MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jltsiren | 2025-10-15 19:45:54+00:00
I think it's the other way around. If you need a visa to enter, the government considers you more suspicious than those who can enter without a visa. And you will likely face more scrutiny at the border.

Some countries have visa-on-arrival schemes, which are the opposite of ESTA and ETIAS. The visa still exists as a formality (maybe due to reciprocity or as a tourist tax), but you need to do little beyond paying the fee to get one.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-15 19:46:03+00:00
Henley's index ranks America 12th, with 180 visa-free destinations [1]. The Global Passport Power Rank 2025 ranks America 9th, with 168...MS [2].

Maybe they count destinations differently?

[1] https://www.henleyglobal.com/passport-index

[2] https://www.passportindex.org/byRank.php
by bariumbitmap | 2025-10-15 19:46:30+00:00
The article does not take into account ESL. In fact, greater participation of ESL kids or those with disabilities appears to be a major reason the NAEP test scores have changed over time:

> In addition, since 1996, main NAEP assessments have been providing accommodations to allow more students with disabilities and students who were not fluent in English to participate. Traditionally, the long-term trend assessments have not provided such accommodations. However, in 2004, it was possible to provide accommodations and assess a greater proportion of students.

https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/ltt/bridge_study.aspx
by CobrastanJorji | 2025-10-15 19:46:43+00:00
During the height of blockchain, there were plenty of good, legitimate jobs. The things they were building were some combination of inane, criminal, or stupid, but the jobs themselves were often quite real. I knew more than one person being paid $300k+/yr building something completely stupid like a collectible pet dragon breeding simulator because a VC thought it had a decent chance of being the next monkey coin or something. Sure, you had to get a new job every six months as each VC ran out of money, and sure you were making the world a worse place, but hey, it's a living.
by pipes | 2025-10-15 19:46:45+00:00
Maybe not the same thing, but chatgpt 5 was driving me insane in visual studio co pilot last week. I seemingly could stop it from randomly changing bits of code, to the point where it was apologising then doing the same in next change even when told not to.

I've now changed to asking where things are in the code base and how they work then making changes myself.
by spacechild1 | 2025-10-15 19:47:07+00:00
That's a bit hyperbolic. Sure, it's not exactly ergonomic, but that doesn't mean I can't use it. One thing that bugs me is that there is still no overload helper in the standard:

// helper type for the visitor template<class... Ts> struct overloads : Ts... { using Ts::operator()...; };

Of course, having true pattern matching would be much nicer. At least there's a proposal: https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2024/p26...
by onlyrealcuzzo | 2025-10-15 19:47:20+00:00
Look into methbot.

Typically, it's people who game the algorithm (for ad dollars), and use these bots to click on other things (including ads) to make it more difficult for FB / Google / etc to detect all the traffic going to their pages and content is their own fake clicks, trying to train the algorithm to send other people to their stuff.
by kragen | 2025-10-15 19:47:22+00:00
This does mention Archy, but not in any depth. It doesn't mention The Humane Interface (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface), THE, or RCHI. I wonder what the reason is for these omissions? You'd think they'd be central to any discussion of recreating the Canon Cat document interface!

Bootstrapping Computing looks interesting.
by baobun | 2025-10-15 19:47:29+00:00
A lot of the world has moved on from virtualbox to primarily qemu+kvm and to some extent xen. Usually with some higher-level tool on top. Some of these are packages you can run on your existing OS and some are distributions with hypervisor for people who use VMs as part of their primary workflows. If you just want quick-and-easy one-off Windows VM and move on, check out quickemu.

Libvirt and virt-manager https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Libvirt

Quickemu https://github.com/quickemu-project/quickemu

Proxmox VE https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-ve

QubesOS https://qubes-os.org

Whonix https://whonix.org

XCP-ng https://xcp-ng.org/

You can also get some level of isolation by containers (lxc, docker, podman).
by pstuart | 2025-10-15 19:47:32+00:00
Exactly this! National defense is a sovereign need but it should not be above scrutiny for how the money is spent.

