as avoidable as you think world war 2 was. It’s more a question of semantics at this point, given they are unchangable past events.
by michaelt | 2025-09-13 17:22:12+00:00
Nobody's distributing a free dataset of child abuse, animal torture and terror beheading images, for obvious reasons.

There are some open-weights NSFW detectors [1] but even if your detector is 99.9% accurate, you still need an appeals/review mechanism. And someone's got to look at the appeals.

[1] https://github.com/yahoo/open_nsfw
by stavros | 2025-09-13 17:23:00+00:00
I got a Sony RX-100 for trips, I recommend it, the image quality is great and it has quite a bit of zoom (though I forget the exact lengths).

I also have a 5D, and the 95% of the difference between the 5D and the RX-100 is the increased ergonomics, so if you aren't shooting seriously/professionally, you don't really have to bother with anything above a cheap, good Sony.
by pyuser583 | 2025-09-13 17:23:04+00:00
A nitpicky note: Aeschylus didn't say that.

RFK probably studied Aeschylus in the original Greek, and did an on-the-fly translation. A more literal translation is:

"Zeus, who guided men to think, who has laid it down that wisdom comes alone through suffering. Still there drips in sleep against the heart grief of memory; against our will temperance comes. From the gods who sit in grandeur grace is somehow violent."

There's no "turning the other cheek here." It claims violence does indeed beget violence, and there's no human way around that.

To be clear, I'm not advocating violence, or even criticizing RFK. I'm simply defending the purity of Aeschylus.
by claytonwramsey | 2025-09-13 17:24:59+00:00
This reminds me of Zobrist hashing [1] in chess engines. In fact, if you split the sum into 256 columns (instead of 8) and set the prime to 2 for each column, I think it's essentially the same. I'd be curious to see some quantitative benchmarks and their results on performance + collision rates.

[1]: https://www.chessprogramming.org/Zobrist_Hashing
by pipodeclown | 2025-09-13 17:25:30+00:00
Man you see this crap pop up on here so many times I'm almost starting to wonder whether car industry shills are just trying so sow seeds of doubt with misinformation.. haven't we agreed by now that the only future we should strive for is one that can plausibly be made completely emmissionless...? All options you list either still have emmissions associated with them or are so hilariously inefficient that we would need to blanket half the globe with PV panels to power everything. All alternatives have been extensively explored and the only and most efficient way to power cars in an emmissionless way turned out to be a battery electric drivetrain. There is a reason all the options you list didn't take off.
by caseyohara | 2025-09-13 17:25:33+00:00
> I like the wide shot from the mountaintop better because it's lively and has people in it

Agreed. And strongly related to your other comment about selfies/bugs/flowers/boring landscapes…

One of the best pieces of advice for leveling up from novice snapshots to compelling photographs is: take photos about things, not photos of things.

Purposefully including people in the frame goes a long way to make photos more interesting because it instantly attaches a narrative.
by privatelypublic | 2025-09-13 17:26:14+00:00
I dropped Proton when a ton of services (all the major A and B tier cloud providers I tried for starters) could not/would not activate an account with a proton email.

Email is a critical infrastructure these days. Most people have neither the time nor the will to deal with emails failing to send and/or be delivered. (Send or receive)
by electric_muse | 2025-09-13 17:26:39+00:00
It’s a mixture. But yeah, today I pushed the boundary further.

A few days ago I flagged a piece someone else had written with ai. It has a specific cadence and some typical patterns. But many people seemed to buy it before I commented.

So I’ve been running a bit of an experiment lately where I write posts and LLM-ify them in varying amounts to see if an LLM actually produce something more upvotable and when people start to notice.

I started out just saying “rephrase this so it sounds tighter” and moved recently towards just jotting rough notes and saying “make an HN comment out of this” and then editing.

Today was the most AI-influenced set of posts, and people clearly noticed, so that’s definitely the threshold. Fascinating.

Check my post history to see the evolution. Using gpt-5.
by defaultcompany | 2025-09-13 17:26:49+00:00
How about because spent nuclear fuel will be hazardous to humans for the next ~20 thousand years? How do you amortize that cost? You can't just assume someone else will deal with it and call that cost savings. People talk about burying it but in reality it sits in containment vessels above ground and the more there is the higher the cost to deal with it so the less likely it ever will be dealt with.
by tmtvl | 2025-09-13 17:27:15+00:00
If J is the right tool to use to handle a problem with, Prolog is an alright tool for that purpose, and Python is kind of a bad fit; why would you use Python instead of J or Prolog?

