MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jerf | 2025-09-11 17:35:23+00:00
Rice's Theorem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice%27s_theorem

Or the "why we can't have nice things" theorem. Colloquially, anything interesting about a Turing-complete program is unprovable. You may have proved specific instance of this if you went through a formal computer science program and reduced problems like "this program never uses more than X cells on the tape" to the halting problem.
by trimethylpurine | 2025-09-11 17:35:37+00:00
Literally all of them are. Netflix has Obama making films. Co founders funding Gavin Newsom's campaigns.

Even CNBC a left leaning news source, classifies Netflix as among the most liberal.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/02/most-liberal-tech-companies-...

Disney is not left leaning?

Obviously the rest of the humans sharing the planet with you think they are:

https://www.movieguide.org/news-articles/is-disney-moving-aw...

I won't bother continuing, because this is boring at this point, but at least you could search before responding.
by notorandit | 2025-09-11 17:35:39+00:00
The only thing that comes to my mind is the so-called blobs, the closed source hardware drivers that are needed to make an Android phone work and that run at high privilege level.

If GrapheneOS is not tightly sandboxing them, then chances there are that a capable operator can use whatever backdoor each driver offers, mainly the wifi adapter, the baseband modem and the Bluetooth adapter.

No matter what GrapheneOS developers have done.

Imagine the wifi driver being able to spoof on pin entry procedure.
by tomp | 2025-09-11 17:36:00+00:00
Very interesting and cool article, if you love low-level optimisation (like myself!)

Interestingly, recently I've been thinking that basically the Big-O notation is essentially a scam, in particular the log(N) part.

For small values of N, log(N) is essentially a constant, <= 32, so we can just disregard it, making sorting simply O(N).

For large values, even so-called linear algorithms (e.g. linear search) are actually O(N log(N)), as the storage requirements for a single element grow with log(N) (i.e. to store distinct N=2^32 elements, you need N log(N) = 2^32 * 32 bits, but to store N=2^64 elements, you need 2^64 * 64 bits).

Cache locality consideration make this effect even more pronounced.
by ACCount37 | 2025-09-11 17:36:01+00:00
And what would that "other form factor" be?

Can that "other form factor" climb stairs? Or operate existing power tools? Or get into a generic car to get transported to a new workplace? Or get teleoperated by a human with mocap gloves?

Non-humanoid robots don't get simplicity for free. They have to trade off capabilities to get there.
by SamInTheShell | 2025-09-11 17:36:01+00:00
I suspect you misunderstand my intent here.

Right now the url is site.co/coparenting.

That’s .co/coparenting

What I’m saying is this works too: .co/parenting

It’s just irrelevant linking linguistics that I’m pointing out that was a missed opportunity. Doesn’t truly matter though.
by Atlas667 | 2025-09-11 17:36:09+00:00
And so how does this relate to legos?

I was explaining reasonings for lego defaulting yellow into white.

The defaulting of "american" into white does happen frequently in news headlines by simple fact of often referring to black people as "african americans" and white people simply as "americans".

And like someone else pointed out in the thread there have also been studies who have researched this topic. I think it's a real bias people/media seems to have.

You may have a point with your retelling of the history of terms, I dont really know and I wont pretend to know. Though i sense some racial resentment in you with your statement that white people shouldn't, or weren't allowed to, have a racial self identity. But that is beside the point.

> Finally, what do you think was the internal logic of referring to black Americans as African Americans in the first place? It was to remind everyone that they are also Americans.

I don't think it was to subjugate them I think those are after effects of this country who systemically subdued other races and identified itself as white. In part that will never go away because the majority is still white. But there is a latent bias in there. And that's what I'm pointing out.

You're trying to accuse me of "crypto-anti-black racism" when I point out that we come from a racist society. Like I said before: 80 years ago+, 2-3 generations min, "americans" was meant to refer to white americans only. And that was almost 100 years AFTER slavery was abolished. The country was incredibly racist till relatively recently.

