MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thadt | 2025-10-16 20:21:26+00:00
Starts reading: "fantastic, this is what we've been needing! But... where is code signing?"

> One problem that WAICT doesn’t solve is that of provenance: where did the code the user is running come from, precisely?

> ...

> The folks at the Freedom of Press Foundation (FPF) have built a solution to this, called WEBCAT. ... Users with the WEBCAT plugin can...

A plugin. Sigh.

Fancy, deep transparency logs that track every asset bundle deployed are good. I like logging - this is very cool. But this is not the first thing we need.

The first thing we need, is to be able to host a public signing key somewhere that browsers can get and automatically signature verify the root hash served up in that integrity manifest. Then point a tiny boring transparency log at _that_. That's the thing I really, really care about for non-equivocation. That's the piece that lets me host my site on Cloudflare pages (or Vercel, or Fly.io, or Joe's Quick and Dirty Hosting) that ensures the software being run in my client's browser is the software I signed.

This is the pivotal thing. It needs to live in the browser. We can't leave this to a plugin.
by inglor_cz | 2025-10-16 20:21:26+00:00
You also vote so often on public topics that it takes the sting out of politics.

In a standard country, you have only one chance in 4 or 5 years to change your politicians and then basically have to put up with everything the winners come up with, checks and balances notwithstanding. And the candidates are chasing enormous power.

In CH, the threat of a hostile referendum is always hanging over the heads of your politicians. Their position of power over their voters is much weaker than elsewhere.

I envy you your system. I wish we adopted it in 1990 after the Velvet Revolution. By now, our people would have learnt how to use it and would tame the excesses of the first years.

"We are simply in a geographic region that has always been economically active."

So is Iraq (since Antiquity) or South Africa (since the Age of Sail).
by telotortium | 2025-10-16 20:21:29+00:00
That’s true enough, but at that time whites were 90% of the US population, so there was arguably enough wealth then, definitely enough wealth these days, to extend entry-level jobs to the remaining 10%. When 40% or more of your population is descended from post-1965 immigrants, the competition for good jobs goes up a lot in most industries, unless enough economic growth makes up for it - and even with growth, housing scarcity is almost always an issue.
by wbolt | 2025-10-16 20:22:16+00:00
This is interesting and may reveal additional properties of certain class of CAs.

Yet, as some comments already stated what you do is basically study a subclass of multi-state 2D CAs where specific states from the finite state set have a specific meaning associated.

In general a CA is defined as a dynamical system governed by a local rule operating on the neighborhood configuration and yielding a new state. State set is typically finite. But the actual structure of the states can be anything you like. A valid state can be a tuple of a form (visible state, number of neighbors, sum of neighbors degrees, …). As the maximum neighborhood size is finite and the visible cell states are finite - there is a finite number of such tuples which constitute the state set on which a CA can operate.

Summing up - you are studying CAs in which your multi-state setup has some implied meaning. Still cool and interesting.
by joshstrange | 2025-10-16 20:22:23+00:00
I work for a POS company, I can assure you it's the restaurants doing this. They often have different menus with different prices for UberEats/Doordash/etc. One abstraction company I've worked with (You push your menu to them and they push it out to multiple providers then route the orders back to you), even provides tools to be able to increase all your menu items by a set % rounding to the nearest 5/10/25-cents.

The UberEats/Doordashes/etc of the world all charge pretty high fees so this is one way the restaurants can recoup some of that.

Also, I spend way too much time pricing out Doordash vs Official App (normally using Doordash for delivery) vs Pickup just to see what the spread is.
by Worldblender | 2025-10-16 20:22:28+00:00
Yeah, you really got projects mixed up. It was Replicant, the attempt at creating a libre Android distro, that got stalled. Stalled due to being unable to work around the nonfree device firmware and binary blobs found in today's smartphone models.

In contrast, Librephone has only been aannounced this week, and it attempts to reverse engineer stuff related to device firmware and binary blobs. It's not the same as creating another Android distro, and any usable results won't be tied to Android, so they for example can be used to give better support for mobile non-Android Linux efforts.
by yabones | 2025-10-16 20:22:30+00:00
It's not inherently an American thing, it's the result of several mid-century zoning and urban design decisions.

