MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by timpera | 2025-10-22 16:09:17+00:00
Yet another alternative AI browser based on Electron, but this one is based on notebooks.

https://github.com/deta/surf

> Deta Surf is an AI notebook that brings all your files and the web directly into your stream of thought.

> It’s meant for simultaneous research and thinking that minimizes the grunt work: manually searching, opening windows & tabs, scrolling, copying and pasting into a document editor.

> Surf is primarily built in Svelte, TypeScript and Rust, runs on MacOS, Windows & Linux, stores data locally in open formats, and is open source.
by FridayoLeary | 2025-10-22 16:09:22+00:00
Imagine a country where every level of the judiciary and law enforcement is used to persecute a president, with cases so weak that they fall apart on their own, or are so obviously politicised it turns everyone against said systems, even if there is substance to the claims. But he still wins the popular vote, because he is so good and everyone else is so bad.
by wolrah | 2025-10-22 16:09:24+00:00
> Without researching, idk when that got fixed because nothing on the boxes tells you.

In fact it did, in the transitional models that were sold both with and without 802.3af support there was a sticker added to the box on the ones that had it.

The switch was early in the life of the UAP-AC series of access points. IIRC the "Pro" and in-wall models always supported 802.3af but the "Lite" and "LR" models initially were 24v passive only. I vaguely recall there also being transitional models of their cameras but we were not deploying those at the time.

> Consumer tier means people will plug whatever fits.

And this is why I hate passive PoE with a passion. Standards-based PoE ports are safe, you can plug devices not supporting PoE (or requiring passive PoE) in to them with no risk of damage. Passive PoE ports are dangerous, they can and will destroy things that are not expecting to receive power on those ports.

They're even dangerous to devices designed for it in some cases, Ubiquiti actually famously had problems with UAPs on the end of long cables being damaged when fed by passive PoE from the source and eventually recommended that those installs add their "Instant 802.3af" adapters which took standard 802.3af over the wire and converted it to passive right at the device end. I had one site that lost three UAP-LRs before that was revealed.
by iamnothere | 2025-10-22 16:09:24+00:00
They could not easily do this, as there’s no mechanism for it. The “Block BEARD” bill currently in Congress is a first attempt to enact some kind of domestic site blocking in the US, but it’s focused on piracy and would need modifications.

The closest thing we have is seizing domain names which has been done for various reasons, but this doesn’t work for foreign domains.

They could just order it blocked extralegally, then attempt to exert extralegal pressure to force ISPs to implement the order, but this would likely face widespread pushback, a successful court challenge, and public embarrassment. So it’s not a serious risk until there is a law in place that could be twisted to enable this sort of blocking.
by mritchie712 | 2025-10-22 16:09:24+00:00
We started giving our (https://www.definite.app/) agent a sandbox (we use e2b.dev) and it's solved so many problems. It's created new problems, but net-net it's been a huge improvement.

Something like "where do we store temporary files the agent creates?" becomes obvious if you have a sandbox you can spin up and down in a couple seconds.
by eMPee584 | 2025-10-22 16:09:25+00:00
Is HN not the place with lots of people qualified to build an alternative to all this scam data silos with their profit-driven toxic dark patterns? An open source, open access meeting platform run as a commons (and maybe upkept by a foundation for love, joy & connection.. or, meh, the wikimedia foundation?) should be far from rocket science with today's tools..
by codyb | 2025-10-22 16:09:27+00:00
I don't know if this is true. A pack of cigarettes in Virginia costs... what 4 bucks? 5?

Those Virginia taxed cigarettes are sold in NYC for 10 bucks a pack now or 1 dollar a loosey (a... friend told me). That's 2x on packs and 4x on looseys.

That gives you a pretty healthy margin before busts could impact your profits.

Presumably you're also buying them in bulk in Virginia for cheaper than the 4 or 5 dollar store price too.

