MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by torginus | 2025-11-30 12:25:53+00:00
I'm sorry but this whole thing stinks

- The data was collected in 2016, and was used in 2023 - a retention period of 7 years, way longer than the specified maximum of 2

- I'd argue that the basis of lawmaking is weighing the advantages versus the costs - supplying partial evidence in a case once a decade does not meet the requirements for introducing mass surveillance with infinite retention

The police work was sloppy, the facts as they stand are:

- The guy was on a list of 1400 or so of suspects, and was convicted of abducting a 13yo in 2023, a different crime. It bears mentioning that the town had a population of 5k and the municipiality 63k, halving that just to count the men doesn't give you a short list

- A white car was seen at the 2016 scene of the crime, suspected to be a Hyundai i30, but with a degree of uncertainty, just to illustrate how uncertain they were, the article mentions the police confiscated a white van

- The guy owned and sold his 2016 Hyundai around the time

- Thanks to Big Brother dragnet perma-retention surveillance (mobile cell info), it was established that the guy was in the area (a train station!) of the 2016 crime at the time (which is a large window considering the exact time of the disappearence of the first girl is not well known)

From this it's unclear to me whether the same guy was the perp in the 2016 and 2023 cases. If he was, I'd argue the dragnet-collected evidence is only circumstantial. I feel like it was possible that the police wanted to pin the crime on him as they had an expectation to catch the 2016 killer and he was obviously a pedo.

Even if he did it, I'd say the digital evidence was neither necessary nor that important in convicting him.
by mesrik | 2025-11-30 12:25:54+00:00
Yes traceroute is something where approximate rough estimate where IP perhaps could be as up to ISP level hosting it, but traceorgute isn't usually allowed pass firewalls and seldom reaches target IP on networks where clients really are.

One possibility is BGP advertised and known information like https://www.cidr-report.org provides could be used. But like I wrote commercial GeoIP data providers are not allowed to use WHOIS information from RIR registries. It's their ToS generally prevent it being collected and resold why MaxMind told me that they don't use it.

Thus the LOC information I had updated RIPE DB in our records LOC or any other information there were not used by MaxMind. Or at least that's what they claim. True or not I don't know, but that's what they tell if you ask from them.

Also apparently they did not use LOC records from the organization domain I maintained DNS LOC records either. And I got no answer why nor what they use as their sources of information. As it's more likely some kind of trade secret of them.
by cjbgkagh | 2025-11-30 12:26:08+00:00
The Netflix deal with Obama for $50M and book deals for $65M are a bit blatant. Certainly a $8B crypto rug pull is far worse by a few orders of magnitude. I think it’s weird that these are the new standards, I really hate presidential politics. Perhaps Jimmy Carter was the least damaging and he was forced to give up his family farm.

One difference is that the few on the right that I know (I’m sure a biased sampling) think that what Trump did is wrong but those on the left seem to have forgotten all about Obama’s deals or worse they think that its kosher.
by partomniscient | 2025-11-30 12:26:15+00:00
Having lived in the UK and Australia, they're not kidding when they have don't get skin cancer promotions. The most remembered one from my youth is Slip, Slop, Slap. So Australian. Slip on a shirt, Slop on some suncream and Slap on a hat.

And yet mostly living in Australia, (was only in the grey UK from 2.5 years in our 20's), I'm still vitamin D deficient, because the majority of my life I've been inside on computers, presumably like a large percentage of Hacker News readers.

Ironically, our suncream QA is crap and all of the supposedly good sunscreens with high SPF factors failed indepdent testing - even including the one recommended by the Cancer Council.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-11-30 12:26:56+00:00
Construction, a few trades… Help me, I've run out of ideas without resorting to "Walmart Greeter".

Most of those jobs went overseas a long time ago. Short of the couple I could think of, the rest of the jobs remaining that don't require some advanced education don't pay a "living wage".

I'd love to see the US have a vocational "track" beginning in high school again. But that also requires we have the jobs for them when they graduate.
by csomar | 2025-11-30 12:27:54+00:00
Here is my made up guess: The average university graduate will do better without degree than the current non-grad averages.

