MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by petsfed | 2025-11-13 20:33:05+00:00
Granted, but the problem with direct democracy is that you either let issues be decided only by the most engaged voters or you require participation from all, and issues are decided based on who can present the most sexy case on otherwise very unsexy issues.

I'm not a huge fan of representative democracy, but for direct democracy to work, we have to change society sufficiently to let ignorant lay people become informed enough on various issues to have a meaningful opinion on them.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-11-13 20:33:09+00:00
> I think Wyoming joining the US as a state without equal representation as the most populous state would still be a massive win for them and they would have almost certainly taken the deal at the time.

I doubt that very much. But more pertinent is this: we know for a fact that the smaller founding states would not have joined without the compromise in how Congress is structured. They were, after all, the whole reason it exists. So without that compromise, the country would not exist at all (or would at minimum exist very differently to today). You can't just renege on that deal 250 years later and figure people should be ok with it.
by runako | 2025-11-13 20:33:17+00:00
The Senate is already an antidemocratic brake/stabilizer. Adding a brake to it is stultifying.

> so that small swings in representation, say 51-49 to 49-51 can't produce massive swings in policy

Exactly, and this is bad. Voters should all know that every vote matters. The current setup creates the false impression that both parties would fundamentally steer the ship the same way ("uniparty"). The path to a government that is more responsive to the needs of citizens involves allowing winning parties to actually govern.

I would argue that we want a more responsive, dynamic government that attempts to represent us. The filibuster is in direct direct opposition to all of that.

The GOP won the last national elections. They should be allowed to end SNAP, ACA, EPA, Labor Dept, NSF, Dept. of Education, FDA, all science grants, Medicaid, put armed military checkpoints on every city block, end legal immigration, and zero out federal funding to any school that is closed on the federal MLK Jr holiday[1]. (And to the extent that those things are not legal now, they have the votes to make them legal.)

And then in '26 and '28, voters should decide whether they agree with that vision for how the country should be run.

The result will be a much more responsive, dynamic system where Congress cares more about what we voters think.

1 - taken loosely from the 2024 GOP party platform and administration statements from this year
by ifwinterco | 2025-11-13 20:33:35+00:00
Yeah, I can see both sides of this argument. We're certainly already in a situation where Monero in particular is very much persona non grata in a lot of countries and the only way to cash it out to fiat is P2P (which is risky).

Having said that, if you are a crypto proponent, you would argue that cashing out to fiat will become less and less necessary as time goes on and simply swapping to USDT/USDC and spending that will become easier. The jury is still out on that one
by tguvot | 2025-11-13 20:33:40+00:00
Hazard:

The lithium-ion battery cells in certain Powerwall 2 systems can cause the unit to stop functioning during normal use, which can result in overheating and, in some cases, smoke or flame and can cause death or serious injury due to fire and burn hazards.

Remedy: Replace

Recall Date: November 13, 2025

Units: About 10,500
Show HN: DBOS Java – Postgres-Backed Durable Workflows
by KraftyOne | 2025-11-13 20:33:43+00:00
Hi HN - I’m Peter, here with Harry (devhawk), and we’re building DBOS Java, an open-source Java library for durable workflows, backed by Postgres.

https://github.com/dbos-inc/dbos-transact-java

Essentially, DBOS helps you write long-lived, reliable code that can survive failures, restarts, and crashes without losing state or duplicating work. As your workflows run, it checkpoints each step they take in a Postgres database. When a process stops (fails, restarts, or crashes), your program can recover from those checkpoints to restore its exact state and continue from where it left off, as if nothing happened.

In practice, this makes it easier to build reliable systems for use cases like AI agents, payments, data synchronization, or anything that takes hours, days, or weeks to complete. Rather than bolting on ad-hoc retry logic and database checkpoints, durable workflows give you one consistent model for ensuring your programs can recover from any failure from exactly where they left off.

