MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by djoldman | 2025-11-20 20:39:49+00:00
Folks may be talking past each other on the "100 mile" issue.

The dissonance arises from these contradictions:

1. Federal regulations specifically state "100 air miles" with respect to the US Border patrol: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-8/part-287/section-287.1#...

2. The US Border Patrol has lost court cases for things they have done within those 100 miles, essentially saying they shouldn't have done those things.

An informal interpretation of this is that the US Federal Government and BP generally view the powers of the BP as more expansive than the judicial branch, possibly including the legislative.
Why don't we see agents around us? Share your thoughts
by spacemnstr42069 | 2025-11-20 20:40:05+00:00
The agents space is full of demos and hype, but almost no one talks about what actually breaks in production and why we do not see actually agents around us.

Found Breakpoint they are building a space for engineers to swap war stories, post-mortems, and real fixes.

First one tomorrow: https://luma.com/w95wm3k7
by Aurornis | 2025-11-20 20:40:22+00:00
> Personally knowing what I know, I'd let my home sit empty a good amount of time

Sadly, this is how most squatting situations start. Having an empty housing unit is very risky.

When my friend had squatters break into his house while it was being renovated, the police said their hands were tied. They had become squatters first, and the breaking and entering couldn't be definitively proven. They got to stay in the house for months while he paid lawyers to do the eviction proceedings.
by ericbarrett | 2025-11-20 20:40:36+00:00
California did not require numbered paper plates when Jobs did this. Car dealers would put paper plates advertising themselves on the car, but you could remove them. Your temporary registration was taped on the inside of the front windshield.

I personally saw his SL500 with dealer plates a couple of times while visiting the Apple campus as a vendor. He'd park in the handicap spot too.
by drtgh | 2025-11-20 20:41:03+00:00
This sounds extremely necessary, but what warrants the funds reaching such a exclusive destination?

I think that Firefox needs an exclusive non-profit foundation, but I don't think Mozilla Corporation/Foundation would allow it, so a fork with a new name (marketing problem) sounds necessary (although splitting the forces may not be a good idea?), I wonder if the current Firefox's forked communities could join forces to create such non-profit foundation, and start from there, making grow the developers under such non-profit foundation, the new main tree.
by WorldMaker | 2025-11-20 20:41:07+00:00
Thomas Jefferson knew Greek and Latin (was a "polymath" of the old Enlightenment era sort) and used somewhat more original sources than King James, translating them himself into English. He probably did cross-check the King James Edition for some of the English wording, or at least couldn't entirely escape its orbit/gravitational pull, but it is mostly true the Jefferson Bible was a fresh early-American translation.
by Gormo | 2025-11-20 20:41:20+00:00
And Sierra. It would be amazing if MS released the source code to some of Sierra classic Hi-Res/AGI/SCI games, or the engines themselves.

IIRC, Al Lowe had retained copies of source code from the early Sierra days, and was planning to release some of it publicly a few years ago, but Activision shut him down. Maybe MS would be willing to reconsider that now that they're pursuing historical preservation.
by giantg2 | 2025-11-20 20:41:55+00:00
"I think you're vastly over estimating property taxes."

You're implying that this needs to be the biggest monthly cost, which I don't agree with. Eventually you will pay off your mortgage, leaving you with just property tax and (technically optional at that point) insurance. The duration of payment matters. I will end up paying more in property taxes in my life than I will in interest - 20 years below 4% vs 50+ years of paying 2+%.

2% on even a $200k house is $333/month. That's a lot for low income people. The principal and interest on $180k is about $960/mo on a 5% 30yr. So he property tax is 25% of the payment.

So instead of me overestimating property tax, I feel that you are underestimating how much that money is worth to low income people.
by adolph | 2025-11-20 20:41:58+00:00
> Wow, this is incredibly concerning. So they can pull me over, lie about why and then try to manufacture something?

Parallel construction is a law enforcement process of building a parallel, or separate, evidentiary basis for a criminal investigation in order to limit disclosure as to the origins of an investigation. In the US, a particular form is evidence laundering, where one police officer obtains evidence via means that are in violation of the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, and then passes it on to another officer, who builds on it and gets it accepted by the court under the good-faith exception as applied to the second officer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
by ErroneousBosh | 2025-11-20 20:41:59+00:00
> along with ignoring all the modern Windows and Office piracy tools which are also on GitHub

You weren't going to buy it anyway. No-one cares about you. Pirate it if you like. Take your warezed copy of Office Home Edition and be blessed, no-one is going to miss your 120 bucks.