I am simply pointing out how the bias of a white nation still lives on in some way today and can be seen in the racial defaulting of little plastic figurine colors.
by vouwfietsman | 2025-09-11 17:37:25+00:00
Although I welcome a parquet successor, I am not particularly interested in a more complicated format. Random access time improvements are nice, but really what I would like just storing multiple tables in a single parquet file.

When I read "possible extension through embedded wasm encoders" I can already imagine the c++ linker hell required to get this thing included in my project.

I also don't think a lot of people need "ai scale".
by dylan604 | 2025-09-11 17:37:59+00:00
"We find evidence that 38.52% websites installed third-party event listeners to intercept keystrokes, and that at least 3.18% websites transmitted intercepted information to a third-party server, which aligns with the criteria for wiretapping."

They say they autopopulate fields based on field type, but address fields are common to have an autocomplete feature enabled. That would require transmitting data before submitting the form. I didn't see anything about rating probabilities of the transmitted data being benign and useful or nefarious and malicious.
Show HN: ThunDroid AI – A private AI companion for emotional wellness
by thundroid | 2025-09-11 17:38:33+00:00
Hey Hacker News readers,

We're the team from Aetherrax Technologies, and we'd like to share something we've been building: ThunDroid AI.

The goal was to create a genuinely helpful tool for emotional wellness without making the usual privacy compromises. We noticed that many apps in this space have vague data policies, and we wanted to build an alternative where the user is in complete control.

ThunDroid AI is an emotional support companion that runs on your iPhone. It's a private space to talk through your thoughts with an AI, use guided journaling prompts, or go through breathing exercises.

Here’s how we’re approaching this, keeping a tech-savvy audience in mind:

Privacy-First by Design: This is our core principle. All conversations are end-to-end encrypted, and all of your data is stored exclusively on your device. We have no access to it. We don't use your conversations for training data. What you say in the app, stays in the app.

No Cloud, No Servers for Your Data: Your journal entries and chat logs are not uploaded to our servers. It's a local-first experience.

Core Features: The app offers unlimited AI conversations, smart journaling with prompts for different wellness areas, and a set of evidence-based breathing techniques.

We just launched on the App Store and are looking for honest feedback, especially from this community. We're open to all thoughts on the app's utility, our approach to privacy, and any features you think might be missing.

Our aim is to build a tool that people can trust and find genuinely useful. Thanks for taking a look.
by jbstack | 2025-09-11 17:39:29+00:00
Consider what would happen if the tax rate was 100% across all tax types, and you'll probably see then how there's an upper limit to how much tax revenue can be raised by a government. Would you get up and go to work if you got to keep 0% of your earnings? How about if you got to keep 1% of them? 2%?

Surely we can agree that there is a threshold, even if we don't agree where that threshold is. That's all there is to the point I'm trying to make: tax resources are limited and therefore all governments must ultimately allocate those limited resources and cannot simply spend unlimited amounts on any "good" projects that they'd like.
by cyphar | 2025-09-11 17:39:34+00:00
The FSF considers linking to be a definite example of derived works in general, but I don't believe they consider lack of linking to prove that something isn't a derived work.

The goal of the GPL is to flip draconian copyright maximalism on its head, and copyright laws don't talk about linkers so that can't be the deciding factor. Not to mention that it would be trivial to work around linking by creating a stub and calling the GPL code as a subprogram (in kernel contexts a spiritually similar setup is called the "GPL condom" and my impression is that most lawyers not employed by NVIDIA consider this to not be a get-out-of-jail-free card).
by bccdee | 2025-09-11 17:40:05+00:00
> The idea that hamas isn't stealing all the aid is ludicrous.

Bro what the fuck are they going to do with enough stolen food to feed an entire nation? It's not as if they can sell it. World's biggest mukbang tiktok stream?

