MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tialaramex | 2025-09-08 21:29:33+00:00
You're not supposed to drive 60mph on those tiny roads.

Why are they 60mph? Well, the symbol they display doesn't say 60mph, it's basically just a slash symbol - it should be read "National Limit Applies" or perhaps "Derestricted" and it so happens that the law in the UK says that if there's no other rule in place that limit is 60mph and on these tiny roads nobody has put in place a more specific limit so that's the law.

[If there is carriageway separation, e.g. a larger road on which traffic flowing in the opposite direction isn't sharing the same tarmac, this global rule says 70mph, but no tiny roads have multiple carriageways, actually sometimes it feels like there's barely room for one let alone two]

However, just because there isn't a lower limit doesn't mean it's appropriate to drive at 60mph and people who do are generally maniacs. Where I grew up there are lots of these roads, steep, winding, narrow tracks paved in the 19th or 20th centuries for access to a farm here or a cottage there, and maintained by the public. You absolutely might turn a corner and find an entire flock of sheep in the road going "Baa!". If you're doing 60mph after you've killed a bunch of sheep and the bodies start smashing through your windscreen you're probably dead. Sheep don't have lights, don't know about jaywalking laws (which Britain doesn't have anyway) and aren't smart enough to have considered this risk, they're just there and now you're dead. So you drive at maybe 30-40mph on the straight parts, slower on curves and always pay a lot of attention 'cos things can go very bad, very quickly.

Roundabouts are a bit different. The UK has a lot of what are called "mini roundabouts". As a pedestrian, or perhaps on a bicycle these do just look like they're small roundabouts, too small for the island in the middle to have any purpose so it's just paint. But in a vehicle it's apparent that the island can't exist because you'd crash into it, perhaps not in a Mini but certainly in a bin truck or a bus. The mini roundabout isn't a roundabout except in the sense that the same rules apply as if it was, which means if I can see you can't enter before I do then I know you mustn't enter, I have right of way, which means I needn't slow down - you won't be in my way, you're not entering.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-09-08 21:29:38+00:00
Alexa is trash. If you have to basically hold an agent's hand through something or it either fails or does something catastrophic nobody's going to use or trust it.

REST is actually a huge enabler for agents for sure, I think agents are going to drive everyone to have at least an API, if not a MCP, because if I can't use your app via my agent and I have to manually screw around in your UI, and your competitor lets my agent do work so I can just delegate via voice commands, who do you think is getting my business?
by kragen | 2025-09-08 21:29:51+00:00
That's how we mass-produce sodium silicate today, for example for foundry cores and waterproofing concrete. You have to get the quartz (from granite or otherwise) pretty hot for this to work. Pottery kiln temperatures.

Normally you purify the quartz first, but here we're discussing what molten washing soda would or wouldn't do to granite. The quartz in granite normally forms a continuous phase, so as long as the quartz remains solid, the granite will remain solid.

Granite melts at a lower temperature than pure quartz, and I'm not entirely sure it wouldn't just melt before the washing soda had an effect.
by overfeed | 2025-09-08 21:30:01+00:00
> I would have expected "rights to publish or distribute in perpetuity"

I think that would have been unlikely to occur to Nintendo's lawyers, since in the NES era, publishers required the developer's co-operation to provide masters targeting any additional platforms. This was before intergenerational emulation and internet distribution became widespread, and Nintendo would have had a sunset date for NES title sales.
by ghaff | 2025-09-08 21:30:52+00:00
Rearchitecting for containers is indeed a lot more effort and, indeed, one of the reasons for VMware's success was that it provided more efficiency without (at least initially) much in the way of operational changes.

But kuvevirt with Kubernetes does much of the same, especially for companies that are--or know they will--move to containerized workloads anyway.
by dboon | 2025-09-08 21:31:20+00:00
I’ve had major Nissan Altima effect with this lately. A few weeks ago I set out to make a simple C and C++ package manager that just ignores dependency hell in favor of you explicitly specifying packages. And no binaries, just build from source and use Git as a backend for managing what source maps to what builds.

