MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gerdesj | 2025-10-15 01:35:39+00:00
Some years back an aunt and uncle owned a cottage in Devon (near Exeter) with 1649 carved into the wall by the front door.

Cottages like that had a simple timber frame and cob walls, which is only a slight improvement on wattle and daub! Cob is mud and straw and a few binding agents and traditionally: horse piss to act as an accelerant to aid setting or something. Floors are joist and boards. The roof is thatched, often with a "cat slide" and foundations are laughable.

The thatch needs replacing something like every 25-50 years. Cob needs patching, especially if the roof leaks (not replaced on schedule) and it starts rotting. However all this stuff happens gradually and it can be repaired gradually too in most cases, as and when you like and within budget.

A concrete structure ... let's say Charles Cross multi-storey car park in Plymouth ... well hello concrete cancer! OK this is a bit different to the cottage but let's see how the "modern" world has progressed with a building material that was used by the old Romans and likely before.

A concrete beam on its own is "quite" good as a supporting material. Conc is superb in compression and quite good in tension. In a horizontal beam when you put a load on it, the top will be compressed and the bottom will be in tension. Think about a wide thin rectangle and imagine pushing down on it. Imagine it bending into a U shape - the top side will be compressed and the bottom will be stretched (tension). That's a fairly simplified model!

Now, cast your concrete beam around a long steel bar and put nuts and washers on both ends and tighten them so that the entire beam is in tension. There are other methods to do this but this is easier to envision.

Now you have locked in a lot of energy into the system. The upside of "pre-stressed" concrete is that a given beam ("member") cross section can carry a lot more weight than a non pre-stressed member. The down side is that deliberate demolition is really hard and non deliberate demolition is possible.

So, that concrete cancer thing. Conc cancer is caused when salty sea air and moisture (rather likely in Plymouth) permeates conc made from Portland cement. Its more complicated than that but the sea salts are key. The conc gradually degrades in a rather strange way - map cracking and a gel develops in the cracks (I think, I studied this stuff quite a while back). The usual conc matrix ends up with weak lines running through it.

Anyway - you have energy locked up in members and those members are failing. Boom!

There is a lot to be said for old school materials and practices.
by 827a | 2025-10-15 01:36:42+00:00
A lot of people will say "well, the market of people who want that is so small that its not even a blip on Google's radar", but let's cut that one off at the pass: No one buys pixel devices anymore. Their sales are abysmal, Tensor mobile silicon has been a failure, and the one thing they kinda had going for them was general good vibes with the broader tech community. But, they're Google, so they ruined that too.

I suspect there will be a Pixel 11, maybe a Pixel 12, but that'll be it.
by willmadden | 2025-10-15 01:37:22+00:00
Don't put words in my mouth. Disingenuous.

Belgium: Tine Nys, 38, autism/depression (non-terminal), euthanized 2010; rushed procedure amid family presence, weak oversight, sisters allege undue pressure and unmet incurable criteria.

Belgium: Frank Van Den Bleeken, prisoner with untreated psychiatric disorder, requested 2014; non-terminal suffering from inadequate care, systemic pressure via prison failures, oversight gaps.

Belgium: Nathalie Huygens, 50s, trauma-induced mental illness, approved 2022; financial barriers to treatment raise coercion concerns, questions on incurability oversight.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-10-15 01:37:46+00:00
> While it’s unclear how or why those archives vanished, Abulhawa says the coincidence raises concern about a broader digital erasure of Palestinian documentation.

Note: I am making no comment on the conflict itself here.

I understand that journalists have to go where the people are, but if your archive strategy relies on posts on social media, you do not, in fact, have an archive strategy.
by aclimatt | 2025-10-15 01:38:45+00:00
Right and not just that it's new, it's that it's noteworthy.

The NYT's motto is "all the news that's fit to print". The job of a news source is to report on stories that are A) new and B) noteworthy.

Sure they're sensationalist to gather more clicks. But even if they weren't, this skew wouldn't change.

