MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by antonvs | 2025-10-27 16:02:51+00:00
Shortest summary I could quickly find:

> "...building a suspension bridge of this scale poses significant engineering challenges. The Strait of Messina is known for strong winds, seismic activity, and deep waters, all of which complicate construction and long-term stability. Engineers will need to ensure the structure can withstand earthquakes, which aren't unheard of in the region, while addressing corrosion from the salty marine environment."

-- https://www.iflscience.com/worlds-longest-suspension-bridge-...

I remember reading an article, posted here on HN, that went into much more depth about why this was all unusually challenging, but I haven't found it again.
by tremon | 2025-10-27 16:02:52+00:00
This to me overstretches the definition of teaching. No, a human baby is not "taught" language, it learns it independently by taking cues from its environment. A child absolutely comes with an innate ability to recognize human sound and the capability to reproduce it.

By the time you get to active "teaching", the child has already learned language -- otherwise we'd have a chicken-and-egg problem, since we use language to teach language.
by tracker1 | 2025-10-27 16:03:08+00:00
We have freedom of speech in the U.S., it's mostly that simple to start with. That said, if you are not a citizen, then speaking out against the government of your host country is generally a bad idea regardless of where you are. Coming into the US on a VISA comes with certain restrictions and understandings. Even as a permanent resident, your privileges i.e. access can be revoked.

This isn't to say you can't or shouldn't speak out against anything only that when you participate in political activism, especially when accompanying those decrying a hatred or wishing destruction of the nation you are in, there can and often will be negative repercussions.

On the global scale, the U.S. is one of the less restrictive nations on this issue. Many countries will absolutely block you at the border, imprison you for years then deport you.

As to CAIR, there are a lot of groups in the US that I think are antithetical to a free society as a whole. If it were up to me, the communist groups, antifa, neo-nazi orgs, CAIR and several other groups wouldn't exist in the US in the first place. As it stands, we have freedom of speech and that protects speech you don't like... speech you agree with doesn't need protecting. I'm not a free speech absolutist, but far more in favor of the open discussion than not, the light of day is the best disinfectant. This does not include violent acts, terrorism, or the advocation thereof.
by recursive | 2025-10-27 16:03:16+00:00
There's no way it could have gained traction. Consider two browsers. One follows the spec explicitly, and one goes into "best-effort" mode on encountering invalid markup. End users aren't going to care about the philosophical reasoning for why Browser A doesn't show them their school dance recital schedule.

Consider JSON and CSV. Both have formal specs. But in the wild, most parsers are more lenient than the spec.
Show HN: Omnia OS, the Most Efficient Email Client Without AI
by jmchugh9 | 2025-10-27 16:03:20+00:00
I just shipped something I’ve needed for years - a more efficient email client.

I finally built Omnia OS because my inbox turned into a landfill of AI-generated noise. If you're going to email me going forward, I suggest including a more compelling subject and opening line, otherwise all emails from unknown people will not make it to my inbox. AI draft-suggestion tools never solved the real problem: finding the messages, files, or company I actually need to follow up with. After securing AI systems for a living, I know how easy it is to weaponize prompt injection, so bolting AI onto email without redesigning the core experience felt reckless. First, we need to separate trusted from untrusted senders, then decide whatever touches automation.

Omnia OS is the email client I now rely on: New senders/orgs are isolated until you approve them, so domain spoofing means you will not make it to the inbox anymore, because it will be isolated as a new organization that needs approval.

Catch-up view shows everything that happened since you last checked:

- meetings, threads, urgent items.

- Every company you work with has its own space for contact lists, file management, and basic company intel, so you stop searching through old chains.

- Mass unsubscribe and delete emails

Coming back to work on Monday or a long weekend used to take half a day reviewing emails. Now you see what matters, act, and move on.

It's free to use as a desktop app for your email client on MacOS.

Install from https://omniaos.co

*Since this is my side project, the initial build only supports MacOS and Gmail. Happy to collaborate on new capabilities.
by bigyabai | 2025-10-27 16:03:28+00:00
> While others have pointed out his pro-Hamas rhetoric

I refuse to accept these accusations by word-of-mouth. The White House is currently accusing former presidents of "pro-Hamas rhetoric" (which they never expressed).

It would seem to me that "pro-Hamas" is a meaningless cudgel used by the ruling party to justify mistreatment of those who oppose Israel.
by codyb | 2025-10-27 16:03:33+00:00
Where is it illegal to smoke in public spaces?

NYers are out here smokin' bogeys and joints on our streets all day, and when I went to Florida the tables had ashtrays, even occasionally inside. Certainly was the same in Lisbon and France.

