MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
The Disinformation Commission: A New Voice in the Fight Against Falsehoods
by emmanol | 2025-10-13 06:45:07+00:00
The Disinformation Commission (disinformationcommission.com) presents itself with a simple mission: “We Monitor, We Act, We Protect.” Though still relatively new and not fully transparent about its leadership or governance, the initiative signals growing global concern over the dangers of disinformation.

Mission and Focus

From its tagline, the Commission appears committed to three pillars:

Monitoring false and misleading information circulating online and offline.

Acting when disinformation is detected, whether through fact-checking, corrections, or public communication.

Protecting societies from the destabilizing effects of manipulated narratives.

These goals mirror broader international efforts to reduce the harms caused by disinformation, such as democratic erosion, public mistrust, and the spread of hate or violence.

Why It Matters

Disinformation is not just about fake news; it is a weapon that can influence elections, disrupt public health campaigns, and divide communities. Organizations like the Disinformation Commission aim to fill the space between government oversight, civil society watchdogs, and tech platform responsibility. By acting as a neutral body, they can potentially alert the public to harmful trends while promoting media literacy.

Global Context

Other regions have tried similar approaches. The European Union enforces a Code of Practice on Disinformation, while UNESCO emphasizes balancing counter-disinformation efforts with freedom of expression. In countries like Sri Lanka, partnerships between UN agencies and local groups monitor hate speech and misinformation to maintain social stability. For the Commission to succeed, it must align with these international principles of transparency, accountability, and respect for free speech. Challenges Ahead

Despite its promise, any disinformation watchdog faces obstacles:

1. Defining the line between harmful disinformation and legitimate opinion.

2. Credibility—without clarity on funding or leadership, neutrality may be questioned.

3. Access to data, since much disinformation circulates on closed or private platforms.

4. Speed and scale, as false information spreads faster than corrections.

5. Measuring impact—success is hard to quantify beyond tracking reach or awareness.

What Remains Unclear

At present, little is known about the Commission’s actual structure, jurisdiction, or methodology. Is it advisory, regulatory, or purely a research and advocacy body? Until those details are made public, its role remains more aspirational than authoritative.

Conclusion

The Disinformation Commission is a timely addition to the growing movement against false and manipulative information. Its effectiveness, however, will depend on whether it can earn public trust through openness, impartiality, and collaboration with media, academia, and technology platforms. In an age when truth itself is contested, such institutions can help protect the integrity of information—if they themselves remain credible.
by impendia | 2025-10-13 06:46:10+00:00
You can't turn off notifications on MacOS AFAICT, but you can set "quiet hours" to 24 hours a day. So now I only see any notifications if I happen to be using my computer at exactly 10:00 pm.

If you have any notifications you actually do want, this isn't a viable solution. But personally I have yet to ever see a notification on my computer which I considered important.
by HenryYWF | 2025-10-13 06:46:17+00:00
I’ve been working on AirSend — we help workers to get paid in fiat currency but spend in stablecoins. Clients can pay invoices in fiat (like USD or EUR), and it’s automatically converted into USDC inside your wallet (0.5% platform fees).

From there, users can either send funds to another wallet or spend directly using a pre-funded debit card. It’s still early, but we’re testing with a small group of users who want to receive payments faster and avoid PayPal or wire fees.

