MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nosefurhairdo | 2025-10-07 01:38:58+00:00
Additionally, the kind of person who would reach for prescription medication vs accepting hair loss may be predisposed to depression. I.e. this may be selecting for people who struggle with self-acceptance generally.

I also wonder whether there's some degree of placebo going on. Patients know finasteride is anti-androgenic; perhaps when they inevitably experience some symptoms associated with hypogonadism they assume the worst and lament the choice between having hair and feeling youthful. This would also explain why many who get off finasteride don't notice their symptoms improve.

Personal bias: I've taken finasteride for years with no side effects.
by jasoneckert | 2025-10-07 01:39:04+00:00
Even though the article says that Microsoft removed the “bypassnro” workaround earlier this year, I just used it earlier this evening to set up a new Win11 PC for a neighbour successfully (she didn't have a Microsoft account on her previous Win10 laptop, and wanted it the same way).

At the part of the initial setup where it asks to connect to a network, press Shift + F10 to open the Command Prompt. Then, type oobe\bypassnro and press Enter. The system will reboot and start the initial setup again in a non-network mode that allows you to create a local user account.
by AuthAuth | 2025-10-07 01:39:31+00:00
A lot of big tech apps launch and try to be something else. Tiktok grew with its own design goal and its own site culture. You cannot rip a site and rip its culture and expect people to want to join the knock off.

Take a look at X vs bluesky. The only reason this works is because the site culture changed enough for platforms to be different enough to warrent leaving one for the other.
by JimDabell | 2025-10-07 01:39:48+00:00
Apple doesn’t have a veto. If two independent implementations are required for something to become a web standard, all Google have to do is convince anybody outside of Google to implement their specs, such as Mozilla – who Google pay billions of dollars to.

The problem with all of these new specifications is that Google can’t convince anybody to do this, no matter how much money they throw at them. That’s not an Apple veto stopping these things from becoming standards, that’s Google pushing shitty specs.
by josephcsible | 2025-10-07 01:40:25+00:00
> Why, if you dont mind my asking?

Because I care that I'm secure, but I don't care that my computer isn't secure from me.

> how long would you expect Microsoft to write updates for computers with insecure boot chains, and secure boot chains?

Forever, because the same code works for both unless they go out of their way to do extra work for it not to.

> How much should they spend on mitigations for classes of attack that you can shut down just by updating?

There are basically zero attacks against ordinary consumers that SB/TPM protect from. The kinds of attacks regular people need to worry about are resolved through regular updates that don't need those things.

> Why would they risk being seen to support a platform, that they consider a potential vector of incredibly bad PR, just for end user convenience?

What are you talking about? There's no bad PR in allowing SB/TPM to be off. The bad PR comes from requiring them to be on.

> They have been browbeaten into being extremely security conscious, especially after the SMB stuff.

SB/TPM aren't actual security. They're DRM masquerading as security.

> Personally, my Win 10 laptops are becoming Debian laptops as god intended.

That's good, but it doesn't invalidate any of the above.
by yegor | 2025-10-07 01:42:13+00:00
Company who's blog post this is ain't bad either if you're looking for a non-ecosystem VPN. Proton is trying to be Nord and create an ecosystem of products that store all your most private data, all under the umbrella of 1 company which defeats the whole point of a VPN who should have no data on you (not even an email).

PS. I'm from the company who's blog post this is.
by lmm | 2025-10-07 01:42:46+00:00
> Your lifestyle is subsidized by society. You depend on other people and services to make it work. You either have to eat out all the time or make many small trips to grocery stores and rent places with furnished kitchens. There is no self reliance, no preparation for things to go wrong besides saving money and hoping you can buy your way out.

Everyone lives in and depends on society. I don't think that means you're being "subsidized"; if anything the footprint of living like this is much smaller than someone who owns a house full of stuff and drives a car every day. (At least if you skip the routine flying part. Trains and boats are great)
by mh- | 2025-10-07 01:43:00+00:00
I was with you until you listed Xbox - their consoles are dying in the market.

