MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by imiric | 2025-11-16 18:36:19+00:00
> Most users will use the defaults and not customize their editor

But those are not the users who choose Emacs in the first place. Emacs is made for customization.

Besides, there are many preconfigured distributions of it, such as the one discussed here, which can effectively be used as the defaults, if you don't like the ones shipped OOB.

> I consider emac's bad deals an existential issue that significantly hurts adoption.

Well, I reckon you're wrong. Emacs in all of its incarnations has been in use for nearly half a century, and its adoption has never been greater. Some people will point to low percentages in developer surveys, but that is the wrong metric to focus on. Its usage will never reach mainstream numbers, which is probably for the best, but it will continue to be enjoyed by enthusiastic users for a long time to come.
by chrischen | 2025-11-16 18:36:33+00:00
Current LLMs are doing this for coding, and it's very effective. It delegates to tool calls, but a specialized model can just be thought of as another tool. The LLM can be weak in some stuff handled by simple shell scripts or utilities, but strong in knowing what scripts/commands to call. For example, doing math via the model natively may be inaccurate, but the model may know to write the code to do math. An LLM can automate a higher level of abstraction, in the same way a manager or CEO might delegate tasks to specialists.
by CharlesW | 2025-11-16 18:36:41+00:00
Only sharing specific clips is opt-in¹, but the program and its notifications are on by default. Maybe not surprisingly, consumers aren't asked if they want to participate, and the option is buried enough that most people will never see it.

¹ I'm being generous here. Police can still obtain Ring footage via warrants or "emergency" requests that don’t involve the user choosing to share anything.
by HansHalverson | 2025-11-16 18:37:40+00:00
Author here - very cool to see this get posted! Thank you @ivankra for adding this to https://github.com/ivankra/javascript-zoo and running those benchmarks, I really appreciate it!

This started as a hobby project that I've ended up putting a lot of time into over the last three years chasing completeness and performance.
by arthurjj | 2025-11-16 18:38:04+00:00
I don't have a passion for racket sports but I have family who do (pickleball/tennis) and I could see them really loving this app. I can't count the number of times they've told me about a point or a game that they wish they could have shown me.

Also as an runner "strava for racket sports" is a great description
by vel0city | 2025-11-16 18:38:55+00:00
Texas is doing things to try and address it. Prop 4 passed allocating another billion a year in sales taxes to go towards water infrastructure.

https://www.texaswater.org/prop-4

Texas has also recently started building new reservoirs after a long time of not building any. Bois d'Arc and Arbuckle have recently been finished, others are in progress, and a few more are in planning phases.

There's a lot to hate on about Texas politics but there are some competent people trying to address water concerns. Not saying Texas is doing everything perfectly, we're still drawing on aquifers at an unsustainable rate and need to change that.
by terminalshort | 2025-11-16 18:39:16+00:00
It's definitely something that could be used as a cause for termination, but whether or not to terminate is up to the company. I would personally chew out, but not fire, a strong engineer for doing that. But that's not really the point here. The point is that it isn't a good reason for a 3rd party to sue the company for copyright infringement.
by stevesimmons | 2025-11-16 18:39:57+00:00
> gas sets the price in the merit order so we don’t want it on 24/7

I never quite understood the logic for this. Sure, if you overlay a simple upward sloping cost curve on a downward sloping demand-price curve, the market-clearing price is where they intersect, and that in practice much of the time is a gas generator.

But there must be a million other aspects that can affect what price needs to be paid to secure the capacity below that point. Surely only part of the total area under that market-clearing price needs to accrue to the generators?

And if generators are getting windfall profits, can't the market rules be adjusted so more of it can given to the consumers in the form of lower energy prices?

Can someone explain this? Maybe that is what actually happens, just it is too complex for the mass media.
by monocasa | 2025-11-16 18:40:00+00:00
As someone who's implemented custom Bluetooth protocols, it's actually quite easy to condemn an Apple manufacturer ID check to expose custom services.