This library contains all you need to add durable workflows to your program: there's no separate service or orchestrator or any external dependencies except Postgres. Because it's just a library, you can incrementally add it to your projects, and it works out of the box with frameworks like Spring. And because it's built on Postgres, it natively supports all the tooling you're familiar with (backups, GUIs, CLI tools) and works with any Postgres provider.

If you want to try it out, check out the quickstart:

https://docs.dbos.dev/quickstart?language=java

We'd love to hear what you think! We’ll be in the comments for the rest of the day to answer any questions.
by AJRF | 2025-11-13 20:34:02+00:00
Imagine you are predicting the next token, you have two tokens very close in probability in the distribution, kernel execution is not deterministic because of floating point non-associativity - the token that gets predicted impacts the tokens later in the prediction stream - so it's very consequential which one gets picked.

This isn't some hypothetical - it happens all the time with LLM's - it isn't some freak accident that isn't probable
by tgbugs | 2025-11-13 20:34:47+00:00
A fully psychometric version of this that explores more than just the fovea could be created by varying the scale parameter (if you crank it up high enough you can see the movement in the periphery). The additional component you would need is to have trials where the subjects has to report whether a particular region (could even be cued with a red circle, I don't think it needs to be random) is actually moving or not while fixated on the center. There are clearly cells that detect this kind of motion in the periphery but they need larger visual input, possibly because the receptive fields of the cells that feed in are larger out there.
by twodave | 2025-11-13 20:34:53+00:00
There is probably some nuance that I am just not aware of. As the adoptive parents it is difficult to get the full account, since we weren't present until a few hours later.

From what I was told, he was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around his throat, and just kind of "fell out" while his birth mother was walking from the bathroom to the living room. I know that part is true, at least, because we saw the apartment floor the next day...

I think probably the paramedics were able to detect some faint vitals upon arrival. Since the birth mother and her partner weren't super reliable or coherent, we weren't really able to piece it all together until we tracked down the two young men who helped save our son's life that night.
by bgwalter | 2025-11-13 20:34:54+00:00
We believe this is the first documented case of a large-scale cyberattack executed without substantial human intervention.

The Morris worm already worked without human intervention. This is Script Kiddies using Script Kiddie tools. Notice how proud they are in the article that the big bad Chinese are using their toolz.

EDIT: Yeah Misanthropic, go for -4 again you cheap propagandists.
by iso1631 | 2025-11-13 20:35:01+00:00
Personally I'd never go for 10g copper, just run some fibre back to your cupboard.

For APs sure, do copper for POE, but not for computers. I doubt APs will need >1G in practical places for the next decade, and I don't think 10g does poe anyway (maybe 2.5g does)
by tecoholic | 2025-11-13 20:35:39+00:00
With the AI stuff, it feels like they invested a bit prematurely. When the Agentic editing demo came out (6 months, 10 months ago? It’s a blur), it felt right. Accepting and reviewing edits, live tracking ..etc., felt like pair programming. The ACP addition felt like a natural evolution .

With the continuous improvement in CLI tools and people’s experience with them, it feels like doing a live review or edit-by-edit approvals all feel like a drag. I personally have come to avoid using the IDE/Editor. I just kick up Claude code - plan mode, auto-accept edits. Once the session is done, switch to the editor and make necessary adjustments. I suspect people with Max subscription and “dangerously-skip-permissions” …etc won’t even care if an editor has AI integration or not.
by pwg | 2025-11-13 20:36:33+00:00
Part of the point of the split when the US Congress was designed was to intentionally make it difficult for bills to pass, because they had to pass votes in two independent houses, that (presumably) were focused on differing agendas.

This inherent difficulty was the intended outcome to try to assure that only bills which had strong support overall from different perspectives and viewpoints would make it through the double gauntlet.
by sjs382 | 2025-11-13 20:36:37+00:00
I'm just realizing that while I understand (and think it's obvious) that this tool uses AI to summarize the news, they don't really mention it on-page anywhere. Unless I'm missing it? I think they used to, but maybe I'm mis-remembering.

