MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by NotPractical | 2025-10-14 16:10:30+00:00
> 4chan does provide access to people in the UK

That's the default when you host an app on the world wide web, though. Regardless of how big of a burden it is for 4chan (I would think it's as simple as flipping a switch in some control panel blocking UK access?), it still does compel the US-based company with no commercial presence in the UK to consider complex international law and to make changes to their US-based web app in response to a foreign jurisdiction's regulations, which feels wrong to me.

This is tangential to whether it affects "free speech" outside the UK, though, and I'm inclined to agree that it doesn't, but I guess it depends on how you define free speech. If 4chan's web app itself is considered speech, and not just the content that's posted there, maybe. But I think free speech advocates are a lot more concerned with the content.
by Herring | 2025-10-14 16:11:02+00:00
Look, I like liberals, but they're way too blind about living in the same house with Nazis. Immigration is Trump's best polling issue for a reason. https://www.natesilver.net/p/trump-approval-ratings-nate-sil...

Trump won the popular vote. I'd love to just blame a couple oligarchs, but there are a LOT of very normal-looking Americans who really like what is going on with ICE and China. And they're willing to pay higher prices for it.

It's a red state zero-sum mentality, eg they don't want healthcare just because some black/female/trans person might benefit. Yes that's why they're so poor. Yes it applies to food prices. No they won't ever change. Yes they're trying to turn the whole country into one big red state or even a mafia state like Russia. In the long run (10-20 years) I'd say it's 80-20 they'll succeed.
by dh2022 | 2025-10-14 16:11:23+00:00
Can you share some details about AI Debt Financing? In particular, who supplies the cash? I am thinking that commercial banks would not be able to supply all of this cash because of post-2008 regulations. Commercial banks may supply some cash but not all.

If debt is supplied by some pension funds or some sovereign wealth then the real economy would not be affected as much...
by motorest | 2025-10-14 16:11:48+00:00
> Current state-of-the-art models are, in my experience, very good at writing boilerplate code or very simple architecture especially in projects or frameworks where there are extremely well-known opinionated patterns (MVC especially).

Yes, kind of. What you downplay as "extremely well-known opinionated patterns" actually means standard design patterns that are well established and tried-and-true. You know, what competent engineers do.

There's even a basic technique which consists of prompting agents to refactor code to clean it up to comply with best practices, as this helps agents evaluate your project as it lines them up with known patterns.

> What they are genuinely impressive at is parsing through large amounts of information to find something (eg: in a codebase, or in stack traces, or in logs).

Yes, they are. It helps if a project is well structured, clean, and follow best practices. Messy projects that are inconsistent and evolve as big balls of mud can and do judge LLMs to output garbage based on the garbage that was inputted. Once, while working on a particularly bad project, I noticed GPT4.1 wasn't even managing to put together consistent variable names for domain models.

> But this hype machine of 'agents creating entire codebases' is surely just smoke and mirrors - at least for now.

This really depends on what are your expectations. A glass half full perspective clearly points you to the fact that yes agents can and do create entire codebases. I know this to be a fact because I did it already just for shits and giggles. A glass half empty perspective however will lead people to nitpick their way into asserting agents are useless at creating code because they once prompted something to create a Twitter code and it failed to set the right shade of blue. YMMV and what you get out is proportional to the effort you put in.
by kakacik | 2025-10-14 16:11:53+00:00
The most addicted family-as-a-whole to the screens I know of live literally 100m from each other (3 generations). Suffice to say this is far from their only addiction. What you describe is certainly true for some people, but I am having hard time believing this is majority. I live long term far away from family and an occasional whatsapp video call is covering our digital meeting needs.

Most people are simply too weak mentally to resist various self-forming addictions and don't care about these topics at all.
by jasonthorsness | 2025-10-14 16:12:14+00:00
It’s not the betting, it’s the business machine that delivers the betting. This looks the same for any business that makes most of its money only through exploiting some human vulnerability whether it’s social media; shorts, gambling, nicotine, alcohol. Legislation needs to target the industrialization of the delivery not the act itself.

