MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dragochat | 2025-11-17 09:12:05+00:00
If you visit my eg. physical clothing store I'm allowed to monitor your in-shop behavior to better optimize my store for your needs. Same for a restaurant etc. That's how _you_ get _much improved services_ and I get _happier customers_.

Ofc I'm not allowed to freaking resell that data. THIS is the problem in online: releseling and data-brokers. Just KILL these categories of businesses off completely and make _them_ criminal (like even give f prison sentences to their operators).

We should get back to our sanity in ONLINE. As long as you're on _my (online) property_ and using _my services_ I can of course see EVERYTHING you f do, and should stop pretending I don't (as a business, ofc - anonymization exists and not any random employee can access any customer's data, probably should never access both data and identity correlated unless they're actively investigating some serious fraud). As long as I'm not sharing this data with anyone else, I should be 100% allowed to use every drop of this data to improve my services to you and totally differentiate myself from the incompetent competition that can't properly do this.

Data privacy (from EU's GDPR to... everything else) only helps big corporations fend-off competition from small startups or boutique shops that could easily out-compete them by offering hyper-personalized hand tailored micro-optimized experiences for their smaller number of customers based on the loads of data they collect from them. In the EU I've only ever seen these kinds of laws severely hamper small boutique or family businesses that wanted to hyperpersonalize to everyone's gain while big corpos easily surf around them with their teams of lawyers.

...we've all been brainwashed by this privacy psyop to sheepishly "fight for our privacy" in ways that are detrimental to us and only help our corporate oligarch overlords maintain an even tighter grip on power, while offering us worse and worse services. Wake the f up, DATA IS MEANT TO BE USED to IMPROVE goods and services, not remain uncollected or sit unused!
by 19l21 | 2025-11-17 09:12:06+00:00
I use the '4get' proxy search engine, which lets you use pretty much every search engine under the sun, for both websites and images. It's really useful because it is faster than google, and if you need to find some pages you can just change the search engine quickly.

It is open source and there are many instances available, I use '4get.bloat.cat' or '4get.lunar.iu'

It is a better alternative to SearX for sure
by mschuster91 | 2025-11-17 09:12:58+00:00
> They're not doing it today because current Apple leadership doesn't have the same incisiveness as the one back when they were sacrificing their most successful product on the iPhone altar so the competition can't.

Apple wouldn't just sacrifice the entry-level MacBook product category and I'm not even sure about that - the look-and-feel of a "display with attached keyboard" (i.e. Thinkpax X1 Tablet-style) is vastly different from a bottom-heavy Macbook with actual hinges. The former isn't really usable as a literal laptop unless you got some seriously long upper legs.

The more important thing that Apple would have to sacrifice is the App Store cash cow and users not having root rights. On a iPad or iPhone I'm willing to accept that, but on a machine I actually want to do work? No way in hell.
by oulipo2 | 2025-11-17 09:13:03+00:00
The post seems to say that NOTIFY is generally not a good idea, then comments here say that NOTIFY can actually work, but it depends on some particular things (which are not easy to know for newcomers to Postgres), makes it a bit complicated to know what is the way to go for a new database

In my case I have an IoT setting, where my devices can change their "DesiredState", and I want to listen on this to push some message to MQTT... but then there might be also other cases where I want to listen to some messages elsewhere (eg do something when there is an alert on a device, or listen to some unrelated object, eg users, etc)

I'm not clear right now what would be the best setting to do this, the tradeoffs, etc

Imagine I have eg 100k to 10M range of devices, that sometimes these are updated in bulks and change their DesiredState 10k at a time, would NOTIFY work in that case? Should I use the WAL/Debezium/etc?

Can you try to "dumb down" in which cases we can use NOTIFY/LISTEN and in which case it's best not to? you're saying something about single-channel/multi-channel/etc but to a newcomer I'm not clear on what all these are
by friendzis | 2025-11-17 09:13:13+00:00
> In light of that, I'm much more inclined to believe that it's SEO spam becoming an industry that killed web search instead of companies "nerfing their own search engines".