Cigarettes are probably a nickel a piece coming off the line?
by ErroneousBosh | 2025-10-22 16:09:34+00:00
Aha, no, Transmeta was a totally different thing, from the early 2000s. The idea there was they would have a special "Very Long Instruction Word" processor, kind of the opposite of RISC, where a lot of things would be embedded into a single 128-bit opcode. Think of it as being hell of a wide horizontal microcode architecture, if RISC is kind of a vertical microcode architecture.

It was pretty clever. You loaded x86 code (or Java bytecode, or Python bytecode, or whatever you felt like) and then it would build up a table of emulation instructions that would translate on-the-fly to run x86 natively on the Crusoe's ludicrous SUV of an instruction set. They were physically smaller and far less power-hungry than an equivalent x86 chip, even though they were clocked roughly 30% faster.

25 years ago they were going to be the future of computing, and people stayed away in droves. Bummer.

No no no, though, the transputer was a totally different thing. That was from 40-odd years ago, and - like the ARM chips we now use in everything - was developed in the UK by a company that did pretty okay for a while and then succumbed to poor management.

They were kind of like RISC processors. Much has been made of "you programmed them directly in microcode!" but you could say the same of any wholly combinatorial CPU, like the Good Ol' 6502, where the byte that's read on an instruction fetch directly gates things off and on.

The key was they had very very fast (like 10Mbps) serial links that would connect them in a grid to other transputers on a board. Want to run more simultaneous tasks? Fire in more chips!

You could get whole machines based on transputers, or you could get an ISA card that plugged into a 16-bit slot in your PC and carried maybe eight modules about the size of a Raspberry Pi Zero (and nowhere near as powerful). I remember in the late 80s being blown away by one of these in some fairly chunky 386SX-16 doing 640x480x256 colour Mandelbrot sets in like a *second*.

Again, they were going to revolutionise computing, this is the way the world was going, and by the time of the release of unrelated Belgian techno anthem Pump Up The Jam, transputers were yet another footnote in computing history.
by Meegul | 2025-10-22 16:09:35+00:00
The battery pack contactor is one of the only, if not actually the only, moving pieces in a battery pack. A solenoid connects or disconnects the battery pack from the rest of the car's electronics. In this case, it seems to fail in the open state, meaning the battery was not able to power the car. Either there was simply a bad production batch of these particular solenoids or a change in supplier for this part.

Model Ys still have a separate, standard 12V battery that power many of the car's non-drivetrain related parts. So in this case, the battery pack contactor failing open would cause the car to lose the ability to drive, but the doors/windows/lights/screen would all still likely be working.
by reaperducer | 2025-10-22 16:09:53+00:00
Why is it that every single Tesla recall becomes national news, but virtually no recalls by other automakers ever do? (I can only think of two exceptions in recent history: Takata airbags and Chevy Bolt batteries.)

Maybe you don't read enough legitimate/mainstream media? I see them all the time.

Just yesterday: Ford, Dodge, Nissan among over 1.1 million vehicles recalled - https://www.usatoday.com/story/cars/recalls/2025/10/20/check...

It doesn't get much more "national" than USA Today.
by gadders | 2025-10-22 16:10:02+00:00
Great hardware knowledge. Appalling backup software.

I got told by their support that I had to change my password for their service. Opened the website, went to my account and tried to change my password. Didn't work.

Got told by their customer support that you have to use the "lost password" method.

How hard is it to right a password reset method that works?
by recitedropper | 2025-10-22 16:10:25+00:00
I hope your generous interpretation is right... I can't really tell what's going on with Anthropic's theater either. They definitely seem like they are vigilant of bad outcomes, going as far as to publish their own economic index trying to monitor how AI is affecting labor markets.

That said, the cynic in me thinks they give lip service to these things while pushing fully ahead into the unknown on the presumption of glory and a possibility of abundance. A bunch of the leadership are EAs who subscribe to a kind of superintelligence eschatology that goes as far as to give a shot at their own immortality. Given that, I think they act on the assumption that AGI is a necessity, and they'd rather take the risks on everyone's behalf than just not create the technology in the first place.

