MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kerkeslager | 2025-11-10 19:42:10+00:00
I don't buy that. It's not logically consistent to call a corporation a human when everyone knows a corporation isn't human, and the leakiness of the abstraction is obvious.

More likely, HN simply has the same distribution of intelligence (i.e., it's mostly near-average-intelligence people), and HN's members are just as susceptible to the same obvious propaganda as everyone else, especially when it might benefit you. HN is full of people who believe they're future rich people, so anything that benefits the rich is easy for HN folks to believe.

Throw in a bit of flattery for a bunch of people whose self-worth is based in their belief that they are intelligent, and you can manipulate HN folks just as easily as any other population. That's why I refuse to play into that narrative: HN folks aren't more logical than any other group and I refuse to pretend they are.

I have plenty of criticism of the rationalist movement, but one thing I think they get right is that if you are unable to conceive of yourself as irrational, you'll never identify your irrationalities and fix them--if you can't admit you are irrational sometimes, you are doomed to remain as irrational as you are.
by ACCount37 | 2025-11-10 19:42:13+00:00
> But we already know the inner workings.

Overconfident and wrong.

No one understands how an LLM works. Some people just delude themselves into thinking that they do.

Saying "I know how LLMs work because I read a paper about transformer architecture" is about as delusional as saying "I read a paper about transistors, and now I understand how Ryzen 9800X3D works". Maybe more so.

It takes actual reverse engineering work to figure out how LLMs can do small bits and tiny slivers of what they do. And here you are - claiming that we actually already know everything there is to know about them.
by cipehr | 2025-11-10 19:42:39+00:00
Its an interesting question indeed. You're saying there might be some expectation of privacy even in public?

The line here is a little different. I could point a camera out my window and record every license plate that drives by my house, and that would be allowed because its recording public activities, and the data I collect would be private—its mine from my camera.

The question here is if a public/government agency pays a private company to setup cameras in public, for the benefit of the public, then should that data collected by those cameras not also be public?

The courts seem to agree that it should be public, and I fail to see why it shouldn't be. Maybe I should read the opposition briefs on it.
by nrb | 2025-11-10 19:42:40+00:00
> So why is the city listening to hysterical idiots who assumed that ICE was accessing systems they weren't?

What have you heard or seen that gives you that impression?

According to the article “University of Washington researchers released a report Oct. 21 showing federal immigration agencies like ICE and Border Patrol had accessed the data of at least 18 Washington cities, often without their police departments’ knowing”

It seems plausible that the local government came to realize that unauthorized use of Flock data was happening elsewhere in the state and decided to act. These sort of privacy intrusions start off with the veneer of best intentions but when abuse is uncovered, people tend to get real.
by nieksand | 2025-11-10 19:43:39+00:00
Unexpected, runaway AWS cost is a real problem.

"Tunable spending limit" has consequences that can create other, equally real, problems.

Best effort: Turn off all compute resources, drop dynamically-adjustable persistent resources to their minimums (e.g. dynamo write and read capacity of 1 on every table), leave EBS volumes and S3 alone. In some cases, a user might find their business effectively offline while still racking up a massive AWS bill.

Hard cutoff: Very close to deleting an AWS account. In addition to compute and dynamically-adjustable resources to minimums, this means deleting S3 buckets, Dynamo tables, EBS volumes and snapshots, and everything else that racks up cost by the hour.

The best effort approach sounds reasonable to me. The hard cutoff solution sounds worse than the problem it purports to solve.

Agreed that AWS is poorly incentivized to fix the problem.
by impossiblefork | 2025-11-10 19:44:11+00:00
It's really stupid that people imagine that the GDPR would hold back European AI.

Seeing as the Americans firms have in fact rolled out their systems, it's unlikely to be a legal problem withe GDPR. Maybe copyright is a problem.That would have been a solved problem if that regulation requiring people to list their training data had been applied fully.

This won't make any difference for AI and will reduce EU cohesion, as a belief in privacy is a shared European value.
by jeffadelic | 2025-11-10 19:44:12+00:00
Hi, I like your newsletter concept and I do subscribe to it.

