MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by TacticalCoder | 2025-10-08 00:32:48+00:00
> It's maddening that they haven't come up with a reasonable way to allow a purchaser to register multiple Yubikeys to enable freely restoring backups between them.

It is possible, using a cryptocurrency hardware wallet allowing to install tiny apps on the hardware wallets. These wallets are meant to initialized by a "seed" and there's a protocol to easily write down that seed (a list of words, all coming from a dictionary of 2048 words and the list of words contains a checksum in [part of] the last word).

Now from that seed, cryptocurrencies hardware wallet can derive any secret. And it's possible to derive a secret that's used like Yubikey.

So as long as you have your "seed" backed up somewhere, you can duplicate your 2FA key.

I did test the old U2F version, pre FIDO2/webauthn, using early Ledger Nano hardware wallets and it worked.

I think there's now a more recent version available but haven't checked that. A Ledger Nano S Plus, from their website, costs 70 EUR / 80 USD. I'd say it's not too pricey to try it and see if it could suit you. Check their available apps first and see if there's one that can simulate a Yubikey (or a similar 2FA security key).

I know HN loves to hate on cryptocurrencies but I'd say that at least the crypo-bros got the "you cannot trust your computer" part right. The attack surface of a cryptocurrency hardware wallet is not only minimal: it's minimal on purpose, built on the premises that computers were not devices to be trusted. They're literally built with the idea that they can be used on a compromised computer and you should still be safe, so there's that.
by bix6 | 2025-10-08 00:32:53+00:00
I’ve heard it can if we apply some of the techniques to larger scale farming.

Yvon talks about it a bit in “Let my people go surfing” but if you want something more focused I’m not sure. I’ve mostly picked stuff up through convos here and there, haven’t done a deep dive.

I haven’t read this but it sounds promising: https://www.patagonia.com/product/regenerating-earth-farmers...
by dasil003 | 2025-10-08 00:33:13+00:00
That line jumped out at me as well as being weirdly specific and reductive compared to the rest of the article which read as pretty broadly truthy.

My take as a middle manager in medium sized company (but who came from a startup background) is that some structure is necessary as a company scales just for people to know how to do their jobs. You can design it lots of different ways from light to heavy, but once you go beyond Dunbar's number you can't just rely on common sense and informal communication. If you really really hate "process", you can push things pretty far, and I guess Steam would be the canonical example here, but even there you see that it heavily filters for certain personality types and the politics can be brutal if you're not part of the in-crowd.
by ronbenton | 2025-10-08 00:33:30+00:00
Perhaps you missed it or the author updated the article, but I think this does cover it:

>Oh, and I highly recommend providers that offer a "catch-all" feature. This way, you can have one main email address and unlimited <put something here>@yourdomain.com email addresses. It's useful to have it separated, like netflix@yourdomain.com, but still receive the emails inside the same inbox.
by slg | 2025-10-08 00:34:28+00:00
That remains to be seen. Typically, the userbase is the product for a social media company, not their customers. Which means without a sizable enough userbase, there is nothing to actually sell to their customers. Bluesky has claimed to be different, but they are very much still in the early phase of trying to attract enough users so they need to cater to those users' priorities and decentralization simply isn't a priority that will attract many users.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-10-08 00:34:40+00:00
This has always been a balancing act.

I was an engineering manager for 25 years, and had to deal with the balance. I worked for a heavily process-driven company. It could be infuriating, but they did manage to consistently produce some of the finest hardware in the world (unfortunately, the same could not be said for the software).

I have found that writing things down, can ossify a project, but you really can't do without. Communication overhead is the single biggest killer. That's why a small team of experienced engineers, that are used to working together, can often do amazing amounts of work, and that "tribal knowledge" -that bugaboo of software process gurus- is actually a very important accelerator.

I wrote a post called "Concrete Galoshes"[0], that talks about the things that add structure and inflexibility to projects.

