MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rmccue | 2025-10-04 01:33:29+00:00
DID is basically one extra level of abstraction, allowing for different methods.

did:web: eg is literally HTTP, did:dns: is DNS, and there’s loads of others.

This extra level of abstraction allows of arbitrary IDs, which is what the PLC DIDs were created for.

Let’s say that I am currently known as rmccue.com.au. I move overseas and now want to be rmccue.scot - or worse, because I am no longer in .au, I can’t even keep my old domain name. How do you persist this identity?

With PLC, I can instead be an abstract did:plc:hv27plmlx6zkuv7bnzbqb6xr (an arbitrary hash of the genesis entry for my DID). I associate rmccue.com.au with this via a TXT record, and back the other direction by recording the domain as an alias.

If I change my handle, I’m still the same arbitrary handle everywhere, everyone keeps following me, and in theory old references to my alias could even continue resolving.

(Similarly, this solves the issue for trademark changes, name changes throughout a person’s life, and changing job roles.)

The core of it is basic tech:

1. Look up _atproto.rmccue.io for a TXT record

2. If it’s did:plc:… send a HTTP request to the directory - eg https://plc.directory/hv27plmlx6zkuv7bnzbqb6xr

3. Parse the JSON response to get my signing keys and where I’m hosted.
by ghaff | 2025-10-04 01:33:35+00:00
It's hard to say why people's experiences differ so much in the US I get maybe 3 a week or so. I would probably be more aggressive about adding businesses and people to my contact list if I were more aggressive about blocking possible SPAM. For me, the SPAM is one of life's lesser annoyances but I should probably check out some of the prevent features Apple has built into iOS.
by minimaxir | 2025-10-04 01:33:41+00:00
It’s more a ballpark since exact numbers vary and OpenAI could be employing shenanigans to cut costs, but in comparison, Veo 3 which has similar quality 720p video costs $0.40/second for the user, and Sora’s videos are 10 seconds each. Although Veo 3 could cost more or less to Google than what is charged to the user.

I suspect OpenAI’s costs to be higher if anything since Google’s infra is more cost-efficient.
by devmor | 2025-10-04 01:34:08+00:00
No, you just missed the point I made.

Which is that if you’re scared of being assaulted by someone you should be scared of everyone around you at all times. Someone’s housing status does not make them any more likely to attack you.

Being scared of homeless people hurting you is like being scared of flying in a plane when you drive a car every day.
by akerl_ | 2025-10-04 01:35:00+00:00
I use https://github.com/go-acme/lego and DNS validation. I'm not sure what DNS provider you're using, but a ton of them have robust APIs. In my case, I'm using Route53 which is notable in that I can generate API credentials that can only update the specific record needed for a particular name's ACME validation record.

Here's a list of supported providers: https://go-acme.github.io/lego/dns/

And in case you're curious, the API perms dance to do specific-record updates: https://github.com/armorfret/terraform-aws-r53-certbot/blob/...
by privatelypublic | 2025-10-04 01:35:11+00:00
I'm interested in... why? What are you building that loading data from disk is so lopsided vs CPu load from compiling, or network load/latency(one 200ms of "is this the current git repo?" Is a heck of a lot of NVMe latency... and its going to be closer to 2s than 200ms)
by throwaway173738 | 2025-10-04 01:36:09+00:00
Why not? What would you want for yourself or your children if you found yourselves destitute and without other people to fall back on? Would you be comfortable with them starving?

Let’s get back to the original point, which is that the motive for profit in healthcare is at odds with the stated goal that everyone should have healthcare by right. Trying to make it about something else is a distraction.
by saulpw | 2025-10-04 01:36:34+00:00
It sounds like you are [dis]interested in a philosophical discussion about epistemology. So it seems that you've skipped the inquiry yourself and have short-circuited to "don't care". Which is kind of "utilitarian". For other perspectives[0]:

> The school of skepticism questions the human ability to attain knowledge, while fallibilism says that knowledge is never certain. Empiricists hold that all knowledge comes from sense experience, whereas rationalists believe that some knowledge does not depend on it. Coherentists argue that a belief is justified if it coheres with other beliefs. Foundationalists, by contrast, maintain that the justification of basic beliefs does not depend on other beliefs. Internalism and externalism debate whether justification is determined solely by mental states or also by external circumstances.