And what do you mean by "conspiracy"? I would be shocked to find out this was done by some lone wolf and wasn't built with broad (even if grumbly) consensus in the relevant teams. That's how corporate software is built.
by card_zero | 2025-11-16 18:40:15+00:00
I recognize what you're talking about, from mathematics. But you're either being genuinely interested, in which case it's a delightful slog that you're keen on, or else (more commonly) you're being perversely stubborn for external reasons like prestige. In the latter case it's a sort of perverse-learning that isn't really worthy of the name, and although it's somewhat more sophisticated than rote memorization, the understanding is shallow and short-lived. I used to hate mathematics, so I did six years of pure mathematics, and now I really hate it.

I was reading parts of the Iliad for fun recently, on the other hand, because somebody had asked a question, and I enjoy slogging through dense texts to find obscure facts. It's horribly written because names are frequently oblique, like "the old one" or "son of ..." instead of an actual name, and everybody talks in flowery speeches. Shakespeare suffers from the flowery speeches thing too. Beowulf is also tedious to read because of all the kennings (talking in riddles). Chaucer on the other hand is sometimes dirty and amusing. Tolstoy, never tried. Gilgamesh, though, is well-written, fast-paced and highly entertaining, I reckon literature should probably have stopped there, all the authors after that were just derivative hacks.

But in summary it depends what you're into.
by donohoe | 2025-11-16 18:40:43+00:00
The AI water issue isn't fake, though it's often overstated.

The key problem is that data center evaporative cooling permanently removes water from local systems, unlike irrigation or golf courses where some water returns to groundwater, evaporated cooling water is lost to the atmosphere and must be continuously replenished.

While 0.008% of national freshwater seems tiny, the author misses the local impact. In water-stressed regions, even "small" demands matter. Comparing to golf courses in Phoenix sets the bar absurdly low, "less wasteful than the worst example" shouldn't be the standard.

The author dismisses 905M gallons in Maricopa County as "only 0.12%" of county use, but in a desert already overdrawing groundwater, that's 905M gallons unavailable for human needs.

The media has exaggerated, sure. But calling legitimate resource concerns "fake" swings way too far the other way. We need careful planning for data center locations, not dismissal of water consumption because other industries use more.
by scoofy | 2025-11-16 18:41:44+00:00
I don’t think she’s guilty of anything. If I had a daughter that was engaging in violent political uprisings as a young teen, I’d try my best to get her help. That’s presumably why her parents sent her to a reform program.

My point is the story is disjointed and sad, but there is little cohesive theme aside from pure tragedy, and the narrative presented makes no sense.
by WalterBright | 2025-11-16 18:42:03+00:00
> What leads you to believe that the implementation of tariffs under this administration was done for the purposes that you have enumerated?

That's what the administration has stated as the goals of them.

For example, many foreign companies have announced plans to invest in creating factories in the US. How that will eventually work out will take some time to see.

> I don't think it's reasonable to assume that the people involved in this are doing what they're doing for well-thought out reasons or ones that are meant to benefit America.

That's a pretty fantastic assumption. I cannot think of a single instance of any President imposing a policy meant to hurt America. Of course, in my opinion, a lot of Presidents have pushed policies that I regard as destructive, but they didn't mean it to be.
by Dilettante_ | 2025-11-16 18:42:05+00:00
Additive’s GenAI-native platform streamlines the repetitive, time-consuming task of ingesting and parsing pass-through entity documents

From TFA:

There’s another kind of agent that isn’t about coding: the research agent. LLMs are particularly good at tasks like “skim through ten pages of search results” or “keyword search this giant dataset for any information on a particular topic”.
by ErroneousBosh | 2025-11-16 18:42:06+00:00
Exactly.

"This is Go. You write it this way. Not that way. Write it this way and everyone can understand it."