Also, taxes have increased on gambling recently, although prediction markets appear to be a loophole.

And I dunno, I guess people are gambling on the screen a lot but I completely missed it. I'm not sure, do people think gambling is cool? I definitely missed that one. But I can see people getting hooked on the fun part if that high is their thing

I believe, although I'm not going to look it up for you, that the public health campaign against smoking is well documented as exceedingly effective for dollars spent. But hey, in today's day and age, we all gotta do our own research!
by dehrmann | 2025-10-27 16:03:56+00:00
It got this way because 99% of people are happy running what's in the app store, and the security protections are more valuable than being able to run arbitrary code.

Linux as an answer doesn't address the needs of 99% of people, so 98% will never adopt it. It's better to meet people where they're at and push for sideloading and alternative app stores.
by blinkingled | 2025-10-27 16:04:56+00:00
I was referring to the "HTTP request in Tokyo to find the nearest instance in Sydney" part which felt to me like a differentiating feature- no other cloud provider seems to have bidding or HTTP request level cross regional lookup or whatever.

The "decision that long predates Corrosion" is precisely the point I was trying to make - was it made too soon before understanding the ramifications and/or having a validated technical solution ready? IOW maybe the feature requiring the problem solution could have come later? (I don't know much about fly.io and its features, so apologies if some of this is unclear/wrongly assumes things.)
by dminik | 2025-10-27 16:04:56+00:00
Ok, I'm confused here.

I had a look at what Stallman said and what Minsky allegedly did.

Apparently, Minsky had sex with one of Epstein's girls, who later said she was forced into it. Now, his wife denies the allegation, as she was apparently with him at all times on Epstein's island.

Now, I can believe that he went once, and maybe had sex with someone he didn't know was not doing so willingly. But, what about his wife? Was he cheating on her? Was she a part of it?

And why did he return a second time? And after Epstein's conviction in 2011???

And here comes Stallman, and he's not even denying that he's slept with someone, potentially cheating on his wife? His issue is with the wording?

Nobody in this situation looks good.
by shagie | 2025-10-27 16:05:08+00:00
https://www.opb.org/article/2021/09/29/google-water-data-cen...

> The company has negotiated a pair of agreements with The Dalles city officials that would significantly reduce property taxes Google must pay on the new development and secure for the company the water it needs for its expanded operations.

> The deal to deliver groundwater to Google has drawn skepticism from members of the public who’ve grown wary of Oregon’s water stability in a changing climate, and that suspicion was on full display at a recent City Council meeting.

> ...

> “Without this agreement, [Google] or any other industry could use those wells as they wanted just as the aluminum plant previously did,” Anderson, the public works director, told the Council.

> Anderson said the amount of water that can be withdrawn from The Dalles groundwater aquifer annually without causing a decline is 5,500 acre-feet per year. Only about 1,800 acre-feet per year are being drawn out of the aquifer currently.

---

Most surface water has a "you can't drain this" compact. For example, the Great Lakes compact - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes_Compact

Part of the sticking point for the Foxconn mess in Wisconsin was the water use within the watershed of the Great Lakes. https://observatory.sjmc.wisc.edu/2018/05/10/great-lakes-wat...

Microsoft's plan use: https://www.wpr.org/news/microsoft-data-centers-8-million-ga...

> The data obtained by WPR from the city shows the first phase of Microsoft’s data center campus would use a peak of 234,000 gallons per day or 2.8 million gallons per year. Under subsequent phases, the campus would use a peak of 702,000 gallons per day or 8.4 million gallons annually.

https://www.wpr.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/MKE-Regional-... shows the demand and discharge request.
by gwbas1c | 2025-10-27 16:06:00+00:00
> It is reasonable for companies to increasingly target that small part of population and sell them the same (small) number of widgets /services in higher prices and see their profits go up.

(Joke), well, if they keep convincing the small part of the population to spend ever increasing amount of money on "better" widgets...

In reality, if too many people are unemployed, no one's going to be able to buy things so that companies can have profits!

That being said, what I read is that a lot of companies are doing general housekeeping and trying to avoid bloat.
by flufluflufluffy | 2025-10-27 16:06:20+00:00
They do apply, also for NIH funded research. I work in healthcare research and all the investigators I know have had to go to great lengths to whitewash their grant proposals (you can’t use the word “gender” for example, you must say “difference” instead of “disparity”, etc etc…)

It’s absolutely bonkers. However most of the researchers I work with are operating under a “appease the NIH to obtain the grant, but the just do the research as it was originally intended” approach. It not like the federal government has the ability (or staffing - hah!) to ensure every single awardee is complying with these dystopian requirements.
by diath | 2025-10-27 16:06:36+00:00
> Other people will then be able to use Bevy for actually making a game.