You're either wilfully blind or unspeakably obtuse. Open your eyes or shut your mouth.
by themaninthedark | 2025-09-11 17:40:45+00:00
Try earlier than that for the US:

>In 2015, the Guardian revealed Chicago Police had allegedly employed torture and days-long unlawful detention at the secretive “black site”-like Homan Square facility

And the federal government knew and participated.

>“When we’re doing joint operations with the federal government, it’s generally — it’s under the supervision of an Assistant U.S. Attorney and they’re merely using our facility because it’s more convenient."

https://thegrayzone.com/2025/03/15/feds-used-chicago-black-s...
by neobrain | 2025-09-11 17:41:03+00:00
There's a concept of "separate works", see for example https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLCompatInstaller .

Tangentially, I assumed that the GPL must have some built-in exception for running non-GPL userspace programs on top of a GPLed kernel (similar to the System Library exception). However, it seems like it doesn't, since the Linux kernel has its own exception to allow this: https://spdx.org/licenses/Linux-syscall-note.html.
by cyphar | 2025-09-11 17:41:17+00:00
Sure, that is the point of the original point of the article after all. I was speaking about the problem in general (I suspect most Rust projects--if not most projects in general--with this setup do not have patents).

It also requires actively persuing a patent case which may result in the patent being rendered invalid, while a termination clause for the whole license just requires a far more clear-cut copyright infringement claim (possibly achievable purely through the DMCA system, out of court). But I'm not a lawyer, maybe counter-suits are more common in such situations and so either approach is just as good in practice.
by jbstack | 2025-09-11 17:42:23+00:00
I disagree strongly with you on this, but nonetheless I think you've proven the point that the original comment was making i.e. that what constitutes a "good" or a "bad" government is subject to people's views.

In my view, a government that does nothing to tackle global warming is "bad". In your view, a government that spends resources on something you think is a fraud, is also "bad". We can't both be right.
by ta1243 | 2025-09-11 17:43:08+00:00
> I was working in Libya

Complete tangent, but I don't think many Americans know this (I'm assuming you're an American)

If you aren't American, you now are now ineligible to go to America as a tourist without an expensive hasslesome visit to a US embassy. (No online ESTA)

I have friends that have gone to countries like Libya, and Syria to do similar international work. An British engineer I know recently went to Syria for a few days.

I pointed out that he is no longer allowed to go to the US without going to the embassy for a visa. He's ineligible for an ESTA.

He said "fine, work will have to pay for it".

I then pointed out this is for the rest of his life. He regularly holidays in Florida. He might leave the media or change jobs so they no longer pay for a visa.

I've been asked to go to Iraq in the past, but I've said no because of this. Was a very expensive weekend for my friend.

Another friend is in the British Army, he's gone to various places as part of both British and NATO deployment, not using his personal passport - but using travel orders. He managed to avoid going to Iraq which is lucky for him, means he can still get an ESTA.
by LeifCarrotson | 2025-09-11 17:43:44+00:00
I've commissioned dozens of robot cells (6-axis industrial arms for manufacturing are old, proven tech) and the wear and tear costs have been inconsequential. Even a large arm like a Fanuc R2000iC only uses about $0.50 in electricity per hour, some cells use significant power for pneumatics (in particular, compressed air venturi vacuum generators).

A couple grand for gearbox rebuilds every few years, replacement vacuum cups or worn hard tooling as needed, troubleshoot electrical issues as they arise... and your quarter million robot cell ($60k of that is the robot, most of the rest is NRE labor) will only need one human instead of eight to spit out parts every 60 seconds for the next decade.

Unless you think the humanoid robots are going to wear out significantly faster than existing robots, wear and tear costs are negligible.

With tight process controls, turning a work cell that has multiple humans doing manual labor for material handling, fastening, inspection, labeling, etc. into one intelligent human keeping the automation well adjusted is a solved problem. Eliminating that last human - the one that makes decisions instead of moves materials - with a humanoid robot is going to take decades.
by Earw0rm | 2025-09-11 17:43:59+00:00
I can see that for the factory floor, but there's no particular reason for "it" to be "humanoid".

