MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tptacek | 2025-10-04 18:27:14+00:00
The metro area is blanketed in ALPRs and we were the only ones actually writing real policy about them. Now we don't have any ALPRs and can't build policy or shop it to any of our neighbors. We had harm reduction for the cameras and a plausible strategy for reducing their harm throughout the area, and instead we did something performative.
by dotancohen | 2025-10-04 18:28:32+00:00
About forty years ago I read a terrific book about life forms that live on a star. Maybe Starquake was it called? Did to the abundance of energy on the surface of a star, they live their lives a million times faster than humans. Thus for both them and the humans who discover them, communication is difficult. I think the humans push these life forms to develop civilization, which from the human's perspective had them go from primitive animals into sophisticated beings of technology past their own in something like a day.
by alephnerd | 2025-10-04 18:28:32+00:00
Chris Brunet is part of the Canadian turned American Alt-Right movement having been a worked at the Daily Caller and "The American Conservative" [0]. Sort of like a Canadian and less sharp Oren Cass, and basically the same ideological pipeline that created "Rebel News".

He attempted a pre-doc at UChicago but didn't stand out, and had similar issues at his other conservative employers along with his personality.

One of my buddies was his peer in the program at the time, and from down the grapevine, he was dismissed for some, let's say "academic issues". The reason he failed in his Econ career was for similar reasons a large number of Econ majors can't hack it - they lacked the mathematical and computational sophistication needed in modern Econ.

He was right to call out Christine Gay for academic fraud, but it's a bit of a "pot meet kettle" kind of situation given his academic background.

The stereotype of what Econ is in common parlance is what has become "Political Science" in 2025. To succeed in a modern top tier Econ or PoliSci program, you will need data science and mathematical chops comparable to a bachelors in Applied Math or CS (excluding the systems programming portion). Heck, Government students gunning for grad school back at Harvard tend to take mathematical Game Theory classes with proofs comparable to those taken by CS and Applied Math majors.

This wouldn't have been bad in the policy world (plenty of non-technical "economists" on both sides) but his personality has made the actual Alt-Right and the traditional conservative right both detest him based on my friend and alumni group. One of the other comments on this thread about applied versus think tank and journalist background does resonate to my personal experience to a certain extent.

> the majority of all economists are Republican

I'd disagree with that. The majority of economists ik who ended up in academia or industry are largely split evenly ideologically, but in action don't really care one way or the other. They tend to have a "show me the data" mentality.

On top of that, while UChicago is nowhere near as conservative as it was when Friedman roamed the earth, it's Econ and PoliSci departments are very open to heterodox thought and various conservative leaning Econ and PoliSci grads have come out of the program.

[0] - https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-brunet-28074a288
by MountDoom | 2025-10-04 18:29:11+00:00
I'm surprised you say that. To flip this on its head, what would be your principled argument to accept ambient surveillance?

I don't doubt that license plate readers are used primarily to solve crimes. But the fact that it is collected and can be made available to anyone essentially strips you of privacy in everyday life. Cops are people too; once the tech is available, it is sometimes abused to spy on spouses, neighbors, journalists critical of the local PD, and so on.

There is also a more general argument: an ever-growing range of human activities is surveilled to root out crime, and we can probably agree that the end state of that would be dystopian: it'd be a place where your every word or even every thought is proactively monitored and flagged for wrongthink. We're ways off, but with every decade, we're getting closer. I'm not saying that Flock-listening-to-conversations is the line we can't cross, but if not this, then what?
by buran77 | 2025-10-04 18:30:33+00:00
> I do not understand this idea that it's an obvious red line.

It's an invasive surveillance technology that contributes to building the pervasive surveillance day to day reality.

You're muddying the waters asking "why are you against this" without even hinting at an argument why anyone should not be against this.

You can already see the progression. What was sold as "only listens to gunshots" now no longer listens only to gunshots. The deal constantly gets altered.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-10-04 18:30:41+00:00
> [At dotcom time] There was a bubble, many non-viable companies got funded and died, and nevertheless the internet did eventually change everything.

It did, but not for the better. Quality of life and standard of living both declined while income inequality skyrocketed and that period of time is now known as The Great Divergence.

> He's (unsurprisingly) making an analogy to the dotcom bubble, which seems to me correct.

He's got no downside if he's wrong or doesn't deliver, he's promising an analogy to selling you a brand new bridge in exchange for taking half of your money... and you're ecstatic about it.
by rootnod3 | 2025-10-04 18:30:41+00:00
One problem in this are bad actors. German Telecom for example (t-online.de) only accepts mails from servers it whitelists.

