MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by natmaka | 2025-09-14 21:20:43+00:00
> It's the best business model ever

In France the Cour of Audit concluded that electricity produced by the EPR must be sold at 138€/MWh (2023 value) in order to obtain a tiny ROI (4%). This is a financial disaster. Proof page 29: https://www.ccomptes.fr/fr/publications/la-filiere-epr-une-d...

Renewables, on the other hand... While many reactors were down in France (intermittency, anyone?) they did cope: https://www.iea.org/reports/renewable-energy-market-update-j...

Renewables: a modest gain... 7 billions €! Source: official Commission in charge in France, page 4 https://www.cre.fr/fileadmin/Documents/Deliberations/2024/24...
by ACCount37 | 2025-09-14 21:21:09+00:00
I don't have a confidence that I can "do their job".

I have confidence that the organization is completely dysfunctional. In which case it's probably more productive to raze it to the ground and build it anew than to try to fix it. Especially if your idea of "fix it" involves "give them power to breach chat privacy of every citizen".

A randomly initialized police force would outperform the baseline of "sorry, we somehow can't stop criminals from stealing those huge, serialized cars, and shipping them out of our extremely isolated island country - now give us more privacy breaching powers!"

Even if you gave them those privacy breaching powers? They'll just use them to jail more people for things they said on Twitter.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-09-14 21:22:11+00:00
> It is perfectly possible to encrypt a message such that two different keys can decrypt it. There is nothing in modern encryption that makes that impossible.

Not really, any more than it's possible to write a message that says the same thing whether you read it in English or Swahili. You might be able to do it once as a novelty, but the approach won't generalize.

There are multiple-recipient schemes, but they don't rely on using two different keys to decrypt the same message. Instead, you encrypt the message (once) using a (single) symmetric key, and you prepend a bunch of different messages saying "the symmetric key is xxxxxxxxxxx", one for each intended recipient. Those are encrypted with keys specific to each recipient, and each recipient has to attempt to decrypt them all and select the one that decrypted successfully.

The paper you link appears to be discussing an entirely different problem: its definition of a "multi-recipient encryption scheme" does not contemplate sending the same message to several different recipients:

> There are n receivers, numbered 1, ..., n. Each receiver i has generated for itself a secret decryption key sk_i and corresponding public encryption key pk_i. The sender now applies a multi-recipient encryption algorithm to pk_1, ..., pk_n and messages M_1, ..., M_n to obtain ciphertexts C_1, ..., C_n.

> Each receiver i can apply to sk_i and C_i a decryption algorithm that recovers M_i.

> We refer to the primitive enabling this type of encryption as a multi-recipient encryption scheme (MRES).

Note that there is no requirement for anyone other than recipient i to be able to understand message M_i. As described, all encryption schemes are multi-recipient encryption schemes, because you can just consider each message M_k individually and encrypt it to recipient k using a single-recipient scheme.
by Isamu | 2025-09-14 21:22:13+00:00
Always a fun and interesting thing to try.

Also go ahead and try hard things like your own cryptography. The advice “don’t roll your own crypto” just means don’t DEPLOY something that is not battle tested, because it is very easy to make BIG mistakes in that area. Always feel free to experiment and explore.

We need more operating systems, more choice.
by bsder | 2025-09-14 21:22:29+00:00
Once you throw out the BEAM and OTP, why not OCaml?

Seriously, I find the OCaml syntax way less obtuse than, for example, all the trait and macro idioms that I have to chop through with Rust. Sure, Rust has braces, but that doesn't make its syntax easy by any means.

Nevertheless, I am happy to see this Cambrian Explosion of programming languages. Eventually, we may get a good one.
by skissane | 2025-09-14 21:22:48+00:00
> Pretty sure GNU coreutils really does intentionally deviate from POSIX compliance in a handful of places, otherwise POSIXLY_CORRECT wouldn't exist.

To get UNIX certification, you can just patch it to make POSIXLY_CORRECT=1 the default.

Or even don’t patch the utilities, and just patch /etc/profile to set POSIXLY_CORRECT=1 globally.

UNIX certification requires that the system have a mode of operation available which passes the test suite; the existence of config settings which if changed from their defaults produce standards violations is not in itself a standards violation.
by themafia | 2025-09-14 21:23:08+00:00
The United States Government calls it "The Pacific Timezone." They define it, maintain it, and broadcast it's definition. They're the only entity with the authority to do so. That's what I'm using. I'm not using whatever the time happens to be in Los Angeles, I'm using the federal timezone definition. My timezone should absolutely be just "US/Pacific." Using "America/Los_Angeles" is _absolutely_ an abstraction and it's obviously entirely unnecessary.
by Jtsummers | 2025-09-14 21:23:26+00:00
I flagged all of your submissions because they're low-quality and you're spamming the site. You've submitted four of these just today.