The single biggest lesson, is that we should be very careful about "One Size Fits All" solutions. Different types of projects need different types of overhead and structure.

[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/various/concrete-galoshes/
by jibal | 2025-10-08 00:34:56+00:00
Indeed it wouldn't happen in a game but ... I easily created a position where promotion to a bishop is stalemate after any black move (confirmed by Stockfish):

White pawns on a7 and b7, king on h8. Black king on f2, bishop on g3, rook on h3, knights on a6 and b8, pawns on c6, d7, f3, and h2.

This position is a draw after a8=Q or axb8=Q but that is easily remedied by adding black pieces, e.g., a queen on h4.
by MillironX | 2025-10-08 00:35:20+00:00
I think all elected officials plug their ears when they hear this.

I know the governors of Wyoming gave land away to NCAR and Microsoft talking about how they were going to "diversify Wyoming's economy," and then every employee of those data centers was a contractor out of Colorado. The current governor has kept up the hype, now claiming that AI will be good for the local energy companies despite the fact that the proposed centers are going to be connected to out-of-state energy pipelines.

When you look at top campaign contributions and see Google and Microsoft at the top, you understand why the gubernatorial class keeps their ears plugged.
by txrx0000 | 2025-10-08 00:35:21+00:00
You're right, 0 kb/s would be too obvious. Let's do 0.1 kb/s, or restrict their plan to 1 minute of use per day.

You realize that while the charter still safeguards your freedoms, it will eventually be overturned if the populace gets used to more and more control over time. Laws like this are cracks in the dam. If you pay no attention to it or give it charitable interpretations, then someday the dam will crumble.
by furyofantares | 2025-10-08 00:35:56+00:00
I lost mine when a TLD (.xyz) thought I was malicious. I've also just failed to renew a domain before. So you're relying on the registry operator for the TLD itself to not ban you, the registrar to successfully renew, and yourself and your bank to successfully lay the registrar.

In fact the entire reason I stay on free email from a company I don't like is because I think it minimizes the chance I lose access to my email. My conclusion is essentially the exact opposite of the article.
by martinald | 2025-10-08 00:36:28+00:00
Every time I read one of these articles the main issue I have is that it doesn't take into account the huge shortages of compute that are going on all the time. Anthropic and Google especially have been incredibly unreliable, struggling to keep up with demand.

Each of the main providers could easily use 10x the compute tomorrow (albeit arguably inefficiently) by using more thinking for certain tasks.

Now - does that scale to the 10s of GWs of deals OpenAI is doing? Probably not right now, but the bigger issue as the article does point out in fairness is the huge backlog of power availability worldwide.

Finally, AI adoption outside of software engineering is incredibly limited at work. This is going to rapidly change. Even the Excel agent Microsoft has recently launched has the potential to result in hundred fold increases in token consumption per user. I'm also suspect of the AI sell through rate being an indicator that it's not popular for Microsoft. The later versions of M365 copilot (or whatever it is called today) are wildly better than the original ones.

It all sort of reminds me of Apple's goal of getting 1% in cell phone market share, which seemed laughably ambitious at one point - a total stretch goal. Now they are up to 20% and smartphone penetration as a whole is probably close to 90% globally of those that have a phone.

One potential wild card though for the whole market is someone figuring out a very efficient ASIC for inference (maybe with 1.58bit). GPUs are mostly overkill for inference and I would not be surprised if 10-100x efficiency gains could be had on very specialised chips.
by vkou | 2025-10-08 00:37:15+00:00
> The commons were actually fairly well regulated by community norms that were well documented and established.

Not really. You are correctly citing the enclosure acts as a historic example, but that was not beginning or the end of history. It was just a recent, location-specific historic moment when big English landlords won in the millenia-old power struggle between peasant and landlord.

Control of the commons - land and the resources buried in it - has been a point of contention and bloodshed for as long as recorded human history. It's a pendulum that swung back and forth, but has always had bad actors making personally-profitable, socially-impoverishing decisions.

