MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by duxup | 2025-09-15 17:37:42+00:00
Not trump but a quote in the article:

>"In our experience, quarterly earnings guidance often leads to an unhealthy focus on short-term profits at the expense of long-term strategy, growth and sustainability," the pair wrote.

So I worked at a company where the CEO on a call announced he wouldn't give "guidance" anymore. His argument was that whatever he gave if he didn't beat it, they thought it was bad, if they did the guidance wasn't high enough. So he just quit playing that game.

They did release numbers.

It doesn't seem like guidance is required exactly?
by somenameforme | 2025-09-15 17:37:57+00:00
Sure thing, and agreed - I think at this point we're probably just going to go around in circles so there's not much more to say. But it's always great to be able to just wrangle ideas back and forth in a civil fashion, particularly when people see things so very differently.

I think if more people did this, we could get back to being a much more united country, not necessarily in agreement - but simply in acceptance of each of us having our own different takes on things that aren't necessarily wrong - even if they might be largely incompatible with what we personally happen to believe to be true!
by gbacon | 2025-09-15 17:38:20+00:00
The role of the entrepreneur is predicting future states of the market and deploying present capital accordingly. Beck is advocating a game-theory optimal strategy.

Judgment is a skill improved through reps. Sturgeon’s law (ninety percent of everything is crap) combined with vibe code spewage will create lots of volume quickly. What this does not accelerate is the process of learning from how bad choices ripple through the system lifecycle.
by ronsor | 2025-09-15 17:38:48+00:00
> So the remaining protection is a form of security by obscurity: "we invented this command protocol, so nobody knows how it works".

ChaCha20-Poly1305 authenticated encryption is cheap for low-resource systems and trivial to implement. There's no reason not to use some form of encryption, if at least to prevent forged commands. (Preventing replay attacks is left as an exercise to the reader.)
by anthk | 2025-09-15 17:39:30+00:00
In the Spain in the 80's maybe the a bit-loaded neighbour (or families with older brothers and no duties) had a ZX Spectrum and that's it. IBM PC's were for big companies, corporations, banks and such. They were very expensive, maybe the same cost of a small car. Later, in early 90's, yes, lawyers and small companies got DOS PC's once they became cheap enough.

Macs in Spain were for people from the Humanities branch. Journalists, editors, writers, media creators, graphic designers, audio producers...
by latexr | 2025-09-15 17:39:38+00:00
> Meta is run by people with no regard for ethics, and if that surprises you, that’s on you.

I genuinely do not understand why someone comments this, so I am earnestly asking you what do you wish to convey or accomplish with such a remark.

Yes, many of us on HN know Meta is deeply unethical. But not everyone does, or to which extent, and everyone has a different “final straw”. Someone may still think they operate within laws, for example. Furthermore, being known for being unethical should not leave them above reproach or criticism, nor should victims be blamed. It’s like seeing a report on increased killings by the KKK and answering “well, the KKK are a bunch of racists, and if that surprises you, that’s on you”. Information doesn’t have to be surprising to be useful.
by greyb | 2025-09-15 17:39:42+00:00
>Perhaps this is a question you should be asking yourself. Is your cancellation system working? There was a billing session created the day after the initial charge, are you sure there wasn't an attempt to cancel the that the system failed to register and log due to an error?

This happened to me once with a meal planning app (Eat This Much). I did validly cancel and get a cancellation email, but Stripe had errored out (I didn't realize this) and I ended up disputing the charge with my credit card because I couldn't get a hold of them (they had just done some UI changes that unfortunately broke their in-app contact function).

In the exit survey, I mentioned I was disappointed that they chose not to honor my cancellation request. Their support person reached out to me to let me know that they couldn't refund me without me dropping my dispute, but my dispute was already marked as resolved by my bank. I guess they issued a courtesy credit and didn't want to deal with the back-and-forth internally.