I used to live in a 1920s era "streetcar suburb" neighbourhood. I lived on the third floor, and the ground level was a full (but small) grocery store. I never spent more than ~$50 at a time on groceries because I only bought for a couple days at a time.

The same decisions and laws that created the current system can be changed to take us back to the "norm" in the rest of the world.
by JohnnyBrevo | 2025-10-16 20:22:30+00:00
TL;DR: PPP adjusts prices across currencies; this metric converts a fixed essentials basket into hours of local work. Formula: Hours = Monthly essentials basket price (local) ÷ Typical local hourly wage. Two countries can have similar PPP price levels, but if wages differ, the hours required can be very different. This is an affordability / effort measure, not a price-level measure. It’s closer to the classic “hours of work to buy X,” except the “X” is a core monthly basket (rent + utilities + basic food + transport + essentials). Currency-agnostic, distribution-sensitive, and directly relatable to workers’ time.
by ok_dad | 2025-10-16 20:22:30+00:00
So we need a car that drives around and makes hamburgers on-demand, drives to your home while it's being prepared, and delivers it hot and fresh to your door with a smaller bot.

To be clear, we do not need this, and I am being sarcastic. However, if a VC wants to fund me to do this, I'll try my best in the hours between my use of the startup's office sim-rig and the office wood workshop.
by dfxm12 | 2025-10-16 20:22:59+00:00
For anyone who doesn't know, the literal words are from a book, but its meaning is metaphorical and isn't limited to boots. The point is still that it's expensive to be poor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory

Just taking a second to think about this, since we're in the context of groceries, here's another example: the bigger box of cereal will be cheaper per pound and last longer, but you have to pay more up front for it. Another example closer to the boots metaphor is comparing the longevity of cheap, used cars vs new cars.

Even outside of consumer goods, poor people are not able to hire accounts to find, um, ways to minimize your tax bill, or have the money for investments or even savings etc. Even middle class people who may be able to afford a mortgage that is less than their rent might take a while to save up for a down payment (and hopefully the housing market hasn't gotten too much worse in the mean time).
by asdff | 2025-10-16 20:23:19+00:00
They have deployed some of these in LA by other companies e.g. Coco robotics. Really ridiculous offering imo. It moves slower than walking speed. Even slower when you factor in all the unnavigable obstacles they run into like upturned sidewalks, debris in the sidewalk, homeless encampments, etc. There are of course videos online of them being vandalized or broken into. Videos of them crossing the road like a game of Frogger. What is more is that they are actually controlled by a person vs actually being some automated solution. And then they have to wait there on the sidewalk until the customer comes and picks up the food. They can't manage going into buildings of course.

I can't imagine getting food delivered from only a half mile away in 30+ mins but that's the offering I guess. Not sure why so many people these days are tolerating soggy cold food sold to them at a markup.

This video was pretty ironic: waymo crashing into one of these crossing the sidewalk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bit1OjJBB0Y
by lholden | 2025-10-16 20:23:22+00:00
I didn't actually buy anything new for my transition back to Linux. I have a gaming system that had traditionally been running windows. It's a powerful system, but has always been a "toy" running Windows for playing games. Last year I moved it to Linux and have been incredibly happy with the move.

These days I am also now working from home full time, so it kinda hit me. "Why the hell am I trying to work from this MacBook when I have my really great gaming desktop that runs Linux now?" Moved my work over and have been incredibly happy.

I'll have to give the Fedora Asahi Remix a go on my MacBook Pro though. That's a great idea!
by xp84 | 2025-10-16 20:23:46+00:00
> the data flows required for it are probably more complex than in other countries due to the fragmented nature of the US government

I'd also add the color that one of the main reasons for that complexity is political itself: In our zero-trust zero-confidence in government world today, even the notion of two .gov entities sharing data freely with one another terrifies people on any side of the political spectrum. Leftists freak out that say, their HUD application data could end up with ICE and allow a criminal immigrant who lives with them to get deported, while rightists freak out about their financials being shared with IRS to allow IRS to guarantee all taxes owed are paid.
by teaearlgraycold | 2025-10-16 20:23:57+00:00
Any time I need to explicitly give a lifetime in a struct I use an Rc or some other container. I’ve been using rust casually for years and every time I try to appease the compiler with lifetimes I realize it’s not worth my time. If someone has a very ELI5 resource that will make me understand when and why to do this I’d appreciate it.

