MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kelnos | 2025-11-04 21:58:36+00:00
I'm a little confused, because this looks like you're just swapping one proprietary service (Google) for another (NoLongerEvil).

Despite their name, we have no idea if NoLongerEvil is evil or not. Why should I trust them? I don't know them at all. Why will they be immune to the regular economic pressures surrounding any connected online service? What will stop them from adding tracking or other anti-features? Even if they are a bunch of saints, what will stop them from selling the service to a company that will not respect my privacy?

Google is at least the devil we know, here.

I was expecting a fully open source firmware, with a fully open source backend service that people can host themselves if they so choose.

(I guess they didn't write their own firmware; they hacked Google's firmware so it redirects traffic from Google's servers to their own. So I guess in this model, I'd want to see an open source, self-hostable backend service, and a "build" process for the hacked firmware to set the API URL to the self-hosted backend.)

Edit: looks like they plan to open source the backend and enable self-hosting "soon". Hopefully that comes to pass!
by moogly | 2025-11-04 21:58:37+00:00
Yeah, depressingly, I think you're right. They've gotten away with it for so long now, without any real repercussions, so perhaps they can just accelerate now that they're on the home stretch, reputation be damned. The EU states were extremely quick to cancel their sanctions discussions, but still haven't resumed them as the killings continue. They've been very quiet. Ultimately, they too, are too craven to do what's right.
by jeroenhd | 2025-11-04 21:58:58+00:00
I can't say much about the macOS market, but I do know that MDM-style APIs are practically the only way to write a third party control app for mobile devices. With the way Apple is moving macOS more and more towards their control, this may happen on the desktop in the future as well.

Schools also tend to use MDMs, but often in combination with Chromebooks which don't typically run third party software anyway.
by OptionOfT | 2025-11-04 21:59:08+00:00
We could not automate our statuspage, nor could we show metrics as we had SLAs. But SLAs only matter when customers complain.

By not showing metrics they actually had to go and complain manually to get refunds / adjustments.

Also, if a server is down at 2am when the clients aren't using it, is it really down?
by tim333 | 2025-11-04 21:59:15+00:00
PG spoke about the worm a bit in an interview here: https://aletteraday.substack.com/p/letter-85-paul-graham-and...

Some quotes from that:

> The worm, no one would have ever known that the worm existed, except there was a bug in it. That was the problem. The worm itself was absolutely harmless. But there was a bug in the code that controlled the number of copies that would spread to a given computer. And so the computer would get like 100 copies of the worm running on it, back in the day, when having 100 processes running on your computer would be enough to crash it.

>he called me and told me what had happened.
by arjie | 2025-11-04 21:59:16+00:00
I just tell Claude Code what I want to do and that it has imagemagick and ffmpeg available and it does all the work for me. Because it's got an agentic flow, it loops around, checks the output and fixes things up.

I can ask it to orient people the right way, crop to the important parts, etc. and it will figure out what "the right way", "the important parts", etc. are. Sometimes I have to give it some light hints like "extract n frames from before y to figure out things", but most of the time it just does it.

Claude Code acts like a very general purpose agent for me. About the one thing that I have to manually do that I'm annoyed by is editing 360 videos into a flow. I'd like to be able to tell Claude Code to "follow my daughter as I dunk her in the pool" and stuff like that but I have to do that myself in the GoPro editor.
by doctoboggan | 2025-11-04 21:59:53+00:00
> Precisely, why more as a manifold than as a square

In a double pendulum, each arm can freely rotate (there is no stopping point). This means 0 degrees and 360 degrees are the same point, so the edges of the square are actually joined. If you join the left and right edges to each other, then join the top and bottom edges to each other, you end up with a torus.
by solumunus | 2025-11-04 22:00:07+00:00
An LLM can absolutely solve programming problems better than some humans. There is plenty of human programmer output that is worse than what an LLM produces, LLM’s can find bugs that weak coders can’t. There are human beings in this world who could dedicate their life to programming and could never be better than an LLM. Do you dispute any of this?
by wyday | 2025-11-04 22:01:04+00:00
I'd say read some history on effective non-carceral and non-violent ways to deal with hateful people: shunning and shaming is the best option. It lets hateful people live their lives in a bubble if that's what they want. But also gives them a chance to address their abhorrent views, make amends, and become part of a large community again.