I sent them the cancellation email that I had received proving my cancellation. I'm pretty sure if I hadn't received that email, they would've cursed me up and down as one of these "anti-social chargebackers", because it confused them enough that their CEO personally emailed me to apologize; they found the Stripe error in their logs, it had only happened one other time in recent history, and they wouldn't appeal my dispute as a result. They did offer me a free month, but I really did want to cancel - it just wasn't working for me, but at least they were nice about it.

I'm sure without that added context, the story would've been the same as this post - yet another person charging back and not reaching out first to explain. I was pretty angry about the situation at first (having no knowledge it errored out or that they would be more willing to refund me than deal with my chargeback), but they were a small team, they were nice about it, and I dropped my interest in posting a public complaint about it.
by Molitor5901 | 2025-09-15 17:40:05+00:00
I stopped at chicken restaurant in Georgia, and the drive through speaker was clearly AI. It sounded like a computer. It got the order wrong when it repeated, and stopped responding. So with some.. trepidation I said "Hello?" and after a few seconds an actual human (with noise in the background) responded, took my order, and all was right.

If they can apply AI to customer service phone queue hell, why not to most customer service transactions - my thinking goes - what will be next? Hospital? 000? Tax office?
by BorisTheBrave | 2025-09-15 17:40:21+00:00
I congratulate you on an accurate diagnosis, I think all three are true. I don't remember the details of Excession very well as I didn't actually like it and relied on an LLM too much. That was a mistake.

Some of these were my own supposition - 1% felt about right for how casually they are mentioned in story.

> Banks describes several ways how such individuals are managed - such as offering full immersion level VR to satisfy extreme megalomania.

I don't remember that at all, perhaps you could tell me which book to look at.
by throwway120385 | 2025-09-15 17:41:15+00:00
Just because something is common, we shouldn't accept it if we believe it to be wrong. Slavery was once widely tolerated, as was marital rape. But people in those days decided that these things were wrong and should not be tolerated. Had they listened to arguments like yours we would still be living in those conditions.

There's also an argument to be made for holding our political officers to a much higher standard than the general populace.
by epistasis | 2025-09-15 17:41:26+00:00
Check out your grid bill and you'll probably see that cost of the grid is higher than the cost of the generation.

Local solar requires far less grid, and expanding the grid is one of the greatest (political, not technical) challenges of this era in the US.

Unless you're accounting for the grid costs, the "cost" of utility vs. rooftop is not an apples-to-apples comparison.

As far as a "con" the only con is that the costs in the US for rooftop solar are multiples higher of other places, like Australia. That's the con. Australia also shows that rooftop solar is great for grid in general, greatly driving down costs.

Of course, rooftop solar is terrible for utilities, so you are going to encounter tons of astroturf denouncing it all over the web, and even face to face. Utilities are fundamentally threatened by consumres taking over more and more of their own electricity responsibility, especially as batteries get super cheap.
by andrewmcwatters | 2025-09-15 17:41:46+00:00
VGA isn’t going anywhere so stop removing it. DVI isn’t going anywhere so stop removing it.

What a dumb comment. USB-C has been available for over a decade now. Just drop type A and force everyone to use adapters for their remaining type A devices since we’re all forced at this point to use them anyway.

Just kill it off already.
by ben_w | 2025-09-15 17:41:53+00:00
The Culture is an anarchic democracy: if all but one single GSV had voted to disband, or to become a dictatorship, that lone GSV could disappear elsewhere without anyone stopping them.

They were up for, and welcoming of, even quite extreme changes; compare with humanity today, where being transgender is considered controversial by a significant percentage of the population of a nation that likes to self-promote on the idea it is the beacon of liberty and freedom, versus the way Culture bodies are written to be able to flip gender more completely than our best biotech and just by conscious will, with most people being expected to try it, and with some couples flipping gender while pregnant and pausing the pregnancy just so both can give birth together.

