MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kmeisthax | 2025-11-20 22:38:10+00:00
License plates are there not to "catch evildoers". They're there because cars are heavy and kill people even when non-evildoers are operating them. The problem is not that cars can be tracked, it's that we design cities to mandate people travel in heavy metal boxes that kill people. When we made walking inconvenient, we also surrendered our rights.

In other words, cars were a fascist[0] long-con - a project of societal engineering to deliberately control Americans[1] by offering the illusion of freedom. I don't even think the panopticon of license plate readers was in the thoughts of the people who designed this nonsense, but all the major figures involved with the institutionalization of cars would have loved being able to bulldoze those pesky 4A/5A rights.

[0] Fords and Volkswagens are the original model swasticars.

[1] And, arguably, make segregation survive the Civil Rights Act - but that's a different topic for another day. Look up what Robert Moses did to highways on Long Island if you want to know more.
by WorldMaker | 2025-11-20 22:38:21+00:00
Writing a terrible "verb object" parser in BASIC was certainly a rite of passage for many of us. I recall making more than one. I also recall my best one having rudimentary "verb object preposition subject" support, but that being about my limit at the time in BASIC.

But also I had access to TADS and early Inform (at home) and still wound up building a couple in BASIC (because school computer labs would have that available).
by freediver | 2025-11-20 22:38:21+00:00
Kagi founder here. We are moving to a future where these subscriptions will be separate. Even today more that 80% of our members use Kagi Assistant and our other AI-supported products so saying "people are NOT paying Kagi for bullshit AI tools" is not accurate, mostly in the sense that we are not in the business of creating bullshit tools. Life is too short for that. I also happen to like Star Trek version of the future, where smart computers we can talk to exist. I also like that Star Trek is still 90% human drama, and 10% technology quitely working in the background in service of humans - and this is the kind of future I would like to build towards and leave for my children. Having the most accurate search in the world that has users' best interest in mind is a big part of it, and that is not going anywhere.

edit: seeing the first two (negative) replies to my comment made me smile. HN is tough crowd to please :) The thing is similar to how I did paid search and went all in with my own money when everyone thought I was crazy, I did that out of own need and need for my family to have search done right and am doing the same now with AI, wanting to have it done right as a product. What you see here is the result of this group of humans that call themself Kagi best effort - not more, not less.
by anthk | 2025-11-20 22:38:43+00:00
I know, I play IF games since 2001 and 2002; and my previous gameplays where with the classical ones for ZX Spectrum (in Spanish) and some freeware games bundled with 'shareware' CD's with Winfrotz and later Frotz/NFrotz. Some GNU user used to have several under libre licenses (even non-ZMachine ones), such as Beyond the Titanic, but he has no working repos any more.
by falleng0d | 2025-11-20 22:39:02+00:00
From the dialogues in the pictures it doesn’t sound like they are using anyones emails for training. The messaging indicates it’s more like using as context and/or generating embeddings for RAG. Unless there’s something else I’m not aware of.

I know that Google does a lot of bad stuff but we don’t need to make up stuff they just aren’t doing

This doomsday messaging an alarmism is only serves to degrade the whole cause

edit: and before someone say that they also don’t want that then let’s criticize it for what it is (opting users to feature without consent). We don’t need to make stuff up, it really doesn’t help.
by jmward01 | 2025-11-20 22:39:18+00:00
'as a kid I....' Man. This brings back memories. I got into the BBS world and started programming in earnest because I wanted to write shells for the MUDs out at the time. A friend and I built some amazing things all in the name of auto-mapping, adding graphics, etc etc. Simple games really help confine a problem to the point that you can grow your curiosity easily with them.
by pdabbadabba | 2025-11-20 22:39:49+00:00
The executive branch asserts that there is such a zone. But the truth is likely that many, if not all, 4th Amendment rights still apply in many situations within that zone. It's situation dependent, so it's difficult to make a sweeping generalization. But some of the executive branch's most aggressive claims and tactics, at least, may well not hold up in court.
by amarant | 2025-11-20 22:40:12+00:00
Only problem is, fiat is better at most of the "good-natured" crime too.