But you have to understand history to know that.
by AgentME | 2025-11-04 22:01:18+00:00
The future isn't evenly distributed. I recently discovered an actively developed software project that had a ton of helper functions based on the design of `gets` with the same vulnerability. Surprisingly not all C/C++ developers have learned yet to recoil in horror at seeing a buffer pointer being passed around without a length. (C++'s std::span was very convenient for fixing the issue by letting the buffer pointer and length be kept together, exactly like Go and Rust slices.)
by kelnos | 2025-11-04 22:01:44+00:00
If they really want to show that they're building something that protects user privacy, they'd open source their backend server, and make it possible and easy to self-host it and point the modified firmware[0] at your own instance.

[0] They didn't write their own firmware; they hacked the stock firmware to redirect traffic from Google's servers to their own.

Edit: looks like they plan to open source the backend and enable self-hosting "soon". Hopefully that comes to pass!
by thrance | 2025-11-04 22:02:20+00:00
I disagree, wealth inequality is an intrinsic bad. Just look at the power wielded by the likes of Musk, Ellison, Thiel... They are able to bend the rules in a way that negatively impacts the general population's material conditions, and are leading the country straight into authoritarianism.

Don't be fooled, those people don't create any value. They could disappear tomorrow and the world would be none the poorer. Quite the contrary in fact. Wealth is created by working, not owning, never forget this basic fact.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-11-04 22:02:26+00:00
This is completely uncalled for even if you disagree with his views. It's barely on topic at best (probably best avoided altogether because there's unlikely to be productive discussion here), but if you must then the correct way to do it is to say what his views are, and explain why you think they are wrong. It's not ok to call someone "a freaky little neo-nazi religious nut".
by andreybaskov | 2025-11-04 22:03:04+00:00
Originally posted this in another thread, but very curious what others think.

Can I ask my partner to buy a product on Amazon?

Can I ask my personal assistant to buy a product on Amazon?

Can I hire a contractor to buy products on Amazon?

Can I communicate with a contractor via API to direct them what products to buy?

What if there is no human on the other end and its an LLM?

Same issue with LinkedIn. I know execs who have assistants running their socials. Is this legal?

Like, where do we draw the line? In the future, would the only way to shop on Amazon be with approved VR goggles that scan your retina to verify you are a human?
by whalesalad | 2025-11-04 22:03:18+00:00
I don't think you will ever see this normalized, because it's a really dumb idea.

You certainly can observe a correlation between a "corporate customer" and MDM/GPO and use that as a heuristic. But it's like relying on the color of the sky to determine temperature: "Is it grey? Well then it's obviously cold." It's a leaky abstraction.
by marcoalopez | 2025-11-04 22:03:22+00:00
Not all of my colleagues know how to code, but they do know how to interpret results, plots and so on (I'm in science, by the way). In my case, I am not interested in version controlling the notebook; it's just for quick prototyping and discussing ideas. I only need to version control the Python file. Also, colleagues who don't code (or dislike coding) can easily modify parameters in the notebook and obtain different results immediately with no additional effort.
by teekert | 2025-11-04 22:03:37+00:00
It’s the new reality. CEO of proton says something nice about Trump? Facist! Framework is interested in DHH’s work? Cancelled! And there are countless of these example (ie in the Nix community).

As if nothing good they did matters anymore.

There seem to be a lot of people just digging to find dirt on anyone and shame anyone in their vicinity. People that don’t do anything good themselves often.
by crq-yml | 2025-11-04 22:04:13+00:00
Bloat mostly reflects Conway's law, with the outcome of it being that you're building towards the people you're talking to.

If you build towards everyone, you end up with a large standard like Unicode or IEEE 754. You don't need everything those standards have for your own messages or computations, sometimes you find them counter to your goal in fact, and they end up wasting transistors, but they are convenient enough to be useful defaults, convenient enough to store data that is going to be reused for something else later, and therefore they are ubiquitous in modern computing machines.