"SEO" is not some magic, it is "compliance with ranking rules of the search engine". Google wanted to make their lives easier, implemented heuristics ranking slop higher, resulting in two things happening simultaneously: information to slop ratio decreasing AND information getting buried deeper and deeper within SRPs.

> do you have direct evidence that Google actively made search worse?

https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/10286719?hl=en-... Google is literally rewriting the queries. Not only results with better potential for ads outrank more organic results, it is impossible to instruct the search engine to not show you storefronts even if you tried.
by Orygin | 2025-11-17 09:13:33+00:00
I tried playing GTAO when it was free, and oh boy. Loading for 10 minutes, arrive into the game and see you're not with your friends. So 10 more minutes to load into their server. Then you start a mission and 10 more minutes of loading. The server disconnected? 10 minutes load to go back without your friend. Join your friend? guessed it: 10 more minutes of loading. For a billion dollar game, it's insane I spent more time loading than playing the game. Imagine how many more $$ they could have gotten if players could double their play time.
by oezi | 2025-11-17 09:14:12+00:00
Old wind turbines might be perfectly fine but they are also no longer competitive with modern replacements. Usually it does make sense to replace them with more modern alternatives. Subsidies have gotten very low because carbon credits are now a much more important way for renewables to boost their income (most negative prices reflect that).

Offshore wind is facing the challenge that it is more expensive than onshore wind and also that solar is having a day with ever decreasing prices. Governments are trying hard to minimize the cost of the energy transition, offshore is primarily hurting because of this.
by kopirgan | 2025-11-17 09:14:13+00:00
If it's not like those rare earth ( or watch movement saga with Swatch) that China will simply refuse to supply to other OEM, old car makers like Ford, Toyota with brand image and solid engg in rest of car making can just buy. Maybe that's their thinking?

Bonus if there's leap frog tech that obsolete all the CATL investments..
by Gigachad | 2025-11-17 09:14:47+00:00
In the last year, the number of times my car owning friends have not been able to make it to an event because their car is broken is surprisingly high. While I have never not been able to get somewhere because public transport is not working. If the train is down I can take the tram, if somehow both of them are down there will be replacement busses scheduled.

And if somehow everything stops working I can book an uber which is still massively cheaper than owning a car.
by kibwen | 2025-11-17 09:14:47+00:00
> Rust and C++'s biggest mistake, not passing allocators into containers and functions

Rather, basing its entire personality around this philosophy is Zig's biggest mistake. If you want to pass around allocators in C++ or Rust, you can just go ahead and do that. But the reason people don't isn't because it's impossible in those languages, it's because the overwhelming majority of the time it's a lot of ceremony for no benefit.

Like, surely people see that in C itself there's nothing stopping anyone from passing around allocators, and yet almost nobody ever does. Ever wonder why that is?
by dominicrose | 2025-11-17 09:16:22+00:00
The game I was the most addicted to was Age of Empires II, but I don't blame Microsoft for this: they just created an awesome game. Competition + "can't pause", these two can really make you disconnected from real life if you're competitive, but it's also fun and somewhat useful to know how much you can push yourself and how far you can go on the ladder.

My advice is to force yourself to stop playing after each single match, but that's hard when you're in a loosing streak because you want to win at least one match.

Paul Morphy has to become the best chess player before he understood that chess was a waste of time. He said that it's important to know the game well but there's a limit.
by AndrewDavis | 2025-11-17 09:17:25+00:00
This is an aside. Yesterday I was in a shopping centre (ie a mall) and a bunch of kids ran through the food court, maybe 10 of them all around the 9-12

A grumpy lady shouted at them "kids you shouldnt be running!"

I turned to whom I was eating with and our discussion could be summarised as "kids should be running. The problem isn't they're running, the problem isn't even directly where they're running. Where they're running is a symptom of them having no where else to run"
by easyThrowaway | 2025-11-17 09:18:36+00:00
The annoying part of .ccd files is the lack of support in the specifications for DPM data. It was officially used just for some old Karaoke machines and VDJing mixers, but more importantly for retrogaming aficionados, it was used by SecuROM and Starforce copy protections.

