MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by draebek | 2025-09-14 20:53:10+00:00
The replies to this thread cannot be serious, on a web forum populated—I thought—primarily by technologists. Surely you all remember the variations on, "If you make encryption illegal then only criminals will have encryption"?

The next step will surely be to make use of communication programs that law enforcement cannot read illegal, right? The police find some person who has committed a crime, caught in the ways that criminals are usually caught, such as with forensics, or simply with the guns and drugs in the boot of their car. Then they can see what forms of communication this person was using, and who was using it with them. At that point, it doesn't matter what those other people were doing: The use of banned encryption technology is the crime. You can roll them up for that, or use evidence of this crime to justify further intrusion into their meatspace lives. And so it goes, on up the chain of a criminal organization. Theoretically, at least.

I don't like this, I don't support this, but as has been said elsewhere in this thread: Let's not pretend this is some insurmountable problem for a government who has already shown an appetite for surveillance.
by analog31 | 2025-09-14 20:53:58+00:00
That's fair. But it turns "possible" into a statement about a company's or government's expected degree of restraint, rather than a mathematical statement about the robustness of an encryption scheme.

The famous case is what happened to government birth records when the Netherlands were overrun by Germany in WWII. They weren't even encrypted, but mere transfer of access led to tragedy.
by matthewdgreen | 2025-09-14 20:54:11+00:00
The proximate goal they're trying to achieve is mostly irrelevant when compared to the broader technical goal. That goal is to force all messaging systems to re-architect so they include a "bump on the wire" that hosts a scanning mechanism sophisticated enough to recognize novel (unknown) image content. This implicitly requires re-architecting these systems to contain neural-network image classifiers that operate over a model that's kept secret (to the user/client.) Everything else is sort of irrelevant compared to the implications of this new architecture.

The "good news" for now is that the systems deployed in this model won't classify text, only images and URLs. The bad news is that the current draft explicitly allows that question to be reviewed in the future. And of course, once you've re-architected every E2EE system to make image scanning possible, most of the damage to cybersecurity is likely already done; a year or two down the road, text scanning will probably be viewed as a modest and common-sense upgrade. I expect that folks who object to text scanning on cybersecurity grounds will be informed that the risks are already "baked in" to the image-scanning model, and so there's no real harm in adding text scanning.

Leaving aside the privacy issues, this is basically an existential national security risk for Europe. It's amazing to me that they're walking right into it.
by keybored | 2025-09-14 20:54:34+00:00
> When you're not feeling good enough it's sometimes helpful to remember that even people who create negative impacts often get into positions of power and stay there for one reason or another. i.e if they can do something very badly then why are you so worried about whether you are worthy?

How does this help? For all you know they’re a snarky something to people beneath them but not to the right people. Or they are snarky to everyone but they’re the kind of pointy-elbow go-getter that got to where they are inspite or even because of that. Are any of these alternatives good?

And now they get to be snarky to people beneath them and only get a tiny sliver of pushback because the mind of the underling has all the time to ruminate but no incentive to push back with anything.

Just more Polyanna HN job advice.
by filoleg | 2025-09-14 20:55:45+00:00
I agree with you (i.e., I share your belief that the whole "safety" argument is a bold-faced excuse to just gain more control and surveillance power over the population), but I believe that the parent comment was just trying to be extra charitable to those pushing for the bill.

I think it is fair to give the opponent's position (which both you and I believe is in the wrong) a steel-man argument treatment, by assuming the best possible interpretation of their argument (even if they don't imo deserve it, and you don't believe in their stated intent).

The approach makes sense to me, as attacking and debating genuineness of someone's intentions is an endless rabbithole. So if you have an option to decimate their case, all while assuming their stated intent to be truthful and genuine, that's a pretty solid way to actually move the needle on the argument in a desired direction.
by isaacremuant | 2025-09-14 20:56:45+00:00
The goal is always to suppress the ability to dissent political.

It was trialed during covid and people absolutely cheered for this type of control.

Now it's only a matter of time unless people accept that it's never acceptable. Not even with "perceived threats". Covid passes and social scores to do activities where absolutely a wet dream for govs and corporations alike. The corporations that benefit from government mandated tools love getting free money and governments love control. They know the tools never spy on them, and that's why everytime they're the ones committing crimes or ignoring their rules it's "a mistake or nothing to see here".
by zahlman | 2025-09-14 20:57:00+00:00
> Is his death a predictable consequence

"Predictable" requires: "could a reasonable person have held a high prior probability of that man, specifically, dying in this manner?"

No.

The definition of "consequence" is conflated. The motte is "the conditions increased the probability of the event". The bailey is something like "the event follows from the conditions due to moral law". For example, when people speak of "consequences" for a crime, they refer to punishment.