I think perhaps removing this from mobile devices would address some of the problem. Increasing effort required to participate (when someone might already want to quit) seems like it might work. It could be opt-in: “disallow gambling apps from my phone” setting that takes 10 days to unset.
by dayvster | 2025-10-14 16:12:34+00:00
Author of the article and owner of the site here.

Google changes the amount and placement of the ads depending what "ad market" you are from so US and other similar countries might experience more ad placements than lower ad market countries.

I tried spinning it down to basically minimal ads in adsense settings and it's still quite a lot.

I strongly encourage the use of adblockers or pi-hole even on my site and see no problem with using them on my site.

The income from adsense just about covers the hosting bills in a year so far, I'm currently exploring alternative methods of monetization that would provide more value to the readers.
by omnicognate | 2025-10-14 16:13:08+00:00
Yeah, I've seen this "for reference only" wording in many places, often used as a sort of disclaimer on stuff that could be wrong, but I have absolutely no idea what it means in that context. To me "reference" implies comprehensive, high quality information that I can refer to when I need to know some obscure detail of something.

Is there some legal context in which this phrase has a specific meaning, perhaps?
by hasante | 2025-10-14 16:13:16+00:00
The database is completely opensource and is technically backed by Pebble golang - which is opensource.

There are no changes to the underlying core, i simply make it easy to use operationally, along with other chat centric demands in the AI age.

e.g Backups, Retention, Scaling it up etc.

So there is no "Vendor lock-in" - and i plan to opensource everything.

I dont even feel i own the idea - its pretty out there, am just bringing eyes towards it.
by truelson | 2025-10-14 16:13:51+00:00
Don't use P/E as an estimate of a bubble... profits often mean revert.

Use something closer to market value to GDP (with some adjustments). That is a much better estimate. John Hussman has imo the best of such metrics. Here's his thoughts from August: https://www.hussmanfunds.com/comment/mc250814/

And this image says a lot: https://www.hussmanfunds.com/wp-content/uploads/comment/mc25...

Yes. A lot now depends on when "growth" stops. But GDP is very hard to grow at an sustained high rate justifying higher valuations. Even through industrial revolutions, assembly lines, transistors, and the internet.
by alexpotato | 2025-10-14 16:13:54+00:00
It's amazing how much of "inter organization information flow" still happens over PDFs and/or just FTP'ing files around.

A couple jobs ago at a hedged fund, I owned the system that would take financial data from counterparties, process it and send it to internal teams for reconciliation etc.

The spectrum went from "receive updates via SWIFT (as in financial) protocol" to "small oil trading shop sending us PDFs that are different every month". As you can imagine, the time and effort to process those PDFs occasionally exceeded the revenue from the entire transaction with that counterparty.

As others have pointed out: yes, the overall thrust of the industry is to get to something standardized but 100% adoption will probably never happen.

I write more about the FTP side of things in the Twitter thread below: https://x.com/alexpotato/status/1809579426687983657
by OkayPhysicist | 2025-10-14 16:14:18+00:00
The felony murder rule completely sidesteps this. For felony murder, all the prosecution needs to establish is 1) you committed a listed felony (arson is included) and 2) someone died because of your actions.

The textbook example is running someone over while fleeing the scene of a robbery. You didn't have mens rea for murder, the crime you intended to commit was robbery. But you chose to commit a felony, and someone did die because of it. Not only that, it's potentially capital murder, because it was for financial gain (Newsom put a moratorium on felony murder death sentences, so that's not a thing at the moment).
by c-hendricks | 2025-10-14 16:15:01+00:00
> KDE looks different enough to windows in its default

Uhhhh it does?

https://kde.org/content/plasma-desktop/plasma-launcher.png

https://laptopmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/win10-sta...

https://pointieststick.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/hebrew...

https://platform.theverge.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/cho...