Even species changes are, for them, easy and of no great consequence or dispute. While you may be seen as weird if you choose to give up the visual accuity of an owl and the cerebral resliliance to survive decapitation in order to live out your life on this quaint rock recently discovered to be hosting an atomic age civilization, the Mind won't refuse to change you into a mere human just because you found Jesus.
by Taek | 2025-09-15 17:42:00+00:00
In the category of doing obnoxious things for shock value, why stop at merely making sure you have enough batteries to keep you covered during the *average* year? Why not make sure that your home is going to be fully self sufficient in 99.99% of years? That probably adds another 50-150% to the total amount of storage that you would need.

But also, the expensive thing about batteries is typically the amount of power they can produce. The post used lithium ion batteries as a reference point, and those typically have a power rating between 1 and 4 hours - meaning they can fully discharge an entire summer's worth of stored energy in 4 hours... which is probably not something you need to pay for.

If you want a ton of really cheap long term energy storage, you'd look into a technology more like hydrogen fuel cells. The raw power (for standard home, 10 kW is plenty overkill) is going to be more expensive than lithium, but for storage you just need a bunch of hydrogen stored somewhere safe (probably buried underground in your yard). That's much, much cheaper than lithium ion batteries on a per kWh basis, especially if you are scaling up into the MWh territory.

And, the other big cost saving solution is to just add more panels. It means you'll be overproducing in the summer and you'll have to curtail, but some curtailment in the summer is a lot cheaper than finding a way to ferry all of that energy into the winter. Then you have extra panels in the winter and you don't need as much storage to be fully self sufficient.
by firesteelrain | 2025-09-15 17:42:08+00:00
Yes, it is not tethered to the ground. The balloon is at the top, then 36awg wire, then solar panels and raspberry pi, then wire hanging down for lower half of dipole

Both top and lower part of dipoles are soldered to Raspberry Pi

It uses WSPR. Some of them use APRS but it is less common
by Theodores | 2025-09-15 17:42:17+00:00
Fair play, that is awesome, and just what I wanted.

I do have a minor constructive criticism, as someone that does not use Apple, I found the '+' to actually select a Google Font to be far from intuitive. I was looking for a big button in the bottom right with 'Select' (or some other label).

Other than that, bookmarked, kettle on and fired up to get my fonts optimised. Thank you.
by alwillis | 2025-09-15 17:43:33+00:00
> It can probably be argued that Apple is a acting like a monopolist in one or a few areas though?

I don't think that's a credible argument. Apple, at best, has about 55% smartphone marketshare in the United States--and significantly less in most other countries.

Remember, having a monopoly isn't itself illegal; it's using the monopoly to disadvantage competitors, especially in emerging markets, which was what the Microsoft case was all about.

I don't think there's a legal justification for suggesting that Apple creating a private feature only they can use--for now--gives them unfair advantage in the market.

I wouldn't be surprised if Apple makes it a public feature in a future release of iOS 26.
by ryandrake | 2025-09-15 17:44:11+00:00
It's been so long since Apple has released anything in either iOS or macOS that excited me as a user. I don't seem to be their target customer anymore.

The only reason I even have to "upgrade" to a higher version number is how quickly app developers (including Apple themselves) drop support for older OS's. My iPhone which is stuck on iOS 15 runs just as well as the day I bought it, but every other app I download tells me (in essence) "LOL your phone is too old and our developers are too lazy to keep our software running on it. Upgrade your OS or get lost loser".

That's literally the only thing motivating me to upgrade anymore: The treadmill of software compatibility. Apple doesn't have to innovate--they just need to make sure the ecosystem is broken after ~5-10 years or so.
by evermike | 2025-09-15 17:44:52+00:00
I’d say if a chargeback does happen, the chances of winning =0, unless you can convince the customer to withdraw it. I realized this especially after my last dispute, where I was 100% sure I would win. But that’s it. I have no faith in the process anymore. What’s left is just the internal struggle, I always want to respond to something unfair and try to prove my case. But here it’s not worth doing.
by ecommerceguy | 2025-09-15 17:44:59+00:00
It doesn't cost a stablecoin anything but a bit of electricity to manufacture a "coin". The coin is valued at whatever the peg is, but it doesn't move the m2 needle or any other measure of circulation, until they purchase a treasury (or whatever they claim is backing). How much did it cost mr stablecoin to do all that? And you better believe the US Gov NEEDS this to happen.

