MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rob | 2025-10-27 15:01:47+00:00
Yeah, I'm really asking for tons of whitespace and everything to breathe sooooo much by asking for the default font size to be a browser default (16px) and updated to match most modern display resolutions in 2025, not 2006 when it was created.

HN is the only site I have to increase the zoom level, and others below are doing the same thing as me. But it must be us with the issues. Obviously PG knew best in 2006 for decades to come.
by bell-cot | 2025-10-27 15:02:59+00:00
I was thinking, "Bob, stop making excuses about how it's hopeless, and you'd need a 'U0hBNTEyICgvdmFyL2xvZy9tZXNzYWdlcykgPSBjNGU2NGM1MmI5MDhiYWU3MDU5NzdlMzUzZDlk'-level password to be safe. That 'b0bj0nes' is so easy that a bored kid might get it in a few dozen guesses, and you need to change it to something better."
by Faelon | 2025-10-27 15:03:52+00:00
Tangential to the point, I think we should be careful about the almond talking point. Insofar as it is used for milk, almond milk uses almost half as much water as dairy milk, uses 1/18 the land and emits 1/5 the amount of carbon. As food, it is eaten in such a vanishingly small quantity compared to other water-hungry foods (meat) as to be insignificant. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/environmental-footprint-m...
by potato3732842 | 2025-10-27 15:03:53+00:00
>In the 50s the industrial might was used to build and improve the country (mostly). Where was the inflection point? Reagan?

Reagan was the reaction IMO. We really screwed ourselves in the 70s. Reagananomics, the 1980s (and beyond) financialization of everything, selling the bottom layers of the economic pyramid overseas piecemeal so that stonks could go up and consumers could buy cheaper junk, I see those that more of a reaction. The money and effort poured into those endeavors because it could no longer make a return on industrial endeavors.
by xhkkffbf | 2025-10-27 15:04:00+00:00
This isn't really about using water as much as dealing with all of the heat that comes out of computation. The water is just the simplest way to dispose of the heat.

Isn't there some better way we can, perhaps, turn some of the heat back into something useful? Maybe heat a building? Or turn it back into electricity. It doesn't have to be an efficient conversion because it's now 100% wasted.
by oskarkk | 2025-10-27 15:04:07+00:00
> HN still uses a font-size value that usually renders to 12px by default as well, making it look insanely small on most modern devices, etc.

On what devices (or browsers?) it renders "insanely small" for you? CSS pixels are not physical pixels, they're scaled to 1/96th of an inch on desktop computers, for smartphones etc. scaling takes into account the shorter typical distance between your eyes and the screen (to make the angular size roughly the same), so one CSS pixel can span multiple physical pixels on a high-PPI display. Font size specified in px should look the same on various devices. HN font size feels the same for me on my 32" 4k display (137 PPI), my 24" display with 94 PPI, and on my smartphone (416 PPI).
by bogwog | 2025-10-27 15:04:37+00:00
Not sure why you're so defensive about this. I'm not trolling. Whether something is interesting or not is subjective, which is my point. You might think you know why that staircase is interesting to people (it's just trivia), but that's just your opinion. This is a tech community, so you're obviously unimpressed by the technology used to make it, but most people don't care about that at all.

There's no secret formula to culture. Some programmers and AI people seem to think there is some magic AI model that will be able to produce cultural hits at the click of a button. If you're a boring person, you're not likely to "get" why something is interesting, or why that part can't just be automated away. No technology can help with that.
by lukaslalinsky | 2025-10-27 15:04:39+00:00
This is not true. Imagine code like this:

const n = try reader.interface.readVec(&data);

Can you guess if it's going to do blocking or non-blocking I/O read?

The io parameter is not really "coloring", as defined by the async/await debate, because you can have code that is completely unaware of any async I/O, pass it std.Io.Reader and it will just work, blocking or non-blocking, it makes no difference. Heck, you even even wrap this into C callbacks and use something like hiredis with async I/O.

Stackful coroutines need more memory, because you need to pre-allocate large enough stack for the entire lifetime. With stackless coroutines, you only need the current state, but with the disadvantage that you need frequent allocations.
by nyrikki | 2025-10-27 15:04:44+00:00
Most of these happen at most scales, but is more to do with the classic laws of classic logic that we accept A priori because they are useful.

* PNC: at most one is true; both can be false

* PEM, at least one is true; both can be true

* PNC + PEM, exactly one is true, exactly one is false

If you stick to the familiar computational complexity classes P=co-P, but NP != co-NP, and those both relate to the accessibility of T/F, where both P and NP are by definition decision problems, specifically the ones that can be verified in poly time.

