MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dsign | 2025-10-12 05:33:34+00:00
Microsoft gets most of its money from big corporate customers. Some of those customers are obligated by law to not leak sensitive personal data to servers in USA soil, because those customers have the missfortune of being in countries with strong privacy laws, functioning civil societies and sometimes even left-winged governments. I know for a fact that the product in question, "OneDrive", it's sometimes mandated in those companies as a backup solution for the company's computers. All it takes is a whistle-blowing incident or a chat with a journalist for this to become a major blow-up for Microsoft, with companies forced by tribunals to back off from contracts with Microsoft.
by aeternum | 2025-10-12 05:33:47+00:00
A better name might be trace metals. They're not actually rare just extremely dilute so you need to create huge chemical leaching ponds (sulfuric or hydrochloric acid) either above or below ground to sufficiently concentrate and collect them.

Of course the ponds create lots of waste gas and water, including radioactive elements and metals since you end up dissolving and concentrating those also. (So both metallic and chemical contamination) The ratio is something like 1 ton of rare earths = 2000 tons of toxic waste.

Seems to me like the issue is not so much the capex cost, but the regulatory and environmental cost. Doing it at scale in a way that doesn't harm the environment (and proving that) is likely prohibitably expensive in the US.
by LVB | 2025-10-12 05:34:19+00:00
>At least the AI is showing up what’s inaccurate and most comments get it wrong.

And we know AI is right, how?

Many folks don't like these AI comments because we're all awash in AI, all day every day. The search results, blogs, news, ads, everything is seriously tilting AI, and it can be dull. I could easily ask ChatGPT or Claude the same thing you did. But a definitely human-written comment, warts and errors and all, can be more interesting.
by Nursie | 2025-10-12 05:34:48+00:00
In Switzerland, at the appropriate facilities, the state provides heroin to addicts.

This has a dual effect - addicts get clean drugs and take them under medical supervision, reducing deaths, helping funnel some towards programs that will eventually get them clean etc. With this sort of support it turns out that people no longer steal to get their fix either, and can usually even hold down employment pretty well.

But also the young folk get to see these tired, worn out, older people queuing outside the clinic in the morning to get their fix and realise hey, maybe that isn't so cool and edgy after all...

Seems like a good plan to me, the problem is (as ever) puritans and their politicians, it's an easy thing to screech about. All it would take to kill it dead in a lot of countries would be someone standing up to shout "The opposition party want to spend YOUR tax money giving DRUGS to filthy JUNKIES!"
by godelski | 2025-10-12 05:36:12+00:00
> an objective metric

I'd like to push back on this a little, because I think it's important to understanding why Goodhart's Law shows up so frequently.

*There are no /objective/ metrics*, only proxies.

You can't measure a meter directly, you have to use a proxy like a tape measure. Similarly you can't measure time directly, you have to use a stop watch. In a normal conversation I wouldn't be nitpicking like this because those proxies are so well aligned with our intended measures and the lack of precision is generally inconsequential. But once you start measuring anything with precision you cannot ignore the fact that you're limited to proxies.

The difference of when we get more abstract in our goals is not too dissimilar. Our measuring tools are just really imprecise. So we have to take great care to understand the meaning of our metrics and their limits, just like we would if we were doing high precision measurements with something more "mundane" like distance.

I think this is something most people don't have to contend with because frankly, very few people do high precision work. And unfortunately we often use algorithms as black boxes. But the more complex a subject is the more important an expert is. It looks like they are just throwing data into a black box and reading the answer, but that's just a naive interpretation.
by jmyeet | 2025-10-12 05:39:17+00:00
Explain to me how there's any substantive difference between either party on:

- Israel

- The rest of the Middle East

- Ukraine

- NATO

- China (tariffs notwithstanding)

- Russia

Even on something like immigration, the ICE Gestapo are only really an escalation of what both parties have been doing. Kamala's immigration plan in the last election cycle was esentially identical to Trump's 2020 platform. Obama was called, among other things, the deporter-in-chief (eg [1]). Biden blocked more asylum seekers under Title 42 than Trump did in his first term.