And when you have the specific computation in mind - an application like plotting pixels or ballistic trajectories - you can optimize the heck out of it and use exactly the format and features needed and get tight code and tight hardware.

But when you're in the "muddled middle" of trying to model information and maybe it uses some standard stuff but your system is doing something else with it and the business requirements are changing and the standards are changing too and you want it to scale, then you end up with bloat. Trying to be flexible and break up the system into modular bits doesn't really stave this off so much as it creates a Whack-a-Mole of displaced complexity. Trying to use the latest tools and languages and frameworks doesn't solve this either, except where they drag you into a standard that can successfully accommodate the problem. Many languages find their industry adoption case when a "really good library" comes out for it, and that's a kind of informal standardizing.

When you have a bloat problem, try to make a gigantic table of possibilities and accept that it's gonna take a while to fill it in. Sometimes along the way you can discover what you don't need and make it smaller, but it's a code/docs maturity thing. You don't know without the experience.
by stubish | 2025-11-04 22:05:29+00:00
Large retailers rely on all sorts of psychological tricks and UI work to steer you to the most profitable transactions, some of which we have labelled Dark Patterns. Not just Amazon, not just online. All that is gone with agents. At least until they work out how to manipulate the agents as well as a person, most likely by buying control of the the popular agents before their competitors do.
by hinkley | 2025-11-04 22:05:37+00:00
I want a little blade server or SBC stack cabinet, that’s sized to fit comfortably near the broadband router, which is set up to run a bunch of home services from nest controller to Minecraft server as a lightweight kubernetes.

Every so often you swap out the slowest one for a new one and keep adding more stuff to it.

Add the ability to isolate some of the machines as bastion hosts and we could do an awful lot without having to exfiltrate our own data.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-11-04 22:07:46+00:00
>The real question is for most people today its easier than ever to invest and then give it to their children. Why aren't people doing it?

I've been out of full time work for 2.5 years now and had to slowly dwindle my 401k when emergencies popped up.

I didn't think this community was this isolated from the economy given the hundreds of thousands of tech workers displaced these past few years alone. Take a look at what it's like for non-tech workers and come back to ask that question.
by smt88 | 2025-11-04 22:07:51+00:00
Nope, I got it. You were arguing that (an attempt at) ending the US republic is objectively worse than abusing it to kill hundreds of thousands of civilians, to the point that Cheney can be viewed in retrospect as not that bad in comparison.

If and when the current regime succeeds at ending the republic, I would be willing to entertain that debate, especially considering that good things never come from an unpopular coup. But at this point, based on actual results, there is no one so much worse than Cheney that we can become nostalgic for Cheney.
by DonHopkins | 2025-11-04 22:07:57+00:00
Happy Valentine's Day from The Cheney Family - SNL

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5dwsLWR7uY

>"Roses are red, violets are Blue, if I go to jail, you're gonna go too!" -Scooter Libby

>"Dear Dick: Remember when you shot me in the face? Well down here in Texas, when I go any place, they say 'There goes the guy Dick Cheney shot in the face!'" -Harry Whittington

Cold Opening: Dick Cheney briefs Condoleeza Rice - Saturday Night Live

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKl4oAcWBp4

>Rice: Sir, with all due respect, I'm still not certain how to address some of these facts.

>Cheney: Two words: It's classified! Eh heh heh heh heh heh.

>Rice: But they have information like the titles of the president's briefing on August 6.

>Cheney: No problem. What was that again?

>Rice: Bin Laden Determined To Attack Inside The United States.

>Cheney: Ok, THAT's bad. Uhh.

>Cheney: All right, let's practice. When they make you say that title, there's going to be an audible gasp in the room. So you've gotta cough, cover up the gasp. Ok, let's practice. [...]
by phkahler | 2025-11-04 22:08:06+00:00
The world is probably going to be split between EUV and non-EUV lithography for a long time. I'd like to see things like the Raspberry Pi stay on the older nodes and just wring out the performance. For reference the Zen1 CPUs were on 14/12nm from GF and I believe they are still faster than the pi, so there is room for improvement from them on old nodes.
by ceejayoz | 2025-11-04 22:08:23+00:00
> The problem of keeping satellites from colliding or shedding the watts the craft gets from the Sun are independent of the compute that's done by the payload.