For my part, I do believe that there is non-propositional knowledge. That a person can look at a set of facts/experiences/inputs and apply their mind towards discerning knowledge (or "truth"), or at least the relative probability of knowledge being true. That while this discernment and knowledge might be explained or justified verbally and logically, the actual discernment is non-verbal. And, for sure, correctness is not even essential--a person may discern that the truth is unknowable from the information at their disposal, and they may even discern incorrectly! But there is some mental process that can actually look behind the words to its "meaning" and then apply its own discernment to that meaning. (Notably this does not merely aggregating everyone else's discernment!) This is "intelligence", and it is something that humans can do, even if many of us often don't even apply this faculty ourselves.

From discussions on HN and otherwise I gather this is what people refer to by "world-modeling". So my discernment is that language manipulation is neither necessary nor sufficient for intelligence--though it may be necessary to communicate more abstract intelligence. What LLM/AGI proponents are arguing is that language manipulation is sufficient for intelligence. This is a profound misunderstanding of intelligence, and one that should not be written off with a blithe and unexamined "but who knows what intelligence is anyway".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology
by blamebento | 2025-10-04 01:36:48+00:00
Hey everyone! I’m looking for 12 people to help beta test my app on Android. Google Play requires testers for 14 days before I can publish. If you’re interested, please add your Google Play email here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdD2_t_PdJm69NXyPEx...

I’ve been a product designer for almost 20 years and I’m happy to exchange help. I can provide UX feedback or QA on your app in return. The app is already live on iOS and you can check it out here: https://getpinata.app/
by l8rlump | 2025-10-04 01:37:02+00:00
These rich and colourful photos remind me of an internal battle I’m having with my own amateur photography. I’ve always aspired to this kind of styling, but lately been intrigued by how you can sometimes make photos subjectively better by muting the colours, making them less true to life, reducing the contrast, etc. Advocates for that style would call the photos in the blog post “cartoonish”. I guess there’s a place for both styles. For what it’s worth, I think the photos in the blog post are great.
by gottorf | 2025-10-04 01:37:10+00:00
Of course that's not acceptable, but my point is that it's the same level of unacceptable that has occurred countless times by all levels of law enforcement entities, be it local or federal. It's just as unacceptable as if your door was broken down and your stuff confiscated because you happened to live in the same building as a drug dealer.

I'm just pushing back on the whole "fascism", "end of the republic" narrative on the grounds that the problem is not specific to this particular administration.
by famouswaffles | 2025-10-04 01:37:51+00:00
That's fine, because this is still a genuine problem in need of a solution. It's not just about startup time for the sake of it (not that this is even a superficial concern - python startup time with large dependencies quickly gets awful). Large projects can have hefty dependencies that not every user will use. And bundling it all for everyone can sometimes be intractable. The work arounds people use already have the sort of problems you're talking about, on top of being diabolical and hacky. Not having to duplicate and hide imports in functions alone would be a big improvement. It's not like it isn't being proposed as an optional language feature.
by scarmig | 2025-10-04 01:38:28+00:00
> After Saint Reagan (hack ... spit) "closed the institutions", there was supposed to be something better. That never happened. So, now you have the mentally ill cycling between the streets, the emergency rooms, and the prisons.

The Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, which made it possible to close the institutions, was almost unanimously passed in the Assembly and the Senate, in an unholy union of civil libertarian do-gooders and budget cutting conservatives. In fact, the lone dissenter in either legislature was a law-and-order Republican.

And it's not like Democrats have been shut out of the government of California ever since.
by dcsommer | 2025-10-04 01:38:29+00:00
Is there a straightforward path to building Zig with polyglot build systems like Bazel and Buck2? I'm worried Zig's reliance on Turing complete build scripts will make building (and caching) such code difficult in those deterministic systems. In Rust, libraries that eschew build.rs are far preferable for this reason. Do Zig libraries typically have a lot of custom build setup?
by zdragnar | 2025-10-04 01:40:25+00:00
> Consequently, faster compile times would not alter my development practices, nor allow me to iterate any faster.