They've adopted a strategy of calling everything "gaming" Xbox, and seem to be going all-in on Gamepass subscription revenue along with making their first-party games available on other platforms. I'll be surprised if there is another flagship console following the Series X.

We'll see how that works out for them.
by throwA29B | 2025-10-07 01:43:42+00:00
>period of 1995-2001

That time basically only some intro-European migrations happened: Germans repatriating from the recently dissolved USSR, other Europeans moving back and forth, maybe some refugees from the Balkans.

Interesting stuff started happening much, much later.

Also what with this line spacing? It renders the paper nigh unreadable!
by Fischgericht | 2025-10-07 01:44:25+00:00
"The range of the ground stations are under 1500 miles and I really don't know where people are getting the idea that the lasers don't work."

Maybe because v1 and v2 did not even have working lasers on the hardware level...?

The idea is coming from "reality", Starlinks own reporting, industry talks, tech press etc.

Anyway, to shorten this we can agree that we have different definitions of what one expects from having a dedicate backbone. I would expect seamless handover amongst other things, which I have never ever seen, and unless you show me a video recording of a 24h Starlink session with MTR running I simply will trust the data I have over a random claim.

As said elsewhere in this thread: It is extremely hard to find detailed benchmarks from happy Starlink users. Next to all positive content is paid content. And a quick look at trustpilot & co clearly hint that there a huge chunk of Starlink customers might be unhappy. And even if it's just because their online gaming sessions getting interrupted on every Sat hand-over, which exists in reality, but not in your mind :)

Seriously, if you have access to any benchmark data sources, please gimme. I'm not here for "winning" an argument. Data, Data, Data.
by lesuorac | 2025-10-07 01:44:25+00:00
> Whatever the merits of the lawsuit, it wasn't about the pay package being too diluting.

But this is exactly the point. If somebody is going to sue Elon when he 13x the share price then of course somebody is willing to sue AMD if they 4x it.

Elon's pay package was voted on by shareholders. AMD's deal with OpenAI had none of that so if anything it's more ripe for a lawsuit.
by brucehoult | 2025-10-07 01:44:31+00:00
Stand-alone array indexing, not in a loop, is quite rare and seldom affects code speed. When it is in a loop, the calculation is usually strength-reduced to a bump of a pointer by a constant, so things such as scaled register indexing aren't actually used a lot.

It is true that there is a range of offsets between ±1 MB and ±128 MB in which arm64 can use a single BL instruction while RISC-V's JAL won't reach. Both need two instructions (8 bytes) for a ±2 GB subroutine call. You'd have to analyse program traces to find out how important this it in practice.

I haven't done that study myself, but I expect it would be a losing thing to bet that one of the authors (and his students / colleagues) of the famous "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach" textbook didn't think to do this while making ISA design tradeoffs.

RISC-V does get genuine extra utility from being able to use other registers as the link register e.g. using the `-msave-restore` compiler flag to call runtime functions to save and restore registers instead of having load/store multiple, and being able to call that function before saving the Link Register.

I mean, that goes for the array indexing thing too, and all the other criticisms erincandescent makes. It's a very easy thing to say that constants and offsets should always be bigger, better, instruction sequences shorter but you then have to ask what else should be left out to make room, especially in an ISA with fixed-length instructions.
by 8cvor6j844qw_d6 | 2025-10-07 01:45:12+00:00
Mullvad doesn't support port forwarding [1] for users that need it unlike proton vpn [2].

Although I have never needed it myself, which in that case Mullvad might be better since they require minimal registration details.

[1]: https://mullvad.net/en/blog/removing-the-support-for-forward...

[2]: https://protonvpn.com/support/port-forwarding
by neoCrimeLabs | 2025-10-07 01:45:50+00:00
There's a lot of attention around increasing malicious contributors. Someone I don't know with no history contributing to my project immediately jumping into packaging, distribution, provenance would really have me questioning their intentions.

Am I being paranoid? Probably, but given recent history I don't think so. Would I ban them for that? Dunno, but it would be a consideration.