For an alternative example of how things have gone in other places, look at the blood feuds between ranchers and farmers[1] in the American west, concerns over upstream and rainfall water rights in literally any part of the world that relies on irrigation, or, the varied situations where existing landlords politically won the struggle... Or lost it in the 20th century.

As for well-established[2]...

---

[1] The enclosure acts echo this farmer/rancher dichotomy, actually. Feudal lord/serf relationships have the lords derive wealth from having ever more serfs doing ever more labour-intensive agriculture on their land. The enclosure acts, however, were intended to drive the peasants from their land, because in the case of England, the lords figured out that they can derive way more wealth from turning over their land to low-labour grazelands for sheep. And the way they could do that was to use the law as a cudgel to drive out their tenants at sword and gunpoint.

[2] They were only well-established for particular points in history. Prior to William the Conqueror arriving in England, and stealing all the land in it for himself and his mercenaries, there were also 'well-established' land use norms - that greatly limited the power and ownership-of-land granted to lords and petty kings. The Norman conquest turned all that over - into a different 'well-established' equilibrium - that was then, again, turned over into a 'well-established' equilibrium after the passage of the enclosure acts.
by waterheater | 2025-10-08 00:38:02+00:00
Just because something is common and widespread doesn't mean it should continue to be common and widespread, though it will continue to happen due to human nature. And yet, people striving to be constructive and positive won't celebrate the death of a stranger. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is a cultural lodestar found globally for a very good reason: cheering the death of others may lead to others hoping to cheer your death, and that potential is enough to significantly curtail offers of constructive and positive assistance from the victims to the perpetrators, leading to a gradual social degradation within the perpetrators. Certainly remember and even memorialize a person's death, but the exaltation of a person's death is a sure path to cultural collapse.

Now, that's assuming people are one unified group. In reality, most people are forced into an "in" group or an "out" group. The "in" group exalts the death of the "out" group member, so the "out" group members must respond in kind. That eventually leads to the degradation of both groups, leaving the "above" and "beyond" groups with the remnants. In turn, the destructive and negative conflict continues.
by layer8 | 2025-10-08 00:39:28+00:00
You really don’t. You discover sites (like this one) and interesting people by word-of-mouth. Within a site (forum or blog), recency, topical categories, sorting and (full-text) searching are sufficient. That’s how the web mostly worked 20+ years ago.

You can have personal rankings, for example people reporting on the most interesting things they’ve recently seen. But these will be individual lists, not aggregated by an algorithm over all user behavior.

You certainly don’t need likes and other reactions, and you also don’t need up- and downvoting of contributions. Those set the wrong incentives and do more harm than good overall, IMO. You do need reporting of problematic content, but only site moderation will see those.
by opo | 2025-10-08 00:39:31+00:00
>...Around this year or last year batteries have hit a price point where they make financial sense for ordinary people,

The LCOE of battery systems for residential systems is still incredibly high according to the Lazard report - an unsubsidized cost maybe 3 - 10 times more expensive than grid batteries.

>...Given that rooftop solar usually pays for itself despite being less cost-efficient that other forms of solar,

If that is the case, then less well off rate payers shouldn't have to subsidize their wealthier neighbors. If it does require subsidies, then that money should go to where it will do the most good in decarbonizing the grid - not as a giveaway to wealthier home owners.

>I see no reason to discourage it.

Who said anything about discouraging it? I certainly wouldn't want to discourage it.
by Akranazon | 2025-10-08 00:39:50+00:00
> If “who is better off” isn’t a good question...

I said the American worker is better off in general. The only question I don't consider is good is, "which types of workers?" Unless your point is that some kinds of workers are better off than others? In which case, make that argument.

> “it doesn’t matter that you could be wrongfully imprisoned and separated from your children without recourse for committing no crime, but that’s OK because if it doesn’t happen you’ll make a bit more money” is detached from the reality of what matters.

