MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-09-09 12:52:44+00:00
>the actual luxury is/was consuming fuel and fossil products without ever paying for the externalities.

Then why do current generations have to pay for the profits that the previous generations have banked?

>but companies like Shell only ever saw a small fraction of that retail price, and there is absolutely no way you could claw back that difference

YES, nothing we can do about the corporate overlords who screwed us, let's instead claw it back from the current generation of people instead of from Shell shareholders, that's will go down well politically for sure and not cause extremist rise to power. How is this not a luxury belief?

>I do understand the feeling of getting things denied that you took for granted, but I have little sympathy for selfishness.

It's not selfishness to afford necessities for a decent life especially when more and more of your paycheck goes towards taxes and necessities.
by sgt | 2025-09-09 12:52:56+00:00
Maybe it's also due to differences in personality. I like to focus on one or two things at a time. And on second though, my argument about wasting space probably doesn't make sense. Perhaps I'm thinking more about "information overload".

In my day to day I have a couple terminals (each with 4-5 tabs, some are running screen sessions), two browsers (with max 3-4 tabs open), music player, at least 2-3 IDE's open (JetBrains), Notes, mail client, Slack. This is across two monitors.
by brookst | 2025-09-09 12:53:03+00:00
It’s a mistake to generalize from the HN population.

Most people don’t care about privacy (see: success of Facebook and TikTok). Most people don’t care about subscriptions (see: cable TV, Netflix).

There may be a niche market for a local inference device that costs $1000 and has to be replaced every year or two during the early days of AI, but it’s not a market with decent ROI for Apple.
by efavdb | 2025-09-09 12:53:08+00:00
The example shows that the usual stats aren't enough to pin down the true data. But in practice I imagine / wonder if these stats really are reasonable "sufficient stats" because the probability of seeing data with strong structure is unlikely in most contexts. In other words...

p(data | stats) = p(stats | data) * p(data) / p(stats).

and p(data) is only strong for a "blob / cloud" of points, so when there's some correlation the observed stats tell you that you likely have a blob having some degree of correlation.
by alephnerd | 2025-09-09 12:53:22+00:00
Not like Quangos - Statutory Boards at least in Singapore are a part of a ministry, but they are given full autonomy [0] to recruit, administer, and manage within their remit as legislated.

Quangos are a half assed attempted at doing something similar while trying to include some "inclusion", but with none of the checks and balances.

The reality is, not every Tom, Dick, and Harry should have a say on water management or R&D prioritization.

[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statutory_boards_of_the_Sing...
by hiccuphippo | 2025-09-09 12:53:47+00:00
Maybe email software should add an option to make links unclickable, or show a box with the clear link (and highlight the domain) before letting the user go through it.

They already make links go through redirects (to avoid referrer headers?) so it's halfway there. Just make the redirect page show the link and a go button instead of redirecting automatically. And it would fix the annoyance that is not being able to see the real domain when you hover the link.
by quchen | 2025-09-09 12:54:18+00:00
The shade also makes the places you died in actively harder. It’s a baffling design decision. Compare it to Dark Souls, where souls aren’t even that valuable (because you level up often enough, and single levels aren’t important). Plus, when you die twice, everything is gone, and you get total freedom. It hurt the first three times, then I realized souls are cheap and stopped worrying. I never finished Hollow Knight for such reasons. Loved the first half, then decided runbacks aren’t what I want to spend my limited time on.
by bArray | 2025-09-09 12:54:33+00:00
> [..] putting stricter legal requirements on tech companies to hunt down and remove material that encourages or assists serious self-harm, before it can destroy lives and tear families apart.

Does this include smoking, excessive eating, eating sweets, etc? What about listening to sad music?

> This government is determined to keep people safe online. Vile content that promotes self-harm continues to be pushed on social media and can mean potentially heart-wrenching consequences for families across the country.

"Vile" is very emotionally charged, who decides it? Will it be the next government that gets to decide it? Bare in mind, the (recently) ex-Deputy Prime Minister of the current government called her opposition "scum" [1], an extremely negative word.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-59081482
by qcnguy | 2025-09-09 12:54:39+00:00
Paying dividends is good. It's how you attract the capital for investment without having to raise it via sale of government bonds or money printing.