I get what the article is trying to say, and they did call this out, but it's still a bit silly to do an entire data analysis to prove that newspapers primarily report on stories that are... newsworthy.
by socrateswasone | 2025-10-15 01:39:34+00:00
I don't think being able to comment here is that valuable, GPS is fine but so were maps, curing cancer won't save anyone from dying anyway, surviving as a species is useless for an individual, mining space rocks won't stop fighting or polluting, I don't see how any of this would inspire children, etc etc. The answer should be obvious and easy to muster, instead we have to dig hard to come up with vague possibilities. That should tell you something.
by aeonfox | 2025-10-15 01:39:46+00:00
About 3/4 of my rooftop solar goes back into the grid. A neighborhood grid-scale battery could sop that up while the market is cheap and dispatch it when the sun is down. Even if I had a battery, it would quickly saturate. Rooftop solar can deliver far more than most households can use. And let's not forget parking lots and commercial real estate. With enough incentive these places can become mini power plants of their own, and provide a nice little passive income for the land owner.
by dathinab | 2025-10-15 01:40:09+00:00
no it's a (accidental) red Hering argument

sure safety checks are added but

it's ignoring that many of such checks get reliably optimized away

worse it's a bit like saying "in case of a broken invariant I prefer arbitrary potential highly problematic behavior over clean aborts (or errors) because my test tooling is inadequate"

instead of saying "we haven't found adequate test tooling" for our use case

Why inadequate? Because technically test setups can use

1. fault injection to test such branches even if normally you would never hit them

2. for many of such tests (especially array bound checks) you can pretty reliably identify them and then remove them from your test coverage statistic

idk. what the tooling of rust wrt this is in 2025, but around the rust 1.0 times you mainly had C tooling you applied to rust so you had problems like that back then.
by jcgrillo | 2025-10-15 01:40:35+00:00
You don't get to excuse a lapse in situational awareness because one or another of your senses is compromised. Compensate. Concentrate. Whatever it takes. Or, of you find that you're sufficiently impaired that you're not competent any longer to do the task, slow down and stop safely. You're in control, and therefore you're responsible. Be it driving, operating a forklift, or a spot welder on an assembly line. Do not cede control.
by deepsun | 2025-10-15 01:40:42+00:00
I tried to do that, and ended up sitting at home watching TV eating chips. At the end of the day I felt way more tense and unsatisfied than whole day of working and worrying. Even "enduring" a jog or a gym gives more satisfaction.

So, I conclude, since our biology is tuned for that -- it's better to keep worrying and enduring, and we will be happier. There must be a contradiction somewhere though.
by aauchter | 2025-10-15 01:41:26+00:00
“The BLM did not cancel the project. During routine discussions prior to the lapse in appropriations, the proponents and BLM agreed to change their approach for the Esmeralda 7 Solar Project in Nevada,” said an Interior spokesperson in an email Friday.

“Instead of pursuing a programmatic level environmental analysis, the applicants will now have the option to submit individual project proposals to the BLM to more effectively analyze potential impacts,” the email continued.

https://www.rgj.com/story/news/2025/10/13/trump-nv-solar-pro...
by willmadden | 2025-10-15 01:41:53+00:00
During the 1990 German reunification talks, Western leaders verbally assured Gorbachev that NATO would not expand eastward beyond Germany. This is from declassified documents. Despite these promises, NATO admitted Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in 1999. In 2004 they let in the Baltic. All of this culminated in Putin's 2022 Ukraine invasion to block the Ukraine from joining NATO.

Sources: https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2017...

https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/16116-document-05-memoran...

https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/16117-document-06-record-...
by bko | 2025-10-15 01:42:52+00:00
A bit off topic perhaps but what's difficult about making this a product? Please forgive my ignorance. Its just a microphone, speaker, could be a Bluetooth controller and a battery, and have it go through your phone. Maybe a small local neural net to monitor for keyword locally.

I guess it's a few more parts if you don't want it to go through your phone, but is that all that's happening here? What am I missing?