If you’re a freelancer or digital nomads interested in trying it out, you can check it out here: https://useairsend.com
by submeta | 2025-10-13 06:46:29+00:00
I have a very extensive neovim setup, and was reluctant to try out Helix, but this morning I installed it, and I am totally amazed what this editor delivers out of the box! Woooow! This is unbelievable. Totally fast, smooth, and has all the settings I had configured over days in lua and with the telescope plugin. How did the makers of Helix know what us hackers need, want, as if they reviewed my config file :D
by HK-NC | 2025-10-13 06:47:09+00:00
Id argue that being a good fiction consumer is not letting a brand or franchise become your identity and know when to drop something. I saw the phantom menace when I was 12 and hated it. I was a massive Star Wars fan. I've seen nothing from Star Wars since and as far as I can tell I've missed nothing of value over 25 years. Terminator 3, Prometheus, Ghostbusters reboot, many more. We are not obliged to consume garbage.
by withinboredom | 2025-10-13 06:47:20+00:00
Between contributing to FrankenPHP (FrankenPHP.dev), I’ve been working on AtlasDb (https://github.com/bottledcode/atlas-db), its a distributed edge database — or it will be when I’m finished. There are a few unique things that make it more robust than etcd, and more scalable. Right now, it basically works except under certain types of contention, which I’ve been trying to solve for a couple of days now.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-10-13 06:48:35+00:00
As someone who recently made a post on how to change it just recently and has been thinking about why[1] Here are some of my thoughts.

Your article is great and that is a reality I also want to live in where everyone completely "owns" their device and lives free from proprietory stuff and you are approaching things from a hardware perspective because you maybe more familiar with that and I am more familiar with software (as compared to hardware) but here's the shocking part that I want to share

People don't even use open source software. Something which just works as compared to hardware. There are sooo many low hanging fruits for privacy in this world that we haven't picked.

Even if I have a completely open source laptop, if the only way to message my school's teacher some message that he will look or send me is whatsapp, all of that falls apart.

We need to advocate on both sides & I 100% agree that we should want the same thing for hardware as well (proprietory blobs Intel ME are scary with proprietory blobs) but we need to definitely prioritize in the process as well.

What are some low hanging fruits of privacy/open source we can share that people aren't using because they are unaware.

Also, as someone deeply interested in advocating for open source and to those comments on that ask HN I made, I am deeply saddened to see the state.

Since I feel from those comments on my post that there is no hope. Everyone expects a better UI/UX but nobody said anything about donating to the contributors.

We expect so much from open source and we give so little back as a society.

And its just funny that on my post which is about how to give back to open source contributors so that they might work full time on it so that they can make a better UI/UX, people expect the better UI/UX first. I can understand them but...

It becomes a chicken and egg problem. Open source is itself a chicken and egg problem. Why do we want unpaid labour abused by big tech which is then used for surveillance/ad-tech and then if we can't create a better UI/UX then stop trying to expect any payment. Why do we want perfection before giving open source guys some donations. They are competing with a company which might have full time guys working on a project funded by a VC fund only to enshitten stuff later.

Please, I genuinely want to change it. Give me any ideas on how we, the people interested in open source, can change/fix this chicken and egg problem.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45558430 (Ask HN: Why are most people not interested in FOSS/OSS and can we change that)

(also I should've probably changed it to say how can we change that but the HN limits the text of a title and I had to modify some of it, and now after writing it, I am genuinely not sure if we even a "how can we change" or if my title was correct and its now "can we even change")
by js8 | 2025-10-13 06:48:42+00:00
Formal verification is ultimately an epistemological problem, how do we know that our model of reality corresponds to reality?

People have commented that validation is different from verification, but I think validation can be done by formally specifying the environment the program runs in.

For example, the question whether user can do X in your software corresponds to a question, is there a sequence of user inputs such that the software plus operating system leads to the output X.

By including the environment (like the operating system) into the formal spec we could answer (in theory) such questions.

Even if the question is fuzzy, we can today formalize it with AI models. For example, if we ask, does paint program allow user to draw a rose? We can take a definition of a rose from a neural network that recognizes what a rose is, and formally verify the system of paint program and rose verifier given by the NN.
by grues-dinner | 2025-10-13 06:49:31+00:00
In any country? Yes. For example, Luxembourg (1200km² of farmland, 677,000 people).

In most countries: not really. And not to the extent that meat farming does, which is land-use broadly considered to be acceptable. One cow needs from under 1 to to 8 acres depending on how good the land is, and grazed land is roughly double cropland in the US. One cow produces roughly 10 people's beef intake in the US. Not to mention much of the cropland is already used for biofuel: diverting 60 million acres of arable land for energy is already a thing the US does. That 60 million acres of solar could produce 5 times current US electrical consumption.