The only application I can even think of where cryptocurrency is actually better than fiat is ransomware. Actually I suppose any kind of ransom payment might benefit from using crypto, as there's no risky physical cash handover for police to intercept. Seems like it could be equally useful for kidnappers as ransomware hackers.

But I can't think of single non-ransom transaction where fiat isn't better than crypto. Legal or otherwise.

For example when buying illicit substances, I don't see why I would want to pay extra to make the transaction traceable and public?
by ottah | 2025-11-20 22:40:16+00:00
The problem is that rules need to be viewpoint neutral to be fair and effective. If we allow authority to pick approved opinions, we end up with this incoherent bullshit. One year you can't mention anything contrary to the CDC and the next you're not allowed to talk about Palestine, only because the dominant political parties switched places. If you tolerate this kind of rule making because you believe your opinions are correct, be ready to be oppressed when the next administration decides they hate you.
by cycomanic | 2025-11-20 22:40:17+00:00
> I'm curious what you think the solution is? > > Taking a photograph of a car with its license plate is legal. As is selling a photo you've taken, whether it has a license plate or not. > > Therefore taking millions of photos in public of cars, and turning their license plate numbers into a database is legal, as is selling that information. It's all data gained in public. > Collecting and selling PII without a person's consent is certainly not legal in many places.
by salawat | 2025-11-20 22:40:18+00:00
No, no, no.

>just like I don't really care about a firearms db existing)

You might not care, but even before computers were a big thing, and people thought "Computer" and IBM mainframes were synonymous, it was put forth in law that no central digital registry of firearms was to be made available to the Federal Government.

View regulations under

https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12057

In short, NFA, GCA, and FOPA basically synergize to outlaw centralized registries of firearms owners in the U.S. due to the recognition of the particular temptation and value in organizing activities resulting in disarming the populace.

It is absolutely the case other identifiers and activity can be restricted to prevent foreseeable abuse, and to be honest, that this type of abuse wasn't foreseen is frankly testament to either our forebearers being comfortable with a surveillance dystopia or just being so disconnected from technical possibilities that they didn't understand the fire we were working with.
The new Grok on X is aligned to favor Elon Musk over anyone else when asked
by kranke155 | 2025-11-20 22:40:23+00:00
Multiple users on X have caught onto to this.

I expect they will correct this shortly.

But it seems obvious that the Grok on X (which is different from the model on Grok.com) is Elon Musk aligned.

The examples include presenting the same historical theory as coming from Bill Gates (doesn't agree) or from Elon Musk (strong theory).

Users picked up on that and started asking nonsensical questions. I found a thread of this because Grok seems disabled now, it wouldn't answer my attempts at replicating these results.

In that thread Grok proceeds to say that Elon would not have rested on the seventh day, unlike God.

That he would have delivered Fallout 4 better than Todd Howard.

That he would get more citations in economics Daron Acemoglu.

Many of these are literal screenshots I made myself. I'm sure they will be scrubbed soon. Link: https://imgur.com/a/hEdKHQf
by watwut | 2025-11-20 22:40:54+00:00
I mean, that is made up psychology, not even a real one.

> guy who never made football team bullies his kid into football

That is much less of a think you are making it to be. A guy who values football, was good at it is significantly more likely to force kids into football.

> guy who never dated in his 20s makes tonnes of money by working 100 hours a week and in 30s fumbles into bad relationships created from status flexing with no depth, never experienced adolescent loves with womans his own age

You made up that guy!

> woman who grew up poor gorges herself on mcdonalds binge once a month due to repressed trauma of always missing out on mcd as a child

Not a thing either.

> you see this with extravagant childrens birthdays a lot too

Those are status competition among adults.
by sroerick | 2025-11-20 22:42:01+00:00
> This seems like you might have got caught in something of a tautological loop situation that because you were working in a language with "object layers" it seemed easiest to work in one, and thus work with an ORM.