It's basically a robot arm with mobility at that point, and if you need more than one, just have more than one robot wheel into place. There's no particular reason to have two arms.. one, or three, or five are all sensible numbers. Heck, a chassis supporting a variable number of arms and other appendages (sensors and so on) is plausible, and the control system looks more like an ant-colony mind than a human one.

Which is a long-winded way of saying, there's no particular reason to link embodiment and cognition at the individual arm level in a factory scenario.
by gregorygoc | 2025-09-11 17:44:27+00:00
> For small values of N, log(N) is essentially a constant, <= 32, so we can just disregard it, making sorting simply O(N). For large values, even so-called linear algorithms (e.g. linear search) are actually O(N log(N)), as the storage requirements for a single element grow with log(N) (i.e. to store distinct N=2^32 elements, you need N log(N) = 2^32 * 32 bits, but to store N=2^64 elements, you need 2^64 * 64 bits).

How can I unread this?
by Freak_NL | 2025-09-11 17:44:28+00:00
On a Pixel from 6 upwards? Absolutely. GrapheneOS is what Android should be in terms of privacy and security. Its major drawback is only being available on Pixels, but if that is what you have…

I bought my Pixel 6 specifically to run GrapheneOS, and I really hope I can repeat that for my next device.
by nradov | 2025-09-11 17:44:36+00:00
I've owned several Roomba type robots, both actual Roombas and competing brands. None of them have really saved any time or labor. They always get stuck under furniture or tangled on charger cables. They don't work on stairs. And clearing dog hair from the roller is a huge hassle. I fully expect to still be paying a human cleaning service decades from now.
by bccdee | 2025-09-11 17:44:38+00:00
> When you can revisit these ideas with a scientific manner, then I can respond.

Ironic that you would level a criticism like this while touting "non-empirical science," whatever that is.

> You chose to make a narrative claim using No Child Left Behind

Do me the courtesy of paraphrasing my claims accurately. I said the drop in test scores you're attributing to phones could more plausibly be caused by NCLB, which is a carefully couched statement that doesn't actually draw any concrete conclusions.

I'm gesturing broadly at the absence of conclusive evidence, and you're telling me you don't need conclusive evidence to make definitive statements. I'm hardly the one spinning narratives here.
by bflesch | 2025-09-11 17:44:53+00:00
Big ick from my side. Manifest-style marketing blog post talking about revolutionary things but it seems their main metric is in the image above the post: "hey, we've raised $22M in funding".

Landing pages of both spiral and vortex are GPU-hugging animations and void of any technical information. Empty nothing-statements like "machine scale". They claim 100x improvements but don't link any metrics.

Maybe this is a "don't hate the player, hate the game" situation but somehow the collective of likeminded AI engineers decided to upvote this post to #1 on HN.
by xp84 | 2025-09-11 17:45:09+00:00
"If there's ever a good time to go out, it's now. Anything else would just be gravy on top."

I hope one day to have the courage to face my own demise with such calm, and the gratitude to appreciate what I've been given, and to find it 'enough.' I still have a long way to go to even come close to either goal.
by cman1444 | 2025-09-11 17:45:46+00:00
For me personally, the through line is that chester cheetah, along with most other spokespeople, was not advancing a political organization that demonized and persecuted outgroups, or that tried to subvert and consolidate power.

I believe those things are true of both the MAGA movement and of Nazis, albeit in different amounts of severity.
by stackedinserter | 2025-09-11 17:45:58+00:00
Of course there always be "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home" people, that's life.

Roomba is pretty mediocre at a single job it's kind of able to do.

Humanoid robots _potentially_, _hypothetically_ can do anything that human can do because they are designed for environment, tools and equipment that we designed for our bodies.
by jbstack | 2025-09-11 17:47:17+00:00
Sure. But the original commenter's point that whether a government is "good" or "bad" is subjective because it's dependent on people's views. Other commenters objected to that and appear to see it as objective: a government is either clearly good or clearly bad, and there's no debate to be had.