One acre of solar makes roughly 30 US households (not people) of energy. Say 5-10 if you also need to cover current fossil fuel heating and transport. And obviously the energy mix won't be 100% solar.

So, on the face of it, it doesn't seem that solar power is an especially inefficient or wasteful use of land in most cases compared to other uses generally considered reasonable. And it also doesn't (further) damage land like intensive farming does. Whereas clearing natural land for solar could be more damaging.

Solar on roofs is not great in terms of coverage and is inefficient in terms of operational costs. Yes, the land was already used, so it's better then nothing and you can probably more or less recoup the house, so it's economical for the people who live there and the more the better. But you will still need to power denser housing and increasingly-electrified industry and transport.

Urban sprawl in the US is big, but still the US is only 3% urban. Even the UK, which is much denser is 8%. Farmland is far and away the biggest land user in most places.
by pllbnk | 2025-10-13 06:49:33+00:00
But then what's the point of buying a device like this in the first place? I agree with the sentiment, but I would only buy this device if I wanted to use Amazon's services. If I decided to customize it, I couldn't blame Amazon for refusing the service.

Perhaps there could be a government-mandated requirement to distinguish between "buy" and "rent". If you get a device bundled with a service, then there should be a subscription fee you have to pay for it without the ability to outright "buy" it. That would make it very obvious to people whether they are buying something to own or merely renting it. My take is very simplistic here but I hope I managed to convey the concept.
by musicale | 2025-10-13 06:49:40+00:00
Lots of games on Steam simply don't have great (or really any) controller support. Steam controller can sort of play some of them though since it can emulate mouse + keyboard etc.

My experience with Steam Input is ... OK in some cases. It's annoying that it seems to break games that actually do support the DualSense properly (though full haptics only work in wired mode) like FFXIV.
by bruce511 | 2025-10-13 06:49:59+00:00
Panels are often quoted has having a 20 year (or 25 year) lifespan. But it doesn't really work like that.

Panels degrade a bit (about 0.7%) every year. So after 25 years or so they're down to 80% of rated power. Or, put another way, after 25 years they're still delivering 80% of rated power.

Depending on space, it may be advantageous to replace panels at some point. Or you might add more and leave those alone.

But they don't just "stop working" - the performance drop off is pretty linear.
by seba_dos1 | 2025-10-13 06:52:00+00:00
And yet I've been using these devices for 17 years now (first Neo Freerunner, then Nokia N900, now Librem 5) and they've been good enough for day-to-day use. With some compromises, sometimes effort, maybe not for everyone, but they sure were usable by a determined person who cares.

I do have a replaceable battery, headphone jack, SD card slot and screws. I do some Web browsing, reliable calls/SMS, playing music for hours. It's starting to get a bit slow and old over the years, but I still see no reason to switch to any less user-respectful device.

What I worry about is whether there will be an upgrade path within the next decade. So far there was the Liberux campaign, and it failed. I already had to use an Android device as a secondary phone for 2-3 years before I got my Librem 5 because the N900 eventually aged too much to be usable for the Web and there was nothing on the market that could properly replace it. I don't want to need to do that again.

PinePhone is a low-end device with no support other than what you get from the community. It was a good option for those who couldn't afford anything else and wanted to invest their time and skills instead of money, but there are no miracles. The community of people who did actually care turned out to be small enough that you can still find some low-hanging fruits to work on today - and that's the thing I wanted to point out. I see lots of people who talk about how much they want Linux phones, but it's a tiny subset that actually acts like it. They won't fall from the sky - not when the sales of existing devices can't finance developing their successors.
by pamelafox | 2025-10-13 06:52:39+00:00
I like this point, for people hiring DevRel:

"Look in your community. Find users of your product or users of your competitor’s product. "

I'm a current DevRel-er myself, and someone recently reached out looking to fill a DevRel role. I told them that I wouldn't actually be a good fit for their product (a CLI tool, and I'm not as die-hard of a CLI user as other devs), and suggested they look within their current user community. That's not always possible, especially for new products, but if a tool is sufficiently used, it's really nice to bring in someone who's genuinely used and loved the product before starting the role.

