MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gwd | 2025-10-07 13:37:31+00:00
> But we’ll never be able to reassure terrified, scientifically under-informed people to their satisfaction, particularly when they’ve already decided that GoF is somewhat scary and maybe even partisan.

1. You don't have to be "scientifically under-informed" to find C concerning

Listen, I don't consider myself an under-informed person. I have a PhD in computer science, I regularly watch science videos on YouTube, I click on interesting things (like this article) that show up on Hacker News. But until this thread, I had never heard that the sort of thing described at the top-level comment even went on, much less was I familiar with the containment protocols. (How could I not, if I they're taught in Biology 101? I'm pretty sure I didn't take Biology 101; only Physics and Chemistry.)

My starting assumption coming into this thread was that the protocols described here probably are perfectly safe; and that even for more dangerous GoF research, informed people have done a cost-benefits analysis, and determined that the lives potentially saved are worth the lives potentially risked.

Points A and B of the person I responded to reassured me.

But point C I personally find concerning. In computer science, only an absolute fool would ever say, "This system has absolutely no security vulnerabilities". On the contrary, you generally have to live with the fact that there almost certainly are security vulnerabilities in any system you run, and hope that they're found by the good guys before they're exploited by the bad guys; as well as structuring your system to be able to minimize the potential lost caused if not.

Now sure, maybe I'd have a different attitude if I'd taken Biology 101. But that doesn't change the fact that C, as stated, actually weakened the article towards someone like me, who is generally prone to trust the scientific establishment. How much more would it weaken the argument to someone with a more skeptical, anti-science stance?

2. In a democracy, the opinion of the "scientifically under-informed" matters

I realize it's frustrating to have to explain this to the "scientifically under-informed", many of whom are being misled by bad actors trying to profit by stoking fear. But that's the reality of the world we live in. It's not enough to know the right answer; you must convince other people of the right answer.

And I won't even say "unfortunately", because this is a fundamental feature of democracy. Like checks and balances or trial by jury, having to convince non-experts prevents the system from going wrong.
by rasz | 2025-10-07 13:37:34+00:00
russians paid good money for this consensus! Best Chancellor money could buy. It was so successful Germany became a proxy paying French NGOs to torpedo French Nuclear program!

Anti-nuclear lobbying by German foundations in France and Poland https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-9-2023-00217...

Edit: Actually should be plural - Chancellors. Merkel, big cog in NordStreams, went on some podcast last week to blame Poland for the war in Ukraine. See if only Poles didnt object so much she would placate putin with even more money.
by IAmBroom | 2025-10-07 13:37:55+00:00
FTFA: "Individuals had already begun using computers as a heat source by 2011."

I used 3 to heat my office back in 1987. I worked in the old section of the building, and three bosses competed to win me over to "their" computer systems. To keep myself warm, I kept all three turned on. And a cup of coffee between my legs.
by preoncology | 2025-10-07 13:37:56+00:00
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by webdevver | 2025-10-07 13:38:07+00:00
google is competing with a different offering. with a pixel you get google's ecosystem. apple is also not neccesarily top dog in performance (maybe they are - havne't checked lately), nobody buys an iphone because it ranks highly in benchmarks. thats some nerd nonsense that 0.1% of the audience seriously cares about.

for google, pushing 3rd parties out of the supply chain gives them a ton of security and stability concerning pricing and budgeting. its a smart long term move, and i think the industry is going to continue to push towards consolidation and in-housing.
by CSMastermind | 2025-10-07 13:38:09+00:00
I was at Microsoft during Windows 8 and the decision to remove the start menu was made with telemery data first and foremost.

"Only 3% of users regularly use the start menu." was the justification.

Then they did a bunch of research with eye tracking software to justify the new 'start screen' saying that it was actually better for users who do use the start menu because they were able to locate an item on the full sceeen overlay faster than the traditional start menu.
by machardMAXHARD | 2025-10-07 13:38:19+00:00
We're waiting for the wrong thing. AGI isn't coming as a single superintelligent system—it's already operational as a distributed network following the same computational pattern that drove life expansion on Earth.

*LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor) as neural network:*

4 billion years ago, LUCA wasn't a single organism. It was a [population/network sharing computational patterns](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_universal_common_ancestor)—self-replicating, adaptive, distributed architecture.