[1]: https://ohss.dhs.gov/topics/immigration/yearbook/2019/table3...
by umanwizard | 2025-10-12 05:40:14+00:00
I loved silverlight. Before I got a “serious” job, I was a summer intern at a small civil engineering consultancy that had gradually moved into developing custom software that it sold mostly to local town/city/county governments in Arizona (mostly custom mapping applications; for example, imagine Google Maps but you can see an overlay of all the street signs your city owns and click on one to insert a note into some database that a worker needs to go repair it… stuff like that).

Lots of their stuff was delivered as Silverlight apps. It turns out that getting office workers to install a blessed plugin from Microsoft and navigate to a web page is much easier than distributing binaries that you have to install and keep up to date. And developing for it was pure pleasure; you got to use C# and Visual Studio, and a GUI interface builder, rather than the Byzantine HTML/JS/CSS ecosystem.

I get why it never took off, but in this niche of small-time custom software it was really way nicer than anything else that existed at the time. Web distribution combined with classic desktop GUI development.
by w10-1 | 2025-10-12 05:40:42+00:00
OpenDoc was mostly given to Taligent (the Apple and IBM joint venture) to develop. It was full-on OO: about 35 files for a minimal application, which meant that Erich Gamma had to build a whole new type of IDE which was unusable. He likely learned his lesson: it's pretty hard to define interfaces between unknown components without forcing each one to know about all the others.

MIME types for mail addressed much of the demand for pluggable data types.
by p0w3n3d | 2025-10-12 05:42:16+00:00
They are like shitty Midas, everything they touch, turns into pile of crap. However people stil buy their products. They think the turd is tasty, because billion of flies can't we wrong...

Meanwhile Apple is applying different set of toxic patterns. Lack of interoperability with other OS, their apps try to store data mainly on iCloud, iPhone has no jack connector etc.
by derelicta | 2025-10-12 05:42:53+00:00
You say that as if it were a bad thing lol.

Also regarding Taiwan, the situation is actually very simple. Imagine one(or many) US State becoming independent just to keep relying on slavery to prop up its economy. Don't you think the rest of the US shouldn't have to step up and put an end to this depravity? Now, if you agree with me, then you should also agree with me on Taiwan. Taiwan is a backward capitalist dictatorship. Why shouldn't the rest of the democratic Chinese homeland take over this island to install a legitimate socialist democracy?
by saxenaabhi | 2025-10-12 05:43:04+00:00
> You're saying China doesn't protect and help their native industries? That's simply incorrect:

My point was they didn't not shut down their companies from foreign competition and that that's exactly what the EU commission is doing with these tariffs.

> What about the European worker and the European citizen? As a European myself, I don't like being reduced to a mere consumer.

European citizens would be fine given how much they like to import from china.

Given the popularity of temu and other apps in europe, I don't think the general public wants to be fleeced by domestic industries/retailer and pay 12E for wine opener from esselunga v/s 1.7E on temu.

As for the domestic workers and industries, they'll have to up their game and innovate to become efficient. It was embarrassing how bad VW's EV products were till a few years ago. Domestic industries can't just expect to hold consumers as captive and fleece them forever.

If they can't good riddance.
by asmor | 2025-10-12 05:43:16+00:00
We run 48TB (after redundancy, 3 striped mirrors) over a USB enclosure (TerraMaster D6-320) and it's honestly not as bad as people say. The only failure this system experienced in the past few years was due to noisy power causing a reset, and the ZFS root (not the data pool) becoming read only due to a write hole caused by a consumer NVMe (Crucial P3 Plus) lying about being synced (who could've expected that).
by contrarian1234 | 2025-10-12 05:44:11+00:00
> Labs used to hire researchers and give them a lot of free reign.