You are making the assumption that it all boils down to the degree (the difference in income). This can't be possible (maybe a majority of it, but not all of it). There are other factors (like being from a middle-class, higher IQ, etc.) that selects for going to Uni. and this has effect later on income.
by blandflakes | 2025-11-30 12:27:59+00:00
The language is actually really nice. The "we won't ship dotty as the next version of Scala, just kidding, here it is", the breakage of editors and IDEs that lasted for years, etc (aka, the WAY they did it) make migrating a poor value prop. If I have to suffer worse tools and pay the tax of fixing them/updating them, then for each system when I think it's time to migrate to Scala 3 I might think it's time to migrate off Scala entirely.

It's possible that nothing could have reversed their existing trend, but I think it's fair to say that smaller communities (as another poster mentioned) can't afford this level of friction. Have we not seen Perl->Raku? Python2-3?

Additionally, while almost all of Scala 3 is an improvement over 2, whitespace significance seems like an awful hill to die on. Most people who value that sort of syntax in domains where Scala has made any inroads are already on Python, and we're going to alienate many existing developers in the (vain) hope of increasing marketability?
by locknitpicker | 2025-11-30 12:28:18+00:00
> When America was truly at the top of the world in the 1950s and 1960s, it was under 10%. A high fraction of college attendance is better correlated with the 21st century decline in America's situation.

I think this is a textbook example of correlation not implying causality. The US was awarded a unique competitive advantage with WW2, which allowed it to become the world's hegemon. Much of the reason that the US was able to preserve it's status was how it managed to leverage that competitive advantage to fuel it's economical and technological development to build up and retain a competitive advantage. This was only made possible by its investment in higher education and R&D, which is a big factor behind the progress in the 1950s and 1960s you're lauding. Things like the GI bill are renowned by the huge impact it had on the tech industry.

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

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

The US never managed to shake off its anti-intellectual bias, and has this irrational belief that ladder-pulling is somehow conflated with the cream always rising to the top, but if anything it's preventing their domestic talent from fulfilling their potential.
by card_zero | 2025-11-30 12:28:25+00:00
I've been reading an old manga called Ikigami: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikigami:_The_Ultimate_Limit

The premise is that people are randomly notified of their imminent death, and variously decide that they have to make amends for things they did wrong, or make up for lost time, or stand up to their enemies, or do whatever they're most proud of, or make arrangements to provide for others, or create something for posterity.

Personally I think mortality makes everybody slightly crazy, and is best ignored, so I wouldn't want to react in any major way. I'd probably record the current state of my projects, in case somebody else felt like taking over. So I'd die doing admin chores.
by ACCount37 | 2025-11-30 12:30:54+00:00
It's an important point to make.

LLMs of today copy a lot of human behavior, but not all of their behavior is copied from humans. There are already things in them that come from elsewhere - like the "shape shifter" consistency drive from the pre-training objective of pure next token prediction across a vast dataset. And there are things that were too hard to glimpse from human text - like long term goal-oriented behavior, spatial reasoning, applied embodiment or tacit knowledge - that LLMs usually don't get much of.

LLMs don't have to stick close to human behavior. The dataset is very impactful, but it's not impactful enough that parts of it can't be overpowered by further training. There is little reason for an LLM to value non-instrumental self-preservation, for one. LLMs are already weird - and as we develop more advanced training methods, LLMs might become much weirder, and quickly.

Sydney and GPT-4o were the first "weird AIs" we've deployed, but at this rate, they sure wouldn't be the last.
by LunicLynx | 2025-11-30 12:31:19+00:00
I bought myself an anker powerbank because of all the rave around them. Mine behaves incredibly strange. Charged in seconds, then not containing half a phone charge. For a 20.000 mAh this was really disappointing. Probably a one of but still leaves the impression that this was looked at because it ruined the price for others.
by blandflakes | 2025-11-30 12:31:30+00:00
As other posters mentioned, a lot of it is about lacking critical mass in the first place. Making such a dramatic change is a high-risk thing, and Scala didn't have enough of a lead at all to justify it.