I think the web frontend space is a really good case for fast compile times. It's gotten to the point that you can make a change, save a file, the code recompiles and is sent to the browser and hot-reloaded (no page refresh) and your changes just show up.

The difference between this experience and my last time working with Ember, where we had long compile times and full page reloads, was incredibly stark.

As you mentioned, the hot build with caching definitely does a lot of heavy lifting here, but in some environments, such as a CI server, having minutes long builds can get annoying as well.

> Consequently, faster compile times would not alter my development practices, nor allow me to iterate any faster.

Maybe, maybe not, but there's no denying that faster feels nicer.
by rhetocj23 | 2025-10-04 01:41:26+00:00
Bad comparison.

The leap of faith necessary in LLMs to achieve the same feat is so large its very difficult to imagine it happening. Particularly due to the well known constraints on what the technology is capable of.

The whole investment thesis of LLMs is that it will be able to a) be intelligent b) produce new knowledge. If those two things that dont happen, what has been delivered is not commensurate to the risk in regards to the money invested.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-10-04 01:41:27+00:00
> How you found it necessary to exhibit a couple of universally known pieces of horseshit so that your original piece would make sense as some sort of reaction to those. Outstanding.

> There's a reason why you're finding it necessary to explain what a personal philosophy even is. Think about that before you go ooh wizdum (and if you have a spare dictionary, throw it up.)

All you have done in this thread is direct conversations into ad hominem attacks you launch and/or a meaningless non sequitur such as:

> If happiness was a choice, there would be no point to happiness.

As I alluded in a peer comment, I hope you reflect on why you choose this style of communication and have someone in your life you trust in which you confide regarding same.

I am not that person and shall no longer enable your vitriol.
by Reason077 | 2025-10-04 01:41:48+00:00
EMV chip & pin cards have always been capable of offline payments.

In the UK this has definitely worked in the past - I remember many years ago there being occasions when something was wrong with the network connection(?) at my local supermarket, but still being able to make a payment in offline mode. This works because the payment terminal authenticates the PIN directly with the chip on the card. They just can't check your balance is sufficient to pay for what you're purchasing.

TfL also accepts your contactless card in offline mode: their buses operate in tunnels and other areas with a poor mobile data signal, but cards are still accepted at all times.
by rahimnathwani | 2025-10-04 01:41:56+00:00
We are using the term 'software engineer' in two different ways:

1. The way most people here on HN, and most people in the US, understand it.

2. The way the laws in most of Canada (but not Alberta) define the term.

AIUI someone can design and develop software for pay in Canada without declaring themselves to be a 'software engineer' and without signing a code of ethics.

Is that correct?
by roenxi | 2025-10-04 01:42:15+00:00
> Part of the problem of modern society is that statistical murder of thousands is treated as less of a crime than a normal murder of one person.

Society is actually quite consistent on that point (unfortunately). The body doing the statistical murder here is the regulator of the hospital system and it is part of the same organisation (the government) that handles the direct murder through the army. People tend to treat horrible missteps in war and medicine about the same.

It might be nice in a moral sense if there was some consistency. It isn't too late to disgrace George Bush and make the rest of his days a living hell, for example. But as political strategies go that seems like a bad idea.
by jfengel | 2025-10-04 01:43:23+00:00
I think Uber invented (or at least made widely available) taxi-by-app. Having scores of cab companies, accessed by telephone call, was supremely user-hostile.