I mean, I think this is likely the case. So, I tried this, for example in Go, which is not really a proper functional programming language as I understand it, but is definitely not object-oriented.

So for my use case, I wanted to be able to take a database schema and programmatically create a set of CRUD endpoints in a TUI. Based on my pretty limited knowledge of Go, I found this to be pretty challenging. At first, I built it with Soda / Pop, the ORM from Buffalo framework. It worked fairly well.

Then I got frustrated with using Soda outside Buffalo, and yoinked the ORM to try and remove a layer. Using vanilla Go, it seems like the accepted pattern is that you create separate functions for C R U and D, as you referred to. However, it seems like this is pretty challenging to do programmatically, particularly without sophisticated metaprogramming, and even if you had a language which had complex macros or something, that is objectively significantly harder than object.get() and object.save().

Finally, I put GORM back in, and it worked fine. And GORM is a nice library, even though I think having an ORM is not the "Go" way of doing things in the first place. But also, Gorm is basically using function magic to feel like OOP. And maybe the problem with this idea is that it's not "Proper Go" to make a thing like this, it would be better to just code it. There's an admin panel in the Pagoda go stack which relies on ent ORM to function as well. I can only assume the developer motivations but I assume they are along the same lines as my experience.

I certainly don't think any of this requires insane class inheritance, and maybe that's all people are talking about with OOP. But I still think methods go a long way in this scenario.

In the real world, in business logic, objects do things. They aren't just data structures.

To summarize, CRUD seems pretty easy in any language, programmatically doing CRUD seems super hard in FP. Classes make that a lot easier. Maybe we shouldn't do that ever, and that's fine, but I'm a Django guy, I love my admin panels. Just my experience.
by mikem170 | 2025-11-20 22:42:11+00:00
> we can all take in whatever is happening in public

People have the right to take in what is in public, but maybe cameras should not?

This could apply to everyone in public spaces. No video, audio or surveillance without obtaining permission. Better blur anything you share, or you might get busted. The least we could do is restrict corporations from possessing such data.

Similar to what Germany does with doorbell cameras, making it illegal to film anything outside of your property, like a public sidewalk or the neighbors house. It is my understanding that people there will confront someone taking pictures of them without their consent.
by anthk | 2025-11-20 22:43:53+00:00
Ditto here. And, better, translated into Spanish with INFSP6. There is one made from a non-native Spanish speaker and it's really bad. Now a proper Zork translation can be a reality.

Ah, and yes, IF6 ports for Adventure do exist, both in English and Spanish, and the Spanish one it's really great, with even the backstory on creating the game perfectly translated..
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-11-20 22:43:58+00:00
Let's assume three things here:

1. The corpus contains every Trump speech.

2. The corpus contains everything ever written about XSS.

3. The corpus does NOT contain Trump talking about XSS, nor really anything that puts "Trump" and "XSS" within the same page.

A Markov Chain could not produce a speech about XSS in the style of Trump. The greatest tuning factor for a Markov Chain is the context length. A short length (like 2-4 words) produces incoherent results because it only looks at the last 2-4 words when predicting the next word. This means if you prompted the chain with "Create a speech about cross-site scripting the style of Donald Trump", then even with a 4-word context, all the model processes is "style of Donald Trump". But the time it reached the end of the prompt, it's already forgotten the beginning of it.

If you increase the context to 15, then the chain would produce nothing because "Create a speech about cross-site scripting in the style of Donald Trump" has never appeared in its corpus, so there's no data for what to generate next.

The matching in a Markov Chain is discrete. It's purely a mapping of (series of tokens) -> (list of possible next tokens). If you pass in a series of tokens that was never seen in the training set, then the list of possible next tokens is an empty set.
by iamnothere | 2025-11-20 22:44:07+00:00
> There are just limits to what a private citizen or even massive corporation can do.

You’re just not being creative enough. Car insurers could increase your premiums if you often travel through dangerous intersections, employers could decide to pass you over for promotion if you’re often at a bar, etc.