> The only bad thing was that it took quite long for Scala3 to become available leading to a lot of stagnation.

Unfortunately this isn't the only bad thing. The language overall is definitely a nicer language (though I complain about the whitespace change elsewhere). The tooling was broken for years, which actually stalled our team's migration. How could I advocate for moving to Scala 3, just to send everybody's editors and IDEs back to the stone age?

I'm not arguing that they built bad technology, I'm arguing that they ignored the reality: the value prop of moving to Scala 3 vs... moving to something else, at that point, isn't that compelling.
by blandflakes | 2025-11-30 12:32:39+00:00
> IDE support for Scala 3 was really rough when it first released. We checked in on it with every IntelliJ release for roughly 3 years before we decided it was far enough along. Prior to that it was rough enough that we froze migration efforts in order to keep the tooling usable enough for engineers to be productive.

Same story for us - about 3 years before Intellij was usable, even then not up to what it had been on Scala 2. We still only have 2 Scala 3 repos, out of about 30, for my team, and we're actually MORE adventurous than most other teams at the company!
by somenameforme | 2025-11-30 12:32:57+00:00
I think very few, if any, countries in the world would be stronger than what we turned Ukraine into. You have a massive army being replenished by a constant slew of bodies, to the point of forcefully dragging people in off the streets, and then being armed with hundreds of billions of dollars in Western arms. But what gives Ukraine a particular superpower is their logistics.

Most people don't realize is that war is essentially a giant deadly game of logistics, and so the typical plan for Russia would be to simply destroy the logistics pipelines arming Ukraine. But thanks to the people 100% responsible for maintaining Ukraine's military managing to maintain a strategically accepted neutrality, it's impossible to fundamentally disrupt their logistics pipeline outside of small scale black ops stuff.

So that has turned this war into a war of attrition where Russia is advancing slowly, but mostly setting the goal as essentially having Ukraine simply run out of Ukrainians. And they seem to be succeeding. Once the real death tolls for this war are revealed, people are going to be shocked. You don't need to drag in people off the streets, close your borders, and continually lower the enlistment age (in a country with a severe demographic crisis) if you're not suffering catastrophic losses, especially since as the amount of territory you have to defend decreases, you need fewer soldiers to maintain the same defensive density.
by zbentley | 2025-11-30 12:33:08+00:00
That’s ridiculous. Space is the least nation-state-dependent place to do computing in existence.

All proposed space computing has an incredibly short orbital lifespan (less than 5y).

Every single space launch capable rocket provider in the world is financially, regulatorily, and militarily joined at the hip to a single government. No launches are taking place without that government’s say-so.

Also, space infrastructure is incredibly vulnerable to attack by nation-states as many others in this thread have pointed out.
by nerdsniper | 2025-11-30 12:33:10+00:00
> It’s allowed because it just runs locally like any overlay and doesn’t interact with their systems.

This is account is spamming - as in advertising on HN. This software is definitely not "allowed" during any typical leetcode interview. The website is very explicit and upfront about this being cheating.

They're also posting during the middle of the day in the country where the company making this product is headquartered, and it's 4AM in the country where the vast majority of HN users are.
by thelastgallon | 2025-11-30 12:33:22+00:00
> The most important thing being cheap is that access to the Space become possible for way more people with creativity. Not just a few people with academic titles but people with practical engineering and scientific mastery (that certainly run circles around them on real projects).

Agreed! Real estate is incredibly cheap in space until Saudi money and private equity figure out a way to make it a scarce resource. Also, we can build massive single suburban homes in space! No need to build vertical and public transit. Just give everyone a rocketship to travel to the nearest space McDs drive through!
by metalman | 2025-11-30 12:33:40+00:00
it makes no difference how far "governments" go down the authoritarian openly fascist path. Real world pressure from climate change, demographic changes, the effect of the developing world rising, and all of it happening in a world where hydraulic despotism is no longer viable, as there is no way to force the world's continuing reliance on pipe lines and sole sources of technology. The last gasps of the colonial gentocratic cleptocracy are going to be uggly. The adsurdity of trying to hide the enslavement of the entire worlds population behind exactly ONE case of technology bieng used to prosecute (not catch) ONE murderer is only going to highlight the thousands and thousands of cases that are, and never will be investigated at all.
by Havoc | 2025-11-30 12:34:21+00:00
That's really cool!

