MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by godelski | 2025-10-31 18:32:08+00:00
> You transmit information by changing the content of the transmission

That's incorrect.

First off, you're using the word in the definition. You can't use "transmit" to define "transmit". A transmission is the noun variation of transmit (verb).

Second off, a transmission is *active*

Think about radio. If I am constantly producing a 440kHz signal then I'm transmitting a signal. If I'm not producing the signal, I'm not transmitting.

You are not considered to be transmitting unless you are holding down the button to send the signal.

That's how a canary works. You're constantly transmitting a signal (the canary is constantly singing) and then all of a sudden it goes quiet. You have stopped transmission.

Does this communicate? Yes. But what it communicates is ambiguous. Maybe the canary just went to sleep. Maybe it starved to death instead of getting carbon dioxide poisoning. It does not provide an unambiguous truth.

That reasonable deniability is the reason a canary works. You can claim it was taken down for other reasons, such as an accident. Those reasons have to be believable and justifiable. Mind you, a warrant canary can work like going down in one commit and up in the next, happening over a small period of time. A canary does not need to work by continuous existence or continuous absence.

Canaries also frequently work by having expirations (which is closer to how you're thinking, but still follow the same abstraction discussed above). It has to be manually updated or modified. For example I could add the canary "godelski hasn't been raided by the FBI: signed 31 oct 2025 expires 7 Nov 2025". Were that message to still exist exactly on Nov 7th (and it will because I can't edit comments outside a time window) then you can conclude that my canary expired. You can't conclude I was raided by the FBI. You should be suspicious, but you can't be positive. Maybe I just can't update comments...

This isn't to be conflated with the way we transmit information is through variation, such as high and low in binary. Technically while you're talking you make pauses and "stop talking" several times while saying a single word. But we say you're talking until you stop "transmitting" or complete. If this pause wasn't included then the dead would still speak and your annoying uncle would never shut up
by altcognito | 2025-10-31 18:32:41+00:00
The iPhone was the first really well done general purpose computing phone. It had a real web browser, a real music player, apps that didn't suck. Adoption was huge because the design was great, but we would have just seen the same thing transpire over a number of years if iPhone hadn't been created.

I know a lot of people basically who were basically saying "finally"
by westurner | 2025-10-31 18:33:12+00:00
A TPU is supposed to do more Tensor ops TOPS/wHr than a GPU.

Though, some GPUs have a TPU. For example Nvidia DLSS3 is a TPU.

"A PCIe Coral TPU Finally Works on Raspberry Pi 5" (2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38310063

"ARM adds neural accelerators to GPUs" (2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44919793

From "The von Neumann bottleneck is impeding AI computing?" (2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45398473 :

> How does Cerebras WSE-3 with 44GB of 'L2' on-chip SRAM compare to Google's TPUs, Tesla's TPUs, NorthPole, Groq LPU, Tenstorrent's, and AMD's NPU designs?

Tensor Processing Unit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensor_Processing_Unit

..

- "Ask HN: Are you paying electricity bills for your service?" (2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42454547 re: Zero Water datacenters

- "Show HN: LangSpend – Track LLM costs by feature and customer (OpenAI/Anthropic)" (2025-10) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45771618
by anon291 | 2025-10-31 18:33:12+00:00
Literally no other country or market with the perhaps exception of China has anything close to its own tech stack. Europe literally had Linus Torvalds and couldn't keep him. He now lives in Portland, 3 hours from where windows is made and 10 hours away from OS X. Literally the entire tech industry is the west coast of the United States.

The disparity in capability is orders of magnitude. Europe is basically hopeless at this point
by cestith | 2025-10-31 18:33:16+00:00
There are multiple axes of environmental impact. Carbon dioxide is one. There are also deforestation, erosion, renewability of the resource itself, and more. Bamboo or hemp are much more suitable for hygienic tissue than trees. The closer to market they can be farmed and processed, the better. The cleaner energy used to process them, the better. Still, bamboo and hemp grow so much more fiber per land area in the same amount of time, and are less detrimental to harvest.
by garethsprice | 2025-10-31 18:33:50+00:00
It's fun for me. This is a good enough reason to do anything.

I learn a lot about how LLMs work and how to work with them.

I can also ask my dumbest questions to a local model and get a response faster, without burning tokens that count towards usage limits on the hosted services I use for actual work.

