MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by implements | 2025-10-28 07:24:26+00:00
Yep. There’s a safe engineer on YouTube who was explaining the history of dial combination locks commonly used for government filing cabinets, etc. He pointed out that you can drill them in minutes but you’d need several hours to make good the damage such that the break in wouldn’t be easily detected. The combined time is therefore the ‘strength’ of the security. (Also, why it might be a good idea to have open sensors on safes, cabinets, etc)
by avidiax | 2025-10-28 07:26:03+00:00
I'm sure the ANPR network in the UK will make short work of people rolling back odometers, especially now that it is tax evasion.

The sort of people that roll back odometers are also the sort that steal post-pay gas by driving off and fail to carry insurance, and fill their diesel vehicles with tax-free dyed agricultural fuel, etc. They will have a scheme no matter the system, and the system will have a scheme for them.
by CjHuber | 2025-10-28 07:27:30+00:00
That is very interesting to read as I view him as very genuinely Christian. I would not agree with your description of the nihlist characters. I see it that mostly the (self)destructive acts are earlier nihilist actions and only then after facing and having accepted the consequences, the repentance emerges like in Crime and Punishment. The ones that stay nihilistic and don’t repent at all still face destruction.
by energy123 | 2025-10-28 07:27:36+00:00
Basically, the spherical cow mindset of "just police the borders harder" is wishful thinking. The world is interconnected in multiple aspects, not just physical borders. Even if you succeed in immunising yourself from all side effects, your immediate neighbor may not be successful, and the instability can come for you through many mechanisms. Prices of food, breakup of the EU, wars, authoritarianism in your own society. Just look at Canada dealing with tariffs through little fault of their own. It isn't as easy as declaring yourself as immune from international instability.
by lmm | 2025-10-28 07:27:45+00:00
On the contrary, train ferries used to be commonplace - for decades they were a great solution to the problem when you need to cross a relatively small stretch of water as part of a long, mostly overland journey. They've gradually faded out as we've gotten better at building longer and longer bridges and tunnels, but that doesn't mean they weren't a good approach in places where we hadn't managed to build a bridge or tunnel yet.
by Schlagbohrer | 2025-10-28 07:27:48+00:00
What a godawful mess that must have been to debug. I've never used wirewrap, it looks awful to me.

I am trying to imagine what it would have been like to design such a system using only pencil and paper. Going from block diagram to the lowest level, just on big sheets of paper... the pencil sharpeners must have been emptied twice a day.
by kelnos | 2025-10-28 07:28:00+00:00
> But too few people are willing to admit that if 40% of the speakers are women that represents a drop in the quality of the talks.

Not necessarily. It's certainly possible that, if you go and rank the top 100 python speaker candidates, 40 of them will be women. The total number of female programmers will certainly influence the number in the top 100, but it won't define it.

GP said that the PyCon speaker review process starts blinded, meaning that reviewers don't know the gender of the speaker candidates. So if they got 1000 submissions, and had to pick 100 of them, and 40 of those chosen were women, they were likely among the top 100 speaker candidates, or at least approximately so.

> But often DEI goes to absurd lengths like lowering standards for female firemen or combat soldiers.

Big fat [citation needed] there. (Not just for the idea that it happens -- I'm sure it has happened at least once -- but to support your assertion of "often".)
by solumunus | 2025-10-28 07:28:25+00:00
Well the end game with AI is AGI of course. But realistically the best case scenario with LLM’s is having fewer people with the required knowledge, leveraging LLM’s to massively enhance productivity.

We’re already there to some degree. It is hard to put a number on my productivity gain, but as a small business owner with a growing software company it’s clear to me already that I can reduce developer hiring going forward.

When I read the skeptics I just have to conclude that they’re either poor at context building and/or work on messy, inconsistent and poorly documented projects.

My sense is that many weaker developers who can’t learn these tools simply won’t compete in the new environment. Those who can build well designed and documented projects with deep context easy for LLM’s to digest will thrive.