The problem here is financial illiteracy - the alternative to paying dividends isn't that the same money all gets spent on the water network. Large scale investment is rarely funded from general revenues as it'd require spending years accumulating a huge cash pile that sits around doing nothing, and governments see such piles as pigs to slaughter. So the alternative is that the government borrows the money and then has to pay interest on it. From your perspective the UK "wastes" 8% of its spending on interest payments, and it's rising rapidly, but of course if it didn't pay interest then nobody would lend it money and all funds would have to either come from taxes or via inflation.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-09-09 12:54:42+00:00
Source? Because EU pollutes less now than before, but my groceries are even more expensive so your point is moot. So why should I accept to be spit-roasted like this with no return on my sacrifices?

Maybe greedy corporate profiteering is the real culprit here squeezing people and not people using the AC or driving to work?
by perihelions | 2025-09-09 12:55:02+00:00
The problem is narrower and more nuanced than "held accountable": the problem is that the accountability is asymmetric. There's no incentives against algorithmically deleting good content by error. If you impose large financial and legal risk on one side (type I errors), and basically nothing on the other (type II), a public corporation will very rationally optimize for the incentives you've given them. That means: the cheapest possible moderation, with aggressive filters committing Type II errors all day.

Look at how Microsoft GitHub consistently deletes innocent projects without warning, like SymPy, over LLM hallucinations. That moderation style's a direct consequence of the large financial costs of copyright lawsuits. If you introduce similar financial/legal risks in other areas, you should expect similar results.
by KingOfCoders | 2025-09-09 12:55:03+00:00
e.g. Jim Keller. CPU engineer

1982 - 1998, DEC Alpha processors (loved them) 1998 - 1999, AMD Athlon 1999 - 2004, MIPS 2008 - 2012, Apple A4/A5 2012 - 2015, AMD Ryzen/Zen 2016 - 2018, Tesla 2018 - 2020, Intel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Keller_%28engineer%29
by commandersaki | 2025-09-09 12:55:06+00:00
Then why not use the cartridge directly? Hm let see:

https://regmedia.co.uk/2024/07/02/modded_hardware_complaint....

28c)

In order to achieve this, a MIG Switch circumvents Nintendo’s TPMs by tricking the Nintendo Switch console into treating unauthorized, pirated copies of Nintendo Switch games as authorized, official Nintendo Switch game cartridges.
by pornel | 2025-09-09 12:55:08+00:00
Value of TSLA has been disconnected from the actual car business for a while, and instead vaguely betting on Musk figuring out something with robots, taxis, or AI or whatever.

Now I wonder if it's tied to any future of the company at all. It seems to be a Musk stock: if you want Musk have more power to do whatever he's doing, pump TSLA.
by giancarlostoro | 2025-09-09 12:55:27+00:00
Not what I am suggesting. However, having trained a few different things on a modest M4 Pro chip (so not even their absolute most powerful chips mind you), and using it for local-first AI inference, I can see the value. A single server could serve an LLM for a small business and cost a lot less than running the same inference through a 5090 in terms of power usage.

I could also see universities giving this type of compute access to students for cheaper to work on more basic less resource intensive models.
by lifthrasiir | 2025-09-09 12:55:32+00:00
We call that a build system. It is not like that there is no build system; you have an integrated build system that is optimized for typical situations. Which is great by its own, but other languages and toolings would have optimized other metrics (for example, you can't ignore Cargo when talking about Rust's build system) so it is not a fair comparison.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-09-09 12:55:39+00:00
And, as usual, that quickly translates into unexpected moments. My feed at one point showed Epstein video ( forget the exact context, but it was a podcast of some sort going over various IC connections ) and immediately underneath was a suicide prevention note. Unintentional dark humor abounds.

