MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by microtonal | 2025-11-13 14:14:58+00:00
For some reason things that happen in the air seem to privatise much better than things that happen on the ground.

I know that there are some nuances to this, but this makes sense right? If you think you can compete on say London-Amsterdam, your airline can in principle decide to compete there (yes, they need slots, etc.).

If you want to compete with rail between Amsterdam and Berlin, you are either going to pay an insane amount for extra infrastructure (too expensive) or you have to let companies bid on exploiting a line. But you can never have two companies competing at exactly the same times.
by graemep | 2025-11-13 14:15:26+00:00
It implies railways were les safe post privatisation. This is misleading. There were more accidents and deaths, but that was because of a huge increase in miles travelled. Deaths per billion kilometers fell consistently before and after privatisation.

A lot of the problems lie in tracks and their maintenance, and the tracks were re-nationalised many years ago. It is not efficiently run (see HS2!).

They are expensive, but that is partly because rail workers are well paid. Train drivers can be paid as much as aircraft pilots. Their ability and willingness to strike affects both costs and people's willingness to rely on public transport.

The big constraint is lack of subsidies. it probably makes little difference whether the system is privately owned but tightly regulated, or publicly owned so much as willingness to subsidise it. This is also shown by the failure of franchises taken back into public ownership to improve.
by jermaustin1 | 2025-11-13 14:15:27+00:00
I also go there rather frequently (much more before covid, though), and agreed, compared to the rail I'm using in the US (NYC, Boston, Amtrak), it is pretty good, but I've had some VERY bad experiences on it.

As a whole though, at least out of major cities London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Manchester, the rail system is great.
by sschueller | 2025-11-13 14:15:53+00:00
You can't privatize what can't make money in itself. By that I mean, rail is beneficial to the entire economy of a country. This profit is not something a rail company can benefit from but a country can. Serving low traffic areas are a loss business but vital for a country to grow.

Same for fiber infrastructure, running fiber into a desolate town may not be profitable but giving the chance for some kid in that town to build the next unicorn from his home benefits the entire nation. Not all talent is in the cities.
by KronisLV | 2025-11-13 14:15:58+00:00
Afraid not, a bit outside of my budget (given that I've been pushing millions of tokens daily, especially for lots of refactoring that'd be great to do in an automated fashion but codegen solutions for which... just don't exist). From what little I've used Opus in the past, I'm sure it'd do reasonably as well. Maybe even Sonnet with more attempts, different prompts etc.
by rpdillon | 2025-11-13 14:16:12+00:00
How do you feel about Google vacuuming up the world's data when they created a search engine? I feel like everybody just ignores this because Google was ostensibly sending traffic to the resulting site. The actual infringement of scraping should be identical between OpenAI and Google. Why is nobody complaining about Google scraping their sites? Is it only because they're getting paid off to not complain?

Everybody acts like this is a moral argument when really it's about whether or not they're getting a piece of the pie.
Show HN: PolyCouncil: Multi-Model Deliberation Engine for LMStudio (Open Source)
by tpierce89 | 2025-11-13 14:16:13+00:00
I built PolyCouncil to solve a problem I kept running into when testing local LLMs, I never knew if a single model's answer was actually good, or just confidently wrong. Instead of querying one model, PolyCouncil runs multiple local LLMs in parallel through LM Studio, has them evaluate each other's responses using a shared rubric, then conducts weighted voting to reach consensus on the best answer. Think of it like a panel of experts that score each other's work, then vote democratically on the winner. Key features:

Parallel execution across multiple models Rubric-based cross-evaluation (accuracy, clarity, completeness, etc.) Weighted voting system based on peer scores Custom personas (fact-checker, engineer, risk assessor, etc.) Built-in leaderboard to track model performance Single-voter "judge" mode for controlled experiments Clean Python/PySide6 GUI with pre-built Windows executable

Why it's useful:

Compare models systematically without manual evaluation Get more reliable answers through ensemble methods Explore emergent behavior from model deliberation Test how different personas affect model responses

It's free for personal/research use (Polyform Noncommercial). Built for anyone tinkering with local models who wants to see how collective intelligence emerges from LLM orchestration. Would love feedback from folks experimenting with local models! GitHub: https://github.com/TrentPierce/PolyCouncil
by fauigerzigerk | 2025-11-13 14:16:26+00:00
As far as I'm concerned they can grant this permission by default. I just want the power to disable it.

