MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rwmj | 2025-10-29 13:29:34+00:00
The method is buried about 60% through the article, but it's interesting. It seems incredibly risky for the cloud companies to do this. Was it agreed by some salespeople without the knowledge of legal / management?

Leaked documents from Israel’s finance ministry, which include a finalised version of the Nimbus agreement, suggest the secret code would take the form of payments – referred to as “special compensation” – made by the companies to the Israeli government.

According to the documents, the payments must be made “within 24 hours of the information being transferred” and correspond to the telephone dialing code of the foreign country, amounting to sums between 1,000 and 9,999 shekels.

If either Google or Amazon provides information to authorities in the US, where the dialing code is +1, and they are prevented from disclosing their cooperation, they must send the Israeli government 1,000 shekels.

If, for example, the companies receive a request for Israeli data from authorities in Italy, where the dialing code is +39, they must send 3,900 shekels.

If the companies conclude the terms of a gag order prevent them from even signaling which country has received the data, there is a backstop: the companies must pay 100,000 shekels ($30,000) to the Israeli government.
by Levitz | 2025-10-29 13:29:39+00:00
Not putting the focus in accessibility is not the same as cutting those people off. I think I get your point, really, because someone who needs this kind of aid and doesn't get it does definitely feel cut off and usage of everyday devices becomes and everyday battle. We are not going to disagree there.

But surely there can be a point in which there are larger problems than that Linux reached 5% adoption this year in the US:

https://ostechnix.com/linux-reaches-5-desktop-market-share-i...

That's better than what it was. It's also not a whole lot. But you must understand, the more people use Linux, the better it becomes. Even if value accessibility over other matters, increasing the market share surely will increase the amount of people working on accessibility too.
by rcxdude | 2025-10-29 13:29:42+00:00
I really dislike the fallacy that just because you're buying something it means that you're not building anything. In practice this is never true: there's always some people-in-your-org time cost of buying something just as much as there's some giving-money-to-other-orgs cost to building something. So often organisations wind up buying something and spending way more time in the process than it would cost for them to build it themselves.

With AWS I think this tradeoff is very weak in most cases: the tasks that you are paying AWS for are relatively cheap in time-of-people-in-your-org, and AWS also takes up a significant amount of that time with new tasks as well. Of the organisations I'm personally aware of, the ones who hosted on-prem spent less money on their compute and had smaller teams managing it, with more effective results than those who were cloud-based (to various degrees of egregousness from 'well, I can kinda see how it's worth it because they're growing quickly' to 'holy shit they're setting money on fire and compromising their product because they can't just buy some used tower PCs and plug them in in a closet in the office')
by FeepingCreature | 2025-10-29 13:29:51+00:00
In principle, it should be possible to identify malign IPs at scale by using a central service and reporting IPs probabilistically. That is, if you report every thousandth page hit with a simple UDP packet, the central tracker gets very low load and still enough data to publish a bloom filter of abusive IPs, say a million bits gives you pretty low false-positive. (If it's only ~10k malign IPs, tbh you can just keep a lru counter and enumerate all of them.) A billion hits per hour across the tracked sites would still only correspond to ~50KB/s inflow on the tracker service. Any individual participating site doesn't necessarily get many hits per source IP, but aggregating across a few dozen should highlight the bad actors. Then the clients just pull the bloom filter once an hour (80KB download) and drop requests that match.

Any halfway modern LLM could probably code the backend for this in a day or two and it'd run on a RasPi. Some org just has to take charge and provide the infra and advertisement.
by haltingproblem | 2025-10-29 13:30:09+00:00
"Grammarly announced Tuesday the acquisition of email client Superhuman in a push to build out its AI for its productivity suite. Neither companies provided details about the financial terms of the deal..... Superhuman was founded by Rahul Vohra, Vivek Sodera, and Conrad Irwin. The company raised more than $114 million in funding from backers including a16z, IVP, and Tiger Global, with its last valuation at $825 million, according to data from venture data analytics firm Traxcn." [1]

Interested to understand what would be the terms of the deal if Superhuman was valued at $825mm and what the founders cleared if the all the VCs rounds had 2-3x liquidation preferences.

edit: added source

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/01/grammarly-acquires-ai-emai...
by adornKey | 2025-10-29 13:30:22+00:00
For some time there has been a race going on between Educa and Ravensburger for the worlds biggest puzzle. Some years ago Ravensburger hired a new designer and I somehow can't stand their style any-more. But Educa is still going strong. Sadly I'm now out of wall space...