If you ignore the Heisenberg uncertainty principle to avoid that complexity, the standard model of QM is just mapping continuous functions to discrete space, and will have problems with the above.

This happens in math too, where we use the rationals over the reals or Cauchy sequences to construct the reals, because almost all reals are normal and non-computable, and even equality between to "real" real numbers is undecidable.

This is also related to why after Weierstrass show that almost all continuous functions are nowhere smooth, we moved to the Epsilon-Delta definition of a limits etc...

We have the lier's paradox, which is easier to understand than Berry's paradox, which relates to Chaitin proof that there is an upper limit to what any algorithm can prove.

Things at Quantum scale do act very different than our typical intuition, but lots of maps from a continuous space to discrete categories can exhibit the same behavior even at macro scale, we just can often use a model that lets us ignore that to accomplish useful work.

Often we can even use repeated approximation or other methods to reduce those problems to something that is practical, but that is still the map and not the territory.

Superposition is just that:

f(a + b) = f(a) + f(b)

And:

f(sa) = s*f(a)

If you have two vectors, one at i (0,1) and one at 1 (1,0), but a map that maps only to choice(1,i) and think of that as up and down, how you divide that continuous arc from that segment of the unit circle to UP or DOWN, almost all of quantum mechanics still works, and it will be the contradictions that conflict with our intuitions that will become the barrier. (ignoring Heisenberg)

If you think about Heisenberg uncertainty as indeterminacy instead, Independence in math (Like ZFC + CH) which are neither provable as false or true, Chatlin's complexity limits, the breakdown of Laplacian determinism, or even modal logic all apply at multiple levels.

The amazing thing in my mind is that we found useful models despite these limits and using methods which are effective.

But IMHO it is best to think that in the quantum world, we aren't so lucky rather than those limits aren't still lurking under the surface at the macro scale, which they very much are.
by Jabbs | 2025-10-27 15:05:10+00:00
It is a paid platform so people remove it from "show hn" if not free. But about 30% of the listings are indeed unlisted so it is more than an aggregator. Sadly the feature to tag those listings used google serp results and they cracked down on bots a bit early this year. So it is a mix of unlisted (aka not on paid platforms like Indeed) and listed
by maxloh | 2025-10-27 15:05:33+00:00
The title of this thread actually says "with extensions support", so I think it is a major selling point intended for casual users like me, who priorities convenient over privacy.

> ...would consider 'sync with the data parasites' as a misfeature.

I am curious why Firefox isn't a choice for you. Why Mozilla as a NGO isn't trusted for handling your data?
by mschuster91 | 2025-10-27 15:06:00+00:00
> Exactly. There are a lot of comments in this thread from people who are either non-parents or who haven’t lived in a situation where they didn’t have perfect WiFi coverage of their entire living area.

... and from people who take care of configuring their entire smart home crap of their entire relatives. In Germany we have a joke roughly translated to "Christmas is the time of the year where the children come back home to fix their parents' computers" for a reason - but a lot of people don't have family or friends who can deal with getting stuff set up.

The average user isn't competent enough to deal with a setup flow more complicated than "install this app, scan this QR code on the device, enter your wifi password, that's it". The user neither knows nor cares to know that the Thing sets up a temporary wifi access point (whose credentials are in the QR code), gets the home wifi credentials via a small API endpoint, tests the connectivity and then shuts down the temporary wifi. For them, it Just Works.
by coldpie | 2025-10-27 15:06:05+00:00
Passkeys are another brick in this wall. The authors of the spec built in client software identification and attestation, which means authenticating parties can require you to only use certain, closed-source passkey clients. It's not hard to imagine a future where only blessed Passkey clients, such as Microsoft's, Apple's, and Google's implementations, are allowed by most services.
by heddycrow | 2025-10-27 15:06:20+00:00
The majority of the questions I ask are delivered with the hope that the answer I get is beyond what I might expect. For me, that's sort of the point in asking - fun times exploring together.

I do think everything can be seen as bait and switch if you assume there is someone behind the wheel who knows where we are going and how to drive. If anything, I might have been suspecting we'd both arrive at that point together.

Again, was hoping to be surprised a bit. The wizard bit was kinda fun. Mild thanks, human. I'll just be over here beating this tech over the head for kicks. I wish you well!
by MattPalmer1086 | 2025-10-27 15:06:37+00:00
The majority are really not that hard to categorise.

In the UK at least, fantasy and sci fi occupy the same shelving. Takes me ages pulling books out of the shelf, and immediately rejecting because they are fantasy.

The majority of the books are fantasy, not sci fi. Fantasy seems to have a much bigger audience in the UK anyway.
by tredre3 | 2025-10-27 15:06:45+00:00
Thankfully on Macos x and Windows, the file picker isn't provided by the UI toolkit (though they usually provide abstract methods of calling it, for convenience).