IMO this is something that should just be handled by extra runtime code or a magically smarter compiler. Lifetime management feels like something that matters in a microcontroller or hyper-optimized setting, but never when I’m executing code on Apple Silicon for a random application. And yet the language makes simple GC ergonomically painful. I love the language but don’t really need all of that performance. I would gladly take a 1% hit to increment reference counts.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-10-16 20:24:32+00:00
The US has already experimented with the theory that nobody wants to live in a dense city: urban sprawl is ubiquitous and also why all of our cities have the same problems.

It would be nice to have other options more like the dense cities in other parts of the world that Americans vacation to because they are far more pleasant to be in.

One single east asian style metropolis in the US would be nice.
by libraryofbabel | 2025-10-16 20:24:37+00:00
This is the classic blog post, by Thorsten Ball, from way back in the AI Stone Age (April this year): https://ampcode.com/how-to-build-an-agent

It uses Go, which is more verbose than Python would be, so he takes 300 lines to do it. Also, his edit_file tool could be a lot simpler (I just make my minimal agent "edit" files by overwriting the entire existing file).

I keep meaning to write a similar blog post with Python, as I think it makes it even clearer how simple the stripped-down essence of a coding agent can be. There is magic, but it all lives in the LLM, not the agent software.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-10-16 20:24:53+00:00
There is a social meme going around about Mississippi being wealthier than Bordeaux, France [1] that relates to the “Mississippi Question" (the question is whether a country is poorer than Mississippi, which is used as a benchmark for low income and wealth within the U.S). Broadly speaking, it speaks to GDP and economic numbers being poor metrics for tracking happiness and quality of life [2] [3] [4]. Mississippi GDP per capita is higher than Spain, Italy, the UK, and France; where would you rather live as a human?

Edit: I do like that this uses time as a measure versus fiat; fiat can be gamed, time consumed to meet a need cannot.

[1] https://www.threads.com/@sarahbesingrand/post/DJGCx47sqPI/th...

[2] https://mises.org/mises-wire/britain-france-and-spain-poorer...

[3] https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/poorest-us-state-rivals-ge...

[4] https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/mississippi
by happytoexplain | 2025-10-16 20:24:53+00:00
"Free speech absolutism" was always applied just as vigorously - more so even! - to people "inciting violence" to a greater degree than in this example (they defended much more explicit glorification of violence and hatred than in this example, and even outright inciting of violence, as you call it, which this is obviously not an example of).

The stance flipped polarity utterly.
by whatevertrevor | 2025-10-16 20:25:13+00:00
The GP comment is talking about active ventilation though, through an ERV/HRV system. Also the article states this:

> The lifetime of these compounds indoors can be extended via partitioning to the surface reservoir as modulated by ACR. Higher ACR, which may be achieved by opening windows or through mechanical ventilation, leads to shorter t_half_surf because once indoor compounds partition from the surface reservoir to the gas phase as controlled by gas diffusion across the boundary layer, they would be removed from indoor air more quickly before repartitioning to the surface reservoir.

So they do state active ventilation can help, as you reduce the vapor pressure of VOCs allowing them to partition back into the gaseous env, where they can be promptly ejected. How much exactly is hard to ascertain from their graph since I don't have the exact data they used in the plots. But from squinting at it, it seems 1 OOM change in ACR gives you close to 1 OOM change in the VOC half life, which seems substantial to me.

So adding an active ventilation system might be a good idea for this particular concern. Of course it will add to your energy bill.
by Lammy | 2025-10-16 20:25:23+00:00
> That question took me into the guts of the ZIP format, where I learned there’s a tiny index at the end that points to everything else.

