MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by swombat | 2025-10-01 07:22:27+00:00
Bitcoin's success is extremely easy to understand.

Socially:

Some people don't trust governments to handle one of the most powerful collaboration technologies ever invented (money). All financial systems before Bitcoin were government controlled. Some have behaved in a trustworthy way, many have not. And over the longer term they all tend to mess it up eventually.

So these people set out to build an alternative that they believed governments couldn't control.

Technically:

The interesting key advance that made Bitcoin interesting and successful was coming up with an algorithm that solved the problem of getting parties that don't trust each other at all, to collaborate on maintaining a global ledger to everyone's benefits, without them having to even know about each other.

This is already a feature of money (I don't need to know about you to have indirect financial ties to you) but was not true of the financial system itself until Bitcoin.
by paganel | 2025-10-01 07:25:08+00:00
> I think that's largely down to people not taking EU elections as seriously as national elections.

No, they don't represent anyone because we, the European people, are voting based on lists, we do not select our own "representatives" by name and surname. This "contact your representative" trope is an American thingie, which, like many American thingies, has no place outside of its original context.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-10-01 07:25:13+00:00
More anecdote too but worth noting that of the friends of mine from childhood and high school who did later turn into really bad apples, all but one had come from broken or dysfunctional homes and social landscapes. The only exception to that was one friend from a good family who later ended up serving over a decade for kidnapping and armed robbery. He had made friends with a pretty rough crowd well before that. In all cases, seeing some porn before they were adults or seeing other nasty online content had only the most absurdly dubious connection to anything about their future conduct.

If anything, I see rules for content control in minors as a very convenient step by government to kill two birds with one stone: On the one hand, implement more social control, surveillance and normalization of restricting access to unpredictable media (dangerous that for government bureaucrats who want to control narratives). On the other hand, offset blame for systemic problems in a society on "dangerous online content" instead of government's own potential failures in managing a legal system, mental health services or economic administration and etc.
by selim-now | 2025-10-01 07:25:26+00:00
well, fine-tuning is possible on consumer hardware, the problem is that it would be slow and that you're limited in the size of the dataset you can use in the process.

In case you would want to follow the approach in this paper and synthetically augment a dataset – using an LLM for that (instead of a smaller model) just makes sense and then the entire process cannot be easily run on your local machine.
by junaru | 2025-10-01 07:25:42+00:00
Every "protect the children" law is just a gaslight attempt to push a package of other Orwelian laws. It's been like that for atleast half a century - even Simpsons parodied this with "think of the children" back in 1997.

It's good companies are walking out of jurisdictions where FUD is the basis of a law.
by BatteryMountain | 2025-10-01 07:27:43+00:00
Why are children on the internet? Why are the parents not being fined for being irresponsible? Give the kids a loaded gun, its the same as giving them access to the internet. The internet is not a place for children to begin with. Why try to bend the internet to conform? It will destroy the internet as it is as well as all it's freedoms. Oh and it probably won't stop/protect them, as thousands of new sites come & go every year, so impossible to control. Its better to try regulate the children than to regulate the internet.
by yculinkedin | 2025-10-01 07:27:58+00:00
I have 2, not yet sure where to focus on so both for now

https://YouGotPicked.com - A simple list picker tool (for when you can't decide between options)

https://Drop.Top - A lightweight emoji-based feedback widget in minutes, so real users can drop contextual bugs, suggestions & ratings — all tied to session replays. See trends, sentiment & hotspots in real time, then feed feedback straight into your Jira/Slack/analytics stack.
by jonplackett | 2025-10-01 07:28:15+00:00
What you all (most likely technical people) need is someone who teaches HOW a language works.

Please check out Michel Thomas.[1]

You will be speaking sentences and understanding how words connect together in the first 20 minutes.

He is the only reason I speak any Spanish at all, and it’s a borderline miracle I can now speak fluently despite being the absolute worst language learner as a kid.

The BBC made a documentary about him (teaching French) where he goes into a UK school, says “Give me your worst pupils” and then teaches them most of the years long curriculum in a couple of weeks.[2]

He was also in the French resistance a Nazi interrogator in the 2nd world war. [3]

An absolute dude. Would be my #1 historical dinner party guest!