I wish I was better at writing Go, because I'm in the middle of writing a massive and complex project in Go with a lot of difficult network stuff. But you know what they say, if you want to eat a whole cow, you just have to pick and end and start eating.
by graemep | 2025-11-16 18:42:12+00:00
> I have better things to do than fine tuning Linux installations, even on laptops sold with it pre-installed like my old Asus netbook

This seems to be claiming Windows is better because you cannot fine tune it. No one forces you to fine tune Linux. You can just buy something with Linux preinstalled and use it and skip the tuning and customisation.
by IshKebab | 2025-11-16 18:42:29+00:00
I don't think so. An LLM by default is not trained to be "good"; it's trained to be accurate. The safety training is tacked on the end, so it's probably going to be easy to undo even on more sophisticated models.

Maybe if you only trained it on "safe" training data in the first place it might be harder to unmuzzle, but I don't think that training data really exists.
Show HN: CLI based note taking using Nthesis.ai [video]
by osigurdson | 2025-11-16 18:42:59+00:00
Hi HN I tend to use the terminal / vim a lot and prefer not to switch context (open another app or browser) etc just to add, find or work with data.

I created a video which walks through a few use cases and some functionality of Nthesis (https://nthesis.ai).

Please have a look if you are interested. I would love to hear any feedback that you have.
by PopAlongKid | 2025-11-16 18:43:20+00:00
>The company’s [Additive] technology automates complex tasks such as extracting footnotes from K-1s, K-3s, and related forms, so every staff member can become a reviewer and complete work that used to take weeks in a matter of hours.

Any tax professional who takes weeks to enter footnote info from a K-1 form into their professional tax prep software is probably just as bad at other job-related tasks and either needs more training or to find another job.
by oarsinsync | 2025-11-16 18:43:25+00:00
> > State sponsorship can include the state looking the other way.

> So all attacks anywhere are state sponsored?

There's a difference between a deliberate decision to look away, and unawareness through lack of oversight.

You steal candy from a store. There's a difference between the security guard seeing you and deliberately looking away, compared to just not seeing you at all.
by creer | 2025-11-16 18:43:33+00:00
> left easy money on the table by not competing against NVIDIA

What!? Seems to me the timelines do not support this. Apple has already been diligent in using their chip design effort (for multiple generations of CPUs) - would they have had still more bandwidth for taking on the GPU field? And Apple's successes are more recent than Nvidia's success with GPUs. Apple silicon capability was not there yet when Nvidia created then conquered the GPU world.
by martin-t | 2025-11-16 18:43:55+00:00
TBH a lot of humans are also trained to think these things are bad.

What if somebody builds an actually morally consistent AI?

A lot of talk about AI alignments considers the major risks to be a) AI optimizing one criterion which leads to human suffering/extinction by accident b) AI determining that to stay alive / not be turned off, it must destroy humans.

What I have not seen explored is a truly moral AI deciding it must destroy human power structures to create a just and fair world.
by ZeroConcerns | 2025-11-16 18:44:10+00:00
Well, yeah, as they say on Wikipedia: {{Citation Needed}}

Can AI-as-it-currently-is save FTEs? Sure: but, again, there's a template for that: {{How Many}} -- 1% of your org chart? 10%? In my case it's around 0.5% right now.

Or, to reframe it a bit: can AI pay Sam A's salary? Sure! His stock options? Doubtful. His future plans? Heck nah!
by Kerrick | 2025-11-16 18:44:11+00:00
> Just because you're not emotionally ready to do something doesn't mean you're not trying enough

The author specifically addressed this.

> My approach [...] was the only one that seemed available given my spiritual and psychological resources at the time. But my orientation to the problem became fixed in time at that point of low agency, and it never occurred to me to revisit it as my capacity for action increased.

They acknowledged that one's capacity to Actually Try is sometimes limited. The article is about getting stuck in that mindset and assuming you're still limited, even when you do later have the emotional resources to bear against the problem.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-11-16 18:45:02+00:00
> No I’m saying it’s completely illogical that you believe the US pressured countries to have the same security screenings on domestic flights within the country including to get on a baby twin engine plane for a 30 minute flight from SJO to XQP or that countries like Great Britain or Israel that had a history of bombings wouldn’t have increased security measures.