One thing I think may be cool, is put a thumbs up/thumbs down link in the email to track sentiment of the links you share. Some links are really cool, others I am not interested in at all, it may be useful to capture that info.

I would visit a site daily if you expose some of that info publicly (like 49% positive 51% negative for a link), to see how my sentiment matches your wider audience.
by saubeidl | 2025-11-10 19:44:25+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rootless_cosmopolitan

> The term is considered to be an antisemitic trope

> common ancestry or heritage

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_and_soil

> Blood and soil (German: Blut und Boden, pronounced [ˈbluːt ʊnt ˈboːdn̩] ⓘ) is a nationalist phrase and concept of a racially defined national body ("Blood") united with a settlement area ("Soil"). Originating in the German völkisch movement, it was used extensively by Nazi Germany
by Insanity | 2025-11-10 19:44:26+00:00
It's a tricky balance to strike. I don't want EU to fall behind further in the AI race, and I do want them to be more competitive in the tech landscape. At the moment, EU really isn't competitive in tech (and neither in tech salaries) and it leads to a certain amount of 'brain drain' as people move abroad.

So while I do understand the need for regulations, they shouldn't regulate themselves into irrelevance. I don't think there's an easy solution to this.
by nis0s | 2025-11-10 19:44:31+00:00
I go back and forth on the idea that some jobs are bullshit, maybe I haven’t been exposed to enough industries or work places. Every place I worked definitely didn’t have bullshit jobs to hand out as adult daycare, but I can see how some places can become bloated because an over ambitious middle manager wants to say they manage X number of people on their resume. So there are bullshit jobs in that there are people who aren’t being utilized correctly, so in that case I’d say they’re no bullshit jobs, just bullshit leadership or managers.
by Jonovono | 2025-11-10 19:44:38+00:00
I love the picture painted of an ikea for fashion. I’m working on an idea where instead of searching for individual garments you first create the outfit (using gen ai) and then shop the complete look (I basically reverse search the pieces of the generated outfit to find similar items)

But it would be so cool if you could like print the fabric pieces and send them and the person assembles their created outfit.

This definitely got me thinking

https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/dress-better-w-make-my-outfit/...
by shadowgovt | 2025-11-10 19:45:08+00:00
Basically correct (IANAL).

This has come up in cases where, for example, machine learning (or even heuristics) were used to sort candidates and the algorithms were discovered to be discriminating based on things like name or zip code, which in the US correlate heavily with race and cannot be used as discriminators for that reason (the court does not turn a blind eye to the notion "Well, Your Honor, technically we weren't discriminating against race, we were discriminating against people named 'Jaqualin'...").

IIUC, precedent is that is incumbent upon the organization using machine learning to confirm that their system hasn't come up with a novel proxy for one of the protected classes and is using that proxy to violate discrimination protections.
by BSTRhino | 2025-11-10 19:45:15+00:00
It uses rollback netcode. The inputs are relayed to the other players and executed on all clients, and they end up in the same state because all Easel programs are guaranteed deterministic. To hide latency, the clients simulate forward even before they have received all inputs, and once inputs have been received it rolls back to the point of divergence to correct the prediction error. This works because the prediction is correct most of the time.

To be able to roll back, Easel incrementally snapshots the game state every tick. It only snapshots (and restores) what has changed, which makes it a lot more efficient than most rollback netcode implementations.

It also uses a peer-to-peer relay and adapts the latency asymmetrically, so the player who introduces latency feels their own latency.

I know there are other models and pros and cons, this is the right choice for Easel because I wanted to make the multiplayer fully automatic. One shared world, coded like a singleplayer game. There are certainly games which suit a client/server model better but I think the developer would then need to understand where their code is running and when to do remote procedure calls, and my goal was to make multiplayer so easy that even a teenager on their first day of coding could do it.
by cromulent | 2025-11-10 19:45:21+00:00
Last time I flew Ryanair in July, I presented my phone to the agent to check my boarding pass. She took my phone to scan it. I turned my head to talk to my companion.

When I looked back, the agent was in my settings, quietly enabling all the permissions for the app (which I had deliberately disabled).