Plus Lua for package recipes. It’s going really well!
by MangoToupe | 2025-09-08 21:31:26+00:00
There are three points of prioritization here: you can use other peoples' code, manually vet all the code you're running, or accept that you need to trust a social network to vet stuff for you. Pick two. This is not a solvable problem.

EDIT: I've been rate limited, so the point is: unless you're Terry Davis, you're not going to be able to write software of any real complexity. Few people are going to even bother to vet the standard library, let alone the compiler, the runtime, etc etc.
by bitpush | 2025-09-08 21:31:32+00:00
That's a lot of paragraphs to say .. nothing? Out of the 8 paragraphs, the first 6 paragraphs are recounting the trial, and the decision.

The 7th paragraph talks about what Mozilla's position was.

> This balance is something we’ve stressed throughout the trial. True competition in search starts with a healthy marketplace, one where small and large companies can compete on merit, where consumers have choice, and where the best new products, features, and ideas have a chance.

----

The 8th paragraph talks about the future, what was promised in the headline. Which is .. "we will not change anything"

> As this case continues to unfold, one thing won’t change: Mozilla’s commitment to an internet that’s open, accessible, and built for the public good. We’ve historically met market and regulatory shifts with creativity and care. Each moment has helped us grow and discover new ways to live out our mission, and we’re invigorated about the path forward.

---

Frankly, I dont even know why they wrote this blogpost. Folks, sometimes you dont need to say anything.
by trekz | 2025-09-08 21:31:58+00:00
> I really am mad at Rachel

Don't know what you're so angry with Rachel about. I provide feeds for readers and many of them are way too greedy and frequently do hammer websites, often unneccessarily. Mix in all the rampant AI bots and you got a recipe for an extremely expensive server bill.

Getting angry at someone who's trying to keep their server costs down to provide you something for free is kind of weird.
by swed420 | 2025-09-08 21:32:16+00:00
> All they did was add more nuance and bring up the fact that these benefits may come at a cost. Authoritarian governments can be very well-managed and efficient (something something trains run on time), but there's nothing to stop them if that efficiency starts being used against you.

Have...you been following the recent events in the US? And/or forgotten what the OP is about? Also, I'm not arguing for full authoritarianism. Just pointing out the tradeoffs in China compared to our crumbling empire.

Maybe we should couple China's benefits with the more democratic looking solution they found in Taiwan:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/17/audrey...

https://www.plurality.net/
by pas | 2025-09-08 21:32:20+00:00
It's ridiculously different, there's no single person or country that can do anything like that

there are multiple ways to make EU law, there are regulations (that apply directly) and directives that member states need to implement (basically ratify)

the Commission proposed something and then the Council votes on it and then there's the EP which votes on it

this one is a regulation proposal

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_to_Prevent_and_Co...

the treaties have some areas that are under "Special legislative procedures" where the EP cannot propose amendments, but still has consent power, but in some cases like internal market exemptions and competition law only consultation right

https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/council-eu/decision-makin...
by magicalhippo | 2025-09-08 21:33:28+00:00
Similar here. I regularly check my subscriptions, and I too noticed that lately a lot of them was never shown as a recommendation. Like maybe 20% of the videos were recommended, at most.

Instead I get even more silly stuff. Like one youtuber I'm subscribed to had an old video about anodes in water heaters. Hadn't heard about that (I've been sheltered) so viewed it. For a week after I had like 10 water heater anode videos in my recommendation list. Also more clickbait stuff, which I strongly dislike.
by utyop22 | 2025-09-08 21:33:47+00:00
"Humans make the same error but my one concern was that it doesn’t realize it’s in the wrong lane"

This is actually very deadly.. at least humans will signal / try do something in a safe manner to continue going on. An autonomous vehicle may behave in unpredictable ways and cause carnage. It only takes one incident to completely shutter it forever.
by kelnos | 2025-09-08 21:33:49+00:00
I'm an adblock user and I do pay for Premium, so there's at least one of us.

