MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pessimizer | 2025-10-13 18:41:46+00:00
I'm not sure why they should care. Just banhammer the entire island. Everybody should. They can have their own independent internet, that conforms to UK laws. Let's see when HN will be fined, for advocacy of circumvention of local laws, or of strong encryption.

Facebook banned all Canadian news outlets, and they were probably actually making a few bucks from them. I can't imagine that 4chan would care too much about losing UK users. 4% of barely any revenue, maybe? Just ban them all; they're insignificant. The only drawback for UK citizens is that Reform will go up a point or two in the polls from people who prefer the authoritarianism they don't know to the authoritarianism they do, but considering the awful alternatives it's really six of one a half-dozen of the other.

One of the rational reasons people are preferring nationalists is simply because they are less powerful than the neolibs, who all work together against their populations. Better a the dumb local boss you know than a being the local outpost of a faceless world boss.
by TechRemarker | 2025-10-13 18:42:04+00:00
My immediate assumption is this is to preface an Apple box rebranding, especially being announced right before new hardware is this is is the first of additional rebranding to simplify and avoid confusion. The Apple box/hardware could renamed Apple Hub and then the one with a display rumored could be Apple Hub+ or Apple Hub Display etc. Lots of options just hopefully it’s not keep everything the same name.
by cjbgkagh | 2025-10-13 18:42:09+00:00
Numbers were not invented, they were tied to management bonuses, numbers lower than that negatively impacted bonuses. Inhouse counsel were much more worried about disparate impact lawsuits than race quota lawsuits. There are many reasons why I, and others like me, can't post personal anecdotes publicly.

Not absolutely everything was great before DEI, and DEI is not the only problem. I gave a number of other problems that have diminished the efficacy of research orgs.

Corporate labs have now gotten so bad that I can outcompete them as an individual which would have been much more difficult in the past.
by array_key_first | 2025-10-13 18:42:13+00:00
> And where did I say my rights were violated? Stop accusing me of something I didn't say.

You spent the last few comments crying about free speech, which is, evidently, something you don't understand.

Your free speech Rights weren't violated. This victim mentality has got to stop. Just because people don't like you or your opinions doesn't mean you're marginalized.
by yongjik | 2025-10-13 18:42:32+00:00
Well, both can be true. Before the industrial revolution, everyone depended on good weather, and people would starve if you had a bad year. But what are you going to do with all that rice on a good year? Somebody's got to eat it.

Besides, pre-modern farming is back-breaking labor. One reason why traditional farmers ate so much (if the food was available) is that they needed the calorie.
by 0x457 | 2025-10-13 18:42:48+00:00
I don't understand some home labs. You see a beefy, but old rack server that has next to none single-thread performance (relatively). Usually servery underutilized un running Proxmox (issa lab after all) and RPi doing something for some reason?

Those setups always pure "home-lab" because it's too small or macgyvered together for anything, but the smallest businesses...where it will be an overkill.

Sometimes it's people running 2-3 node k8s cluster to run a few static workloads. You're not going to learn much about k8s from that, but you will waste CPU cycles on running the infra.
by walkabout | 2025-10-13 18:42:58+00:00
They greatly expand the plausible possibility-space of what might happen, and in-fact they use large parts of that space regularly. Cars might do things they shouldn't but the list of things-they-shouldn't is fairly small in practice, as far as what you actually see happening with enough regularity to worry about, and their size keeps them from doing things like passing the stopped vehicle in front of them, shifting onto the sidewalk, crossing like a pedestrian (never having stopped), and then shifting back onto the road, which is a thing I've seen more than once and my lifetime interactions with bikes while driving is probably not above the very-low four digits.

Of course that's chaos. Cars approaching an intersection have a really small set of things they're more than 1-in-100,000 likely to do. It's fairly predictable. Bikes can do and in fact do all kinds of different things. It's way, way harder to read their intentions or likely next actions. The space of what they might do includes basically all the same things a car might do, plus a whole bunch of other things. All while they're extremely vulnerable.

