MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by husamia | 2025-11-11 01:02:48+00:00
Data brokers are a legal surveillance loophole: Police can simply buy your private data from commercial data brokers—no warrant, no court order, no oversight. This massive, unregulated market lets agencies sidestep every traditional privacy protection. “Super warrants” exist for real-time content: If cops want to intercept your messages as they’re sent, they must meet the highest legal bar—probable cause, exhaustion of alternatives, and strict minimization rules. This requirement is stricter than for stored data, yet most users have never heard of it. Gag orders silence providers—and you: Law enforcement can force tech companies to keep data requests secret, blocking them from notifying you. These open-ended non-disclosure orders erode First Amendment rights and hide the true scale of surveillance from public view.
by eru | 2025-11-11 01:04:30+00:00
> If/when that balance stops, they could turn it into a failed state in a forthnight.

You say that as if Singapore has no agency here. And you are under-estimating Singapore's resilience: after all just after independence we were close to the nightmare scenario you are trying to conjure.

> Being this careless by relying on "friends" (in global politics? lol) is ok for a small place like Singapore that can't do anything else anyway. For an ex-empire, it's more suicidal than prudent.

What does it matter that the UK was part of an Empire in the past? Singapore used to be part of the same empire.

And yes, keeping good relations with your allies is extremely important in global politics. This shouldn't be news. Or do you think we should all strive for autarky, like North Korea or 1930s Germany?
by aw1621107 | 2025-11-11 01:04:32+00:00
iex [0] might be potentially relevant here. From what I understand it basically implements this bit:

> Finally, another option is to say that -> Result<T, E> behaves exactly as -> T ABI-wise, no error affordances whatsoever. Instead, when returning an error, rather than jumping to the return address, we look it up in the side table to find a corresponding error recovery address, and jump to that. Stack unwinding!

And at least based on the listed benchmarks it can indeed result in better performance than "regular" Result<T, E>.

(Might be nice to mention this on the corresponding lobste.rs thread as well to see if anyone has anything interesting to add, if anyone has access)

[0]: https://github.com/iex-rs/iex
by orliesaurus | 2025-11-11 01:05:22+00:00
i didn't realize the cloud side of an editor had grown to ~70k lines of Rust already… and this work is laying the foundation for collaborative coding with DeltaDB.

BUT it's worth noting that WebAssembly still has some performance overhead compared to native, the article chooses convenience and portability over raw speed, which might be fine for an editor backend.
by nradov | 2025-11-11 01:05:52+00:00
European countries have used free college education as a technique to artificially hold down the youth unemployment rate. Full time students don't count as unemployed. The problem is eventually they graduate and then many still can't find a job, or they end up underemployed in a job that doesn't really require a college degree. At least they don't have huge student debts but this system is tremendously inefficient for the rest of society which has to pay the taxes.
by rogerrogerr | 2025-11-11 01:06:53+00:00
The M3 version of the Studio can have either an M3 Ultra chip with up to 512GB RAM, or an M4 Max with up to 128. And these aren’t different generations of the product, they were announced at the same time: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/03/apple-unveils-new-mac...

My guess is they’re doing this to solve some yield issue. M4 is a more difficult process with worse yield, so harder to make an Ultra version today. M3 has better yield so it’s tolerable to make an Ultra.

Probably either a tick/tok pattern forming, or a “previous gen gets an ultra version” pattern forming.
by torginus | 2025-11-11 01:07:19+00:00
Here's my 2 cents - a programming language (or any technology, smartphones, LLMs etc) has a honeymoon phase - during which everyone's excited about it and extols its virtues and focuses on how different it is from everything else.

Once that's over, people start looking at it with a more pragmatic eye - how much better is this really than what I had before. People start focusing less on the gimmicks and more on everyday usability.

For a programming language to be really popular, it needs that something that captures people's imaginations, but ultimately the stay power is determined by how useful it turns out.