If I need to drive a screw I'll first grab a screwdriver. If that's not okay I suppose I could use a knife. A monkey wrench would not be among the first tools I reach for.
by digitalPhonix | 2025-09-13 17:27:26+00:00
>> The license does not bind the original copyright owner, who can do anything with the code

> whether or not it's legal according to the license

The original author is not bound by any licence. Only the licensees are. The licence they chose to use by definition cannot bind them; they are issuing the licence.

(They are obviously bound by the licences of anything that they use, but that’s not what the person you’re replying to is talking about)
by hvb2 | 2025-09-13 17:27:26+00:00
You're looking for the biggest which isn't all that important. It's like saying you cannot deal with a difference in peak and through in production using a single power plant. For example, Norway has just 78TWh[1] in storage like that. Which is 2000x your example

And yes, I realize how well positioned Norway is for this. But you can put these wherever you have a stream and a big reservoir

1: https://energifaktanorge.no/en/norsk-energiforsyning/kraftpr...
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-09-13 17:27:48+00:00
> Using LLMs exactly doesn’t train that skill

I actually think this is one skill LLMs _do_ train, albeit for an entirely different reason. Claude is fairly bad at considering edge cases in my experience, so I generally have to prompt for them specifically.

Even for entirely “vibe-coded” apps I could theoretically have created without knowing any programming syntax, I was successful only because I knew about possible edge cases.
by lucideer | 2025-09-13 17:27:53+00:00
Astral did something similar for the Python ecosystem (Rust-inspired tooling built in Rust, replacing a lot of pre-existing - bad - tooling) & the impact has been revolutionary. Python had some of the worst tooling of any popular language & now has some of the best.

Composer is one of the best package managers in any language ecosystem but beyond that, other PHP tooling, while technically well maintained, aren't particularly great at what they do. It's an ideal starting point for positive disruption.
by cantor_S_drug | 2025-09-13 17:29:31+00:00
Modernizing software systems take time because of inherent corruption in the procurement process or workings of consulting company involved. Those problems can be solved much faster and cheaper if a knowledgeable tech person was involved.

Hertz vs. Accenture: In 2019, car rental company Hertz sued Accenture for $32 million in fees plus additional damages over a failed website and mobile app project. Hertz claimed Accenture failed to deliver a functional product, missed multiple deadlines, and built a system that did not meet the agreed-upon requirements.

Marin County vs. Deloitte: In 2010, California's Marin County sued Deloitte Consulting for $30 million over a failed SAP ERP implementation. The county alleged Deloitte misrepresented its skills and used the county as a "training ground" for inexperienced consultants.
by borroka | 2025-09-13 17:30:06+00:00
“You have to learn how to learn” has been a phrase often repeated by teachers, but I don’t remember any of them emphasizing, for example, retrieval practice: you learn a skill or subject, move on to the next one, and leave it up to fate whether you remember anything from the first one.

It always surprises and saddens me that, despite having been an excellent student throughout my years of education, I remember practically nothing about 90% of the subjects I studied.
by slwvx | 2025-09-13 17:31:55+00:00
> participants aged 18–40 years with a body mass index between 23 and 30 kg/m2 were assigned to ADF (alternating fasting and ad libitum eating days), to TRE (eating only between 12:00–20:00), or control (no change in eating times).

Seems like comparing late and early TRE would be good. I.e. compare 12:00-20:00 eating with 8:00-16:00. Heavy or high-fat meals can take 12 hours to digest; eating early allows your heart rate to go lower overnight and otherwise allows better sleep. I guess the early TRE would give better results.
by electric_muse | 2025-09-13 17:32:14+00:00
Yes, it is. Sort of.

I’m running an experiment.

A few days ago I flagged a piece someone else had written with ai. It has a specific cadence and some typical patterns. But many people seemed to buy it before I commented. I was surprised.

Today I pushed the boundary further and it clearly was that boundary.

Check my comment history.

I started out just saying “rephrase this so it sounds tighter” and moved recently towards just jotting rough notes and saying “make an HN comment out of this” and then editing.

I’ve been using gpt-5. I was going to see how Claude sonnet 4 performs at coming across as human-written / flagging some spidey senses.

(This was all by hand.)
by natmaka | 2025-09-13 17:32:23+00:00
Deploying a continental renewable mix (wind, solar...) reduces the effets of 'intermittency' on electricity production.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09601...

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13640...

It is possible because interconnecting grids at continental-level is The Way for quite a while, even without any renewable, because it enables operators to optimize (preferring less-emitting and cheaper production units) and also to obtain a better service guarantee (less blackouts!).