I assume all of this applies to spreadsheets.
by procaryote | 2025-10-28 07:28:55+00:00
Assuming it's AI slop, considering that there's been an upswing of AI slop CVE reports seems pretty reasonable.

However, it doesn't necessarily matter if it's submitted by an incompetent human, a malicious human, or is AI slop. The end effect of wasting time on a non-vulnerability is the same

In a world where generating AI slop is cheap, the standard should probably be that the person submitting a vulnerability needs to prove it is a vulnerability, and probably that they're a person. Having the person receiving it prove it isn't won't scale
by 3oil3 | 2025-10-28 07:29:58+00:00
I think they come to that conclusion with that segregation thing? Besides that, all nonsense. We need the best for the job, the best we can have. Just the best, with no regards to anything else but the abilities to fulfil the job and all around it. Instead of non-sense of choosing someone based on racial, etnic, religous, etc... it goes both way. Instead of that, put more teachers in schools, provide free books/uniforms/utilities. Fix that damn airco in that kindergarden class. Better what makes better.
by jacquesm | 2025-10-28 07:30:03+00:00
Basically Levenshtein on previous responses minus noise words. So if the response was 'close enough' then the bot would use a previously given answer, if it was too distant the human-in-the-loop would get pinged with the previous 5 interactions as context to provide a new answer.

Because the answers were structured as a tree every ply would only go down in the tree which elegantly avoided the bot getting 'stuck in a loop'.

The - for me at the time amazing, though linguists would have thought it trivial - insight was how incredibly repetitive human interaction is.
by zwnow | 2025-10-28 07:33:05+00:00
I dont know, stockholm syndrome exists and I feel like its very relevant in modern society considering how many people are bootlickers for their employers.

I agree that people with an anti humanistic worldview being able to network is very dangerous. But most polarization I've personally witnessed are people not wanting to live in a system that heavily favors the rich without forcing them to contribute in the same amount poorer people do. People just wanna buy houses and be able to afford a family, while houses are being used as speculative objects by the rich.
by b112 | 2025-10-28 07:33:34+00:00
From my side of the coin, I've always thought that the best solution is ground level support.

Ensure that students of any type have excellent public schools. Ensure that people without resources, of any background, have access to higher education. This can be by grants for the very poor, just as it can be by government backed, guaranteed approved student loans.

Healthy, stable food in schools is an excellent way to keep a child's mind on education.

These things level the playing field. There are plenty of white males who need such help to be on a level playing field with wealthier families too. I grew up in a rural community in Canada, and saw many smart but underprivileged(including trouble with keeping food on the table) families end up with grants to go to university.

If you do this, if you provide the capability for merit to shine, and ensure that merit can be fed intellectually, you're doing much of the work required for true equality.

I frankly don't give a rat's ass about women being in any specific field, or someone of whatever skin tone. I do 100% care if people want to, but cannot!! I want all who are capable, to be able to express that capability.

If this is done, and done correctly, then the numbers of candidates applying for jobs will result in numbers indicative of candidates in the field. And more importantly, of people wanting to be in those fields. If you get 11% women in the field, and 11% women applicants, and nothing prevented women from entering that field, you're where you want to be.

We don't need to encourage people to enter a field. We need to only ensure they can if they want to.

This sort of "women are weak and are scared of entering fields" is bizarre, from an equality standpoint. The same for people with different skin tones. Why do people seem to think women, for example, are weak and incapable of pursing their dreams? They are not!

The women I've known in my life have been strong in opinion and in drive, the same goes for people of any racial background. There are of course those that are not, but I've seen lazy, undriven white males too.

People don't need to be prodded, dragged, pulled into a field.

They just need to have no way that they are hindered. They just need the freedom to choose. To know that they can pursue that which they desire.

Support at the ground level does this.
by jwr | 2025-10-28 07:33:49+00:00
Oh, this is where I disagree. A wire can be quietly and discreetly cut with wire cutters in seconds. This is no protection at all. It's just inconvenience for you.

What I've been using for years is a heavy chain with a lock (disc-detainer style). The chain weighs around 3.5kg. You can of course cut it with an angle grinder, but have you ever tried cutting a chain with an angle grinder without a vise? The chain slips away and it's really difficult to hold it in place for the cutting, which would take more than a minute.