You put that in quotes, but my comments have nothing whatsoever to do with that. Can you clarify what this has to do with whether a country should enact regulations which make it difficult for firms to lay off employees?

> Most individuals aren’t money-hungry ghouls who care for wealth above all, including their own personal safety and liberty.

Great. Again, what does this have to do with labor market regulations? I am not interested in debating "what matters" generally, in a "meaning of life" sort of way, unless you can connect it to labor market regulations, the discussion you entered.
by jibal | 2025-10-08 00:40:14+00:00
Underpromotions to rook or bishop certainly can happen in play to avoid stalemating the opponent and preserving the win. Other reasons don't exist in play (aside from extraneous reasons like not having a queen handy or weak players underpromoting just because they are afraid of stalemating even though promoting to a queen wins) but can in compositions. e.g., here's a position that is the other way around, where promotion to a bishop is stalemate regardless of where the opponent moves and any other promotion loses:

1n6/PP1p4/n1p5/8/7q/5pbr/5k1p/7K w - - 0 1

https://www.chess.com/analysis/game/pgn/5WfasZuA6A/analysis

P.S. https://timkr.home.xs4all.nl/chess2/minor.htm contradicts my "Other reasons don't exist in play", assuming that the game that he analyzes actually happened, which is questionable.
Safe AI
by _e8at | 2025-10-08 00:40:24+00:00
Hey friends I have an idea for a way to make neural networks deterministiclly instead of probabilistically.

Right now we train neural networks on unstructured data but the problem is they are probabilistic models and hard to understand.

I want to create a new neural network that is fully understandable, and each weight is intentional.

So what we do is this. We create a neural network that specializes in reading, understanding and writing actual neural network weights.

So the idea is that a correctly trained network could actually intentionally create and update neural networks with new knowledge deterministically.

So like you could say "create a network that can read mnist", and it would like actually know how to make the network including the weights, and it would come up with reasonable values for the weights in the network. It would specify each nerve and each connection with the actual value of the weight.

The cool thing about this is we could have it like gain an intuition for various neural architectures. it would set weights, assign input values, run it through, and "debug" so it would get better and better at making neural nets.

Honestly, we could have it like do reinforcement learning where every time it makes updates that are better it can be like "yes"! and it will reward itself by doing reinforcement learning for that series, and we do this in parallel and the ones that work win.

So the benefit would be for safety sensitive scenarios, having an ai that can truly understand and inspect what weights mean and what they are for, and ability to edit them for precise purpose. This would prevent a surgery robot, for example, from having neurons left over poorly set from bad training cutting too much because it saw a video in pretraining about a butcher shop.

The other benefit is that it could intelligently do what our brains do - create "skip" connections from early layers to later layers enhancing efficiency.

It could also lead to enhanced efficiency where it only makes a few connections that are necessary. It could also choose data types intelligently using high precision floating points for areas that are sensitive and need it, and low precision elsewhere.

By training a network to be able to inspect and make networks, we can get much closer to guaranteeing that networks don't have rogue neorons.

Since networks have billions of neurons, I would guess that it would need to do inspection of neurons at high levels and low levels bit by bit and a ton of work and experimentation on different sections and sort of create a plain text "database" of what sections refer to what, it could make indexes and stuff like that.

Eventually a neural network could be "self compiling" like a language where it doesn't even need a pretraining phase or backprop.
by jadenPete | 2025-10-08 00:40:59+00:00
I’ve considered running an email server on my personal domain for some time, but the effort of changing my email hasn’t felt worth it to me, given how many services I’ve signed up for with my current email (a Gmail address). Is anyone aware of any strategies to make this easier? It’d be nice if I could set up forwarding so services would automatically use my new email, but I’m not sure if something like that exists.
by gyomu | 2025-10-08 00:41:19+00:00
> That's a fairly new term that implies being engineers which we are not. We haven't studied to be engineers, nor have real engineering degrees. We've called ourselves that because we were doing much more than the original job of programmer and felt like we deserved a raise.

