MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pabs3 | 2025-11-18 02:07:20+00:00
Debian manages to build Chromium, Firefox, and LLVM on servers of multiple architectures, including quite slow riscv64 machines, without any network access to the builds for any architecture.

https://buildd.debian.org/status/package.php?p=firefox-esr

See Bootstrappable Builds for starting from almost nothing, so far only GNU Guix and StageX have worked out how to start from the BB work to get a full distro. Should be fairly trivial for other distros too if they cared.

https://bootstrappable.org/ https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2023/the-full-source-bootstrap-bui... https://stagex.tools/
by downsplat | 2025-11-18 02:07:32+00:00
I'm sure there are plenty of problems with the open web, and that Google is not entirely a stranger to them... but removing an ancient language that basically failed to get traction is not one of them. No matter how elegant and advanced a certain class of nostalgic XML programmers find it.

And no, XSLT doesn't have much to do with how much RSS thrives or not. RSS is basically consumed by RSS reader backends, not directly by users on their browser.

One of the web platform's problems, is that it accumulates untold cruft from every failed experiment. The entire XHTML exercise turned out to be an expensive mistake, but we can't remove that because too many pages depend on it, and it ended up in a whole lot of places, including the EPUB definition. But at least XSLT could get removed. Yay for that.
by esseph | 2025-11-18 02:07:33+00:00
Hmmm

Results Overall, 11% of respondents reported purchasing a gun since 1/1/20, 35% for the first time. Among recent purchasers, larger proportions of Democrat, Black, Asian, and Hispanic respondents were new gun owners than Republican or white respondents. Compared to prior owners, odds were 4.5-times higher that new gun owners’ recent purchase was motivated by racial violence and 3.2-times higher for political violence.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11378614/
by defrost | 2025-11-18 02:08:10+00:00
> it's strange that that person would buy a gun precisely to use against their government, right?

IF that was indeed what they said, what they believed, and what they actually did, sure.

You do seem to have fashioned a weak strawman here though.

This thread appears to be about liberals, PoC's, and LGBTQ's buying guns due to a perception of increased threat from Trump supporters, MAGA cos-players, newly empowere Groypers, etc.

Not (that I can read in the article) to use against their government.

So that's a double no to both your artifically posed questions.

Right?
My Professional X Account Was Hacked and X Support Won't Help Me
by Bobdavies | 2025-11-18 02:08:12+00:00
I am a college football coach. I do a lot of recruiting through my professional twitter account - its critical to my job. About a week ago it was hacked and the hacker changed my password as well as the email associated with the account. (Thank goodness that so far they've just been posting Crypto ads). X Support has only sent me automated emails basically saying they can't help me. What can I do?
by nine_k | 2025-11-18 02:08:52+00:00
Can you do an infinite loop in that separate language? Throw an exception? Write to disk? Start processes? Access the Internet?

If not, you can use this language safely inside the config.

If yes, you could as well use the main language of your application, and not introduce an extra dependency.

There is, of course, always a temptation to take awk, or PowerShell, or Ruby, "because it's already installed on the system", which may not be the case on all platforms.
by Aurornis | 2025-11-18 02:10:09+00:00
> A lot of stuff "normal" people do is charm, manipulate, and game social interactions. Except because they are not conscious about it, we give them a pass.

I don’t think that’s a fair comparison to what’s describe in this blog post.

The writer describes taking on different personas and trying different tricks with other people portrayed as subjects of some sort of experiment.

The casual mentions of how they tried some conversational trick and got someone into full on sobbing was particularly striking because there was hardly a mention of concern for the other person. The only discussion was about the trick used to elicit the response.

That is what I do not agree is consistent with normal interactions. Most people would feel some degree of guilt or dirtiness, for lack of a better word, if they used some of these tricks to lure random interactions into a false sense of connection and feigned friendship, especially if for no other reason to experiment on the other person.
by CGamesPlay | 2025-11-18 02:11:12+00:00
Remember that "thought process" is just a metaphor that we use to describe what's happening. Under the hood, the "thought process" is just a response from the LLM that isn't shown to the user. It's not where the LLM's "conscience" or "consciousness" lives; and it's just as much of a bullshit generator as the rest of the reply.