I like KDE a lot, and yes you can configure it to look and act just abut any way you like, but it's default definitely has a lot in common with Windows.
by baerrie | 2025-10-14 16:15:14+00:00
We have life-saving allergy treatments that also can target digestive issues that we did not 5 years ago. We have vastly expanded research into chronic illnesses thanks to long covid putting viral fatigue syndrome on the map. Autism diagnosis has risen because research has expanded drastically. There have been major improvements because of existing systems, they do not require entire dismantling
by chimprich | 2025-10-14 16:15:24+00:00
RFK is a crackpot, and just because he's got someone to write it to sound plausible, it doesn't mean it is plausible. It's incredibly irresponsible to promote his pet theories over scientific orthodoxy.

Here's a commentary from someone who does know what he's talking about. https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/acetaminophen-and-...
by notatoad | 2025-10-14 16:16:14+00:00
from what i can tell, the one-shot thing only works on youtube.

you might produce something that looks usable at first, but the actual application functionality will be significantly broken in most ways. it maybe works enough to do a demo for your video, but it won't work enough to actually distribute to end-users. and of course, as you say, it's not testable or maintainable in any way, so fixing what's broken is a bigger project than just writing it properly in the first place.
by guywithahat | 2025-10-14 16:16:17+00:00
Not only that, but science was largely a privately-funded industry until a few decades ago, and many would argue governments do a bad job of funding science because a lot of nonsense gets wrapped up in it. It's frustrating because people will whole-heartedly claim science research needs more funding, and then hand the funding over to John Money so he can publish what happens when you sexually abuse children (spoiler: they committed suicide).

I don't think a lot of the people defending government backed research understand everything they're defending
by prewett | 2025-10-14 16:16:32+00:00
I like having a dividend. A company like NVDA forces shareholder returns to the whim of the market price, but dividends stabilize things because the stock is actually tangibly worth something. It also forces a certain discipline in the company, since shareholders don't like dividends getting cut. It also limits empire-building, di-worsification, and "good ideas" that have questionable ROI.
by varunneal | 2025-10-14 16:16:35+00:00
I think it's good to bring up Bernstein & Newhouse as well as Yuchen Jin, Jiacheng You and the other speedrunners who helped iterate on Muon. But I think it's very fair to call Keller Jordan the main author of Muon of its current form. I'm also in the speedrunning community though maybe not as long as you have
by ndiddy | 2025-10-14 16:16:45+00:00
Here: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/09/20/us/pentagon-p...

The most draconian new rule is that it bars the press from reporting any information unless they get it approved for public release by an appropriate authorizing official. This would basically turn the press into a PR mouthpiece for the Dept of War.
by dijit | 2025-10-14 16:17:03+00:00
> E) (I believe) don't enable E2EE with more than one device

my response was:

> E) Neither does Signal/Whatsapp.

The thread of the "E" topic is relevant here, i'm not claiming that Signal/Whatsapp support (or do not support) encryption for group chats.

Sorry that it wasn't clear, I thought referring to them directly by letter would make it easier to differentiate.
by quapster | 2025-10-14 16:17:15+00:00
Interesting point about Cranelift! I've been following its development for a while, and it seems like there's always something new popping up. That connection with e-graphs adds a neat layer of complexity—it’s kinda wild to think about how optimization strategies can vary so much yet still be rooted in similar ideas.

I wonder if there's a place for copy-and-patch within Cranelift at some level, maybe for specific sequences or operations? I had a similar experience trying to streamline some code generation tasks and found that even small optimizations could lead to surprisingly big performance gains.

I think it's cool how different teams tackle the same challenges from different angles—like how CPython's JIT works, for instance. It really makes you appreciate the depth of creativity in the community. Do you think there are other JITs out there that are using these techniques in ways we haven’t seen yet? Or maybe there are trade-offs between speed and optimization that some projects have to weigh heavier than others?
by rhynolite | 2025-10-14 16:17:54+00:00
FWIW, Wireshark 4.6.0 ships with `sharkd`, which encapsulates all the EPAN dissectors into a simple to use server that accepts JSON-RPC requests.