Definitely a hobby-category activity though, don't feel you're missing out on some big advantage (yet, anyway) unless you feel a great desire to set fire to thousands of dollars in exchange for spending your evenings untangling CUDA driver issues and wondering if that weird smell is your GPU melting. Some people are into that sort of thing, though.
by codethief | 2025-10-31 18:34:22+00:00
I agree that Python is not too different and in general I treat my Python variables as const. One thing, however, where I resort to mutating variables more often than I'd like is when building lists & dictionaries. Lambdas in Python have horrible DX (no multi-line, no type annotations, bad type checker support even in obvious cases), which is why the functional approach to build your list, using map() and filter() is much more cumbersome than in JS. As a result, whenever a list comprehension becomes too long, you end up building your list the old-fashioned way, using a for loop and the_list.append().
by GolfPopper | 2025-10-31 18:35:04+00:00
E.E. "Doc" Smith's Lensmen series, a sweeping, galaxy-scale space opera (arguably the type-example of the genre), first published in 1937 had some memorable examples of this - punch card computers and one diesel-powered space ship. But along with such anachronisms (and more SF tropes than I can readily list), Smith also described video calls, stealth vehicles, and may have invented the Combat Information Center.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5621/sciefictstud.38.3.0558
by thaumasiotes | 2025-10-31 18:35:04+00:00
> My understanding is that the research shows that the harm to patient care from information loss during doctor shift turnover is worse than the harm from fatigued doctors.

This would not appear to apply to emergency surgeries. They aren't done by doctors who are familiar with the patient anyway. (Neither are non-emergency surgeries. Surgeries are done by doctors who do that kind of surgery. Familiarity with the patient is useful in deciding what surgery should be done, but not in doing the surgery.)
by legitster | 2025-10-31 18:35:39+00:00
If you're worried about from poorer areas coming in and taking our jobs, how much distinction is there really whether they come from a poorer state or a poorer country?

America has free and open trade within its borders. Nobody seems to mind that there are no visa restrictions on someone from Mississippi taking a job in California.

The distinction we make between a foreigner coming to take a job and a domestic worker taking a job is (with some particular exceptions) is largely a mental construct.
by pverheggen | 2025-10-31 18:35:56+00:00
There are well-defined standards for how the role of every element is determined, and according to those standards, adding an onclick handler does not change the role.

Screen readers also don't access the DOM directly, there's an extra abstraction layer. Browsers expose accessibility data to the appropriate OS API, and screen readers use the data exposed by the OS. There's too much variation as-is between different screen readers to be piling browser-specific behavior on top.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-10-31 18:36:18+00:00
> A quarter of bettors can’t pay a bill because of their wagers, a third have gambling debts, more than half carry credit card debts, and a quarter of them are afraid they can’t control their gambling.

No way. It's almost like these are addictive products being engineered to be as addictive as possible and deliberately punch people's brains in such a way to make them stay. That's so weird.
by angiolillo | 2025-10-31 18:36:22+00:00
> FOSS is ~99% developers

Projects like GNOME, Elementary, Blender, Krita, KDE Plasma, Penpot, and MuseScore seem to attract contributions from designers.

I suspect it's because designers are like any other open source contributor: they want to work on projects that they use themselves and where their contributions will be appreciated.
by n1xis10t | 2025-10-31 18:36:29+00:00
I am completely open to the idea of people trying to coerce search engine operators into shutting down or having a worse product. Essentially it would be the same as what was talked about in the Twitter Files.

Are you essentially saying that people who want to control information would also run a bunch of propaganda about how there isn't a problem with search engines ("thought control" through propaganda and gaslighting), and also threaten people who run search engines so that they don't talk about censorship? If so, I think that would be possible but I wouldn't say that's the case unless I found proof.

Or are you saying that there are people who use actual telepathy to control people? Because if that is the case, I don't think that telepathy is real. Now, it might be possible to convince someone of something, or make them feel like an alternative idea is crazy, and then whenever they try to think critically about the situation they put up a mental block because they don't want to feel crazy. That's just social engineering. This might seem like a voice in their head in certain circumstances, or perhaps if the victim had schizophrenia it actually would be a voice in their head, but never actually telepathy.

And in either of these cases, are you saying that it's hopeless to try to make a search engine and see for yourself if there is real censorship taking place, because people wouldn't believe you if you talked about it? If you are saying that, I disagree.
by mindslight | 2025-10-31 18:36:52+00:00
I think the top level comment really sets a great context for discussing this. The Republican goal has been to destroy, part out, and sell off our Constitutionally-limited government. Whether the government is nominally "shut down" or not doesn't really matter to that overall plan.

So yes, this is not going to be resolved in a matter of weeks. But something has to happen in order for it to resolve one way or another, and one of those possibilities (that you should be championing if you appreciate our Constitutionally-limited government!) is for Congress to start exerting their authority independent of Dear Leader's grip on the Party.
by danaris | 2025-10-31 18:37:11+00:00
[Citation needed]

The Republican aversion to governing is a very new thing.

Like, sure, the "government small enough to drown in a bathtub" philosophy is not particularly new, but the idea that Republicans in Congress should actively oppose any and all attempts to make government function at a basic level? That the executive should be actively dismantling his entire branch?