If the cab companies had gotten together on an app, they might have shortcut Uber and all of its many dubious practices. They finally are starting to but it's much too late.
by PaulHoule | 2025-10-04 01:43:29+00:00
I think more people than you know are using Sinatra-like frameworks on Java or C# because you can get the job done with heavy loads. If you were thinking about building your application around a schema you'd look at GraphQL. If you were going to make the "new Ruby on Rails" it would have to build out the front end and back end based on the schema.
by teyc | 2025-10-04 01:43:46+00:00
SOAP started life as XmlRpc. It was a simple model used in Python. It was a simple serialisation format. It was a micro format and could be implemented in a day. It didn’t cover encryption, signing , routing, cyclic references. But it could be implemented in a day. It’s all text and easy for implementers to fix. Since these were early days of the web, there were no openidconnect, no jwt, no encryption standards. If you used Ruby you couldn’t easily interoperate if there were standards calling for all these things. The SOAP specs were big documents.
by gottorf | 2025-10-04 01:44:13+00:00
I assume your point is that not all laws are just only by virtue of being laws. I agree with this. And of course, not all lawbreaking is equal in severity. We all can tell that jaywalking is not the same as vehicular homicide. At the same time, we should also be able to agree that selective following and enforcement of laws is disparaging to the spirit of a nation of laws.

Do you find the current American immigration laws, and the enforcement thereof, to be unjust? Do you see it as your moral duty to abrogate them, and help others do so? If so, can you explain why?
by pmarreck | 2025-10-04 01:44:24+00:00
NixOS will get you there (or anywhere, to any version, of any thing, and/or back again) just by pinning any conceivable package (and it has more than any other Linux distro) to a particular nixpkgs hash.

I thought of this because it sounds like one of the reasons you're not upgrading it is fearing the risk of it fucking everything up and it being a pain to roll back (your "it ain't broke, so why fix it?" is a hallmark of that mentality). Well...

I will never use another Linux distro for this specific reason. NixOS is the complete freedom to dip in, dip out, roll back on problems, try new things out, etc. The freedom to experiment, try it, back out if there's any issue... but with seatbelts, thanks to the declarative nature of everything (as well as being able to pick previous "instances" on boot).

Afraid of Nix (the language)? LLM's make that trivial these days. For example, I just did something like this today: "Instead of using the one in nixpkgs, whose build has issues on my hardware, set up a derivation that uses its git repo and compiles that instead." A minute later, boom. Declarative working glory, forever.
by sudosysgen | 2025-10-04 01:44:34+00:00
Iran being neutered is propaganda that is necessary for the (failed, for now) Israeli plan of regime change.

Iran maintains the ability to build ballistic missiles in large numbers, greatly depleted Israel-US BMD reserves, continues to build even more reinforced nuclear sites. Neutering those capabilities was the main goal of the 12 day war and by most accounts, that didn't work.

Israel did not manage air superiority over the large majority of Iran, instead the majority of strikes over Iran were done using standoff weapons and drones, many flown from within Iran as an act of sabotage.

If Israel truly managed to get air superiority over Iran, the Iranian regime would have suffered the same fate as Nasrallah. But that didn't happen, because while Israel was able to execute a number of deep strikes, the capability to do so was much closer to Russia's ability over Ukraine than, say, the way the US operated over Iraq. And Iran at the same time was able to execute dozens of deep strikes within Israel, but with much less precision - without a much deeper cut to the Iranian MIC it's only a matter of time before the newer, much more precise missiles are built in sufficient numbers to become a similar threat to the Israeli airforce.

There is no reason why China would ever want to partner with Israel on defense anymore. They tried do in the 2000s, and they found that Israel was so deeply and inextricably dependent on US technology and manufacturing for it's military technology that there was almost nothing worthwhile they could get that wasn't so dependent on the US that the US would veto it. Israel's military sophistication is not endogenous to the extent it would be competitive without the US - it's entirely dependent on an extremely privileged relationship with the MIC that allows Israel to stand on the shoulder of giants and produce weapons that are far more sophisticated than would be possible for any economy of its' size otherwise.

An article came out only today on Haaretz detailing how much of the footage and imagery from Israeli strikes were deepfakes or recycled footage. That's not something you do when you've managed to neuter your opponent.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-10-04 01:44:35+00:00
Not really, no. The shift started long before that.

Look, I'm old enough to remember the 1960s. Reporters then tried to be objective. They never succeeded perfectly, but they tried. The editor of the New York Times deliberately slanted editing a little right, because he knew his reporters slanted a little left. He literally had them put on his tombstone "He kept the paper straight".

