MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ryandrake | 2025-11-10 18:17:19+00:00
"Companies want customers" is often not enough of a market force to result in behavior that is inclusive of everyone, which is why, for example, we need things like the Americans with Disabilities Act, which mandates that companies' services are accessible to all, and other laws which require full and equal accommodations. We could almost argue that making things "[new] smartphone only" might violate the ADA. I'd like to see such a lawsuit.
by marigovsignals | 2025-11-10 18:17:33+00:00
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by EasyMark | 2025-11-10 18:17:34+00:00
The US can't force intel to put back doors in products, but in China you can't refuse to do the same. It really just boils down to that. It is very possible for China to force a Chinese owned company to put in backdoors in hardware and firmware as demanded by it's intelligence agencies. The alternative is going to prison for treason. Network equipment is Prime Real Estate for such a directive. It's a no brainer for me unless tp-link can prove that they have completely moved away from being Chinese owned. If you have any proof that the US government has had Intel, AMD, apple, etc put in backdoors I would love to see it or documents that prove they can force such backdoors.
by robot-wrangler | 2025-11-10 18:18:46+00:00
Personhood for non-persons is definitely absurd. But if you're actually stuck with a broken system, then the most logical thing to do is at least apply your broken logic consistently. That's an important part of the difference between rule of law and wild corrupt barbarism. Of course it's much better to actually fix absurdities, but if you can't or won't, inconsistency still has to be forbidden or else the whole thing is a farce
by varispeed | 2025-11-10 18:18:47+00:00
People often miss:

- Productivity is low, because the pay is low and from that comes everything else (thinking of paying the bills instead of the job, being seen as "cheap" by others etc.)

- Nobody cares about "social status" if the pay is right. Status comes from pay.

- There is some merit to that, but I think the real reason was outsourcing. Why invest at home if you can get the same or better cheaper from overseas.

The problem is the UK is the class system. Shareholders see workforce as slaves and not equals. That's why we see wage compression and it is now next to impossible for working class to climb the social ladder. So why bother? Your quality of life will not be vastly different whether you are stacking shelves or develop software. Everything is being creamed by shareholders, who also enjoy preferential tax system and other incentives not available to working class.
by porridgeraisin | 2025-11-10 18:19:10+00:00
Ok, not asking in the context of this thread but in general: why do you think so? With their stake in openai especially and github being a good place to sell AI code assistants (one of the clear revenue streams for LLMs thus far) they seem quite well placed. Is it all their big "enterprise" and government contracts that bring them a lot of money now losing value?
by LatteLazy | 2025-11-10 18:19:12+00:00
Broadly speaking if the data is on someone else’s computer, it’s in their “house” for the purpose of the search.

Cracking open your phone might require a warrant. But basically every byte of data on it has come from your ISP and is backed up to Apple\Google etc. and those companies will let me search their computers for your data no questions asked (or for a nominal fee).

That’s how you sidestep the 4th amendment when it comes to tech in the modern age.
by hex4def6 | 2025-11-10 18:20:01+00:00
This seems like a job for a truecrypt style system. Either you do it at a file-level, or you have it split into (say) 10MB file chunks, and if you want to access a certain file you have an encrypted local db that acts as a magic decoder ring ("file test.csv is spread across CLOUD1.DB CLOUD3443.DB CLOUD132.DB").

Combine that with steganography (Enter real_password, and test.csv is a list of bank accounts, enter fake_password, and test.csv is a list of apple store locations, enter random_password, and it decodes junk). Maybe combine that with multiple layers of passwords (one ring to rule them all, except certain files).

Obviously, you'd want to steganographize the decoder ring as well.
by chawco | 2025-11-10 18:20:10+00:00
Yeah, it's not a historical quirk, really. In talking to many Americans it seems like they don't really cover loyalists at all, or what happened after the Revolutionary War. Much of what became Canada was settled by former colonists from the what became the United States who remained loyal to the crown. My hometown was founded by loyalists from New York -- including the mayor of New York City -- after the Revolutionary War.