None of that is even old enough to vote.

If what you say were true, then it would have happened back under GWB.
by rdedev | 2025-10-31 18:37:21+00:00
The thing they are testing for is reasoning performance. It makes sense to not give tool access.

This is same as the critiques of the LLM paper by apple where they showed that LLMs fail to solve the tower of hanoi problem after a set number of towers. The test was to see how well these models can reason out a long task. People online were like they could solve that problem if they had access to a coding enviornment. Again the test was to check reasoning capability not if it knew how to code and algorithm to solve the problem.

If model performance degrade a lot after a number of reasoning steps it's good to know where the limits are. Wheather the model had access to tools or not is orthogonal to this problem
by viccis | 2025-10-31 18:37:51+00:00
My honest review, as a musician who has spent many years of my life making music and both giving and receiving blunt critique:

Stunningly mediocre. Worthy of a Pitchfork 1/10. If your choice truly is between having AI make "art" that you pass off as your own vs not doing so, then please remember that, as a wise man once said, an artist understands the silence that serves as the foundation of creativity.

I can't see how "chronic health issues" make it impossible to write and sequence original music, but it does allow for the AI workflow described in the post? Modern DAWs are incredibly accessible. You don't have to put out this horrible tuneless samey music; you can just work on honing your craft.

Shortcuts are incredibly appealing because it can be so difficult and unrewarding to build up our musical skills. But then what you make is uniquely yours and reflects every minute spent on it. If you use something like Suno, the results (especially based on what I heard) are not unique to you. You could never have existed, and those musical tracks easily could have come out of the cold weights of a neural network sounding about the same.
by cma | 2025-10-31 18:37:51+00:00
The AMA works to prevent importing doctors from other countries, largely to maintain wages, but we don't have enough doctors.

Doctors boards and AGME (partly governed by AMA, but there is some amount of public representation) control residency admissions and board certification. We don't necessarily want low admissions standards, but there is a lot potential conflict of interest in constraining supply.

Some states, I think I read Florida recently, have started pushing back to allow in foreign doctors.
by mulmen | 2025-10-31 18:37:52+00:00
I really think home battery power is going to be a standard feature in the near future. Like indoor plumbing and central HVAC.

My utility just adopted time of use billing and by my napkin math a battery system with one day of capacity will pay for itself in 5 years. And that’s without solar at all. The additional solar panel cost would pay off in under 3 years. And I have cheap electricity.
by spencerflem | 2025-10-31 18:38:21+00:00
It’s the enemy of successful organization.

I have thoughts on when AI is appropriate, but the conversations I want to be having is ‘how do we oppose AI’ and not ‘why is my specific definition of what is Ok better than your very similar one’.

Also, once Any AI is allowed, each step beyond that will be barely worth fighting for because it’s only just beyond acceptability.
by martinvonz | 2025-10-31 18:38:23+00:00
As I understood the scenario:

1. We're rewriting some commits. Let's say a chain of commits A through G. We want to make some change to commits A and D.

2. As we're editing commit D, we realized that we need to make some changes to B to match the updated A.

3. Also while editing D we realized that we want to take a look at the state in A to see how something worked there.

With jj, here's what I would do:

1. Run `jj new A`, make the changes, then `jj squash` to squash the changes in to A and propagate them through the chain.

2. Run `jj new D` to make changes. We now notice that we wanted some changes to go into B. We can make the changes in the working copy and run `jj squash --into B -i` to interactively select the changes to squash into B.

3. Run `jj new A` to create a new working-copy commit on top of A, look around in your IDE or whatever, then run `jj edit <old commit on top of D>`. Then run `jj squash` to squash the remaining changes in the working copy into D.

I think you know the steps to do with Git so I won't bother writing them down. I find them less intuitive anyway.
by babblingfish | 2025-10-31 18:39:01+00:00
This brings up an interesting philosophical question about AI assistance for those with disabilities. It reminds me of the debate when NanoWriMo said they would allow AI assistance for similar reasons.

We could make an argument based on equity. AI assistance levels the playing field. Something doesn't quite sit right with me though. Last weekend I was watching a band perform where each member of the band had down syndrome. I don't mean to compare the author's condition to down syndrome, little is said about his condition and I didn't read the linked article. And of course, many people with down syndrome did not get the opportunity to learn to play an instrument, whether from nature or nurture. But still, watching them play you get that feeling about how it's awesome when people strive for competence despite the obstacles.