Is the hard part just the size? Or battery efficiency? Seems like all stuff i have in my drawer from messing around w raspberry pis over the last ten years
by firesteelrain | 2025-10-15 01:42:53+00:00
Rust doesn’t really need a better stdlib as much as a broader one, since it is intentionally narrow. Go’s stdlib includes opinions like net/http and templates that Rust leaves to crates. The trade-off is Rust favors stability and portability at the core, while Go favors out-of-the-box ergonomics. Both approaches work, just for different teams.
by d3Xt3r | 2025-10-15 01:43:18+00:00
It's more of an issue for carriers who don't sell Pixel devices, particularly in countries where the Pixel isn't sold officially (eg: New Zealand). So generally VoLTE, VoWiFi and sometimes even 5G too might not work. You can use a hack to get around that, but now Google has blocked that hack: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45553764

Edit: Looks like there's an updated workaround now, but this is what I mean - it's really unacceptable that an essential feature like VoLTE - which is required to make phone calls - may not work depending on your carrier/region.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-10-15 01:44:04+00:00
Took them long enough... The free software movement was still stuck on PC despite the fact the whole world moved to mobile. Glad to see they're finally starting to catch up.

They should probably prepare themselves to make ideological concessions... The situation is very ugly here in mobile land. Treacherous computing, remote attestation, DRM, all ubiquitous and normalized...
by schoen | 2025-10-15 01:44:15+00:00
Well, one point is just that the Trump administration is often accused of making up government powers when, on inspection, they're kind of dusting off powers that were actually on the books for a long time. Or perhaps dusting off and oiling?

Now, I think some of their interpretations are unreasonable. But some of them are actually just making things more routine and visible that have happened under many different administrations, doing those same things on a larger scale. That's why I mentioned border searches: lots of people (like my mom!) first heard about this recently and thought that the Trump administration somehow invented this power. But in fact, we've seen thousands, or tens of thousands, of border searches of electronic devices, including those of citizens, under all presidential administrations.

Even for things like tariffs where the administration's interpretations just sound silly to me, we've had every single administration for decades declare and renew multiple "emergencies" in order to impose various kinds of trade restrictions by executive fiat (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Emergency_Econom...). Some of those emergencies have probably been going on longer than the lifetimes of most people reading this, and they led to very expansive executive control over trade and trade-adjacent foreign policy issues.

In the Trump administration case, you can find increasing numbers of border and immigration actions, like border searches, that are "political", but I remember some that were "political" under the George W. Bush administration, again including against U.S. citizens.

Similarly, people's visas were cancelled and denied for political reasons all the time under prior administrations, just on a smaller scale because it wasn't (many?) people's job to identify targets for this, and we didn't have social media, and we didn't have government programs to search or archive social media in an immigration context. But we had the "revocation or denial of a visa is not a punishment" (and is generally not appealable for cause...!) doctrine for ages.

I've kind of just repeated myself a bit here, but I guess my overall point is that I see lots of government powers as something like loaded weapons that we've left lying around for many years. (Or we could use some other metaphor like toxic waste, landmines, whatever kind of danger is seemingly largely inert but can still eventually be dangerous.) So it feels to me like people are concerned to see the current administration pick up or play around with some of those weapons, but to me the big picture is that lots of people should have been able to agree to dispose of some of them longer ago: to say that we don't want the government to have so much power and we don't want the president to have so much discretion.

Furthermore, I even think we could still say that, and possibly find broader political consensus about that idea than we could about the personal virtue of Trump, Biden, Trump, Obama, or George W. Bush as a wielder of some of that power.
by phs318u | 2025-10-15 01:44:16+00:00
I agree that FSF and similar groups should be focusing efforts on influencing government policy at least as much as on software. The problem is that in practice, you’ll get a bunch of people who are erstwhile free software supporters, shouting back that the FSF should “stay n their lane” and stay out of politics (missing the point that in life, everything is politics).
by theamk | 2025-10-15 01:44:53+00:00
Well, the device _did_ turn on, at least enough that author could adb into, SSH into it, examine files, read the logs.