I do genuinely want to watch YouTube videos, but I don't want to have to deal with anti-adblock measures ruining the experience. So I pay. Which is reasonable, no? Either I pay with cash or by allowing myself to be manipulated into buying things I don't want or need. If those are the choices, I choose not to pay with my attention.
by spacechild1 | 2025-09-08 21:34:28+00:00
I see your point. Just a few things:

1. This is only relevant when using such class as a local variable. Member variables are typically not moved-from.

2. In my understanding the user has the freedom to specify what constitutes a "valid but unspecified state" and it would be perfectly ok to mandate that anything you can do with a moved-from object is to either destroy or reassign it.

3. The problems with the state of moved-from objects from the perspective of a library author could have been prevented simply by imposing stricter requirements in the standard (e.g. every usage except destruction, and possible reassignment, shall be UB).

4. With all the issues you've pointed out, it is still be perfectly possible and reasonable to design a socket class your way (= no closed socket state) in C++, yet somehow most people seem to prefer open() and close() methods instead of modelling the state with an optional. Even in the presence of destructive moves, I don't think that one way is necessarily better than the other and it is mostly a matter of culture and personal preference.

All the being said, I definitely agree that destructive moves are good thing, in particular if the compiler prevents you accidentally accessing moved-from objects (which is a mistake that is very easy to make in C++).
by GuB-42 | 2025-09-08 21:34:36+00:00
Tests in legacy code... LOL

From my real life experience with legacy code:

- There is usually a "test" folder, but what they test look nothing like the actual code, they often don't even compile, and if they do, they fail, and if they don't, that's because every failing test is disabled.

- Refactoring? What refactoring? Usually, all you see is an ugly hack, usually noticeable because the style is different from the rest of the code base. The old code is generally commented out if it is in the way, left alone as dead code if it isn't.

- Writing tests yourself? It would require you to put the test framework back in order first, they don't have the budget for that. Something as simple as reformatting the function you are working with is already a luxury.

- Sometimes, some refactoring is done, but that's only to add new bugs as to keep things exciting.

Still, as surprising as it may seem, I actually like working with legacy code. It is a challenge, understanding what it is doing (without reading the documentation of course, as if it exists, it is full of lies) and trying to leave it in a better state than it was before in a reasonable amount of time. It is great at teaching you all the antipatterns too, very useful if you end up in a greenfield project later on and you don't want it to end up like all the legacy code you have worked on before. If people actually use it, it will, but you can at least delay the inevitable.
by crinkly | 2025-09-08 21:35:10+00:00
Well we don't have working fusion reactor topology yet but the current "reactor" components are low level waste so safe within 40-100 years. Which is still a hell of a long time. Also they still will require biological shielding and associated materials are quite difficult to deal with (concrete etc).

I expect that the longevity of their attention is considerably less than this, particularly if the LLM boom crashes. ROI will not pay for the disposal later down the line.
by klipklop | 2025-09-08 21:35:27+00:00
> edit: I forgot a recruiter was working with me. I asked him what was going on. He said I was "too senior", "looked expensive", and "no one wants to hire white males right now."

Out of curiosity, what chronological age do you "present" as? Ageism I suspect is a factor on top of the overt racism that is seemingly OK as long as it's against a single group.
by shakna | 2025-09-08 21:35:28+00:00
Thinking is better understood than you seem to believe.

We don't just study it in humans. We look at it in trees [0], for example. And whilst trees have distributed systems that ingest data from their surroundings, and use that to make choices, it isn't usually considered to be intelligence.

Organizational complexity is one of the requirements for intelligence, and an LLM does not reach that threshold. They have vast amounts of data, but organizationally, they are still simple - thus "ai slop".

[0] https://www.cell.com/trends/plant-science/abstract/S1360-138...
by axiolite | 2025-09-08 21:35:51+00:00
> By 2005 I expect 90% of new PCs sold were already 64 bit ready.

You're several years off:

"The FIRST processor to implement Intel 64 was the multi-socket processor Xeon code-named Nocona in June 2004. In contrast, the initial Prescott chips (February 2004) did not enable this feature."

"The first Intel mobile processor implementing Intel 64 is the Merom version of the Core 2 processor, which was released on July 27, 2006. None of Intel's earlier notebook CPUs (Core Duo, Pentium M, Celeron M, Mobile Pentium 4) implement Intel 64."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64#Intel_64

"2012: Intel themselves are limiting the functionality of the Cedar-Trail Atom CPUs to 32bit only"

https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/no-emt64-on-intel-at...