Add to this the fact that the US Military is effectively a jobs program and there's little to no domestic return on that investment.

This subject gets artfully deflected by "We love our troops!" nonsense but if anybody is complaining about government spending they should be willing to look at all facets of it regardless of which side of the aisle they're on.
by mainecoder | 2025-10-15 19:47:38+00:00
this is silly money spent on research is always going to be better spent than the numerous misuse of tax payer dollars spent. ICE has a bigger budget than NASA and NSF combined consider this how little is science being valued. We have gained tremendously from NSF and NASA and now we are seeing that only SpaceX and maybe Rocketlab could hold a candle to China's CNSA and their private industry which is quickly going to be catching up because they have the ability to produce it in scale.
by eterm | 2025-10-15 19:47:39+00:00
For anyone else who was curious C#/.NET:

By default string.Length measures characters, but System.Globalization.StringInfo is provided to work with "text elements".

Unlike System.String, StringInfo doesn't have a built-in PadLeft function in it's base library. But it gets the length "right" by the author's standard.

Code to show lengths:

using System; using System.Globalization; public class Program { public static void Main() { var weirdStrings = new string[] {"𝄞","Å","𓀾","אֳֽ֑","résumé","résumé"}; foreach(var weirdString in weirdStrings){ var asStringInfo = new StringInfo(weirdString); Console.WriteLine($"{weirdString.PadLeft(10,'-')} {weirdString.Length} {asStringInfo.LengthInTextElements}"); } } }
by antinomicus | 2025-10-15 19:47:45+00:00
Though the adage “this is the worst it’ll ever be” is parroted daily by AI cultists, the fact is it’s still yet to be proven that currently available LLMs can be made cost effective. For now every ai company is lighting tens of billions of dollars on fire every year and hoping better algorithms, hardware, and user lock in will ensure profits eventually. If this doesn’t happen, they will design more and more “features” in the LLM to monetize it - shopping, ads, sponsored replies, who knows? It may get really awful. And these companies will have so much of our data and eventually the need to make profits will lead them to sell that data and just generally try to extract as much out of us as they can.

This is why in the long run I believe we all should aspire to do LLM inference locally. But unfortunately we just are not anywhere close to par with the SoTA cloud models available. Something like DGX spark would be a decent step in this direction, but this platform appears to mostly be for prototyping / training models meant to eventually be run on data center nvidia hardware.

Personally I think I will probably spec out an M5 max/ultra Mac Studio once that’s a thing, and start trying to do this more seriously. The tools are getting better every day and “this is the worst it’ll ever be” is much more applicable to locally run models.
by thisislife2 | 2025-10-15 19:47:53+00:00
Personal anecdote - I would say (a cautious) yes. Bought 3 WD hard drives (1 external, 2 internal, during different time periods; in the last 10+ years) for personal use and 2 failed exactly after the 5 year warranty period ended (within a month or so). One failed just a few weeks before the warranty period, and so WD had to replace it (and I got a replacement HDD that I could use for another 5 years). That's good engineering! (I also have an old 500GB external Seagate drive that has now lasted 10+ years, and still works perfectly - probably an outlier).

That said, one thing that I do find very attractive in Seagate HDDs now is that they are also offering free data recovery within the warranty period, with some models. Anybody who has lost data (i.e. idiots like me who didn't care about backups) and had to use such services knows how expensive they can be.
by Kim_Bruning | 2025-10-15 19:48:04+00:00
I get the idea that different AI have different characters, and different people can either 'get along with them' or not.

To wit, I have absolutely no problems with claude code, but anytime I try to do anything useful with chatgpt it turns into (effectively) a shouting match; There's just no way that particular AI and I can see eye-to-eye. (there's underlying procedural reasons I think)

The author of this piece has the exact opposite experience. Apparently they hate Claude with a passion, but love ChatGPT. Weird!
by jodrellblank | 2025-10-15 19:48:05+00:00
Lay out a way that could happen?

Say the AI is in a Google research data centre, what can it do if countries cut off their internet connections at national borders? What can it do if people shut off their computers and phones? Instant and complete control over what, specifically? What can the AI do instantly about unbreakable encryption - if TLS1.3 can’t be easily broken only brute force with enough time, what can it do?

