MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by duxup | 2025-10-27 20:10:11+00:00
>The Cloud Sovereignty Framework is a structured assessment tool to evaluate cloud services against eight sovereignty objectives. These objectives range from strategic, legal, and operational considerations to supply chain transparency, technological openness, security and compliance under EU law, and environmental sustainability. The framework transforms the concept of sovereignty into measurable, verifiable criteria

Regulation like this where you measure vs some set of ideals, and then have to measure using some "tool" just seems to vague and awkward to accomplish the goal.

When I think of criminal law where things are pointed, to a fault at times, that at least is workable to understand.
by sillysaurusx | 2025-10-27 20:10:15+00:00
Ditto. I was even able to put my lock picking skills to use one fine summer day when the dog park was locked due to "rain from yesterday" even though the grass and everything was clearly fine. We had a lovely time running around as a family, along with a couple other families, for about an hour before the groundskeeper came and shooed us away.
by ratelimitsteve | 2025-10-27 20:10:54+00:00
I wanna zoom in on the "omega 6 content of seed oils vs real food" graphic. in addition to the obviously prejudicial language in "real foods", you'll notice that the comparison is between a tablespoon of seed oils and...a random amount of a completely unrelated food. Is the author suggesting that any time a recipe calls for a tablespoon of soybean oil I should instead reach for approximately 4 oz of beef? Why not compare to what an average person could reasonably use instead of seed oils?

I wholeheartedly agree with the author that the effects of these oils are understudied, and that they came to have a reputation as "healthy" through an extreme oversimplification of nutrition designed as more a marketing campaign than an actual scientific inquiry into what's best for human bodies, but this type of propagandizing was wrong when the people who invented seed oils used it to gain prominence and it's wrong now that the anti-seed-oil crowd is using it to combat that prominence. Foods can't be sorted into buckets labelled "always bad and to be minimized at all costs" and "always good and to be maximized at all costs", the answer to whether something is "good for you" is always that it depends on your current situation and goals. But the only culture less ready to receive a message like that than the product-oriented culture of the last few generations is the attention-oriented culture of this and proceeding generations. No one wants "limit fat intake overall with an eye toward overall calorie consumption and try to balance different sources as a matter of principle so that you're not exposed to both known and unknown risks of a highly specialized diet", everyone wants "buy this not that" and everyone wants to feel like there's a big secret that they're in on.
by WesolyKubeczek | 2025-10-27 20:10:55+00:00
You may thank millenial hipsters who used think emojis are cute and proliferation of little javascript libraries authored by them on your friendly neighborhood githubs.

Later the cutest of the emojis paved their way into templates used by bots and tools, and it exploded like colorful vomit confetti all over the internets.

When I see this emojiful text, my first association is not with an LLM, but with a lumberjack-bearded hipster wearing thick-framed fake glasses and tight garish clothes, rolling on a segway or an equivalent machine while sipping a soy latte.
by skissane | 2025-10-27 20:11:10+00:00
> Definitely, but on the other hand, I do think that picking your head office's time zone as the "canonical"

What happens when you move your head office to a different time zone? e.g. Oracle moved their HQ from California to Texas (and have announced a further move to Tennessee, although last I heard that still hasn’t happened)

What happens when an M&A happens and you are now part of a much larger enterprise with a different HQ timezone, and systems with wildly inconsistent configured timezones due to having acquired multiple companies which had HQs in different time zones and all of which configured everything to use their HQ time?

> UTC midnight might be very unintuitive to both you and your customers

I live in eastern Australia, UTC+11 at the moment (UTC+10 during Southern Hemisphere winter). Right now, resetting stuff at UTC midnight means at 11am my time, resetting stuff at US Eastern midnight means at 3pm my time - roughly equal in potential inconvenience, but I’ll be much more forgiving of the first than the second.

> And I do think that UTC is actually somewhat Eurocentric! From personal experience, it's significantly easier to mentally add/subtract one or two hours (modulo 24) than 7 or more.

For me, add/subtract 10 is pretty easy… and then just one more during DST. Does that make UTC “Australia-centric”? Or Guam-centric or Vladivostok-centric? (both of which are also UTC+10)
by 63stack | 2025-10-27 20:11:18+00:00
The linux foundation would introduce this is an optional thing you can download, with documentation on how it works, and where you can find the source. Within 3 days the community would make self hosted servers for it.

They are not known for siphoning user data through dark patterns, so there is nothing to object from me. If they were to try it the same underhanded way as microsoft, I'd be just as much against it.
by bediger4000 | 2025-10-27 20:11:27+00:00
If LLMs made a huge difference, I would expect that we would have already seen reductions in traffic jams, significant drops in trip times etc from Google and Apple Maps. Use is close to universal, and anecdotally, Maps will take you via routes you'd never discover on your own.