Them recently flirting with money from the gulf states is a pretty concerning signal pointing to them being more concerned with their own goals rather than ethics.
by simonw | 2025-10-22 16:10:32+00:00
It's not an LLM thing at all. Prompt injection has always been an attack against software that uses LLMs. LLMs on their own can't be attacked meaningfully (well, you can jailbreak them and trick them into telling you the recipe for meth but that's another issue entirely). A system that wraps an LLM with the ability for it to request tool calls like "run this in bash" is where this stuff gets dangerous.
by pavel_lishin | 2025-10-22 16:10:54+00:00
I distinctly remember that Freshman year, we were told in some big auditorium, during onboarding, that we should start using our university-provided emails as our primary "professional" emails.

Someone then asked what happens when we graduate and lose access to those emails, and they didn't have a particularly good answer.

I think that was also the same onboarding where they passed around a piece of paper for us to sign in with our name and social security number.
by dylan604 | 2025-10-22 16:10:59+00:00
Tracking and recovery is as simple as placing a GPS locator on the payload, and then driving+hiking out to where the payload lands. hopefully on dry land. If these are simple balloons using hydrogen or helium, they will continue to rise in altitude until the gasses expand to the point the balloon bursts. This could take around 2-3 hours depending on size of balloon and weight of payload. Once the balloon bursts, it's just free falling with I'd assume a parachute of some sort. From burst altitude to on the ground would be about an hour again depending on weight and parachute. From there, you just go to the dot on the map. This is all based on my personal experience with helium balloon "experiments". Balloon reached close to 90000', and went 100+ miles down range in about 3 hours from launch to landing.

Depending on how sophisticated the efforts are, there are websites you can go to that will give you a flight path prediction based on current+previous day(s) wind. So you could stage recovery teams in the general area to get much closer. There could also be some sort of timer that some how deflates the balloon instead of waiting for simple physics to have a little more control. At the end of the day you are subject to whatever the wind currents are.
by shadowpho | 2025-10-22 16:11:00+00:00
At higher power the Ethernet drops quite a bit of voltage/power compared to the wiring in your walls. Furthermore 48v vs 110v is double the amperage/more loss on top of that.

Then there’s double/sometimes triple conversion (120:48 and then 48:dc; 120:48 and then 48:12, and then 12:dc).

Furthermore magnetics are a must on both side of the PoE which also isn’t great.

At lower power there’s more circuitry to run and multiple conversions aren’t great compared to a simple cheap flyback.

For more technical feel free to check here, although it isn’t quite end to end: https://e2e.ti.com/cfs-file/__key/communityserver-discussion...
by elAhmo | 2025-10-22 16:11:01+00:00
It is a bit of an odd comparison to make - one on hand you have world's biggest economy which is part of huge majority of our lives, and on the other hand you have a website from a billionaire who is bored and wants to destroy our social fabric.

But to answer your question: yes, if there is a good alternative or the product is replaceable. Twitter is one of those things.

I do actively avoid products produced by a nation which is committing genocide for example and ignores international law.
by mindslight | 2025-10-22 16:11:43+00:00
I'm with you on the idea that fascists will make any argument, and only value arguments as weapons rather than a good-faith attempt to figure things out. But I still believe there are people in the middle who are swayed by better arguments.

Maybe that's just my fatal flaw of being eternally hopeful that people will actually use their intelligence. But if this isn't the case, then what are we even doing?

(as for your actual argument, one can make the same argument that people will die without being able to get their fix of social church interaction. so then we're talking about numbers for hypotheticals, and right back to the dynamic where it's not even about logic)
by dpc_01234 | 2025-10-22 16:11:50+00:00
Not only that link is a paywall, but I just don't trust propaganda outlets like this. Over and over I've seen these twisting and misinterpreting people's opinions. Quick googling suggests that he does have some unconventional (borderline quackery?) opinions there, though lots of it seems like a typical smearing tactics. Nevertheless, if I need to support even a complete quack to defend my rights, so be it. I wish both sides were more reasonable, so we could slap some warning signs on raw milk bottles, ensure higher safety standards on raw milk producers, so I could enjoy my glass of raw milk in peace, but I guess it is never going to happen.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-10-22 16:11:55+00:00
Going to the moon is a symbol. It’s symbolic to China being better if China gets there first. It is the only reason why we want to go. There is no one else who can do it except for spacex, it’s likely he’s just applying pressure onto spacex.

