MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by BrenBarn | 2025-10-07 19:45:23+00:00
> Unless we agree to fight for freedom everywhere, the only logical excuse is that the digital world doesn't have real world consequences, except that it increasingly patently does now.

I think the relevant difference is that it has real-world consequences for other people. And the consequences are likely to scale with the magnitude of the audience, meaning that it is bigger players that should face stiffer regulation. And yes, I think some of the examples you give should also be allowed.

Catalytic converters are there because they reduce the emissions your car produces. Those emissions get out into the air and affect everyone around you, and (over time, potentially) everyone on the planet. Rules around selling baked goods exist to ensure you don't sell bread made with rotten eggs or something that would make people sick. (And there are now "home kitchen" laws in some places that do allow you to do this anyway.) Installing a new electrical outlet has potential fire risks which could affect nearby buildings. Building a deck has potential safety consequences, but I imagine there are many jurisdictions where you can do that without a permit, and even more where you can get away with doing so even though it's technically not allowed.

Me installing a tic-tac-toe game from F-droid doesn't have the same kind of ripple effects on other people. It probably has much smaller such effects than installing a mainstream app like Facebook.

> Unless we agree to fight for freedom everywhere, the only logical excuse is that the digital world doesn't have real world consequences, except that it increasingly patently does now. It's no surprise to me then that the argument does not resonate. That does mean we may have to allow people to have an uncomfortable level of freedom, across the board, in order to be logically consistent.

The bigger you are, the more everything you do affects other people. To my mind the "logically consistent" approach is to impose greater restrictions on almost all sorts of behavior the larger and more powerful the entity performing the behavior. By this logic, it would be Google that is restricted from changing its policy like this, simply because it is big.
by DeepSeaTortoise | 2025-10-07 19:46:00+00:00
Sure, if you want to read the messages, but the whole point is that that's rarely necessary and the price isn't worth the minimal gain.

Of the serious criminals, the only ones you'll be catching are those with low technical knowledge (everyone else will just be using their own applications) and the Venn diagram of those with little tech knowledge and those whose digital privacy practices could deceive law enforcement resembles AA cups against a pane of glass.

Regarding Encrochat, it is no surprise that an (unintentional?) watering hole gathered up a bunch of tech-illiterate, the fallacy is that those people wouldn't have been caught if they weren't allowed to flock to a single platform for some time.

Would some people have not been caught until much later or even not at all? Sure, but if LE would do its job (and not ignoring, or even covering up, well known problem areas and organizations for years to decades), only those of low priority.

Is that little gain worth creating a tool to allow Iran or similar countries to check every families' messages if they suspect some family member might be gay?

Hard nope.

> Or just downvoting me.

Don't worry, I rarely do that and that's not just because I can't...
by magicalhippo | 2025-10-07 19:46:03+00:00
RDP uses h.264 for rapidly updating regions. I've played near-fullscreen YouTube videos over RDP via the internet without realizing I was doing so remotely.

I've also gamed over RDP. It wasn't the best experience, though to be fair I was on an island literally on the opposite side of the globe, and ran the game fullscreen. But I'm sure a dedicated solution like Steam or Sunshine/Moonlight would fare better for such.

Though at least with Steam the console has to be unlocked, which is a problem if I'm away.
by ndriscoll | 2025-10-07 19:46:09+00:00
> I can't sell my baked goods to my neighbors without a license, or replace the interior of my kitchen without a permit.

You can though. No one will stop you from doing either of those things.

> I can't build a deck, add an addition, or even install a new electrical outlet, without permission. Have you ever tried putting something in your front yard?

A deck or addition might draw attention and run afoul of some rule depending on where you live, but a lot of places won't care. If you want to put in an outlet, the world's your oyster. The only real consideration is if you're worried you may do it wrong and may run into insurance denials after a catastrophe or something. You don't actually need anyone's permission. And it's October; I have decorations in my front yard right now. No one was consulted about this.