A while ago I wanted to scan the NFC chip in my passport. Obviously, I didn't want this information to leave my device.

There are many small utility apps and games that have no reason to require network access. So "need" is not quite the right word here. They _want_ network access and they _want_ to be able to bully users into granting it.

That's a weird justification for granting it by default. But I wouldn't care if I could disable it.
by dboreham | 2025-11-13 14:16:46+00:00
These entities are not really the same kind of thing. BA and RR were successful private companies that ran into difficulty for one reason or another and took on the UKG as an investor of last resort. BT was an offshoot of the Post Office, a service that is run by the government even in the USA. BP was government controlled for...geopolitical reasons.
by Marshferm | 2025-11-13 14:17:30+00:00
Neurobio is built from the base units of consciousness outwards, not intuited interpretation. Eg prediction has nothing inherent to do with consciousness directly. That’s a process imposed on brains post hoc.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38579270/

And

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262552820/the-spontaneous-brain...

Easily refute prediction or error prediction as fundamental.

The path to intelligence or consciousness isn’t mimicry of interpretation.

In terms of strong definitions, start at the base, coders: oscillation, dynamics, Topologies, sharp wave ripples, and I would say roughly 60 more strongly defined material units and processes. This reverse intuition is going nowhere and it’s pseudoscientific nonsense for social media timeline filling.
by MRtecno98 | 2025-11-13 14:17:37+00:00
> There's no point maintaining the illusion that we're soliciting feedback or discussion on the issues tracker when we are not.

You could have just said this (maybe you did when linking the code of conduct) instead of writing a paragraph of confrontational arguments and it would have looked way better imho.

> You may think it hyperbolic but drive-by negativity by non-code-contributor users is the biggest existential risk to projects like Homebrew.

If this was true every oss project would either be dead or be entirely comprised of dicks, neither of which are the case.
by corimaith | 2025-11-13 14:17:49+00:00
Graphics have long reached diminishing returns in gameplay, people aren't going to playing VRChat tomorrow for the same reasons today.

AI can speed up asset development, but that is not a major bottleneck for video games, what matters is the creative game design and backend systems, which existing on the interaction between players and systems is just about as hard as any management role, if not harder.
by pmontra | 2025-11-13 14:17:51+00:00
I'm with you and personally I boycott Apple because of the walled garden, for what it's worth. However it is a better way (a more convenient way?) for companies to make money and it gave an idea to legislators and regulators. Now they expect that the owner of the OS can decide what runs and what does not run on their OS and be made accountable for it.
by simoncion | 2025-11-13 14:17:51+00:00
> But maybe that impression is wrong and they now cooperate better.

Based on my experience with Blasted Corporate Hellscapes, I find it very unlikely that they cooperate better. Middle-ish management lives to stab each other in the back, belly, and face.

> ...Windows Explorer can even create files and folders starting with a dot...

That's progress! Does Windows Explorer still shit the bed when you ask it to interact with a file whose name contains the '|' character? That's always been valid in NTFS, and I think is valid in at least a subset of the Windows programming interfaces.
by madcaptenor | 2025-11-13 14:17:52+00:00
See the maps here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-17/this-simp...

Most of the eastern US gets more inches of precipitation than Seattle. But there are few places (mostly in a band from eastern Ohio and West Virginia, across Upstate New York, through to northern New England) that have more days with measurable precipitation than Seattle.

Someone also pulled data on the fifty largest cities: https://www.acsh.org/news/2019/01/16/how-rainy-seattle-its-n.... Seattle is 32nd for amount of rain but 5th (behind Buffalo, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh in the band I mentioned, and also its neighbor Portland) for number of rainy days.
by komali2 | 2025-11-13 14:18:15+00:00
I disagree and am working on an article arguing that Japan rail privatization represents a failure, as does its much lauded pedestrian friendliness.