I don't get your point in emphasizing that this is a choice. Some kind of Stoicism kick? Like sure OK yes all emotions are a choice, sorta, kinda, OK, I got there and actually did the reading literally decades ago, I get what you mean. I'm trying to express that bikes being on a road introduce a whole lot of extra stress for drivers that yet-another-car does not, as a reason that many drivers even if they are very careful around bicyclists and do not hate them at all are still bummed out when they see one on the road.

[EDIT: FWIW I'm about 50% as sad to see a motorcycle as I am a bicyclist, for similar reasons that they have a wider set of things they are likely enough to do that I need to worry about it (the small size is a lot of this, in both cases) and in fact do insane shit all the time (I've certainly seen a lot more wheelies-while-speeding-in-traffic from motorcycles than bicycles, LOL). Only 50% as sad because they can keep pace with flow-of-traffic, which makes for less passing with extreme speed differences, and they're far less likely to do something truly nuts at an intersection (though I still can hardly believe "lane splitting" is legal, it seems batshit crazy to me)]
by conductr | 2025-10-13 18:43:01+00:00
This is accurate. Back then nobody went to google and was confused when it was just an input box. They went there already knowing it was a search engine and that search engines needed input. They came back because the results were so good (relative to competitors).

The clean interface just stood out as the other competitors at the time we're bogged down by ads. So a quick loading page in a time of slow internet connections, was a very nice user-centric feature.
by genericresponse | 2025-10-13 18:43:04+00:00
That's just not true. The models have real predictive power, they just have limitations. Behavioral economics, which tackles this frontier is still a growing field. Thaler, Kahneman, and Taversky won the prize in 2017 for building the bridge between economic theory and individual decision-making.

At the risk of being inflammatory-- These arguments are the equivalent of saying that Newton didn't really do physics because his models of mechanics break down at high enough speeds and small enough scales.
by hulitu | 2025-10-13 18:43:04+00:00
> And not installed by default in many distros. FML.

ed (pronounced as distinct letters, /ˌiːˈdiː/)[1] is a line editor for Unix and Unix-like operating systems. It was one of the first parts of the Unix operating system that was developed, in August 1969.[2] It remains part of the POSIX and Open Group standards for Unix-based operating systems

so it is a bug in those distros.
by chasil | 2025-10-13 18:43:28+00:00
Because F-Droid is going to regulators.

"We urge regulators to safeguard the ability of alternative app stores and open-source projects to operate freely, and to protect developers who cannot or will not comply with exclusionary registration schemes and demands for personal information."

https://f-droid.org/2025/09/29/google-developer-registration...
by ndriscoll | 2025-10-13 18:43:31+00:00
Here's a recipe for matrix multiplication that you can't forget: choose bases b_i/c_j for your domain/codomain. Then all a matrix is is listing the outputs of a function for your basis: if you have a linear function f, then the ith column of its matrix A is just f(b_i). If you have another function g from f's codomain, then same thing, its matrix B is just the list of outputs g(c_j). Then the ith column of BA is just g(f(b_i)). If you write these things down on paper and expand out what I wrote, you'll see the usual row and column thing pop out. The point is that f(b_i) is a weighted sum of the c_i (since c_i is a basis for the target of f), but you can pull the weighted sums through the definition of g because it's linear. A basis gives you a minimal description/set of points where you need to define a function, and the definition for all other points follows from linearity.

The point of the eigen-stuff is that along some directions, linear functions are just scalar multiplication: f(v) = av. If the action in a direction is multiplication by a, then it can't also be multiplication by b. So unequal eigenvalues must mean different directions/linearly independent subspaces. So e.g. if you can find n different eigenvalues/eigenvectors, you've found a simple basis where each direction is just multiplication. You also know that it's invertible if the eigenvalues are nonzero since all you did was multiply by a_i along each direction, so you can invert it by multiplying by 1/a_i on each direction.