Linux is now working towards that goal as well, in the form of XDG Desktop Portal. It puts the Desktop Environment (or third party provider) in charge of providing services like the file dialog/picker/chooser for better integration/coherence. It's not been fully adopted yet, but I'm very excited about it because GTK's file chooser is just awful and I want to provide my own to those apps!
by anon-3988 | 2025-10-27 15:06:46+00:00
Our society lives and breathes this contradiction. We believe in determinism and demands justice. We believe in an omnipotent God and is sinful. On a personal level, there is quite literally nothing "you" can do to change yourself; to change oneself, one has to change to one that changes oneself. This is recursive. Looking at it this way, the important thing is to create an environment, situation, society that makes it easier to change oneself for the better. "Show me the incentives, and I will tell you what happens" as someone might say.
by dfxm12 | 2025-10-27 15:07:24+00:00
My big company just throws more and more work at fewer and fewer people. Our managers are quiet quitting as we're mostly told to just figure it out for ourselves. I've asked for more money due to having more responsibilities, but the answer is "we can't have that conversation now". I suspect I'll get the same answer in a few months. Hey, the stock is up though.

Talking to friends in other places, and reading the article, it isn't really different elsewhere. Given the disarray the US government is in & their refusal to give us benefits we've already paid for, employers know they have all the power at this time.
by no_time | 2025-10-27 15:07:25+00:00
Even if I try to steelman your argument that locking down general purpose computers has some benefits particularly to gaming, its very short term imo.

How far away are we from hooking up a vision model to the display output of let’s say, Battlefield 6 and hooking in mouse+kb input from said vision model + an aimbot that perfectly replicates a top performing players mouse movements?

I’d say not very far away.

Much like how in online chess, no technical solution can attest that a move is really from a human brain and not a chess program running on his phone.
by righthand | 2025-10-27 15:07:32+00:00
This pushes the duty to run the scraper manually, idealy with a person present somewhere. Great if you want to use the web that way.

What is being blocked here is violent scraping and to an extent major LLM companies bots as well. If I disagree that OpenAI should be able to take train off of everyone’s work especially if they’re going to hammer the whole internet irresponsibly and ignore all the rules, then I’m going to prevent that type of company from being profitable off my properties. You don’t get to play unfair for the unfilled promise “the good of future humanity”.
by wat10000 | 2025-10-27 15:08:25+00:00
My point is that the skills shouldn't be useless. If you can understand that the spaceships you saw whizzing around in Star Wars on a theater screen weren't real, you can understand that a dancing cat on a phone screen might not be real. Plenty of old people do understand this, so it's not some impossible task, or even one as difficult as learning an extremely difficult foreign language.

Trusting eloquent people just because of how they sound has always been a way to get scammed. Exposure might be higher now, but people who are getting scammed by eloquent SMSes today were probably getting scammed by friendly, educated-sounding people offering "an incredible investment opportunity" or to "help with the ATM" decades ago, or Amway, or chain letters.

My bank doesn't qualify as "strangers." I have an existing business relationship with them. That relationship started when I reached out to them, not vice versa.
by zozbot234 | 2025-10-27 15:08:27+00:00
> You don't have to color your function based on whether you're supposed to use in in an async or sync manner. But it will essentially be colored based on whether it does I/O or not (the function takes IO interface as argument). Which is actually important information to "color" a function with.'

The Rust folks are working on a general effect system, including potentially an 'IO' effect. Being able to abstract out the difference between 'sync' and 'async' code is a key motivation of this.
by raxxorraxor | 2025-10-27 15:08:44+00:00
I cannot even tell Windows that I manage updates myself, how can Recall not be an insane paternalism fail?

In my opinion the product owners of Windows lack the maturity do implement anything like Recall responsibly. Perhaps there is pressure in the background, but as the consumer that isn't my problem.

I could see something like Recall be helpful for a lot of users, but the politics of Windows would need to be changed considerably.

e2e encryption freaks should know about the limits of encryption for that matter.

Also I still don't have a Microsoft account. A private one at least.
by lubujackson | 2025-10-27 15:08:45+00:00
The best insight I heard from a founder was to realize most VCs goals aren't to have a successful exit, but to have a successful next round of funding.

It makes sense when you realize the time horizon for successful VC plays is long and VC firms need some metric to determine which people are funding or promoting good bets.

Much of VC behavior makes a lot more sense when you understand this. It's not the firm you are selling to (for mid to large VCs) but your contact there specifically.