Essentially we are even closer than many people think in terms of history, but Canadian identity was seeded from the beginning with the idea of rejecting being "American". We are indeed your closest brothers and sisters because of history, but it's no quirk at all that we're separate -- it's the entire reason we stayed separate at all.

You can also see the reverse play out -- what would become Alberta was settled by large numbers of American colonists moving to Canada, and to this day you can see the cultural impact of that in the politics and world view from the region.
by hunter2_ | 2025-11-10 18:20:31+00:00
I agree with that completely. I'm just struggling to agree that what we see in this case is an edge case to be manually adjusted back, due to my inability to think of examples that we wouldn't see as having the exact same "wrong" nature. If virtually every application of this rule feels the same as this one, then leaving the adjustment in place (or abolishing the rule if possible) would be the more sensible outcome.
Ask HN: Why not use AI for smart product placement in free ad-supported novels?
by amichail | 2025-11-10 18:20:35+00:00
The idea is to have a free audiobook/ebook service for novels that makes money by subtly integrating advertising directly into the stories themselves.

Instead of interruptive ads or sponsorships, brands could be woven into a novel in a way that feels organic. A character might drink a Diet Coke, drive a Tesla, or order Starbucks, depending on the story’s context.

AI would adapt ads dynamically so they fit naturally with tone, setting, and character behavior. The ads could even change over time and be personalized for each user.

It’s basically product placement for novels but automated and scaled.

Readers get free access. Authors and publishers earn ad revenue. Brands get more immersive, less annoying exposure.

Would you read a free ad-supported version of your favorite novel?
by gregsadetsky | 2025-11-10 18:21:12+00:00
I submitted this [0] story a few weeks ago, which led to some discussion and then being flagged since (I think) people were unsure of how verifiable the stats around COBOL were (the submitted page had more than a tinge of self-promotional language).

I was curious to ask you, as domain experts, if you could talk more to the "70% of the Fortune 500 still run on mainframes" stat you mentioned.

Where do these numbers come from? And also, does it mean that those 70% of Fortune 500s literally run/maintain 1k-1M+ LoC of COBOL? Or do these companies depend on a few downstream specialized providers (financial, aviation/logistics, etc.) which do rely on COBOL?

Like, is it COBOL all the way down, or is everything built in different ways, but basically on top of 3 companies, and those 3 companies are mostly doing COBOL?

Thanks!

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45644205
by ubermonkey | 2025-11-10 18:21:25+00:00
The only time I ever needed catastrophic backup recovery -- thanks to a robbery a dozen years ago -- Time Machine saved me. I bought a new Mac, plugged in the TM drive, told it to migrate, and stepped out for lunch. When I came back, even my browser windows were restored. I was pretty impressed.

I continue to keep a TM running on both my primary machine and my "media server" laptop. Because I'm an old nerd and I have those scars, though, TM is only one part of my backup regime. I also use a cloud provider, plus somewhat regular drive image backups stored in trusted friend's home, plus doing most of my work via a Dropbox account that's replicated across machines. But the front line remains Time Machine.

I used my TM backup last week to migrate into a new Mac. It worked, nearly as I can tell, with 99% fidelity. For SOME reason, some app data in ~/Library wasn't brought over. No idea why, but I suspect it's the weird container folders that are now the default app-data-storage location for most tools (vs., say, just letting the user create a folder in ~/Documents, which I'd prefer).
by shadowgovt | 2025-11-10 18:21:48+00:00
I have taken the classes and it really isn't as hard to follow the guidelines as you seem to be painting it.

> Like 2 people talking and the 3rd overhearing is a violation

This is the principle that "locker-room talk" in the workplace is not okay, and that's a good principle. Yes, it's not okay to have a "just us guys" conversation because the content of the conversation is not acceptable in the workplace. The fact a third-party overhearing it gets it reported isn't the issue.