That is to say, I'll believe this when I see it
by Tuna-Fish | 2025-10-27 20:11:59+00:00
> in Rust you have to do some shenenigans with things like RefCell<Vec<Rc<RefCell<Item>>>> which is simply not very ergonomic

The entire raison d'être of Bevy and the reason it is built how it is is that the ECS eliminates that. If your Bevy code contains something that looks like that, you are using it very wrong. You put the data in the ECS, and any gameplay code goes into some system that uses the queries to pull the data it needs out of it. If you need something like a backreference, you don't add one in an unholy tower of refcells, you just use a different query.

If you wanted to argue that a soup of mutually referencing objects is easier to deal with than having to use a query system, I'd disagree, but you'd have a valid argument. What you posted above just highlights that you don't know much about bevy.
by corporat | 2025-10-27 20:12:23+00:00
The most thoughtful critique of this post isn’t that AI is inherently bad—but that its use shouldn’t be conflated with laziness or cowardice.

Fact: Professional writers have used grammar tools, style guides, and even assistants for decades. AI simply automates some of these functions faster. Would we say Hemingway was lazy for using a typewriter? No—we’d say he leveraged tools.

AI doesn’t create thoughts; it drafts ideas. The writer still curates, edits, and imbues meaning—just like a journalist editing a reporter’s notes or a designer refining Photoshop output. Tools don’t diminish creativity—they democratize access to it.

That said: if you’re outsourcing your thinking to AI (e.g., asking an LLM to write your thesis without engaging), then yes, you’ve lost something. But complaining about AI itself misunderstands the problem.

TL;DR: Typewriters spit out prose too—but no one blames writers for using them.
by bilkow | 2025-10-27 20:12:23+00:00
> 200 languages that are actually used

Do you have any reference of that or are you implying we shouldn't support the other thousands[0] of languages in use just because they don't have a big enough user base?

> And the fact is that the author of the web page doesn’t know the language of the content, if there’s anything user contributed. Should you have to label every comment on HN as “English”? That’s a huge burden on literally every internet user.

In the case of Hacker News or other pages with user submitted and multi-language content, you can just mark the comments' lang attribute to the empty string, which means unknown and falls back to detection. Alternatively, it's possible to let the user select the language (defaulting to their last used or an auto-detected one), Mastodon and BlueSky do that. For single language forums and sites with no user-generated content, it's fine to leave everything as the site language.

> Other written language has never specified its language. Imposing data-entry requirements on humans to satisfy a computer is never the ideal solution.

There's also no "screen reader" nor "auto translation" in other written language. Setting the content language helps to improve accessibility features that do not exist without computers.

[0] https://www.ethnologue.com/insights/how-many-languages/
by rurp | 2025-10-27 20:12:32+00:00
Are those benefits the norm in most cases though? I'm genuinely asking and don't know either way, but the companies building these data centers have quite a reputation for aggressively pursuing subsidies and tax avoidance strategies. Amazon for one has paid little to no federal taxes some years and they wouldn't be my first pick as an example of a magnanimous corporate entity, to say the least.

Whatever benefits there are have to be weighted against the very real costs. Residential power bills spiking is a hugely regressive burden for many struggling households.
by next_xibalba | 2025-10-27 20:12:53+00:00
The use cases for spreadsheets are much more diverse than that. In my experience, spreadsheets just as often used for calculation. Many of them do require high accuracy, rely on determinism, and necessitate the understanding of maths ranging from basic arithmetic to statistics and engineering formulas. Financial models, for example, must be built up from ground truth and need to always use the right formulas with the right inputs to generate meaningful outputs.

I have personally worked with spreadsheet based financial models that use 100k+ rows x dozens of columns and involve 1000s of formulas that transform those data into the desired outputs. There was very little tolerance for mistakes.

That said, humans, working in these use cases, make mistakes >0% of the time. The question I often have with the incorporation of AI into human workflows is, will we eventually come to accept a certain level of error from them in the way we do for humans?
by bonoboTP | 2025-10-27 20:13:07+00:00
This is beypnd jobs and corporations and is about humanity and civilization. A small minority of people in every era actually pushed on any kind of frontier. That's ok. We need people who just execute the mundane tasks too, that's most of us.

But giving space to exceptional people is not even that expensive. The overtime doesn't even have to be documented. Just leave them alone. There aren't enough of them to truly outcompete regular people.

For most people focusing on family and having a mediocre career is optimal and there really isn't anything wrong with that. But you won't get top achievement out of that. Nor will you get that from forcing people to be in the office. You get it from a rare special alignment of stars where somehow you get an aligned high trust team. Just don't trample that flower, that's all.