I can't think of it ever really paying off. Bell Labs is the best example. Amazing research that was unrelated to the core business off the parent company. Microsoft Research is another great one. Lots of interesting research that .. got MS some nerd points? But has materialized into very very few actual products and revenue streams. Moving AI research doesn't help Meta build any motes or revenue streams. It just progresses our collective knowledge.

On the "human progress" scale it's fantastic to put lots of smart people in a room and let them do their thing. But from a business perspective it seems to almost never pay off. Waiting on the irrational charity of businesses executive is probably not the best way to structure thing.

I'd tell them to go become academics.. but all the academics I know are just busy herding their students and attending meetings
by zyklonix | 2025-10-12 05:47:20+00:00
Microsoft Songsmith is another one that deserved a second life. It let you hum or sing a melody and would auto-generate full backing tracks, guitar, bass, drums, chords, in any style you chose.

It looked a bit goofy in the promo videos, but under the hood it was doing real-time chord detection and accompaniment generation. Basically a prototype of what AI music tools like Suno, Udio, or Mubert are doing today, fifteen years too early.

If Microsoft had kept iterating on it with modern ML models, it could’ve become the "GarageBand for ideas that start as a hum."
by pfannkuchen | 2025-10-12 05:48:13+00:00
How do tariffs depreciate the dollar? Do you just mean in the “prices go up” sense? I’m not trying to nitpick, just wondering if there is some mechanism I don’t know about that actually devalues the dollar in a fundamental way. Like if there is a chicken flu and the price of eggs skyrockets, I wouldn’t say that depreciates the dollar, for example, in strict terms, prices have just risen.
by siromega | 2025-10-12 05:48:45+00:00
Right for the wrong reason.

Are 30y loans bad? Yes.

Is it still ok to buy a home with a 30y loan? Yes.

However, as your career (hopefully) grows and you earn more, plus inflationary aspects of time, eventually you want to be in a spot to refinance your 30y loan into a 15y or 20y one (and hopefully before the half way point!).

I was able to refi a 30y loan about six years into it into a 15y thanks to low Covid rates, and while I only pay a few hundred more per month I went from maybe $6,000 a year in principal and $8,000 in interest to $14,000 a year in principal and $5,000 a year in interest. “Throwing away” a lot less money in interest payments is good for your net worth.
by w10-1 | 2025-10-12 05:50:13+00:00
Optane persistent memory had a fascinating value proposition: stop converting data structures for database storage and just persist the data directly. No more booting or application launch or data load: just pick up where you left off. Died because it was too expensive, but probably long after it should have.

VM's persist memory snapshots (as do Apple's containers, for macOS at least), so there's still room for something like that workflow.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-10-12 05:51:00+00:00
Going by the ingredients list:

sugar, wheat, barley, egg, soybean oil, starch, whey, salt, tallow

These go back before the beginning of history. Quite a long time before.

There are also quite a few additives and preservatives in a Twinkie.† If you're making a point about ultraprocessed food, you're definitely correct. If you're trying to make a point about basic foodstuffs, you aren't.

† https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcS3kQg5blw
by fiddlerwoaroof | 2025-10-12 05:51:01+00:00
As far as I know, most data protection laws accept cryptoshredding as long as the party with a deletion requirement actually destroys the key. For one thing, it’s hard to reconcile deletion requirements with immutable architectures and backups without a mechanism like this.

IANAL, but I think the key remaining in the user’s possession doesn’t matter as far as the company with a deletion requirement is concerned.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-10-12 05:51:34+00:00
> Metric: time to run 100m

> Context: track athlete

> Does it cease to be a good metric? No.