My hiring history:

* Google Maps DevRel, 2006-2011: I first used Google Maps in my "summer of mashups", just making all kinds of maps, and even used it in a college research project. By the time I started the role, I knew the API quite well. Still had lots to learn in the GIS space, as I was coming from web dev, but at least I had a lot of project-based knowledge to build on.

* Microsoft, 2023-present: My experience was with VS Code and GitHub, two products that I used extensively for software dev. Admittedly, I'd never used Azure (only Google App Engine and AWS) so I had to train up on that rapidly. My experience with the other clouds has helped me with this MS cloud fortunately.
by gantengx | 2025-10-13 06:53:16+00:00
I built a routine management app for my kids (7 and 10) called "Oh Yah!" after their constant "Oh yah! I forgot" responses about homework

Link: https://ohyahapp.com

Interesting challenge was designing for minimal distractions while keeping setup simple for parents. Timer-locked navigation so kids can see what's next but can't start other tasks or switch profiles. Also refactored from schedule-centric (nightmare to maintain) to task-definitions as first-class citizens, which made creating schedules way easier

React Native/Expo + Firebase. On the App Store after months of dogfooding with the family
by WA | 2025-10-13 06:54:04+00:00
I use Mail on macOS, but occasionally the Fastmail web app in a browser. Here are a bunch of things I use the web app for besides configuration stuff:

- Block sender (whole domain)

- Report phishing

- Mark as spam

Because that stuff should be done on the server, not on the client and if you mark stuff as spam in Mail, it's on the client afaik.
by ho_schi | 2025-10-13 06:54:15+00:00
Electron is Flash for the Desktop.

https://josephg.com/blog/electron-is-flash-for-the-desktop/

* Non-native UI toolkit * Massive waste of resources (CPU, RAM, Battery, Disk). Consumption of 500 MB RAM for idle is the norm. * Slow. * Often issues with autonomous, local operation. * Security -> Browser Engine

It is always better to use a well-working application with your native UI-Toolkit:

* Linux: Evolution, Geary, K-Mail, Claws, whatever TUI application you prefer. And Thunderbird. * macOS: Apple Mail or Thunderbird. * Windows: Please. Stop using Windows. You harm other people. Start with using Thunderbird :)

The “Electron” from Signal is one of the best applications using Electron. It is fat. Even in this case people resist. Signal isn’t supporting a stable API but: https://github.com/boxdot/gurk-rs

TUI :)

Electron is used, when a company wants to save on developer. All users pay with suffering from bad UI and their hardware resources. In this case it is something nobody asked for?
by davedx | 2025-10-13 06:54:31+00:00
It’s a good idea, but this kind of thing is my problem with linters: “B006: Tables with uppercase names/columns”

They usually end up expanding in scope into places they shouldn’t be. Consider also react linters, full of rules that shouldn’t always be blanket applied or create tons of pointless busywork.

My ORM will decide the naming of my database tables, thank you very much. It’s much more qualified than a linter, which should stay in its lane.
by Intermernet | 2025-10-13 06:55:39+00:00
The mechanism is as old as the hills. You pay for favourable conditions for your business, and unfavourable conditions for your competitors. Australia has a classic history of political figures being given very comfortable jobs in the private sector after they've greased the wheel for their largest donors. This applies to tech, communications, finance, property development and probably every other money making sector.

When contracts are awarded to companies based on lobbying and donations it stymies competition.

The following quote is from the report linked at [1]. It's worth reading the entirety of that report.

"the growing politicisation of public service, exemplified by political appointments to government bodies (Griffiths et al. 2022), may spill over into the contract market. Links between politics, donations, and contracts may negatively impact competition and firm entry".