Is it a valid reason? Depends on how prideful you are. Are you proud to be an American and are you proud to be the greatest economic super power on the planet?

For me it’s not valid. I don’t hold any pride about any country even though I’m American. Pride is a form of emotional bias.

If China becomes better, which is a highly likely possibility. The symbol of this being better is irrelevant.

In fact arguably China is already better than us in many ways.
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-10-22 16:11:55+00:00
> Actually there was a Wikipedia article of this name, but it was deleted in June -- because it was AI generated. Unfortunately AI falls for this much like humans do.

A recent Kurzgesagt goes into the dangers of this, and they found the same thing happening with a concrete example: They were researching a topic, tried using LLMs, found they weren't accurate enough and hallucinated, so they continued doing things the manual way. Then some weeks/months later, they noticed a bunch of YouTube videos that had the very hallucinations they were avoiding, and now their own AI assistants started to use those as sources. Paraphrased/remembered by me, could have some inconsistencies/hallucinations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zfN9wnPvU0
by Zambyte | 2025-10-22 16:11:58+00:00
> I would expect the compiler to ensure that all references to true and false reference single addresses, too.

Why? If you're sending a constant true to a channel, wouldn't that true value exist in the stack frame for the function call? It seems like that would make more sense than a pointer to a constant true value being stored in the stack frame and dereferencing that every time you need the constant value.

> So, at best, the difference of the more obscure code is to, maybe, gain 8 bytes. What do I overlook?

Constructing channels in a loop would potentially multiply memory usage here
by seanhunter | 2025-10-22 16:12:15+00:00
I’ve only skimmed the paper but it seems like the “information not usually available” from NMR is the Jacobian and Hessian of the Hamiltonian of the system.

So basically you’re able to go directly from running the quantum experiment to being able to simulate the dynamics of the underlying system, because the Jacobian and Hessian are the first and second partial derivatives of the system with respect to all of its parameters in matrix form.
by jonathanstrange | 2025-10-22 16:12:16+00:00
What? We're talking about a free open source library (that I happen to use). Nobody who writes and publishes software for free should be subject to any such regulations. That's why the licenses all contain some "provided as is, no warranty" clause.

Otherwise, nobody would ever write non-commercial cryptographic libraries any longer. Why take the risk? (And good luck with finding bugs in commercial, closed source cryptographic libraries and getting them fixed...)
by rowanseymour | 2025-10-22 16:12:23+00:00
I don't know why every time people complain about this there is an assumption that we just don't understand why it is the way it is. I get that x can implement X and x can have methods that work with nil. I sometimes write methods that work with nils. It's a neat feature.

What's frustrating is that 99.99% of written go code doesn't work this way and so people _do_ shoot themselves in the foot all the time, and so at some point you have to concede that what we have might be logical but it isn't intuitive. And that kinda sucks for a language that prides itself on simplicity.

I also get that there's no easy way to address this. The best I can imagine is a way to declare that a method Y on type x can't take nil so (*x)(nil) shouldn't be considered as satisfying that method on an interface.. and thus not boxed automatically into that interface type. But yeah I get that's gonna get messy. If I could think of a good solution I'd make a proposal.
by eulers_secret | 2025-10-22 16:12:24+00:00
This reminds me:

When I was at a newish job (like 2 months?) my manager said I "speak more in a Brittish manner" than others. At the time I had been binge watching Top Gear for a couple weeks, so I guess I picked it up enough to be noticeable.