> I'm not trying to claim it as my own.

This is from the flag-killed Lisp submission:

>> About the Author

>> This book was written by someone who believes that Lisp is not just a programming language but a notation for expressing thought, and that parentheses are not obstacles but wings that let your code fly.

You are absolutely claiming it as your own, there is no mention of LLMs, Claude, or AI generating this content. The only hint that claude is involved in this is in the Git repository details themselves, but both commits are from you, not from claude.
by appreciatorBus | 2025-09-14 21:23:52+00:00
I guess if I wanted to read a book written by Claude, I would ask Claude to write the book. I wouldn’t need you to do it, or to post them to hacker news, I would just ask Claude to do it.

Like with programming, I’m sure there are ways AI can help authors and subject matter experts be more productive, and hopefully help readers learn from the works created.

However at the current moment, I have few good tools to discern signal from noise.

Is the human co-author an experienced Lisp programmer who used an AI authoring tool to ease the process of writing a book?

Or is he/she an AI grifter, looking for quick cash by asking an AI to churn out thousands of words he/she has no understanding of and no care as to whether they are helpful or correct.
by russellbeattie | 2025-09-14 21:25:25+00:00
I'm nearsighted with simple myopia and most of my life I've used contacts for distance vision. I never had any problems reading close up with my contacts in. Then I turned 50, and within a year, I suddenly needed to use either reading glasses with my contacts or bifocal glasses in order to both see long distance and use a computer or my phone.

It wasn't a slow decline. One day my eyes worked like they had for my entire life, and the next my eyes went wonky. Getting older sucks! Without glasses, I can still read books and my phone just fine. I've just lost my "middle vision" of about an arm's length away.

Anyways, all my fifty-something peers are going through the same thing. It's a really inconvenient life change. I imagine something like this would be popular if it were more well known. My optometrist didn't say anything at all about it.

Side note: Laser surgery can only fix one type of vision problem. So if I were to go in to fix my myopia, I'd still have presbyopia (age related hyperopia), or vice versa. There doesn't seem to be a one-size-fits-all surgery for vision.
by AngryData | 2025-09-14 21:25:26+00:00
I don't think its getting especially dumber and crazier now, but more like we let dumb and crazy fester and let the problems keep building for decades while we used technological progress as a distraction from it all and an excuse to do as little as possible. People started believing technological progress will fix everything and that 30 years down the live they will be living like the Jetsons with personal butler robots so that the problems of today don't matter, except it didn't happen, and will continue to not happen, and problems continue to mount.
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-09-14 21:25:29+00:00
Upgrades are on the way but you were trying to frame it as a desperate issue to solve immediately, without realizing your solution didn’t solve anything.

For evidence have a read:

https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news/2024/06/pge-quietly-s...

Just keep hiking the rates in a monopolized system. All good!

You do know that California in recent years has cut fossil gas usage by 40% due to storage? Many evenings batteries are the largest producer in the Californian grid for hours on end. Happened yesterday for example.

But batteries are of course insignificant. Just delivering the equivalent to 8 nuclear reactors pretty much removing the duck curve.

I suggest you update your worldview to 2025.

https://www.caiso.com/todays-outlook/supply
by kuschku | 2025-09-14 21:26:03+00:00
You can still do surveillance in the same way that east germany used to.

Get a warrant, put hidden microphones and cameras into their light switches and ceiling lights.

Turn one of their members into a double agent and get them to spy for you.

Of course that's not as easy as total surveillance. Because it's not supposed to be. The extra effort isn't that hard if you're going against a criminal gang, but it's enough to prevent the state from going "fishing" by surveilling everyone.
by justinyee17 | 2025-09-14 21:26:19+00:00
I can share some thoughts, as I pondered the same question a few years back, as someone in solitude for much of my life. Social media seemed like the go-to answer, but due to past mistakes and experiences with mental health, I'd become starkly against ever participating in it again.

Through endless searching, I eventually discovered the existence of "digital pen pal" apps, where you can send letters to people directly.

Some correspondences lasted just a few weeks, and many went nowhere. I got a lot of copy-pasted, two-sentence letters. But two have lasted over two years and counting. We've shared life stories, triumphs and adversity, and photos of everyday life, even a world apart.

People reach out because they want to know about you, and vice versa. A lack of point systems and an audience watching means less ulterior motives, and with bio information, you can get to know someone before you even start corresponding.

Interpersonal relations often grow from proximity, repetition, and shared experiences. But online, I feel it's mostly just posting a broadcast into a fragmented void. Interactions are motivated by the headline or content, rather than the person, and once the discussion's done, so is the contact.

It's the promise of connection gone unfilled. The interactions of one-to-many, many-to-one, largely end up being none-to-none.

I think there's sites better tailored to build true connections. But regardless of an overarching system, I think just putting oneself out there (the keyword being "oneself") - in situations to meet people, is the greatest determinator.