It's like my air conditioner broke a couple weeks ago, so I ordered a capacitor off amazon and fixed it. I've never touched one of these things before, but the only one stopping you from unscrewing it and going to town is you. If you passed high school you ought to have a basic understanding of how stuff works and be able to do some light reading to make sure you're doing this correctly and safely. LLMs make this even easier.

These phone restrictions, by contrast, would be like if your AC or electrical panel somehow required a licensed professional to activate new parts. Or even more on point, required someone registered with e.g. Carrier (not actually any kind of professional certification; just someone gatekept by a business trying to monopolize things).
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-10-07 19:46:32+00:00
Google is very clear, sideloading has about 50x more malware than the Play Store. The Brazilian government in particular is absolutely furious about the amount of scams, and was openly planning legal interventions.

Your ability to distribute your app anonymously absolutely meets the definition of real-world consequences for other people.

I personally find it absurd we accept that the government regulates food (people can't detect bad food), and hair cutting (people can't detect inexperienced people with scissors), but the right to anonymous app distribution is sacrosanct, as though food quality is less transparent than app quality. It's not - all of these licenses need to be let go of on the small scale.
by tasty_freeze | 2025-10-07 19:47:41+00:00
If you are old enough, you remember when having a CD player in your car made you a target for a break-in. Many models were removable so you could take the CD player with you when you left your car. Once it became a standard option, there was no point in stealing them anymore due to the saturation effect you brought up. Now having a CD player in your car is steampunk.
by thaw13579 | 2025-10-07 19:47:45+00:00
This use of the term "fiction" is mostly popularized by Yuval Noah Harari, and while correct in some sense, I find it tends to favor its meanings of falseness and unreality. Another more widely used term is "social constructs", which seems preferable, at least to me, because it's emphasizes that we are building something together, which has real and practice impacts on people's lives, often through explicit legal agreements, rules, and norms.

I do think the more common usage of the term "fiction" fits these AI uses much better, that is, literature involving imaginary things. It can still evoke real feelings and nudge you towards certain behaviors, but importantly, if you decide to ignore the chatbot, there's no risk of imprisonment by some 3rd party (like if you ignore the social constructs of taxes or national borders).

Perhaps one way to differentiate these is that "singular fictions" impose no obligations to 3rd parties, while "collective fictions" / "social constructs" do?
by Nzen | 2025-10-07 19:48:15+00:00
Likewise. In fact, I was under the opposite impression because of the benefit that sulfur enriched shipping exhaust had for our climate [0]. It looks like these clouds are thinner and don't have the same impact as that, though. While I felt that the featured article linked to their favorite site aggressively (four links to contrails.org), it looks like the google site is legitimate [1]. I couldn't find a recent [2] paper on NoAA about contrails, but presumably others have studied it.

[0] https://cpo.noaa.gov/the-unintended-consequences-of-reducing...

[1] https://sites.research.google/gr/contrails/

[2] https://csl.noaa.gov/news/2011/101_0714.html
by piva00 | 2025-10-07 19:48:40+00:00
> You can say the numbers don't matter, but then you've adopted essentially an unfalsifiable position.

Numbers do matter, just not the cherry-picked narrow ones such as "median wage" with disregard for any context, and all other metrics that could somehow quantify quality of life vs purely financial terms.

> Another factor to consider is the ease of quitting your job. In the US (at least, I have found), it is quite easy to quite your job and find a new one.

Ease of quitting is also a non-problem, most jobs I had in Europe had a 1-3 months notice period which was easily negotiated if you really wanted to quit on the spot, no company wants to keep a disgruntled worker around so it's best to negotiate if said worker explicitly states they would like to shorten it.

> The article explains how American companies are more willing to hire for positions which wouldn't otherwise exist.

That's great for a selected set of jobs which workers would like to do that while being detrimental to society at large, making precarious conditions the default is not great for the less skilled people who prefer stability to keep their families afloat and secure.

> If you are not interested in that, then quit your job and don't work in a position which involves innovation. Which in America, is easy to do.