Of course I told him I'd been binging TG and we discovered a mutual love of cars. I think the Britishisms left my speech eventually, but that's not something I can figure out for myself!
by throw0101c | 2025-10-22 16:12:43+00:00
> He's not trying to write a great newspaper, he's trying to write a newspaper that curries favor or at least doesn't raise the ire of the current administration.

And I think is a problem with news organizations that are part of larger conglomerates: it may be possible to use leverage on other parts of the business to affect how the news operations are done.

If (say) Bill Gates owned WaPo, he doesn't necessarily care much about how Microsoft is doing anymore. Whereas Bezos probably does still care about Amazon, as well as his space stuff.
by incomingpain | 2025-10-22 16:12:55+00:00
the way they train the models is feeding it lots and lots of literature, and usually high quality.

The way they write by default is thus going to be this weird hybrid of all english styles/dialects from the last ~500 years.

The reason they are heavy with em dashes is that they were immensely popular in literature for a long time but not so much in modern times. So it stands out.

If you tell it to write in a specific way though, it does a good job at it.

Here's detroit english, no messin' around. The reason why AI's love the em dash so much is simple: it’s the most versatile and natural punctuation mark they can use to connect ideas and maintain flow. A large language model's primary goal is to sound human, and when people speak, they often pause, clarify, or insert a quick side-thought the dash captures that conversational stop-and-start rhythm better than a rigid comma or a full-stop period. Plus, in the enormous amount of text the AI studies (its data), the em dash is frequently used by skilled writers as an efficient tool to replace colons, parentheses, or strong commas, so the AI simply picked up that effective writing pattern and runs with it, seeing it as the clearest and most dynamic way to structure complex sentences. That's the real deal.
by rconti | 2025-10-22 16:13:31+00:00
It's reasonably well known that Ford has had a very bad year for recalls; it's definitely made the rounds in the auto world, and breaks through to the mainstream news from time to time.

https://www.motortrend.com/news/2024-2026-ford-ranger-recall...

https://247wallst.com/investing/2025/10/17/ford-recall-recor...

https://www.usatoday.com/story/cars/recalls/2025/09/24/ford-...

https://www.macheforum.com/site/threads/ford-issues-more-saf...
by thelastgallon | 2025-10-22 16:13:47+00:00
The Eighth Amendment (Amendment VIII) to the United States Constitution protects against imposing excessive bail, excessive fines, or cruel and unusual punishments. This amendment was adopted on December 15, 1791, along with the rest of the United States Bill of Rights.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Eighth_Amendment_...
by hypeatei | 2025-10-22 16:13:49+00:00
So we shouldn't provide simple hardening tools because it won't be used or applied how you'd like in 100% of software? This mindset in security circles really needs to stop.

If a piece of important or foundational software wants to lock itself down today, look at the myriad of convoluted "solutions" mentioned in a sibling comment. If you wanted to discourage progress in this area, that's how you'd design something. I'm not assuming malice, obviously, but it's certainly a product of the endless nitpicking and "not good enough, doesn't cover <niche usecase>" type of thinking.

EDIT:

> and the ones that do will likely be lazy

I'd argue the opposite, any developer taking the time to add some pledge calls to their code is probably mindful of security and wants to improve it. If you wanted to be lazy, you'd just... not implement pledge at all since it'd get in your way and be too restrictive.
by naikrovek | 2025-10-22 16:13:55+00:00
it used to be that people started businesses so that they could help others by providing a product or a service to them.

late stage capitalism arrives when people create businesses solely to get rich, and when other companies are created solely to get rich by helping those people create their companies so that they can get rich. that's what ycombinator is.

most of capitalism used to be symbiotic. engaging in transactions with businesses benefited both the business and the consumer.

now we live in a world where most or all of the benefit goes to the business and none or almost none to the consumer.
by renewiltord | 2025-10-22 16:13:59+00:00
Wealth equality is not a desirable goal. Optimizing absolute standards of living is a much better target and inevitably allows for some people to have better lives than others. This obsession with other people's things has always been known to be a societal detriment. Exodus 20:17

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour's.