MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by b112 | 2025-09-15 16:30:06+00:00
Unless you live in a location without much sunlight, it’s better to invest in a solar powered system with a transfer switch to go off grid

You're sadly describing my situation. Dec sees 6 hours of light, less even, and while the sun does get above the horizon, it doesn't get over the top of the forest.

(The trees have no leaves, but there's still a lot of tree trunks between me and sun.)

Bah.
by kelthuzad | 2025-09-15 16:30:13+00:00
>No, material support has been ruled to include speech in the past: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/national/2010/06/22/c...

Your claim that "material support included speech in the past" is misleading because it misses the crucial distinction between public discourse and direct assistance. The First Amendment continues to fully protect public advocacy. You can write, speak, and argue publicly in favor of any cause. What the Supreme Court prohibited was not the expression of an idea, but the action of providing a professional service directly to a designated organization, such as giving "expert advice" or "training".

In short, the law distinguishes between expressing an independent opinion (which is legal) and using your speech as an expert tool to help a group operate (which is not).
by Analemma_ | 2025-09-15 16:30:13+00:00
What I find interesting about the Culture as a literary and philosophical concept is that it forces you to choose whether material superabundance and unrestricted freedom is enough to be happy.

Right now with our current civilization we still need to work and have at least some restrictive social structures, because distribution of scarce resources is still a thing; working within these constraints is where all contemporary culture and politics comes from. So at the moment it's still possible to "dodge the question" (although less and less so as time goes on), but once you have the Culture you can no longer do so. You have to choose if you can be happy inside the system of unlimited freedom where you can choose total hedonism or try to construct some kind of meaning for yourself, or if you will "go Horza" and demand deliberately worse social structures to try and force the meaning back in from without (note one of the other comments in this thread saying "the Idirans were right").
by alephnerd | 2025-09-15 16:30:23+00:00
It absolutely would have been a major political football in the US! And I'm in agreement that ICE's conduct was despicable.

What I'm annoyed at is people trying to argue that Hyundai-LG are guilt-free and did nothing wrong.

Both ICE and Hyundai-LG are in the wrong, but Hyundai-LG could have resolved this problem extremely early when it was flagged by the Biden administration.

Notice how Korean reporting is overwhelmingly about business implications and not at all about persistent issues of labor abuse within Hyundai America. Samsung America is equally as large (if not larger) yet has never had similar scandals year after year.

Laying pipe, pouring concrete, and other manual labor is not covered by the B1/2, VWP, or TN [0][1] visas, but Hyundai America and it's contractors continued to flout existing regulations and norms.

This had been a major pain point in the Biden administration as well.

If equally large and Korean Samsung SDI (as well as European, Japanese, and even Chinese conglomerates) can manage to build gigafactories in the US scandal free, other Korean conglomerates like Hyundai can as well.

[0] - https://www.ajc.com/news/georgia-news/a-total-lie-mexican-en...

[1] - https://www.ajc.com/news/georgia-news/lawsuit-says-hyundai-a...
by closeparen | 2025-09-15 16:30:23+00:00
An American middle class house in San Mateo or Santa Clara County will run you about $2 million, or ~$140k-160k/year. The take-home pay for $300k is about $180k.

Alameda County is cheaper because the commute to South Bay and to S.F. destinations not near BART is unreasonable. If you’re willing to rule out those jobs you might be able to get away closer to $1.5m at $120k/year.

I’m guessing you bought with a 3% mortgage and before the COVID asset price takeoff.

Another way to look at it is that for each $100m of company value created, you’re looking at perhaps $20m of employee equity, or about 10 employees being able to buy homes (before taxes) if the equity were distributed evenly.
by GMoromisato | 2025-09-15 16:30:39+00:00
I love watching Star Trek. At its best, it both entertains and expands your mind. As Doctorow says, it explores the impact of technology on society and individuals, and it helps us see our current world in a different light.

But here's the thing: just as I would never try to learn physics from Star Trek, I would never take its ideas as prescriptions for how to run society. There's an episode in which Kirk almost triggers a nuclear war because he gambles that once faced with that possibility, the two sides will make peace instead. This is MAD theory on steroids.