Not working in "innovation" still has the same precariousness, with no upside, making the divide in society between the haves and have-nots even more intense. It works up to a point, leave enough people behind and you get MAGA.
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-10-07 19:49:03+00:00
> No one will stop you from doing either of those things.

It's literally illegal in many US states and countries to do so. In my home state, MN, it is tightly regulated what kinds of "cottage food" you are allowed to sell.

You're confusing ability with legality. Try loading up some food you cooked in your kitchen and selling it out of your car, door-to-door, and watch what happens. This is despite, for most people, judging the health risks of food being wildly easier than the security risks of a sideloaded app.

> These phone restrictions, by contrast, would be like if you AC or electrical panel somehow required a licensed professional to activate new parts.

That already exists in car repair; with key reprogrammers and especially anything engine-tuning being restricted to licensed individuals. Also, good luck messing with your catalytic converter, without the ECU by law detecting it and getting very angry. Take my relative's diesel truck from 2015 - a single failed sensor in the exhaust, and it caps itself as low as 30 MPH.
by KaiserPro | 2025-10-07 19:49:04+00:00
> Certainly there are people on this site who should atone for this.

Mate, if we are going down this route, a whole fucktonne of us should be atoning for this.

Look, technology, our technology has enabled, and continues to enable the every forward march of authoritarianism. It has made the destruction of entire cultures easier, practical and efficient.

WE have managed to trick the populous to share all their thoughts, opinions friendships and realtime location with a handful of corporations who are hell bent on complete domination.

Not only that, but we have cheered as those corporations have undermined our rights to privacy, moral rights[1] and freedom of speech.

[1] as in copyright, not morals as in killing is bad mmkay
by butlike | 2025-10-07 19:49:07+00:00
This is all moot because greenfield projects rarely exist anymore outside of being an entrepreneur, and if you're selling something, you're probably using a shopify wrapper of some sort 99% of the time. If you're working on a greenfield project at a Fortune company, then you probably have a bunch of considerations and in-house frameworks you'll use as a jumping off point instead of running `rails new` at any point.

These discussions are pointless and I'm a little fed up with them. As another commenter has pointed out, this exact same article (with the exact same conversational style) has appeared for at least 10 years, though I'd push it to 15-20. Write something new...BUILD something new...but for god sake's stop reiterating the same point because it's SO. BORING.
by Razengan | 2025-10-07 19:49:10+00:00
I don't know. I mean, things could have gone very differently (in a better or worse way) and the world may be unrecognizable today if certain key events did not happen.

Like if nothing sparked the World Wars (conversely: or if Hitler won). Or Greece harnessed steam or electricity to spur an industrial revolution 2200 years ago. Or if Christianity etc. never caught on.
by phoehne | 2025-10-07 19:49:15+00:00
When I bought a 3-D printer years ago, I had an important insight. I was either buying a printer as a project, or I was buying a printer to help with other projects.

Both are reasonable answers. It makes people happy to work on their 3-D printers. They love tinkering with them, like printing new braces, holders, parts, etc. The love tuning them. They love finding the perfect filament storage system. That's the hobby. The 3-D printer itself.

I was buying a 3-D printer to make parts. When I realized that I didn't want another hobby, a whole bunch of printer options fell off the table. I wound up choosing a printer that would pretty much work acceptably, once assembled. I have printed stuff with the printer, but I guessed right. At no time do I ever look at the printer as anything more than a tool to get something else done.

From my perspective, it feels like a lot of the JavaScript community falls into the former category. Their JavaScript environment is beautifully incomplete. It must be perfected. They tinker with the works to get the perfect packaging and build process. Bits and parts are changed out, re-worked, or re-written. I think the fact the language invites edge-cases also gives plenty of fodder for new ideas.