An organisation with maybe 100,000 users each paying a per-seat licence? Yeah, that's the sale they want. Not your one-off copy.
by wat10000 | 2025-11-20 20:42:07+00:00
Airlines operate to a much stricter standard than one in a million. If one in a million flights ended in a fatal crash, the US alone would see about 3 airline passenger deaths per day on average. The actual average over the past 10 years is under 0.02 deaths per day.

It's true that you can never get to zero. There's always a chance of some catastrophic failure. The lesson of modern airline safety is that you can get extremely close to zero by carefully analyzing and learning from the failures, which is exactly why these thorough investigations are done. The lesson from UA232 was to make sure one failure can't take out all of the hydraulic systems.

In this specific instance, "the engine fell off and took out another engine, leaving the aircraft with insufficient power to climb" is definitely not in the realm of "probabilities will get you eventually." It's very much in the realm of a mechanical failure that should not happen, combined with a bad design flaw that turns that failure from a mere emergency into pretty much guaranteed death.

Cargo is held to a lower standard than passenger service, but I suspect this will still spell the end of the DC-10 and MD-11, at least in the US. Engines will fail, and for an aircraft of this size, that needs to be survivable in all phases of flight just for the safety of people on the ground.
by Bender | 2025-11-20 20:42:17+00:00
From [1]

What if we incorporated as a non-US corporation?

If your company is already incorporated somewhere other than the United States, Canada, Singapore or the Cayman Islands, in order to participate in YC you will need to create a parent company that is in one of those jurisdictions. The existing company will then become a subsidiary of the new United States, Canada, Singapore or Cayman parent company.

Many companies in each YC batch do this process in order to join YC. While we will connect you with lawyers who will drive this process, it will require a significant effort on your part.

[1] - https://www.ycombinator.com/faq
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-11-20 20:42:27+00:00
> If you create a problem like this by essentially opening the border and failing to enforce the law, the necessary corrective action is going to have to be a lot heavier than if you’d just patrolled the border in the first place

Deportations are lower than under Obama, despite ICE having Saudi Arabia's military budget. The resources are very clearly being spent on something other than immigration enforcement. Whether that's an authoritarian agenda or simply corruption is still, in my book, to be seen.
by artimaeis | 2025-11-20 20:43:28+00:00
Happy to share the report from the ME Mini box (below). But the other one is running Windows so I can't help there. Thanks to this I was able to find I'd initially left off secure boot and was able to fix a couple of its suggestions at least, but if I'm understanding the HSI status and coreboot needs, there's fuses flipped that would prevent it.

WARNING: UEFI capsule updates not available or enabled in firmware setup See https://github.com/fwupd/fwupd/wiki/PluginFlag:capsules-unsupported for more information. Host Security ID: HSI:0! (v2.0.8) HSI-1 csme override: Locked csme v0:16.50.15.1515: Valid Platform debugging: Disabled SPI write: Disabled Supported CPU: Valid TPM empty PCRs: Valid TPM v2.0: Found UEFI bootservice variables: Locked UEFI secure boot: Enabled BIOS firmware updates: Disabled csme manufacturing mode: Unlocked SPI lock: Disabled SPI BIOS region: Unlocked UEFI platform key: Invalid HSI-2 Intel BootGuard: Enabled IOMMU: Enabled Platform debugging: Locked TPM PCR0 reconstruction: Valid Intel BootGuard ACM protected: Invalid Intel BootGuard OTP fuse: Invalid Intel BootGuard verified boot: Invalid HSI-3 CET Platform: Supported Intel BootGuard error policy: Invalid Pre-boot DMA protection: Disabled Suspend-to-idle: Disabled Suspend-to-ram: Enabled HSI-4 SMAP: Enabled Encrypted RAM: Not supported Runtime Suffix -! fwupd plugins: Untainted Linux kernel lockdown: Enabled Linux kernel: Untainted CET OS Support: Not supported Linux swap: Unencrypted UEFI db: Invalid This system has a low HSI security level. » https://fwupd.github.io/hsi.html#low-security-level This system has HSI runtime issues. » https://fwupd.github.io/hsi.html#hsi-runtime-suffix
by culopatin | 2025-11-20 20:43:34+00:00
I saw the suspension behavior and I can’t necessarily agree with the realism statement. Some mild bumps that a million dollar rally car would absorb no problem send the car flying as if it was a 1995 Civic DX going down the road.