Even the concept that there is no money in the Star Trek future is non-sensical. It is the economic equivalent of "Heisenberg compensators" or "inertial dampeners".

I feel the same way about Cory Doctorow. I enjoy reading him because he expands my mind. But I can't take him seriously.

Like Star Trek, Doctorow espouses simple themes in which there are good guys and bad guys. He envisions a utopia in which all his needs are met, and when the world falls short, he trots out the usual villains to blame, billionaires instead of Klingons. And he does it in an entertaining and clever way.

Reality is far more complicated, of course.

My father had a theory that the Industrial Revolution happened, not because of a technological change, but because the Bank of England invented fractional reserve banking. With fractional reserve lending, a bank can lend more money than it has on its books. And as long as that money is put to productive uses, the economy will grow faster than if the money supply were limited.

Instead of a central authority deciding what we should invest in, there is a distributed system that tries various things, some of which succeed and some of which fail. And with fractional reserve banking, there is more money for experiments, allowing for more shots-on-goal.

If I were to try to simplify things as Star Trek or Doctorow do, I might say that every material benefit that you have today, from electric lights to Uber, happened because someone decided to invest in an idea. In my morality tale, investors and founders are not "tech hucksters" but an essential cog in a complex, and almost miraculous machine that has made the world of 2025 almost unrecognizably better than the filthy, poor London of 1760.

I love watching Star Trek and reading Doctorow. But I find reality much more fascinating.
by random3 | 2025-09-15 16:30:43+00:00
I wasn't using em dash, but appreciate looking it what seems pedantry. It's about semantics after all and having the right syntax is key. So I realized I'd like to be more thorough and use em dashes, en dashes and hyphens correctly.

My point is that if you/we treat things "statically" we're missing the point. It's not just tech that's changing, it's society changing as a result of tech (always has been).
by saghm | 2025-09-15 16:30:45+00:00
You've already lost me by step two; I have no clue what "force is the negative gradient of potential" means or what a "conservation force field" is. When my non-expert perception is that potential energy already seems a bit like a hack to cause conservation to work, citing some technical fact based on the assumption that there's something called "potential" with a negative gradient that I should take for granted as equivalent to force doesn't really do much to dispel that. It seems like your response is assuming I understand a lot more than I do, and I suspect that if I understood enough to do anything other than just trust it at face value, I probably wouldn't need any explanation about why my intuition is wrong in the first place!

Circling back to the blog post here, it seems like the author is specifically trying to discuss things in a way that non-experts can still follow along with I took a lot at a couple of other posts on the blog after finishing this one, and the one about a "proof" that pi equals 4 had a section that felt pretty similar to me, where it cites an explanation of why it's wrong conveyed in as way that probably doesn't do much to help the people who are most likely to need it in understanding why the proof is wrong: https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/4
by whyandgrowth | 2025-09-15 16:30:58+00:00
Cool project, lightweight and easy to drop into a codebase I have a few ideas.

1. Zone name storage – right now you store a raw char. If it points to a stack/local string it can blow up . Better to use const char (if always literals) or strdup.

2. Thread-safety – the global arrays (prof_zones, prof_zones_stack) aren’t protected. In multithreaded workloads everything breaks. You could make them thread_local.

3. Cycles vs time – __rdtsc() isn’t always stable (TurboBoost, NUMA, CPU scaling). clock_gettime() is more portable. Might be nice to let the user pick via a macro.

4. Output – the printf("[%16s]...") is old-school. Sorting zones by total_secs or total_cycles would make hot spots pop out immediately.

5. Limits – PROF_MAX_NUM_ZONES = 256 is small for bigger projects. Could malloc and grow dynamically.

6. Overhead – the profiler doesn’t subtract its own overhead (push/pop, clock reads), so absolute numbers are inflated. Relative numbers are still valid, though.

Bonus idea: add a macro like

#define PROF_SCOPE(name) for (int _i = (prof_begin(name), 0); !_i; prof_end(), _i++)

so you can just write:

void foo() { PROF_SCOPE("foo"); // code... }
by jasonpeacock | 2025-09-15 16:31:02+00:00
It's not that slow?