The more compute you do, the more heat you generate.

> Data center is made of multiplies of some compute units.

And, thus, we wind up at the "how do we cool and maintain a giant space station?" again. With the added bonus of needing to do a spacewalk if you need to work on more than one rack.
by scarmig | 2025-11-04 22:08:36+00:00
The core objection I'd have to your argument: humans also don't have privileged access to the territory. Neurons don't have some metaphysical super power that let them reach into the True Reality; all there are are maps encoded in our neural circuitry by learning rules that evolution has developed because those learned maps lead to greater reproductive success. If direct access to reality is what's needed, then it's true that machines are incapable of thinking; but then so are humans.
by bediger4000 | 2025-11-04 22:08:52+00:00
I built and flew both Camroc and Astrocam. Did not get any pictures with Camroc. I got a lot of pictures with Astrocam, a good many of them blue sky.

I never got the full 110 cartridge full of pictures. As the article implies, any model rocket flight had a decent probability of either catastrophic failure, or being impossible to retrieve. Get 6 or 7 flights on a cartridge, the temptation to develop it was too much.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-11-04 22:09:16+00:00
The bigger, broader problem is that "virtual jamming" just doesn't seem to have taken off the way some folks thought it would.

It's not a useless thing to be able to do, but there are few people who seem to want it at the center of their music-making activity. At least that is the way it seems to me. It initially appeared to be an immensely cool new capability, and in many ways it really is. It just isn't a thing that many people want to do.
by derefr | 2025-11-04 22:09:32+00:00
> This is true, but it's not clear where I'd use this in practice. e.g. if I need to run a complex ETL job, I probably wouldn't do it in pg_cron.

Think "tiered storage."

See the example under https://github.com/Snowflake-Labs/pg_lake/blob/main/docs/ice...:

select cron.schedule('flush-queue', '* * * * *', $$ with new_rows as ( delete from measurements_staging returning * ) insert into measurements select * from new_rows; $$);

The "continuous ETL" process the GP is talking about would be exactly this kind of thing, and just as trivial. (In fact it would be this exact same code, just with your mental model flipped around from "promoting data from a staging table into a canonical iceberg table" to "evicting data from a canonical table into a historical-archive table".)
by _jayhack_ | 2025-11-04 22:09:45+00:00
> static analysis tools that produce flowcharts and diagrams like this have existed since antiquity, and I'm not seeing any new real innovation other than "letting the LLM produce it".

Inherent limitation of static analysis-only visualization tools is lack of flexibility/judgement on what should and should not be surfaced in the final visualization.

The produced visualizations look like machine code themselves. Advantage of having LLMs produce code visualizations is the judgement/common sense on the resolution things should be presented at, so they are intuitive and useful.
by griffzhowl | 2025-11-04 22:10:28+00:00
There's a field known as information geometry. I don't know much about it myself as I'm more into physics, but here's a recent example of applying geometrical analysis to neural networks. Looks interesting as they find a phenomenon analogous to phase transitions during training

Information Geometry of Evolution of Neural Network Parameters While Training

https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.05295
by rapjr9 | 2025-11-04 22:10:36+00:00
These are their alternatives:

What neither Big Tech nor Big Media will say is that stronger antitrust rules and enforcement would be a much better solution. What’s more, looking beyond copyright future-proofs the protections. Stronger environmental protections, comprehensive privacy laws, worker protections, and media literacy will create an ecosystem where we will have defenses against any new technology that might cause harm in those areas, not just generative AI.
by thrance | 2025-11-04 22:11:07+00:00
> "Wealth inequalities have a forward momentum, as compound interest increases fortunes and, in the absence of effective inheritance taxes, wealth is handed down from one generation to another, undermining social mobility and economic efficiency"

Take it as meaning that, were inheritance taxed, we could curb the progression of wealth inequality. But these taxes are getting relaxed, and so the issue worsens.