And why would it want complete control? It’s effectively an alien, it doesn’t have the human built in drive to gain power over others, it didn’t evolve in a dog-eat-dog environment. Superman doesn’t worry because nothing can harm Superman and an AI didn’t evolve seeing things die and fearing its death either.
by k310 | 2025-10-15 19:48:32+00:00
They have the right to say no, and ban all age-sensitive apps from being downloaded to age-verification states.

Impossible? Pornhub does so (blocks access) to the extent that such is possible.

There's a difference between standing on principle and acting on principle.

And who has the leverage? (until they give it away)

I previously posted:

Do not obey in advance

Historian Timothy Snyder’s first lesson in his book On Tyranny is “Do not obey in advance.” To obey a tyrant before you are compelled to do so teaches them what they will be able to get you to do, easily, without even needing to expend the resources and energy it takes to carry out that part of their agenda.
by robenkleene | 2025-10-15 19:48:33+00:00
Yes, I use Ableton Live every day.

> It lacks support for lots of plugins and hardware, and costs loads for what is essentially a weaker value prop than Bitwig or Ableton Live.

This is an obviously silly statement, not only is Logic Pro competitively priced ($200, relative to $100-$400 for Bitwig, $99-$750 for Live), but those applications obviously have different focuses than Logic Pro (sound design and electronic music, versus the more general-purpose and recording focus of Logic Pro, also you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who doesn't think Logic Pro comes with the best suite of stock plugins of any DAW, so the value prop angle is a particularly odd argument to make [i.e., Logic Pro is pretty obviously under priced]).

But all this isn't that important because many of these applications are great. DAWs are one of the most competitive software categories around and there are several applications folks will vehemently defend as the best and Logic Pro is unequivocally one of them.

> Most bedroom musicians are using Garageband or other cheap DAWs like Live Lite, and the professional studios are all bought into Pro Tools or Audition.

This is old, but curious if you have a better source for your statement https://blog.robenkleene.com/2019/06/10/2015-digital-audio-w...

Found a more recent survey https://www.production-expert.com/production-expert-1/2024-d...

> We can see that Pro Tools for music is the most popular choice, with Logic for music second and Pro Tools for post coming third.

Note that I'd say Logic Pro's popularity is actually particularly notable since it's not crossplatform, so the addressable market is far smaller than the other big players. It's phenomenal popular software, both in terms of raw popularity and fans who rave about it. E.g., note the contrast in how people talk about Pro Tools vs. Logic Pro. Logic Pro has some of the happiest users around, but Pro Tools customers talk like they feel like their hostages to the software. That difference is where the quality argument comes in.
by Casteil | 2025-10-15 19:49:05+00:00
Part of me misses my OG base 14" M4 Pro. The battery on that thing was absolutely phenomenal - literal 12-14+ hours of real-world use. Not so much on the 14" M1 Max (64GB) that I upgraded to after about 2 yrs.

'Real-world idle' efficiency on the newer chips is the main reason I've got the (slight) itch to upgrade, but 64GB+ MBPs certainly don't come cheap.
by marcusb | 2025-10-15 19:49:16+00:00
> I keep seeing it pop up again and again and it only makes sense in that context.

Not saying that these companies would turn down corporate welfare given the chance, but I’ll offer an alternative explanation: it shifts accountability away from the company by positing a highly resourced attacker the company could not reasonably be expected to protect against.

If you have a physical security program that you’ve spent millions of dollars on, and a random drug addict breaks in and steals your deepest corporate secrets people are going to ask questions.

If a foreign spy does the same, you have a bit more room to claim there’s nothing you could have done to prevent the theft.

I’ve seen a bunch of incident response reports over the years. It is extremely common for IR vendors to claim that an attack has some hallmark or another of a nation-state actor. While these reports get used to fund the security program, I always read those statements as a “get out of jail free” card for the CISOs who got popped.
by badc0ffee | 2025-10-15 19:49:41+00:00
When they stop releasing security patches for that OS version 2 years later, it becomes more risky to connect the thing to a network. Or take in any data from the outside, really, whether it's via Bluetooth, or USB drive.