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

It also enables over-produced electricity to power electrolyzers. 'Green hydrogen' thus obtained can power the backup/peakers (producing electricity to load-follow and also when other intermittent equipment cannot produce enough on-the-spot), further reducing 'intermittency' effects. This isn't sci-fi ( https://www.gevernova.com/gas-power/future-of-energy/hydroge... ), many can burn a mix (methane, hydrogen...) and some recent models can be retrofitted into burning hydrogen (no major investment nor need to reform existing heavy resources/organization).

Storage will also more and more prominent in electrical systems: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45182026

Nuclear will be trounced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45196328

Patent holes in the most hyped nuclear-favorable approach show that there is no issue on sight for it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45182003

The trend is clear: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-fossil-renewa... (explore many nations/regions)

He will soon be dead, Jim.
by toast0 | 2025-09-13 17:32:39+00:00
> Muad'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad'Dib knew that every experience carries a lesson.

-- from "The Humanity of Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan
by npoc | 2025-09-13 17:32:52+00:00
> The ten minutes I watched was one big appeal to authority. "Here's Doctor X, a highly respected scientist. Look at all the big name universities he's linked to.

Fair point. Although two wrongs don't make a right.

> If I need to assume something about (let's say) geology - which I know little about and haven't the time to research myself - I'm going to trust the general consensus of professional geologists.

This is the intelligent, inituitive approach - I agree. However one of the main points that the documentary makes is that there's a hidden corruption involved which means that in the case of climate this is actually the wrong approach to take. The combined state and money printer-backed financial system has an enormous incentive to encourage scientists to find a global climate crisis, and because most scientists rely on government funding, they in turn have enormous incentives to produce statistics that align with this, or else lose their funding. The so-called climate experts that are presented to you are in fact selected by this system because they produce work that aligns with the system's incentive to make people believe there is a climate crisis.

This corruption all stems from the fact that we gave a few questionable people a money printer, and decades later they're getting closer and closer in their ultimate goal of enslaving the world.

https://x.com/OppCostApp/status/1952831340597948565 (only a two minute video this time)

Read "The Creature from Jekyll Island" or "Broken Money" by Alden for the full story.
by MagicMoonlight | 2025-09-13 17:33:30+00:00
Because the places where everyone lives to 200, are also the places devastated by war or full of corruption.

It's like how every asylum seeker in the uk is born 1st of january. It's not because they're born 1st of january, it's because they burned their documents in order to illegally migrate. But if you took that at face value, you'd assume that afghanistan only ever births people on the 1st of january.
by foxglacier | 2025-09-13 17:34:15+00:00
Is there some line photographers are crossing by taking two photos of separate scenes and joining them together in software to create a picture like the people sitting on the log in front of the mountains? I think that would be called photoshopped and fake, but here they're describing manually selecting the background and adjusting its contrast so it ends up looking like it couldn't look in real life. Is that qualitatively better for something?

I guess I'm wondering what's the goal of making these kinds of picture? If it's just to produce the output, why not combine separate photos so you can get the mountains you want and the rocks and people you want without having to find them co-occurring naturally? If it's to follow some kind of rules for not cheating, why not do no hand-editing in software?
by nrjames | 2025-09-13 17:34:45+00:00
We're living in a reality where nuclear waste was not always properly contained and the repercussions of it are long-lasting. While this particular case is related to the Manhattan Project, it's causing all types of issues to this day:

https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2025/09/11/long-term-effects-nu...
by WJW | 2025-09-13 17:35:50+00:00
It really is a neat language. Sort of like the smaller more elegant language that has been waiting to break out of Haskell, but combined with Erlang. Definitely not the "standard" programming language but very very nice.

The core language is pretty small too. Any moderately experienced programmer can probably burn through the language tour and be ready for a few simple AoC problems in an afternoon or so. This is due to the language designer having a very strict dedication to keeping the language as simple as possible. (Much to the chagrin of my muscle memory, as I keep expecting pattern matching on function arguments to work but it doesn't)
by mauvehaus | 2025-09-13 17:36:34+00:00
I'd like to second GP's reply and add that if you get a full-frame mirrorless camera and a couple of adapters, the world is your oyster for cheap, old lenses on eBay.

Figure out what you like on the cheap, and if you want to upgrade to a modern lens, you know what you're seeking for comparatively little money.

Technical version: Infinity focus is determined by how close the lens gets to the focal plane of the film or sensor. The various lens mount standards (some manufacturer specific, some widely genericized) specify the distance between the mounting flange and the focal plane. Mirrorless cameras can have a smaller flange distance than SLR's (because there's no mirror that has to swing through the space), and so you can optically adapt pretty much anything to mirrorless.