Uh, speak for yourself. There are countries where being a software engineer does indeed imply that you studied engineering and hold a "real" engineering degree.

Also, Hillel Wayne's "Are We Really Engineers" is worth reading:

https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/are-we-really-engineers/
by mistahchris | 2025-10-08 00:44:47+00:00
That's actually a pretty reasonable description I think. I mean, in the semi-serious way. But I was just talking to some colleagues of mine about how one can get attached to or invested in code that they hand wrote, even though that code wasn't really solving a problem that was "worth" that level of attachment. And AI assisted code generation changes the dynamic for code that fits in that category for me, and it just so happens to be a lot of the code people write for work fit into that. You only really need to be "artisinal" about the code that "really matters".
by SXX | 2025-10-08 00:45:10+00:00
You have nothing to hide until you automatically marked for whatever and then judged also automatically by a buggy hallucinating AI overlord.

Might be because pattern on your face or T-shirt match something bad.

And this kind of stuff already happened in UK even before "AI craze". Hundreds of people been imprisoned because of faulty accounting system:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal

"Computer says you go to prison"!
by JamisonM | 2025-10-08 00:45:33+00:00
Fair enough on the immediate consequences.. but shutting down these plants was a long term decision, so the long term consequences are still consequences. It is certainly true that no one predicted a Russian invasion of Ukraine when Fukushima happened but Germany's over-reliance on Russian gas was well understood at the time. Which I raise only to point out that the bad things that did happen were foreseeable, the German energy system was subject to systemic risks and those risks were made worse by these choices.

It seems like the statement "No negative effect" is probably not well supported by subsequent events.
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-10-08 00:45:54+00:00
This hasn't been my observation. Yeah you can mute whatever you want (you can on Twitter and Bluesky also) but the HOA tendencies of Mastodon servers are alive and well. If you're a very online type of person and "live and die" by online social currents then no problem, but for others I'm not sure.
by alexandre_m | 2025-10-08 00:46:40+00:00
> public safety minister defended Bill C-8 as a means to crack down on hackers and ransomware fraudsters

That kind of threat mostly comes from overseas anyway, so this doesn’t actually solve any real problems.

Case in point: the recent Salt Typhoon incident (spoiler: it was China) https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/salt-typhoon-canada-cyber-s...

Just another authoritarian attempt by the Liberal government.
by pdonis | 2025-10-08 00:46:52+00:00
> no one is anywhere near prepared to challenge Microsoft for OS support contracts

I don't think governments and large corporations are getting OS support from Microsoft. Certainly none of those I have worked for did so. The support people have to use MS tools, at least to some extent, but they're not MS employees and they have no inside connections with MS.

It's true that what "OS Support", or more generally "Supporting workstations for employees", would amount to would be different for a large organization that uses Linux, compared to what it is for a large organization that uses Windows. But "different" does not mean "worse". I would expect the quality of such support to be better once it sinks in that the organization means what it says about using open source solutions. And there are plenty of open source software projects that would love a huge influx of customers willing to pay for features (LibreOffice comes to mind, for example).
by dlisboa | 2025-10-08 00:47:05+00:00
I’d say what you’re doing is architecting, like the old term for “software architect”. Those are professional who know how to design a system from a high level and have the experience to judge a good implementation of it but they themselves do not write the code.

Likewise real world architects have the skills to design a building but do not care or know how to build it, relying on engineers for that.

I think it’s important to distinguish because we’re increasingly seeing a trend towards final product over production, meaning these “vibe” people want the tool in the end and consider the steps in between to be just busywork and AI can do for them.

That’s closer to product design than to engineering. If I can imagine Monalisa and write that thought to paper, communicating that thought and getting a painter to paint it for me does not make me Da Vinci.