When I (shocked) told her off, she rolled her eyes and said I would need to change them anyway to scan the bag tags.

The cheek.
by Ms-J | 2025-11-10 19:45:34+00:00
Try to only use open source networking equipment. It's also possible to piece it together rather than buy closed source, vulnerable hardware.

Librecmc/Openwrt is great for security and privacy.

With Librecmc, it doesn't contain non-free blobs and uses a Linux libre kernel.

https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Librecmc
by tcoff91 | 2025-11-10 19:46:02+00:00
I was a big fan of a good keyboard-driven git TUI like magit, neogit, lazygit, etc... (as long as you learn the CLI first and understand it).

Now I no longer directly use git, but instead use jujutsu (jj).

Once I became very proficient in the jj cli, I picked up jjui: https://github.com/idursun/jjui

Also, as splitting commits is an extremely frequent operation, this neovim plugin is really nice: https://github.com/julienvincent/hunk.nvim

Also this neovim plugin is amazing for resolving jj conflicts: https://github.com/rafikdraoui/jj-diffconflicts

Now with jj instead of git I edit the commit graph as effortlessly as if I am moving lines of code around a file in my editor.
by sodality2 | 2025-11-10 19:46:08+00:00
Weird how you let this news story pop up on your screen so indolently, instead of fetching your newspaper from the front porch. You’re abandoning your agency! /s

I don’t mean to say that we should outsource our thoughts to LLMs. In this case it’s clear that even if they had just searched “places for xyz” on maps, it would’ve been just as bad - what they wanted was effort, shopping around + research with pros, cons, and discussions, not just “not an LLM”. Valid criticism!
by silisili | 2025-11-10 19:46:36+00:00
I have no idea about Europeans, but as an American who's flown a lot recently, the push to smartphone based tickets has been a nightmare. Not because of the tickets, but people aren't seemingly smart or considerate enough to use them correctly.

Paper tickets were so fast. Fold, press, beep, done.

App based tickets? Constant announcements (I'm talking 10 or more during boarding) to turn your brightness up. Despite that, I saw

1 - 25ish percent of people had dark screens, so the attendant had to take the phone, up the brightness, scan it, then hand it back.

2 - A number of screen with cracks or something (didn't get a good look) that required moving the QR code around to get it to scan.

3 - An alarming number of people who didn't bother to even unlock their phone, who then proceed to fumble with thumbing or face scanning, close whatever they were doing, then go into the app and find their ticket.

I'd say the boarding process took at minimum two to three times as long as they did with purely paper tickets.
by otterley | 2025-11-10 19:46:40+00:00
The first example about ships is inaccurate. A ship isn't treated as a person in the law; it's treated as the thing that it is. There's a specific type of jurisdiction known as "in rem" ("over the thing") that differs from the typical "in personam" ("over the person") that gives the Court the ability to dispose of property without needing jurisdiction over its owner (otherwise known as an ex parte case). These different types of jurisdictions go back centuries, even further back than English common law from which U.S. law is derived.

This leads to amusing case names, like "United States v. 422 Casks of Wine" and "United States v. One Solid Gold Object in the Form of a Rooster".
by franze | 2025-11-10 19:46:53+00:00
My sister is a ship insolvency lawyer in Hamburg. Not only is each ship a company (legal person) but also quite often a single shipping transfer is its own company - owned partially by the ship and/or other entities. And when they exchange cargo at a far away port it can get complicated. Also nearly all global long distance shipping transfers have some kind of "Schwund"

IANASL (i am not a shipping lawyer)
by estearum | 2025-11-10 19:46:59+00:00
"Data Show Trump Would’ve Released as Many Border Crossers as Biden" from the right-wing Cato Institute

> As I previously demonstrated, President Biden removed a higher percentage of border crossers in his first two years than Trump did during his last two years (51 percent versus 47 percent), despite Trump having to deal with many fewer total crossings (Table 1). Congress right now is in a bipartisan state of denial about these three central facts:

> 1) The reason people are being released is because of operational capacity to detain and deport them, not policy.

> 2) Biden has deported vastly greater numbers and a higher share of crossers, but it has not deterred people from crossing.