1. https://www.youtube.com/live/XeQODLgjQu8?si=gIcXoh7XwsGIaXhD

2. https://youtu.be/mr_NUWhYASg

3. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Thomas
by eitland | 2025-10-01 07:28:37+00:00
FWIW, as someone who has chosen to pay for Kagi for three years now:

- I agreee fake news is a real problem

- I pay for Kagi because I get more much more precise results[1]

- They have a public feedback forum and I think every time I have pointed out a problem they have come back with an answer and most of the time also a fix

- When Kagi introduced AI summaries in search they made it opt in, and unlike every other AI summary provider I had seen at that point they have always pointed to the sources. The AI might still hallucinate[2] but if it does I am confident that if I pointed it out to them my bug report would be looked into and I would get a good answer and probably even a fix.

[1]: I hear others say they get more precise Google results, and if so, more power to them. I have used Google enthusiastically since 2005, as the only real option from 2012, as fallback for DDG since somewhere between 2012 and 2022 and basically only when I am on other peoples devices or to prove a point since I started using Kagi in 2022

[2]: haven't seen much of that, but that might be because of the kind of questions I ask and the fact that I mostly use ordinary search.
by kelnos | 2025-10-01 07:28:53+00:00
You're presenting a false dichotomy, though. No one in this subthread is expecting an expert computer user. We're just expecting them to have their development environment already set up, and to be familiar and comfortable with their tools.

If they come in with a Linux laptop but aren't comfortable with the command line, that's weird. If they come in with a Mac or Windows laptop and do solid work only with GUI tools, that's fine. If the job requires being able to use specific tools (command-line or GUI or whatever), then the interview should evaluate that as well.
by flakeoil | 2025-10-01 07:29:09+00:00
The article does not discuss what to use instead of Microsoft's products, it discusses a better architecture for authorization than the one Microsoft uses. The architecture which Microsoft uses is flawed and too many companies rely on it.

The solution in short: "...distributed in the form a key who’s pieces live across a decentralized network."

If looking for alternatives to Microsoft's products I would recommend Infomaniak [0]. They have a fairly complete solution of business tools (email, contacts, calendar, cloud storage, file sharing, chat, video meetings, docs and sheets).

[0] https://www.infomaniak.com
by pwdisswordfishz | 2025-10-01 07:30:42+00:00
I don't understand why people insist on simulating a poor substitute for RAII with a feature that is itself almost decent RAII.

> If malloc fails and returns NULL, the cleanup function will still be called, and there’s no simple way to add a guard inside free_ptr.

free(NULL) is a no-op, this is a non-issue. I don't know what's so hard about a single if statement anyway even if this were an issue.
by mallowdram | 2025-10-01 07:30:57+00:00
It's simply the arbitrary as a conduit metaphor to the real, nothing more. ie how debt appears to precede barter. Of course that's not proven, we have no Time Machine to the quaternary. That we develop ever more complex ways of generating value from arbitrary from schema is simply a function of the primate capacity for bias as status. The arbitrary suborns this as a metaphor.
by port11 | 2025-10-01 07:31:11+00:00
I'm the ‘enforcer’ of a fairly large board games meetup, and the CoC is very simple: there's 3 rules. Newcomers are especially likely to ignore some of these rules, so I notify them the first 2 times. 3rd strike and they're out.

What I like about the simplicity of our CoC is that anyone can read it in a few seconds, and we can point it out to people without seeming bureaucratic or annoying.

Happy to share with others. Complicated CoC documents I've seen at other groups don't seem to do anything besides giving the organisers a feeling of power/that they're doing something. Simplicity might be key here.
by raooll | 2025-10-01 07:31:13+00:00
Hey Joshua,

I have been struggling with the same paradox, all AI moat seems to be to remove humans. Although that might be possible in a distant future I don't see it happening anytime soon.

Instead I want AI to be my assistant like and IDE, where it help me get things done faster that I can do it by myself but I am always in command. Also what if there is an AI assistant for each code repo, that understands that repo in its entirely and is downloaded when you clone the repo, it has deep knowledge on the code base, it scope and restrictions, how the code changed over time etc etc.