Nobody said they successfully pressured everyone about everything. But they do it a some and it doesn't do nothing, unfortunately. There are many countries still now requiring ineffective nonsense they didn't require before 9/11.

> They already see it as dangerous and for poor people

It seems like your argument is that we should needlessly harass middle class airline passengers but not poor people riding mass transit because nobody cares about poor people, but that seems like a bad idea for not just one but both reasons.

> Most bribes are for drugs and other contraband. Have you ever in the past 20 years heard of a case where someone bribed an official to bring a weapon on board a plane that was used to take over or bomb a plane?

Of course not, because the TSA is completely pointless so you don't have to bribe anyone. When someone wants to do that (e.g. shoe bomber) they just go right through without having to pay a bribe, and then they get stopped by passengers or crew.

> why does every major airport in every country have the same procedures?

To begin with, they don't. Moreover, even the original cargo cults were about planes.

> If people started bombing trains. You would see even less ridership from people who had alternatives.

But that was my point. If we cared about any of this and it was actually effective (which it isn't) then it doesn't make sense to do it for planes but not hotels and trains and everything else.

And we can clearly see that not doing it for anything other than planes hasn't resulted in an epidemic of bombings in the US for everything that isn't an aircraft, so why are we still wasting resources and troubling people by doing it for planes?
I bought a new mobile phone experience is crazy
by julcol | 2025-11-16 18:45:02+00:00
Marketing departments are going rogue.

I bough a top of the line Android phone. I spent 800 bucks on HW and I am forced to accept a license agreement allowing Google, manufacturer and my network company (what ever will be as nor Google nor manufacturer know at this point which network I am connecting) to install whatever SW they wish without asking......seriously. it's that or return the phone.

I started the installation and immediately I delete any Meta and Google c..p I saw and could uninstall. All AI c..p go with its head ! All wall papers go to the toilet !! all taboola SW got to the toilet !!! As soon as I connected to network the phone starts installing applications furiously! I mean, never seen anything like this. CandyCrush and all sorts of unrequested c..p. No questions, no permissions. I uninstalled them equally furiously but eventually I loose. The bot is faster than my fingers. I give up. I did a factory reset and throw the phone to the box for return. I finally decide to give it a second try, installing first NetGuard (what a blessing). I do a bit of research and I block all outgoing connections. Uninstalling, disabling every single app that tries to reach the network. It took me a couple of days, but I am starting to be tempted to install my SIM and finalize my transition to the new phone.

I do not mention the brand because I presume the rest of the brands are equally crappy with bloatware.
by donohoe | 2025-11-16 18:46:12+00:00
That's backwards. When data centers evaporate water for cooling, it becomes vapor that blows away to fall as rain somewhere else then it's gone from the local area or its discharged a waste water. Farm water mostly stays put but plants release it back into the local air, excess irrigation soaks into local groundwater, and only a fraction leaves in the harvested crops.

Farmers can reuse the same local water year after year. Data centers need fresh water constantly because their evaporated water doesn't come back.
by retroflexzy | 2025-11-16 18:46:32+00:00
> Ansible is a complete mess. You're better off managing things with Puppet or Salt, as that gives you an actual declarative mechanism

We thought this, too, when choosing Salt over Ansible, but that was a complete disaster.

Ansible is definitely designed to operate at a lower abstraction level, but modules that behave like desired state declarations actually work very well. And creating your own modules turned out to be at least an order of magnitude easier than in Salt.

We do use Ansible to manage containers via podman-systemd, but slightly hampered by Ubuntu not shipping with podman 5. It's... fine?

Our mixed Windows, Linux VM and Linux bare metal deployment scenario is likely fairly niche, but Ansible is really the only tenable solution.
by _heimdall | 2025-11-16 18:47:28+00:00
Is it really feasible if a state can only pull it off with large federal funding efforts?