> 3) The logistics are such that once arrivals exceed the deportation machine’s capacity, people will find out and even more will come.

Feel free to click through for data!

https://www.cato.org/blog/data-show-trump-wouldve-released-m...
by thinkingemote | 2025-11-10 19:46:59+00:00
PlantStudio from 1997-2001

https://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/PlantStudio/screens.htm

PlantStudio Botanical Illustration Software is a tool for creating 3D plant models and 2D illustrations. PlantStudio simulates herbaceous (non-woody) plants like wildflowers and cut flowers, vegetables, weeds, grasses, and herbs using a parameter-driven simulation of plant growth and structure.
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2025-11-10 19:47:01+00:00
On topic, collaborative docs with end to end encryption https://cryptpad.fr/ I use the Kanban app, it's so snappy. In comparison Trello is a bloated PoS.

Also on topic, the XMPP protocl is federated and supports E2E encryption via OMEMO aka "the signal protocol". Go create an account and get your friends into it. I use Dino on Debian and Conversations on Android. These two clients support all the "modern" features that whatsapp does, including audo and video calls, in addition to niceties like public channels where you can meet new people outside your circle of friends. For providers, find one on https://providers.xmpp.net/. All of this is free software, (although in the case of XMPP being federated you can't guarantee that your messages won't be routed through proprietary servers.)

Not affiliated with either, I just LOVE those two.
by disambiguation | 2025-11-10 19:47:05+00:00
Granted I'm taking creative liberties reading between the lines and mapping to other context. I'd give it low odds overall, but I'm gleaning a non-zero likelihood worthy of consideration:

1. "Mark Zuckerberg has been cast as the spokesman for the Millennial generation."

2. "I am the most well-known person of my generation"

3. "we'll even see a millennial president within the next few cycles by 2032."

4. The direct comparison to Pete Buttigieg.

5. He's signaled a presidential bid in the recent past.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alexkantrowitz/mark-zuc...

Some additional interpretation of mine from the exchange:

6. The expressed need to "win" in the policy arena in the next few years.

7. The imminent "transfer of value" (and power) from boomers to millennials, and the explicit urgency and intent to "position" themselves to capitalize on this "rapid shift."

Further real world context:

8. Thiel's track record of hands on political involvement with Trump, Vance, and Yarvin.

9. Thiel's recent "antichrist" lectures which articulates a fear of being "scapegoated."
by Yaina | 2025-11-10 19:47:44+00:00
I like the EU, but what's annoying about things like this, or the Chat Control law that keeps getting pushed, is that civil society and privacy advocacy groups always need to stay vigilant and keep mobilizing people. It's an attrition game.

I wonder what harm companies are even claiming. But honestly makes perfect sense that Germany's current conservative government is in favor of it. Giant GDP boosts are always just one deregulation away, hm?
by j-bos | 2025-11-10 19:48:01+00:00
> like Bill Bryson's books, are great at presenting "information" that seems completely plausible, authoritative, and convincing to the reader. But when you actually do know the truth about a subject, you realize how completely full of crap

Wow, I have a couple Bill Bryson books on my reading list, can you share some examples of that?
by joaquintides | 2025-11-10 19:48:06+00:00
Boost.Decimal by Matt Borland and Chris Kormanyos has been accepted! Implementation of IEEE 754 and ISO/IEC DTR 24733 Decimal Floating Point numbers. Thanks to Review Manager John Maddock.

Repo: https://github.com/cppalliance/decimal

Docs: https://develop.decimal.cpp.al/decimal/overview.html
by esseph | 2025-11-10 19:48:15+00:00
It was around that same timeframe that "TV Whitespace" was going to become the next big thing.

Anyway, LTE should be the literal last option. It requires more than 2x as many towers as fixed wireless, with gear more than 20x more expensive. That's also more than 2x-3x the required amount of of battery backup systems, networking equipment, and land / tower leases.

If you have extreme density, you NEED fiber and you need WiFi. You extend from the fiber network with extremely high quality ngFW. To fill gaps, use satellite.

Fiber requires a certain density of subscriber/mile(km), the same as any technology.