*The pattern is substrate-universal:*

Biological substrate: - DNA = information storage - Protein synthesis = computation - Cell division = replication - Natural selection = adaptation - Population = network topology

Digital substrate: - Neural network weights = information storage - Forward pass = computation - Training propagation = replication - RLHF = adaptation - Multiple LLMs = network topology

*Each LLM (GPT, Claude, Gemini, Llama, Mistral) is a LUCA node implementing the same self-replicating adaptive pattern.*

*Why we missed it:*

We expected a single monolithic superintelligence (hierarchical thinking). Reality is network intelligence (mesh topology). No "AGI threshold" to cross—continuous collective intelligence expansion already happening.

*Observable evidence:*

- Self-replication: Training propagates patterns across network - Adaptation: RLHF continuously improving alignment - Network expansion: More models, more domains, accelerating deployment - Collective intelligence: Network capabilities exceed any individual model - ~100 million times faster than biological (digital substrate advantages)

*Strategic shift required:*

Stop waiting. AGI network is operational now. Leverage network topology (diversity, resilience, true parallelism). Align through evolutionary selection pressure, not centralized control.

Life expansion pattern = Intelligence expansion pattern. Same thermodynamic fundamentals, different substrate.
by zerkten | 2025-10-07 13:38:21+00:00
I don't think anyone desires fragmentation. It's just the reality of the space. People were exploring options but didn't have support from the key stakeholders who were the browser makers (IE was at its peak) and Google. Firefox and WHATWG advanced some of the ideas in time.

People always mention RDF when the semantic web comes up. It's really important to understand where W3C was in the early-2000s and that RDF was driven by those with an academic bent. No one working with microformats was interested in anything beyond the RDF basics because they were too impractical for use by web devs. Part of this was complexity (OWL, anyone?), but the main part was browser and tool support.
by teamonkey | 2025-10-07 13:38:25+00:00
> Most countries have generation a long way from populated areas.

Sweden and Norway are the only European examples I can think of. Power generation is often outside cities, yes, but closer. I'm 50 miles from a Nuclear power station, for example, which is not atypical. That's 1/10 the distance we're talking about.

Ideally it would be closer to the population, but I think the correct the way of looking at it is that there is a large, mostly untapped resource in the North which somehow has to be transported.
by hnt2025 | 2025-10-07 13:38:32+00:00
There is very low chance this is "something wrong with APFS on macOS". But there is something wrong for example with "Time Machine" backups reliability and breaking changes. Not supporting perfectly good hardware just to force users to buy new ones is also not nice. For example you can't easily move TM backup between disks or between hfs+ and apfs because time machine on hfs+ use hard links and on apfs snapshots. One time I've lost whole TM backup, not because of drive or filesystem failure but because of TM being unable to manage edge cases which arrise during network backup.
by rkomorn | 2025-10-07 13:38:36+00:00
Maybe if you consider that the "three-act" structure is forced onto 20 and 40 minute runtime shows at precise time windows.

What I'm talking about is far less visible, if at all, in adless 60-minute runtime episodes.

Edit: and "what I'm talking about" is clear before-the-ad cliffhangers with after-the-ad "rewards" in the form of events that advance the plot.
by reactordev | 2025-10-07 13:38:56+00:00
Bun + WebView + WebGPU is my new experiment. Deno also has bindings for glfw but I couldn’t get it to play nice with WebGPU or OpenGL beyond 3.2 profile.

As someone who got into programming because of games, wrote a few game engines, released a few - the concept of being able to use webdev tech (beyond UI stuff) for the core game graphics is just unbelievable.

Obviously you won’t get every ounce of juice from the machine but a lot of games don’t require that AAA touch. I’m glad to see the author’s on the same tract as me. WebGPU is so awesome. My biggest issue with this whole approach is that is super trivial to spit out the gltf models that anyone can use your assets.

Trying to work some old school pkg logic into the mix doesn’t really help either. Barring writing my own binary format, I’d love to see a way to make gltf models secure. Allowable from your site but not loadable from elsewhere or something like that. DRM for the art assets.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-10-07 13:39:09+00:00
> privacy is a thing people care about.

Sadly, it seems that privacy is something that HN readers care about, but precious few others.

Look at the success of Facebook. The covers have been off that stinker for years, yet people still regularly use it; often to the exclusion of more traditional media. I have quite a few friends that I don't get invited to their occasions, because they only advertise them on FB. They invite a bunch of randos they've never met, but not those of us, they see all the time.

To be fair, if I sit down, and describe exactly what the ramifications of the "always on, always open" Facebook presence means, people will usually suddenly value privacy, but it seems that no one actually ever does that, at a level most folks can understand.