Curious how you sourced the feeds? It seems to have a bias towards Indian/Srilanka/Iran/Indonesia/Turkey etc - i.e. not the traditional western centric reporting. Always interested in trying to get a more balanced news diet so anything you could share around that would be interesting. Most out of the box news tools seem to automatically lean west

FYI layout sometimes breaks like so:

https://i.imgur.com/FXeqB9R.png
by TrackerFF | 2025-11-30 12:34:44+00:00
In every practical sense, this is the grifter administration. They know they are untouchable at the moment, so everyone is out to get their piece of the pie.

All decisions and plays have some financial motives behind them. There's a reason POTUS admires Russia, and their style of governance - if he could, and had the time, the US would be a mirror of just that.

Keep the people occupied with a non-stop firehose of grievance bullshit, and be laser focused on enriching yourself and your allies.

EDIT: Gotta love the downvotes. The sheer level of shamelessness exhibited by the this admin, and people somehow still run to their defense.
Show HN: Guide – to help me get moving and keep the momentum going
by 4mitkumar | 2025-11-30 12:34:49+00:00
Hi HN, I built Guide (leaning almost exclusively on Gemini Pro 2.5) for myself initially to get over the blank-page-hurdle while starting on a goal. As well as to reduce the overwhelm from huge lists of to-do when I got into it.

It's Local. Single file HTML+CSS+JS only

You can see the code and try it out here: https://github.com/nextfiveinc/guide (just save to your phone / desktop and start playing;)

What it does: Guide is a task management app based on CBT principles focused on getting you moving when you're stuck, then keeping that momentum going toward your actual goals. Few core ideas: 1. Start small to build momentum – Add quick wins (15-20 min tasks) to break the inertia. Either defined by based on your goal or suggested by App. Once you finish it, the domanine hit makes me want to do another. That's when you define bigger goals. 2. AI suggests next steps – When you set a goal but can't figure out the next concrete task, clicking "Guide me" suggests what to tackle next (optional; bring your own key - Claude / OpenAI / Gemini). Of course, ideal would be you define that next step. 3. Only shows 3 tasks at a time – Add as many tasks as you want, but Guide only surfaces the top 3. Rest remain in what I call Task Bowl - sort of to reduce the idea of a list and enforce the imagery of a bowl I can pick from.

You read more at https://blog.nextfive.in/guide can try it out here: https://github.com/nextfiveinc/guide
by 4mitkumar | 2025-11-30 12:35:36+00:00
There's also some more light CBT-inspired stuff: like reminders when you're stuck, off-screen break suggestions (I consider breaks essential to long term momentum), and automatic summaries showing how far you've come when you feel like you've been just stuck in the weeds (I frequently judge myself a bit too harshly till I see the numbers and am sometime pleasantly surprised)

I made this primarily for myself – I'm someone who gets stuck between "I should be productive" and "I literally cannot decide what to do right now." The pattern I noticed: starting anything small breaks the spell, then I can think about actual goals.

The (optional) AI suggestions are deliberately constrained to be actionable (15-60 minutes tasks that ladder up to your goal) rather than generic productivity advice.

Would love to hear if this resonates with anyone else, or if you have thoughts on the approach.
by blandflakes | 2025-11-30 12:36:11+00:00
It competes in some ways and not in others. It does a pretty good job of providing similar benefits as many Scala ecosystems, but providing approachability over purity.