Either way, I don't find the decision to ban someone from contributing for that to be all that surprising.
Run 35B LLMs on Dual Pascal GPUs with QLoRA
by rickesh_tn | 2025-10-07 01:46:00+00:00
Hi HN,

I built a system to run 35B parameter language models on older Pascal GPUs (P100 + GTX 1080 Ti) using multi-GPU memory spillover. Problem: Most LLM inference tools (Ollama, LM Studio) are limited to single GPU VRAM (~13B models max on a 16GB GPU). If you have multiple older GPUs, the second one sits idle. Solution: Multi-GPU + CPU memory spillover with QLoRA 4-bit quantization. The system automatically distributes layers across GPU0 → GPU1 → CPU RAM, enabling 35B models on hardware that normally maxes at 13B. Benchmarks (P100 16GB + GTX 1080 Ti 11GB): - Qwen-14B: 13.7 tokens/sec (9.4GB VRAM) - OPT-30B: 5.4 tokens/sec (15.2GB VRAM) - CodeLlama-34B: 0.8 tokens/sec (16.7GB VRAM) Quick start: docker pull rickeshtn/large-model-international_release:latest docker run -it --rm --runtime=nvidia --gpus all --ipc=host --ulimit memlock=-1 --ulimit stack=268435456 -v $(pwd):/workspace -e HF_HOME=/workspace/model_cache rickeshtn/large-model-international_release:latest python /app/interactive_chat.py --model-name Qwen/Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct Technical details: - QLoRA 4-bit NF4 quantization (75% memory reduction) - HuggingFace Transformers + Accelerate + bitsandbytes - Automatic device mapping with CPU offload - Interactive chat with conversation persistence GitHub: https://github.com/rickeshtn/locallm-pascal Docker Hub: https://hub.docker.com/r/rickeshtn/large-model-international_release 34 users already running it. Happy to answer technical questions!
by kriops | 2025-10-07 01:46:06+00:00
Rights are not something you enumerate, i.e., they are not a “list.” The underlying idea of God-given rights is, simply put, that your freedom ends where mine begins and vice versa.

The idea, moreover, is the generalization of ethics to an environment with multiple actors, such as Earth. And it is, of course, inconsistent with many ethical systems: A competing idea in equally simple terms is “might makes right.”

And the idea, furthermore, does not change over time. So if you substitute it into my previous comment, you will see that the argument within holds.

Finally, and as a side note, I strongly agree that the state of possible actions, and as the “list” of possible infringements changes with, e.g., technology. An 1800s philosopher would, for example, never have considered the applicability of any theory of rights to the operation of a nuclear power plant.
by theogravity | 2025-10-07 01:46:36+00:00
It's already happening. There are visual novel groups that take pateron sponsorship to run the script through machine translation. It's now done in giant batches. They're released for free and I am not able to speak of the quality as I've never tried them, but when I see reviews on steam for a VN that has been machine translated, it never results in a good review.
by AJ007 | 2025-10-07 01:46:46+00:00
I had a similar issue, after cleaning up a Windows machine for someone else, making sure Firefox with uBlock was running. I took a look at it a few weeks later and there was some bullshit Microsoft Bing search bar or AI thing on the toolbar. Wiped, installed Linux.

Microsoft is setting fire to the bridges and those will be users which they will never be able to get back again.

Linux works great for gaming except some anti-cheat stuff which probably won't be legal anymore anyways in Europe under the PLD.
by gnabgib | 2025-10-07 01:47:23+00:00
2023 Robin Williams' daughter: AI recreations of her dad are 'personally disturbing' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37751401

2023 Robin Williams’ daughter Zelda slams AI for recreating her father’s voice (33 points, 74 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37742529
by totallymike | 2025-10-07 01:48:35+00:00
This is a problem as well, but what I see often is what seems to be the cheapest speech recognition software they could find auto-transcribing the dub, and it falls over any time it meets a name or word it can’t guess out of like to 1,000 most common words in the English language.

Of course, I just went back to scrub for examples and either I am remembering incorrectly which shows demonstrated it most frequently or they’ve fixed Zeta Gundam in the spots I’ve checked.
by nosefurhairdo | 2025-10-07 01:49:02+00:00
Thank you. If we prosecuted scientists for a drug as well tolerated as finasteride we would cease to develop new medication and all of humanity would be worse for it.