Cargo only recompiles the crates that you edit, after the first build of the dependent crates it's quick to iterate.

Compilation is not the bottleneck, it's the human (me) in the loop that's doing the thinking and typing.

The productivity boost comes from Rust's strong type system and ownership (much better than MyPy) which practically ensures that if it compiles, it will work. There's a lot less troubleshooting/debugging of my Rust "scripts" than when I wrote Python.
by chrismorgan | 2025-09-15 16:31:12+00:00
> And if it was such a vital part of punctuation, it would have been on our typewriters and therefore on our modern keyboards.

Typewriters were monospaced, which gives you extremely limited scope for distinguishing hyphens and em dashes. Small wonder that they didn’t bother attempting a distinction, and then that provided the inertia for us to never get such a thing now.

Typewriters are a lowest-common-denominator sort of thing. They lacked all kinds of widely-used stuff, and some of it they killed by their omission. Accented letters you mostly couldn’t do at all, and the rest of the time could only do by a terrible hack.

There’s a similar story in the final death of the letter thorn (þ) in English <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)#Middle_and_Earl...>: imported fonts lacked the character, so people substituted it with y which looked most similar, and that substitution became ubiquitous, and now most people think the first word in “Ye Olde Curiositie Shoppe” is pronounced /jiː/ (“ye”), whereas it was actually just how they spelled “the”, so it was /ðiː/.

It’s a general rule in such technologies: although they make many new things possible, they also damage what was there before.
by hluska | 2025-09-15 16:31:41+00:00
Oddly, I did some work around this recently. I’m a terrible designer but I’m less terrible now because I did a self guided course. A 120 day course to go from a terrible designer to just a really really bad designer isn’t very marketable.

With built in fonts, if you want to support a wide range of machines, you have seven reliable fonts, one monospace and one cursive font to choose from. Georgia is a good looking serif font and I use it too much now, but the sans serif pairings aren’t great.

With CSS, you can make arial work as a heading font with a Georgia body for example, but that takes time and creates a testing burden. It only takes seconds to host a font that looks great out of the box and imposes a smaller testing burden. So for me the answer is a lack of talent that I’ve mitigated through transferring fonts on requests. I don’t think that’s a good thing, but my designs are no longer covered by a Geneva convention so that makes me feel better. :)
by iLemming | 2025-09-15 16:31:42+00:00
> why ... didn't help answer this simple question?

How do you know it didn't?

Someone may have observed it and fixed it someplace else, but from the point of OP it doesn't matter to them - their system still works "as desired". The world wasn't meant to be perfect for everyone, but you can certainly carve out your own "perfect" piece of it.

It seems you have only surface knowledge and little practice of using Emacs. You're not offering any evidence to your arguments and not suggesting any alternatives. Because there isn't a practical alternative that exists today to effectively replace Emacs. You're frantically trying to grasp for reasons not to use Emacs. Why are you looking for validation on an Emacs-themed thread? If you don't want to use Emacs, just don't. If you want to use Emacs but observing obstacles, then get more concrete, instead of complaining just for the sake of it.
by 0cf8612b2e1e | 2025-09-15 16:32:06+00:00
At this point hundreds is millions (billions) of people have received the shot. If there were widespread adverse events, they would have impacted a non negligible fraction of humanity.

I do not understand why Covid makes conservatives so angry. It happened. People died. We have a shot, that is not all that different from other routine vaccines. Why is it so special?
by derefr | 2025-09-15 16:32:57+00:00
I would argue that "augmented programming" (as the article terms it) both is and isn't analogous to the other things you mentioned.

"Augmented programming" can be used to refer to a fully-general-purpose tool that one always programs with/through, akin in its ubiquity to the choice to use an IDE or a high-level language. And in that sense, I think your analogies make sense.

But "augmented programming" can also be used to refer to use of LLMs under constrained problem domains, where the problem already can be 100% solved with current technology. Your analogies fall apart here.