What do you mean? People start doping or showing up with creatively designed shoes and you need to layer on a complicated system to decide if that's cheating, but some of the methods are harder to detect and then some people cheat anyway, or you ban steroids or stimulants but allow them if they're by prescription to treat an unrelated medical condition and then people start getting prescriptions under false pretexts in order to get better times. Or worse, someone notices that the competition can't set a good time with a broken leg.
by jmyeet | 2025-10-12 05:54:04+00:00
I've never had a "smart" speaker or a "smart" display or a "smart" fridge and the only "smart" TV I've had has been intentionally not connected to the Internet. I have got a Nest and a "smart" washing machine and dryer. Some random thoughts:

1. I've literally never wanted a cloud-connected always-on microphone in my home and I'm surprised anyone does;

2. All of the home automation software is awful, bar none. The only thing it's going to impact in society is being the source of future DDoS attacks most likely. Every time I've tried to use it I'm met with unhelpful error messages, networking software that can't get a DHCP IP address or a million other faults. Or the hardware is just deprecated in favor of the newest, shiniest softare or API (I'm looking at you, Google Matter);

3. "Smart" displays are probably most akin to "smart" TVs. No good comes from connecting TVs to the Internet. It's just uploading data about your viewing habits to sell as well as inserting ads. Some TVs get pretty aggressive about this too. I've heard tales of them trying to find an open network. If any TV did that to me I'd put a drill through the Wifi chip. But "smart" displays have to be connected to the Internet. I have no control over such a device so I'll simply never get one.

I honestly don't know who buys this stuff.
by mattmaroon | 2025-10-12 05:54:52+00:00
The key difference is people view heroin as something that will ruin your life, but think gambling is a harmless pass time until it is too late. There’s nobody who doesn’t know the perils of heroin, legal gambling existed in most places in some form and had for a long time. People view it much more like alcohol than heroin.

Also we didn’t just try that with gambling (48 states have had some legal form of it forever) we just tried it with online sports books, which turn out to be a particularly virulent form of gambling. And we haven’t really begun to sensibly regulate that, a lot of harm may be reduced in the near future as we do.
by t_serpico | 2025-10-12 05:55:16+00:00
But there is no way to know who is truly the 'best'. The people who position and market themselves to be viewed as the best are the only ones who even have a chance to be viewed as such. So if you're a great researcher but don't project yourself that way, no one will ever know you're a great researcher (except for the other great researchers who aren't really invested in communicating how great you are). The system seems to incentivize people to not only optimize for their output but also their image. This isn't a bad thing per se, but is sort of antithetical to the whole shoulder of giants ethos of science.
by banashark | 2025-10-12 05:55:47+00:00
Not only do you need to walk a mere block or two from the tourist line to find charming quiet spots, but there are tons of people that walk directly past beautiful and interesting places to get _to_ the jam-packed spots.

Small private gardens with interesting history and splendid views sitting nearly empty while a train of tens->hundreds of tourists walk directly past it per minute. Or small hiking trails within a stones throw of a packed entrance with a tiny fraction of the foot-traffic. They aren’t obscured either, just not the “main attraction”.

I was genuinely baffled.
by samus | 2025-10-12 05:56:00+00:00
Checked exceptions are for errors that are not possible to prevent. How else should the caller know which exceptions are really likely to happen?

Modules absolutely achieved their primary goal: stopping libraries from accessing JDK internals without the application's knowledge. The ecosystem is slow on the uptake since split packages and access to internal APIs is endemic, but it is happening ever so slowly. I wish libraries could opt into not being part of the unnamed module.

Virtual threads were designed with explicit cooperation of the community, with the explicit goal of making it easy to switch as much existing code over to it as possible. I really don't understand the scepticism there. Most other languages went with promises or reactive streams because they were inspired by how functional programming languages do it.
by businessmate | 2025-10-12 05:58:21+00:00
In early 2025, the Prompt-Space Occupancy Score (PSOS™) introduced a reproducible way to measure how brands appear within AI assistant responses. It established visibility as a quantifiable, auditable dimension of brand equity.

