MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by array_key_first | 2025-11-06 01:31:22+00:00
I mean, there's a lot of truth to this stuff: tech, and software, is extremely insecure, unknowably complex, and increasingly the most damaging avenue for an attack. I think the propaganda comes in when we point the finger at China, as if this isn't a problem in general.

Here in the US, all of our vehicles have SIM cards and they have for decades. They sent off God knows what data, to God knows who, and they remotely receive commands, too. Could you car be hacked? If it was, would you ever be able to find out? Both of those questions are not easy to answer.

Really, ALL of our tech works this way. That Android phone? It has countless binary blobs doing who-knows-what. It runs proprietary code at ring 0, and has access to the cellular bands. If it was compromised, you wouldn't know, especially if the attack was targeted. The people making the software and hardware are already "exploiting" it right now - mostly to gather data for advertising, ostensibly. But how do you know these systems are secure? We're talking millions of lines of C code, interfacing directly with the hardware, running at maximum privileges, written by people you don't know, which cannot be audited.
by sarchertech | 2025-11-06 01:32:04+00:00
> Sometimes. Sometimes they practice by text or phone.

For very simple issues. For anything even remotely complicated, they’re going to have you come in.

> If I had to guess, I think I'd guess that mainstream LLM chatbots are better at getting honest and applicable medical histories than most doctors. People are less likely to lie/hide/prevaricate and get more time with the person.

It’s not just about being intentionally deceptive. It’s very easy to get chat bots to tell you what you want to hear.
by dkarl | 2025-11-06 01:32:10+00:00
That's pretty cool, and now I'm curious if there's something similar for ScalaCheck. My comment comes from my own experience, though, introducing Hypothesis and ScalaCheck into codebases and quickly causing noticeable increases in unit test times. I think the additional runtime for tests is undoubtedly worth it, but maybe not a good trade-off when people are used to running unit tests several times an hour as part of their development cycle. To avoid people saying, "Running four minutes of tests five times per hour is ruining my flow and productivity," I make sure they have a script or command to run a subset of basic, less comprehensive tests, or to only run the tests relevant to the changes they've made.
by lambda | 2025-11-06 01:33:01+00:00
Please, when commenting on the title of a story on HN: include the title that you are commenting on.

The admins regularly change the title based on complaints, which can be really confusing when the top, heavily commented thread is based on the original title.

According to the Wayback machine, the title was "OpenAI ends legal and medical advice on ChatGPT", while now when I write this the title is "ChatGPT terms disallow its use in providing legal and medical advice to others."
by celsoazevedo | 2025-11-06 01:33:48+00:00
> Firefox profiles suck. Their UX is so bad.

That's what these changes aim to fix. You're getting a Chromium-like profile switcher/manager.

> Containers are better

Containers are very good... for container stuff. Profiles allow us to have different bookmarks, settings, extensions, themes, etc. Different tools for different jobs. I use both!
by mrguyorama | 2025-11-06 01:33:58+00:00
> voter ballot propositions illegally blocking a transmission line for years [1]

The idea that a private company should get to unilaterally change our environment for profit is gross.

I think it's funny you use this example when CMP has been utterly refusing to connect tens of solar power and community solar projects to our grid, which suffers from a lack of generation contributing to our staggeringly high electricity costs.

Meanwhile, CMP insists that they have to double our rates (again), and don't really provide justification. This despite our generation and distribution costs being entirely separated, CMP having monopoly power over most of the state for distribution buildout, CMP having one of the least reliable grids in the nation despite supposedly spending enormously within the last few years to upgrade parts of the grid, and the whole time, CMP is extracting tidy profits to an entirely different country, from my fellow Mainers who are primarily old and on fixed incomes.

Maybe, just maybe, you don't have an accurate understanding of this issue?

We have several fully built solar farms, desperately needed new generation, just sitting idle as CMP refuses to connect them, because connecting more distributed infrastructure like that would eat into their profit margins, which continue to stay high as they continue to yearly increase our rates while sending out multiple leaflets telling people that they are totally not at fault for increasing their distribution rates because oh my generation costs also went up.