Another topic would be how to safely attach a puzzle onto a ceiling... This would add more options.. Putting it on the floor could also work, but adds entirely new requirements for protection... Maybe that path would end up in building a glass floor...
by entaloneralie | 2025-10-29 13:30:53+00:00
Conway's Fractran traditionally compares the accumulator against reduced fractions, but computationally-speaking, getting to the gcd of a fraction does little more than getting rid of otherwise valuable information used during comparison to match against a restricted set of fractions. The support for catalysts, symbols found on both sides of a rewrite rule, makes for a simpler and faster implementation.

15/6 red [green] > blue [green] 5/2 red > blue red green

These two fractions are not equal and reducing the first into the second, eliminates the capability to match against it only when the catalyst green is present in the accumulator.
by graemep | 2025-10-29 13:31:10+00:00
I think this is true for other European governments. The UK is has introduced age verification (although not mandated an app) and is pushing for digital ID. If digital ID meets too much pushback plan B is a boiled frog approach by introducing it for children first (the legislation for that is in its final stages).

Governments say they want sovereignty but not if they have to pay anything for it. They also like the fact that forcing everyone to do everything through a few big businesses makes surveillance and censorship easy. No need to pass laws, just do deals with a few companies. Governments are all about central control, and its more important to them than what they see as obsolete nonsense about sovereignty.
by hilbert42 | 2025-10-29 13:31:22+00:00
Oh dear. Years ago I had the ‘misfortune’ to taste some of the greatest first and second growth Bordeaux wines—the 1945s, Margeaux, Lafite, etc. Now my palate lies in ruins, ordinary wine is essentially undrinkable, and even good wine only draws comparisons with those Greats, enjoyment for their own sake is thus reduced or lost.

To make matters worse, those great Bordeaux wines and Burgundy's Grand crus such as Romanée-Conti, Grands Échezeaux etc. have in resent years reached truly dizzying heights, only multimillionaires and lottery winners can now afford to drink them. Unless one’s in either of those categories, paying a $1,000, $10,000 and upward per bottle is even an outrageous notion to contemplate.

Lesson: getting spoiled on the very best—especially early on—depreciates one’s appreciation for not only the mundane but also things that by most other criteria are deemed very good.
by L_226 | 2025-10-29 13:31:22+00:00
and you are welcome to buy a hackable tablet to run a browser or desktop app and use that for all your comms. This is not how most people work though :)

The far far worse issue is that public utilities (i.e. governments) and entities like banks force you to use an app only available through one of 2 privately owned distribution channels to interact with them. IMO this is a far worse and pervasive issue than phones being locked hardware.
Show HN: WizzyPrompt – Image generation platform, run and build reusable prompts
by jkuijper | 2025-10-29 13:31:38+00:00
My goal is to create a platform where creators can harness AI image generation to enhance their creative process.

I've developed a new approach for creating and managing prompts using a placeholder notation system. This lets you run and build reusable prompts. Learn more here: https://wizzyprompt.com/tutorials#create-your-own-prompt
by MontyCarloHall | 2025-10-29 13:31:40+00:00
Very cool. tl;dw: an inverted triple pendulum has 2^3 = 8 equilibria, since each arm of the pendulum can either be up or down (naturally, all but one equilibria are unstable), and this controller is able to make all 8*7 = 56 transitions between them.