If there was some indication that the pharmaceutical company knew of and concealed evidence that finasteride caused depression/suicidality, then there could be grounds for criminal prosecution. But a non-consensus view in hindsight that a drug might increase depression looks more like a losing civil liability claim.
by al_borland | 2025-10-07 01:49:15+00:00
I work in a large enterprise and I see more and more people move to macOS every year. We use Office 365. I run the Office apps on my Mac. We backup with OneDrive. We collaborate with SharePoint. We use our AD accounts to login on macOS, use InTune to manage endpoints. My Mac even has Defender on it now.

Microsoft is still getting their money, just slightly less from Windows itself.
by pjerem | 2025-10-07 01:49:54+00:00
Except for games with anti cheats, can you quote from your head three games the last 10-15 years that aren’t running perfectly on Linux ?

Because from my ~1 500 titles steam library, I can think of one game that I had issues with. And even this particular game (which is Tomb Raider 2013, btw) worked perfectly fine after a little hack. And ironically the "hack" was checking a checkbox in Steam to force using the Windows version of the game instead of the official Linux port.
by kragen | 2025-10-07 01:50:06+00:00
You make it possible to undo the action!

In rare cases that's not possible; four that I know of:

- the action is controlling something in the physical world such as a CNC milling machine, or

- the action involves acting on somebody else's computer, for example sending an email, or

- the action involves securely deleting information so that future adversaries who obtain your data storage medium can't recover it, or

- data storage space is so limited that you don't have room to log an undo record.

Obviously none of those were the case here, but when there are, there are well-known techniques for reducing the risk. For example, you can include by default a "cooling off" period to cancel the email send in or restore from nightly backups, or figure out how to do a "dry run" without a cutting tool in the chuck to see if it looks like your CNC program is going to smash the mill.

You can put a molly-guard over inevitably destructive actions; that's why the IBM PC's reset keystroke is a three-key chord, and Emacs asks for you to type "yes" or "no" rather than "y" or "n" in certain cases. (Although in many of Emacs's cases, being able to undo would have been better. Freeing up the memory of a closed buffer with unsaved changes, for example, could almost always wait a few minutes!)

It's also important in such cases for the user to be able to clearly see all the relevant information.
by rcxdude | 2025-10-07 01:50:16+00:00
'no sun and no wind' is not actually a thing that happens. What happens is less sun during the day and more or less wind in different places in Europe. This is a problem that can be solved through a combination of excess capacity, long distance transmission of energy, and storage, affordably and with existing technology. It's been obvious for a long time that a fully renewable grid can work, and Europe is rapidly moving towards that. Gas turbines are a reasonable stop-gap which will slowly get pushed out of generation as the proportion of renewables and storage grows.
by habinero | 2025-10-07 01:51:30+00:00
> In an attempt to reach out to clear up any misunderstandings, I opened a Github issue on my forked repo, tagged the lodash org and primary maintainer, and explained the situation. I gave context as to why I had opened the PR, and what I wanted to achieve. Two weeks later, no response. As a last-ditch effort, I sent an email directly to the same primary maintainer, using an email I found in git commit history

Dude cannot take a no. The lesson here is don't be annoying if you want people to work with you.
by snovymgodym | 2025-10-07 01:52:01+00:00
I'm not convinced Microsoft cares about the Windows market share in consumer PCs or the small amount of money they make from selling Windows licenses to regular consumers.

If they did, Windows wouldn't be so usable unactivated and the MassGravel activation stuff would have been patched already.

They built up their almost-monopoly when it mattered in the 90s and the 2000s, and now their market position is basically secured.

For Microsoft's purposes the main way of making money from Windows is from business and enterprise sales, and those sales will exist pretty much indefinitely.
by flexagoon | 2025-10-07 01:52:24+00:00
> Proton is trying to be Nord

I feel like it's Nord who's trying to be Proton but worse, no? Nord had just the VPN until recently, unlike Proton which was already trying to build an ecosystem (although they did speed up the new product drops significantly in the past few years). And unlike Nord, at least Proton actually has proper zero-access encryption and stuff, and they seem to know what they're talking about rather than just relying on influencer marketing.
by ed | 2025-10-07 01:52:32+00:00
> Once a service can actively involve you and/or your LLM in ongoing interaction

Is there any progress on that front? That would unlock a lot of applications that aren't feasible at the moment.

