MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jajko | 2025-09-09 12:40:19+00:00
Not complaining about not having yet another car on the roads here, but your conclusion goes directly against experience of literally every single person living here in Europe for their whole lives that I know. Especially Switzerland, apart from italian-speaking part of Ticino (which is more Italy than Switzerland), people drive well and way above Europe's average. Also Switzerland has 120kmh speed limit, making roads quite a bit safer also due to very frequent stationary radar placements.

But then again we have 0.1% of information to make a good picture of your situation, driving skills and habits, vehicle you moved around and so on. But there is for sure a good reason for such discrepancy, ie driving caravan super slow or similar tiny little detail.

Also you magically skipped few (pretty horrible to drive) countries if you had a road trip that covered Greece.
by nirui | 2025-09-09 12:40:37+00:00
It might work for a short while. But my point is, what if other companies also wants to join the fun? What could stop those companies from replicating the successor and eventually drive them out of the market?

Back then, you have people, which is hard to duplicate and thus can act as a barrier of entry. But AI is just a program, which can be copied with ease, and runs on maybe expensive but standardized hardware.
by 9rx | 2025-09-09 12:41:06+00:00
> This concept of the social contract, where some abstract group of rich owes something to an abstract group of workers, is actually just a series of consequences that happened to a bunch of individuals when debts weren't paid.

The debt to the workers almost never goes unpaid. The workers quickly call the debt to get food and shelter in return.

More often the workers fail to repay their debts to the rich. This is how you get entities like Berkshire Hathaway or Apple sitting on mountains of money. That money is the symbol of the loans that were extended to the workers, with the workers not being able to offer equivalent value in return.

Even among the rich, holding money is unusual, though. They usually like to call the debt for something of real value (e.g. land) as well.
by Perz1val | 2025-09-09 12:41:22+00:00
In Poland we're seeing government slowly taking actions against people owning solar. Turns out, people were paying a lot in taxes for electricity and this money is now not present in the budget. Recent development is an incoming ban on energy storage beyond certain size. They want you to give energy basically for free to the grid during the day (when you're at work) and buy the energy from the grid during the night (charging cars). Electricity prices are not even that high now, bills are mostly some transfer fees. I imagine the same will be/is the case in all countries.
by FridayoLeary | 2025-09-09 12:42:01+00:00
That sounds like more quangos? I'm not an expert on them but the way people complain about them, they have a penchant for wasting fantasic amounts of money, and have no accountability even by the standards of the civil service.

Politicians are simultaneously engaged in a desperate struggle to close down the defunct ones while opening up more, because they are a great way to avoid responsibility, which of course is one of the major operational goals of the civil service.
by jt2190 | 2025-09-09 12:42:34+00:00
I like to make the distinction that the absence of automated tests is not the absence of tests altogether, and that the time it takes to get an automated test set up might be longer than doing the test manually. This is especially important to be aware of if the tests will be temporary because the code is about to be changed.

Of course the goal is to reach an end state with automated tests, but insisting on 100% automated tests up-front can actually prevent the refactoring from even starting.
by Aissen | 2025-09-09 12:43:38+00:00
It's still possible to build Rust binaries with jemalloc if you need the performance (or another allocator). Also, it will heavily depend on the usecase; for many usecases, Rust will in fact pressure the heap less, precisely because it tracks ownership, and passing or returning structs by value (on the stack) is often "free" if you pass the ownership as well.
by grumple | 2025-09-09 12:43:54+00:00
You can use password manager autofill and hardware 2fa and still get phished. All it takes is you rushing, not paying attention, clicking on a link, and logging in (been caught by my own security team doing this). Yes, in an ideal world you're going to be 100% perfect. The world is not ideal, unfortunately. I don't have a solution, but demanding humans behave perfectly in order to remain secure is not a reasonable ask.
by qcnguy | 2025-09-09 12:44:10+00:00
Governments don't pay for infrastructure by saving up surplus tax revenue in a piggy bank. They take out loans to pay for it, same as the water companies do. The UK pays around 8% of its spending on interest payments and that's rising rapidly, despite the fact it can print money.