Russia's take on the system is correct and we're seeing ASIANs and BRICS run away as fast as possible from $.

Ways out include total protectionism/mercantilism or war.

Gold is parabolic now. 10k by March is completely doable.
by blindriver | 2025-09-15 17:45:34+00:00
No, it didn't. Not at the time. Like I said processing and storage were a pain back around the 2000-ish time. Windows supported UCS-2 (predecessor to UTF-16) which was fixed width 16-bit and faster to decode and encode, and since most of the world was Windows at the time, it made more sense to use UCS-2. Also, the world was only beginning to be more connected so UTF-8 seemed overkill.

NOW in hindsight it makes more sense to use UTF-8 but it wasn't clear back 20 years ago it was worth it.
by tanelpoder | 2025-09-15 17:45:51+00:00
Asciinema is one of the best products/tools I’ve ever used. I mean the auth/upload CLI flow is so straight to the point and easy to use, despite having to cross a few layers (yep I know other CLIs have something similar, it’s just that Asciinema has never “gotten in my way” when doing something with it)
by tialaramex | 2025-09-15 17:45:53+00:00
The thing about boring things is that if they're in your exciting story it might well be because they aren't boring. The actual British spy building next to the river Thames, Vauxhall Cross - looks exactly like the one in the Bond movies, but it's just an office building with higher than usual security. Bond can launch a speedboat to chase bad guys, but actual employees will be sat in a meeting moaning about the catering or the train delays.

Presumably the Arbitrary is just an ordinary contact ship, but Diziet is definitely not an "ordinary" member of contact. She's the one who recruited the guy in Use of Weapons, the one whose name is not actually Zakalwe.
by amatecha | 2025-09-15 17:46:01+00:00
Yeah? That's the nature of social circles. To take the example further, I definitely won't be able to work my way into a social circle of violent criminals who murder rival gang members and think murder is okay. I will not be on board with their general way of life and general perspective on the value of human life, or my overall aversion to committing crimes. They will definitely not "let me in" (unless they intend to exploit me as an unwitting participant in something, lol)

The jist of what I'm saying is, I don't feel like I have a right to join every conversation everywhere just because I have a computer and an internet connection. Groups of people have established norms for what's acceptable and what's not. For once, those social boundaries, the delineation between one group of people and another, can actually be represented in server-to-server communication permissions.

That doesn't mean that "murdering ppl who disagree with you is okay" people will never interact with the "murdering ppl who disagree with you is bad" people. They just probably won't be on the very same server, but the servers will probably communicate between each other unless the conflict level gets particularly high, at which time one server may defederate from or block the other. I regularly see opinions and views I don't agree with or share. Life isn't so black and white, I don't (and my server doesn't) block people just because they say something a bit spicy or weird. Some people/servers might, but the idea is that, for myself, I can interact with those different chunks of humanity in a way that works for me. All part of the word I keep saying, "agency".

Beyond all that, I've not seen anyone provide any reasons that an opt-in consent-based medium has any ill effects.
by gbacon | 2025-09-15 17:46:05+00:00
This is insightful. Which programs will the new tech make profitable (be it cash, psychic/emotional, or some other form) to write?

The Keynesian bogeyman of the deflationary spiral ignores intertemporal effects. Cell phones and laptops are getting cheaper all the time, but no one drops into an infinite wait because of time-preference. In the context of producing software becoming cheaper, people at a definite point value having a usable system today over a marginally cheaper version tomorrow.
by Kon5ole | 2025-09-15 17:47:03+00:00
>The ROI of a large PV farm must be substantially better than a home scale install.