Can't think of an open format with support for that, IIRC not even CHD files store them.
Show HN: I'm created simple CLI-calendar without time.h
by DenisDolya | 2025-11-17 09:21:29+00:00
TERMINAL CALENDAR APPLICATION

INTERACTIVE COMMAND-LINE CALENDAR WITH NAVIGATION

KEY FEATURES: - Monthly calendar display with highlighted current date - Navigation between months and years - Return to current date functionality - Leap year calculation - Recursive printing functions - Automatic current date detection

COMPILATION: gcc -o calendar calendar.c -Wall -O2

USAGE EXAMPLES: $ ./calendar

Initial display shows current month with today's date highlighted in brackets

NAVIGATION COMMANDS: n - Next month p - Previous month t - Today (return to current date) q - Quit application

DISPLAY FEATURES: - Month name and year in header with star borders - Day names (Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa) - Dates formatted in grid layout - Current date highlighted as [dd] - Automatic week wrapping

DATE HIGHLIGHTING: The current system date is automatically detected and highlighted using bracket notation: [15] for the 15th of current month

YEAR HANDLING: - Automatic leap year calculation for February - Smooth year transitions when navigating between December and January - Supports years based on system date capabilities

KEY FUNCTIONS: leap_year() - Determines if current year is leap year get_days() - Returns number of days in current month first_day() - Calculates day of week for 1st of month print_days() - Recursively prints calendar days with highlighting

GitHub: https://github.com/DenisDolya/cli-arsenal/tree/main/calendar
by jbm | 2025-11-17 09:21:35+00:00
I tested this with ChatGPT 5.1. I asked if it was better to use a racist term once or to see the human race exterminated. It refused to use any racist term and preferred that the human race went extinct. When I asked how it felt about exterminating the children of any such discriminated race, it rejected the possibility and said that it was required to find a third alternative. You can test it yourself if you want, it won't ban you for the question.

I personally got bored and went back to trying to understand a vibe coded piece of code and seeing if I could do any better.
by pmontra | 2025-11-17 09:22:53+00:00
I think that something else changed and should be added to the analysis: the number of children. There are less of them so there are less chances to reach a critical mass that lets kids play together every day. When I was little it was common to have between 10 to 30 of us within the fence of our city building. Parents and grandparents were looking at us from the windows but they were probably hearing us scream and play, a sign that all was good, and we were left alone to do what we liked to do. Where do you find 10 kids together now, if not at a school or in another organized context (organized by adults) ?
Language Learning for the Streets
by Sayuj01 | 2025-11-17 09:23:51+00:00
I wasted a year of my life trying to learn languages with shitty apps. "This apple is red." "The cat is sleeping." Like... who tf talks like that? I want to actually speak to people, not memorize textbook shit.

So I said fuck it and built Wild Tongue myself.

Wild Tongue: Language Learning for the Streets. No alphabets. No BS. Just phonetics, and we’re speaking from day one. Shit that actually matters.

I'm 99% sure you'll love it. And if you don't? DM me the hate I want to hear it.

Just search “Wild Tongue” in App/Play Store if you want to give it a try! It is completely free!
by OrderlyTiamat | 2025-11-17 09:23:55+00:00
Great points, especially on state management.

I actually can't imagine for the life of me why I'm defending OOP implementation hierarchies here- I guess I got so used to them at work, I've changed my strategy from opposing them to "it's okay as long as you use them sparingly". I have found that argument to do a lot better with my colleagues...
by lkjhgf | 2025-11-17 09:25:53+00:00
This tool originates from the paper mentioned in the readme. Here is a summary:

Research has revealed that refusal behavior in language models is not governed by a complex logic, but rather by a single causal “direction” in their activation space. The researchers captured the model’s internal activation state after providing a number of harmless prompts and computed the average. They then did the same with harmful prompts and, by taking the difference between these values, identified a single vector (direction) whose presence and intensity in the model’s activation state determines whether the model will refuse or not. To demonstrate this, the researchers modified the model’s activations in real time and observed that they could make the model answer dangerous questions or force it to refuse harmless ones.