The post really makes it unclear how permanent the disablement was, or how exactly "one script had been modified to prevent the main application from launching". Would really love to see some details here. Could author undo that change? Did they try to?
Sexbots Are Coming to ChatGPT
by nutanc | 2025-10-15 01:45:22+00:00
So Sam Altman made a pretty long post[1] about how they are trying to bring "character" back into ChatGPT and ends by saying erotica is also up for grabs. Personally, I think that was a pretty roundabout way of saying we are not making enough money as we should be able to and hence we are opening up the p*n floodgates.

Pretty quick turnaround from about 10 weeks back [2]

Some questions:

- So AI safety is not a problem anymore?

- Real name user checks will start on ChatGPT?

- What do we think will be the major changes in society about this.

1. https://x.com/sama/status/1978129344598827128

2. https://x.com/TolgaBilge_/status/1978151003170996332
by ericbarrett | 2025-10-15 01:46:27+00:00
> "Desert wasteland" teems with life, just maybe not the kind that most people care about.

As somebody who lives in the Southwest US, thank you. There are so many people on HN who think the desert is just Martian dunes to be paved over like a Civ tile.

Just in the hills around me there are 30 species of plant, century-old trees, snakes, lizards, horny toads, bobcats, coyotes, hare, quail, multitudes of ants, the incredible red velvet mite, roadrunners (yes they’re real), flies, wasps, native bumblebees, mice, god it goes on and on. And the soil is encrusted, literally, with countless microbiota. In fact a single vehicle smashing it can damage that crust for years.

I know we need renewables, and yes, the Southwest is a great place for solar. But there is real ecological damage to some of the most pristine places left in America involved in developing unused land.

I take no position on the development which is under discussion here, or whether the cancellation was fair. I haven’t researched it, and probably never will. I’m just sick of the “it’s just desert, who cares, paint it with solar/oil fields/asphalt” attitude that’s everywhere.
by grandfugue | 2025-10-15 01:47:09+00:00
sqlite is embedded. I understand that there might be scenarios in which multi-threaded sqlite is beneficial when an application has many concurrent writers. But taking a look at the company's website makes me wonder what the project's motivation is. The company offers a database service, which is a completely different scenario from embedded dbs. If the intention is to offer a cloud service, evolving from "sqlite" seems odd. The only benefit I can think of is that the new db service helps existing sqlite users migrate. My issue is that if I choose sqlite to store data locally in my browser or my cell phone, why do I suddenly want to store it in the cloud?
by paraboli | 2025-10-15 01:47:36+00:00
A tragedy. Killing this and Revolution Wind are some of the most consequential acts of the Trump administration. We are now unable to do large scale grid-connected energy projects and won't be able to take advantage of the incredible advances in efficiency renewables provide. With data centers causing the first increase in per-capita energy usage in decades there's a good chance we have an actual power crisis and the administration's other priorities like reshoring manufacturing become impossible.
by gridspy | 2025-10-15 01:48:41+00:00
One of frustrating truths about software is that it can be terrible and riddled with bugs but if you just keep patching enough bugs and use it the same way every time it eventually becomes reliable software ... as long as the user never does anything new and no-one pokes the source with a stick.

I much prefer the alternative where it's written in a manner where you can almost prove it's bug free by comprehensively unit testing the parts.
by schoen | 2025-10-15 01:48:51+00:00
It's interesting to see the positive views of benevolence, tolerance, hospitality, and justice toward strangers in many of the ancient Mediterranean cultures. I wonder how typical or atypical those are across time and across cultures, and what kinds of limitations are placed on them.

Apart from Exodus 23:9 and similar commandments (and specific stories of hospitality in the Bible), I think of the idea of ξενία xenia from ancient Greek culture, and then the proverbially famous Arab and Middle Eastern hospitality today.
by Braxton1980 | 2025-10-15 01:49:49+00:00
>China wants all the access to the rest of the world and wants everyone to buy their products... but they do not want to reciprocate.

There's a history with the West where they have been manipulated and taken advantage of in a way that the US never has.