Even better, make the law flexible enough to encompass all data brokers.
by greedo | 2025-11-20 22:44:34+00:00
Technology is going to change a lot of things...

Imagine a drone swarm that follows you wherever you go. Tracking and photographing every step you take in public. When you go into a building, a ground drone follows you in, notes where you've gone, and when you leave, hands you off to the flying swarm. Creating a trail of all your activities. Legally there may not be anything you can do to stop it.

The expectation that you have no privacy in public is what fuels this.
by TimorousBestie | 2025-11-20 22:45:13+00:00
> There are more, but this is around the point where I started getting bored. Sorry. A rare precious technically-rigorous deep dive into the universe’s greatest mystery, and I can’t stop it from blending together into “something something feedback”. Read it yourself and see if you can do better.

Man, Scott is really phoning it in these days. I remember when he used to do deep dives into methodology and experimental setups.

> In 2004, neuroscientist Giulio Tononi proposed that consciousness depended on a certain computational property, the integrated information level, dubbed Φ. Computer scientist Scott Aaronson complained that thermostats could have very high levels of Φ, and therefore integrated information theory should dub them conscious. Tononi responded that yup, thermostats are conscious. It probably isn’t a very interesting consciousness. They have no language or metacognition, so they can’t think thoughts like “I am a thermostat”. They just sit there, dimly aware of the temperature. You can’t prove that they don’t.

> Are the theories of consciousness discussed in this paper like that too? I don’t know.

Then what are we even doing here? Regurgitating an anecdote that one time, one of his friends looked cool?

I’m skipping his half-hearted gesture toward animal consciousness as an analogy because not only is his naive account barely sketched out, he makes no effort to find a real scholarly account of it either.

> One of the founding ideas of Less Wrong style rationalism was that the arrival of strong AI set a deadline on philosophy. Unless we solved all these seemingly insoluble problems like ethics before achieving superintelligence, we would build the AIs wrong and lock in bad values forever.

Notably LW’s other position was to postpone the deadline, by force if necessary: https://gwern.net/slowing-moores-law (I believe gwern is at least half-joking here but his jocularity can not be ascribed to LWers circa 2012 en masse.)
by Ericson2314 | 2025-11-20 22:45:32+00:00
Yeah he did hugely advance it.

This didn't really get noticed in his own day, as they were busy dumbing things down into the classical period, but he was hugely influencial through rediscovery.

Except for Italian humanists rediscovering Greek and Roman writings, I'm having a hard time thinking of an earlier instance of a chiefly posthumous legacy.
by tremon | 2025-11-20 22:45:33+00:00
If you're referring to this quote (excerpted from the AVHerald article linked elsewhere in the thread), I don't think so:

> At the time of the accident, N259UP had accumulated a total time of about 92,992 hours and 21,043 cycles [..] A special detailed inspection (SDI) of the left pylon aft mount lugs would have been due at 29,200 cycles and of the left wing clevis support would have been due at 28,000 cycles

This isn't talking about replacement, only inspection; and it wasn't going to happen in the near future: 7k cycles at four flights/day means inspection is due in 5 years.
by Nifty3929 | 2025-11-20 22:45:35+00:00
In the past, and maybe even to this very day - all color printers print hidden watermarks in faint yellow ink to assist with forensic identification of anything printed. Even for things printed in B&W (on a color printer).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots

Yes, can we not jump on the surveillance/tracking/censorship bandwagon please?
by WorldMaker | 2025-11-20 22:45:52+00:00
In Grad School I started with an "AI in Lisp Textbook" (which was still the most common at the time in the late oughts, I hear many have moved to Python since) and searched for a Common Lisp interpreter that felt right. I think I ended up with SBCL [0], but this was obviously a while back so my memory is slippery about it.

(The professor I had for that AI course in Grad School didn't know Lisp and wanted to learn it better, especially because so much of the textbook was in it, so asked us for volunteers to learn it as well and I took that as an excuse/challenge to do every project with a language choice that semester in Common Lisp.)