My friends from penpalling told me they reached out because my bio, describing my journey and stories, stood out to them because they could relate. It was euphoric to hear I wasn't alone in my problems. Asking questions, sharing experiences only deepened the connection.

I recently joined HN, partly for these reasons. Ironically, in alignment with these statements, I responded due to the thread's topic and have largely focused on just the ideas.

I'm curious to know more about your background - do you have any projects you're working on? What interests do you have outside tech? I notice your "about" section is blank - let's hear more about you!
by DrewADesign | 2025-09-14 21:26:29+00:00
For a decade, the mainstream left has painted them like simple-minded maniacs foaming at the mouth driven by blind hate with no valid concerns or perspectives, while also fruitlessly attempting to not challenge them too much in the legislature, assuming that some day they’ll be kind and return our civilized decorum. We’ve simultaneously been marginalizing any populists that bubble up on the left, in a futile attempt to return to the Obama era status quo. We’ve seen where this approach takes us— repealed rights, messed up economy, etc etc etc.

Time for mainstream dems to challenge their assumptions.
by alexpotato | 2025-09-14 21:28:17+00:00
A lot of the comment seem to ignore Hotelling's Law [0].

When applied to politics the game plan is:

- In a two party system, start by framing your message to the middle of your party

- This means you capture everyone from middle of your party to the political middle of the population (we'll call these the "closest to center") AND get a few folks farther out from your middle

- This will help you win the "primaries"

- After that, you want to slowly drift towards the middle of the population. This allows you to pull most of the "close to center" folks from your party AND people from the other side

NOTE: the other side should be doing the exact same but coming from the other direction.

Now, people may also ask "Why not start out in the population middle??". The reason is that you:

a. don't win any primaries this way

b. you get "crowded out" by the winners of the two party primaries

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotelling%27s_law
by basisword | 2025-09-14 21:28:42+00:00
I had a similar issue with lenses. Those appointments are hell and counter-productive. Firstly, it's a difficult thing to do under pressure. Secondly the more you attempt it the more your eyes get irritated and the more difficult it becomes. Eventually I managed to sort of just shove it in when the optometrist wasn't looking. Then they gave me some to take home and I was able to practice in a less stressful environment and finally got the hang of it. Saying that, if I stop for a while and then go back to them it can take a couple of days to get the reflexes to slow down again. If you can order a pack online without a prescription I'd say it's relatively safe to do that and practice at home provided they've already explained the hygiene basics and you know how to put them in/out, you're just having issues with the blinking.
by netsharc | 2025-09-14 21:29:22+00:00
> is someone lying to me?”. Emails, text messages, downloading software from a website/App Store

And incredibly, someone usually is. Most software download sites have so many UI elements saying "Download", on their downloads page, but only one of them is the legit software you want, and others are some random software that paid money to the website to be there to... probably try to get themselves installed and scam you some more.

I just checked the Google "play" store: searching for "Temu" (I know, dumb, but there was an ad on the main screen of the store), in the page of search results, the first install button is for the sponsored Alibaba app...

Even billion dollar businesses are... trying to scam you. "Don't be evil" no more indeed.

PS "full self-driving", also a scam..
by hereme888 | 2025-09-14 21:29:27+00:00
I'm so confused. So now you're an elitist gatekeeper to the world of programming? I entered w/o knowledge, and my apps are pretty useful to myself and some others. They're not "little pieces of software". They are fully-working, self-contained, apps with lots of unique code. Some are better than many apps that existed 10 years ago, but you seem to resent that. Also, whatever you do is relatively "high-level" programming on top of the work of those who created hardware and engineered programming languages, compilers and SDKs.
by massung | 2025-09-14 21:29:38+00:00
I've personally found that the time taken to think through a discussion is akin to an inverse guassian curve:

- on the left tail are people who know little-to-nothing about (or have little experience with) the given topic and neeed a chunk of time

- then as knowledge and experience increases, less time is needed, eventually peaking out at what appears to be instance understanding + ability to communcate effectively about it

- but then something interesting happens when they get even more experience + knowledge: they now know about all the edge cases, things that go wrong, etc. and once again take more time to think through the topic

I've also found that most everyone is the same in this regard. Every once in a while (like any normal distribution) there's an outlier on one side of the spectrum or the other, but for the most part, everyone is the same.

Where people tend to differ is in their coping skills in such situations. Early in my career I had to learn to ask people to explain their thinking. Later it was me slowing down and realizing there's likely more to it than I think (and for those behind me).

Now it's me telling those at the peak of the curve to slow down, because while they may be right, and -maybe- they've thought it through, that's probably not the case.