To get whitelisted you have to apply with them and your domain HAS to have a website with an Impressum, your clear legal name AND an email that is NOT your domain for emergency contact. It is insane. If every provider would act like that, email would die in a month.
by mystifyingpoi | 2025-10-04 18:31:00+00:00
I strongly believe, that local dev is a must and the entire system (or at least the part needed to start working on any given microservice) should be runnable on a laptop, no matter how big it is. Sure, there might be a need to mock S3 with Minio, or a payment gateway with some handwritten stub in one-file Python webservice, but that's how it should be.

I've seen lazy devs ignore the underlying issue, and then just push over and over broken code and wait 10-15 min for CI to push new version to the evironment. It's maddening.
by oh_fiddlesticks | 2025-10-04 18:31:31+00:00
>technological advances are permanent that have long term impacts

That's not necessarily true, look at the clockwork cylinder fished up from the ancient Greeks that was apparently an Olympic oriented calendar.

And.... the pyramids. Built by humans, yet the method is not well understood now, so little so in fact that aliens seems more plausible.

I would say that technological advancement is often lost to time, those are just two examples and I imagine there are countless more we don't know.
Show HN: Elector – A lightwight Tor browser in Electron
by jamescampbell | 2025-10-04 18:31:56+00:00
Version 2.0 - Now using modern Electron with enhanced security features!

WHY?: "A super lightweight Tor-connected browser built with modern web technologies."

Elector is a simple browser that auto-connects to your local Tor service. If you're running Tor via homebrew on macOS, this app works out of the box. For other setups, you may need to configure your torrc file.
by hollerith | 2025-10-04 18:31:58+00:00
The only anecdotal evidence is in the first para. The second para is an obvious evolutionary argument, which I came up with myself rather than my hearing it from somewhere else (but it follows the same simple pattern as many evolutionary arguments I have heard). The rest is my recollection of what I learned listening to Longo's being interviewed and maybe also what I learned from a few quick uses of a search engine.

I decline your suggestion for me to look stuff up so that I can post the results here. I might have made the effort if my previous 2 comments had been upvoted significantly (which is the main way for me to tell whether readers value them) but both are sitting at a score of 1.
by Aerbil313 | 2025-10-04 18:32:30+00:00
Everyone should learn the concept of a Skinner Box. [1]

Reddit is a Skinner Box. HN is too, though to a much lesser extent [2]. Every Skinner Box has one dominant opinion on every matter, which means, by simply using the product, your beliefs on any matter will shift towards the dominant opinion of the platform.

I was a chronically online Reddit user once. I can spot any chronically online Reddit user in just a few minutes in any social event by their mannerisms and the way they talk. I’ll ask and without fail indeed they are a daily Reddit user. It’s even more obvious in writing where you can spot them in just a few always-grammatically-correct text messages flavored with reddit-funny remarks and snarks and jokes.

Same goes for chronic X users. Their signature behavior is talking about social/political issues unprompted. It’s even easier to spot them.

I think the main reason behind platforms shaping user behavior is this: The most upvoted content will always surface to the top, where it will be seen by most users, meaning, its belief-shaping impact is exponential instead of linear. In the same manner unpopular opinions will be pushed to the bottom, and will have exponentially small impact. Some opinions will even be banned or shadowbanned, which means they are beyond the Overton Window of the specific platform.

This way, the platform both nudges you towards the dominant opinion and limits the range of possible opinions you will be exposed to. Over time, this affects your personality and character.

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber

2: The HN moderators and the algorithm both actively resist the effect and try to increase diversification.
by rglullis | 2025-10-04 18:32:33+00:00
I do not believe for a second that any of those people investing tens of billions of dollars are doing it to "get to AGI". They would only be able to profit from a AGI if it could be simultaneously (a) weaponized and (b) strictly controlled by one party, and there is no one crazy enough that these could be achieved.

If you tell me that people are pouring all that money into data centers because they believe that most applications will use some form of LLM or VLM as the main driver of machine-to-machine and machine-to-person interface, I'd be more inclined to buy it. But then I'd respond that it seems that LLMs are reaching a point of diminishing returns and the big next move is to make it easy and faster to distill/fine-tune the LLMs for specific business needs, which is something that should be possible to do with the existing infra already (I guess?)
by tptacek | 2025-10-04 18:33:16+00:00
No I'm not. I actually do real political work on this issue, ran the commission process that restricted our cameras and created the only restrictive ALPR police General Orders in Chicagoland, and got us to pass an ACLU CCOPS ordinance --- the first municipality in Illinois to have one.

Whatever else I am, I'm not "muddying the waters". I'm commenting in good faith from actual experience. You're going to find my bona fides here are pretty strong.
by nick__m | 2025-10-04 18:33:28+00:00
In my sample of 1 with cold email to a researcher was that they are enthusiastic when someone has read their paper and ask relevant questions.