[0] https://www.sbcl.org/
by sroerick | 2025-11-20 22:46:17+00:00
I think that's fair, and I generally prefer a lighter stack for CRUD, but I still love Django and Rails. Maybe just having "objects" is not enough to qualify as OOP but for many use cases, the convenience offered by "Batteries Included" is worth the trade off in "overengineering".

If I have to build an app, I'm going for rails. If I'm building a back end, I'm reaching for Go. If I need to integrate with Python libraries, Django is great.

But ask me again when I get to the other side of some OCAML projects
by cons0le | 2025-11-20 22:46:27+00:00
Nah Bach shits on Mozart. Mozart make extremely catchy music like Justin Beiber. I seriously do love mozart, but he merely wrote music. Bach weaved math into his music more than anyone before or after. His music sounds dense and more multi dimensional than mozart or saint saens. It really doesn't sound like he was trying to write beautiful music ( even though it is ) , it sounds like he was solving an equation and just writing out the answers as a harmonic sequence

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmsNH8t25ck - This guy is like 95 and still shredding on youtube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1xJoVzoIQg
by networked | 2025-11-20 22:47:04+00:00
I evaluated but didn't adopt https://github.com/awnumar/memguard in Go. No matter how well-implemented and reliable it is, I can't pass its secrets to https://github.com/FiloSottile/age.

I assume all process memory may contain residual secrets. As a mitigation in a password manager and an encrypted file editor, I prevent process memory from being swapped to disk with https://pkg.go.dev/syscall#Mlockall.
by singleshot_ | 2025-11-20 22:47:16+00:00
I’d be interested in a citation for the proposition “social media is like a company town,” but I’m afraid if I promised to wait for one I might be here a while. The best I can do is direct you back to Marsh v. Alabama.

What makes it not an infringement is not that Facebook is not the state; it’s that Facebook does not encompass the traditional function of the municipality. The state action doctrine does not apply.
by rkagerer | 2025-11-20 22:47:36+00:00
Can anyone recommend a specific, well-made, high-performance motherboard with loads of PCIe lanes and expansion slots, and sensible lane topology?

All the motherboards these days make me feel claustrophobic. My current workstation is pretty old, but feels like it had more expansion capability (relative to its time) than what's on the market today.
by proee | 2025-11-20 22:47:55+00:00
I think SpaceX is taking the re-usability part of Starship as foundation. Meaning they won't move forward until it's solved. With Falcon they added it as a bit of a secondary priority. They've spent so much resources trying to get the second stage back to earth. I think they should have just focused on getting the whole system flying to orbit, throwing away second stage for now, and using that platform to replace falcon. Eventually, they could refactor second stage to get it back to earth. But perhaps it's all too coupled that it has to be solved at one time (not later).
by bdangubic | 2025-11-20 22:48:04+00:00
> border enforcement and deportations are what we want.

this is not what “we want” - this is what ruling party wants you to think and obsess over while they pillage and make your life otherwise miserable.

the same young votes voted for Biden in 2020 knowing very well what the immigration policy would be (and they were as bad as it gets the first two years)
by nkrisc | 2025-11-20 22:48:06+00:00
> Taking a photograph of a car with its license plate is legal.

And perhaps it was legal because before mass surveillance and automatic license plate readers it was difficult to impossible to abuse that.

Perhaps it shouldn’t be legal in the same way anymore.

These days they can just photograph everyone and then go back later and figure out where they were when that person is of interest. It’s pre-emptive investigation of innocent people for future use.
by unethical_ban | 2025-11-20 22:48:07+00:00
>When liberals downplay events like these

For casual observers, this is where the fallacy is. I have to wonder what your media diet is, that of all the things to complain about, a false statement about the murder of a woman to justify watching the destruction of the country is the one a person lands on.

Our justice system is being ripped apart. Allies don't trust us militarily or economically. The president is pardoning people openly for money. His family is taking in hundreds of millions of dollars in cryptocurrency from anonymous sources. He shrugged off the murder of a Washington Post journalist while standing next to his murderer and called a journalist "insubordinate" for asking the question.