> Like not playing with the fantasies and embracing reality is a violation

You'll have to be more specific about what fantasies you mean. I'm pretty sure I know, but you are continuing to dance around it and your reluctance to name words strongly suggests you know your opinion is unwelcome in polite society.

> Being against (the "wrong one") discrimination is a violation

Again, you'll have to be more clear. Sounds like you're toeing the line Damore toed before Google fired him.

> Like communicating too much with a woman is a violation as is talking too little

Neither of these are violations, and I don't think I know how someone concludes they are.

> Don't [g]et me started on [] microaggression BS

Microaggression theory is grounded in research dating back to the 1970s. Do you have some specific concerns with the research or its interpretation? The theory seems pretty sound from where I sit, but maybe I've missed something.

> Did you know that liking progress, efficiency, technology, as well as simply being on time is a core of white suppremacy culture that is improperly and racially being imposed on the Black population?

That's not at all what anyone has said. You are misinterpreting several layers of information that suggest to me that your frustration is second-hand. I'm going to have to call for a "cite your sources" on this claim.

> In general, it is a violation if any delusional person decides to be offended, no matter the reality.

This is, broadly, untrue.
by pfdietz | 2025-11-10 18:22:13+00:00
As I said, all the fossil fuel inputs could be replaced with renewables. In particular: farm machinery can be run on non-fossil energy, nitrogen fertilizer can be made with green hydrogen, and pesticides can be synthesized with feedstocks derived from non-fossil sources like biomass.

The second sentence doesn't make any sense. None of that makes something unsustainable, just regrettable.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-11-10 18:22:15+00:00
There are multiple free and paid geoip databases, from $0 to $1000 a year, depending. Then an hour to write a script to add iptables rules from the database for the country of choice. (Example: https://gist.github.com/asheroto/934e056a302adda334077f0c85c...)

I don't know what is unique about Quad9 that they couldn't do this, but it's possible they have some technical limitation
by le-mark | 2025-11-10 18:22:22+00:00
I’ve witnessed two legacy migration projects, both failed. One was a source translation to Java, this one failed because they didn’t have the expertise to manage production Java applications and pulled the plug. The other was a rewrite that went over budget and was cancelled.

> HyperDocs ingests COBOL, JCL, and PL/I codebases to generate documentation, architecture diagrams, and dependency graphs.

Lots of tools available that do this already without AI.

> The goal is to build digital “twins” of the experts on how they debug, architect, and maintain these systems in practice.

That will be a neat trick, will the output be more than sparsely populated wiki?

My experience is there’s not a lot of Will or money to follow these things through.

Edit to add there was a lot of work around business rule extraction, automatic documentation, and static analysis of mainframe systems in 90s leading up to Y2K, but it all fizzled out after that. You all should search the literature if you haven’t.
by bluGill | 2025-11-10 18:23:47+00:00
That is my conclusion too. When something is rare it isn't worth preparing for it when you can shut down. When something is common you have to prepare for it.

If it ever drops below 0C close to the equator (and near sea level) pipes should be drained and everyone do without water - this happens so rarely that it isn't worth the cost to figure out how to handle that. When you live in a place where it goes below 0C for weeks on end every winter that isn't acceptable and so you have to pay the extra costs of putting pipes inside buildings (or far underground) and insulating and heating those buildings to keep the pipes warm.
by 0manrho | 2025-11-10 18:23:54+00:00
> We are all liabilities to our own opsec now.

Always have been.

It's unfortunate that gross government overreach and corporate cooperation with it is what it takes for people to even recognize the concept of data privacy and data ownership is a thing, much less that they should do something about it and that their data is and never was "safe" in the cloud, no matter which corporate overlords walled garden you called home. Apple has never been an exception to this rule.
by uberman | 2025-11-10 18:24:15+00:00
I don't quite understand the hoopla about this "grade inflation" stuff. In fact, my gut tells me that when you have the "best" students in the world and only 40% are getting As then maybe you are grading too hard or your faculty is not teaching well enough.