Strange, but I can't say that it's "damning" in any conventional sense of the word.
by elcritch | 2025-11-18 02:12:20+00:00
Definitely true! Probably add Swift to that list as well. Apple has been pushing to use Swift in WebKit in addition to C++.

Actually Nim2 and Swift both use automatic reference counting which is very similar to using C++’s SharedPointer or Rusts RC/ARC. If I couldn’t use Nim I’d go for Swift probably. Rust gives me a headache mostly. However Nim is fully open source and independent.

Though Nim2 does default to RC + Cycle collector memory management mode. You can turn off the cycle collector with mm:arc or atomic reference counting with mm:atomicArc. Perfect for most system applications or embedded!

IMHO, most large Rust project will likely use RC or ARC types or use lots of clone calls. So performance wise it’s not gonna be too different than Nim or Swift or even D really.
by inferiorhuman | 2025-11-18 02:12:38+00:00
Yeah premium stuff feels nice, as it should given the price. In this case "not that much more" is somewhere north of a 50% premium over mid-range models from the leading brands. If you're cross shopping Samsung then the premium is much larger since they're constantly on deep discount due to their well earned reputation.

I paid $1,100 for my Bosch 500 series dishwasher a couple years ago. The current generation looks like it's on sale for as low as $800. Yale Appliance shows Miele dishwashers currently starting at $1,400. With that kind of premium it should feel better. And, yes, the Bosch feels super cheap.

Miele washing machines start at $1,600 about twice what an entry level LG would cost. While I would never buy an LG, they are generally well regarded in terms of actual washing performance.
by mpoteat | 2025-11-18 02:12:49+00:00
This is a LLM directly, purposefully lying, i.e. telling a user something it knows not to be true. This seems like a cut-and-dry Trust & Safety violation to me.

It seems the LLM is given conflicting instructions:

1. Don't reference memory without explicit instructions

2. (but) such memory is inexplicably included in the context, so it will inevitably inform the generation

3. Also, don't divulge the existence of user-context memory

If a LLM is given conflicting instructions, I don't apprehend that its behavior will be trustworthy or safe. Much has been written on this.
by socalgal2 | 2025-11-18 02:14:06+00:00
Plenty of places in the world with an oversupply. Lots of examples in China

China (like the USA) didn't let the market handle it. China built without letting market demand dictate supply. USA did the opposite, didn't builders meet supply. They try, they try all the time to built more, they get stopped by nimbys and over regulation.
by markdown | 2025-11-18 02:14:10+00:00
> I remember being stunned that students would pay over $60k a year to learn about business from someone who'd never worked for or started a business.

Were you stunned that your parents paid lots of money to put you in front of educators from kindergarten to college?

Why would you restrict yourself to learning from one businessman when you can get learn from an educator who has distilled the experiences of hundreds if not thousands of business people?
by Retric | 2025-11-18 02:14:35+00:00
It’s a huge design space. One easy to understand example is a passive sonar underwater drone that stays close enough to the surface to gather sunlight and easily communicate with satellites without also being visible on the surface or making sounds from surface wave action. It can then send high frequency radio signals to satellites which rapidly attenuate through the ocean creating a near perfect stealth system vs subs. The option exists to deploy a string of much deeper sensors via a tether.

Another option is close equivalents to the existing systems dropped from aircraft, though with significantly more stealthy deployment.

Etc etc.
by Aurornis | 2025-11-18 02:15:42+00:00
> This post actually kind of blows my mind.

I suggest re-reading it from some different perspectives. Consider that the narrator may not be entirely reliable. They way they talk about being able to read other people and manipulate them into a sense of openness and connection has some hints of behaviors that are associated with people who view themselves as superior to others and view others as mere targets for their superior intellect to manipulate.