I don't remember the paper subject neither the researcher name (more than 20yr ago) but I remember that she was an ornitologist, the subject was quite niche and the response I received to my questions was longer than the article that prompted me to asks them.
by gus_massa | 2025-10-04 18:33:28+00:00
<unsupported-speculation-alert>

Please bear with me...

A few years ago I read a paper about the neurons in the brain. In the visual area they form like a surface where each neuron is slightly connected to the nearby neurons. When they fire, the nearby neurons get slightly exited, but each neuron will not fire again for a short time.

Usually the connection with the nearby neurons is small, and most of the signal goes to the neurons in the next processing step, not sideways.

But if you magically increase the connection factor, they start to produce waves. The wave avance and rotate and create nice patters. Somewhat like the patterns in some chemical reactions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LL3kVtc-4vY

In the paper I read a long time ago, they claim that LSD increase the connection and in simulations they get waves that are similar to the hallucinations produced by LSD.

Back to the miracle ...

Is it possible that with the correct amount of light the eyes don't get hurt but part of visual part of the brain is overloaded, somewhat the connection increase, and start to produce these waves that look like LSD hallucinations?

Perhaps they didn't see a rotating sun, just rotating waves over the sun area.

Perhaps it was not a mass delusion, but real hallucinations inside each head, so the camera couldn't take a photo of them.

Experiment proposal...

Apparently in some locations there is the correct amount of light and clouds and soar inclination to produce this effect every few years. Is it possible that someone that usually takes a safe dosis of LSD to go there and compare?

</unsupported-speculation-alert>
by simonbw | 2025-10-04 18:34:01+00:00
> We can't really do much with the information that x amount is reserved for MCP, tool calling or the system prompt.

I actually think this is pretty useful information. It helps you evaluate whether an MCP server is worth the context cost. Similar for getting a feel for how much context certain tool uses use up. I feel like there's a way you can change the system prompt, and so that helps you evaluate if what you've got there is worth it also.
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-10-04 18:34:03+00:00
> Why has the rate of stochastic terrorism only increased since the NSA and Palantir started spying on all of us?

…is this true? What timespan are we looking at? My understanding was that crime has been on the decline pretty much from the 90s up until 2020. And in 2020 the world changed in a way that kind of made everyone go nuts.
by AfterHIA | 2025-10-04 18:34:05+00:00
Thank you for acknowledging this. The internet was created around a lot of lofty idealism and none of that has been realized other than opening up the world's information to a great many. It made society and the global economy worse (occidental west; Chinese middle class might disagree) and has paralleled the destabilization of geopolitics. I am not luddite but until we can, "get our moral shit together" new technologies aren't but fuel on the proverbial fire.
by mooreds | 2025-10-04 18:34:07+00:00
Maybe AI has changed things, but I think it takes more than one year to gain sufficient domain expertise.

But your argument still has validity even if it takes 2-3 years to gain the knowledge, so let me address that.

My response is: if I wanted to be an expert in <startup domain> to the point I didn't need a co-founder CEO, I would take the time, the years I mention above. But that has costs (opportunity costs if nothing else).

Instead, I prefer to be an expert in software development. This gives me less control in each given startup as you point out, but more optionality across startups (and other companies)[0]. This choice also means that I give input on the hard decisions that company leadership has to make, but I don't have to make the final call. Frankly, that's more weight than I care to bear.

That's a personal choice. I've watched friends be CEOs of successful startups and it's not always (nor usually, even) fun or easy.

0: I wrote more about that optionality here: https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/3445
Show HN: Run – a CLI universal code runner I built while learning Rust
by esubaalew | 2025-10-04 18:34:13+00:00
Hi HN — I’m learning Rust and decided to build a universal CLI for running code in many languages. The tool, Run, aims to be a single, minimal dependency utility for: running one-off snippets (from CLI flags), running files, reading and executing piped stdin, and providing language-specific REPLs that you can switch between interactively.

I designed it to support both interpreted languages (Python, JS, Ruby, etc.) and compiled languages (Rust, Go, C/C++). It detects languages from flags or file extensions, can compile temporary files for compiled languages, and exposes a unified REPL experience with commands like :help, :lang, and :quit.

Install: cargo install run-kit (or use the platform downloads on GitHub). Source & releases: https://github.com/Esubaalew/run

I used Rust while following the official learning resources and used AI to speed up development, so I expect there are bugs and rough edges. I’d love feedback on: usability and UX of the REPL, edge cases for piping input to language runtimes, security considerations (sandboxing/resource limits), packaging and cross-platform distribution.