We can provide Small language models for existing codebases for large organizations like banks which run cobol or some other older tech. This AI then empowers there limited developers to punch way above their numbers and help them developer better, cleaner and faster.

This is one way I am thinking on AI/LLMS as they keep shrinking exponentially and keep becoming more powerful.

I think specialized single purpose embedded AI/LLMS will be the future.
by DeepSeaTortoise | 2025-10-01 07:31:46+00:00
With very few exceptions, politicians do know perfectly fine what they are doing.

Each of them has a large budget to hire several staffers presenting every issue to them in ways they understand best, each government has a huge apparatus of various departments with domain experts analyzing every situation from every reasonable perspective and if all of that fails, barely and university or institute would fail to respond to a request for input from an elected official.

Any and all ignorance of any significant politician is by choice. You can't push the oppression a decision causes to the maximum you'll get away with at that point in time without understanding the issue first.
by BatteryMountain | 2025-10-01 07:32:10+00:00
Or, just ban children from the internet, same as gun ownership for 12yo's. Fine/imprison parents. This is a parenting problem, not a technical/business problem. Remove the supply of children and things will get better. A business cannot make laws or override laws with ToS and invent their own moral compasses - rather it is the sole responsibility of the parent on what their child gets exposed to (whether politics, porn, weird beliefs, spam, chat/user generated content). The parents have been getting a free pass all this time.
by willahmad | 2025-10-01 07:32:10+00:00
Of course primary cause could be ZIRP, but AI definitely accelerated the problem.

Interns at big tech maybe impacted less, because their systems are so complex, but when I look at job boards or talk with engineers I see they're mentioning interns less, AI assisted coding more.

Bar for the interns is higher now, why do I need 3 interns to polish the product if I can complete 70% of the job with AI and hire 1 intern to fix other parts
by KingMob | 2025-10-01 07:32:19+00:00
Life is not a high-school debate club. An _ad hominem_ accusation only really works if the attack is unrelated.

I don't know about ESR, but DHH has acted in ways that make it difficult to believe he is making a good-faith, unbiased argument on CoCs, which means I'm not obligated to reciprocate and treat his argument fairly. (DHH oversaw a list at 37Signals making racist fun of customer names, and overruled his employees who complained, eventually leading to a mass walkout.)

To put it in Bayesian terms, the prior that he's making a bad faith argument is higher than any random person, and should be treated as such.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-10-01 07:32:42+00:00
>And avoiding putting stuff in your body that makes your immune system react like air pollution, microplastics,

Good luck avoiding either of those. For the first one, if you live in a heavily industrialized or urban area and can't just leave for X reasons, should you perhaps breathe less?

As for microplastics, from all I've read about them, they're now in nearly everything and many modern humans who haven't spent their lives living and eating/drinking entirely off the land in the deep remote country are unavoidably saturated with them to the point where (need to find the source again) the average modern adult human in the developed world has something like a teaspoon worth of microplastic inside their body. They've become essentially impossible to avoid if you eat or consume any modern food item.
by hanwenn | 2025-10-01 07:33:36+00:00
Thanks for writing the blog post; it was a fascinating read!

I was curious about a couple of things:

* Have you considered future extensions where you can start the VM before you completed the FS copy?

* You picked XFS over ZFS and BTRFS. Any reason why XFS in particular?

* You casually mention that you wrote 'otterlink', your own hypervisor. Isn't that by itself a complicated effort worthy of a blog post? Or is it just mixing and matching existing libraries from the Rust ecosystem?
by whyoh | 2025-10-01 07:33:39+00:00
>it doesn't make any noise

You can hear the fan at full load, especially on the M4 Pro. I really wish Apple went with a larger case and fan for that chip, which would allow quieter cooling.