I own the original AC and I just can’t get over how bad the audio is. Sounds like a simple pitch change on a static mp3 file that’s not even that accurate at idle. An E30 sounds like a synth.

I thought ok, it’s an old game now, I get it, they must have fixed that in ACC, nope. They must have fixed it in AC Evo… based on the videos I’ve seen, nope.

Maybe rally does it better? Does anyone know?
by atonse | 2025-11-20 20:43:42+00:00
I agree with the parent post that it's distasteful.

There's no value in naming the employee. Whatever that employee did, if the company needed to figure out who it was, they can from the commit hashes, etc. But there's no value in the public knowing the employee's name.

Remember that if someone Googles this person for a newer job, it might show up. This is the sort of stuff that can disproportionately harm that person's ability to get a job in the future, even if they made a small mistake (they even apologized for it and was open about what caused it).

So no, it's completely unnecessary and irrelevant to the post.
by sam_lowry_ | 2025-11-20 20:43:43+00:00
So... did they also implement the horrendous quirk of Chrome that breaks XDG when XDG_DESKTOP_DIR and XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR point to the same directory? It probably costed a combined million hours wasted and made many people genuinely hate Linux

See here https://github.com/chromium/chromium/blob/5e4e38173b33159b0e...
by fl0ki | 2025-11-20 20:43:51+00:00
In fairness, it's one thing for an implementation like a building to be as over-enginereed as possible in its own right, but it's another when a standard has to ensure that multiple implementations can interoperate. I'm not saying FIPS-140 has only that kind of limitation (far from it), just that this isn't the best analogy.
by meroes | 2025-11-20 20:44:00+00:00
I’m totally sure you’d apply the same for unchecked corporate law breaking, right? Enforce the Hatch Act, go after wage theft which dwarfs any kind of retail or private theft, etc. If you think it’s about political power, you’d question prisons and detention centers being put in red states where they count political appropriation from the inmates and guards.
by alwa | 2025-11-20 20:44:56+00:00
Do I understand correctly that the parent nonprofit Foundation can decide to use some of its donor money to fund its for-profit Corporation (with the same tax treatment as any other investment, and of the corporation’s profits before they’re returned to the Foundation)? But donors can’t direct their gifts to that use if the donors still intend to deduct them as charitable donations?

And thus I guess Foundation has to do a good amount of conventional non-profitty stuff like “education and advocacy,” otherwise it would just be a flimsy facade for what’s substantially a for-profit endeavor?

Why is the browser arm organized as a for-profit at all?
by ahmeneeroe-v2 | 2025-11-20 20:45:05+00:00
Well-stated. Our prior solutions to internal enforcement of previous Border misses no longer work given that the scale of border "misses" exploded after deliberate non-enforcement.* Now larger-scale internal enforcement is needed. Sucks for all of us.

*Worse than non-enforcement, the feds actively blocked/destroyed Texas border protections.
by ants_everywhere | 2025-11-20 20:45:27+00:00
> The use of any specific word does not determine in and of itself if something is an assertion of fact or an assertion of opinion. It depends on how you're using the word.

Yes that's the point I'm making. The entire thread is about which words you can get sued over libel for, which isn't how it works.

> Computer people have this weird notion that courts are like a computer program. If x == "foo" then punishment.

This seems unnecessarily insulting, especially since your comment is just a repeat of mine with the relevant details removed.
by thwarted | 2025-11-20 20:45:35+00:00
Presumably, "design" here is referring to the visual, graphic design.

> It is pretty interesting because it is true that design is better solo'd than committee'd.

This applies to all manner of "design", especially when it's at the edge/interface, which includes humans interfacing with a tool, but also with interfaces such as APIs. It's hard to maintain consistency and coherency and vision in the design of anything when it's committee'd and/or a free-for-all.
by b112 | 2025-11-20 20:45:54+00:00
While you're not wrong, not sure it applies here. This is an all-party thing:

Started about a decade ago to fight illegal border-related activities and the trafficking of both drugs and people, it has expanded over the past five years.