In this case, it’s worth considering that maybe the blog post itself is yet another chapter in their experimentation with manipulating others into a sense of connection, and the text is written in a persuasive way to leave the reader thinking that they have been blessed with some openness and revelation from the author. In other words, it’s crafted in a way to generate some of the same false sense of connection describe in the article, with the stories and claims crafted to target what the target audience wants to hear.

Something to think about when reading it, at least.
by rickstanley | 2025-11-18 02:15:46+00:00
We tried to use LISTEN/NOTIFY for notification purposes, or rather, a queue in which the order mattered (well, kind of, we were aiming for the best scenario where a customer would not perform a specific task in a matter of milliseconds, because we could afford this expectation), in a .NET application using Npgsql.

The listeners were scattered between replicas, so we took advantage of Advisory Locks (https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/explicit-locking.htm...) by choosing a unique key (unique to the data being sent) and before performing any task on the JSON payload, that the notification would send, we would first check the lock and continue the routine.

The NOTIFY routine was triggered after an insert in an Outbox table, so we could replay it if it failed for some reason.

Unfortunately I don't remember the exact reason we didn't use it, but I was bit sceptical for 2 reasons:

- I had a feeling that I was use this feature in a wrong way; and

- I read both the article and comments from this HN entry: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44490510, and my first point felt validated;

but to this day I'm still unsure. Anyway, since it was a complementary system, it didn't hurt to leave it out, we had another background job that would process the outbox table regardless, but I felt it could/would give something closer to "real time" in our system.
by refulgentis | 2025-11-18 02:16:52+00:00
Typical? Of whom?

You might get destroyed for this? Why?

I don’t know what either of those mean in this context, and I used VB6 for a couple years at least and have been programming ObjC and / or Swift since 2006, with some time in Rails over a couple years.

I’m extremely confused by your comment, it’s apparently near verboten in polite company, yet, manages to say nothing other than that while invoking several things of which I’m quite familiar.

If you are destroyed, I anticipate it will be for a quarter baked, horrible, analogy between ObjC/Swift (or is it Ruby/Swift)? and VB6/VB.NET that somehow has something to do with Ruby.
by swhitt | 2025-11-18 02:17:15+00:00
I’m pretty sure this is because they don’t want Gemini saying things like, “based on my stored context from our previous chat, you said you were highly proficient in Alembic.”

It’s hard to get a principled autocomplete system like these to behave consistently. Take a look at Claude’s latest memory-system prompt for how it handles user memory.

https://x.com/kumabwari/status/1986588697245196348
by theultdev | 2025-11-18 02:17:18+00:00
You think he snuck out from secret service and had an off-the-book thanksgiving with a pedo?

I'm saying there's no direct evidence he did and on face value it's ridiculous.

He was meeting the troops and golfing with Tiger Woods and happened to be in the same state Epstein had a house in.

Have any evidence otherwise, or just conspiracy theories?
by bombcar | 2025-11-18 02:17:34+00:00
I try to grab an outside shopping cart to leave the world slightly less chaotic than when I entered; which is all we can do in life, perhaps.

But now and then I find one of the electric ride-a-carts and that’s the reward for all my work; riding the scootypuff jr in to the glorious chords of … the Walmart theme song.
by tomhow | 2025-11-18 02:19:03+00:00
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
by phantasmish | 2025-11-18 02:19:05+00:00
> The writer describes taking on different personas and trying different tricks with other people portrayed as subjects of some sort of experiment.

It’s typically not done quite so intentionally, but this sounds like most folks’ junior high and high school years. Sometimes also college.

I know I totally changed in those years, and it was mostly by noticing what “worked” and leaning into it.
by renegade-otter | 2025-11-18 02:19:12+00:00
Microsoft once pushed an update that started uploading my data to OneDrive. I had no idea until I was kindly informed that my cloud storage was out of space.