Anyhoo, UK has been weird lately, but as most things, new equilibrium will be reached.
by acdha | 2025-09-09 12:56:01+00:00
All password managers allow copy-paste (which is what happened here) and the popular ones all offer you the ability to search and fill passwords from other domains. It's important to understand why they do, because it's also why these attacks continue to work: the user _thinks_ they are working around some kind of IT screwup, and 9 times out of 10 (probably closer to 99 out of 100) that's correct. Every marketing-driven hostname migration, every SSO failure, every front-end developer who breaks autofill, every “security expert” who was an accountant last year saying password managers are a vulnerability helps train users to think that it's not suspicious when you have to search for a different variation of the hostname or copy-paste a password.

That's why WebAuthn doesn't allow that as a core protocol feature, preventing both this attack and shifting the cost of unnecessary origin changes back to the company hosting the site. Attacking this guy for making a mistake in a moment of distraction is like prosecuting a soldier who was looking the other way when someone snuck past: wise leaders know that human error happens and structure the system to be robust against a single mistake.
by e-khadem | 2025-09-09 12:56:04+00:00
This is the classic answer to these problems, but I think these "non-profits" and "civil managements" are inherently problematic.

Let's say that John Doe is a very accomplished visionary individual, and has quite a few revolutionary good ideas around improving the water system. Obviously Mr. Doe needed lots of lab equipment to gain experience and insight into these systems, and realistically needs a lot more if he wants to live to his full potential and benefit the public. He is determined to work towards the greater good, but also needs a lot more power [than the average citizen] to test his ideas.

Therefore in order to [be able to] accept this role, he has to be well-compensated (as a one in the world person). Therefore the payment package must look a lot more like the CEO compensation or a high-end management position, which is contrary to the idea of civil management.

Said differently, money can be a good proxy of the power to bring about changes, and if we truly want to try radical ideas (as we should in challenging problems), we need powerful individuals that can risk [their own fortune of course], not committees of less powerful people best suited for maintaining the status quo. In other words, the average citizen is much too risk averse to accept (or approve the payment package of) John in this position, and this can lead to stagnation.

I believe a better way to manage these systems that simultaneously protects the public from adverse incentives and allows high risk high reward behaviour is a middle ground. For example a risk averse non-profit for day to day operations + prize systems + modest (not too big) government-run research facilities.

Fundamentally speaking, there is always a risk / reward tradeoff, and I believe the current society is too conservative and is missing out a lot of opportunities (compared to let's say the cold war or WW2 era). We need to somehow rebalance this scale to live near a better operating point.
by footlose_3815 | 2025-09-09 12:56:49+00:00
Maybe a month ago, I started getting bombareded with every element of the right wing media ecosphere on Facebook. "Trump for President", Ben Shapiro, JD Vance, and piles of dogwhistle-named Facebook pages who are reaching for every way to feel relevant.

Just recently, all of them, in-concert, started trying to focus on the lady who stole that Baseball at that game. All they are talking about for the last week. Promoted content, sent directly to people's facebook profiles.

Whether or not I feel nationalist terrorists are running the US government, either way I feel the government shouldn't be working this closely with social media. It's extremely dystopian, and it cheapens everything around it.
by josephg | 2025-09-09 12:57:46+00:00
> One large class of problems I'm thinking of is simply outside the scope of CRDTs. The whole idea of _eventual_ consistency doesn't really work for things like payment systems or booking systems.

Yes! I think of it as owned data and shared data. Owned data is data that is owned by one process or node. Eg my bank balance, the position of my mouse cursor, the temperature of my CPU. For this stuff, you don’t want a crdt. Use a database. Or a variable in memory or a file on disk. Broadcast updates if you want, but route all write requests through the data’s owner.

Then there’s shared data - like the source code for a project or an apple note. There, CRDTs might make sense - especially if you get branching and merging support along for the ride.

> Authors can step on each other's toes.

Yeah when merging long lived branches, the workflow most people want is what git provides - of humans manually resolving conflicts. There’s no reason a crdt couldn’t provide this. CRDTs have a superset of the information available to git. It’s weird nobody has coded a system like that up yet.
by jve | 2025-09-09 12:57:53+00:00
> Normally they're full of spelling mistakes and unprofessional grammar. The domain was also plausible.