If we reflect the analogy back onto the original case, we're talking about situation in which our anti-road-salt activist lived in a world where the roads were already not salted, and had no direct control over that policy and negligible impact on the minds of those who do. Further, his words should have made him no more likely to die than anyone else driving on the same road. Except for the fact that the road is supposed to be analogous to the shooter, who in reality had consciousness and a motive.
by impossiblefork | 2025-09-14 20:57:04+00:00
Nordic cultures are actually substantially different.

Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic and Finnish culture is vastly different. If we include the Dutch or the Estonians the differences become even bigger.

As a Swede I'm not afraid of my neighbours seeing into my apartment, because I have order there and I don't see any harm in them seeing into it, and you can of course interpret this as some kind of 'if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear', but it's more that I don't see a need for physical privacy. Letters are completely different matter and in others I am intensely secretive, but you can't learn anything I want to keep from you from looking at my houseplants.

If I had disorder in my kitchen and people could see into it I would be very unhappy.
by Jtsummers | 2025-09-14 20:57:12+00:00
I'm going to repeat myself, why are people upvoting this? It's an LLM generated book, and not even decent. It's pages and pages of code listings with little or no explanations. It's also wrong at various points.

Perl is weakly typed, for instance, not strongly typed no matter what Claude tells you. Try "1" + 1 and ask yourself if that result makes any sense in a strongly typed language.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45242075
by Kiboneu | 2025-09-14 20:57:14+00:00
I also often don’t have timely responses.

There are sometimes long pauses before my response or even mid-speech, during which I’m thinking about what’s said. But the delay is often interpreted as a cue for someone else to respond or change the subject, which often leads to not being able to say anything that i’ve spent so much glutamate to process.

I used to say “one moment” every 5 seconds while I think, but that was distracting.

Sometimes, I do this thing with my eyes jumping them around as if I’m reading a book; that gives people something to look at while they wait, like a spinner indicator.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-09-14 20:57:14+00:00
> Can you explain the benefit of renaming dataflow as 'neuromorphic'?

Neuromorphic just means brain-like or brain inspired, and brains operate in asynchronous dataflow type fashion.

I'm not sure how you read into what I wrote that I was "renaming dataflow as neuromorphic", which was certainly not what I meant.

I wonder if you regard Steve Furber (who I knew from Acorn), designer of the ARM CPU, as a "complete amateur"? He also designed the AMULET async processors, as well as for that matter the SpiNNaker system for spiking neural network research.

In any case, async (dataflow) processor design, while complex, clearly isn't an impossible task, and at some point in the future when the need arises (mobile robotics?) and there is sufficient financial incentive, I expect we'll see it utilized in commercial systems.

I'm not sure why you focus on "general purpose processors" given that we're talking about ANNs and neuromorphic systems. A custom chip would seem a better bet if the goal is to minimize power usage.
Stop After Current
by Toby1VC | 2025-09-14 20:58:27+00:00
How many things in life are designed to be interacted with one by one and not in batch or random sequence?

Even if presented in clusters, we have the ability to pick one thing.

Then why is it that a music streaming service like YM Music is not presenting me with the ability to play a song one by one. Why does it force me to create entropy by transitioning and initiating the next song when I didn't request it?

This is part a rant because of personal needs but also frustration at the state of these interfaces for lacking basic music flow controls.

I like youtube music and stream services but they all should have this.
by owisd | 2025-09-14 20:58:28+00:00
If a building collapses or a plane crashes that’s a singular case, but the ensuing investigation will be used to enact policy changes based on what went wrong to prevent it happening again. It only becomes ‘meme-driven’ when it deviates from what should be a mundane bureaucratic process, which can include blocking the process as much as putting fingers on the scales.
by AJ007 | 2025-09-14 20:58:46+00:00
That's all bullshit because we already live in a panopticon. Everyone's physical movements are tracked, facial recognition works even on partials, there are HD cameras everywhere, continuous uploads of videos to TikTok and Instagram mean fugitives can no longer hide in the public world. Phones, Alexas/Homepods, vehicles etc can be remotely converted in to bugs with a court order (and a bunch of other devices probably are without.)

Whether its car thieves or drug dealers, these exist in the West today by explicit choice, not because it is impossible to stop.
by hollerith | 2025-09-14 20:59:03+00:00
I first came across GNU tools on NeXTSTEP, which wasn't too bad.

If Stallman had started with a kernel, there would be very few people who had the legal right to run any utilities or apps on the new kernel whereas GNU's utilities and apps (e.g., Emacs) were immediately useful (i.e., without breaking any copyright law or violating any software license) to a large population, namely, anyone with an account on a proprietary Unix system, which explains why Stallman chose to start with the userland.
by skibz | 2025-09-14 20:59:04+00:00
The OP delivered a drive-by contribution and proceeded to condescend one of the maintainers. They posted the interaction to HN (for the second time) out of spite for the maintainer, labelling it an instance of gatekeeping.