Edit: Sampling is a piece of the puzzle https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-03-26/cli...

I also see a lot of discussion on Github around agent to agent (a2a) capabilities. So it's a big use case, and seems obvious to the people involved with MCP.
by AuthAuth | 2025-10-07 01:52:38+00:00
Its not what he says that makes people think he encouraged and forced people towards political violence. He isn't just a guy saying mean things. He is one the most influential people pushing support for the political right wing, he influences masses of young and old people towards their campaign, he works with some of the most evil people in the nation and helps them theorycraft and spread their ideas and make it policy. All of this directly affects peoples lives. Thats why I laugh when he was killed and celebrate his death. Thats why I and many others openly say that he deserved what he got.
by underlipton | 2025-10-07 01:54:41+00:00
This sounds like a great way to decimate outcomes for marginalized people. Some significant portion of those perceived as "not wanting to help themselves" are going to just be "people who doctors don't give the benefit of the doubt and consistently second guess or underserve." Which is, statistically, women, minorities, and physical outliers (including obese and disabled folk). People already die because they're not believed, or important signs are missed, but I suppose making that incidence even more likely by giving every personally judgmental doctor the license to let their bias bleed into their professional conduct with impunity is just in line with the zeitgeist.

Per your anecdote: yes, the 500-pound people were likely to be dealing with some unknown ailment. Painful as yours likely was, I'm guessing it was simple to triage and determine that you weren't likely to bleed out imminently? While the people who went ahead of you might have been facing any number of life-threatening situations. You don't know, so you don't get to make that call. Duh.

But if we're going down this path, why not add ER fast passes and "tips" that rearrange care order a la Uber? That seems to be the next logical step.
by dworks | 2025-10-07 01:56:36+00:00
> Find me hotels in Capetown that have a pool by the beach .Should cost between 200 dollars to 800 dollars a night

I built this 18 months ago at an OTA platform. We parse the query and identify which terms are locations, which are hotel features, which are room amenities etc. Then we apply those filters (we have thousands of attributes that can be filtered on, but cannot display all of them in the UI) and display the hotel search results in the regular UI. The input query is also through the normal search box.

This does not need and should not be done in a chatbot UX. All the implementation is on the backend and the right display is the already existing UI. This is semantic search and it comes as a standard capability in ElasticSearch, Supabase etc. Though we built our own version.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-10-07 01:56:37+00:00
For secure boot and TPM, I'm not worried about someone breaking into my house and hacking my bios. I'm worried about getting a virus. Secure boot is useless but updates are important.

For bitlocker, I like it. But I use the password version that doesn't need any particular hardware.

How long do I expect updates? Well for starters, not even ten years of support for processors that were state of the art in 2018 is very bad. And windows 10 stopped being the newest option in 2021, so would ten years from that be so burdensome for security updates?

And no it's not a PR risk to release updates for windows 10. You don't need to stretch that hard, please.
by totallymike | 2025-10-07 01:57:01+00:00
I see this a lot, and it is a mild pet peeve of mine as well. Along the same lines, since I’m using Gundam as an example in this thread, I’ll point to a technology in the franchise called “psycommu” (pronounced in dubs as psy-com-moo) which is clearly transliterated from how it’s spelled in the original script without taking a second look at it. I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t have just localized it to “psy-com,” But here we are still calling it “psycommu” in recent series
by baobun | 2025-10-07 01:57:35+00:00
Well at least you should then have that on a dedicated gaming machine - treat it like a console. Not the same box you do your surfing, socials, banking and coding etc on. I think the intersection of people who can afford a rig for competitive online gaming but can't afford to keep it separate should be very small. Or at least put the gaming in an isolated Windows VM with GPU passthrough (fun times with anticheat). Git gud.