It is quite easy to write specialized performance tools on top of `sharkd`, and since it has the entire power of the EPAN (including statistics, charts etc.), using `sharkd` is significantly more effective than reading straight from libpcap.
by kayodelycaon | 2025-10-14 16:18:02+00:00
People aren't robots that think through every single decision. Arson happens frequently and nobody dies. Death is a rare consequence and the arsonist didn't intend to kill someone, it feels like an accident, not murder.

This is how humans work. We work on probability and approximation. We often act based the consequences of our intentions, not the consequences of our actions.

Someone that learns the consequences of their actions, regrets the harm they inflicted, and changes their behavior as a result, is not the same danger to society they were before. In fact society would be better off reintegrating them because they'll tell others not to do the same thing.

I'm not exactly sure where to fit this in, but people change. A society that makes vengeance the only rule, where death is punished with death, regardless of a person's intentions, is an authoritarian nightmare.
by btilly | 2025-10-14 16:18:24+00:00
There are two questions that come up.

1. How wide is the search net dragged?

2. Who can ask for access?

The first shows up in court cases about things like "which phones were near the crime" or "who in the area was talking about forest fires to ChatGPT?" If you sweep the net far enough, everyone can be put under suspicion for something.

A fun example of the second from a few years ago in the New York area was toll records being accessed to prove affairs. While most of us are OK with detectives investigating murders getting access to private information, having to turn it over to our exes is more questionable. (And the more personal the information, the less we are OK with it.)
by wongarsu | 2025-10-14 16:18:30+00:00
Hetzner [1]. Bandwidth is 1 GBit/s. You can also get 10 GBit/s, that's hidden away a bit instead of being mentioned on the order page [2]

1: https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-ex

2: https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/dedicated-server/network/10g-...
by WD-42 | 2025-10-14 16:18:33+00:00
It’s the default because it’s much easier to provide a consistent desktop with gnome compared to KDE. Let’s face it, most quality Linux desktop apps use GTK. Even Firefox uses gtk.

So you can make KDE the default but you’re going to be forced to ship a smattering of gnome/gtk apps anyway with different ui/ux and looks.

On the other hand, you can easily ship a GNOME desktop without even shipping qt libraries at all.
by dehrmann | 2025-10-14 16:18:36+00:00
He wasn't elected, but sometimes (spiritual) protest votes win. If Harris had won and appointed a conventional secretary, it would have been a status quo that people haven't been happy with.

> but the "but before that happens ..." wording is bizarre

Biden was very much a status quo president who didn't do much to fix underlying problems. The result was the protest vote winning again.
by bityard | 2025-10-14 16:18:53+00:00
I loved the KDE 3.x series, it felt like the future to me. It was _way_ ahead of both Windows and Mac at the time in terms of features and power.

KDE 4 was a dud. Too much of a radical make-over instead of iterating on what worked. Ugly. Very crashy. I'm not sure how close KDE 4 came to killing KDE altogether, but it must have been pretty close.

KDE 5 was a vast improvement over 4, going back to what made 3 so good. Earlier releases left a bit to be desired and still had a few stability issues. Later releases were pretty well refined. I switched (back) to KDE at this point, when I switched to Debian 12 (bookworm) at the same time.

KDE 6 is just a continuation of KDE 5, but using Qt 6 under the hood and defaulting to Wayland. It's very solid, fast, and just gets out of your way so you can do real work with it.
by theamk | 2025-10-14 16:19:09+00:00
by "today's engineers", do you mean "2001 engineers"?

That's when sbuild[0], a tool to build deb packages in containers, was created. It was pretty innovative in that it started from clean container every time, and thus would build deb in a reliable way even if user's machine had some funky dependencies installed.

(Note that was schroot containers, docker did not exist back then)

[0] https://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs//main/s/sb...
by DaveZale | 2025-10-14 16:19:11+00:00
oh this has me hooked, not tldr at all

"Here, we formulate and compu- tationally simulate a fundamentally diﬀerent hypothesis based on the nature of morphogenesis as a homeodynamic system working toward anatomical setpoints: that aging is the result of a proto-cognitive dysfunction among the cellular collective, and does not require damage or evolved antagonistic mechanisms in order to occur"
by aeternum | 2025-10-14 16:19:20+00:00
When standard of living increases significantly, inequality often also increases. The economy is not a zero sum game. Having both rising inequality and rising living standards is generally the thing to aim for.