Kotlin becoming The Official Android Language helps it quite a bit, though the future gets interesting if Google successfully abandons the JVM entirely to rid themselves of Oracle. I'm skeptical that Kotlin targeting multiple runtimes is a winning proposition, but it certainly seems to be doing a better job than Scala Native (also Rust is probably the better choice than Scala Native for that kind of code anyway).
by mactavish88 | 2025-11-30 12:36:19+00:00
There's something both beautiful/enchanting and deeply tragic about the story.

If anyone's interested in an analysis of Saint-Exupéry's psychology via the symbolism of The Little Prince, the book "The Problem of the Puer Aeternus" by Marie-Louise von Franz [1] is absolutely fascinating.

[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1404609.The_Problem_of_t...
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-11-30 12:36:55+00:00
Reminds me of how I used to play Risk (which I now consider to be one of the worst designed games in a similar fashion to Monopoly) when I'd sit in Australia and just keep building troops until other players weaken themselves with fighting. Of course it helps that there's just a single position to defend Australia and as it's the smallest continent, people usually aim to attack elsewhere.
by constantcrying | 2025-11-30 12:36:59+00:00
>Having a great showcase distro can be a very nice way into Linux in general.

By "nice" do you mean a distro which is fundamentally broken and far less supported then its parent distro?

>It’s alle achieved with these boutique distros which may display the best that’s out there.

It is displaying the worst that is out there, just with a nice interface. These niche distros are always the worst choices, because they lack in support and are all fundamentally broken.

Running someone else's patch set of Arch is the easiest way to have a terrible Linux experience. Having a nice interface to lull people into believing what they are getting is a professional product and then handing them a fundamentally broken system, where some hobbyists have patched a proper Linux distro so bad, that you are not even allowed to ask for help on the Arch forum is down right devious and presents the worst of the Linux world.

The truth is that Linux is mostly stable (even Arch), well supported and maintained. But this does not apply to these small hobby projects, which are just worse versions of their base distros with some ricing on top.

>FOSS is about freedom, freedom works best with options to apply to. Nobody is forcing you to do anything with these options.

At the same time I am free to warn people against this. These distros are a bad Idea and especially if you are new to Linux they will make you suffer far more than you should.
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-11-30 12:37:01+00:00
Anecdotically I'm using it since about 2 years on obsolete Kaby Lake Core i5 7500T & Core i7 7700T @35Watts in 1 liter Lenovo Thinkcentres (M910q tiny). Which have integrated HD630 Graphics.

Under Plasma/KDE. I just followed their defaults in the installer, which at the time were BTRFS for the filesystem, whith systemd-boot, and everything wen't well. The only thing which I would have done differently in hindsight would be the boot partition at 2GB, which seems wasteful when only about 50MB are ever used. But shrug?

What else, hrrm, the stuff is mostly clocked down to 800Mhz, because of the chosen scheduler, in spite of this nothing ever lags. Though the systems have 32GB RAM, that should help with that.

It's really smooth, even on that old 'crap', even mostly clocked down.

I also had it never crash on me with anything, neither single applications, or system hangs.

After upgrading with pacman -Syu I immediately clear the package cache with pacman -Scc, because I never ever needed that.

At the moment I'm considering to remove the pacman hooks into btrfs-snapshots, because I never needed them either. Seems like cargo-cult to me :-)

I also let it bitrot for up to 150 days, meaning no updates whatsover, and then lifting it up in one accumulated rush. Effortlessly. In the past, because I've been lazy and couldn't be bothered. Lately more often :-)

I didn't reboot in these long phases without updates. Just suspend to RAM. Which works every single time. And the system stayed always responsive.

Their ZRAM setup is usable by default. No fiddling necessary.

With this stability I dared to activate https://github.com/graysky2/profile-sync-daemon / https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Profile-sync-daemon and never had any trouble with it so far.

At the moment I'm having fun discovering a new world of audio experience with https://github.com/wwmm/easyeffects

How could I live without that?!

(Don't worry, cores stay at 800Mhz with that playing YT in FF, or watching a movie with MPV)

At least on my hardware it's the DREAM.

Oh. Did I mention I don't game at all? With the exception of maybe some Freeciv in the browser...