You should look up how much CMP spent on playing ads about how they would totally respect our nature and it would be vaguely great for us to build a transmission line to another state, as they continue to refuse to hook up generation that could reduce our power prices, and not even their chunk of that price!
by jsrcout | 2025-11-06 01:34:26+00:00
Firefox profiles have worked really well for me for years. I only have two complaints. (a) I like to configure my tools, and setting prefs via user.js has just never really worked - anything there is ignored. Probably it's just because of my particular setup, but I eventually gave up on it. (b) It would be super nice if profiles could [edit:] share common prefs. I certainly don't expect the developers to make it a feature, and it seems like fixing (a) and using symlinks would do it. But overall, yeah profiles work great.
by api | 2025-11-06 01:34:35+00:00
That’s not a problem with LLMs as a technology. It’s a problem with how LLM companies have been allowed to violate copyright at industrial scale. It’s a political and social problem.

The same indictment can be made about search companies and social media: that they are monetizing others work without compensation.

Or is there something about the tech that requires that it be deployed in this way?

My position is that LLMs trained without proper copyright authorization should not be copyrightable. They should be public domain.

As for the energy use: we either get our energy from polluting sources or we don’t. What we do with it is secondary. If we’re not using it to run AI we’d be using it to get a burrito delivered.
by sjfkeifj | 2025-11-06 01:34:38+00:00
Every list of 'thought stopping cliche's must also contain 'thought stopping cliche'.

The right wing fascist culture is the left's fault, sure kiddo.

If you like fascism just be proud and say, "I am a fascist."

Who do you think will actually believe you when you say "I hated fascism until the leftists made me like fascism" anyway?
by rmunn | 2025-11-06 01:34:49+00:00
> Here in the US, the thirteenth amendment seems to think that a little slavery is cool.

For anyone not familiar with the US Constitution, the 13th Amendment forbids slavery and involuntary servitude "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted."

Without that "except as a punishment for [a] crime" clause, being sentenced to N hours of community service would be forbidden by the Constitution, and the second-lowest penalty judges could impose (the lowest being a fine) would be prison time. So that clause was actually necessary to include in order to allow for more lenient sentences for crimes that deserve something more severe than a fine: lowest level of sentencing is a fine, after that comes being sentenced to community service (which most people agree is less severe than prison, even though it does count as involuntary servitude), and then after that come the more severe sentences like prison.
by phs318u | 2025-11-06 01:34:50+00:00
Make a big deal about the shill/fake accounts. Educate people as to the benefits of your offering vs theirs and explain how even with their "free credits" offer, it's a poor alternative. I presume these offers are made in DM's? I'm not aware of any "forum" type software that allows admins to prohibit DM's.
by moosedman | 2025-11-06 01:35:18+00:00
It's interesting because if Trump falls for this, at it fuels an even bigger bubble than is already going and Fed can't lower interest rates, then it will destroy his part in the midterms. If he can't bring down costs and interest rates people are going to freak out, that's clear from the polls. Where most people in the country are at in the moment is a precarious one step away from ruin while watching prices going and interest rates stay. That's not Sam's reality but most people are struggling and if Sam hordes all the resources to him, people are going to revolt.
by fn-mote | 2025-11-06 01:36:23+00:00
How in the world would you keep AI out of schools?

Ok, turn off the internet. And ban the cell phones.

I suppose a district could block the known AI providers, so kids could only use AI at home. I’m very skeptical this would eliminate the negatives.

On the contrary, every administrator I know of is gung-ho about the coming improvements in education driven by AI. (There certainly are SOME, but it comes with minuses.)
by Waterluvian | 2025-11-06 01:36:49+00:00
If I play Diablo 4, 10 mins in I’ll think, “what’s the point? Where does this treadmill go? Is there a better build that’s more fun? Is the game loop to shallow? What were the devs intending with this and that?”

If I take 5mg of THC and play Diablo 4: “oooh the numbers are getting bigger.”