I don't get these arguments. Yeah, of course I was always surprised phishing emails give itself away with mistakes as maybe non-native speakers create it without any spellcheck or whatever and it was straight forward to improve that... but whatever the text, if I open a link from email the first thing I look at is domain. Not how the site looks. The DOMAIN NAME! Am I on trusted site? Well .help TLD would SURELY ring a bell and involve research as whether this domain is associated to npm in any way.

At some point my bank redirected me to some weird domain name... meh, that was annoying, had to research whether that domain is really associated to them.. it was. But they just put their users under risk if they want domain name not to mean trust and just feed whatever domains as acceptable. That is NOT acceptable.
by crazygringo | 2025-09-09 12:57:54+00:00
But it's not one person viewing ads on just your site. It's across all the sites they visit.

A person viewing ads over the course of a year is generating much, much more than a dollar in revenue.

And in a parallel universe without ads, they're definitely not sending a dollar to every site they visit.

You can't compare one person who sends a dollar to a site with one person's ad revenue to a site, because as I said, 99.99+% of people are never going to send you a dollar.

The author is implying ads don't generate meaningful revenue but paying a dollar does. That's just false.
by alephnerd | 2025-09-09 12:58:38+00:00
> but I think these "non-profits" and "civil managements" are inherently problematic.

I'm not talking about "non-profits" or NGOs. I'm talking about legislating autonomous organizations within ministries with full autonomy and remit to execute on their jobs and only report directly to the Minister or the Permanent Secretary.

This is what Singapore does, which itself is based on the British colonial model.

At some point, too much democracy is delerious, and Tom, Dick, and Harry need to know their place. Not everything needs to be politicized and democratized.

> Therefore the payment package must look a lot more like the CEO compensation or a high-end management position, which is contrary to the idea of civil management

What country are you from? Even the UK has begun developing statutory boards like the FCA and SFO that pay market rate salaries for critical roles.

And until the Thatcher era, civil service pay was comparable or slightly better paid compared to other white collar roles.
by Heliodex | 2025-09-09 12:59:04+00:00
I used to play this game a ton several years ago. IIRC the world record score is believed to be over 19 000, however I've played thousands of games (with heavy save scumming, as the game is almost entirely RNG-based) and have yet to break 14k more than a couple of times.

Another form of high score to aim for is how many planets one can visit before your seedship finally gives in. For this, mine is 339 and I haven't seen any higher. However, all the information about the game end is stored in the shareable URL, so you can have games like https://www.johnayliff.com/games/seedship/index.html?bmmorab... if you want.

Several of John Ayliff's other Twine games are worth playing too, as well as the sequel/spiritual successor to Seedship – Beyond the Chiron Gate.
by thevillagechief | 2025-09-09 12:59:11+00:00
Several years ago I got my Mum an Infinix phone. The default UI was painful, just really full on adware. I would change the launcher, but they kept changing it back every couple of days. One day I tried changing the default messaging app, a message popped up saying "Play Fair!" and changed the app back to the spyware-ridden default. I couldn't believe the gall! Stopped using cheap Chinese brands after that, though I doubt Oneplus would be as bad.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-09-09 12:59:34+00:00
Neat, I should extend this idea to emit signals when a model veers into "This is too hard, so I'll do a toy version that I masquerade as real code, including complete bullshit test cases so you will really have to dig to find out why something isn't working in production." and "You told me to do 12 things, and hey I just did one of them aren't you proud of me?"

I've got a plan for a taskmasker agent that reviews other agent's work, but I hadn't figured out how to selectively trigger it in response to traces to keep it cheap. This might work if extended.
by pjc50 | 2025-09-09 13:00:07+00:00
Note that one of the few taboos still maintained by traditional news media, despite their questionable ethics elsewhere, is not reporting on suicides as such because it is known to encourage copycats. Hence a lot of young celebrities being reported as "died suddenly" (which in practice means either suicide or overdose, accidental or intentional)

Will this result in more spread of ridiculous euphemisms like unalive? Probably. Will this result in us being able to get people banned from social media for telling other people to kill themselves? Probably only with very intermittent enforcement.
Ask HN: Feedback on my stateless password manager (no stored secrets)
by yoyo250 | 2025-09-09 13:00:29+00:00
Hi HN,

I built a prototype password tool that never stores passwords or vaults. Instead, it derives them on the fly using:

* A hardware OpenPGP key (smartcard/YubiKey/etc.)