Tangential, but any Free Software that uses `shared-mime-info` to identify files (any of your GNOMEs, KDEs, etc) are unable to correctly identify Zip files by their EOCD due to lack of accepted syntax for defining search patterns based on negative file offsets. Please show your support on this Issue if you would also like to see this resolved: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xdg/shared-mime-info/-/issues... (linking to my own comment, so no this is not brigading)

Anything using `file(1)` does not have this problem: https://github.com/file/file/blob/280e121/magic/Magdir/zip#L...
by titzer | 2025-10-16 20:25:24+00:00
While not generally a bad idea, I find it amusing that they are reinventing shared libraries where the code format is...English. So the obvious next step is "precompiling" skills to a form that is better for Claude internally.

...which would be great if the (likely binary) format of that was used internally, but something tells me an architectural screwup will lead to leaking the binaries and we'll have a dependency on a dumb inscrutable binary format to carry forward...
by wbolt | 2025-10-16 20:25:53+00:00
Actually most of CA simulations are done on torus which is referred to as periodic boundary conditions in the literature. Alternatively you can also have null (or fixed) boundaries or reflective ones. If the initial configuration has compact support (finite number of non-null states) and the CA keeps null-neighborhoods as null in the next step, you can simulate infinite grids… but not many people bother to do it. Many many papers use finite grids on torus.
by joshstrange | 2025-10-16 20:25:54+00:00
Also, Doordash does not have "zero fees" for orders when you pay for DashPass, they have "reduced" fees. I do absolutely hate the practice of "Taxes & Fees" being a line item and only when you click into it do you see that the taxes are minimal and most of that is the platform fees.

I'm not sure how UberEats/etc handle it but it's absolutely crazy how much of a markup there is to order through Doordash vs going to pick it up when you factor in Restaurant Upcharge + Doordash Fees + Tip. It's easy to have an $8 item suddenly cost $20 or more total out-of-pocket when all is said and done.
by dpark | 2025-10-16 20:26:19+00:00
> The critical test isn't that safety has been demonstrated, but that potential risks (known or unknown) have been disclosed and understood.

Yes and no. For some things it doesn’t matter if the risk is understood. You can drive yourself to a boiling hot spring, put on your scuba gear, and dive in, killing yourself horribly. I cannot take you to the same hot spring, give you scuba gear, and let you jump in. It doesn’t matter if you sign the waivers saying it will probably kill you. The risk is too high and I will still be criminally liable for exposing you to this risk.

In the case of a completely untested medicine, the risk is unknown. It could be the cure for cancer. It could be a placebo. It could melt your skin off. There is no way to even attempt to explain the risk because the danger is unknown. You can’t go in front of a city and argue that the patient knew the risks, because you don’t know the risks.

> And yet I am not allowed to make my own medicine

I’m not sure what that means. I’m pretty sure you can mix up bleach and ammonia in your kitchen and drink it if you want hoping it cures Covid. You can make whatever “medicines” you want so long as they don’t involve controlled substances.

If you mean you can’t pay someone else to manufacture untested medications for you, yeah, probably not. Because that someone else becomes criminally liable for the stupidity they facilitate.

> I am saying it shouldn't be that way.

I’m not sure the current rules are that bad. I’d take this over scammers being legally able to sell poison as medicine so long as they can get the buyers to sign a document saying they know it’s poison. “The FDA makes me get you to sign this. Wink wink.”
by dzink | 2025-10-16 20:26:21+00:00
I think it has to do with the Brain’s favorite sources of dopamine. If you steer clear of the hedonistic approaches and focus on finding constructive ways to get your dopamine, those constructive ways may give you a living you enjoy. Physics, math, trading, coding, writing are all self-feedback fields you can iterate on in your own to get as good as you want to be. The fact that you don’t depend on others to make progress can give you infinite dopamine rewards and fuel more desire to work. The key is finding your Brain’s most constructive sources of dopamine and see how much you can feed it.
by tgtweak | 2025-10-16 20:26:53+00:00
At term (and not even far term) - LLMs will be able to churn up their own "skills" using their sandbox code environments - and possibly recycle them through context on a per-user basis.