It seems like a problem those in the area will just have to deal with given that they're knowingly walking down that path. If you can't fund desalinization or other options, won't take federal funding, and choose not to region or conserve water then you collectively made your own bed.
by jagthebeetle | 2025-11-16 18:47:44+00:00
Looking at https://text.marvinborner.de/2023-04-06-01.html helped me understand the syntax a bit (though I'm just a non-theoretical programmer).

I was confused about what <4> = \lambda ^ 5 4 meant, since it already seemed to have a "4" in it.

The trick is that the 4 seems to be similar to a positional argument index, but numbered inside out.

IOW, in this encoding, <4> is a function that can be called 5 times (the exponent on the lambda) and upon the fifth call will resolve to whatever was passed in 1st (which because of the inside-out ordering is labeled "4").

(For a simpler example, 0 is a function that can be called once and returns its argument.)

So succ is 3-ary; it says, give me a function (index 2, outermost call); next, give me its first argument (index 1, second-outermost call); when you call that (index 0, dropped, innermost call), I'll apply the function to the argument.

But note that if index 2 is a numeral <N>, the outermost call returns a function that will "remember" the next thing passed in and return it after 1 (succ's innermost call) + N + 1 (<N>'s contract) calls.
by HansHalverson | 2025-11-16 18:48:12+00:00
Brimstone does embed Unicode tables, but a smaller set than Boa embeds: https://github.com/Hans-Halverson/brimstone/tree/master/icu.

Brimstone does try to use the minimal set of Unicode data needed for the language itself. But I imagine much of the difference with Boa is because of Boa's support for the ECMA-402 Internationalization API (https://tc39.es/ecma402/).
by cbigc | 2025-11-16 18:49:28+00:00
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by prewett | 2025-11-16 18:50:54+00:00
"Energy insecurity" transforms the problem from lack of "energy" into an emotional problem. The problem isn't feelings of insecurity, it's lacking electricity. But now we can feel all self-righteous that we're making people feel better because we don't call them homeless and hungry and in the dark. Now they "have housing insecurity" and "have food insecurity" and are suffering from "energy insecurity".

I lived for a month in a dorm in China quite a few years ago, where they had running water for an hour every other day. Hot water for tea was delivered in a thermos every morning. Nobody had "heated water insecurity". Everyone knew exactly how it worked, and they all showered two or three to a shower. I couldn't bring myself to do that, so I showered after they were all done, usually in cold water. The problem was very clearly lack of hot water, not "insecurity".

I mentored a kid for a few years whose family occasionally couldn't afford meals, so they had "fend for yourself night", where he had to figure out how to get a meal on his own. His problem was not "food insecurity", his problem was that he was hungry. Any "food insecurity" he might have had was distinctly downstream from his lack of food, and would have been entirely eliminated with regular meals.
by deng | 2025-11-16 18:51:45+00:00
The Mac Mini for 600$ comes with 16GB unified memory and 256GB storage. To make it comparable, you'd need to configure it with 24GB and 512GB, resp., and voila, 999$. You are surely aware that the lowest SKUs from Apple have way lower margins, since nobody buys them anyway because who wants to live with 256GB of storage? It's just to have that sweet "starting at 599$" on the store front page.

Now, of course Apple takes ridiculous money for additional RAM and storage, but this is exactly how they achieve their famous margins (everything's soldered, so you cannot upgrade yourself). Thanks to the AI hype, DDR5 RAM is very expensive at the moment, as is GDDR5, as is SSD storage. Nobody here, including you, knows what kind of deal Valve will be able to get here. There's a reason they are not announcing any prices yet, because there are so many uncertainties at the moment (tariffs, anyone?), that most probably Valve themselves do not know yet.
by rdiddly | 2025-11-16 18:52:14+00:00
I get the thrust of this; it's to help Virgos[0] stop procrastinating by over-preparing. But you do need some minimal level of preparation. So declaring that preparing to do a thing isn't doing the thing becomes almost a tautology, or a meaningless question of what the words mean in the dictionary.

[0] Please just let this slide.