Aren't these kids mostly "the best" from their high schools, kids who are valedictorians, run their own businesses, 3 sport athletes, or music prodigies with a high gpa already?

Why would we not expect these kids would be getting As at college?
by qball | 2025-11-10 18:24:17+00:00
The same is true of Canada, but to a far greater extent since Toronto/Ottawa/Montreal have a permanent veto on whatever the rest of the country wants. The US political system, for all its other faults, has successfully avoided this problem.

It is not a surprise that region can't find anyone else (in the rest of the economic zone over which it claims dominion) willing to die for its interests, especially when their interests have been revealed to be nothing but "loot the rest of the nation".
by kakacik | 2025-11-10 18:24:25+00:00
On personal level, you have to choose whether your priority is privacy or convenience. If its privacy, no whining about 'I want this and that and I am too lazy to rollback' is relevant.

Never trust US services, 3-letter agencies are endlessly greedy to fill your profile with another tens of thousands of data points. As do all advertisers all around the globe. As do (with various success) all other governments and private companies who have something to gain, HDD storage has never been cheaper and all personal data are worth gold and beyond.

Or if you have to use them, use your own encryption with strength to not be broken for next few hundreds of years, to stand a chance. That is, if you actually have something to hide, but I have never met a person who really doesn't :)
by HeyLaughingBoy | 2025-11-10 18:24:35+00:00
That's interesting. I agree that outside of gaming you really don't see much being done with the old systems.

My first job out of college was with a tiny, now-defunct company that built simple I/O hardware for 8-bit systems. One of the "side products" was a MacPaint clone for the Radio Shack Color Computer II called CoCoMax. We didn't write it: AFAIK, the programmer for the original version contacted the company and asked if they wanted to buy it and pay him royalties. He later went off and built an even more successful product used in TV stations called the Video Toaster. Side product or not, CoCoMax was a cash cow!

On the heels of that success, another programmer who'd written a more advanced version for the Color Computer 3 offered the same deal. From what I recall, they both made buttloads of money from their royalties.

Sometimes I wish I had kept some of that old hardware & software, but it's long gone.
by Gracana | 2025-11-10 18:24:35+00:00
You'd have to be doing something where the unified memory is specifically necessary, and it's okay that it's slow. If all you want is to run large LLMs slowly, you can do that with split CPU/GPU inference using a normal desktop and a 3090, with the added benefit that a smaller model that fits in the 3090 is going to be blazing fast compared to the same model on the spark.
Show HN: Papiers.ai – A new interface for ArXiv
by smnair | 2025-11-10 18:24:36+00:00
Hey HN! I built Papiers.ai — a new interface for arXiv papers. It includes an AI-generated wiki, scientific lineage graphs, a mind map, a live Twitter feed, and a research agent to help you explore ideas faster. The motivation is: as scientific progress accelerates, we need tools that augment human cognition so we can keep up.

Would love your thoughts!
by alt227 | 2025-11-10 18:25:03+00:00
The problem IMO is nothing to do with status or pay, specifically in the UK the issue is capitalism.

Capitalism demands that companies show continous growth, or they are classed to be failing. The UK is very small on the world stage, and so inevitably all manufacturers come up against the need to export and grow beyond the UKs borders. This is when aquisitions and mergers from overseas corperations occur, and they have little need for an expensive workforce in the UK.

Foreign investors or parent corporations buy out the UK businesses, strip out the manufacturing, and use the brand recognition to turn them into shell companies for distributing the material which are produced much cheaper overseas.

This has happened time and time again with all raw material manufacturing, and is now happening to the food production industry too (the Cadbury story is used as a regular example around these parts).
by sylefeb | 2025-11-10 18:25:05+00:00
Hi there, a while ago I had a ton of fun with the Fomu: https://x.com/sylefeb/status/1571489610647371776

Fantastic little device! Relating to the post, I also happened to brick one erasing the Foboot bootloader by writing the flash beyond the limit (there was a bug regarding writing to addresses beyond max at the time, but then I was pushing the limit by abusing dfu-utils :) https://x.com/sylefeb/status/1391898565061001225 ). I tried to use the programming pads but at the time was lacking the skills and it ended in disaster (ripped pads...).