I'm a tool user, and that's what I liked about straight-up rails. It did a good job, was faster to develop on than enterprise Java, and the end-product was understandable. Rails and Ruby weren't my projects. The application I was working on was my project.
by fzeroracer | 2025-10-07 19:49:42+00:00
The SCOTUS abdicating their duty to the constitution does not make ICE's actions any less illegal, it just makes the Supreme Court as an institution illegitimate. It is unfortunate that things have devolved so far, but it is more important than ever that we state things clearly and succinctly in the face of those that have decided the constitution no longer matters.
by epistasis | 2025-10-07 19:50:17+00:00
> (it's never included in the LCOE).

Right, because that would change the definition of LCOE. And you are right that it's important, and there are other terms to look for, as LACE, which EIA has been putting out for a long time. And Lazard's energy reports:

https://www.lazard.com/news-announcements/lazard-releases-20...

have an entire section on "Cost of firming intermittency" where it estimates costs based on each region of the US.
by jancsika | 2025-10-07 19:50:33+00:00
I think a big reason it's lost to time is because it was poorly-specified and therefore a non-portable art.

E.g., there's no way for you to easily send me the desktop state of the open window sizes and dimensions you have in mind. And even then, I'd have to hack the window decorations and fonts myself. I'm back to meth-addled chicken pecking!
by Zanfa | 2025-10-07 19:51:03+00:00
And I think rejecting the monolith is a massive mistake for the average CRUD app.

And it’s not like I’m not familiar with JS/Node, it’s the ecosystem I’ve spent the most time over the last 15 years. I’ve just seen so much wasted engineering effort in that time. Not sure what the exact multiplier is, but gut feeling says you’d typically need at least 2x the amount of engineers when using Node over Rails.
by aldousd666 | 2025-10-07 19:51:03+00:00
'vanilla rails' is really a bunch of other tech bundled together. including much of it that is rendered using other technologies. hotwire? javascript and websockets. The thing that always gets me about Rails (and I am a decades long fan of it,) is that when they upgrade major versions, all of the tooling that comes bundled in the box changes. Sure rails 1.0 didn't have websockets bundled in but it did indeed come built on Prototype.js, which if you still have in a rails 8 project probably gets a lot of laughs. There's a lot more to 'staying current' in a long lived rails app than just upgrading the gems.
by cjbgkagh | 2025-10-07 19:51:03+00:00
I didn’t suggest that the wealthy would want their taxes increased, but that it would increase inequality that would benefit the wealthy.

That said there are many billionaires who advocate for greater taxes, Patriotic Millionaires and Proud to Pay more. Including but not limited to Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, George Soros, and Abigale Disney. Bill Gates, as an example, goes to incredible lengths and uses shady Caribbean methods to minimize the tax he pays.

It’s important to make a distinction of weighting the wealthy by numbers vs wealthy by wealth, the higher the inequality the bigger the difference. The wealth is dominated by an increasingly small minority.

I’m making a prediction of what I strongly believe will happen, not what has happened. There are examples in history where there were unexpected emergent behaviors created out of perverse incentives. One of my favorite is the selling of indulgences by the Catholic Church to pay for St Paul’s cathedral, meant the Catholic Church made more money if people sinned more, which created some problems.
by lithocarpus | 2025-10-07 19:51:11+00:00
I should take back my statement- I had a knee jerk reaction to someone saying that proof is required of harm for a drug, when I've seen so many cases of drugs being inadequately tested and then causing harm, and I think the precautionary principle is often not followed anywhere close to adequately when it comes to new chemical stuff we do to our bodies. We probably mostly agree in principle. I'm not saying they didn't do safety testing. I would suspect that the safety testing was flawed as it has been in every other case that I have looked into, and failed to catch possible harms that may now be happening.

Whether those harms outweigh the benefits overall remains to be seen and likely will never be known unless it's really really bad, which is likely not the case here.

I'd agree more research is probably justified, but there's likely little profit in it for anyone.
by deepsun | 2025-10-07 19:51:27+00:00
Well, if mechanic is present on the workplace all day, they must get paid at least a minimum wage per day, regardless of any estimates or even if there's any work at all.