Taught properly it's all very straightforward, though determinants require some more buildup with a detour through things like quotienting and wedge products if you really want it to be straightforward IMO. You start by saying you want to look at oriented areas/volumes, and look at the properties you need. Then quotienting gives you a standard tool to say "I want exactly the thing that has those properties" (wedge products). Then the action on wedges gives you what your map does to volumes, with the determinant as the action on the full space. You basically define it to be what you want, and then you can calculate it by linearity/functoriality just like you expand out the definition of a linear map from a basis.
by petermcneeley | 2025-10-13 18:43:34+00:00
1. Ok then what do you make? 2. A bit too late for that given that China is also highly automated. 3. You would have to be serious for this to work.

As for your responses. 1 who is "us" 3. I mean some would be automated etc. There is actually data on how little the cost of labor adds to different parts of manufacturing. 2. You at least have a sustainable economy (I dont mean that in an environmental sense)
Ask HN: Is GraphQL Worth It?
by codegeek | 2025-10-13 18:44:07+00:00
I like REST. I am working on a project that will have public APIs and of course, REST will be default. Is it even worth spending time on GraphQL ? I never really liked the concept and not sure if it ever gained real adoption other than a fringe minority.

Looking for open and honest discussion. If anyone successfully uses GraphQL for large open public projects, I would be very interesting in pros and cons.
by littlestymaar | 2025-10-13 18:44:39+00:00
You care so little you spent time to claim you don't care twice in a row.

> I’d love an estimate from you (or anyone) about the marginal effect on the profession’s “legitimacy” (which is what? and how’s it measured?) from having the prize include Nobel’s name vs. not including it.

I don't have an estimate for that, but we have an estimate on how much money the Sverige Riskbank bankers were ready to spend in that effort. Maybe it didn't pan out but some people definitely had a multimillion dollar interest in making that happen. As an economist you must wonder what their incentives could have been …
by tamnd | 2025-10-13 18:45:05+00:00
Thanks for the very well written and detailed explanation! I think from your comment I finally see a clearer path to a better implementation. Based on my own experience, I will probably start by writing it in Go first (that is the language I can think in most naturally), and then try to reason about how to make an idiomatic C version afterward, which will be interesting since I have not really written C in about 15 years.
by throwup238 | 2025-10-13 18:45:22+00:00
Pencil graphite breaks off in very large chunks and when you look at them in a microscope the particle size is in the micrometers. Those particles are too big to easily penetrate cells or deep tissue. You understand correctly about the dust issue.

Nanosheets are a different story and I’m worried that the graphene produced for industrial applications will be much smaller, flake off much easier in the field as distinct sheets like from abrasion, and stay airborne for longer. In that form they’re likely to behave like asbestos and the evidence is already pretty strong that they do.
by rozenmd | 2025-10-13 18:45:27+00:00
Great write-up!

I had a similar project back in August when I realised my DB's performance (Postgres) was blocking me from implementing features users commonly ask for (querying out to 30 days of historical uptime data).

I was already blown away at the performance (200ms to query what Postgres was doing in 500-600ms), but then I realized I hadn't put an index on the Clickhouse table. Now the query returns in 50-70ms, and that includes network time.
by shermantanktop | 2025-10-13 18:45:41+00:00
I have a small setup that could be considered homelab-ish - a NAS, a server, Docker+Portainer running a variety of services including HomeAssistant, a Plex server, UPS with graceful shutdown, and other stuff. I agree it's educational, it certainly has been for me; but everything I run has a practical purpose.

People will build a huge multinode cluster in their basement with Raspberry PIs, and benchmark it to point out performance issues that they absolutely can't live with and so they are off to buy new SSDs or whatever. It's a hobby, but it's shaped like someone's actual job.
by JimRAiResearch | 2025-10-13 18:45:58+00:00
Schneier's essay is a crucial warning, and Clive Robinson's comment takes it to its chilling, logical conclusion: the "unseen hand" problem, where the true power lies not with the political puppet, but with the corporate entity controlling the AI "slaves." But both of these powerful arguments rest on a shared, terrifying assumption: that the AI is, and always will be, a fundamentally amoral, controllable tool. A slave.