Having a polite and diplomatic conversation about a non-trivial contribution idea is a common prerequisite for it to be accepted into a project, like Hapi.js.

It's no surprise that project maintainers don't wish to work with recalcitrant individuals, regardless of the merit of their contributions.
by pembrook | 2025-09-14 20:59:44+00:00
To point out the glaring holes in your comment:

- Criminals will still use encryption even if its against the law, given they are criminals

- Denmark is one of the safest countries on earth and every year crime has been declining for decades. Even your property theft example is a declining occurrence in Denmark: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1178977/number-of-report...

Given property theft is down and encryption has been available for the entire time period of that chart -- do you have any actual steelman for why Denmark would need this, absent a thirst for power/control, especially now?
Show HN: Freeze Trap
by dwa3592 | 2025-09-14 20:59:47+00:00
A game made with vanilla JS and HTML5 Canvas. The goal is to trap bouncing balls by drawing boundaries over them but the balls hate your cursor so they will try to run away.

--There is a paint pollock option. It's inspired by jackson pollock, the painter. if you let it run for 5,6 minutes, the screen will turn into a pollock painting (-ish).

--It was a fun personal project.
by isaacremuant | 2025-09-14 20:59:51+00:00
> An internet where what you say online, will be treated with no difference than if you had said it in person.

It's 1984. Surveillance in your home so you only speak the government speak. If you criticize the government or the genocides commited by them you're "doing hate speech/wrong think" and you'll receive the cops at your door to be disappeared without recourse

The populace will be told you were evil and no one dares question too much or they will be next.

Or we can tell them to fuck off and stop buying into every little crisis and fake right v left fight they try to sell.
by vaylian | 2025-09-14 21:00:13+00:00
> But there are a few people asking who is pushing for this legislation so hard. That's mostly police forces who are pointing out that they're unable to track the activities of criminal organisations. For example, in the UK sophisticated gangs steal cars and phones and ship them around the world where they're resold.

If that is really such a big problem, then why don't the politicians say so instead of saying that this law is for protection children?
by martin-t | 2025-09-14 21:00:26+00:00
Why do you call them "leaders"? They are "people in positions of power".

I don't understand where this desire to be led comes from. Other people do not have your best interest in mind. I want others to get out of my way, unless we have a conflict of interest and then we _might_ need a third party to resolve it. But I certainly don't need or want to be led.
by dqv | 2025-09-14 21:00:34+00:00
Yes, but it's vastly less ambiguous: ambiguity for one day between 1:00AM - 3:00AM out of the year vs ambiguity for all future dates and times.

Now you can prompt the user for their intent when the time change is known or expected. The ambiguity is now narrowed down to only the situations where the time change could not have been known in advance.
by positr0n | 2025-09-14 21:00:45+00:00
That happened to me when I was a student. Crammed all night, napped, and slept in.

The adrenaline from rushing to class somehow made me both ace the test and be the first to turn it in.

Funny enough that was my last day attending, I decided I wanted to switch majors and dropped it the next week. I always wondered what the professor thought haha.
by Awhdh235H | 2025-09-14 21:01:33+00:00
Alan Wade started the data analysis company Chiliad with Christine Maxwell (sister of Ghislaine). Palantir was sponsored by In-Q-Tel while Alan Wade moved on to being CIO of the CIA.

People in the orbit of Thiel are in favor of getting Greenland, one way or the other. Good luck Denmark with your software.
by arp242 | 2025-09-14 21:01:34+00:00
Yeah, I don't really get that either, especially since Musk is still so involved in these companies.

But Musk is hardly a unique case, and his racism is just part of the "Make Racism Great Again" movement that has, especially over the last year or so, become exceedingly explicit. You can see this here on HN as well.

Or maybe it's more "Make 1820s Great Again" movement, because also from today: "Women’s suffrage is apparently up for debate again in America" https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/sep/13/womens...
by atmosx | 2025-09-14 21:02:19+00:00
> More abstractly I think that a multi-cultural or multi-ethnic society at scale is not able to handle anonymous and private communication without collapsing. If we dont go in the direction of benevolent censorship like China and Singapore I think the west is going to see some dark times.

Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither and will lose both.
by toss1 | 2025-09-14 21:02:26+00:00
The govt key decrypts everything, real-time and stored/archived, sent in that nation during the time it is in use, and that key is in use in multiple places/machines, and is in an org that is a high-profile target for many other reasons (so could likely be exposed in a crack that initially had other purposes.

In contrast, a person's key can decrypt only that person's messages, is used only in one place (usermset of machines), and is a generally low-value target.