It's employer's problem, employer never wants to pay workers less than minumum wage per hour, and loading them with work is manager's job.

But I doubt mechanics want minumum wage, especially since it's not keeping up with inflation.
by jajuuka | 2025-10-07 19:51:31+00:00
I don't think Qualcomm bought them to destroy them. I think they see Arduino as a gateway. Instead of hoping students will learn ARM it's more reasonable to leverage Arduino's simple nature to act as an on-ramp for more low level developers. I wouldn't be surprised if Arduino IDE saw a revamp to better support jumping the gap between the Arduino to Snapdragon.

ST and TI do the same thing with their boards too and it's not a bad strategy.
by burkaman | 2025-10-07 19:51:34+00:00
It links to this post which has a little more technical explanation: https://notebook.contrails.org/comparing-contrails-and-co2/

And also this paper which is a very in-depth technical explanation: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S135223102...

I understand why you're reminded of chemtrails, but it is not crazy or conspiratorial to look at these giant lines in the sky and think "those things must be doing something". You can't then make the leap to "it's intentional and it's a biological weapon to control my mind and I don't need any evidence to believe this", but you can take the next step of looking into decades of research on the topic and deciding if the conclusions make sense to you.
by kazinator | 2025-10-07 19:51:44+00:00
> This pattern was officially standardized in C99,

No it wasn't; the C99 flexible array uses [] not [1] or [0].

When using the [1] hack, you cannot use the sizeof the structure to get the offset, because it includes the [1] array.

When using C99, you also cannot use sizeof to get the offset of the [0] element of the flexible array; sizeof is allowed to pretend that there is padding as if the flexible member were not there.

>

// The (N - 1) adjusts for the 1-element array in Payload struct Payload *item = malloc(sizeof(Payload) + (N - 1) * sizeof(char))

>

If you are in C++ you need a cast; the void * return value of malloc cannot implicitly convert to Payload *.

Payload *item = static_cast<Payload *>(malloc(...));

Or of course a C cast if the code has to compile as C or C++:

Payload *item = (Payload *) malloc(...);

Setting aside that issue for brevity, pretending we are in C, I would make the malloc expression:

Payload *item = malloc(offsetof(Payload, elements) + N);

sizeof(char) is by definition 1, so we do not need to multiply N by it.

By taking the offset of the elements array, we don't need to subtract 1 from N to account for the [1] element being skipped by sizeof.

These kinds of little things take away complexity for something that must be carefully coded to avoid a memory safety issue. You really want the calculations around the memory to use the simplest possible formulas that are as easy as possible to reason about to convince yourself they are correct.

Also, when you do use sizeof in a malloc expression, the following pattern avoids repeating the type name for the size, and also lets a pair of parentheses be dropped since sizeof only requires parentheses when the operand is a type:

Payload *item = malloc(sizeof *item);
by shawntan | 2025-10-07 19:51:55+00:00
I think everyone should read the post from ARC-AGI organisers about HRM carefully: https://arcprize.org/blog/hrm-analysis

With the same data augmentation / 'test time training' setting, the vanilla Transformers do pretty well, close to the "breakthrough" HRM reported. From a brief skim, this paper is using similar settings to compare itself on ARC-AGI.

I too, want to believe in smaller models with excellent reasoning performance. But first understand what ARC-AGI tests for, what the general setting is -- the one that commercial LLMs use to compare against each other -- and what the specialised setting HRM and this paper uses as evaluation.

The naming of that benchmark lends itself to hype, as we've seen in both HRM and this paper.
by rkomorn | 2025-10-07 19:51:55+00:00
The 2017 Dell developer edition XPS 13 with Ubuntu is actually one of the systems that gave me the most trouble, quite ironically.

Bluetooth loved to disappear for no reason and would only return with a reboot. No amount of unloading/reloading modules could bring it back.

Didn't have any issues with Windows on that laptop.

Current laptop is a Lenovo X1 Nano and it's behaving reasonably.