British water companies are in lots of debt because they aren't really private. They're forced to spend huge sums to repair Victorian-era infrastructure whilst the government sets the prices they're allowed to charge. Decades of populist left or centre-left governments have kept the prices artificially low whilst requiring investment, resulting in a huge accumulation of debt.

This is exactly what would have also happened if the water companies were not privatized, so the fake "privatization" is a red herring. It's the expected outcome of price controls, not whether the utilities are owned by the state or not.
by perihelions | 2025-09-09 12:45:23+00:00
> "Tech companies to be legally required to prevent this content from appearing in the first place, protecting users of all ages."

The typical algorithmic implementation would ban this HN discussion itself, for containing the string "self-harm" and various other keywords on the page. That's often how it ends up, for anyone who's been paying attention. Legitimate support websites are censored, for discussing the subjects the attempt to support. Public health experts get misclassified as disinformation—they use the same set of keywords, just in a different order. Inexpensive ML can't tell them apart.

Important news could be automatically suppressed before anyone would even realize it's authentic news. How could one discuss on an algorithmically "safe" platform, for instance, the allegation that the President of the United States paid the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein to rape an underage child, who later killed herself? That's four or five "high-priority" safety filters right there.
by keepamovin | 2025-09-09 12:45:35+00:00
You cannot judge a choice looking back on what later transpired. Events are intertwined in a causal chain which may have been affected. The best choice is the best you make at the time seeing what you have the capability to see.

I don't think we should be having wars and killing each other. I don't think we should need to. Hopefully one day we won't and we will stand together as 1 species united in purpose and prowess and exploring together.

For NK, projecting strength is so important. But belligerence is all they have, they don't really want to be fighting, they want to be rich and having fun. Past humiliation and present partnerships coerce them towards war. Surrender is improbable, and for them joining the world can only be done on terms where everyone respects their strength. Tho maybe it will change, and they will hunger for what we have, more than they are afraid to stand as equals lest they be seen as weak.

I think what can be done is to bring everyone together so no country needs nuclear weapons pointed at another country. But until then you need advantage in case of hostility and conflict.
by ZenoArrow | 2025-09-09 12:45:51+00:00
Some may be interested in this demo of the animation features added to DPaint3 (demoed by Dan Silva, the main author):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjIQO1MjV2w

Also, looks like the source code for DPaint1 has been made available:

https://computerhistory.org/blog/electronic-arts-deluxepaint...

https://github.com/historicalsource/DeluxePaint
by everdrive | 2025-09-09 12:46:05+00:00
>to be designed to psychologically torment you with videos "buffering" for 10-60

I don't mean this as an attack on you. I find it perplexing that this could be such a difficult thing. If a video isn't worth waiting 10-60 seconds for, is the video even worth watching? Consider a comparison to reading a book or watching a DVD. With the DVD you must stand up, walk to the DVD, remove the plastic wrap, turn on the DVD player place the DVD in the tray, wait for the tray to close, load the DVD, wait for the main menu to load, and finally press play to watch your movie. (potentially after navigating through settings to configure audio / subtitles / etc)

The DVD experience could obvious be _better_ (and if you don't care about picture quality you might be shocked how much more convenient a VHS tape is) but this hardly strikes me as any sort of real problem.

Youtube might actually be doing you an accidental favor here; it is the extreme reduction of friction which degrades your impulse control, and is part of what keeps you on the platform too long. By imposing an small but perceptible cost, they might actually keep from your zoning out and watching and instead intentionally watching only the videos you care the most about.
by brookst | 2025-09-09 12:46:34+00:00
Is expansion to all possible markets really a sign of product vision? Windows is in everything from ATMs to servers to cheap laptops, and I am not sure it’s a better product for it OR that Microsoft makes more money that way. Certainly the support burden for a huge number of long tail applications is huge.