All those Kryptonite-style U-locks have the disadvantage of being easily fixed in place for the cutting. They are also useless for attaching your bike to large trees, street lights, etc.

Remember that if a bear is chasing you, you don't have to outrun the bear, you only have to outrun your friends. If there are 4 bikes and my bike is the most difficult to steal, I'm fine.
by jacquesm | 2025-10-28 07:34:45+00:00
> Maybe. Going on a tangent: in theory GMail has access to lots of similar information---just by having approximately everyone's emails. Does HIPAA apply to them? If not, why not?

That's a good question.

Intuitively: because it doesn't attempt to impersonate a medical professional, nor does it profess to interact with you on the subject matter at all. It's a communications medium, not an interactive service.
by 4gotunameagain | 2025-10-28 07:34:56+00:00
Telegram vs Signal is really a moot comparison in the technical sense.

It is more of a question, who would you rather read your messages ? USA or Russia ?

Because even if there is E2E encryption and an open source client, unless you review it and compile it yourself, there is nothing to say that your messages are relayed to some agency's datacenter after decryption. The USA has all the legal framework necessary to achieve that with the tremendous power of the "intelligence" agencies, and Russia.. well.. doesn't even need that.
by tromp | 2025-10-28 07:35:24+00:00
The 79-bit lambda term λ1(λλ2(λλ3(λ312))(1(λ1)))(λλ1)(λλ211)1 in de-Bruijn notation exhibits f_ε0 growth without all the complexities of computing Kirby-Paris hydra or Goodstein sequences. Even that is over 60% larger than the 49-bit Graham exceeder (λ11)(λ1(1(λλ12(λλ2(21))))). I think one should be quite surprised if you can climb from f_4 (2↑↑2↑↑2↑↑9) to f_{ω+1} (Graham) with just 1 additional state.
by TomasBM | 2025-10-28 07:36:07+00:00
If you're asking this seriously:

We need to grade people because that's the best way we have to determine (for one or more subjects) who's:

1. capable enough, so that we can promote them to the next stage;

2. improving or has potential for improvement, so that we can give them the tools or motivation to continue;

3. underperforming, so that we can find out why and help them turn it around (or reduce the pressure);

4. actually learning the content, and if not, why not.

Thankfully, everyone knows this system is flawed, so most don't put too much weight on school grades. But overall, the grades are there to provide both an incentive for teachers and students to do better, and a way to compare performance.
by nerdsniper | 2025-10-28 07:36:39+00:00
Because no one manufactures a cheap silicon chip that converts DP Alt-Mode to UVC at 4K. There exist great <$5 ultra-commoditized options for 1080p HDMI -> UVC but as soon as you move up to capture 4K it gets super expensive for the silicon alone and the engineering complexity goes way up as well.

Generally all these devices are just slapping together a few existing silicon chips. If the chip they need doesn’t exist, no ones really going out of their way to overengineer a different solution for which price to consumer would be prohibitive.
by motorest | 2025-10-28 07:37:40+00:00
> Probably many reasons for this, but what I've seen often is that once the code base has been degraded, it's a slippery slope downhill after that.

Another factor, and perhaps the key factor, is that contrary to OP's extraordinary claim there is no such thing as objectively good code, or one single and true way of writing good code.

The crispest definition of "good code" is that it's not obviously bad code from a specific point of view. But points of view are also subjective.

Take for example domain-driven design. There are a myriad of books claiming it's an effective way to generate "good code". However, DDD has a strong object-oriented core, to the extent it's nearly a purist OO approach. But here we are, seeing claims that the core must be functional.

If OP's strong opinion on "good code" is so clear and obvious, why are there such critical disagreements at such a fundamental levels? Is everyone in the world wrong, and OP is the poor martyr that is cursed with being the only soul in the whole world who even knows what "good code" is?