Nobody aspires to that now. It's not just that we consume more. It's not just that economic pressure has made them have to pump out more stories with less resources. They're not trying for what they tried for before. They gave up on trying to be objective. Yeah, they can't do it perfectly. But the difference really matters.

And it will eventually matter to the media. If they aren't going to do what we need... then we don't need them any more.
by irjustin | 2025-10-04 01:45:39+00:00
Thought experiment - Startrek replicators are real.

This basically means almost everything can be built without human involvement. The guy who owns the replicators is the richest.

The wealth gap is so massive you get revolts (because we're educated, not serfs, right?) So then government needs to step in. Either tax->ubi?, socialize it, or make it a state asset?

Regardless, that's the goal of AGI/robotics/etc.
by Reason077 | 2025-10-04 01:46:03+00:00
> "FWIW I am Australian and we have a similar adoption rate of cashless payments. If a merchant tries to promote cash options I immediately think they’re doing it for tax evasion reasons"

I don't know about Australia, but in New Zealand many small retailers and restaurants add a card payment surcharge (typically 1.5%-2.5%) automatically when you pay by card. So you are somewhat penalised for the convenience of using a card. This never happens in Europe.
by godelski | 2025-10-04 01:47:35+00:00
My guess? Hype. All the companies at the top have a lot of hype. I don't think that explains everything, but I believe it is an important factor. I also think with tech we've really entered a Lemon Market. It is very difficult to tell the quality of products prior to purchase. This is even more true with the loss of physical retail. I actually really miss stores like Sharper Image. Not because I want to buy the over priced stuff, but because you would go into those stores and try things.

I definitely think the economy has shifted and we can see it in our sector. The old deal used to be that we could make good products and good profits. But now "the customer" is not the person that buys the product, it is the shareholder. Shareholder profits should reflect what the market value of the product being sold to customers, but it doesn't have to. So if we're just trying to maximize profits then I think there is no surprise when these things start to diverge.
by Retric | 2025-10-04 01:47:45+00:00
I was trying to be objective which is why I didn’t try to compare individual shows.

Thus average production quality seems like a useful metric. There’s currently a handful of “traditional media/streaming” shows with absolutely crazy budgets today and if you happen to like them then that’s great. However, if you don’t things quickly fall off a cliff in terms of production quality.

The same is true of YouTube. The quality of 50,000 one man operations is irrelevant if you happen to like MrBeast, but if you don’t like MrBeast budgets drop off fast. A reasonable argument is you and everyone else may prefer a specific YouTube cooking show over Baking with Julia or other 90’s show with a much her budget, but there where several options to chose from.

Thus purely objectively even if 90’s TV had lower maximum budgets the floor being relatively high is worth taking into consideration.
by kg | 2025-10-04 01:47:48+00:00
The one line you've pulled out is a quote from someone else and not the words of the authors of this paper, to be clear.

Here's the full context:

1 Overview The culture of AI is imperialist and seeks to expand the kingdom of the machine. The AI community is well organized and well funded, and its culture fits its dreams: it has high priests, its greedy businessmen, its canny politicians. The U.S. Department of Defense is behind it all the way. And like the communists of old, AI scientists believe in their revolution; the old myths of tragic hubris don’t trouble them at all. Tony Solomonides and Les Levidow (1985, pp. 13–14) This paper sets out our expert position on artificial intelligence (AI) technologies permeating the higher education sector, demonstrating how this directly erodes our ability to function (see also our Open Letter, Guest, van Rooij, et al. 2025). (the rest elided)

I was surprised to learn it's a quote from 1985.
by ThrowMeAway1618 | 2025-10-04 01:48:04+00:00
I'm getting a little worried about you HNers.

Granted, this is pretty obvious satire, but upvoting it?

If you did, is it because you support murdering poor and disadvantaged people?

I hope not. But some folks around here make me wonder.

Maybe I'll just stop, as I certainly don't want to encourage murderous pieces of shit.