The code repo for the overall project is here: https://github.com/sylefeb/tinygpus
by toast0 | 2025-11-10 18:25:07+00:00
The /32 is going to matter for the addresses outside the /48. The customer only wants one /48 to go through Cloudflare; from the article context, probably because that /48 is under DDoS. DDoS scrubbing services are expensive in dollars and latency (and sometimes network features), so you only want to expose your traffic to that when necessary. When the DDoS is over, you don't want any of your traffic going through Cloudflare, so you withdraw the /48, you wouldn't want to advertise the /32 through Cloudflare at that point either.

Using the article's example ranges:

If the customer's IP 2001:db8::1 is being DDoSed, then they advertise 2001:db8::/48 through cloudflare, but 2001:db8:1::1 doesn't want that; it'll be handled by their 2001:db8::/32 announcement on their usual ISP(s)
by oivey | 2025-11-10 18:25:10+00:00
That’s basically the main example I’d give. I think the static proponents with that opinion are a little myopic. Those sorts of relationships could generally be statically checked, it’s just that most languages don’t allow for it because it doesn’t fit in the OOP/inheritance paradigm. C++ concepts seem to already do this.

The “bug waiting to happen” attitude kind of sucks, too. It’s a good thing if your code can be used in ways you don’t originally expect. This sort of mindset is the same trap that inheritance proponents fall into. If you try to guess every way your code will ever be used, you will waste a ton of time making interfaces that are never used and inevitably miss interfaces people actually want to use.
by incomingpain | 2025-11-10 18:25:32+00:00
Russia is weak, they cant even take ukraine. To think they'd have a shadow of a chance against NATO is a joke.

China is strong, their standing army is probably 300 million and if they invaded canada. Our <100,000 CAF will be goners. Since they havent done it, they either dont want to or there's something external to canada protecting it. Either case, an unfounded threat.

>I don't know much about Canada's current plans and how effective they would be.

Ya that original comment about russia/china wasnt a significant part of my post anyway.
by qazxcvbnmlp | 2025-11-10 18:25:46+00:00
so many opportunities for shenanigans!

'watch this ad before we give you your boarding pass'

'no boarding pass for you until your group is called'

'ah ha! you have an iPhone 17 pro max instead of a $BUDGET_ANDROID, cool your seat fees will be 20% higher'

'oh you got your boarding pass on this device, but need it on a different device now? cool lets do a device transfer fee'
by buran77 | 2025-11-10 18:25:52+00:00
> they are a gateway to everybody

They are, and most time this allows them to abuse you. But what do you think happens once you that gateway is blown open, isn't your front door next?

> There are multitudes of online storage providers outside of the UK's reach and jurisdiction

What I said above means that once you normalize the situation that providers have to open the gate to your yard whenever the state comes knocking, the state will just come knocking directly at your door. In other words I'm not sure the state will stop in its pursuit of access to your data when it can just incriminate trying to evade the law by storing it out of reach.
by asmor | 2025-11-10 18:25:53+00:00
The best LLM powered solutions are as little LLM and as much conventional search engine / semantic database lookups and handcrafted coaxing as possible. But even then, the conversational interface is nice and lets you do less handcrafting in the NLP department.

Using Perplexity or Claude in "please source your answer" mode is much more like a conventional search engine than looking up data embedded in 5 trillion (or whatever) parameters.
by goalieca | 2025-11-10 18:26:05+00:00
The USA is a fantastic ally! When a small aircraft was recently hijacked from Vancouver international airport, guess which Air Force came to our rescue? Thank you!!

While there’s a lot of news and media about trade wars with the USA, the vast majority 85% of it remains under the free trade agreement. China does not even come close to a free and open market for us and their state sponsored corporate espionage is a real and growing danger.