A better analogy that covers both of these cases, might be something like grid-scale power storage. We don't have any fully-general grid-scale power storage technologies that we could e.g. stick in front of every individual windmill or solar farm, regardless of context. But we do have domain-constrained grid-scale power storage technologies that work today to buffer power in specific contexts. Pumped hydroelectric storage is slow and huge and only really reasonable in terms of CapEx in places you're free to convert an existing hilltop into a reservoir, but provides tons of capacity where it can be deployed; battery-storage power stations are far too high-OpEx to scale to meet full grid needs, but work great for demand smoothing to loosen the design ramp-rate tolerances for upstream power stations built after the battery-storage station is in place; etc. Each thing has trade-offs that make it inapplicable to general use, but perfect for certain uses.

I would argue that "augmented programming" is in exactly that position: not something you expect to be using 100% of the time you're programming; but something where there are already very specific problems that are constrained-enough that we can design agentive systems that have been empirically observed to solve those problems 100% of the time.
by Isamu | 2025-09-15 16:33:04+00:00
>Surely Apple also knows this

No, this is not as simple as Meta calling internal APIs that can be detected. This is Meta developing tricky ways of identifying users from patterns of usage without regard to opt-in. If users consent, the app can use the Apple API to track. Easy. If users don’t consent, Meta tracks through tricks matching behavior stored on their servers.

This is Meta abiding by the letter of the Apple developer agreement but not the spirit of the agreement.
by jrochkind1 | 2025-09-15 16:33:06+00:00
I mean, there's a reason Banks chose to write Consider Phlebas with a narrative perspective from someone on the side of the Idrians. As I said in another comment, I think Banks fully intentionally means to make this perspective visible, legibible, understood as not entirely unreasonable.

Which is part of what makes the books so enjoyable to me, being invited to see multiple perspectives (especially reading Consider Phlebas after reading others that establish the Culture from it's own point of view).

Sure, Banks is portraying the best society he can think of for what he values and wants -- but acknowledging that even the best society he can think of has warts and can be seen by some as a dystopia too, and that not all might share the same values and wants.
by JimDabell | 2025-09-15 16:33:09+00:00
From the official Google note:

> Also, please note that Google LLC is certified under both the EU-U.S. and Swiss-U.S. Privacy Shield frameworks and our certifications can be viewed on the Privacy Shield list.

It’s very important to be aware that the Privacy Shield was declared invalid by the European Court of Justice in 2020, so that note from April 17, 2018 is worthless.
by gnabgib | 2025-09-15 16:33:25+00:00
Somewhat related:

The Tapo C200 research project https://drmnsamoliu.github.io/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37813013)

PyTapo: Python library for communication with Tapo Cameras https://github.com/JurajNyiri/pytapo (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41267062)
by LolWolf | 2025-09-15 16:33:34+00:00
What? Yes it is! This is exactly how peer review works! People look at the paper, read it, and then reproduce it, poke holes, etc.

Peer review has nothing to do with "being published in some fancy-looking formatted PDF in some journal after passing an arbitrary committee" or whatever, it's literally review by your peers.

Now, do I have problems with this specific paper and how it's written in a semi-magical way that surely requires the reader suspend disbelief? For sure, but that's completely independent of the "peer-review" aspect of it.
by DiabloD3 | 2025-09-15 16:33:35+00:00
I honestly don't give a shit anymore.

I have female-A-to-male-C cables, I have male-A-to-female-C cables. Some of them have the USB 3 pins (which has kind of been a niche case for C in my life), all of them are safe up to 5A power.

All my computers that didn't have C now have at least one, and all of my C-only computers have an A they can use if they need one.
by sleepybrett | 2025-09-15 16:33:37+00:00
Privacy in sealed mail is different than privacy when you are shouting on the street corner.

I think an interesting experiment would be to create a social platform where all identities must be verified and public and all messaging must also be public. If you could verify identities well enough, this would create a platform where everyone is saying everything knowing it's traced to their identity. Perhaps the information communicated on such a platform would be considered to have more weight than information spewed on pseudo and fully anonymous platforms.
by jake-salomon | 2025-09-15 16:34:00+00:00
Hi,

My name is Jake and I lead the early stage tech division at Roc — we primarily work with Seed - Series B Agentic AI companies in SF & NY.