They do mention "Summaries may contain errors. Please verify important information." on the loading screen but I don't think that's good enough.
by pizlonator | 2025-11-13 20:36:39+00:00
This isn't control for confounding factors.

For example: folks are more likely to rewrite stuff that is well-understood, and stuff that is well-understood is going to have shorter review times and lower rollback rate.

That gnarly horrid mess that only a few greybeards grok and has massive test coverage, a long tail of requirements enforced by tests and experience, and a culture of extreme rigor? Longer reviews, more rollbacks, and less likely to be rewritten.
by littlestymaar | 2025-11-13 20:37:14+00:00
> Chromium: Parsers for PNG, JSON, and web fonts have been replaced with memory-safe implementations in Rust, making it easier for Chromium engineers to deal with data from the web

I find this surprising, isn't Wuffs[1] (also made by Google) an even better fit for this particular use-case? (It has compile-time spatial memory safety, where Rust has compile-time temporal safety but runtime spatial safety, with bound checking).

Obviously for general-purpose system programming, Rust is a no-brainer and I'm happy to see Google pursuing their rustification of Android.

[1]: https://github.com/google/wuffs
by SigmaEpsilonChi | 2025-11-13 20:37:22+00:00
It would have been stupid if that's what actually happened :)

I am the Chris cited in the piece. We have actual legal counsel that we go to for legal advice! However, that's not what was being sought here. In this conversation, the question on the table was "What is a data breach?" according to common convention (setting aside the more technical question of what it means specifically in the context of GDPR). The author contended that a single address record—her own record, IIRC—retrieved as a test of an unsecured endpoint counts as a data breach, and therefore that we are legally obligated under GDPR to email all 5,000 participants about it. My contention was/is that a data breach implies exfiltration of a meaningful amount of data. This was a vulnerability, which we patched within about a day, but we had no reason to believe there was a breach by any definition. I pointed to a few sources to demonstrate the consensus definition of "data breach", and one of them was Gemini (or "Omniscient Robot God", as I called it in the conversation).

There are real issues touched on in this post, but the author is not a reliable narrator and they are flattening a very complex issue into a narrative that centers themself as the hero. In reality, this user was banned from our community for a long string of conduct violations, culminating in repeated incidents of saying horribly abusive things to other teenagers. They have been pursuing a grudge against the organization ever since.
by skrtskrt | 2025-11-13 20:37:29+00:00
The world of Auth has been made miserable with everything having to support OAuth2/LDAP/SSO/SAML etc., plus a million versions of access control, session configs, yadda yadda. Each of these has their own (usually legitimate) purpose, but also each one has to integrate with other providers that each don't follow and/or extend the spec in their own special way. And the pain goes on and on.

Obviously you can make a product that only does really good username/password auth for example, but there's always more pressure to implement more things for another use case.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-11-13 20:38:00+00:00
> We do not live in a democracy, we live in a representative democracy

We live in a republic. Republics mix representative and direct democracy with other featurs to become larger, safer and more powerful than pure democracies have historically been able to be.

The American republic, in my opinion, oversamples representation and undersamples plebescite, lot and ostracisation. (In Athens, elections were assumed biased to the elites. Selection by lot, i.e. by random.)

In my opinion, a lot of the supermajority requirements for legislation are better replaced with plebescite. (We have national elections every two years.) In my opinion, Supreme Court cases should be allocated by lot to a random slate of appelate judges. And in my opinion, every election should have a write-in line where, if more than X% of folks write in a name, that person is not allowed to run for office in that jurisdiction for N years.

The first requires a Constitutional amendment. The second legislation by the Congress. The last may be enactable in state law.
by btilly | 2025-11-13 20:38:04+00:00
Actual concrete examples as judged by whom?

Any concrete example can be dismissed as imaginary slights conjured up by people with a persecution complex. You just indicated your willingness to do so. Doing so creates a version of a No True Scotsman fallacy. You demand examples, but any example you are provided with, you will dismiss.