Kotlin and Swift are very practical, but never had any wow features, so they never got hyped, they just quietly got more popular. Go had it with its green threads and channels, but nowadays most people seem to be not using those that much (I don't think there are a ton of instances of Go processes in prod with 10k threads), but otherwise its a solid language.

Rust - it's a solid language as well, and an improvement over C++ in some aspects like package management, but it's borrow checker and programming style is divisive.

Thing is, unlike goroutines there's no avoiding the borrow checker, so a lot of people don't really commit to Rust.
by estearum | 2025-11-11 01:07:23+00:00
It’s not “iffy.” POTUS has absolutely no ability to curtail due process rights. It is a blatant violation of a right that undergirds every single other right in the Constitution. Without due process right, there are no property rights, no gun rights, no speech rights, no religious rights — all of them can be taken away by the state simply declaring that you have been found guilty of such an offense that those rights are stripped from you.

The solution to Congressional deadlock is called “electing new representatives.” The executive in fact does not have the ability to “shut off” asylum processing, no matter how dysfunctional Congress is. And even under the INA. Read INA § 1158(a)(1).

We could have a clause in the Constitution that says something like, “if Congress is deadlocked, POTUS can do whatever they want.” Alas we do not have such a clause, and so he cannot, even if you feel there is deadlock.
by snickerbockers | 2025-11-11 01:08:18+00:00
We aren't at the point where it's unavoidable though. Even if we assume that its impossible to dodge random onstar/sirius bloatware crap that probably tracks you, you can definitely still buy a car that doesn't have a 5g wireless modem, 360-degree webcam coverage, mandatory automatic software updates, and ass-warming seats locked behind DRM that forces you to have an online account linked to your credit card.
Y'all See the Astroturfing, Right?
by justcuriousss | 2025-11-11 01:08:20+00:00
Long time HN lurker here, please forgive the throwaway.

Not self promotion or VC tomfoolery, I am talking about public discourse management. Opinion shaping, multiparty, and on some topics, guaranteed like clockwork.

Just wondering, because... damn. This is different.
by eru | 2025-11-11 01:08:55+00:00
> Friends aren't good enough, unless you have a mutual defense treaty, they aren't real friends and can't be counted on.

No, no, just the opposite: treaties aren't good enough. Try suing your supposed allies when they break your mutual defense treaty.. Broadly speaking (and with only some exceptions), there's no higher authority you can appeal to for enforcement of international treaties.

Mutual defense treaties only work amongst something like friends. A big part of NATO's success is because they take this lesson very serious and designed the whole system around it.
by jdprgm | 2025-11-11 01:09:06+00:00
Memory bandwidth is a joke. You would think by now somebody would come out with a well balanced machine for inference instead of always handicapping one of the important aspects. Feels like a conspiracy.

At least the m5 ultra should finally balance things given the significant improvements to prompt processing in the m5 from what we've seen. Apple has had significantly higher memory bandwidth since the m1 series approaching 5 years old now. Surely an nvidia machine like this could have at bare minimum 500Gb+ if they cared in the slightest about competition.
by robotresearcher | 2025-11-11 01:12:05+00:00
You knowing the answer does not make a question silly.

It's not obvious to me that the Army won't do whatever it wants with you once you've taken the shilling. I was interested so asked Gemini, so subject to the usual LLM caveats, here's the reply:

"It is possible to join the U.S. Army and be guaranteed a position as a truck driver, provided you meet all the qualifications.

This guarantee is part of the enlistment contract. The specific job you're asking about is known as MOS 88M, or Motor Transport Operator.

[...]

What "Guaranteed" Means

When you have 88M in your contract, the Army guarantees you a slot at the Advanced Individual Training (AIT) for that job.

You will first complete Basic Combat Training (BCT), which is about 10 weeks.

After graduating from BCT, you will go to 88M AIT, which is approximately 7 weeks long, located at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri.