Control theory is one of those things that shouldn't possibly work, yet here we are.
by JohnFen | 2025-10-29 13:31:59+00:00
If I'm programming with/for others, I use the style the team has adopted. If I'm working with existing code, I maintain the style already used by it.

For my own projects, my preferred style isn't purely any of the ones you list. It's a mongrel style. I do it that way because I choose my style elements to most closely match the way my brain works.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-10-29 13:32:01+00:00
I pay for it, I am the customer, it just works. The quality of the search results, in my opinion, is very good compared to Google. Kagi is a small business, and I want to support their continued existence and operation. I have a family plan, which I provisioned for our family.

I avoid Google, and "Big Tech" in general, whenever possible. I am not the customer in those cases, I am the product, which I dislike.
by bayindirh | 2025-10-29 13:32:04+00:00
> Feel free to complain, but don't forget you can make choices.

Of course. I can make a choice. When the choice is between being able to login to secure services with my SIM embedded e-signature, use mobile banking and conduct official business and not being able to do any of these things, making choices are easy.

Running Linux on desktop is easy mode when compared to phones, and yes, I started using Linux on desktop in 1999 too with SuSE 6.0. Phones are way more interconnected and central to our lives now when compared to a general purpose computer running your $FAVORITE_OS.
by hylaride | 2025-10-29 13:32:13+00:00
This is all automatable and is well documented for almost every setup. If you're on a cloud provider/CDN it's even easier as they'll handle all this for you at pretty much no cost.

You can also still use your own threat model. You can use self-signed certs, import your own CA, etc. The issue is that browsers need to service the mass market, including the figurative grandma who won't otherwise understand fake bank certificates.

As for email, yes...that is a complete shitshow and I'm still surprised it works as well as it does.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-10-29 13:32:40+00:00
I think next time I upgrade my "phone" I'm going to get a gaming capable tablet with wireless and give it the steamos treatment. This gives you decent linux/windows/android interop.

I already lug a small backpack around most of the time, I can leave the tablet in the bag and use buds for conversations and when I need an actual computer it'll be way better.
by surgical_fire | 2025-10-29 13:32:57+00:00
I think people tend to have double standards when it comes to MacOS. People who run MacOS generally choose to run MacOS intentionally and are for that reason more willing to accept/overlook issues.

I use both Linux machines and Macs (at work) and Macs has always been objectively worse when it comes to usability ajd development. It's just has a large number of paper cuts.
by jerf | 2025-10-29 13:33:28+00:00
Yes, yes, you're an invincible winter god upon whom the temperature means nothing. Let us all acknowledge that and bow before you.

Now tell me everyone is doing that, all the time. I also live fairly north, which is part of why I've learned this about Vitamin D in my own research, and I can't help but notice that stores selling winter coats and gloves and other assorted cold gear don't go out of business ever year because nobody is buying them. Nor do I walk through a crowd of people in the middle of winter and have people point and laugh at me because I'm the only one in a coat.

Come on. You're just arguing to argue and swagger a bit, not because you actually think people are getting enough sun exposure in the middle of winter to get enough Vitamin D and there's nothing to worry about.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-10-29 13:33:45+00:00
While Dry Forks, WY is the only coal plant where the economics works for coal in the US, it is unlikely this support scales nationally [1] [2]. Also, it is unknown if a coal generation EPA permit would be issued after political winds shift by the time this new generator comes online. For comparison, Meta has contracted for 600MW of solar in Texas (Swenson Ranch, Stonewall County), which will be online in less than two years (2027). Longroad Energy announced last month that construction has started on a 400MW solar PV plant in Yoakum County, named 1000 Mile Solar. The project will be up and running next year (2026) [3][4].

(and while coal and solar capacity factors and dispatchability are different, consider uptake rate of solar and battery storage, along with their cost decline curves; one cannot build coal generation as cheap and fast as battery backed solar [5])

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45569451

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45569317

[3] https://cleantechnica.com/2025/10/27/texas-adds-more-solar-p...