[1]: https://e61.in/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Political-Economy-...
by oezi | 2025-10-13 06:55:56+00:00
Let me understand the AI argument you are making: Are you saying that if AI is valuable (which is likely) then not having cheap electricity is going to be downside?

I would have two objections:

- Data center operation and construction is only a fraction of the value creation. If Europe is behind on the AI race it won't matter where the data centers are because the profits are going to go to US companies (as with Google and Facebook so far).

- What makes you think that Nuclear would help in any way to have cheap energy? Nuclear has become by far the most expensive energy generation method. Building new nuclear is unfeasible in the west.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-10-13 06:56:58+00:00
Mobile is the battleground but you are forgetting how damn easy it is on android (atleast right now before google's attestation) it is to install f-droid and then install open source.

People don't even do that. They don't even search for software on f-droid first and try the UI. Nope they go to play store and search software which is going to advocate for closed software because ads/review buying...

You really have to expect something from the general populus as well imo. Maybe they don't know about f-droid but people say to me its not about knowledge but rather caring, they don't care and I don't know wtf to say to that.

It's a very weird chicken and egg problem.
by asah | 2025-10-13 06:56:59+00:00
new PostgreSQL index type which outperforms B-Trees for many common cases. As a wild experiment, I'm entirely vibe coding this and not hand-writing it.

It works by specializing for the common case of read-only workloads and short, fixed-length keys/includes (int, uuid, text<=32b, numeric, money, etc - not json) and (optionally) repetitive key-values (a common case with short fixed-length keys). These kinds of indexes/tables are found in nearly every database for lookups, many-many JOIN relationships, materialized views of popular statistics, etc.

Currently, it's "starting to work" with 100% code coverage and performance that usually matches/beats btree in query speed. Due to compression, it can consume as little as 99.95% less memory (!) and associated "pressure" on cache/ram/IO. Of course, there are degenerate cases (e.g. all unique UUID, many INCLUDEs, etc) where it's about the same size. As with all indexes, performance is limited by the PostgreSQL executor's interface which is record-at-a-time with high overhead records. I'd love help coding a FDW which allows aggregates (e.g. count()) to be "pushed down" and executed in still requires returning every record instead of a single final answer. OTT help would be a FDW interface where substantial query plans could be "pushed down" e.g. COUNT().

The plan is to publish and open source this work.

I'd welcome collaborators and have lots of experience working on small teams at major companies. I'm based in NYC but remote is fine.

- must be willing to work with LLMs and not "cheat" by hand-writing code.

- Usage testing: must be comfortable with PostgreSQL and indexes. No other experience required!

- Benchmarking, must know SQL indexes and have benchmarking experience - no pgsql internals required.

- For internals work, must know C and SQL. PostgreSQL is tricky to learn but LLMs are excellent teachers!

- Scripting code is in bash, python and Makefile, but again this is all vibe coded and you can ask LLMs what it's doing.

- any environment is fine. I'm using linux/docker (multi-core x86 and arm) but would love help with Windows, native MacOS and SIMD optimization.

- I'm open to porting/moving to Rust, especially if that provides a faster path to restricted environments like AWS RDS/Aurora.

- your ideas welcome! but obviously, we'll need to divide and conquer since the LLMs are making rapid changes to the core and we'll have to deal with code conflicts.

DM to learn more (see my HN profile)
by pamelafox | 2025-10-13 06:57:14+00:00
Ooo bobcats! I live in the bay area near Tilden Park, and I spent a while on iNaturalist trying to figure out where the bobcats hang out, as my 6 year old is very interested in wild cats. I realized sadly that bobcats are usually out at morning/evening, when we are not in the parks. Still used the bobcat stalking as an excuse to take a walk in Tilden today though.

What's your approach to finding the bobcat locations for your shot?
by pjmlp | 2025-10-13 06:57:21+00:00
We aren't in the 1980's any longer, most of these systems are way more powerful than a typical 16 bit home computer, and incrediblly as it sounds, those 16 bit home computers still had better tooling than most MCUs have nowadays.

Anything that brings MCU tooling into the 21st century is very much welcomed.