During AIT, you will be trained to operate and maintain the Army's fleet of vehicles, including Humvees, light/medium/heavy trucks, and tractor-trailers.

The guarantee is for the training. You must successfully pass both BCT and 88M AIT to officially become a Motor Transport Operator."
by gpm | 2025-11-11 01:13:34+00:00
> The article speaks of this personnel like reservists, but could the training also apply to helping defend public infrastructure and institutions, where they work? (For example, if there ever be a need to quickly hand out firearms on-site, or if ever there was a need for random people to know how to observe and report threats?)

Can't quite imagine the threat that would cause a need for this in Canada, but sure. Edit: I guess in the north the training would be useful for polar bear defence...

> Could this training be practice, before mass military training of most adult citizens?

Probably not politically viable unless we were invaded (and border conflicts in unpopulated areas don't count). Not logistically viable after the US invades us, and they are the only contender.

Maybe you could manage to make a volunteer based reserve program attractive enough to get a significant fraction of adult citizens? If you could that might be politically viable. I doubt the current government is anywhere near ambitious enough to try.
by p_ing | 2025-11-11 01:13:49+00:00
Washington State Public Records Act has no fee if you simply want to "inspect" the records (bodycams are the named exception); they can charge "actual" costs for storage, but presumably Flock stores the data, so... They cannot charge for salaries, etc.

You can make your own copy of records for free; if you want them to make copies, they can charge actual costs.
by hanoian | 2025-11-11 01:13:55+00:00
The author doesn't seem to understand how much "intelligent thinking" is used in all the other apps she undoubtedly uses. Her maps app decides the best route and I'm sure she blindly follows it. That is outsourcing the decision on what roads to take. Skyscanner decides what flights to take. Google's Restaurants near me is similar. A lot of what we read, including her article, come to use through algorithms, not significantly different from an LLM. If you read anything from FB/Insta etc., you have outsourced what will come next in your feed.

This is an author who simply does not understand how people actually use LLMs. She thinks it is a recommendation engine because her only use of it was to type Google searches into it. The chat interface encourages this sort of short question so I cannot really blame people who don't know you can enter enter tens of thousands of words.

I have colleagues who use it like this, and one who has proudly never used it at all. I politely congratulate him on this when he brings it up because I know it is very important to him for whatever reason, but it is meaningless, like someone proudly saying they haven't used Google Maps. He is apparently the only person I know who the author could date, and his ego as a lover of writing is so important to him that he eschews technology to protect himself.
by nicklewers | 2025-11-11 01:14:11+00:00
Interesting feedback, thanks for taking the time! I hadnt tried with over 500 honestly, mainly because it takes too long (until ive got good background processing in place so you can switch apps whiles its doing the work ), so thats a great observation.

I like the idea of annotating the photos within a group, updating the metadata so you could reference them easily in the future - I shall investigate. But yeah, everyones has a different relationship with their camera rolls, this initial app version is primarily focused on people who have duplicates/vacation photo cleanup/bloat etc todo, but I'll definitely look into other avenues of functionality it could offer.
by deepsquirrelnet | 2025-11-11 01:14:22+00:00
One of the issues with using LLMs in content generation is that instruction tuning causes mode collapse. For example, if you ask an LLM to generate a random number between 1 and 10, it might pick something like 7 80% of the time. Base models do not exhibit the same behavior.

“Creative Output” has an entirely different meaning when you start to think about them in the way they actually work.
by Terr_ | 2025-11-11 01:14:56+00:00
P.S.: To put it another way, a major purpose law is to clarify and codify the expectations the people. Not just expectations of privacy, but expectations of when we have liberty to observe or record.

We expect that our faces might be captured on someone's vacation photos in public, surviving as an anonymous and unconsidered background detail, and that we can take our own photos like that without getting permission from everyone in the background.