In this discussion you've had the opportunity to hear several concrete examples. For example my description of my son's experience, and JulianChastain's in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45918197. If you're opening to listening, there are plenty of young men out there who are willing to share their stories. Granted, the men doing so are generally hurt. And hurt people overgeneralize. So you need to listen, with empathy, for the hurt. And not dismiss because of the overgeneralization.
by rootusrootus | 2025-11-13 20:38:04+00:00
So then it boils back down to 'most people are stupid' and the reason we have representative democracy is so we can cultivate a class of elites who are smart enough and have enough skin in the game to make good decisions for the rest of us.

People recoil at the idea, but isn't that sort of what the founders were doing? They had beautiful, lofty ideals on paper, but they were all wealthy, white, male landowners. Their idea of "the People" might have been a wee bit more limited than the generally accepted definition today.
by mothballed | 2025-11-13 20:38:16+00:00
That one definitely reflects that the founders tended to limit voting to those with higher level of stakes in society (usually land owners).

While I'm not defending the practice, the parallel here is lifelong NYC dwellers with family roots in NYC were far less likely to vote for Mamdani than more recent immigrants or residents. It was largely a vote of those with the least stakes in NYC voting to overpower those with the highest stakes in NYC.
by roblabla | 2025-11-13 20:38:33+00:00
Google Certified Devices is any device that has GMS (Google Mobile Services) installed - ergo almost all of them. It's worth noting that a _lot_ of apps stop functioning when GMS is missing because Google has been purposefully been putting as much functionality in them instead of putting them in AOSP. So you end up in a situation where, to make an Android phone compatible with most apps, you need GMS. Which in turn means you need your phone to be Google Certified, and hence must implement this specification.
by teraflop | 2025-11-13 20:38:52+00:00
I think it's completely fine to renege on deals that were made with people who have been dead for centuries, actually, if there's a good reason to.

Courts and political institutions routinely nullify all kinds of "deals" that are considered to be against public policy. For instance, lots of people in the US made legally binding deals to purchase other human beings as slaves, and those deals were undone by the 13th amendment. Maybe those people would have made different life choices if they knew that their slaves would be freed in the future. Tough luck.

In other legal contexts, we recognize that allowing people to exert control over things long after their deaths is a bad idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_against_perpetuities
by rglover | 2025-11-13 20:39:09+00:00
I love MongoDB's query language (JS/Node.js developer so the syntax fits my mental model well), but running a production replica set without spending tons of cash is a nightmare. Doubly so if you have any unoptimized queries (it's easy to trick yourself into thinking throwing more hardware at the problem will help). Lord help you if you use a hosted/managed service.

Just fixed a bug on my MongoDB instance last night that, due to a config error w/ self-signed certs (the hostname in the replica set config has to match the CN on the cert), that caused MongoDB to rocket to 400% CPU utilization (3x, 8GB, 4VCPU dedicated boxes on DO) due to a weird election loop in the replica set process. Fixing that and adding a few missing indexes brought it down to ~12% on average. Simple mistakes, sure, but the real-world cost of those mistakes is brutal.
by formerly_proven | 2025-11-13 20:39:33+00:00
Transistors in principle have the same issue as tubes with bias stacking in that they only operate biased in one way and so the bias potentials necessarily add up (of course we're talking about much smaller voltages, both in absolute terms and in relation to usual supply voltages). But p-type transistors are practical, unlike p-type vacuum tubes. Well, you could build every other tube out of antimatter.
by smileysteve | 2025-11-13 20:39:59+00:00
It's worse than the founding though because Congress has artificially capped its growth. If the house of representatives followed the per capital ratios of the early 20th century, we'd have more than 2x the representatives, if it went back to the 18th century ratios we'd have thousands.

Only, since the 1930 house appropriation, the technology has existed - the automobile, the telephone; by 1960 we had flight, by the 90s we had widespread Internet and faxes.

Theb, the Senate is only made to be like the house of lords, which by itself it now an antiquated concept.
by alistairSH | 2025-11-13 20:40:07+00:00
Additionally, the Senate in original form was actually selected by the states (or rather, their governments). Direct election of Senators only came about in the early 20th century with the 17th Amendment.