There are many benefits to letting homeowners do it. First of all you get a lot more solar deployed in much shorter time, because you mobilize hundreds of thousands of people to the effort immediately instead of having them wait for a solar plant. Homeowners pay for it, provide the area for it, hire and organize the workforce - small scale but "everywhere at once" so to speak.

The government/state/county doesn't need to wait for the land to be available, raise the money, build infrastructure to transfer electricity from a new large solar site to the consumers and so on. So for the "state" the ROI is better with home installs.

>responsibility for the climate crisis to consumers rather than industrial energy providers.

That's where the responsibility belongs through. Most of us drove fossil fuel cars for years, which is the largest single emission source. In democracies we could have voted for guys wanting gas to cost 50 bucks per gallon, or who would prohibit any more oil and gas to be traded. We didn't. We could have refused to travel for vacations, refused to buy goods shipped from overseas and so on - but we didn't. So this is on us.
by nextaccountic | 2025-09-15 17:47:33+00:00
Human cognition has weird failure models that modern advertising can exploit. Free choices can only happen with a free mind, but unfortunately we have this weakness that makes us prone to manipulation. (this is also exploited by political propaganda)

We can still individually make better choices, and also eat our vegetables, etc, but in the aggregate public policy is more efficient to make the large scale changes we need
by jdiez17 | 2025-09-15 17:47:36+00:00
There are some reasons. As a satellite operator, the worst thing that can happen is getting locked out of the satellite for any reason. So the risk of implementing a “new” technology that has a high risk of locking you out if you lose the keys for some reason sometimes outweighs the benefit of increased security. So I think there’s some work to do in building generally applicable key management practices and backup ways of reestablishing a command link.
by zahlman | 2025-09-15 17:47:56+00:00
I said

> the freedom to fork is one of the essential freedoms of FOSS. Many people in certain organizations (cough GNOME cough RedHat cough) don't seem to get this."

and you asked for examples. XLibre is a fork (of XOrg); people from GNOME and RedHat have spoken publicly to object to the fact that the fork exists (along with more generally expressing opinions that I find incompatible with my understanding of FOSS). The GitHub for the project has a wiki page (https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver/wiki/Are-We-XLibre-Yet%3...) tracking what Linux distributions do or will include the package; several prominent developers were found (https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver/issues/346) to have defaced this page by referring to the developers in very unkind ways. Among these was Jordan Petridis who is part of GNOME as well as XOrg and wrote extensively about the effort to remove the X11 GNOME session (both on a gnome.org blog and on social media), making many contentious claims about the XLibre developer in the process.

For more, I'd have to put in considerable time collating information, or else you'd have to follow sources that I have found are better not to mention in places like HN because doing so would attract too much drama. But I only make comments like these on the basis of what I can independently verify.
by felixhandte | 2025-09-15 17:47:57+00:00
Zstd has a similar-ish capability called "repetition codes" [0].

The first stage of Zstd does LZ77 matching, which transforms the input into "sequences", a series of instructions each of which describes some literals and one match. The literals component of the instruction says "the next L bytes of the message are these L bytes". The match component says "the next M bytes of the input are the M bytes N bytes ago".

If you want to construct a match between two strings that differ by one character, rather than saying "the next N bytes are the N bytes M bytes ago except for this one byte here which is X instead", Zstd just breaks it up into two sequences, the first part of the match, and then a single literal byte describing the changed byte, and then the rest of the match, which is described as being at offset 0. The encoding rules for Zstd define offset 0 to mean "the previously used match offset". This isn't as powerful as a Levenshtein edit, but it's a reasonable approximation.

The big advantage of this approach is that it doesn't require much additional machinery on the encoder or decoder, and thus remains very fast. Whereas implementing a whole edit description state machine would (I think) slow down decompression and especially compression enormously.

[0] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8878#name-repeat-of...