Thanks — I’ll try to answer questions and share design notes.
by mikert89 | 2025-10-04 18:35:00+00:00
One shortcut would be to:

1. pick a vertical (construction, legal, accounting, etc)

2. look at how to apply ai (compliance, voice customer service, email)

3. find sales people from a would be competitor or old school b2b saas in that area, and pay them 150$ an hour to tell you what customers are paying for

4. at the direction of how to do sales, come up with the product and either do the sales yourself without building, or pay someone to do cold calls and pitch the product

5. build the product
by mooreds | 2025-10-04 18:35:49+00:00
I'd recommend:

- the lean startup: https://www.amazon.com/Lean-Startup-Entrepreneurs-Continuous...

- Amy Hoy's blog: https://stackingthebricks.com/

- working in the domain you are interested in for a year. Go be a realtor. Go work in a lawncare business. etc. etc.

- read Patrick's advice about how he found customers for Appointment reminder: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/05/14/unveiling-my-second-pro...

edit: added link to Patrick's piece
by benzible | 2025-10-04 18:35:55+00:00
100% agree. I'm a CTO for a vertical SaaS, working with a first-time founder with deep domain expertise. He came in with a thesis as to why our target customer was still using Excel, even though it was completely unsuited to their needs. Almost everything he thought at the beginning has been borne out, and there's no way I would have figured out this market on my own. There's also no way he would have built a usable product without someone like me - his original plan was bloated and we narrowed it to the core where we have very specific value.

I've been a solo founder as well multiple time co-founder / CTO at venture-backed startups so I'm certainly capable of starting something myself, but I think this combination is an excellent model. A couple of other things that make it work: the CEO has sales skills, and does not have much of an ego and is willing to listen to someone who has been through all of this multiple times.
by Leynos | 2025-10-04 18:36:07+00:00
It depends what you're fitting to. At the simplest, you can ask for a reduction in cyclomatic/cognitive complexity measured using a linter, extraction of methods (where a paragraph of code serves no purpose other than to populate a variable) or complex conditionals, move from an imperative to a declarative approach, etc. These are all things that can be caught through pattern matching and measured using a linter or code review tool (CodeRabbit, Sourcery or Codescene).

Other things might need to be done in two stages. You might ask the agent to first identify where code violates CQRS, then for each instance, explain the problem, and spawn a sub-agent to address that problem.

Other things the agent might identify this way: multiple implications, use of conflicted APIs, poor separation of concerns at a module or class level.

I don't typically let the agent do any of this end to end, but I would typically manually review findings before spawning subagents with those findings.
by cameldrv | 2025-10-04 18:36:12+00:00
You're right about the Civil Rights act, I had misremembered. However Kennedy met with MLK and proposed the Civil Rights act.

Blaming "business executives" is unhelpful as an explanation because "business executives" is not a static group. Business executives who moved their manufacturing to China or Mexico made their businesses more profitable or at least preserved their profits, because they saved a ton of money. Business executives who kept manufacturing in the U.S. generally were outcompeted and they were either replaced, their businesses shrunk, or they were forced to reorient towards higher end, smaller markets.

NAFTA, MFN/PNTR for China, and then WTO membership for China is what created this situation. This was a total disaster for American labor. All of the things that Perot warned about with the "giant sucking sound" were exactly what happened.

Underpaid workers in other countries most certainly did get a lot of that money. Have you seen what has happened to wages in coastal China over the past 25 years? Most of that money comes from exports, and a large portion of those are to the U.S.

Perot's other policies don't necessarily track as "pro-labor." My point was just that the two biggest things that negatively affected American labor in the past 40 years were passed under Clinton. Interestingly, the vestiges of the labor-oriented Democratic party were still there in Congress, and large majorities of Democrats in the House voted against NAFTA and PNTR for China. On NAFTA, this result wouldn't even be possible today due to the "majority of the majority" way that the House is run.
by Spooky23 | 2025-10-04 18:36:14+00:00
People live in fear, and these things help police close cases quickly.

I served on a jury where a young woman slipped on ice while crossing the street and was run over by a negligent driver who was fleeing what he thought was the police, because he was on probation and not supposed to drive. With private surveillance, red light cameras and some other sources, they were able to track down the vehicle and apprehend the individual within 45 minutes of the event. Prior to that, much more primitive version of that technology being available, there would no chance of that case being solved.

Personally, I think this technology is dangerous, lacks effective governance, is operated without transparency, and is prone to abuse. Events of late highlight how different jurisdictional boundaries at the city, state and federal levels can be in conflict. But the technology is not going away -- imo it's time to govern it and limit the inter-jurisdictional data sharing.
by abdullahkhalids | 2025-10-04 18:36:31+00:00
Oh! That's what it is. I just thought some websites just took longer to send an email to my unknown domain.

I see that the only way to disable greylisting is to configure the underlying tool [1]. But it also means that SPAM will increase a lot.

[1] https://discourse.mailinabox.email/t/how-to-turn-off-edit-gr...