I am always taking on new searches and primarily partnered with clients that ask for candidates to have previous startup experience or know how to build from 0 => 1.

If you have any interest in working for an early stage organization and feel in alignment with these things shared, I'd love to connect!
by CuriouslyC | 2025-09-15 16:34:32+00:00
LLMs are noisy channels. There's some P(correct|context). You can increase the reliability of noisy channels to an arbitrary epsilon using codes. The simplest example of this in action is the majority decoding logic, which maps 1:1 to parallel LLM implementation and solution debate among parallel implementers. You can implement more advanced codes but it requires being able to decompose structured LLM output and have some sort of correctness oracle in most cases.
by mattnewton | 2025-09-15 16:35:41+00:00
It’s been used before to punish political speech, especially during the Mcarthy era against “un american” speech like support for labor rights where the government couldn’t win in court. I thought we had all agreed that was bad and moved passed it, but, I guess not.

(Notably it was used against WEB Du Boise and then when it was lifted and he traveled to Ghana, the US state department refused to renew his passport stranding him there until he became a Ghanaian citizen.)
by BoredPositron | 2025-09-15 16:36:05+00:00
You are both simply ignorant. How hard would it have been to Google it yourself? You had all the context you needed. Now I will get comments that it's not a good enough source blurb. There are countries that have fixed the exact problem you are pondering about. At first we talked about chlorine now about pipes... keep kicking the ball. It's still a governance problem.

https://www.bundesgesundheitsministerium.de/en/topics/drinki...

https://www.blog.foma.net/en/brass-and-drinking-water-the-re...
by LolWolf | 2025-09-15 16:36:21+00:00
Not to completely plug my own work here, but I also wrote about this for a slightly more mathematical audience (and uhh, a much shorter post): "There are exponentially many vectors with small inner product"

https://lmao.bearblog.dev/exponential-vectors/

For those who are interested in the more "math-y" side of things.

For what it's worth, I don't fully understand the connection between the JL lemma and this "exponentially many vectors" statement, other than the fact that their proof relies on similar concentration behavior.
by vdupras | 2025-09-15 16:36:39+00:00
You're much more likely to stumble one something more modern, but that modern something is also much less repairable. It's great if it works and if it can run Linux or Dusk OS, but when it can't, you're out of luck.

With a 6502 or other such CPU, the machines you scavenge them from are much more repairable and adaptable. You can use those components like lego blocks. It breaks? either repair it or strip the working parts to use in another frankenstein computer.
by taylodl | 2025-09-15 16:36:41+00:00
What problem does Optimus solve? Who are their competitors and how is Tesla planning to differentiate themselves in the market?

WRT to FSD, I've had too many harrowing experiences as a passenger in friend's Teslas trying to show me how awesome it is. My experience in Industrial Automation and HMI (Human-Machine Interfaces) would lead me to never use FSD.
by Barrin92 | 2025-09-15 16:37:25+00:00
>By definition, if they're tedious, they're not utopias

Utopias are by definition tedious because a utopia is an end to history and as such an end to meaning or negotiation of how to live. A utopia is always an end to a story or Freedom with a capital f. As Dostoevsky points out in Notes from Underground, on man in utopia:

"[he] would pur­pose­ly do some­thing per­verse out of sim­ple in­grat­i­tude, sim­ply to gain his point. I be­lieve in it, I an­swer for it, for the whole work of man re­al­ly seems to con­sist in noth­ing but prov­ing to him­self ev­ery minute that he is a man and not a pi­ano-key! It may be at the cost of his skin; but he has proved it!"

Another way to phrase it. If you are in a utopia, you cannot be in a democracy that entails the possibility of ending it. Which is to say, you can't govern yourself at all. And that is why Ian M Banks culture is nothing of the sort. It's a society literally controlled by "perfect minds" using a Sapir-Whorf like language to manage the behavior of its people. Even Banks who tried to write a positive utopia and that's not his fault, couldn't imagine a utopia that entails the possibility of rebellion.