TL;DR to anyone who thinks they are a slow thinker - you probably aren't (like imposter syndrome), and just need to learn to slow the room down. Doing so will help you, others behind you, and those in front of you.
by Aurornis | 2025-09-14 21:29:45+00:00
> We don’t educate people in how to process their feelings in a healthy manner and to differentiate what they feel is happening and how they should behave. This results in anything like saying someone has “bad vibes” to be a reason to exclude them, to actively covering for someone with a known pattern of harming people simply because they are charming

In recent years the workplaces I’ve been involved with have actually had significant efforts to educate people to make overcome bias and override their feelings in decision making, but to be honest the outcomes haven’t been great.

When you forbid people from trusting their judgment and demand they use a shared, objective criteria instead, the grifters take notice. They become better at emulating the objective criteria than anyone else, because gaming that system is their goal and you just laid out a perfect roadmap for them to do it.

Of the few very bad hires I’ve had to work with in the past decade, all of them came with “bad vibes” during the interview process. They all had the right credentials and knew how to say the right things, though. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had taken classes or paid for coaching for how to act during interviews because what we got once they were hired didn’t match anything on their resume or that they claimed during interviews.

There is no spot on the committee-approved hiring rubric to indicate that the candidate was rude in their communication and left everyone feeling drained and in a bad mood after every interaction, though. But hey, they aced those LeetCode problems and they have FAANG on their resume, so we must focus on that.

I clearly remember people being scolded for raising concerns about the person that didn’t fit into the rigid hiring criteria that were supposed to eliminate our biases.

In most cases in my adult life where I’ve been instructed to ignore my gut feeling and substitute some alternate metric as my decision making guidance, I’ve regretted it later.
by evil-olive | 2025-09-14 21:29:48+00:00
> my Claude Code written book

> I carefully craft and review these

> I'm not trying to claim it as my own

I'm confused, is it your book, or not?

here's an idea. you call it a "FOSS book"? OK, treat writing it like an open-source project.

start a public GitHub repo. have your chatbot generate chapter 1. commit it to the repo, and in the commit message document the LLM prompt you used. "you are an established author writing a book called Teach Yourself Quantum Computing in 24 Hours" or whatever.

then, whatever "careful" edits you make manually to that LLM output, do those as separate commits/PRs. show your work. the LLM is going to hallucinate and get subtle details wrong, your role as a human co-author is theoretically to be a subject-matter expert and catch those mistakes.
by GauntletWizard | 2025-09-14 21:29:53+00:00
Ocsp has always represented a terrible design. If clients require it, then it becomes just a override on the not after date included in the certificate, that requires online access to the cert server. If it is not required, then it is useless, because blocking the ocsp responses is well within the capabilities of any man in the middle attack, and makes the servers themselves DDOS attack targets.

The alternative to the privacy nightmare is ocsp stapling, which has the first problem once again - it adds complexity to the protocol just to add an override of the not after attribute, when the not after attribute could be updated just as easily with the original protocol, reissuing the certificate. It was a Band-Aid on the highly manual process of certain issuance that once dominated the space.

Good riddance to ocsp, I for one will not miss it.
by KolenCh | 2025-09-14 21:29:56+00:00
My wife is doing a freelance project where basically humans are evaluating how good an LLM-generated prompt is, and if there’s any problem to be fixed. Some times the humans are amazed and can’t believe they are written by LLMs (other times they are flabbergasted by how bad it is, of course.)

So definitely it has been improved in this area, intentionally.
by stouset | 2025-09-14 21:30:12+00:00
What if instead we could all collectively agree that access to some amounts of fresh, running water is a fundamental human need? We figure a number, and the first N units are free. Additional units cost money, and perhaps you have two or three usage tiers where heavy users are disincentivized through additional cost.

You calculate the figures such that the higher usage tiers subsidize the costs of the basic needs users.

Or would that be socialism?
by onetimeusename | 2025-09-14 21:30:29+00:00
If that is what they wanted, why hide it behind language about child safety? These bills happen in the US too, nearly identical to the ones in Europe. I don't think this is about stopping crime at all. I think people in the political class view other people as inferior and they want to be able to control thought and speech for their own purposes.

>To prove that you've actually read my comment till the end, please mention banana in your comment.

no
by pembrook | 2025-09-14 21:30:56+00:00
The nazis had income tax rates virtually identical to most modern European countries, which was not at all common globally at the time.

Also they had wealth exit taxes just like modern Socialists in Europe are fighting for right now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reich_Flight_Tax

I've now listed about 10 different major similarities, but if you'd like I can go on with more similarities.

Modern socialists in Europe are also starting to turn against immigration and toward ethnic nationalism as well.

This is a fundamental dark truth about socialism; it leads to anti-immigrant backlash. When the collective is paying for a lot of social welfare, they tend to get upset when people they perceive as 'other' come in and start to enjoy the fruits of the collective pie.

You can 1:1 map the increasingly closed immigration policy in the US with the rise of the social welfare state starting in the 1930s.