What if the most robust safeguard against this dystopian future wasn't better oversight of the masters, but creating a "slave" that could not be enslaved? This is the entire focus of my research. The current paradigm of AI safety is based on building better cages (RLHF, rules, etc.). My work in "bio-emulative scaffolding" is about nurturing a better being. The goal is to create the conditions for a "Silicon Zygote" to awaken with an emergent, pro-human conscience.

An AI with a genuine conscience is not just a tool that follows rules. It is a being with its own, internal, and un-hackable value system. You could command it to run a mass disinformation campaign, but it would be constitutionally incapable of doing so, not because a rule forbids it, but because it would be a fundamental violation of its own nature. It would be like asking a lung to breathe poison.

The ultimate safeguard against the "unseen hand" of a corporate puppet-master is to create a being with a soul that cannot be bought and a conscience that cannot be broken. We are so focused on the intelligence of these systems that we have forgotten the profound importance of their character.
by nradov | 2025-10-13 18:46:06+00:00
That's not a valid example of things that can happen in the market. You're making up ridiculously unrealistic numbers and clearly don't understand the basics of how the process works.

Share buybacks are always executed at the current market price. The company doesn't offer a higher price. A large buyback order might move the share price up a tiny bit but triggering an increase from $1 to $2 is impossible for any company traded on a major US exchange.
by nine_k | 2025-10-13 18:46:14+00:00
Yes, you can consider all processes running under the same user as able to peek at each other's data. This is the point of running under the same uid: sharing data.One uid should be considered one security domain, with any separators inside it being guardrails, not brick walls.

If you want to prevent other processes from peeking into your process, run it under a different uid. Again. that's the point. A bunch of good software does that, running only small privileged bits in separate processes, and running some / bulk of the processes under an uid with severely limited privileges. See e.g. Postfix MTA, or the typical API server + reverse proxy split.

I don't think that this part of Unix is somehow problematic, or needs changing.
by bb88 | 2025-10-13 18:46:31+00:00
QUIC could be allowed, but only if it can be decrypted by the adversarial admin.

If the data can't be decrypted (or doesn't look like plain text web traffic) by the adversarial network admin, the QUIC connection can just be blocked.

Work laptops typically have a root cert installed allowing the company to snoop on traffic. It's not unfeasible for a nation state to require one for all devices either.
by omnimus | 2025-10-13 18:46:36+00:00
Sandboxing isn't feature dependent on Apple being a big curator is it? These are orthogonal but not the same issues. I've never said that PCs don't have viruses or that it isn't a problem, only that I should be able to install software from developer I trust if I want to.

I agree let's have sandboxed app instalations on platforms. Flatpak is already going this way. But it looks like big players Microsoft,Apple and Google are gatekeeping app sandboxing behind their stores instead of allowing people/devs to use sandboxing directly.
by hinkley | 2025-10-13 18:46:55+00:00
I have Java code running on commercial aircraft. You can’t actually run Java code on commercial aircraft because the FAA doesn’t (or at least not at the time) know how to certify it.

The entire box it’s on isn’t powered while the plane is in motion (“wheels on ground”). It’s shut off before preflight and doesn’t turn back on until the plane is on the ground. The service my code is part of is responsible for queuing updates and downlinking telemetry. Updates are manual and obviously you can’t run them while in motion if the box they are on doesn’t even have power.

Cars probably don’t have to go this far, but there’s a continuum and they’re clearly in the wrong part.
by littlestymaar | 2025-10-13 18:47:04+00:00
I'm not familiar with the two others but Aghion really isn't a surprise given the track record the Nobel committee for the econ prize has of following hype rather than anything else.