Goodhart's Law strikes again.
by zahlman | 2025-10-27 15:09:39+00:00
> For example my python interpreter imports my custom List and Path classes and I could just do the following to get the same result:

List(List(Path("filepath").read_text_file().splitlines()).group_by_key(lambda x:x).items()).map(lambda x:(len(x[1]),x[0])).sorted()

... But I don't know why you would, because with builtins and the standard library you can already do

sorted((count, line) for (line, count) in Counter(Path("filepath").read_text().splitlines()).items())

> and if used often enough, it could made an utility method:

Sure, but you can do that for any functionality in any practical language.
by tshaddox | 2025-10-27 15:09:42+00:00
It’s easy to focus on the exceptional cases and say we need “one more level” to be able to override all the other levels. But it’s not clear to me that this is a useful way to frame things. After all, what do you do if you’re “one more level” is the one that commits a miscarriage of justice? What if an executive pardons political or business friends simply for being friends?
by NickC25 | 2025-10-27 15:09:49+00:00
You most certainly are, Boz.

You've pursued "growth" and made a bunch of wealthy people (who certainly don't need the money) a magnitude wealthier, by exploiting the negative side of youth self-consciousness.

You're the CTO of what effectively is a capitalist bastard hybrid of the NSA, a town square, and an invasive, digital version of the yellow pages.

You've made more money than most of us combined will see in a lifetime and you still continue to force ads on us, and negative content on young people.

You are how you act, indeed.
by jasonlotito | 2025-10-27 15:10:07+00:00
We can. We do. It depends on what you are trying to count. If you think there is a single number that will answer everything, no. Are you going to include all the water ancestors used? After all, without that water, I wouldn't be here.

You seem to think there is only one way to count. That's completely wrong. The important thing is whether you are clear about what you are counting and why.

Your comment is odd. But let me be the first to give you permission to count things how you want. Just make sure you explain the criteria and reasoning. Have a good day.
by brandonb | 2025-10-27 15:10:19+00:00
FWIW, I received several TestFlight invites to a "ChatGPT Ads" app that were actually scams. Apple removed them after a few hours.

Check the developer name carefully if you get one of these. This screenshot shows a developer name of "ChatGPTAdvertising By OpenAI", not "OpenAI" itself.
by aantix | 2025-10-27 15:10:41+00:00
Growth through savings is limited.

Greed is sustainable.

When there's enough money on the sidelines, the pendulum swings, and big bets come back in fashion.

Downsizing is not a big bet.

Nobody leads tech to save billions and have money sit on the sidelines. It's a weak, shallow bet that should be reserved for discount retail and commodity markets.

The savings will be spent on engineering, eventually.
by ratelimitsteve | 2025-10-27 15:10:58+00:00
the only reason Alice's intentions matter is their ability to predict her future behavior. if we assume for the sake of argument her behavior will always be identical to bob's then not only does it not matter what her internal motivations are it's arguable that her internal motivations don't actually differ from bob's. Thinking is, after all, an action, and all of their actions are identical. Therefore it seems like your example assumes Alice's behavior both is and isn't identical to Bob's.
by xpe | 2025-10-27 15:11:13+00:00
I'm sharing the article out of pain as I try to add only the relevant files from ~/.config into version control. Many programs partially implement the XDG Base Directory spec by using ~/.config. But then some also dump data, cache, state, logs, and other non-configuration material into the same place. [1] The article above summarizes how XDG offers four different places:

- Cache $HOME/.cache - Configuration $HOME/.config - Data $HOME/.local/share - State $HOME/.local/state

[1]: This is why we can't have nice things!
by swiftcoder | 2025-10-27 15:11:16+00:00
So far, yes. It's getting hardware with every release. First you had to click approve in a dialog to launch unsigned software. Later you had to right click -> "open" -> then approve. Now you have to open system settings to find the button to show the approval prompt.

Meanwhile to install a kernel extension you now have to reboot into safe mode and disable part of system integrity protection (with big warnings that it's at your own risk).

For the average user, kernel extension are already gone, and unsigned software not far behind.
by IAmBroom | 2025-10-27 15:11:40+00:00
People care when they are personally and noticeably harmed. And the court system provides for redress, when laws are broken. Very imperfectly, but it is there.

A substantial portion of that 2/3 of the law is never enforced because it's easier to just go ahead and obey, than to fend off class action lawsuits.

Another portion is actually irrelevant. The safety of my next airplane trip is not actually affected by how many barefoot people walk over a threshold.
by bonoboTP | 2025-10-27 15:12:10+00:00
I just remembered this video https://youtu.be/7vWSi44ZTSw and it seemed like a chill place with nerds having fun making something. (Actually they were still DMA at this time, not Rockstar).

And as for the achievement, the product turned into a franchise with the biggest entertainment products ever made (GTA 5/6).