Optically being the operative word. You'll lose metering modes that depend on the camera getting info from the lens by either physical or electrical means. If you're shooting landscapes or product, this is unlikely to be a problem. If you're shooting action, you may want to disregard this suggestion.

EDITED TO ADD:

I haven't kept up with the mirrorless world since I bought mine, but if you're doing this get one where the image stabilization is implemented in the body.
by torginus | 2025-09-13 17:36:45+00:00
I'm sorry but after reading your comment I can't seem to be able to decide if you favor writing the dynamic programming version or pulling in the constraint solver.

Both are correct in the sense that they give the right output, and I don't think pulling in a huge library (maintained by who knows and for how long) is going to be beneficial for maintenace. And having a good understanding of both the precise requirements, and the algorithms used to solve them also helps maintenance.

It's just having two dozen lines tucked of code away in a function in the repo seems infinitely more maintainable to me then using some giant framework (of possibly unknown quality) to solve the issue.

This is a general argument I'm making, not just applying to this constraint solver/
by scuff3d | 2025-09-13 17:36:57+00:00
I tried with Gleam, I really wanted to like it. I really like Louis Pilfold and I like his goals for the language. But something about it just didn't click for me. It's a good language, but at the end of the day I just didn't enjoy writing it.

It might be something the author talked about, but I think the language might be too small. It's one of the things I dislike about Rust too. I prefer a more batteries included approach because I can't stand having to pull in a bunch of small dependencies.
by api | 2025-09-13 17:37:22+00:00
I studied biology in college and this has always been obvious to me, and it shocks me that people with backgrounds in e.g. ecology don't understand that living systems are unpredictable auto-adaptive machines full of feedback loops. How a bunch of ecologists could take doomerism based on "world models" seriously enough to cause a public panic about it (e.g. Paul Ehrlich) baffles me.

Human cultural systems are even worse than non-human living systems: they actively fight you. They are adversarial with regard to predictions made within them. If you're considered a credible source on economics and you say a recession is coming, you change the odds of a recession by causing the system to price in your pronouncement. This is part of why market contrarianism kind of works, but only if the contrarians are actually the minority! If contrarianism becomes popular, it stops being contrarian and stops working.

So... predicting doom and gloom from overpopulation would obviously reduce the future population if people take it seriously.

Tangentially, everything in economics is a paradox. A classic example is the paradox of thrift: if everyone is saving nobody can save because for one to save another must spend. Pricing paradoxes are another example. When you're selling your labor as an employee you want high wages, high benefits, jobs security, etc, but when you go shopping you want low wages, low benefits, and a fluid job market... at least if you shop by comparing on price. If you are both a buyer and a seller of labor you are your own adversary in a two-party pricing game.

I personally hold the view that the arrow of time goes in one direction and the future of non-linear computationally irreducible systems cannot be predicted from their current state (unless you are literally God and have access to the full quantum-level state of the whole system and infinite computational power). I don't mean predicting them is hard, but that it's "impossible like perpetual motion" impossible.

I also wonder if we are being fooled by randomness when we think we see a person or a technique that yields good predictions. Are good prophets just luck plus survivorship bias? Obviously we forget all the bad prophets. All lottery winners are lucky, therefore lucky people should play the lottery. But who is lucky? The only way to find out is to play the lottery. Anyone who wins should have played, and anyone who loses should not have played.
Show HN: KittyLoader – a modern shellcode loader displaying top-tier evasion
by bolik | 2025-09-13 17:38:04+00:00
KittyLoader was developed for controlled red-team and adversary-emulation engagements where a stealthy shellcode loader was required to exercise detection, response, and hunting controls. Its design focuses on minimizing persistent artifacts, utilization of undocumented methods, and providing defenders with reproducible telemetry to test detections. KittyLoader is intended for authorized, ethical use only, do not deploy it against systems you do not own or have explicit permission to test. If you're curious about how modern malware operates against top-notch EDRs, and what methods modern day APTs and other threat groups deploy, make sure to check KittyLoader out.

I’m happy to answer technical questions and hear feedback.
by tobr | 2025-09-13 17:38:08+00:00
Terrible article. Did Hassabis really say ”learning how to learn” is itself a skill, like the article paraphrases it? Surely the skill isn’t that you can learn how to learn, the skill is that you know how to learn. Just like ”learning to ride a bike” isn’t a skill; it’s something you do once, leading to a useful skill.

”Learning how to learn” sounds vaguely insightful just because of the repetition, but if you think for a bit about what it actually means it falls apart.