At this point I would ALWAYS assume that anything I do on a Windows system is not completely private, and the only true way to make a PC secure from Microsoft is to air-gap it.

Also, this is completely ridiculous.
by sointeresting | 2025-11-18 02:19:24+00:00
It seems like you're unable to follow or understand the thread. Several posts up is this post:

>It is more like if you have to worry about masked goons breaking into your house and trying to kidnap you or your family members then maybe you can't trust the government either.

Referring to agencies such as ICE, I believe. Then the post I replied to said that it's not about trust, it's about effectiveness. Now you're telling me it's not about the government at all, but essentially for general purpose self defense, which still seems hypocritical coming from the gun control crowd. Also I'm not sure what an "artificially posed" question is.
by socalgal2 | 2025-11-18 02:21:15+00:00
I don't know what Linux you're on. On mine I have to actively maintain it. I have to run something `sudo apt update` `sudo apt upgrade` every week or so and then deal with whatever breaks. Conversely, on my Switch and PS5 it does this automatically. I expect the Steam Machine will also update itself automatically. They have an incentive not to break things since it will cost them money to fix all the device they break. Linux on the other hand (not complaining) basically says "not our fault if it breaks". So, I'd prefer the Steam Machine where, I believe, it is their fault if it breaks and they will fix it.
by pdpi | 2025-11-18 02:22:16+00:00
I’d go as far as to say that Good Will Hunting is a pretty good example of writers getting it right. The equivocation and miscommunication isn't a plot device to conjure up conflict from thin air. That sort of avoidant behaviour is a classic malaptive coping mechanism in highly intelligent victim of abuse. Communication with Will fails not because people aren’t willing to speak plainly to him, but because he’s too emotionally bruised and battered to handle that communication, and he’s _way_ too clever for his own good, so he runs circles around the people trying to have those conversations with him. Sean’s successes come from being patient and not letting Will bait him.
Show HN: Discussion of ICT Model – Linking Information, Consciousness and Time
by DmitriiBaturo | 2025-11-18 02:25:00+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been working on a conceptual framework that tries to formalize the relationship between:

– informational states, – their minimal temporal stability (I_fixed), – the rate of informational change (dI/dT), – and the emergence of time, processes, and consciousness-like dynamics.

This is not a final theory, and it’s not metaphysics. It’s an attempt to define a minimal, falsifiable vocabulary for describing how stable patterns persist and evolve in time.

Core ideas:

– I_fixed = any pattern that remains sufficiently stable across time to allow interaction/measurement. – dI/dT = the rate at which such patterns change.

Time is defined as a relational metric of informational change (dI/dT), but the arrow of time does not arise from within the system — it emerges from an external temporal level, a basic temporal background.

The model stays strictly physicalist: it doesn’t require spatial localization of information and doesn’t assume any “Platonic realm.” It simply reformulates what it means for a process to persist long enough to be part of reality.

Why I’m posting here

I’m looking for rigorous critique from physicists, computer scientists, mathematicians, and anyone interested in foundational models. If you see flaws, ambiguities, or missing connections — I’d really appreciate honest feedback.

A full preprint (with equations, phenomenology, and testable criteria) and discussion is here:

https://www.academia.edu/s/8924eff666

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17584782

Thanks in advance to anyone willing to take a look.
by dtgriscom | 2025-11-18 02:25:04+00:00
I have a 30-year-old Frigidaire upright freezer in my basement. I'd been assuming for a while that it's wasting power due to leaked refrigerant or some such, but I borrowed a power logger from work, and whadda ya know: it's actually reasonably efficient.

The thermostat is dying, so I picked up one of those thermostat plugs with a probe on a wire. Gonna keep it as long as I can. (Plus it's the perfect size for its space, and they don't make that size any more.)
by nandomrumber | 2025-11-18 02:25:32+00:00
You make some not entirely unreasonable points that I tend to agree with.

If you don’t know much about a person how do you know they’re a religious zealot white nationalist conservative?