In contrast, we don't (didn't?) expect all the photos to feed into a mega-panopticon that that does facial-recognition on all subjects and cross-references us over time and space while running algorithms looking for embarrassing, criminal, or blackmail-able events.
by jaredklewis | 2025-11-11 01:15:37+00:00
Might be logical. The government can throw me in jail, steal my stuff (aka civil forfeiture), or (as we found out recently) tear gas my kids all without any penalty. In some situations, the government decides they are allowed to kill you.

Companies at least risk significant consequences if they start tear gassing children. For the most part the worst they can do is screw you out of some money, which is not great, but obviously better than imprisonment and the like.
by gwbas1c | 2025-11-11 01:15:41+00:00
Pretty much any comment that runs contrary to the current hype narrative gets downvoted: 10 years ago, if you pointed out that cryptocurrency is a scam, you get downvoted. Today, if you point out that AI isn't going to live up to the hype, you get downvoted.

That being said, I think you need to have concrete examples of opinion shaping for this thread to get any constructive discussion.
by TheRoque | 2025-11-11 01:15:48+00:00
Are you kidding me ? Everyone knows it's pirated content (aka stealing), there are a ton of proofs here and there:

- https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-torrented-o... - https://news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/openai-risks-billions-a...

Other than that, just a bit of common sense tells you all you need to know about where the data comes from (datasets never released, outputs of the LLMs suspisciously close to original copyrighted content, AI founders openly saying that paying for copyrighted content is too costly etc. etc. etc.)
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-11-11 01:16:29+00:00
That is not a pitfall, that is the whole point of checked exceptions. By making the errors part of the type system, you get the ability for the compiler to warn you "hey man, that method started to raise a new error so you have to make sure to handle it". That is a great benefit, not a pitfall!

Put another way - it would be a lot easier for the programmer to write code if there were no types checked by the compiler at all, but we recognize that the safety net they give us is worth the additional effort at times when refactoring. So why would the benefits of static type checking be worth it, but not the benefits of static error type checking? It seems to me that either both are good ideas, or neither is.
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-11-11 01:20:12+00:00
This was particularly interesting in regards to the US military not being at the bleeding edge:

The trip underscored what they already knew: America was vulnerable. Russia and China produced millions of drones annually, while the United States barely made 100,000.

It almost feels as if the US need(s|ed) to be a bit more involved in the Ukraine war in order to keep their finger on the pulse of how conflicts are evolving, especially in regards to Russia's capabilities (and vulnerabilities).

Related:

Monroe-Anderson didn’t just read about Ukraine’s drone revolution—he flew to Kyiv to learn from it. That’s the critical insight here: battlefield necessity drove innovation cycles that lapped Western procurement systems entirely. Ukrainian operators testing drones under live fire generated iterative feedback loops traditional defense contractors couldn’t match.
by spamizbad | 2025-11-11 01:20:22+00:00
It's pretty simple: People will tolerate surveillance technology if it promises to promote order and justice. People imagine them being instrumental in convicting murders, rapists, etc. ICE raids have been shown to be (I'm being generous here) sloppy and chaotic and seemingly targeting towards working people to grind towards a government-mandated quota - not the "bad guys" that plague our streets. Few are interested in a massive surveillance network to clamp down on what are essentially civil infraction of otherwise law-abiding and productive members of the community.
by retrochameleon | 2025-11-11 01:20:48+00:00
VRChat has intriguing possibilities, but I always got the impression the underlying architecture and programming is too shoddy to really support the breadth of custom experiences people want to make. I tried various mini games or special worlds, and it was always incredibly jank and barely functional. It seemed more like problems stemming from instability or jankiness of the engine and API they were working with than anything else.