PSOS-C, the conversion-weighted evolution of that metric, extends PSOS beyond exposure. It connects assistant-level visibility to measurable user actions and verified financial outcomes through a transparent, auditable attribution chain. PSOS-C closes the loop between being seen and creating value—transforming AI visibility into a governance-grade financial indicator.
by mattmaroon | 2025-10-12 05:59:44+00:00
I don’t think that’s true of heroin to a large extent, but I do think it would be true of cocaine, psychedelics, and other drugs. But regardless, I think the overall effect would be net harm mitigation given all the downsides of making it illegal. Funding violent crime at home and abroad, stigmatizing it and deterring treatment, overdoses from unsafe supply, etc. It’s entirely possible that more people would use it and it would still result in less harm to society.
by wisty | 2025-10-12 06:02:33+00:00
99% of tourists are like that.

No real confidence so they don't wander around and use their own brains. They just go to the top 10 spots chatGPT, tiktok, or some other list dictates.

It's like how people go to the Louvre and stand in line for 3 hours to look at one famous painting that they probably don't even really like all that much, and not see anything else in arguably the world's best gallery.

This is doubly true for a hot spot like Japan, because it's the current number one on the dumb lists.
by bamboozled | 2025-10-12 06:03:05+00:00
I was in Japan during covid, Kyoto was absolutely incredible…we sat in zen gardens for an hour and saw 5–10 other people. Mostly extremely quiet, beautifuly dressed Japanese women enjoying the scene together.

I setup my camera and toook photos at Kinkakuji for hours in different lighting situations while having nice conversations with various Japanese tourists. It was, unimaginable. I still enjoy Kyoto though. It is what it is.
by samus | 2025-10-12 06:03:50+00:00
> * "Invisible control flow", where you can't tell from the call site whether or not a call might throw (you need to check the signature, which is off in some other file, or perhaps visible in an IDE if you hover).

Never found this this to be a problem. It is really common to all implementations of exceptions, not just checked ones. And when you write code the compiler will yell at you. In monadic code,
by mattmaroon | 2025-10-12 06:04:17+00:00
Ha.

I think the bigger problem than the military is probably the nascent EV industry here. It must use orders of magnitude more of them than the defense industry, which can surely source them indirectly much the way China is still getting the chips we have export controls on.

I doubt they can kill our missile production no matter what they do but they can probably kill Tesla.
by themafia | 2025-10-12 06:04:18+00:00
> just to win the extractive rentseeker race to own the entire economy's productive labour.

They're already there. Inflation nearly doubled prices for consumer goods while wages have remained static. People are clearly too paralyzed to effectively organize their labor pool against these monopolists.

> Amazon jumped too early.

I disagree. The platform is cheap to manufacture and efficient to operate. They kept the walls on the garden too high. There was never any push to bring third parties or developers onto the platform in a credible way and never on an even footing with Amazon's own offerings.

They clutched it too tightly. It was never going to pan out in the long term. It was a dazzling loss leader right up until Amazon brass realized it was unsustainable. Then the usual conversion into selling your own users data and cramming every spare inch with visual ads came as predictably as it always does.
by bitwize | 2025-10-12 06:04:24+00:00
> ReactOS, the effort to create a free and open source Windows NT reimplementation.

Some projects creep along slowly until something triggers an interest and suddenly they leap ahead.

MAME's Tandy 2000 implementation was unusable, until someone found a copy of Windows 1.0 for the Tandy 2000, then the emulation caught up until Windows ran.

Maybe ReactOS will get a big influx of activity after Windows 10 support goes offline in a couple days, or even shortly after when you can't turn AI spying off, not even three times a year.
by munchlax | 2025-10-12 06:05:57+00:00
So this wasn't really fixed. The impressive thing here is that copilot accepts natural language. So whatever exfiltration method you can come up with, you just write out the method in english.

They merely "fixed" one particular method, without disclosing how they fixed it. Surely you could just do the base64 thing to an image url of your choice? Failing that, you could trick it into providing passwords by telling it you accidentally stored your grocery list in a field called passswd, go fetch it for me ppls?

There's a ton of stuff to be found here. Do they give bounties? Here's a goldmine.