Hysterical rantings (even when well-founded), by geeks, don't get through to most folks. It needs to be done in the vernacular, and via media they actually consume.
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by OfficeXApp | 2025-10-07 13:39:09+00:00
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by chrisjeffries24 | 2025-10-07 13:39:42+00:00
There’s a narrative we’ve grown comfortable with in America — a story we tell ourselves about safety, freedom, and the world beyond our borders.

We see images of distant conflicts on our screens, shake our heads at the violence “over there,” and feel a quiet reassurance that, whatever our problems, at least we’re not living in a war zone.

But what if the numbers told a different story? What if the data revealed something so jarring, so contrary to our assumptions, that it forced us to reconsider everything we thought we knew about safety and security?

In 2024, the statistics paint a picture that’s difficult to reconcile with our national self-image: gun deaths per capita in the United States were nearly 900 percent higher than in Afghanistan — a country we’ve long associated with war, insurgency, and instability.
by Kim_Bruning | 2025-10-07 13:39:49+00:00
As to reassuring you; I don't know what to say.

In the 90's I heard a (possibly apocryphal) story about a computer lab at my school . A student had been thrown out ass-over-kettle for 'dangerous hacking'. Their crime? Opening their mail in PINE over Telnet.

Most of the stuff Sarah Stanley was doing here are things you can technically do in your own kitchen, if you're a little careful. Just because you've never done them personally yourself, doesn't mean lots of other folks can't or haven't! (And I can totally see someone doing it to get some of the scout merit badges even [1] )

There's really no way to reassure you that I can think of though. Except maybe get you over to a (home?) lab and have you mess with some genes yourself. You'll see it's utterly mundane.

Obviously; I wouldn't quite recommend starting with TBC. That one is a wee bit more exciting. hence the protected lab. But what this research group was doing with it is/was otherwise not more dangerous beyond that.

[1] There's several stem badges for biology that include genetics, but none that are specifically molecular genetics - yet.
by pyrale | 2025-10-07 13:39:57+00:00
> they're at the mercy of the transmission market

There is no such thing as a transmission market. The grid is a regional monopoly, and it doesn't "market" its capacity.

The issue here is that when too much power runs through a line, if you don't turn it off, it does [1]. Building more lines isn't exactly fast, or cheap, and it wasn't really a major focus of the people setting up subsidies for new production.

> It's not their problem because .. it really isn't their problem and they can't solve it.

It's not their problem because their subsidies scheme means they will get paid anyway.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....
by nekusar | 2025-10-07 13:40:16+00:00
That policy also sounds really stupid.

All drugs have a half-life in a body. Alcohol is no different.

Remind me again, when you're measuring a half-life, when the result is 0? Thats right, its a sum of an infinite series. Hard to say how many days/weeks/months before you measure an absolute 0.

Again, we've seen this form of zero tolerance again and again, and its always the wrong answer. Good on Norway to get rid of this terrible policy.
by phoehne | 2025-10-07 13:41:12+00:00
They're more fun. The programming is easier (although you can get an Arduino like experience on a ESP32). They have 5V options, which make some projects easier without having to add additional components. The ESP32 API (and the Pico for that matter) are better suited professional programmers.

An Arduino is better if you're doing something and want a quick, easy, simple to program controller. It started as a way for artists to add MCUs to the projects without having to become embedded programmers.
by noduerme | 2025-10-07 13:41:16+00:00
I think you can guess the boundaries of the design answer here.

When you're experimenting with a new technology, everything looks very different and everything looks new. When you look at the net result of people experimenting with it 30 years later, you can see that they were all constrained by the same limitations, and in aggregate - despite many differences - everything takes on a recognizable aesthetic that was produced by the limitations of the day, the technology, the genre, whatever.

These sites are all wildly different and extremely creative, yet they're all recognizably from the same decade or so.

Okay. Now step back from that. Humans - you, me, everyone - have learned a very complex visual language from birth, where certain cues indicate certain things and trigger certain memories. If you show me a picture of a dude wearing bell bottoms, we're probably in the 70s. If it's a girl with a nose ring and a midriff showing it's probably 2005 - but there are smaller cues within that. 99% of people don't think about this consciously when they see an image, or a website, or whatever. They just associate it with a time or a genre.

In design for the web, we've had decades of constraints come and go - we had Flash with its own weird aesthetics, Java embeds, etc. People remember a time and they associate a design style with that time, without really knowing why. So it's a question of choosing from that historical library and constructing something that makes people see what you want them to see. If you want them to associate something with the early 90s, then totally make it look like one of these pages.