Let's face it: the reason there is no such thing as "good code" is that opinionated people making claims such as OP's are actually passing off "good code" claims as proxy's for their own subjective and unverified personal taste. In a room full of developers, if you throw a rock at a random direction you're bound to hit one or two of these messiahs, and neither of them agrees on what good code is.

Hearing people like OP comment on "good code" is like hearing people comment on how their regional cuisine is the true definition of "good food".
by kelnos | 2025-10-28 07:38:23+00:00
> We have seen what happens when groups become "more diverse and welcoming" --- they become filled with lowest-common-denominator stupidity that drags everyone else down with them.

Funny, I've seen the exact opposite. Nice anecdotes we have here, maybe some real data would be more appropriate in arguments such as these.

And on the flip side, if I look at the state of my (US) government, seems like we've managed to fill it up with lowest-common-denominator stupidity, and most of it is white men (with a smattering of white women here and there). And it certainly seems we're dragging everyone else down with us...
by brucehoult | 2025-10-28 07:38:30+00:00
It's not THAT hard. Heck, I've done it myself. But, as I said, the burden of proof that something new is truly useful quite rightly lies with the proposer.

The ORC.B instruction in Zbb was my idea, never done anywhere before as far as anyone has been able to find. I proposed it in late 2019, it was in the ratified spec in later 2021, and implemented in the very popular JH7110 quad core 1.5 GHz SoC in the VisionFive 2 (and many others later on) that was delivered to pre-order customers in Dec 2022 / Jan 2023.

You might say that's a long time, but that's pretty fast in the microprocessor industry -- just over three years from proposal (by an individual member of RISC-V International) to mass-produced hardware.

Compare that to Arm who published the spec for SVE in 2016 and SVE 2 in 2019. The first time you've been able to buy an SBC with SVE was early 2025 with the Radxa Orion O6.

In contrast RISC-V Vector extension (RVV) 1.0 was published in late 2021 and was available on the CanMV-K230 development board in November 2023, just two years later, and in a flood of much more powerful octa-core SpacemiT K1/M1 boards (BPI-F3, Milk-V Jupiter, Sipeed LicheePi 3A, Muse Pi, DC-Roma II laptop) starting around six months later.
by panstromek | 2025-10-28 07:38:51+00:00
This is great write up. I especially appreciate the focus on mobile, because I find it's often overlooked, even though it's dominant device to access the web. The reality of phones is brutal and delivering a good experience for most users in SPA-style archictecture is pretty hard.

"Slowness poisons everything."

Exactly. There's nothing more revealing than seeing your users struggle to use your system, waiting for the content to load, rage clicking while waiting for buttons to react, waiting for the animations to deliver 3 frames in 5 seconds.

Engineering for P75 or P90 device takes a lot of effort, way beyond what frameworks offer you by default. I hope we'll see some more focus on this from the framework side, because I often feel like I have to fight the framework to get decent results - even for something like Vue, which looks pretty great in this comparison.
by klelatti | 2025-10-28 07:39:17+00:00
Probably closer to RISC-1 which shouldn't be surprising given Patterson's role in both - as Patterson himself sets out:

https://aspire.eecs.berkeley.edu/2017/06/how-close-is-risc-v...

https://thechipletter.substack.com/p/risc-on-a-chip-david-pa...
by yzydserd | 2025-10-28 07:40:54+00:00
The display was in a booth replicating the 1984 Winter CES booth. Here is a Creative Computing article from the 1984 event.

https://www.atarimagazines.com/creative/v10n4/150_Amiga_Lorr...

Forbodingly, the article signs off with "Amiga, please don't join the sorrowful ranks that have wasted technological superiority through marketing muck-ups."
by e-khadem | 2025-10-28 07:43:34+00:00
If this works for you, then great, do it as long as it works. But for me this will never work. What actually has worked though, is being in an enjoyable environment (surrounded by friends and family, lab / hobby equipment, quality books and poetry, or just spending a couple of hours outside) that can grab my attention better than those social media apps. Also, I regularly delete and recreate my social media accounts.