The premise is basically that Tokyo is the busiest city on planet earth and so should therefore have the best public transit and pedestrian infrastructure by a huge margin, when in fact it still gives unbelievable space to cars (Shibuya crossing should have been permanently closed to cars 20 years ago).

As for trains, during rush hour trains can be so full you might be squashed against the door unable to move - incredibly unsafe, leads to daily injuries, and some argue have something to do with the heinous levels of sexual assault on trains. Not to mention even in Shinjuku station most platforms don't have guardrails to prevent accidental or purposeful death by trains, another outsized problem in Tokyo.

But the most glaring issue is around the very design of the system. Privatization results in requiring riders to sometimes exit a station of one company, go all the way up to ground level, walk a block or to two another different company station, and then ride another train. A government managed system wouldn't have this issue, it would simply combine the stations at design time.
by ckozlowski | 2025-11-13 14:18:52+00:00
Amazonian here. My views are my own; I do not represent my company/corporate.

That said...

We do our very best. But I don't know anyone here who would say "it can never happen". Security is never an absolute. The best processes and technology will lower the likelihood and impact towards 0, but never to 0. Viewed from that angle, it's not if Amazon will be hacked, it's when and to what extent. It is my sincere hope that if we have an incident, we rise up to the moment with transparency and humility. I believe that's what most of us are looking for during and after an incident has occurred.

To our customers: Do your best, but have a plan for what you're going to do when it happens. Incidents like this one here from checkout.com can show examples of some positive actions that can be taken.
by graemep | 2025-11-13 14:19:05+00:00
That has happened in Britain. it was how Gordon Brown claimed a balanced budget while running up what would be classified as off balance sheet debt if anyone other than the government did it. A lot of things like hospitals were financed this way.

I would say the motive here was mostly to avoid increasing the government debt numbers. it would not work if the government did not exempt itself form the rules applied to everyone else.
by Auntypelz | 2025-11-13 14:19:25+00:00
Curacel is hiring Senior Full-Stack Engineers, Senior Full-Stack Product Managers (Growth Pilled) and AI/ML Engineers - HYBRID (Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Egypt, Morocco, South Africa)

Curacel is on a mission to empower financial services with AI-powered infrastructure that creates a world of better opportunity and prosperity. We're building something exciting, and we need a team that works faster than the industry we're disrupting.

Tech Stack: PHP, Laravel, Vue, React Native, Python, Node, MySQL, MS SQL, Electron| AWS, GCP, Docker, Kubernetes (nice to have)

More details and how to apply here:

Senior Full-Stack role|Compensation $6k-$9k|Equity 0.05% - 0.50%: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/curacel/jobs/jSq2LzM-s...

Senior Full-Stack Product Manager (Growth Pilled)|Compensation $7k-$11k|Equity 0.05% - 0.50%: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/curacel/jobs/jhmEbWF-f...

AI/ML Engineer|Compensation $6k-$9k|Equity 0.05% - 0.50%: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/curacel/jobs/wXA1RlF-a...
by rpdillon | 2025-11-13 14:19:50+00:00
When I looked for the base of this lawsuit, I was looking for some kind of monetary damage that the New York Times had suffered as a result of open AI's actions, like specific cases where their work has been reproduced or people canceling their subscriptions to the New York Times because of OpenAI's launch. I've done so much reading, and I've still been unable to find anything that articulates this. Do you know of anything that talks about it?
by randycupertino | 2025-11-13 14:20:05+00:00
This reminds me of when Trump was obsessed with Kristen Stewart's and Robert Patterson's breakup and would post about it all the time, and also when Elon Musk got involved with #freeBritney and was obsessed with Britney Spears.

Like... why on earth are these grown men with very busy important jobs injecting themselves in these celebrity dramas, why are they tweeting about it, why do they think we care, and why is the media covering it!!

https://www.reddit.com/r/popculturechat/comments/14wwff3/doe...

https://nypost.com/2021/07/05/elon-musk-tweets-free-britney-...

https://www.imdb.com/news/ni60689959/
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-13 14:20:11+00:00
> Feel like this should be built in?