Intel had 80% of the CPU market at the time.
by potato3732842 | 2025-09-08 21:36:30+00:00
Not partly, pretty much wholly.

Like every other safety regulation, it's a stupid game of stupid optimization. You "score best" by keeping the dummy's head off the windshield so you make a big giant flop/crunch zone full of engineered plastics and empty void spaces that is (ideally) at least as tall as the dummy's center of mass (belly button). This is why every car, suv, crossover, whatever that's expected to be sold in europe (including most of the small SUVs and crossovers that people complain about in North America) has a tall(er than it would have been 20yr ago) hood line these days.
by pseudosavant | 2025-09-08 21:36:51+00:00
Thinking about this more, I doubt I'll setup any OpenWRT APs on my network going forward. Most of the things I like about OpenWRT, and need it for, are related to being my router. My OpenWRT APs are just "dumb" APs. Wifi is off on the router.

For the APs, I could use a mesh kit like the TP-Link Deco unit I installed for a friend recently. Super easy setup, reasonable price (cheaper than equivalent OpenWRT hardware I'd buy), wired backhaul up to 2.5Gbps.
by mdhb | 2025-09-08 21:37:07+00:00
This is unfortunately entirely seperate from that other article.

FTA:

> Attaullah Baig, who served as head of security for WhatsApp from 2021 to 2025, claims that approximately 1,500 engineers had unrestricted access to user data without proper oversight, potentially violating a US government order that imposed a $5bn penalty on the company in 2020.
by sas224dbm | 2025-09-08 21:37:21+00:00
A favorite past-time back in the day was driving at night from pub to pub along the 'back roads' (B-roads specifically in the UK) as fast as 'possible'. There were typically no street lights, however lights from other vehicles showed up alerting you to any possible danger. It was fun at the time, but i wouldn't do it now .. lol ..
by neilv | 2025-09-08 21:37:21+00:00
I've worked with at least two such "Nukes". One a researcher, the other a tech startup founder. Both very smart, team-oriented, amiable and down to earth, and inspiring respect (through their ability and how they conduct themselves).

I suppose, on a sub, besides whatever admissions filtering they do for aptitude, you have to take work seriously, and also cooperate and get along with people.
by jrm4 | 2025-09-08 21:37:38+00:00
One, I doubt your premise ever happens in a meaningfully true and visible way -- but perhaps more important, I'd say you're factually wrong in terms of "what is called AI?"

Among most people, you're thinking of things that were debatably AI, today we have things that are AI (again, not due to any concrete definition, simply due to accepted usage of the term.)
by kace91 | 2025-09-08 21:37:46+00:00
It is awful. Recommendations either don’t surface your content at all or hyper-fixate in something you searched once.

I saw a couple of videos from a Chinese travel blogger and now I’m getting Chinese military parades, speeches by Fidel Castro and shorts with “tough guy moments” by Putin.

It’s not ideological, you can watch a bench press video next and then it’s all Joe Rogan and “feminist put in her place”.

It’s like it is programmed to give you the twisted monkey paw version of anything you wish for.
by Atlas667 | 2025-09-08 21:37:58+00:00
I think there are a bunch of assumptions in your take.

There are billions of us. We cannot all be capitalists and start our own businesses. Literally 100 years ago American socialists like Olive Johnson were already pointing out how the profit motive from large players has ruined mom and pop shops and made medium businesses almost completely beholden to production and finance monopolies.

What do you think will happen with the increased production from AI? Will the capitalist just allow the masses to compete openly with them?

I doubt it. Most likely more monopolization will occur.

Small business owners are the tip (retail) of the massive whole-sale industrial-production monopolies or they are artisans at best. And the masses are the rest of us, the 95%.