Also, many units are affected by idle (power supply) buzzing: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255853533?sortBy=rank

The Mac Mini is quieter than a typical PC, but it's not literally silent like, say, a smartphone.
by Timwi | 2025-10-01 07:33:59+00:00
The TikTok feed is an amalgamation of posts from lots of people who aren't collaborating. The Song of Ice and Fire is a single work by a single author (or so I assume). So it's more like you're reading a single humongous post that has been “liked” (bought, positively reviewed, critically appraised) by a shitton of people, compared to a firehose of morsels that barely anyone cares about.
by bildung | 2025-10-01 07:34:00+00:00
Words are just noises. Think of them as pointers. They point to a concept in the brain. What concept that may be differs from person to person. But as long as the words point to something, they aren't used wrongly.

The idea that there was some point in history were the pointer target was officially designated to be x is just false. That point in time never existed.
by KnuthIsGod | 2025-10-01 07:34:31+00:00
Duolingo is a good example of terminal enshittification.

"[I]f it’s our content, as in, like, our learning content, there’s so much of that - thousands and thousands and thousands of kind of sentences and words and paragraphs. That is mostly done by computers, and we probably spot-check it. But if it’s things like the user interface of Duolingo, where we say - like, you know, the button says quit, and we have to translate, that is all done with humans. And we spend a lot of effort on that, but that’s because each one of those is highly valuable.

Yes, the button that says ‘quit’ is more valuable than the learning material, which is only ‘probably’ spot-checked."
by KaiserPro | 2025-10-01 07:35:59+00:00
Remember that GDPR is about storage and processing of personal information, not data created by a user. They are related by not 1:1 linked.

If the username is removed, and there is no reasonable way to link the user to the comment, then its not PII. I would hope that this is logical because its not personally identifiable. (caveats apply here like if you put your home address in every comment. However is it reasonable to expect a user to do that in a public forum? probably not. )

As you can request that your username is deleted here, and assuming they are deleted properly, then HN is reasonably following the user's request. Hence my assertion that HN is GDPR compliant enough to no worry.
by rawoke083600 | 2025-10-01 07:37:19+00:00
I went down this road with their Japanese.. in summary, their focussing on "words" vs "phrasing/talking" from day one like Pimsleur was, wat killed it for me.

On that note Pimsleur was/is EXCELLENT for me: 1. Focusing on phrases vs words 2. Talking from Day 1 3. Lesson oriented.
by fancyfredbot | 2025-10-01 07:37:21+00:00
People who are content feel less need to take risks by accepting dubious statements without proof. They have what they need so why risk it for more?

Sceptical people will be grounded by what we know to be true. They will explore new ideas but will not be swept up by them. We need people like that or we'll waste our time on flights of fancy. But we need the irrational optimists to explore new ideas too. It's a classic exploration vs exploitation trade-off.
by ZuLuuuuuu | 2025-10-01 07:37:52+00:00
Looks like M5 Macbooks will still have an edge over PC equivalents, but I am glad that with the new Qualcomm CPUs, PCs are at least getting close. Unfortunately Intel and AMD are falling so much behind that they cannot compete on laptop form factor anymore. The best Intel and AMD laptop CPUs, regardless of their TDP, are still around 3000 score on Geekbench single core.
by kelnos | 2025-10-01 07:38:08+00:00
From my perspective, I think it shows poor judgment that you've chosen hardware where you can't get your webcam and bluetooth headset to work under Linux. Or you haven't bought a wired headset and a USB webcam that you've researched and know works properly under Linux. It sounds like the alternative you've chosen is to take interviews using an OS and development environment you're not comfortable in, which seems like a foolish choice to make.

These days it's not difficult to buy hardware with Linux in mind, even on a budget. (And if you have two computers, I feel like budget is probably not really a problem for you.)
by n2d4 | 2025-10-01 07:40:11+00:00
Hindsight bias, and you're wrong by saying that the $5k were conditional on the line item change (they weren't). Here's the quote from the indictment:

> JAVICE responded to Scientist-1 that same day, “Can you send the invoice back at $18k and just one line item for data analysis?” > > Scientist-1 replied, “Wow. Thank you. Here is the new invoice.” Attached to this email was a new invoice, now for $18,000, with the previous specific descriptions removed and replaced by the one-line description, “Data science services”

It is very common for large companies to ask for changes to line items as it helps the finance team categorize. Also, it's clear from this conversation that the scientist believed the $5k to be a generous tip.