Not everyone uses LLMs the same way, which is made extra clear because of the announcement this submission is about. I don't want conversational LLMs, but seems that perspective isn't shared by absolutely everyone, and that makes sense, it's a subjective thing how you like to be talked/written to.

> Explain your setup in more detail please?

I don't know what else to tell you that I haven't said already :P Not trying to be obtuse, just don't know what sort of details you're looking for. I guess in more specific terms; I'm using llama.cpp(/llama-server) as the "runner", and then I have a Rust program that acts as the CLI for my "queries", and it makes HTTP requests to llama-server. The requests to llama-server includes "tools", where one of those is a "web_search" tool hooked up to a local YaCy instance, another is "verify_claim" which basically restarts a new separate conversation inside the same process, with access to a subset of the tools. Is that helpful at all?
by ghaff | 2025-11-13 14:20:37+00:00
I think there are a lot of good reasons to (also) carry a small number of cards and cash.

Take medical. The usual procedure if they need to scan your insurance info is to feed one or two cards through a scanner thingie. Others mention traffic stops and other interactions of that sort.

Could this all change eventually? But I have no problem with carrying a small business card sized wallet if only as backup in the interim.
by dickiedyce | 2025-11-13 14:20:42+00:00
As a Scot who travels on Scottish, English, and Welsh railways, and on Swiss and German railways... Scotrail (now in Public ownership) is pretty good. And I say that as someone in the Highlands, which has had the worst of it in the last 30 years. There's been recent investment, and even the re-opening of closed lines and finally new stations where they've been desperately needed (Inverness Airport, Kintore, Laurencekirk). But still plenty more to do. I visit the south semi-regularly, and worked in London in the 90's. Rail around London seems to have really improved over the last few years. Swiss Rail (SBB) is still the poster child for a decent rail system. Clean, on time, reasonably priced (compared to UK rail), and easy to use. What was eye-opening for me was recent travel in Germany (München to Basel in CH)... DB was dreadful and the stations were in an awful state of repair.
by jackhalford | 2025-11-13 14:21:23+00:00
I think it has a lot to do with licensing. Companies feel safer using BSDs because there’s no fear of being sued under the MIT license, I suspect this is the reason sony chose FreeBSD for the playstations. A second reason would be quality vs linux, netflix has been line rate encrypted traffic with FreeBSD just because the network stack is (was?) more mature than linux. We used it at $job for zfs file servers because it’s native and much more mature than linux alternatives.
by nyreed | 2025-11-13 14:21:24+00:00
BT was deep into preparations for a nationwide fiber rollout at the time of privatisation in the early 80s. The project was cancelled, the fledgling factories equipment and expertise were instead exported to South Korea, enabling their widespread fiber penetrance.

That delayed fiber rollout in the UK by decades.

Was that a success? Could be they were too early to justify the cost? But without someone pushing ahead, who develops the technology?
by toomuchtodo | 2025-11-13 14:21:27+00:00
Original title "A Kansas county agrees to pay $3 million and apologize over a raid on a small-town newspaper" compressed to fit within title limits.

Related:

Ex-Kansas police chief who raided local newspaper criminally charged - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41240755 - August 2024 (92 comments)

Kansas police chief who led the raid on the Marion County Record has resigned - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37757664 - Oct 2023 (8 comments)

Police chief who led raid of Marion County Record has been suspended - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37722438 - Oct 2023 (48 comments)

Marion County atty withdraws search warrant against Kansas paper, returns items - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37151697 - Aug 2023 (37 comments)

Police raid of a Kansas newsroom raises alarms about violations of press freedom - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37120350 - Aug 2023 (146 comments)

Small Kansas newspaper says co-owner, 98, collapsed and died after police raid - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37120188 - Aug 2023 (43 comments)

Co-owner of Kansas newspaper dies after police raid - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37114892 - Aug 2023 (4 comments)

Illegal raids contribute to death of newspaper co-owner - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37105764 - Aug 2023 (103 comments)

A conversation with a newspaper owner raided by cops - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37102271 - Aug 2023 (118 comments)

Police stage ‘chilling’ raid on Marion County newspaper - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37096015 - Aug 2023 (138 comments)
by andsoitis | 2025-11-13 14:21:32+00:00
> if this really is a simulation, why is it so polished? Why is there zero evidence of the underlying system?