Regarding cancer. Lots of cancer research, simulations and drug discovery use GPUs that were only developed because there was a gaming industry which was kickstarted by a bunch of outlier nerds like John Carmack and the popularity of those 3d games enabled economies of scale for making specialized hardware, GPUs. And then other tinkerers who likely also pulled lots of all nighters developed GPGPU, general purpose computations on GPUs which was not the original purpose of GPUs at all. Seeing the research success of such uses, NVIDIA developed Cuda and made GPUs more convenient in non graphics use cases. You just never know. Let the outlier people do their thing and pursue their passion. There will never be a world where all the average employees can have this kind of output. Somebody has to dream a vision, the implementation tasks don't fall out of the sky. Tall poppy syndrome is very bad for societies.
by dang | 2025-10-27 20:13:43+00:00
Related. Others?

Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40805136 - June 2024 (12 comments)

Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31568387 - May 2022 (1 comment)

Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23153778 - May 2020 (40 comments)

Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19765019 - April 2019 (87 comments)

Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9560567 - May 2015 (20 comments)

Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6947257 - Dec 2013 (37 comments)

Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1581696 - Aug 2010 (20 comments)
by acdha | 2025-10-27 20:15:22+00:00
The “requirements” are vague and still being litigated against congressional intent, but the problem is the scale: when you have so many complex things to review and only a few trusted political apparatchiks, they end up doing things like simple keyword searches for terms like “diversity” and “inclusion” blithely aware of those being used in fields such as geology.

I know this because I know people who’ve had to take time away from their research to keep their grants from being cancelled.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-10-27 20:15:30+00:00
> No one would be surprised if you showed that you could cut a hole in pretty much any normal door

The definition of “normal” varies by region. In European cities, it means a pretty heavy door of multiple layers of steel (and pretty unpleasant stuff in the middle) that would probably take 15 minutes of deafeningly loud cutting with a circular saw. I understand the standard for US suburbs is much lower (as it might as well be, given windows exist and the walls aren’t all that sturdy either).
by Jtsummers | 2025-10-27 20:15:58+00:00
Command-Query Separation is the term for that. However, I find this statement odd:

> having functions that do things without verifying preconditions are exploitable

Why would you do this? The separation between commands and queries does not mean that executing a command must succeed. It can still fail. Put queries inside the commands (but do not return the query results, that's the job of the query itself) and branch based on the results. After executing a command which may fail, you can follow it with a query to see if it succeeded and, if not, why not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command%E2%80%93query_separati...
by sherr | 2025-10-27 20:16:31+00:00
I agree to an extent but they are usefully kept somewhat separate. The introduction to the great "Encyclopedia of Fantasy" put this well. Re: Fantasy :

"Its roots go much deeper into history, and its concerns are more archetypal" [1]

There can be a lot of cross-over of course. Right now, "fantasy" (perhaps of the "romantic" variety) seems to be a juggernaut and is taking over.

[1]https://sf-encyclopedia.com/fe/introduction

(edit: spelling)
by dang | 2025-10-27 20:16:31+00:00
Can we please not play this internet game here?

"This is [sarcastic reference] coming from [personal reference] who [cherry-picked outrage bit]" is a trope that doesn't lead anywhere interesting. It ratchets up indignation, fries curiosity, and removes any semblance of ontopicness.

Also, I assume that's a skewed pseudo-quotation since no one would actually say that. Please don't play that internet game here either.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

p.s. You're a good commenter otherwise and I even put https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26787519 in https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights.
by manquer | 2025-10-27 20:16:42+00:00
Light did not mean to imply quantity of paperwork you have to do, rather are you allowed to do the things you want to do as a company.

More compliance or reporting requirements usually tend to favor the larger existing players who can afford to do it and that is also used to make the life difficult and reject more claims for the end user.

It is kind of thing that keeps you and me busy, major investors don't care about it all, the cost of the compliance or the lack is not more than a rounding number in the balance, the fines or penalties are puny and laughable.

The enormous profits year on year for decades now, the amount of consolidation allowed in the industry show that the industry is able to do mostly what they want pretty much, that is what I meant by light regulation.
by ratelimitsteve | 2025-10-27 20:16:59+00:00
>actions are identical

>actively worked to deceive

that's the contradiction i'm talking about. deception requires effort and planning, it's not just casually doing something. I think that as I explore this I might fundamentally be arguing that saying the same words when you believe them true vs when you believe them false are measurably different, and that the only way for someone to say something falsely in exactly the same way they do truthfully is for them to believe that they're true. You said yourself, you actively tried to deceive people.