It's possible their desire to force companies into partnerships is genuinely based on a fear of that happening again.

You say that China wants everyone to buy their products. There's also the implication that this is bad for the US economically. However China wouldn't benefit if their customers are poor.
by aeonfox | 2025-10-15 01:51:01+00:00
> How do we replace that with rooftop solar that many homeowners seek loans to install?

Australia has managed to do it. Installers are tripping over each other to put solar on roofs here.

> How does that incentivize power companies, who are allowed to operate monopolies, to invest in clean energy infrastructure?

Arbitrage. If every house has solar and battery, that's a huge load off the grid, but there's still apartments, businesses, and industry that need power, especially at night. Grid-scale batteries take the excess from households, and distribute to those that need power. There would still be need for grid-scale renewable generation, just hopefully not built on existing nature reserves.
by chris_wot | 2025-10-15 01:51:03+00:00
It's not my Supreme Court, I'm not an American. It is my concern because you lot have been telling the rest of the world that you are the Freest Country On Earth And Everyone Else Is Inferior for quite some time now. As I say, for a while there many of us kind of thought that might actually be the case, but not any more. And I live in a country that is a staunch ally.

We've been watching your country for some time now tear itself apart, and watch as you all get sicker, weaker and poorer. You all think you live in the Greatest Nation On Earth, but you can't even afford to pay for your own health care.

I'm assuming you've never been pulled aside to prove you are an American by an ICE agent.

I'm watching your country slide into totalitarianism and cruelty. And I'm watching your economy slowly get hollowed out.

Your ICE agents are unaccountable, immoral and racist, and you are going the way of Germany in the the late 1930s. Good luck with that.
by jopsen | 2025-10-15 01:51:11+00:00
Whenever I look at rooftop solar (Denmark) 2/3 of the cost is easily installation. Add to that the risk that I'll have to replace the roof early.

Rooftop seems expensive, if not done as part of a roof replacement. And even then it's expensive.

If we had deserts that would be a great place to put up solar.
by theamk | 2025-10-15 01:51:38+00:00
Sure it does need the cloud - you might have notice that the kill command was delivered _over cloud connection_. And author carefully blocked not entire connectivity, but only the part that they considered "logs". They wanted to keep cloud control, just not the whole thing.

Given the complete lack of relevant technical details, it could be something as simple as "internal log storage full, refusing to start up until logs uploaded". We'd never know.
by tkgally | 2025-10-15 01:51:41+00:00
> LLMs don't learn from a project.

How long do you think that will remain true? I've bootstrapped some workflows with Claude Code where it writes a markdown file at the end of each session for its own reference in later sessions. It worked pretty well. I assume other people are developing similar memory systems that will be more useful and robust than anything I could hack together.
by ack_complete | 2025-10-15 01:51:42+00:00
This is partially due to the compromises of mappingvector intrinsics into C (with C++ only being marginally better). In a more vector-oriented language, such as shader languages, this:

s1 = vaddq_u32(s1, vextq_u32(z, s1, 2)); s1 = vaddq_u32(s1, vdupq_laneq_u32(s0, 3));

would be more like this:

s1.xy += s1.zw; s1 += s0.w;
Show HN: Free YouTube Transcript Generator – 99% Accuracy, No Signup Required
by howardV | 2025-10-15 01:51:49+00:00
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I noticed many existing tools either require signup, have paywalls, or produce low-quality transcripts. This tool aims to solve that.

Try it: https://harku.io/tools/youtube-to-text

Feedback welcome!
by Desafinado | 2025-10-15 01:52:00+00:00
It isn't so much about the smartphone replacing family as it is about phones giving us something to do in our homes in lieu of the presence of other people.

Even a family that lives close to each other is separated in space by different homes and will often find themselves alone. But their situation will be much better than someone with no family around. They have the option to see each other, many don't.

I think the more detailed point is that we're largely atomized these days into separate physical spaces where we're often alone, or confined to a small number of people. Smartphones and computers make it a hell of a lot easier to break through that problem.