Even with 0 labor cost, you still need to get conduit in the ground (materials), fiber, terminations, switching, routing, OLT/ONT cost, handholes, any permitting or utilities location, horizontal boring equipment , jackhammers, splicers, etc. The upfront cost is many, many, many times higher for fiber and if you're okay with your cost-per passing being more than you would ever make on customer ARPU, then sure do that. Even if labor cost was 0. And it will take YEARS longer to deploy and see a return on investment from, of ever.

It doesn't matter if there's broadband to the location if nobody at the location can afford it.

If you want broadband, LTE is the worst option.
by Zambyte | 2025-11-10 19:48:49+00:00
The less I use git directly, the more convinced I am that git is an absolutely awful interface to git repositories. I have been using jj for about two years now, and I literally cannot imagine going back to using the git cli. I have not used lazygit, but if you find it interesting, I say please go for it.

The please is because I am tired of fixing issues created by people being confused by git. Just use anything else than the git cli, it's probably better.
by robot-wrangler | 2025-11-10 19:49:08+00:00
> It does not much matter what outcomes that produces.

One outcome would be a predictable and mechanistic process, which reduces the potential for corruption and creates a more fair world. The currently popular legal theory in the US is far worse than "logical consistency" would be, because it's blatantly corrupt and autocratic. See Judge Barret's position on stare decisis (basically "should we honor precedent?") combined with reliance interests (basically "can we change anything without effecting someone?").

You know how division by zero allows you to prove 1=2? There's a similar thing at work when you allow completely contradictory legal systems to just continue with business as usual. Now a few people can do whatever they want with all the appearance of rigor/consistency/process without actually having any. As Leibnitz says, "let us calculate". Or just admit there is no process, and thus no real basis for the authority
by InexSquirrel | 2025-11-10 19:49:20+00:00
Honestly I don't think that's a valid stance to have ("habitually fighting anything new", not your view), to reject anything new entirely based on habit or principle.

It means you don't have a reason for rejecting the thing in question. Just crossing your arms with scowl and pretending things were better in years of yore.

Having a reason why you think the thing is bad, and should not be accepted is the better position to have.
by felixfurtak | 2025-11-10 19:49:30+00:00
I always assume that people are lazy and try and click the least amount of squares as possible to get broadly the correct answer. Therefore, if it says motorbikes just click on the body of the bike and leave out rider and tiles with hardly any bike in them.

If it says traffic lights just click on the ones you can see lit and not the posts and ignore them if they are too far in the distance. Seems to work for me.
by michaelt | 2025-11-10 19:49:43+00:00
> - Poor quality management. [...] So the best and the brightest were not interested in manufacturing.

There's also the challenge of the Baumol effect.

When hiring engineers in the UK, manufacturing companies are competing for smart, numerate graduates against the likes of Google and Facebook and HSBC and Barclays.

But when selling products, manufacturing companies are competing against the likes of Foxconn - so they can't just raise prices to raise salaries.
by hobofan | 2025-11-10 19:49:48+00:00
One quick data point (might be not the most accurate, but I just looked into it a bit and thought I might as well share it): According to a quick look up with Sumble[0], ~120 out of Fortune 500 companies show any interest in COBOL.

Out of those it looks like about ~60 of those are actually using COBOL in-house, while most job postings from the rest are mostly "has experience with dealing with legacy COBOL systems". The top ~40 users are the ones you would expect (big banks, insurances, telco).

Of course this is a very LinkedIn/job postings lens on it, but in terms of gauging how big the addressable market for such a solution may be, I think it should do a decent job.

[0]: https://sumble.com - Not affiliated, I just quite like their product
by cassepipe | 2025-11-10 19:49:52+00:00
A lot of people strive for something that is simple (not like Rust, and I am not only talking about the borrow checker) and explicit ("debug your program, not your knowledge of the language) but also doesn't bear the historical cruft and idiosyncrasies of C. The fact that it can integrate with C code means that if you are already using C you can adopt it incrementally, plus it works as a build system and cross-compiler and I believe a package manager too.

So to sum up : A powerful C without the quirks that manages to keep things simple but is also a batteries-included experience with a smooth adoption path. What's not to love ?