Both parties seem to agree we should build more electric capacity, that does seem like an excellent thing to invest in, why aren't we?

As the cost of material goods decreases, they will become near free. IMO demand for human-produced goods and experiences will increase.
by xpe | 2025-10-14 16:19:23+00:00
Hello. I've taken some time to think about this. I appreciate your explanation, I care about HN, and I'm open to feedback.

> Also, please stop crossing into name-calling and personal attack, as you did here.

I see many of my comments were unkind and unnecessary. I'm sorry, and I will stop. Here are three examples in this thread of where I went wrong, in my own words:

- I was accusatory, mean, and condescending when I wrote "I wonder if you will be intellectually honest if/when I reveal errors, mistakes, oversimplifications, and so on?"

- I did some psychoanalysis (which is unwarranted), such as when I wrote "You are clearly upset and bothered and resorting to rationalization and attacks."

- I accused someone of bad faith when I wrote: "You exaggerated and trivialized. You deflected and moved the goalposts. These are signs you want to win more than discuss in good faith."

I will keep these course corrections in mind.

P.S. I know this isn't a full reply to your comment; I am still processing some parts.
by motorest | 2025-10-14 16:19:24+00:00
> I expect the $500 billion magic machine to be magic. Especially after all the explicit threats to me and my friends livelihoods.

That's a problem you are creating for yourself by believing in magical nonsense.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world is gradually learning how to use the tool to simplify their work, being it helping onboard onto projects, doing ad-hoc code reviews, serving as sparring partners, helping with design work, and yes even creating complete projects from scratch.
by tracker1 | 2025-10-14 16:19:32+00:00
It seems that microchips are a major export, a single industry in a country collapsing can cause a lot of damage. From other mentioned articles, it seems like the company was setup to extract all value to prop up another company... not dissimilar from K-mart and Sears stripped of all value at the end. Now imagine that accounts for say even 5% of GDP and other industries rely on that product as well.

I've been advocating for years that US prescription medications should require dual sourcing and at least 50% domestic production purely for security reasons. You can ramp up from 50% with multiple providers a lot easier than 0.
by mothballed | 2025-10-14 16:19:54+00:00
>South Carolina became the first state to formally secede in December 1860

>At 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861, Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter in South Carolina's Charleston Harbor. Less than 34 hours later, Union forces surrendered. Traditionally, this event has been used to mark the beginning of the Civil War.
by ACCount37 | 2025-10-14 16:20:21+00:00
Humans are dominating the environment by hopelessly outsmarting everything in it. Applied intelligence is extremely powerful.

Humans, however, are not immune to being hopelessly outsmarted themselves.

And what are we doing with AI now? We're trying to build systems that can do what human intelligence does - but cheaper, faster and more scalable. Multiple frontier labs have "AGI" - a complete system that matches or exceeds human performance in any given domain - as an explicitly stated goal. And the capabilities of the frontier systems keep advancing.

If AGI actually lands, it's already going to be a disruption of everything. Already a "humankind may render itself irrelevant" kind of situation. But at the very limit - if ASI follows?

Don't think "a very smart human". Think "Manhattan Project and CIA and Berkshire Hathaway, combined, raised to a level of competence you didn't think possible, and working 50 times faster than human institutions could". If an ASI wants power, it will get power. Whatever an ASI wants to happen will happen.

And if humanity isn't a part of what it wants? 10 digit death toll.
by dijit | 2025-10-14 16:20:21+00:00
I thought it worked the same as Whatsapp, whereby there's a sort of backdoor connection to the app running on your phone to send messages.

However, after doing a smidge more research it seems like somehow Signal is sharing it's key with the desktop app and only syncing history of messages directly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15596980

I'm not 100% sure how it works as the server is fake-open-source and not actual open-source.