> Then a thought hit me.

> What if our consciousness is running in a sandbox so isolated that we can never perceive anything outside it?

The simulation hypothesis runs in the Exponential Resource Problem:

To simulate a sysmte with N states/particles with full fidelity, the simulator needs resources that scale with N (or worse, exponentially with N for quantum systems). This creates a hierarchy problem:

- Level 0 (base reality): has X computational resources

- Level 1 (first sim): needs X resources to simulate Level 0, but exists within Level 0, so can only access some fraction of X

- Level 2: would need even more resources than Level 1 has available.

Eacy simulation layer must have fewer resources than the layer above it (since it is contained within it), but needs more resources to simulate that layer. This is mathematically impossible for high-fidelity simulations.

This means either:

a) we're in base reality - there's no way to create a full-fidelity simulation without having more computational power than the universe you're simulating contains

b) simulations must be extremely "lossy" - using shortcuts, approximations, rendering only what's observed (like a video game), etc. But then you must answer: why do unobserved quantum experiments still produce consistent results? Why does the universe render distant galaxies we will never visit?

c) the simultation uses physics we don't understand - perhaps the base reality operates on completely different principles that are vastly more computationally efficient. But this is unfalsifiable speculation.

This is also known as the "substrate problem"; you can't create something more complex thatn youself only using your own resources.

Even more devastating is the CASCADING COMPUTATION PROBLEM.

Issue: it is not just that you need resources proportional to the simulate system's complexity, you need resources to compute every state transition.

The cascade:

a) simulated universe at Time T: has N particles / states

b) to compute time T+1: the simulator must process all N states according to physics laws

c) that computation itself has states: the simulator's computation involves memory states, processor states, energy flows. Let's call that M computational states

d) but M > N: the simulator needs additional machinery beyond just representing the simulated states. It needs the computational apparatus to calculate state transitions, store intermediate values, handle the simulation logic itself.

The TIME PROBLEM

There's also a temporal dimension:

- one "tick" of simulated time requires many ticks of simulator time (to compute all the physics)

- if the simulator is itself simulated, its ticks require even more meta-simulator ticks

- time dilates exponentially down the simulation stack

So either:

a) we're in base reality, or

b) we're in a very shallow simulateion (maybe 1 - 2 levels deep max), or

c) the sim uses radical shortcuts that should be observable
by Hilift | 2025-11-13 14:21:43+00:00
No. The UK refuses to accept reality, which is a poverty rate 12% higher than the US, and families with three or more children poverty rate of 47%. The cost of benefits and other costly boondoggles compete with these failed public works ventures. The largest water utility has £20 billion debt and will probably need to be un-privatized. They probably breathe a sigh of relief knowing that France is twice as bad financially, so that feeds the denial mass delusion. And the economy doesn't have the fantasy growth that was expected, so automatic additional borrowing. And it's budget season. Yay!
by lrvick | 2025-11-13 14:21:47+00:00
Age only covers encryption. It does not cover signing, ssh, web of trust, hierarchical keys, key discovery, etc. It is in no way a replacement for a modern PGP keychain.

Ignore GnuPG which is a shit show stuck in the 90s. PGP != GPG

For a modern long lived personal PGP keychain use Keyfork on AirgapOS which gives you a secure 24 word mnemonic backup, optional split backup across redundant smartcards, and a separation of a CA key and daily driver subkeys on smartcards all done correctly so you do not have to think about it. I would suggest a Nitrokey Pro due to open source rust firmware, though Yubikeys are supported.

From there you can use your smartcard for ssh, password management, git commit signing, etc. and make your key easy to discover without impersonation using keyoxide to have all your services, domains, etc attest to your key, as well as any humans who vouch for you.

A proper PGP keychain is a long lived digital passport first, that has encryption and authentication subkeys.

https://git.distrust.co/public/keyfork

https://git.distrust.co/public/airgap