The reality however is that all governments are a mixture of good and bad, and different people will see that mixture in different proportions. One person might overlook the fact that their government funds the Israeli military because their government does plenty of other "good" things to make up for it. Another person might find that to be a completely unacceptable compromise.
by mrgoldenbrown | 2025-09-11 17:47:56+00:00
Looks like Feedly relies on third party websites to create the RSS, like FetchRss, which has limitations. I guess the existence of all these intermediate tools means some people do still care about RSS, even if the big companies are trying to keep us through walled garden.

https://docs.feedly.com/article/660-can-i-follow-facebook-fe...
by drdaeman | 2025-09-11 17:48:03+00:00
Storing multiple tables in a single file would be trivially solvable by storing multiple Parquet files in a most basic plain uncompressed tarball (to retain ability to access any part of any file without downloading the whole thing). Or maybe ar or cpio - tar has too many features (such as support for links) that are unnecessary here. Basically, anything well-standardized that implements a very basic directory structure, with a simple index located at a predictable offset.

If any tools would've supported that.
by phendrenad2 | 2025-09-11 17:48:04+00:00
I agree, nobody prominent is celebrating this. Just a lot of people who vote. I have to confess, I don't really understand the point of this discussion. Nobody reading this is going to start out agreeing with me and then see your post and go "oh, yeah, good point, I guess it's fine that lots of people are celebrating this, because they aren't prominent!" I guess this means I have nothing more to say.
by FireBeyond | 2025-09-11 17:48:06+00:00
Yes and no (and I worked for a company that built software for administrating all that).

You are right, the insurers in a sense don't care about specifics - you can say "everyone gets 52 massage visits a year covered 100%" and they'll do that for you.

But when you talk about TPAs, realize too that those self-funded employers obviously haven't done the actuarial work, so they'll by and large follow an insurer plan because that's had a lot of effort put into balance, optimization and such. Otherwise it's like "I don't know, how much -should- we pay for X?"
by b112 | 2025-09-11 17:48:09+00:00
Since the 1980s, we have been consistently taxing less. If the tap is dry, it isn't because of over-taxation - it's because there's a reservoir of wealth hoarded by the relatively few.

A even cursory glance at the trajectory of wealth distribution will make that clear.

Others have attempted to refute your above statement, but it's not really relevant. Your response does not really align with the parent post, because at no point did the post you replied to say "We need to tax less all the time!" or even "we need to tax less!" or "we cannot have better health care".

None of these things were said, advocated for, or espoused as a position.

Instead, they said "you cannot solve everything ever, and everything has tradeoffs", along with "because if you try, you run out of money no matter what".

This seems like a fair statement. Would you care to address that?
by theamk | 2025-09-11 17:48:18+00:00
I can think of at least two methods right off top of my head:

- centrifugal governor, as used in old-school rotary phone dials (this could be too fragile though)

- an air cylinder with a small hole, as used in mechanical typewriters and vehicle shocks.

I am sure a real MechE can can come up with even more methods.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-09-11 17:48:58+00:00
I think the reasoning is that the world is built for humans, so if you need a robot to do arbitrary human tasks in an unmodified environment then perhaps that gives an advantage.

The premise itself seems bogus though - there's plenty of tasks such as traditional assembly line and conveyor belt automation where a stable robot bolted to the floor, with a wired power source and custom manipulators is going to be a much better option.

For a mobile robot stability and reliability are key, and it's hard to see how a humanoid robot would be anything other than a massive downgrade for applications like Amazon's warehouse robots, hospital drug delivery robots, mall security robots, robot vacuum cleaners, etc. Wheels for the win.

OTOH there's the dream/hype of a domestic robot doing all your household chores, where humanoid form might actually be a plus, but at this point that's a pipe dream, and I seriously doubt many people really want C-3PO in the kitchen washing the dishes even if he is managing to do it without breaking anything or short-circuiting himself. It's like a 60's vision of the future, with people in flying cars or living on mars. No product-market fit.