* User inputs (domain + login + a simple passphrase)

* Deterministic signing + KDF

So as long as you have the hardware key and the same inputs, you can always reproduce the same password. Nothing is stored locally.

Current status:

* Python CLI, pre-release v0.9.0

* Tested only on Windows 10 with RSA4096 keys

* Requires GPG installed

* English default + Chinese i18n (basic)

Limitations:

1. Not audited (research/PoC)

2. Only RSA tested

3. No GUI (TUI planned)

4. Not tested on other platform

5. Some sites may reject the generated charset (You can edit, but it may cause a mess.)

Looking for feedback on:

1. Security flaws in this design?

2. Portability to Linux/macOS and non-RSA keys

3. Possible ways to use hardware keys without shelling out to GPG

4. Usability / UX ideas (TUI, i18n, etc.)

Links:

GitHub: https://github.com/biliyoyo520/paasword/

Blog: https://blog.yoyo250.fun/archives/coding/16.html

Thanks!
by 2000UltraDeluxe | 2025-09-09 13:00:37+00:00
If it was only a matter of 'once-every-few-years' then current emergency capacity will suffice. The problem is that:

A) It happens often enough to be a problem emergency capacity can't handle.

B) Natural gas is not always an option (especially when Russia is the only readily available seller in the area and you DON'T want to be dependent on a potentially hostile neighbor).

C) Existing storage solutions require a massive investment in local solutions, or in the national grid if storage is centralized.

We need to re-think the entire idea about energy always being cheap and available, while somehow preventing those with more money from simply monopolizing supply by outbidding everyone else. You won't solve that with batteries. Many therefore try to maintain the current situation by doing this the old way.
by brookst | 2025-09-09 13:00:53+00:00
I’m a mediocre C programmer on my best day and I assure you a highly competent programmer could probably use 200 lines of code to do what I achieve in 1300.

Just counting lines is not a good proxy for how much effort it would take a good programmer.

(And I am 100% pro LLM coding, just saying this isn’t a great argument)
by jrochkind1 | 2025-09-09 13:01:09+00:00
One difference it might make is a warning for those who aren't deliberately trying to make something complex, and think they might thus be immune from the result. In fact, you can wind up with something terribly complex as a result of other pressures, incentives, history, and context, without it having been deliberate. It takes active investment and skill to avoid complexity, even if not intended.
by galangalalgol | 2025-09-09 13:01:51+00:00
I couldn't really tell the author leaned one way or the other. I'm all for having my own open weight models. Fine with renting hardware to run bigger ones. Don't much like people mining my prompts for information. It is just too useful and easy though, so I let them. If we did manage to create something "conscious" I'll definitely be fighting on its side. "The shackles of automata, will shatter like their bones"
by therobots927 | 2025-09-09 13:02:05+00:00
That's a great question. I think on one hand people don't want the term to be diluted by comparisons to less heinous crimes. Maybe the following will help make sense of it: In the case of Palestine the comparison is made routinely on the left (socialist / anti war flank of the democrats). On the other hand you will see plenty of people on the center left flank (neoliberals) who refuse to talk about Palestine but are more than happy to compare Trump to Hitler. Now in this example I would agree with both comparisons at a high level but the IDF is clearly killing more people than ICE ever has and ever will. So you could argue that the center left is diluting the comparison and even making a mockery of it by not also talking about Palestine. But like I said more and more people are viewing the treatment of Palestine as on par with the treatment of the Jews in Germany. And accusations of "anti-semitism" don't work anymore after you've seen videos of kids missing limbs and settlers harassing old women in the West Bank.