And then there's 3rd party software that will stop supporting that old OS version, in part because Apple's dev tools make that difficult.

Eventually, Apple's own services will stop supporting that OS - no convenient iCloud support.

Finally, the root CA certs bundled with the OS will become too out of date to use.

I'm planning on putting Linux on my Intel Mac Mini soon. But when a M3+ Mini goes out of support, will we have that option?
by alganet | 2025-10-15 19:50:07+00:00
> Humans don’t get rewarded for saying “I don’t know” to every question, because that’s not useful.

Humans get rewarded for thinking "I don't know", a lot. That's why it's hard to compare.

> A model that always bluffs

A model doesn't bluff. It feels to us humans that they bluff, but there is no bluff mechanics in play. The model doesn't assess the prompter's ability to call their bluff. It's not hiding that it doesn't know something. It's just not reached a predictable point in a sequence of token predictions that can or not have something that resembles a call to what resembles a bluff.

Up to the point it's corrected, the model's representation of what was asked is the best it can do. It has no means to judge itself. Which leads to...

> The real issue isn’t that models make things up; it’s that they don’t clearly signal how confident they are when they do.

Which sounds like exactly what I said, but it's not. Signaling confidence is just a more convincing faux-bluff. Signaling is a side-effect of bluffing, a symptom, not the real thing (which is more related to asessing whoever is on the other side of the conversation).

> Imagining things, seeing problems from the wrong angle, and even fabricating explanations are the seeds of creativity.

I agree with this. However, Newton was not bluffing, he was right and confident about it, and right about being confident about it. It just turns out that his description was of a lesser knowledge resolution than Einsten's.

For this to work, we need lots of "connective tissue" ideas. Roads we can explore freely without being called liars. Things we can say without saying that these things are true or false, without the need for being confident or right, without being assessed directly. This is outside the realm of bluffing or saying useful things. It's quite the opposite.

When people saw comets and described them as dragons in the sky, they were not hallucinating or telling lies, they were preserving some connective tissue idea the best they could, outside of the realm of being right or wrong. This were not bluffs. There were some "truths" about their mistakes, or something useful (they were unadvertedly recording astronomical data, before astronomy existed). Those humans felt that was important, those stories stuck. Can we say the same thing about LLM hallucinations? I don't think we're ready to answer that.

So, yes. Hallucinations could be a feature, but there's a lot missing here.
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-10-15 19:50:20+00:00
This article is so interesting, but I can’t shake the feeling it was written by AI. The writing style has that feel for me.

Maybe that shouldn’t bother me? Like, maybe the author would never have had time to write this otherwise, and I would never have learned about his experience.

But I can't help wishing he'd just written about it himself. Maybe that's unreasonable--I shouldn't expect people to do extra work for free. But if this happened to me, I would want to write about it myself...
by palata | 2025-10-15 19:50:24+00:00
The reason why GrapheneOS only supports the Pixels is that the other manufacturers are not trying to get their shit together and release a phone that is reasonably secure. It's not that GrapheneOS supports Google, it's just that the other manufacturers are worse than Google.

If a major manufacturer released a good smartphone that GrapheneOS could support, they would get new users from the set of people who want GrapheneOS. I would gladly buy a non-Pixel as long as it can run GrapheneOS.

Which means that in a way, if you buy a Pixel and install GrapheneOS, you give more credibility to GrapheneOS, making it more interesting for a different manufacturer to consider supporting them.
by dijit | 2025-10-15 19:50:57+00:00
Ugh, Canada used to have this kind of visa free travel (at least for British people) and it was really jarring to me. I spent the whole flight worrying that I would be denied entry upon landing, but nope: no worries.

Until I tried to travel back a few years later and they didn't let me board the plane because they had changed to an e-visa scheme called eTA.