Additionally, a very effective way of becoming less attached to the phone is to occasionally "forget" to bring it out with you, but that only works if you for example don't need maps or aren't expected to take a phone call. The key-point here is the irregularity, because then over time you will get used to replacing smartphone usage with some other joyful (or idle) activities instead of just moving the dopamine rush hour around. Furthermore I believe that embracing boredom is a must, and I just accept that sometimes I will be bored with nothing to do for a couple of hours and that's when I get most creative.
by jakewins | 2025-10-28 07:44:05+00:00
I think CQRS is something different than what’s being described here. “Query” code in CQRS can still “do stuff”: call an external database, grab locks, audit trail recording etc.

What’s being described here is something lower level, that you keep as much code as you can as a side-effect-free “pure functional core”. That pattern is useful both for the “command” and “query” side of a CQRS system, and is not the same thing as CQRS
by sam-cop-vimes | 2025-10-28 07:44:15+00:00
Not really - if the market price for a crop is such that it depends on the greater volume which can be produced by GMO seeds, switching to non-GMO seeds becomes uneconomic.

Let's say GMO crops gives you a grain yield of 1-ton/acre and that non-GMO crops gives you a yield of 0.5-ton/acre. Now the market price is say set at $100/ton. This cuts down their earnings by half in the best case, all other inputs remaining the same.

Now if the GMO-seeds are controlled by a foreign entity, your entire agri output becomes dependent on that foreign entity not behaving badly. Whichever nation that controls the entity who owns the GMO-seed now has leverage over you.

So no, it isn't as simple as "switch back to using non-GMO seeds". This has to be carefully considered before adopting GMO-seeds.
Show HN: PostFast – AI-Powered Copywriting Browser Extension
by WayneFung1992 | 2025-10-28 07:44:24+00:00
We built PostFast to simplify how creators and marketers generate platform‑specific copy. Instead of manually adapting the same product info for Twitter, LinkedIn, or a newsletter, you configure your product once, and PostFast uses AI to generate tailored content.

Key features: - One‑time setup for your product or service - Generates copy adapted to different platforms (style, tone, length) - Includes copy scoring and A/B variant comparison - AI-powered recommendations for which version to use - All inside your browser; no external app needed

It's built for indie makers, content teams, and marketers who need quick, consistent copy without jumping between tools. We focused on making it flexible and non‑opinionated—you control the inputs; the extension handles the formatting and platform nuances.

We're launching soon and opening a waitlist. If you regularly write promotional copy, we'd love your feedback on: - Which platforms you post to most - What kind of scoring criteria would be useful - Whether you'd prefer a free tier with limited generations

Waitlist and brief demo: [https://postfast.today/#subscribe]

(I’m one of the developers.)
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-10-28 07:45:41+00:00
This is a really good article. It’s not my bailiwick, but it must be extremely useful for folks that work in this space.

> When someone’s standing in front of a potential buyer trying to look professional, a slow-loading app isn’t just an annoyance. It’s a liability.

I liked reading that. It’s actually surprising how few developers think that way.

> Mobile is the web

That’s why.

I know many people that don’t own a computer, at all, but have large, expensive phones. This means that I can’t count on a large PC display, but I also can reasonably expect a decent-sized smaller screen.

I’ve learned to make sure that my apps and sites work well on high-quality small screens (which is different from working on really small screens).

The main caveat, is the quality of the network connection. I find that I need to work OK, if the connection is dicey.
Ask HN: Why didn't online speed-dating catch on?
by puppion | 2025-10-28 07:45:49+00:00
Why isn't online speed-dating main stream? I noticed there are some apps that try to do it but they are not popular at all.

To me this seems so much more efficient than the endless swiping and pointless texting.

I'm thinking about trying to create and promote such an app myself. WDYT?
by INTPenis | 2025-10-28 07:45:57+00:00
Passenger trains used to be ferried across the baltic sea when I was a kid, in fact they still ferry cargo trains over to Poland.

I think it's more about the state of the infrastructure, and the scope of the railway carrier, at least in this case with Sicily.

For example the railway ferries between Sweden and Denmark ended long before the bridge was built, in the 80s.