Western suburban mentality always posits that these ills cannot happen, even though they were continuously happening even through out the 20th century (Detroit is just one example).
by Marsymars | 2025-09-08 21:38:40+00:00
"People showing disregard for your privacy" is a matter of scale when going from analog to digital, it's at least not inconsistent.

e.g. If you engage in private spoken conversation, most people are not going to treat your conversation as if it's privileged, avoiding any mention of it in casual conversation, and refusing to divulge any details to law enforcement.
by ivape | 2025-09-08 21:38:43+00:00
Man, I hope so. Too many ads and mods that dictate things. Reddit’s front page is not organic, it’s curated and they’ll easily sneak in covert ads (looks like a genuine post).

It should die, but I don’t know, we need like an army to kill this thing really. An army killed Digg. We need to assemble the avengers all over again.

The best thing I can think of is to clone Reddit posts and bring it over to a new Reddit clone daily (not a full clone, just the last 24 hours of top subreddits). That way there’s no FOMO for people on the new platform. Basically, seed the Reddit clone with Reddit.

Figure out how much it costs to run a Reddit clone, and try to charge a dollar or two a month from the community.

It needs to die, god willing. It’s really one of the most shameful YT alumni, like they literally do not get the spirit of Internet forums and made it disgusting.
by monkeywork | 2025-09-08 21:38:54+00:00
To manage my child’s online viewing, I remove YouTube from all of his devices and instead use Pinchflat[1] to automatically download videos from a curated list of pre‑approved channels. We periodically explore YouTube together to discover new content aligned with his interests, which I then add to the list. Pinchflat retrieves new uploads within hours and automatically deletes them after a set period. The videos are stored locally and made available through Plex, Emby, or Jellyfin for remote access. This approach eliminates ads and algorithm‑driven recommendations while giving me full control over content, though it requires some setup, ongoing management, and storage capacity.

[1]https://github.com/kieraneglin/pinchflat
by sudohalt | 2025-09-08 21:38:59+00:00
If I were to guess what was going on it has little to do with cognition as a company and more to do with it as a vessel. Too much capital raised without adequate venues to use the capital, low confidence in USD. In that sense parking the money in a startup that is being propped up by other capital is probably safer in an unstable future. If Cognition fails it's likely that the economy in general fails so that capital would have become worthless anyway.

This also probably serves to excite the market more potentially creating more opportunities in other areas. Also, this probably will make Cognition into some Katamari ball accumulating more startups.
by CyLith | 2025-09-08 21:39:11+00:00
We are constantly losing technology as the treadmill of technological progress continues. Casette tapes, CRT displays, and perhaps photographic film are some examples. One can argue that there are "strictly better" technologies available now, but there are always niche cases where the new and obsolete technology are not quite fungible. What if for some reason a modern industry gets wiped out? Then we'd have to revisit the lost art.

As an immediate example, my wife's business needs p-channel small signal JFETs. These apparently are no longer fabricated, and with the way the semiconductor industry moves, they are likely never coming back in any appreciable quantity. So once the world's supply of obsoleted semiconductors dries up, the technology will basically be lost.
by Razengan | 2025-09-08 21:39:37+00:00
Some questions I've had since forever:

1. Would our current technology be able to detect life on EARTH ITSELF from "just" as far as Pluto?

2. If an alien probe was sending pings towards Earth, deliberately or not, from as far away as Voyager, would we be able to, detect of course, but notice it?
by bsder | 2025-09-08 21:39:59+00:00
> Genuinely asking -- what is it due to?

Mostly memory/cache subsystem.

Apple was willing to spend a lot of transistors on cache because they were optimizing the chips purely for mobile and can bury the extra cost in their expensive end products.

You will note that after the initial wins from putting stonking amounts of cache and memory bandwidth in place, Apple has not had any significant performance jump beyond the technology node improvements.
by mystraline | 2025-09-08 21:40:16+00:00
So the better solution is to set up Navidrome, "acquire" 1TB of music. Look for discographies, top 10k, stuff you like. Use a reverse proxy to a cheap VPS or Cloudflare. (Ssh port forward from Navidrome to VPS 127.0.0.1, and have nginx handle reverse proxy. Put it in systemd unit to autoreconnect)

Then you can listen to whatever you want.

Im all for paying for good content or service. But I quit paying for companies to abuse me.