Insanely huge difference between losing a person's key vs the key to an entire nation's communications, even if it is the key of the nation's president -- still far lower value & consequences (start with: if you have the nation's key you can decrypt the president's comms anyway).
Should LLMs Write FOSS Books?
by DavidCanHelp | 2025-09-14 21:02:36+00:00
I got flagged after sharing my Claude Code written book Lisp in 2025. I carefully craft and review these. Is there anti-AI bias here, or are we making a rule that generated (code?) work is invalid? I think people find a lot of the content delightful, and I'm not trying to claim it as my own.
by cge | 2025-09-14 21:02:38+00:00
>(12a) In the light of the more limited risk of their use for the purpose of child sexual abuse and the need to preserve confidential information, including classified information, information covered by professional secrecy and trade secrets, electronic communications services that are not publicly available, such as those used for national security purposes, should be excluded from the scope of this Regulation. Accordingly, this Regulation should not apply to interpersonal communications services that are not available to the general public and the use of which is instead restricted to persons involved in the activities of a particular company, organisation, body or authority.

From document 11277/24 [1]. Unless it has changed more recently, the exemption is actually considerably broader, and presents the unusual argument that the system will be secure enough for any private personal communications, yet too insecure for any company's trade secrets (which, apparently, have the same weight as national security).

[1]: https://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-11277-2024-...
by pona-a | 2025-09-14 21:02:39+00:00
And how are you supposed to exist as any sexual, gender, religious, or political minority when Gestapo's listening in on every phone? And also, we were talking about private conversations, not Reddit, not any less private than what is spoken in your own home.

I am sympathetic to whatever made you believe that, but if you advocate for such evil, inhumane, reckless systems, you are not a good ally to anyone, including yourself or your community.
by nis0s | 2025-09-14 21:02:56+00:00
I see your point, consider also that even people with the best intentions and skills misinterpret given inputs or information. The problem of figuring out motivations, or predicting next moves, is compounded by the multitude of options available to any given rational (and sometimes irrational) agent. Unless there are artificial constraints placed on an agent which limit available options, then I guess this sort of predictive work becomes easier.
by IlikeKitties | 2025-09-14 21:03:03+00:00
> Then we agree. Piracy is a service issue.

I'd say piracy is best fought with better service but draconian laws and enforcement would also work.

> There’s no controversy that copying data is easy. That’s obvious to everyone. What you have failed to articulate is why that’s relevant in a conversation on intellectual property rights.

The fact that copying data is so easy means that any law trying to criminalize it is unjust by nature, that's my most important argument.
by saghm | 2025-09-14 21:03:04+00:00
When I was super young, I used to think my dad (who everyone I met seemed to think was extremely funny) had a huge repitoire of hilarious stories, but after a few years I noticed him repeating them and realized he just had a few specific ones that he would re-use with new people, like you mentioned. As someone who tends to be pretty slow to learn how to navigate new social situations, it was eye-opening when I recognized this was something I could do. What's amusing to me at this point is that I'm still not sure he fully realizes that this is something he does sometimes, because he'll still sometimes try to whip out one of the stories when talking to me and then genuinely be surprised when I remind him of some very minor detail about it that he forgot to mention this time he told it.
by whynotminot | 2025-09-14 21:03:22+00:00
Hold up, people are starting to mark PRs with [vibe] as in “I don’t stand behind this, good luck.” ??

I do not care if engineers on my team are using AI. In fact, I think they should be. This is the new world and we need to get used to it.

But it’s still your work, your responsibility. You still have to own it. No cop outs.
by kristoff_it | 2025-09-14 21:03:29+00:00
For those who want a "packaged" experience doing this same kind of work, there's "Operating System in 1000 Lines of Code" (https://operating-system-in-1000-lines.vercel.app/en/), I followed it a while ago in Zig (which meant translating C code snippets to Zig) and had a good time. I have the code and VODs here: https://github.com/kristoff-it/kristos/
by lordnacho | 2025-09-14 21:05:11+00:00
I have very few issues with Claude. If I just tell it what the goal is, it will make some sensible suggestions, and I can tell it to start coding towards it. It rarely messes up, and when it does I catch it in the act.

You don't necessarily want to completely tune out while you're using the AI. You want to know what it's up to, but you don't need to be at your highest level of attention to do it. This is what makes it satisfying for me, because often it eats up several minutes to hunt down trivial bugs. Normally when you have some small thing like that, you have to really concentrate to find it, and it's frustrating.

When the AI is on a multi-file edit that you understand, that's when you can tune out a bit. You know that it is implementing some edit across several instances of the same interface, so you can be confident that in a few minutes everything will build and you will get a notification.

It's as if I can suddenly make all the architecture level edits without paying the cost in time that I had previously.