[4] https://en.newsroom.engie.com/news/engie-and-meta-strengthen...

[5] https://web.archive.org/web/20251029151054/https://www.eia.g...
by 4gotunameagain | 2025-10-29 13:33:52+00:00
Well then we simply disagree. I would suggest to look up negative criticism for linux online (e.g. "linux sucks site:reddit.com" etc).

It is flooded by complaints about HW incompatibilities, HW acceleration not working etc. Haven't been able to find complaints about accessibility.

Furthermore, what is the percentage of visually impaired people in the US and what is the percentage of linux desktop users ? The numbers speak for themselves.
by mikkupikku | 2025-10-29 13:34:09+00:00
I get what you're saying, the plurality of gamers want to play the new release AAA stuff. And the majority of movie goers want to see the latest Minions Emoji movie. And the majority of cheese eaters want to eat American cheese or at best Wisconsin cheddar.

These things are mass market slop which are engineered to be bland and predictable to make the most reliable returns for institutional investors. Discerning consumers know better and don't go by what's popular.
by zozbot234 | 2025-10-29 13:34:26+00:00
You could use Fil-C in combination with a memory-safe language like Rust to allow for both "safe" leaf references (potentially using ownership and reference counting to represent more complex allocated objects, but would not themselves "own" pointers to Fil-C-managed data, thus avoiding the need to trace inside these objects and auto-free them) and general Fil-C managed pointers with possible cycles (perhaps restricted to some arena/custom address space, to make tracing and collecting more efficient) to be contained in a singke origram. Due to memory safety, the use of "leaf" references could be ensured not to alter the invariants that Fil-C relies on; but managed pointers would nonetheless be available whenever tracing GC could not be avoided.

This would ultimately save much of the overhead associated with tracing GC itself.
by kace91 | 2025-10-29 13:34:37+00:00
I don't fully agree with that, IMO it's a multifaceted problem.

There's the obvious fact that tech has become the new path to high salaries, and culture changes when people are pursuing the money rather than the trade.

There's the centralisation and capture of resources - app stores in mobile, message boards moving to reddit then being astroturfed, hardware closing to repairs for water resistance/ form factor reasons...

There's also the death of piracy limiting access to resources. Apps, courses and books were files pirated massively, online services kinda stopped that.

I don't think free/open source resources failed to catch up in quality, but I do think they failed to soften friction and remove the barrier of access. Consider mastodon vs twitter, creating a website vs a facebook page, sideloading an app vs app stores, reading a manual vs an influencer course.
by baq | 2025-10-29 13:34:51+00:00
I remember having to put in orders for pallets of servers which then ended up storage somewhere because there were not enough people to carry and wire them up and/or there wasn't enough rack space to install them.

Having an ability to spin up a server or a vm when you need it without having to ask a single question is very liberating. Sometimes such elasticity is exactly what's needed. OTOH other people's servers aren't always the wise choice, but you have to know both environments to make the right choice, and nowadays I feel most people don't really know anything about bare metal.
by L_226 | 2025-10-29 13:35:05+00:00
See my other reply to sibling. If this is how you operate, you are welcome to purchase or build hardware that better reflects your needs. Forcing a private company to modify their product, which people are happily paying for, because you personally disagree is a stretch. The better argument is that other entities whom you pay (government; tax, bank; fees) shall allow non Play or Apple store interfaces to their services, and not supporting this is an abdication of their responsibility to you.
by ulrikrasmussen | 2025-10-29 13:35:19+00:00
Unfortunately western governments are moving to impose more and more control over our digital life, and I think they see a locked down commercial platform as a convenient means to that end because they can regulate it. If the EU commission ever succeeds in passing Chat Control, which requires client side scanning on all devices, then it is very convenient for them if people do not use open source operating systems where they can just run clients that don't send data to a third party.
by MisterTea | 2025-10-29 13:35:22+00:00
> It is interesting though how this same conversation doesn't exist in the same way in other areas of computing like video game consoles or other embedded computing devices ...