As far as using crises to undermine indistinguishability, that was another part of my point: if actions are indistinguishable between two actors we only care about the actors' motivation as an attempt to guess how likely they are to remain indistinguishable. If a crisis causes the two actors to distinguish themselves then, once again, we've undermined the original premise of the experiment.
by waisbrot | 2025-10-27 20:17:18+00:00
The article is mostly talking about using the `cron` scheduler and running things at 2am on Sunday because there's especially low traffic. These cron jobs are "I don't care when it runs, but it should have minimal chance of causing problems."

Your use-case is totally different: "I want this job to run at this time" so the only lesson that applies to you is that the `cron` utility might behave weird during DST switches. No idea if it underlies your cloud provider, so it may be completely irrelevant.
by 2b3a51 | 2025-10-27 20:17:19+00:00
There is another aspect to this kind of activity.

Sometimes there can be an advantage in leading or lagging some aspects of internal accounting data for a time period. Basically sitting on credits or debits to some accounts for a period of weeks. The tacit knowledge to know when to sit on a transaction and when to action it is generally not written down in formal terms.

I'm not sure how these shenanigans will translate into an ai driven system.
by lozf | 2025-10-27 20:17:32+00:00
Better to think of it that it changes at 01:00 UTC, which takes care of the parts of Europe that are 2 or 3 hours ahead (instead of CET's 1 or 2), and the UK going "forward at 1 and back at 2"

"Europe DST changes at 01:00 UTC" - much simpler ;)
by kstrauser | 2025-10-27 20:17:37+00:00
> I'm asking for an attribution given that the tool was copied, how is that aggressive?

Because it implies that the tool is copied. To me, they look similar, in a way that all tools like this are going to look somewhat similar.

> - fnix imports, - secretspec extends

So, they both have ways to slurp in other files so that you can kind of emulate inheritance. They call them different things, but the idea's similar: they both look similar to mise's configuration hierarchy, which predates both tools.[0]

> - secretspec profiles, - fnix profiles

They both support named profiles like "dev", "production", etc... like so many other devops tools that I'm having a hard time narrowing it down to one pre-existing example among thousands.

No, I'm still not seeing it. Fnox seems to be a copy of secretspec in the same way that Nginx is a copy of Apache, because they both do similar things and have config files that talk about domain names and ports and paths and certificates.

[0]https://mise.jdx.dev/configuration.html#configuration-hierar...
by consumer451 | 2025-10-27 20:18:12+00:00
> I keep searching for a sign, but everyone I talk to has horror stories. It sucks as a technologist that just wants to play with the thing; oh well.

The reason that Claude Code doesn't have an IDE is because ~"we think the IDE will obsolete in a year, so it seemed like a waste of time to create one."

Noam Shazeer said on a Dwarkesh podcast that he stopped cleaning his garage, because a robot will be able to do it very soon.

If you are operating under the beliefs these folks have, then things like IDEs, cleaning up, and customer service are stupid annoyances that will become obsolete very soon.

To be clear, I have huge respect for everyone mentioned above, especially Noam.
by munificent | 2025-10-27 20:19:21+00:00
OpenDoc [1] was another attempt in this space.

I think the fundamental problem was that no one ever figured out a business model around components. You can get people to buy an application and the application could edit its own files. But it's not clear how a document or app that contains a mash-up of pieces of code written by different companies is paid for.

Would users be willing to pay for a component that let them add charts to their word processing docs? Would that mean no one else could open the doc unless they had the same component? It didn't seem at the time like there was a business model that held together.

(The somewhat related counter-example is modern digital audio workstations. Third-party plug-ins ["VSTs"] are a remarkably success model there for both users and businesses. And users do seem to understand and accept that, yes, if your project uses some audio plug-ins then anyone else you collaborate with needs to have those same plug-ins.)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc
by mdasen | 2025-10-27 20:19:24+00:00
I don't think that the data centers are having a negative economic impact on Louden County residents. It's the richest country in the US with a median household income of $156,821. They also get really low property tax rates because the data centers are paying a lot of taxes compared to their costs. If there were lots more people working there, the county would need to spend a lot more money on roads and such. Instead, they're getting close to free money.

I'm not saying that anyone should want data centers to take over their city/county, but there isn't a strong economic argument against them in Louden County. The people there are the richest in the US and they're getting great economic benefits from it. The question isn't economic. The question is whether that's the community they want to live in: rich and making lots of money off data centers or an area where they don't have as much money and don't have to look at the data centers.
by rurp | 2025-10-27 20:19:39+00:00
The best research one can do is only going to be so useful. Zoning laws might stop an average person or corporation from building something undesirable, but entities with enough wealth and connections can get those changed. Lately the conventional wisdom seems to be that NIMBYs have too much power, but in all of the cases I'm personally familiar with a single wealthy person or corporation was able to re-zone property however they wanted over the overwhelming objections of the longtime residents nearby.