Nobody makes games in Bevy though, Bevy is just a very good, modern graphics tech demo, not something suitable for developing actual games. Even the biggest title out there, Tiny Glade, is just a level editor with precisely zero gameplay features. Bevy's "popularity" (on social media, not among game developers) is entirely hype-driven by people that do not actually make games at all.
by micromacrofoot | 2025-10-27 16:06:55+00:00
this assumes that the needs of both the workers and the owners (who pay for the lobbying) are aligned, and they're often not

lobbyists will advocate for taking the water right from under the noses of the workers, and the workers will turn around and praise their employer for maintaining their jobs... it's often some kind of perverse shell game

at the end of the day the owners fly off to wherever with a pile of money and the workers are left without jobs or water — these false dichotomies of "if it weren't for lobbyists all jobs would be regulated away" is often used to disenfranchise people from actually changing these systems
by dragonwriter | 2025-10-27 16:07:00+00:00
> Why would someone who has not committed a crime and is not accused of a crime need a court case?

So if the executive decides they suspect you are an illegal alien, detains you, claims to have checked you are an illegal alien, and then expels you to some foreign country you have no right to challenge this at any point in the process?

Because if that’s what you think “due process” means, than the government never has any need for criminal process at all, it just needs to decide it suspects people of being illegal aliens instead of criminals, then it can imprison them indefinitely while it “checks” and expel them whenever it decides it tires or imprisoning them (perhaps to someplace it knows they will be killed or deprived of then nevessities of life), all without ever defending any of those acts as justified in court.
by tannhaeuser | 2025-10-27 16:07:01+00:00
Not only do html and body auto-close, their tags including start-element tags can be omitted alltogether:

<title>Shortest valid doc</title> <p>Body text following here

(cf explainer slides at [1] for the exact tag inferences SGML/HTML does to arrive at the fully tagged doc)

[1]: https://sgmljs.sgml.net/docs/html5-dtd-slides-wrapper.html (linked from https://sgmljs.sgml.net/blog/blog1701.html)
by HWR_14 | 2025-10-27 16:07:24+00:00
The most valuable thing MS gets from its OpenAI dealings is that they can incorporate its AI in all their products. If you look at it as a defensive move to protect the value of Office, Windows, etc. from an AI focused competitor it's worth absorbing the losses. But try showing that on a balance sheet!

Plus, of course, if OpenAI makes money, that's also good for them.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-10-27 16:07:42+00:00
Human identity is first a question for philosophical anthropology. What does it mean to be human? What is the nature of human identity? What is the nature of individual human identity? What does it mean to be a social animal, especially a human social animal? What does it mean to be an intellectual animal? A moral animal? What is personhood? And so on.

You will discover that there are different aspects to what and whom a person is. How we act is a matter of volition and thus choice motivated by reasoning. Our actions are expressions of the powers we possess, that is, exercised potentials that belong to us. Thus, our actions are the expression of our moral agency; I choose to exercise certain potentials for certain reasons. The reasons we do things have moral import - they are part of the act as two apparently similar acts are different if the motives are different, making our motives partly constitutive of the moral character of an act. The exercise of our potential per se likewise has moral import - it is the motive made manifest in act.

Each act is a step in some direction. There is an expression that each decision moves us either toward heaven or toward hell. A good act is both good in motivation and in the motivated act. A good act actualizes and develops the human person acting toward a fruition and fullness of humanity-in-potency. A bad act acts against such fruition, corrupting the person through ill motive and damaging acts, or squandering potential when there is a moral possibility of exercise.

So, from a moral perspective, we can say that we are our decided acts. The acts are not just ticked off boxes on a list, but actualizations of the person. There are higher actualizations and lower actualizations.

In that sense, to speak of actions and intentions as if they were distinct is a false dichotomy. You can speak of reasoning and motives as the "inner" aspect and the manifested act as the "outer" aspect, if you want. But they constitute a single act as a matter of fact. You cannot speak intelligibly of one without reference to the other for the same reason you cannot speak of a cause or its effect without reference to the other. The nature of an act is both in motive and in execution.

And "fake it until you make it" is a misunderstanding. There is nothing fake involved. I have potentials. Initially, I do not have experience exercising them. I have little familiarity with them. So I try to exercise them. Typically, first attempts aren't very good, but I learn from the effects of my trial, and perhaps from the feedback of others, to "calibrate" my subsequent attempts. This is called practice. I repeat in order to discover and work out and strengthen the actualization of a potential. This is a not error in a moral sense. It is a kind of dialogue with nature.
Show HN: Secure File Uploads for Intercom
by paulmbw | 2025-10-27 16:07:57+00:00
Hi HN!