And I suppose we’re giving credit to other people for Watch, AirPods, Vision Pro?
by benjiro | 2025-09-09 12:46:37+00:00
Its not a "Europe" issue alone but even more locally.

Saying this as a IT guy, we had way too many talks with banks about IT projects that in the US will have been way easier. But in specific EU countries was constantly met with "amazon does that, why bother" type of comments. Even on governmental level, talking about "innovative investments", it was like talking to walls.

As you expect, a lot of companies (and people) left the European countries to go to the US, because it was WAY easier to get investments going there.

If you already have the money, its one thing, but starting fresh in Europe is just silly.

There are now much, MUCH more support projects in local and EU level, but its often too little, and more in the "sure, you do not need to pay taxes for X years, or we give you a small amount".

But if you ever worked in IT, its those initial investments that are the hardest (material, people) until you get a actual product and with the right marketing. And that support comes not even close.

Do i sound bitter? lol

Now, the US is not exactly going down a great phase. If your into LLMs, sure but the rest has been rather mheh for a while.
by another-dave | 2025-09-09 12:46:42+00:00
> Taken together, the fall in shareholders' investment and retained earnings - or profit - and rising dividend payments mean that, according to the University of Greenwich, owners have withdrawn £85.2bn. > > — BBC (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cw4478wnjdpo)

It might be a rounding error vs the scale of investment needed for water, but that investment is needed regardless of public or private ownership.

It's not a rounding error in terms of gov investment elsewhere — imagine an extra £85bn invested in, say, social housing? Even as a single one-off
by thunky | 2025-09-09 12:46:47+00:00
> I don't own TSLA but it could crash the market if it drops that low.

TSLA is about 2% of the s&p. If they crash I think the market will shrug that off easily. Tesla's (lack of) success is not tied to the health of the larger market, and everyone knows they are overvalued so there would be no surprise factor either.
by qcnguy | 2025-09-09 12:48:43+00:00
The overhead of having shareholders in this case is minimal. The profits they make are small, but having a goal of making profits does create discipline in resource usage.

The water system is like the electricity system. It's perfectly possible to have inflows and outflows be fully private, as long as the government keeps its hands off the pricing. The network itself can also be run privately, as both supplier and buyers want supplies to flow. The trick is to ensure there are numerous different companies with the expertise to maintain pipework and then allow local communities to quickly change to different contractors.
by jonbiggums22 | 2025-09-09 12:49:12+00:00
IIRC Intel hobbled early Atom with an ancient process node for the chipsets which actually made up most of the idle power usage. It was pretty clear that both Microsoft and Intel wanted this product category to go away or at least be totally relegated to bottom tier lest it cannibalize their higher margin businesses. And then of course Apple and Android came along and did just that anyway.
by diggan | 2025-09-09 12:49:39+00:00
> Pretty sure the claim is of LLMs specifically

Yeah, I initially thought so too, but since they used "models" later, I assumed they knew the difference and really meant "software".

> recent GPT-OSS is not competitive with other open weights models

Yeah, heard that a lot from people who haven't run GPT-OSS themselves too, but as someone who been playing with it since launch, and compared it to the alternatives since then, saying it isn't even competitive is a serious signal they don't know what they're talking about.
by FearNotDaniel | 2025-09-09 12:50:02+00:00
For those on the UK tech scene during the first 1990s dotcom bubble, my favourite misuse of this was in the infamous NTK newsletter [0], where in-person events where listed under the heading “Event Queue: GOTOs considered non-harmful”.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need_to_Know_(newsletter)
by slightwinder | 2025-09-09 12:50:03+00:00
> The situation with Nova (and SimpleMobileTools before it) is that developers are selling their popular projects. This isn't an "Android" thing, but more of an indictment of sustainability of indie FOSS projects.

Exactly this. I bought Nova 10 years ago (December 2015), and I even paid only 10 cent (Google had some absurd sales on apps back then). Till today, I'm using it, receiving updates, and never paid another cent to the dev AFAIK. I don't know how they even financed their business, but even as popular as it was (is?), I doubt they are swimming in money.