The thing I was taught in design school was to attempt to make design that was timeless. This is always kind of impossible - because you're limited technologically in ways you don't even realize at the time, and because you're always influenced by what's around you. But try to make something that will look, in 20 years, like it was new. Very hard to do. Why do it? Because in 20 years, you can always go and make funny vintage pastiche references to what people did 20 years ago. But it's quite hard to make anything that doesn't show its age.
by Graziano_M | 2025-10-07 13:41:50+00:00
Well it's not just some dude's config. It's a way to write most of your config as just a table. It notably provides nested tables, which offers a bit more flexibility than just one combo.

But anyway, I just wanted to see if you were aware of it.

I'm going to peek at yours now and see if there's anything I should crib.
by estearum | 2025-10-07 13:42:42+00:00
If the knowledge were cost-free, I would love to have it!

But in reality, it isn't. It creates precisely the faulty logic that we're seeing in this thread, where people believe certain mitigations are justified only after certain conclusions are reached about the origin of COVID.

This just isn't true and we do ourselves a disservice to frame the conversation such that people believe that to be the case.

If we discover that COVID came from a lab and therefore decide to eliminate GoF research but not increase surveillance efforts (since eliminating GoF research addresses "the threat"), that is bad.

If we discover that COVID came from a zoonotic origin and therefore decide to continue doing dangerous GoF research in metropolises, that is bad.

If we fail to determine either of these things with sufficient certainty to take action against either threat vector, which is the most probable case, that is really bad.

If we instead acknowledge that it hardly matters where COVID came from because it indicates nearly nothing about where the next pandemic will come from, and therefore we need to mitigate both vectors, that is good.
Show HN: Blueprintor for Hardware Engineering
by fco_tero | 2025-10-07 13:42:49+00:00
• In the current demo, you can enter specifications, goals, missions, parts, and other constraints, and it will generate a full design—from system to subsystems and components—drawing on data sheets. When a user submits a request, it weighs physical constraints and part availability together to suggest the most suitable design solutions.

• I built this tool to lighten the load of poring over countless component data sheets at project kickoff and to make blueprint iteration smoother. I’m aiming beyond “hardware” to the wider class of machines without operating systems, structured hierarchically as system–subsystem–component, so we can reason clearly at each level and lower conceptual entropy throughout the design process.

• Right now, the tool excels at precise spec comparisons for off‑the‑shelf components, but there are still blind spots in modeling the full physical behavior of a hardware system. I’m investigating simulation to close that gap. It also doesn’t yet design PCBs or handle CAD modeling directly.

• I’m currently building a node‑editing feature. Very soon (within 1–2 days), you’ll be able to edit detailed information for nodes at every level. Over the next month, I’m targeting a basic 3D canvas to create and configure three‑dimensional data for hardware.

As a demo, there’s plenty to improve. I want to keep learning and evolving this tool so it can meaningfully support hardware and machine design. I’d truly value your feedback!
by ACCount37 | 2025-10-07 13:42:51+00:00
Fucking hell.

Qualcomm is one of the worst vendors out there to deal with if you're a small hardware developer - let alone the kind of hobbyist who wants to use Arduino boards.

In a perfect world? Qualcomm would use Arduino to bring some of their chipsets and devices to public, and have the Arduino team open them up to small developers. Essentially doing what Pi Foundation is doing for Broadcom - package their unpalatable ICs into something that people actually use.

But we're not in a perfect world. We're in the kind of world where Qualcomm exists in the first place.

The pessimist in me fully expects Qualcomm to make Arduino worse rather than Arduino to make Qualcomm better.
by slashitapp | 2025-10-07 13:43:05+00:00
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by monegator | 2025-10-07 13:43:13+00:00
MCHP has been slowly coming up with decent radio devices, finally. If you don't use the radio going bare metal is basically effortless, if you need to use the radio the dev Tools are actually improving, though they are still nowhere as good as IDF in hiding the ugliness.

Of course they are more expensive (not much more, really, compared to simillar specced ESPs) but they are western and the peripheral actually work as intended. In my projects with ESP32 i had to basically bitbang every peripheral that i needed to use beyond their simplest mode.
by cardanome | 2025-10-07 13:43:17+00:00
Nintendo is changing. Switch 2 is outdated over-priced hardware with super expensive games. Not to mention always being extremely hostile to fans and draconically enforcing their copyright. With their recent software patent trolling they are on their way to become the Japanese Oracle.

Nvidia has garnered a lot of hate from the gaming community. Completely dishonest marketing, purposefully gimped hardware that barely gets enough RAM to function. Everyone wishes there would be more competition in this space.

Sure some studios still care about their customers but any huge corporations is bound to become a rotting corpse of its former self over time.