Even if all of that weren't the case, this should be a case of innocence until proven guilty; it's easy to see the crime in hindsight, but if you suspect nothing that thought might just not cross your mind in the first place.
by Stratoscope | 2025-10-01 07:41:36+00:00
If you ever find yourself on Highway 101 south of Port Orford, Oregon, Prehistoric Gardens is a must-visit:

https://maps.app.goo.gl/nncu1vYRtGoK83Rg6

My sister and I went there with our mom and our dachshund Bismark when I was a kid. They had a "no dogs allowed" sign, but we figured it wouldn't hurt to ask. The guy in the ticket booth looked at Bismark and asked, "Is that a dog or a Texas flea?"

We found out that Texas fleas were allowed in!
by jeroenhd | 2025-10-01 07:43:28+00:00
Not the author, but:

> Any reason why XFS in particular?

XFS is still the default filesystem of choice for many enterprise systems. For instance, Red Hat states in their manual [1]:

In general, use XFS unless you have a specific use case for ext4.

There are good reasons to choose other file systems, but if you just want good performance on simple storage, XFS is a pretty good default.

[1] https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_...
by m101 | 2025-10-01 07:44:50+00:00
Some may think that harm doesn't matter, but perhaps actual fines are unjustified without the presence of actual harm.

And yes, perhaps the rules should be followed regardless of what they are, but perhaps the government bureaucracy is such that it's just too hard to change rules.

I'm one to think that the UK is generally overregulated, excessively obsessed with safety, and the regulation ethos is inconsistently applied. The government and civil service are also incompetent to the extreme. There also isn't a culture of accountability in government.

I also think that regulation is often simply used as a revenue generation measure, which is not what it is supposed to be about.

Perhaps a good middle ground is for a company that is at threat of investigation is simply asked to leave the UK or pay a fine.
by vulnex | 2025-10-01 07:45:29+00:00
The Open Source Hex Editor v0.3 has been published.

. Added Kaitai Struct format support for advanced binary parsing · Implemented progressive loading for files up to 1.5GB . Added chunk-based file processing for improved performance . New export functionality with multiple format support . Enhanced Visual View and Hex Viiew with color scheme toggle . Added context menu for hex operations . Improved dark mode support and set by default . Added format search and loading indicators . Cleaaner UI and better error handling . JSON export functionality updated . New help dialog and about page . Many bug fixes and improvements
by vbezhenar | 2025-10-01 07:45:33+00:00
I don't understand this too. Terminal need to buffer tty output (so it's not the slow part of pipeline) and display latest visible lines. GPU is not needed for that. Even 10 FPS is enough for smooth CLI work. I don't type that fast or read that fast anyway.

That said, all pixels are rendered via GPU anyway. So using GPU API seems like the most appropriate API and if it means that terminal could work with 100500 FPS, why not?
by jbstack | 2025-10-01 07:46:41+00:00
Can someone explain to me why I should want my terminal to be hardware-accelerated? I use my terminal to get stuff done by running commands and viewing the output. Sometimes I might run a TUI but I've certainly never found one that required a GPU to run. If I want to run a full-blown GUI I run it from my WM / DE. Am I missing something here?
by __alexs | 2025-10-01 07:47:10+00:00
> All financial systems before Bitcoin were government controlled

Company scrip, community currency, hawala have all existed for centuries.

Also Bitcoin is also government controlled. It lacks the anonymity required to protect participants making it trivial for nation states to influence. And it does nothing to prevent the centralisation of capital that causes so much manipulation in traditional currency systems.

> And over the longer term they all tend to mess it up eventually.

Over the long term the probability of failure of all systems is 1.
by Koffiepoeder | 2025-10-01 07:47:15+00:00
Saying the internet is not a place for children is like saying the street is not for children. Full of drug dealers, cars and danger!

Yet learning how to cross the street is an essential skill in life. They are also filled with flowers, pathways to playgrounds and much more. And that's why children are not forbidden on the streets.

My point being: let's educate instead of regulate. "Regulating the children" is silly and countereffective.