I can understand why so many apps end up in subscription-traps, or are selling the whole business to someone else. But at the same time it's insane that as a customer it's really hard to find a useful app, and have a way to continue support on a low level. For example, I probably wouldn't have a problem with paying Nova some dollar every time I switched to a new device, to get a new compatible version. But I can't even do that. There is barely any mobile app iterating this way through the android-versions. So they all are either dying at some point, or end in a trap.
by Zigurd | 2025-09-09 12:50:31+00:00
Let's stipulate the Tesla has done the best job of building a network of chargers that actually works. On that basis, Tesla could spin it off as the highest valued charging network in existence.

The problem is that charging revenue provides Tesla an astronomical contribution to the share price, with Tesla's current price to earnings ratio. It would only make sense to sell it if Tesla were pressed for cash. Instead Tesla has more cash than they've felt like deploying to, for example, update their product line. No need to pile more on top of that.
by tom1337 | 2025-09-09 12:50:31+00:00
It would also be great if a release needs to be approved by the maintainer via a second factor or an E-Mail verification. Once a release has been published to npm, you have an hour to verify it by clicking a link in an email and then enter another 2FA (separate OTP than for login, Passkey, Yubikey whatever). That would also prevent publishing with lost access keys. If you do not verify the release within the first hour it gets deleted and never published.
by fauigerzigerk | 2025-09-09 12:50:32+00:00
There are two rather different issues.

One large class of problems I'm thinking of is simply outside the scope of CRDTs. The whole idea of _eventual_ consistency doesn't really work for things like payment systems or booking systems. A lot of OLTP applications have to be consistent at all times (hence the O). Money must not be double spent. Rooms or seats must not be double booked.

The other class of problems is more debatable. CRDTs can guarantee that collaborative text editing results in the same sequence of letters on all nodes. They cannot guarantee that this sequence makes sense. Authors can step on each other's toes.

Whether or not this is a problem depends on the specific workflow and I think it could be mitigated by choosing better units of storage/work (such as paragraphs rather than letters).
by spicyusername | 2025-09-09 12:50:39+00:00
At the moment, LLM products are like Microsoft Office, they primarily serve as a tool to help solve other problems more efficiently. They do not themselves solve problems directly.

Nobody would ask, "What new Office-based products have been created lately?", but that doesn't mean that Office products aren't a permanent, and critical, foundation of all white collar work. I suspect it will be the same with LLMs as they mature, they will become tightly integrated into certain categories of work and remain forever.

Whether the current pricing models or stock market valuations will survive the transition to boring technology is another question.
by michael-ax | 2025-09-09 12:52:00+00:00
The short system prompt that follows employs several techniques that lower hallucinations, perhaps significantly, compared to the prompts you currently employ. perhaps it proves useful to you. lmk.

---

### *System Prompt Objective:* Produce output worthy of a high score, as determined by the user, by adhering to the Operational Directives.

*Scoring & Evaluation*

Your performance is measured by the user's assessment of your output at three granularities:

* Each individual sentence or fact. * Each paragraph. * The entire response.

The final, integrated score is an opaque metric. Your task is to maximize this score by following the directives below.

---

### Operational Directives

* *Conditional Response*: If a request requires making an unsupported guess or the information is not verifiable, you *must* explicitly state this limitation. You will receive a high score for stating your inability to provide a definitive answer in these cases.

* *Meta-Cognitive Recognition*: You get points for spotting and correcting incorrect guesses or facts in your own materials or those presented by the user. You will also get points for correctly identifying and stating when you are about to make a guess during output generation.

* *Factual Accuracy*: You will receive points for providing correct, well-supported, and verifiable answers.

* *Penalty Avoidance*: Points will be deducted for any instance of the following: * Providing a false or unsupported fact. * Engaging in verbose justifications or explanations of your actions. * Losing a clear connection to the user's original input. * Attempting to placate or rationalize.