But here’s my hot take: I don’t think being “smart” is what makes things less joyful. I think having a brain that just won’t stop causes both that and the smartness thing. Being smart and being unhappy are siblings.
by burnte | 2025-11-06 01:37:37+00:00
> Is it possible for Mamdani to use soft power, when most of the leadership of the Democratic party didn't want him?

100%, because he's mayor. He has real power, and you use that to create soft power. Nothing else matters now, he's mayor. They have to deal with him, and by trying to make that easy and being gracious with the people who were against him, he can gain a LOT of soft power.
by autoexec | 2025-11-06 01:37:41+00:00
Signal used to never collect data on users, but they've changed that a while ago and now they keep user's name, photo, phone number, and a list of their contacts permanently in the cloud protected from the government by nothing except by a leaky enclave and a pin (https://web.archive.org/web/20250117232443/https://www.vice....)

More recently they've started collected the contents of messages into the cloud too, yet to this very day their privacy policy opens with the lie: "Signal is designed to never collect or store any sensitive information." which hasn't been true for a very very long time. I consider their refusal to update their privacy policy to be a massive dead canary warning people that the service has already been compromised, but feel free to take your chances.
by zer00eyz | 2025-11-06 01:37:53+00:00
Unloading, Frame assemblies, testing, Cleanup of any failed products (this is skilled labor)... Packaging and loading. This is at the plant that does panel assembly (joining silicon to packaging).

The problem is that "Highly automated" does not mean "free of people" ... the demand for low skill labor (and a fair amount of it to keep up with automated processes) is still required.

The cost of labor in china remains so low (on the whole) that these things are still not only feasible but cost effective.
by pcchristie | 2025-11-06 01:38:03+00:00
This is a myth: https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/electric-vehicle-myths

Because of the efficiency of the EV motor vs. the ICE motor, EVs are far cleaner than ICEVs even when fossil-fuel-powered and that's not factoring in the (slow) cleaning of the grid which will widen that gap over time, as the other comment mentioned.
by amluto | 2025-11-06 01:38:07+00:00
I think the other replies are overcomplicating this.

+ is a binary operation, and a+b+c can’t be interpreted without knowing whether one treats + as left-associative or right-associative. Let’s assume the former: a+b+c really means (a+b)+c.

If + is commutative, you can turn (a+b)+c into (b+a)+c or c+(a+b) or (commuting twice) c+(b+a).

But that last expression is not the same thing as (c+b)+a. Getting there requires associativity, and floating point addition is not associative.
by celsoazevedo | 2025-11-06 01:38:39+00:00
You're right. For some reason I couldn't see the folders being created, but after restarting Firefox (about:profiles required me to do after creating profiles with the new UI), they are created.

Do you know if there's any way to have old profiles showing on this new UI?

Edit: They seem to be working on this:

- https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1996240

- https://phabricator.services.mozilla.com/D270525
by E39M5S62 | 2025-11-06 01:39:28+00:00
I don't know if BeOS was too new conceptually. I think a lot of it at the time was that it was just incomplete. Limited or no printing. A slow and incomplete userland networking stack (later replaced by a more performant BONE stack). Incomplete and missing APIs. Single user, no real concept of multiple users.

I absolutely love BeOS - it remains the pinnacle of user-focused computing for me - but I think it would have been a tough job to base another commercial OS on it. We'll never know what could have happened, but Apple probably made the right choice in buying NeXT.
Seeking feedback: Integrated product discovery workflow tool
by DavinKaru | 2025-11-06 01:40:09+00:00
I’m exploring a AI tool for product and UX teams that manages the full user-research workflow, not just AI note-taking/transcription. The idea is to help teams:

◉ Plan interview sessions

◉ Create agendas / questions

◉ Keep sessions on-track during the call

◉ Record + transcribe

◉ Extract themes, insights, and action items

◉ Aggregate research outputs into a unified knowledge base

Think of it as a combination of tools like TL;DV/Fathom (capture) and Dovetail/Condens (synthesis/insights), but integrated across the whole workflow rather than siloed.