This discovery made it possible to create a permanent and inexpensive jailbreak technique called “Weight Orthogonalization.” Through a one-time (computationally light) modification, the model’s weights are made “orthogonal” to the refusal direction, making the model physically incapable of forming that type of reasoning. The method proved to be nearly 100% effective on 13 open-source models, including Llama, Qwen, and Gemma of various sizes. Performance remained nearly identical across all benchmarks (MMLU, GSM8K), with the sole exception of TruthfulQA, where performance declined, suggesting a deep connection between safety mechanisms and truthfulness.

link to the paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2406.11717
by markussss | 2025-11-17 09:26:34+00:00
Thanks for the link and tl;dr, even though it's a quite short video (3:16). I found your explanation very interesting because I have intuitively felt like this is accurate, but never knew what the underlying process is. I have been following this for years already, first absorbing information about anything where I need to make a decision, and then just leave it to stew in the back of my mind. And after a while the answer just appears in my mind, without me really understanding where it comes from.
by lkjhgf | 2025-11-17 09:26:43+00:00
This tool originates from the paper mentioned in the readme. Here is a summary:

Research has revealed that refusal behavior in language models is not governed by a complex logic, but rather by a single causal “direction” in their activation space. The researchers captured the model’s internal activation state after providing a number of harmless prompts and computed the average. They then did the same with harmful prompts and, by taking the difference between these values, identified a single vector (direction) whose presence and intensity in the model’s activation state determines whether the model will refuse or not. To demonstrate this, the researchers modified the model’s activations in real time and observed that they could make the model answer dangerous questions or force it to refuse harmless ones.

This discovery made it possible to create a permanent and inexpensive jailbreak technique called “Weight Orthogonalization.” Through a one-time (computationally light) modification, the model’s weights are made “orthogonal” to the refusal direction, making the model physically incapable of forming that type of reasoning. The method proved to be nearly 100% effective on 13 open-source models, including Llama, Qwen, and Gemma of various sizes. Performance remained nearly identical across all benchmarks (MMLU, GSM8K), with the sole exception of TruthfulQA, where performance declined, suggesting a deep connection between safety mechanisms and truthfulness.

This is the link to the paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2406.11717
by OJFord | 2025-11-17 09:28:40+00:00
Even if you think everything shuts down at night, how can you think busy consumption days are highly correlated with the windiest & sunniest & waviest days?

Renewables are great, let's do more of that too, but it's patchy supply, and yes demand is patchy, but they don't match - so you need storage too, and that problem is eased by having non-patchy (coal, gas, nuclear) supply for the lesser more constant load demanded.
by dragochat | 2025-11-17 09:29:16+00:00
+ as a bonus we'd also incentivize businesses to internalize their marketing and related tech operations (since sharing data with 3rd parties would not be allowed), same for AI-customizations etc., forcing them to tech-ify and become more tech-savy businesses instead of externalizing all such things to evil big tech (eg. a clothing store chain could compete not only by producing better clothes, but also by developing better monitoring and generative AI for human-in-the-loop hyperpersonalization, spreading tech out... instead of outsourcing these to tech or big-consulting companies as they do now when the too-little-data they so collect anyhow is otherwise easily share-able to third parties)
by tralarpa | 2025-11-17 09:29:18+00:00
There are two approaches (sometimes mixed):

(a) you reverse engineer the application writing or reading the file. Even without fully understanding the application it can give you valuable information about the format (e.g. "The application calls fwrite in a for loop ten times, maybe those are related to the ten elements that I see on the screen").