And this whole discussion gets further complex when you consider the US uses an antiquated indirect system to elect the President (who in our government is more akin to a Prime Minister in many parliamentary systems than the ceremonial president in those same systems).

In the US, each state gets a number of electors who elect the President. The number is based on the number of Sentators plus the number of House members. So the smallest states are guaranteed 3 electors no matter how out of proportion that count may be.

The consequence of this is in my lifetime, Republicans have won the Presidency twice with a minority of the popular vote (and thrice with a majority)...

2000 - George W Bush won with 47% of the vote to Al Gore's 51%. 2016 - Trump won with 46% to Clinton's 56%.

Reagan, Bush Snr, and Trump (2nd term) won with majorities of the popular vote.

Notably, a Democrat has NEVER won the presidency with LESS than a majority.

For those of who are both residents of moderately sized states, and also lean left on political issues, this certainly feels like a massive structural problem.
by sjs382 | 2025-11-13 20:40:23+00:00
> AI slop eventually will get as good as your average blogger. Even now if you put an effort into prompting and context building, you can achieve 100% human like results.

In that case, I don't think I consider it "AI slop"—it's "AI something else". If you think everything generated by AI is slop (I won't argue that point), you don't really need the "slop" descriptor.
by b-karl | 2025-11-13 20:40:29+00:00
The field of AI has become very big in the recent years and people are becoming more and more specialized just like the in the rest of software or R&D. There’s all sorts of model building and development, integration in other traditional software, infrastructure, deployment and devops and now also all the governance and compliance for a lot of fields. It’s good for people working in those stacks to understand the full chain at some level but pretty fast you will have experts in particular parts of the chain and no one will understand it all.

And then there’s of course career climbers playing politics and people getting into the field because of interest or resume building.
by littlestymaar | 2025-11-13 20:40:55+00:00
> That gnarly horrid mess that only a few greybeards grok and has massive test coverage, a long tail of requirements enforced by tests and experience, and a culture of extreme rigor? Longer reviews, more rollbacks, and less likely to be rewritten.

I'd say that this is likely the most likely to be rewritten actually, because high test coverage is a massive enabler in such a rewrite, and because having a project that “only a few greybeards grok” sounds like a big organizational liability.

That being said, and while I'm pretty convinced that Rust bring massive benefits, I agree with you that these measurements shouldn't be taken as if it was a rigorous scientific proof. It's more of one additional anecdotal evidence that Rust is good.
by bickfordb | 2025-11-13 20:41:16+00:00
Since changing the constitution is difficult, maybe a reasonable remedy to this would be to significantly increase the number of states by population. In 1776 there were 13 states with a total population of 2.5M. There are now 50 states (3.8x increase), with a total population of 340M (136x increase). If we increased the number of states proportionally to the population in 1776 that would result in ~1768 states, almost one for every two counties.
by vessenes | 2025-11-13 20:41:37+00:00
> That’s not necessarily a bad thing.

I think it is in that it gives censorship power to a large corporation. Combined with close-on-the-heels open weights models like Qwen and Kimi, it's not clear to me this is a good posture.

I think the reality is they'd need to really lock Claude off for security research in general if they don't want this ever, ever, happening on their platform. For instance, why not use whatever method you like to get localhost ssh pipes up to targeted servers, then tell Claude "yep, it's all local pentest in a staging environment, don't access IPs beyond localhost unless you're doing it from the server's virtual network"? Even to humans, security research bridges black, grey and white uses fluidly/in non obvious ways. I think it's really tough to fully block "bad" uses.
by beeflet | 2025-11-13 20:41:42+00:00
rust has other advantages. I think cargo is better than cmake. I think the syntax is better, I think the way dependencies and modules are handled is better.

It can be annoying to write "safe" code, but once it meets a certain standard I can be confident in multithreaded applications I write.

I would like to use rust to write android apps. I don't really like the whole android studio java thing.