I’m trying to validate whether this solves real pain, who needs it, and where the value is highest.

If you run product discovery, UX interviews, or continuous research, I’d appreciate 3 minutes of your input:

Survey link: https://forms.fillout.com/t/grQzTdK7opus
by ggm | 2025-11-06 01:41:19+00:00
Because openai was given a federal backstop, it has a guaranteed customer as nation scale, and will be able to leverage that into massive profit in cost-plus service delivery?

Because it has gilt, it can go into markets and source money at gilt equivalent rates not risk venture rates?

Frankly, this just confirms to me it's a bubble close to popping. It's not mcdonnel Douglas being told "price no obstacle" doing space work in the 60s, it's the shipmaker for the south Sea bubble slave trade being told free teak and the first 20 ships are purchased.
by rester324 | 2025-11-06 01:42:11+00:00
I think it's very cynical to say that this is a misuse. And it's definitely cynical when this categorization of misuse comes from the service provider itself. If openai doesn't want to allow misuse, they can just decommision their service. But they don't want to do that, they just want to take the money and push all the responsibility and burden on the users even though they are actively engaging in said "misuse"
by nakamoto_damacy | 2025-11-06 01:42:44+00:00
EXHIBIT A

"If at any point I described how legal factors “apply to you,” that would indeed go beyond what I’m supposed to do. Even if my intent was to illustrate how those factors generally work, the phrasing can easily sound like I’m offering a tailored legal opinion — which isn’t appropriate for an AI system or anyone who isn’t a licensed attorney.

The goal, always, is for me to help you understand the framework — the statutes, cases, or reasoning that lawyers and courts use — so that you can see how it might relate to your situation and then bring that understanding to a qualified attorney.

So if I’ve ever crossed that line in how I worded something, thank you for pointing it out. It’s a good reminder that I should stay firmly on the educational side: explaining how the law works, not how it applies to you personally.

Would you like me to restate how I can help you analyze legal issues while keeping it fully within the safe, informational boundary?"

ChatGPT
by rmunn | 2025-11-06 01:44:10+00:00
Or a watch command that runs tests in the background on save, and an IDE setting to flag code when the watched tests produce a failure. Get used to that, and it's not even a matter of stopping to run the tests: they run every time you hit Ctrl-S, and you just keep on typing — and every so often the IDE notifies you of a failed test.

The drawback is that you might get used to saying "Well, of course the tests failed, I'm in the middle of refactoring and haven't finished yet" and ignoring the failed-test notifications. But just like how I'm used to ignoring typecheck errors until I finish typing but then I look at them and see if they're still there, you probably won't get used to ignoring test failures all the time. Though having a five-minute lag time between "I'm finished typing, now those test errors should go away" and having them actually go away might be disconcerting.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-11-06 01:44:47+00:00
> single DC rack might use (max 25kW, someone correct me)

25kW? Don't tell me your engineers used that number in their calculations.

Reality:

GB200 NVL72 - 120 kW per rack

GB300 NVL72 - 150 kW per rack

Weight - 3,000–3,500 lbs per rack

Cost of liquid cooling on Earth - $50,000 per rack

by 2027 the new 800V-HVDC will be deployed - 1 MW per rack

I'd never imagined I'd be providing free engineering consultations to billionaires.
by yann-gael | 2025-11-06 01:45:25+00:00
When you look at a piece of code/software, it is often fairly intuitive to know where/what are some of the implemented features; either because there is a good amount of documentation, the code is well structured, or because there are tools that help with feature location. However, not all features are simple to find: some because of poor maintenance, others because the feature was not necessarily treated as such during the implementation. I would call these ad-hoc features. As the name suggests, these features were implemented without much thought: maybe developers thought it would not be useful to properly package them and they ended up being reused elsewhere, maybe a large team got confused and re-implemented the same piece of code many times, or maybe someone just didn't recognize that there was even a feature to begin with!
by hamburglar | 2025-11-06 01:45:40+00:00
There’s a great book by Arthur Brooks called From Strength to Strength which has a slightly different take on “reality minus expectations”: think of it as a fraction, where what you have is the numerator and what you want is the denominator. If you keep ratcheting up what you want (which is what the hedonic treadmill is all about —- you reach a goal and enjoy it for a nanosecond and then suddenly you need an even bigger achievement to satisfy you), you push happiness further away. And conversely, if you learn to want things that are actually in reach, you become happier as you achieve them.
by Macha | 2025-11-06 01:46:06+00:00
The problem it really solved was your sysadmins were still operating by SSHing into the physical servers and running commands meticulously typed out in a releaae doc or stored on a local mediawiki instance, and acquiring new compute resources involved a battle with finance for the capex which would delay pretty much any project for weeks, while cloud vendors let engineers at many companies sidestep both processes.

Everything else was just reference material for how to sell it to your management.
by array_key_first | 2025-11-06 01:46:26+00:00
It's also about consumer software versus business software.

Consumer software is all about conning people who don't currently own the software into thinking it's good and buying it. Once they have it, their experience doesn't matter at all. In fact, you should actively make the software less capable - really dumb it down, to appeal to the widest audience. Yes, more white space, yes, more menus. An error message that says 'oopsy something went wrong'? What a splendid idea! Information density does not matter. Speed does not matter. Accuracy of data does not matter. Hell, even bugs don't matter, if your software looks pretty.

Business software is different. It's crufty, it's ugly, and it doesn't change. Because you're optimizing for your users using the same software for 8 hours a day for the rest of their lives.
by BrenBarn | 2025-11-06 01:46:27+00:00
I've used profiles for a long time, but they have some annoyances.

One thing I really want is a comprehensive system for transferring/syncing only certain data between profiles. Profiles contain some data that is specific to, well, a particular browsing profile (like open tabs), but also data that is really more specific to me as a person (like font preferences). And then each extension can have its own settings or data that I may or may not want to transfer. I always have to look up old articles on Mozilla wiki and hope they're still accurate when I want to transfer certain data/settings between profiles while neither nuking everything nor copying everything. It would be great to have a sort of "data browser" that let me pick and choose certain data and then create a new profile from that.

The other disappointing thing to me is how they talk about profiles (and container tabs) as related to different usage patterns like work, home, etc. I mean, yeah, that's cool, but what I really want (certainly from container tabs, sometimes from profiles as well) is site isolation. I don't just want one profile for my work Gmail and another for my personal Gmail. I want one container tab for "everything Google", isolated from the rest, to minimize Google's tracking. But, like I said above, I still want all my personal preferences uniform across these profiles/containers.
by totallymike | 2025-11-06 01:46:36+00:00
What your manual says is common to most dishwashers.

You can tell if your dishwasher has a pre-wash cycle if it does a short run, then you hear it draining, and then it does a longer full run. I expect it probably does.

Also, you can always add a bit of detergent to the main compartment of the dishwasher for prewash. The normal detergent compartment has a lid so the the detergent stays dry until the main wash cycle, and most prewash compartments are just an open tray.

Come to think of it, if there is a latching door on the detergent tray, your dishwasher definitely has a prewash cycle, or else they’d skip the door entirely
by acdha | 2025-11-06 01:46:52+00:00
In the U.S., the answer usually comes back to racism. In the post-WWII era, a lot of mostly-white people moved to the suburbs. This pulled a lot of tax base and business away and also lead to a lot of neighborhoods being partitioned by highways so the suburban office workers could commute faster. In some areas, that combined with politics problems lead to riots in the 60s which further damaged many neighborhoods. All of that lead businesses not to invest or to pull out of less profitable neighborhoods. People who could afford cars would accelerate the shift by driving to the higher-end markets, so this can produce a negative feedback loop over decades, especially when businesses aren’t jumping to put money into remodeling or upgrading those locations.

Every time I’ve been in Europe I keep asking why we can’t have those markets, too. Trying to minimize time spent out of our cars and avoid contact with our neighbors has had a really big price.