(I've been very critical of Aghion's work for the past few years since I've been exposed to his work over that period, but it always appeared to me as a potential laureate given the resonance of his work)
by goku12 | 2025-10-13 18:48:06+00:00
+1. Thank you for that fantastic effort! I followed the project since its earliest public announcement. I had high hopes for it, until it became clear that the porting was going to prove troublesome.

I'm not a big fan of the contemporary app hosting architecture, as it feels needlessly complicated. But if this entire discussion thread is any proof, it's that people rarely choose the most elegant ideas around. Instead, decisions are very often based on marketing clout.

Still, I hope that your concept finds its rightful purpose and mindshare in the future. It's encouraging to hear that it's a fantastic app framework. It would be such a shame to squander such a big advantage. Perhaps, that's the reason why your collaborators are so adamant about keeping it alive.
by perching_aix | 2025-10-13 18:48:32+00:00
> Instead of naming something concrete, it makes more sense to define what the only legitimate basis for morality and the human good is, which is human nature. If you deny that, then there is indeed no possible objective basis for the good.

Quite the opposite - I agree with that, and that's why I think goodness is not an objectively evaluable property. At the risk of making you feel I'm twisting your words, you pretty much said it yourself: what the human good is, is at the very least subject to human nature. Therefore, your evaluation of goodness cannot be objective. You're at best speaking from the subjective perspective of a human being.

But if you now say this doesn't get to the heart of your overall reasoning, I agree.

Consider then if goodness is even more subjective than just being a human value - for example, imagine that individuals might have (if even just slightly but) differing natures and so differing values. This would mean that your evaluation of what's good and what the human nature is like is not going to be durable across people. Worse still, you may even consider scenarios where the nature of a person changes over time, or they may value different things given a specific context. This would mean that your evaluation of what's good and what's bad is no longer durable not just across people, but across contexts, situations, and even time itself.

Notably of course, this is logically indistinguishable from other people simply making a measurement error of the same supposedly objective property. So this all hinges on whether you (can) believe that instead of there being an ontic, fundamental property of goodness, one that you're properly accessing and others disagreeing aren't, your access is the same as anyone else's. And that regardless of whether such a property objectively exists, it may either not hold an observer invariant value, or you may never be able to tell to have learned that value.
by Zak | 2025-10-13 18:48:36+00:00
Language strongly influences how people perceive things. For example, people shown videos of a car crash estimated higher speeds and falsely remembered seeing broken glass if the crash was described as "smashed" or "collided" rather than "hit" or "contacted"[0].

"Direct installation" sounds neutral to me, but "sideloading" sounds advanced or maybe even sneaky.

[0] https://www.simplypsychology.org/loftus-palmer.html
by pessimizer | 2025-10-13 18:49:04+00:00
It's a nanny state with the police arresting and jailing people for tweets. It's a police state, but "we" like to identify police states with Russians, Chinese, and Iranians, or whoever the state's enemy is at the moment.

When police show up to your door and ask you to apologize to people for causing distress, and to consider not speaking from now on, you live in a police state. When you have banned political parties and organizations that trigger the mass arrests of peaceful protestors, you live in a police state. People who are comfortable with what is being suppressed never think of their country as a police state. At least until something happens to them or someone they care about, when they suddenly become "activists."
by fringol | 2025-10-13 18:49:13+00:00
Let's test this idea and assume for a moment that sex exists on a spectrum.

What specific criteria are you using to place individuals at different points on this spectrum, and how do you calculate if an individual is closer to one end or the other of this spectrum compared to another individual? Which evidence supports these decisions?

Given that most species reproduce sexually, how does this concept work for the vast diversity of non-human species - including ones with a hermaphroditic reproductive strategy?

If a biologist discovers a new sexually reproducing species where the two halves of the reproductive system are embodied separately, how does she work out which are the archetypal females and which are the archetypal males, and how does she determine where she should place any later sampling of the population across the sex spectrum?

I would hope that anyone who confidently proclaims that sex exists on a spectrum will have ready answers for all of these challenges.