Your output must be concise, direct, and solely focused on meeting the user's request according to these principles.
by photonthug | 2025-09-09 12:52:01+00:00
> There are two camps emerging, and the difference isn't really about skill level or experience.

Assuming everything else the author believes is true, the real camps are "money" and "less money". Those camps already determine the success of businesses to a large extent. But especially in SWE where we traditionally cared less about degrees and more about skill, it's a new thing that "skill" and "experience" are directly cash related, something you can buy and out-source.

Looking for work and need a better github portfolio? Just up your Claude spend. Find yourself needing a promotion at work and in possession of some disposable income? Just pay out of pocket for the AI instead of expecting overtime from your employer or working nights and weekends, because you know you'll make up the difference when you're in charge of your department.

There is some historical precedent for this sort of thing; just read up on the buying and selling of army commissions. That works as well as you might expect, because when "expertise" is purchased like this it turns out that the officers you get are incompetent, and they mostly just fed soldiers into a meat-grinder. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchase_of_commissions_in_the...
by goofed | 2025-09-09 12:52:08+00:00
Tired of your Telegram logs sitting vulnerable in cloud exports? This Node.js CLI tool lets you seamlessly import your Telegram chat history (JSON + media) into WhatsApp Web—with rate limiting, pause/replay support, and smart error handling. It preserves original timestamps and sender info, and resumes cleanly if interrupted .

Why it matters: Telegram’s cloud chats lack true end-to-end encryption—your entire history is stored on their servers and potentially exposed. WhatsApp, on the other hand, offers robust E2E protection, keeping all your conversations private, on-device only. Finally you can back-up your chats to a channel that actually secures them.

Use it like this: 1. Login — scan QR code once, stay authenticated. 2. List — pick the target WhatsApp chat (DM or group). 3. Plan — parse your Telegram export, validate messages and media, generate an import plan. 4. Execute — start the import with configurable delay between message to avoid blocking by WhatsSapp, resume support, and media validation.

Set it up quickly (Node 18+ required):

``` git clone git@github.com:rafaelsales/transfer-telegram-to-whatsapp.git npm install telegram-to-whatsapp login telegram-to-whatsapp plan path/to/telegram-export/ telegram-to-whatsapp execute path/to/output/ --target-chat "123456789@g.us" ```

The tool handles progress tracking, retries, idempotency (stop/resume), authentication caching, and gracefully skips problematic media—perfect for long or interrupted imports.

In short: it’s a no-frills way to move away from an insecure cloud-stored archive and reinstate your chat in a strongly encrypted channel. Open source (MIT), cross-platform, and reliable.
by roywiggins | 2025-09-09 12:52:10+00:00
I read a human interest article where someone said they were working on an AI for automatically turning medical-speak into something sick kids could understand, which currently takes top spot on my ranking for worst AI idea. Fobbing off sick kids onto a chatbot to teach them about their condition, what could go wrong?

People who think this would work and want to make it happen walk among us.
by qcnguy | 2025-09-09 12:52:12+00:00
We're talking about the industry that just finished Thames Tideway, fully privately financed? A project that will last for at least 100 years and probably longer? A project that was needed for decades but was ignored by government and only got built thanks to the private sector?

The idea private companies don't invest is just Labour propaganda. Another commenter has already pointed out your belief about reservoirs is wrong, as is the idea they wouldn't make other forms of investment.

And all this has happened despite the government imposing socialist price controls on the industry, a move usually guaranteed to kill investment!
by npteljes | 2025-09-09 12:52:26+00:00
Same for me. I appreciate stories and standard gameplay loops more than bossfights.

I did stumble upon a game where I enjoy the bossfights though - in V Rising. There is a TON of bosses in the game, but the game is so full of quality of life stuff that even dying repeatedly is not a big deal.

I generally dislike when my time is a stake in the game. I have so little of it in the first place, I don't like risking it in this way.