While I like the flexibility of deploying your own skills to claude for use org-wide, this really feels like what MCP should be for that use case, or what built-in analysis sandbox should be.

We haven't even gone mainstream with MCP and there are already 10 stand-ins doing roughly the same thing with a different twist.

I would have honestly preferred they called this embedded MCP instead of 'skills'.
by whatevertrevor | 2025-10-16 20:27:05+00:00
If the porous surfaces are saturated then you'll basically be maximizing the vapor pressure of these gases in the air you breathe. Check out my sibling comment, extrapolating just from the data in the article an active ventilation system should help.

EDIT: And yes, charcoal filters aren't as effective if they're not part of your critical airflow/ventilation path. :D
by trenchpilgrim | 2025-10-16 20:27:11+00:00
They both probably have licenses; Intel stated in 2017 they intended to require licenses for emulators: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tiriasresearch/2017/06/16/intel...

Presumably Apple and Mocrosoft both have counter-leverage of requiring app developers to ship native binaries at some point in the future.
by jaymzcampbell | 2025-10-16 20:27:26+00:00
Some of this has been mentioned so far but from my side I'd say the 5 minute timer yet very complex scenario is something that sets the "candidate" up to fail immediately, certainly if they're typing all this out. You're lulled into trying to cover the big picture but needing sufficient detail (it's not clear how low to go) to make sense. Having a multi-step process where it's progressively more low level as you drill in would be great. When we do interviews we tend to do very high level boxes then drill into increasing detail covering edge cases. This is hard to do in a one shot response.
by righthand | 2025-10-16 20:27:46+00:00
One thing you will be up against is this mind set that TurboTax is saving you money. One way to dismantle this cognitive dissonance is to compliment your user with the option of choice. Even if the choice is obvious positioning yourself this way empowers your target user to make the right one:

Freefile helps ensure you keep your entire refund unlike TurboTax and other filing services which takes money from your refund. This tax season the choice is yours.
by ok_dad | 2025-10-16 20:28:01+00:00
Yep, this cannot be called anything less than MURDER today, for sure.

I was literally a Naval Officer on a ship doing counter drug operations about 10-15 years ago, and it was made very clear to us at the time that we were not to use weapons unless fired upon. The only exception was trained sharpshooters from the Coast Guard who were allowed to shoot outboard motors, though they were extremely careful about not harming the people on the boats. We'd "arrest" them (the Coast Guard would) and then turn them over to one of several partner countries. Once we captured the same person twice in one deployment. Today, I am not proud of what we did back then, as I am sure we caused more harm than good and spent more resources than was worth it to capture those drugs.

To be PERFECTLY CLEAR: we RARELY found fishing boats that had drugs on them, or who were even supporting drug operations. The fact that several fishing boats have been hit now makes it CLEAR to me FROM EXPERIENCE that we've MURDERED INNOCENT FISHERMEN because I KNOW that there is ZERO POSSIBILITY that all of these guys were a threat in any way. AT MOST these fishermen would refuel a drug boat, and I don't think that's worthy of death. Furthermore, those people usually were forced to do these jobs under threat from the gangs in their towns against their families, so killing these folks makes even less sense because they aren't the actual dangerous people who are running the narco-gangs.

It's a FUCKING SHAME what this country is doing to those people now and I am ASHAMED of having "served in the military" when in reality I was obviously just a tool for a fucked up regime that has finally gone mask-off.
by pixelmelt | 2025-10-16 20:28:24+00:00
OCR would likely work, however I would need to render everything out with a browser and do (probably) more processing. I also wanted a way to preserve text styling exactly as the web viewer shows it, not sure if OCR supports detecting text alignment.

Also I've released the tool and a post about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45610226
by blhack | 2025-10-16 20:28:42+00:00
These are all over the place in Tempe, AZ. I see them cruising through my neighborhood all the time.

The funny thing is that there is usually a guy on an ebike following right behind, and he's usually just decked out in sortof tactical-ish gear. Full mask, head to toe in all black. I feel bad for whoever it is in the summer, because it gets really hot here.

Very interesting to see.