We're introducing Fibre - secure file uploads for Intercom.

Fibre came out of a real pain point we hit using Intercom for support.

We needed customers to upload sensitive docs all the time - proof of address, ID verification, business documents etc. However, customers kept pushing back - they didn't feel comfortable sending sensitive files to Intercom. Not forgetting the privacy and GDPR challenges, and the 100MB limit for file uploads.

So what happened? Everyone just fell back to email. Which made things worse - unencrypted attachments flying around, compliance nightmares, documents scattered across channels.

That's why we built Fibre. The idea is simple: files go straight from the customer's browser via Intercom Messenger to your storage (Google Drive, S3, or Azure). Nothing touches our servers or Intercom's. Customers stay in Messenger where the conversation already is, you get documents exactly where you need them.

We're currently in beta - if you want to try it out, simply sign up to the platform and DM me requesting an invite code - this will allow you to try out the product free of charge for 7 days.

It's early days, but we're excited about where this is going. Next up: AI-powered document understanding to help ops teams triage faster.

Would love to hear what you think, especially if you're dealing with document collection in your support workflow!
by some_furry | 2025-10-27 16:08:09+00:00
Right.

My stance on this is: Try to find a way to do good that doesn't make you miserable. Lying is to yourself is a form of oppression, and lying to others is a tactic for enduring oppression. (Ask a queer person about their time in the closet if you don't understand what I mean here.) Oppression makes you miserable, and misery tends to result in vapid thinkpieces that don't scratch below the surface of the referenced source material.

But also: Be honest with yourself about what you want and why you want it. Whether for good or for ill. That way, at least you can have a modicum of peace. I wrote more about this train of thought recently, if anyone's curious: https://soatok.blog/2025/10/15/the-dreamseekers-vision-of-to...
by bigbuppo | 2025-10-27 16:08:17+00:00
It wasn't targeted. Mostly they were trying to exploit confirmation/bounceback spam as the form accepted an email address. The spammers never got beyond probing the system. I would get one or two messages at a time. They realized it wasn't actually sending email out and then go elsewhere until the next spammer came along. The system didn't actually mail anything. It dropped it into a rabbitmq broker running at the colo, which then shoveled that back to the house where it eventually printed on a dot matrix printer.

Originally planned to use a proper teleprinter, except mine is designed to sit in the the cramped racks of missile silos, so it has a rather obnoxious fan in it. It's also fully electronic and uses a dot matrix mechanism rather than something more fun. It's only redeeming quality is the VFD for message composition.
by prewett | 2025-10-27 16:08:21+00:00
> We don't know that there's anything like our rich inner world in the mind of a chimpanzee, let alone a dog, let alone a lobster.

If be "we don't know" you mean we cannot prove, then, sure, but then we don't know anything aside from maybe mathematics. We have a lot of evidence that animals similar consciousness as we do. Dolphins (or whales?) have been known to push drowning people to the surface like they do for a calf. Killer whales coordinate in hunting, and have taken an animus to small boats, intentionally trying to capsize it. I've seen squirrels in the back yard fake burying a nut, and moving fallen leaves to hide a burial spot. Any one who has had a dog or a cat knows they get lonely and angry and guilty. A friend of mine had personal troubles and abandoned his house for a while; I went over to take pictures so he could AirBnB it, and their cat saw me in the house and was crying really piteously, because it had just grown out of being a kitten with a bunch of kids around and getting lots of attention, and suddenly its whole world was vanished. A speech pathologist made buttons for her dog that said words when pressed, and the dog put sentences together and even had emotional meltdowns on the level of a young child. Parrots seem to be intelligent, and I've read several reports where they give intelligent responses (such as "I'm afraid" when the owner asked if it wanted to be put in the same room as the cat for company while the owner was away [in this case, the owner seems to be lacking in intelligence for thinking that was a good idea]). There was a story linked her some years back about a zoo-keeper who had her baby die, and signed it to the chimpanzee (or gorilla or some-such) females when it wanted to know why she had been gone, and in response the chimpanzee motioned to with its eye suggesting crying, as if asking if she were grieving.

I probably have some of those details wrong, but I think there definitely is something there that is qualitatively similar to humans, although not on the same level.
by atomic128 | 2025-10-27 16:08:26+00:00
Continuously updated HTTP response dumps from all the major Tor hidden services: https://rnsaffn.com/zg4/

It is accurate to say that Tor's hidden service ecosystem is focused on drugs, ransomware, cryptocurrency, and sex crime.

However, there are other important things happening there. You can think of the crime as cover traffic to hide those important things. So it's all good.