Because of what someone else told you?

Fatherless homes.

That’s how women tend to act when they feel they’ve been slight: straight for the reputation.
by nunez | 2025-11-18 02:25:48+00:00
Dogs and cats have different modalities for intelligence.

Dogs are social animals that have evolved to be human companions a long time ago. This is why they are "trainable" and, therefore, seem more intelligent.

Cats are not; they are extremely good hunters that by and large tolerate humans in exchange for easy access to food and water. You can't really train them, but they will find hiding spots you didn't even know existed and you will NEVER have problems with mice with one around.
by mewpmewp2 | 2025-11-18 02:25:52+00:00
Looking at the definition of manipulation, it occurs to me that manipulation must be a win-lose situation. Otherwise it is persuasion. You could use the same technique, but if it is win win for both it is persuasion, but if you are gaining from their expense it is manipulation. At least according to Wikipedia.

There are also white lies. Are you manipulating children if you are claiming santa exists? Are you manipulating a person if you either omit a truth or do a white lie because you know truth at that moment in time would be worse for their life.
by shoo | 2025-11-18 02:26:09+00:00
> the section about retries doesn't mention correlations. [...] By treating P_{3rdParty}(Failure) as fixed, they're assuming a model in which each each try is completely independent: all the failures are due to background noise. But that's totally wrong, as shown by the existence of big outages like the one they're describing

Yes, that jumped out at me as well. A slightly more sophisticated model could be to assume there are two possible causes of a failed 3rd party call: (a) a transient issue - failure can be masked by retrying, and (b) a serious outage - where retrying is likely to find that the 3rd party dependency is still unavailable.

Our probabilistic model of this 3rd party dependency could then look something like

P(first call failure) = 0.10 P(transient issue | first call failure) = 0.90 P(serious outage | first call failure) = 0.10 P(call failure | transient issue, prior call failure) = 0.10 P(call failure | serious outage, prior call failure) = 0.95

I.e. a failed call is 9x more likely to be caused by a transient issue than a serious outage. If the cause was a transient issue we assume independence between sequential attempts like in the article, but if the failure was caused by a serious outage there's only a 5% chance that each sequential retry attempt will succeed.

In contrast with the math sketched in the article, where retrying a 3rd party call with a 10% failure rate 5 times could suffice for a 99.999% success rate, with the above model of failure modes including a serious outage failure mode producing a string of failures, we'd need to retry 135 times after a first failed call to achieve the same 99.999% success rate.

Your points about overall latency client is willing to wait & retries causing additional load are good, in many systems "135 retry attempts" is impractical and would mean "our overall system has failed and is unavailable".

Anyhow, it's still an interesting article. The meat of the argument and logic about 3rd party deps needing to meet some minimum bar of availability to be included still makes sense, but if our failure model considers failure modes like lengthy outages that can cause correlated failure patterns, that raises the bar for how reliable any given 3rd party dep needs to be even further.
by JuniperMesos | 2025-11-18 02:26:35+00:00
Why should the game end at all? Why shouldn't people continue developing better and better shells that people can use to interact with their computer, or maybe different ones for different use cases? Supply-chain attacks are bad and worth mitigating for any kind of software, not just your shell; but the possibility of such an attack doesn't mean it's inherently unwise to try out new pieces of software. Saving time on your shell history search is good and declaring it unimportant merely because the amount of time saved sounds small, is how we wind up after many iterations with software that is noticeably laggy to the end user. But the real value of new shells I think is the new features you didn't know you would find useful at the time.
by timeon | 2025-11-18 02:26:56+00:00
> IMHO, most large Rust project will likely use RC or ARC types or use lots of clone calls. So performance wise it’s not gonna be too different than Nim or Swift or even D really.

I do not think so. My personal experience is that you can go far in Rust without cloning/Rc/Arc while not opting for unsafe. It is good to have it as default and use Rc/Arc only when (and especially where) needed.