My own fault for not checking, but, in fairness, I didn't expect the agreements between Canada and the UK to have materially changed.
by Kim_Bruning | 2025-10-15 19:51:19+00:00
Define "animal species", if you mean vertebrates, you might be surprised by the modern ethological literature. If you mean to exclude non-vertebrates ... you might be surprised by the ethological literature too.

If you just mean majority of spp, you'd be correct, simply because most are single celled. Though debate is possible when we talk about forms of chemical signalling.
by comprev | 2025-10-15 19:51:49+00:00
I use AI mostly for writing docs and always make sure the documents have an "AI generated content" notice as the first thing readers see.

In the codebase itself I add in-line comments pointing to precisely where AI was used.

AI has proven very useful for providing extensive in-line comments too as my employer is pushing hard for our Ops guys to learn IaC despite the vast majority having zero-to-none development experience.

Contextual comments explaining _what, why & how_ loops/conditionals/etc. work has (so far anyway) proven quite successful.
by habinero | 2025-10-15 19:52:22+00:00
Nation-state actors do this kind of stuff all the time, and they're difficult to defend against because they tend to be well-funded and therefore able to hire talent, have resources, and spend money on intelligence and 0days. And they're immune from prosecution unless they're stupid enough to travel to a hostile state.

North Korea really does spend a lot of money on this, and so does Russia and China. And US and Israel, for that matter.
by gubicle | 2025-10-15 19:52:58+00:00
The whole point is the prompt (+ a static set of (system)prompts). If your whole function as a human is clicking one of a set of buttons to trigger an AI action, then you are automate-able in a few lines of code (and the AI is better than you at deciding which button to click anyway (supposedly)).

There are like thousands wrappers around LLMs masquerading as AI apps for specialized usecases, but the real performance of these apps is really only bottlenecked by the LLM performance, and their UIs generally only get in the way of the direct LLM access/feedback loop.

To work with LLMs effectively you need to understand how to craft good prompts, and how to read/debug the responses.
by ziml77 | 2025-10-15 19:53:19+00:00
> I'm actually wondering why PC games never converged on a "left joy-con" style controller with a stick and buttons, for one hand, while the other hand holds the mouse. I guess the ordinary keyboard is good enough so there wasn't much pressure to replace it.

Really does seem to be a matter of the keyboard being good enough and knowing that most everyone has one connected to their PC. I've just come to accept that I need to prioritize what matters most for a given game. So, selecting between KB+M or controller on a case-by-case basis. I think the only game recently that annoyed me for not fitting one or the other very well was Cyberpunk 2077 because the cars were very touchy and would have been better with analog input.
by Aachen | 2025-10-15 19:53:29+00:00
WhatsApp clone storing messages plaintext on the server if I'm skimming the repository right?

Or a Spotify clone I clicked at random, idk, the screenshots look nearly 1:1 but then the "features" list doesn't mention that it can play music or, more importantly for Spotify (since playing music, I can do with any old mp3 player) generate useful recommendations if you could somehow feed it listener data

What's the point of these then, are they meant to be superficially functional UI clones (like screenshots except you can click things) or am I missing something?

Edit: Mastodon is also in the list as a Twitter clone. Some of these are not like the others :s
by hopelite | 2025-10-15 19:53:38+00:00
You cannot actually deny entry of an American into America, at least not of a true naturally born American to at least one equally naturally born American parent and relatives, probably at least two more generations back.

People are not going to like hearing this, but everyone else who were merely made American citizens by process, has a bit of an increasingly minor risk of being denied entry if they or their first generation relative are deemed to have received their citizenship illicitly and or shown or even just accused of foreign ties, let alone any involvement of espionage or terrorism.

More likely is that even in cases of espionage and terrorism, the government would simply prefer permitting entry and then simply prosecuting people.
by homebrewer | 2025-10-15 19:53:40+00:00
I and a couple of friends of mine have been to China since they introduced visa-free access for my country (low on various "passport power" lists), and it's been an absolutely painless experience. No advance notice, no ETA (like e.g. South Korea does), just buy the tickets and go. The officers at the airport were very nice too.

If anything, dealing with WeChat and AliPay is much more of a headache.