Granted, the last time I touched it was a few years ago. Unless they've done a major rewrite of the game I don't expect it to have improved all that much. Maybe I'm wrong.
by voidhorse | 2025-11-11 01:21:29+00:00
This isn't the "people" waking up and not being okay with this, it is one governmental power (the state) realizing that its own power to manage its citizens (the residents of WA) and its sovereignty is being threatened by another power (the fed) in a new way. The system the state previously used to enforce its own power over its constituents is now helping the competing power to have more power over those constituents outside of cooperation with the state power, so they are removing it. There is no sudden awakening of citizen consciousness here. Many of the actions emerging around ICE stuff are about states trying to combat overreaching federal power.
by gwbas1c | 2025-11-11 01:22:16+00:00
I don't get it: In the US (and probably the rest of the English speaking world,) "black market" means illegal goods: Illegal drugs, media piracy, stolen items, banned items, items that bypass taxes, illegal guns, ect.

These already exist, or existed: There's the pirate bay for piracy, and the various incantations of The Silk Road. These also attract a lot of attention and get shut down; so they need to operate in a weird "word of mouth" way where only the people who look for them find out about them.

Perhaps consider the term "flea market" or "art fair" instead? It implies legal goods sold by independent vendors; with little overhead from the venue.
by pas | 2025-11-11 01:22:19+00:00
if food security is important then the EU should pay for cost-effectiveness, economic sustainability, ecological resilience, storage capacity, and so on.

AFAIK right now it pays the same for a huge unproductive monoculture of non-edible corn (ie. for bioethanol) as it pays for wheat. (though there's finally talk about some changes to CAP, mostly to stop paying already rich big farms.)

food prices are pretty volatile anyway, and as you see even a war only moved them 15% whereas in Hungary inflation was more than 20%.
by walterburns | 2025-11-11 01:22:23+00:00
"But we'd like to give a type to this function. In most languages (Haskell, Typescript, C++, Rust, C#, etc.) there is no way to do that.[2] "

Can't you do this with a GADT? With a GADT, the type of the output can be specified by which branch of the GADT the input matches. Seems quite a similar idea.
by tialaramex | 2025-11-11 01:22:39+00:00
It could be, but it's often just that the things you got in the box were higher quality and so your results are higher quality by default.

Better types like VecDeque<T>, better implementations of common ideas like sorting, even better fundamental concepts like providing the destructive move, or the owning Mutex by default.

Even the unassuming growable array type, Rust's Vec<T>, is just plain better than C++ std::vector<T>. It's not a huge difference and for many applications it won't matter, but that's the sort of pervasive quality difference I'm talking about and so I can well believe that in practice this ends up showing through.
by tombert | 2025-11-11 01:22:41+00:00
I mean, I think the answer to this is the very simple: they think it will lead to more money.

I'm sure someone in a board meeting saw something about GrapheneOS and LineageOS and Cyanogen and feels like if they de-open Android, some (or most) of those users will move to vanilla Android, and that will lead to profits.

I'm not saying that they're right about this; I think ultimately very few (if any) people actually know how to run businesses and it's all about giving an appearance of maximizing profitability, and as long as it leads to a potential short term stock boost then these executives get their huge bonuses and they can just blame the next guy when things break.

This isn't really theoretical; look at how Jack Welch took one of the most respected companies in the world, more or less integrated ponzinomics to temporarily bump the stock prices, and 20+ years later GE is kind of a joke and isn't even on the S&P500 anymore.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-11-11 01:23:13+00:00
We shall see how this plays out in the market. However, currently RISC-V competitors are RISC-V along with the established market options. Resources are finite, and everyone's pet use-case will probably bleed this ISA to death sooner or later.

Currently, RISC-y offers few advantages over ARM8/9 ecosystems in the consumer space, and while that may change someday... few will likely notice in the mess of options already spamming the community.

Indeed, groups tried to consolidate a viable standard subset (even an ISO proposal), but these will also likely fail given it contradicts peoples pet use-cases. Note, the silicon fab business is about sustained sales of replicated standard product, and not clown volumes of 100k bespoke chips.

"Letting the dog drive..." product design was also unwise. =3