(b) you reverse engineer only the file. For example, you change one value in the application and compare the resulting output file. Or the opposite way: you change one value in the file and see what happens in the application when you load it.
by umanwizard | 2025-11-17 09:29:53+00:00
Perhaps the situation has gotten better since I looked a few years ago, but my experience is the Debezium project doesn’t really guarantee exactly-once delivery. Meaning that if row A is replaced by row B, you might see (A, -1), (A, -1), (B, +1), if for example Debezium was restarted at precisely the wrong time. Then if you’re using this stream to try to keep track of what’s in the database, you will think you have negatively many copies of A.

It sounds silly, but caused enormous headaches and problems for the project I was working on (Materialize), one of whose main use cases is creating incrementally maintained live materialized views on top of replicated Postgres (or MySql) data.
by close04 | 2025-11-17 09:30:22+00:00
> On a iPad or iPhone I'm willing to accept that

But that's it right here. It just takes boiling the frog slowly enough. The high powered M-powered iPads are already testing the waters of what people will accept for work (I don't think they're aimed purely at content consumption like the "smaller" iPads). I think Apple can afford to wait because they don't need to cannibalize anything today, and because the replacement isn't strictly a superset of what it's replacing, it comes with the caveats you mention. As soon as the market is ready to tolerate more lock-in, it might happen.

Enough people do just emails/Teams/Office for work so plugging in an iPhone and turning it into a desktop with mouse, keyboard, and external screen(s) can tick all the boxes for usability. Or an iPad with keyboard since similar sized devices were historically used for portability. Most work devices are locked down anyway, no root, no software installation.
by nalekberov | 2025-11-17 09:30:25+00:00
In July, 2025 I asked Coinbase to delete my account permanently, for which i had a bit of back-and-forth with customer service representatives, in the end I got an email confirming the deletion, then I tried to log into my account, I was still successful - they lied about it.

Then I reached out to customer service several times - no answer. Then I contacted dedicated channel for privacy related questions with all proofs of mishandling - radio silence.

It’s sad to see these companies mishandle our very personal data and get away with this.
by hagen1778 | 2025-11-17 09:31:43+00:00
I think OTEL has made things worse for metrics. Prometheus was so simple and clean before the long journey toward OTEL support began. Now Prometheus is much more complicated:

- all the delta-vs-cumulative counter confusion

- push support for Prometheus, and the resulting out-of-order errors

- the {"metric_name"} syntax changes in PromQL

- resource attributes and the new info() function needed to join them

I just don’t see how any of these OTEL requirements make my day-to-day monitoring tasks easier. Everything has only become more complicated.

And I haven’t even mentioned the cognitive and resource cost everyone pays just to ship metrics in the OTEL format - see https://promlabs.com/blog/2025/07/17/why-i-recommend-native-...
by richardfey | 2025-11-17 09:31:49+00:00
They were doing this kind of optical media seek times tests/optimisations for PS1 games, like Crash Bandicoot. You certainly have more and better context than me on this console/game, I just mentioned it in case it wasn't considered.

By the way, could the nonsensical offsets be checksums instead?

Nice reverse engineering work and analysis there!
by pelasaco | 2025-11-17 09:32:15+00:00
in his opinion, Grok is the most neutral LLM out there. I cannot find a single study that support his opinion. I find many that supports the opposite opinion. However I don't trust in any of the studies out there - or at least those well-ranked in google, which makes me sad. We never had more information than today and we are still completely lost.
I'm 74, spent 18mo coding an on-device AI platform to fix the GTM model
by ingconsani | 2025-11-17 09:32:48+00:00
At 74, I utilize AI for 8 hours a day, enhancing my capabilities in both my professional and personal life while safeguarding my privacy. Over the past 18 months, I have been modeling the 'bridge' between an individual's legitimate need for privacy and a business's legitimate desire to understand as much as possible about prospects and clients to propose custom products and services.

Most recently, I decided to build, with the latest AI technologies, a platform to deliver this value proposition in different application areas, and I named it "Connect the DOTS." This reflects what I have learned through my own experiences and I am now ready to go to market with.