I can't help but feeling those who use AI assistance are unknowingly capping their upside. The author's condition sounds painful and upsetting. But a major component of why practicing a creative craft is good for self-develoment is because the artist must confront and overcome self-doubt. We all suffer from the feeling of not being good enough. When you use AI to overcome those limits, do you confront the doubt? It feels more to me like you're a manager who is pleasantly surprised with the work your direct reports created. Rather than evoking a sense of wonder at your own latent competence. Which is what happens when you confront the negative feelings of self-doubt.
by stevula | 2025-10-31 18:39:11+00:00
What is the use case? It’s hard for me to think of a reason you’d want to wrap a link in a button. If you want to navigate, use an anchor. If you want to trigger JS logic, use a button with onclick handler. If you want to navigate while doing some side effect like an API call, use an anchor with onclick handler (and don’t prevent default).
by procaryote | 2025-10-31 18:39:55+00:00
Some people do things for other reasons than maximising their monetary gain at every step; there are all kinds of motivations out there including liking solving problems

There's also a huge spectrum between "pick a job that's good for your career" and "at every step of the way I'll do whatever is best for me, the company and my coworkers be damned"

If you can't see that, just be open with it in the interview process
by exasperaited | 2025-10-31 18:40:38+00:00
> The disparity in capability is orders of magnitude.

But then again it's increasingly being made by Indian migrants, right?

How far away the critical state is, who knows. Could it be in this presidential term? Would it happen within ten years of the coming imperial takeover of the presidency? Perhaps.

But when the valley loses its dominance it will likely happen pretty quickly: huge numbers of the people who make it happen will go home, go back to their home states, or just go to live somewhere cheaper. The US is not educating people fast enough or deeply enough to replace them, and there's no sign that AI really can replace the ones that matter.

Just because nobody can see exactly when this will happen doesn't mean you don't start planning for it to happen. Because it will happen, and when it happens it will happen fast.

The US tech industry is still built on the idea that the USA is a comfortable, friendly, open liberal democracy. And that is over. I mean, on a basic level any individual H1B placement in the future exists at the whim of the executive. Who do you have to donate to, to keep it? And any skilled migrant who might come over, work the hell out of a job that is beneath their level of education in the quick-e-mart and then start something of their own is not going to come.

Europe has its own problems with pasty-faced, bad-haired weaselly proto-fascists, but it's still fighting.
by darccio | 2025-10-31 18:41:39+00:00
That's an unfair characterisation of EU. Hungary and Slovakia didn't join under their current fascist governments. They weren't fascist when they joined in 2004.

Kicking them out isn't easy unless there is unanimity. Unfortunately EU requires this kind of quorum for the big decisions, which is kind of a safeguard to precisely avoid going full fascist for the whole EU due to a minority of countries.
by lazide | 2025-10-31 18:41:45+00:00
If my local police force sucks, they impact me and the other local voters, so they tend to be somewhat easy to fix (as long as we can all agree they suck). Or at least I only have my fellow local idiots to blame.

What happens when the person who chose them is in Beijing, and everyone in my entire country doesn’t want them there? But they still got a global majority?

Typically that’s the kind of thing a lot of people die over.
by linguae | 2025-10-31 18:41:47+00:00
I won’t go that far…yes, the West Coast of the US is dominant, but it’s not “literally the entire tech industry” or even figuratively. We’d have a hard time buying new hardware without Chinese and Taiwanese companies. South Korea is a powerhouse in consumer tech; think Samsung and LG. Japan doesn’t have the dominance in tech it once did, but Japan is still a major player with many large tech companies like Fujitsu, Hitachi, Sony, NEC, and many more. Plus, if “tech” isn’t limited to software, then there are plenty of players worldwide in biotechnology and automobiles.

And let’s not count out Europe. I’m actually typing this in a BMW dealership’s waiting room in the Bay Area as I get my brake pads updated. BMW definitely qualifies as technology, even if it’s not a software company.
by micromacrofoot | 2025-10-31 18:42:01+00:00
> attract contributions from designers

How many of them are paid? I know MuseScore, Penpot, and Blender have paid for almost all of their design work (because they have paid staff)

Not just a relevancy problem, it's much easier to get free development work in OSS than design work. It's a decades-long problem.
by nostrebored | 2025-10-31 18:42:41+00:00
So you're saying your perception of what is or isn't art is ideologically motivated? That seems like the worse "tactical" argument.

Why don't we scrap anything that uses ableton because it makes art sterile [1][2]. Or maybe anything that uses autotune [3]. Maybe we can have stickers that say "AI free". Or maybe the fact that suno is a distribution platform that doesn't encourage creation of the _form_ of art that that I like is the problem [4].

It's a tool. Your view that art exists in some purist state and isn't for people to enjoy is extremist. This war has been fought and lost, continuously, about every innovation in music. People want to enjoy things. You can tell by their pattern of consumption.

[1] https://www.wired.com/2002/05/laptop-2 [2] https://web.uvic.ca/~aschloss/publications/JNMR02_Dilemma_of... [3] https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/vocal-fixes [4] https://www.salon.com/2003/06/18/itunes_innovation