Well that is the consumers choice. I have a friend who is a hard core gamer and said hands down he will buy a console any day of the week because all he wants to do is play a game. He doesn't want to deal with Windows updates (or god forbid, fiddling with Linux), driver issues, things suddenly not working, and so on.

Personally, I don't buy video game consoles because it kills me to own a powerful compute device that is hamstrung by the manufacturer to only run blessed software. No thanks. I game on open platforms like my Linux PC running open source games like gzdoom, classics on DOSbox, emulators for classic consoles/arcades, Steam games and so on. And I can run whatever I damn well please.
by crote | 2025-10-29 13:35:50+00:00
It worries me how we are increasingly making browser vendors a critical part of the TLS ecosystem - first with CRL bloom filters, now with signature Merkle trees. And they of course also manage the root stores.

Sure, it's nice and convenient if you're using an evergreen browser which is constantly getting updates from the mothership, but what is the rest supposed to do? How are we supposed to use this in Curl, or in whatever HTTP library your custom application code is using? How about email clients? Heck, is it even possible with embedded devices?

"The internet" is a hell of a lot bigger than "some website in Google Chrome", and we should be careful to not make all those other use cases impossible.
by Thorrez | 2025-10-29 13:35:57+00:00
>So the platforms have to make it nearly impossible to keep everything in their controlled channel.

I don't understand what you're saying. Are you saying Google is making it harder to develop an app for sideloading than to develop an app for the Play Store? I don't see how that's the case. AFAICT, the new "sideloading" requirements aren't more restrictive than the Play Store requirements.

Disclosure: I work at Google, but not on Android.
by babel_ | 2025-10-29 13:36:01+00:00
It might actually be a better environmental decision, if instead of buying a new second phone, it is instead about keeping an existing phone in use and not adding to the burning heaps of e-waste. Given the rising popularity of refurbished phones, not to mention the lower costs, it might actually be the opposite of what you claim, at least on those grounds.

And for the rest, well, "just works" for what? With a little time and effort, it may even get to the case of the "just works" part is a siloed unit like a SIM card that is just installed to the device, making it opt-in and user owned...
by ed_mercer | 2025-10-29 13:36:27+00:00
Talos is great until it's not. We ran into Ceph IO speed bottlenecks and found it was impossible to debug ("talosctl cgroups —preset=io" is a mess) because the devs didn't want to add an SSH escape hatch into their black box OS. Our Talos nodes would also randomly become unhealthy and you have no way of knowing why. Switched to PXE booted Alpine linux with vanille k8s, and we had a much more stable experience with no surprises, and the ability to SSH whenever we want has been hugely helpful.
by jsmailes | 2025-10-29 13:36:47+00:00
Helix and other new editors (kakoune comes to mind) always appealed to me because they seemed to have slightly more intuitive approaches to editing than vim, but I just don't think I can ever switch, purely because vim just exists everywhere I need it. It (or vi) is installed on practically every system I ever touch by default, and almost every IDE/editor under the sun supports vim keybinds either natively or via well-maintained plugins.

It's the same problem with keyboard layouts: I'm sure I could learn to be slightly faster on dvorak/colemak, but nothing beats the convenience of always having guaranteed access to qwerty, everywhere I go.
by lapcat | 2025-10-29 13:36:47+00:00
> I believe that the WebExtensions API is more powerful in the sense that it allows more complex blocking rules.

This is not really accurate.

The Safari content blocking API and the WebExtensions DeclarativeNetRequest API are comparable. The difference is that WebExtensions are JavaScript and can run in the context of the web page. With WebExtensions, you get DNR plus arbitrary JS, whereas the Safari content blocker API is native code and doesn't run in the context of the web page. The arbitrary runtime JS is what allows you to do things that you can't do with declarative content blocking rules.

You could also have a Safari content blocker with an optional WebExtension for additional functionality with no usage of DeclarativeNetRequest.