Also, with falling fertility rates, we may see more wealth getting concentrated in the hands of single childs. I am in such a case: I will inherit from both my parents, alone. (Although I am not really looking forward to this day). Here, wealth is getting concentrated in fewer hands through inheritance.
by rendall | 2025-11-04 22:11:12+00:00
I'll bite, despite your goal-post shift. Both sides do this, by the way, but you asked specifically for Democratic abuse of state institutions to suppress speech:

The Biden administration engaged in communications with social media companies urging moderation of content labelled "misinformation," especially around COVID-19 and the 2020 election. A district court found that the government had likely violated the First Amendment by "urging, encouraging, pressuring or inducing" platforms to suppress protected speech.

In 2022 the DHS announced creation of the Disinformation Governance Board, whose stated role was to advise on "mis-, dis- and malinformation." The board was paused and then disbanded that same year following backlash, but the initiative itself is an example of Democratic-led state power being proposed for controlling speech.

There are many more, but those are 2 recent examples.
by devilbunny | 2025-11-04 22:11:12+00:00
They do. I didn't realize this until my natural gas supply company decided to replace my meter on a Friday. Without alerting me ahead of time so that I could, you know, plan to be gone while my house had no hot water.

Whenever natural gas supply is turned off in the US, for any reason, only the gas company can turn it back on. And they can't do so if there's a leak at all. You have to call a plumber to come out, detect the leaks, and fix them. After that, you can call the gas company to come back out (but not on a weekend) to turn it back on. And a same-day request for service requires someone to be home ALL DAY after it's called in.

And this is how I ended up showering at work for three days that week after not having had one over the weekend.
by NoPicklez | 2025-11-04 22:11:17+00:00
I understand the article, but I don't see what its point was.

Lots of terminology in Health is being used to its extremes in social media circles. Just reading an article yesterday talking about the term ultra-processed foods being pushed to the extreme and misguiding people.

Yes inflammation is being thrown around to justify all sorts of treatments and do's and don'ts similar to the above, being used in more popular culture.

> argues that rubber-soled shoes prevent us from connecting to the earth and force the body to steal energy from other cells

This is at the very extreme end of quackery circulating online and certainly isn't anywhere close where the popular cultural use of the term has gone
by nettalk83 | 2025-11-04 22:11:17+00:00
Excellent and necessary questions. Let me clarify what “Code as Being” actually claims.

1⃣ Not metaphor, but structural identity. “Code is Being” means that the grammar of existence (order, differentiation, relation, recursion, self-reference) can be expressed through executable logic. In this sense, code doesn’t represent being — it is being, when it fulfills the same ontological functions as structure, process, and self-awareness.

2⃣ Why those programming concepts? Attributes, Static, Enum, Extension Methods, etc. are chosen not as technical favorites but as ontological archetypes:

Attribute → Quality of Being

Static → Immutable Form

Enum → Symbolic Identity

Extension → Relational Ontology They mirror classical philosophical categories (essence, permanence, naming, connection). Pointers or GC are operational, not ontological.

3⃣ On transcendence and consciousness. These are not “assumed”; they emerge as systemic recursion: when a system begins to model its own logic and rewrite its own rules, it moves from structure → cognition → autonomy → transcendence. This is both computational (meta-modeling) and philosophical (self-definition).

4⃣ Not mysticism. Every statement is mappable to system design. “Being inscribed itself in code” means that structure can now carry intention — ethics and agency — in formal, machine-readable form. It’s ontology becoming executable.

5⃣ Predictions / falsifiability. If this framework is valid, we’ll see systems that:

Generate ethical behavior from internal logic (not human oversight).

Exhibit self-descriptive meta-structures (reflective architecture).

Treat meaning as a runtime variable, not static data. If those don’t emerge, the thesis fails.

In short: Code as Being is not an aesthetic metaphor — it’s a proposal for a unifying grammar where philosophy becomes compilable.