Some of the lawsuits (cited in article) to fight this, and illegal pull overs, go back years.

Really? It shows how this tech can be used in ways you don't like, when your party is no longer in power. How whatever laws you pass, surveillance you enact, powers you give, aren't just for you.

But also your political adversary.
by ssl-3 | 2025-11-20 20:45:58+00:00
Perhaps so. The trend is definitely for emergency calls to be handled very rudimentarily.

And an unworkable call to 911 that at least connects is better than one that does not.

In the first case, it's possible that a 911 PSAP operator might get a hint that help is needed by someone -- somewhere. It may even be good enough to get a vague idea of where the person is, and which phone it is that is calling.

And that may not sound like much, but it's way, way better than in the latter case, wherein: It is certain that the PSAP will know nothing at all.

(Some data is better than no data.)
by jacquesm | 2025-11-20 20:46:25+00:00
You can, if you're prepared to pay for it. You could halt shipping while people are working on the bridge. You could make tunnels instead of bridges.

The question is simple: who will pay for it? Apparently we are ok with this kind of risk, if we weren't we would not be doing this at all.

There is a similar thing going on in my country with respect to railway crossings. Every year people die on railway crossings. But it took for a carriage full of toddlers to be hit by a train before the sentiment switched from 'well, they had it coming' to 'hm, maybe we should do something about this'. People don't like to pay for risks they see as small or that they perceive as that they're never going to affect them.

This never was about technology, it always was about financing. Financing for proper regulatory tech oversight (which is vastly understaffed) on the merchant marine fleet, funding for better infrastructure, funding for (mandatory) tug assistance for vessels of this size near sensitive structures, funding for better educated and more capable crew and so on. The loose wire is just a consequence of a whole raft of failures that have nothing to do with a label shroud preventing a wire from making proper contact.

The 'root cause' here isn't really the true root cause, it is just the point at which technology begins and administration ends.
by CGMthrowaway | 2025-11-20 20:46:48+00:00
Your comment feels unsubstantiated. What do you mean by that? Or do you just mean the current government has Republicans at the top.

Can you share data on how people of one party are supporting ALPR and the other are against it? I was looking for a public poll on this question and couldn't find one.

edit: Why am I being downvoted?
by kev009 | 2025-11-20 20:46:53+00:00
If you want to realize that the USA is a republic, building will teach you quickly. Normatives and standards are localized.

Stucco is the default in the Southwest, especially in the temperate climates. Most lower density commercial nationally will use some kind of EIFS (think fast food establishment, drug store etc).

In places with more weather, it's not easy to get right and the residential crews aren't always abreast of EIFS that has well designed moisture management. I had to pull the entire failed stucco system off my current dwelling and replace it. There is no easy way to do that, and putting up a new one is also extremely labor intensive.
by vkou | 2025-11-20 20:47:26+00:00
WA state has figured out a solution to the Flock problem.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/washington-court-rules...

If they are going to be used by the government and law enforcement, they are clearly government-collected data about you - and thus, are subject to (the state equivalent of) a FOIA request.

This puts an onerous compliance requirement on Flock and the ciites that allow it to operate.

Hopefully, WA's state legislature will decline to give them any exemptions, which will kill that company's operations in the state.

---

Among other things, these cameras have been illegally used to spy on people who were getting an abortion in WA. Flock's executives (and the engineers who implemented that feature) belong in prison.
by ahmeneeroe-v2 | 2025-11-20 20:48:07+00:00
Agreed. I think it's important to remember the lack of real "mass deportations now" when you see two things:

1) low Trump approval rating. Likely due to lack of following through on these promises (rather than disapproval of the promises themselves)

2) protests against deportations. Why do dems simultaneously crow about their superior deportation numbers while condemning current efforts as heavy handed and cruel?
by OhMeadhbh | 2025-11-20 20:48:10+00:00
I was at Microsoft for meetings once and one of the guys asked if I was a cryptographer. I replied that it depends on who else is in the room. If it's just me and my boss, I'd probably qualify as being a cryptographer. But if I'm in the room with Niels Ferguson or Adi Shamir, I should be considered a software engineer who is somewhat decent at reading math papers. At about the same time, Niels Ferguson walked in the room and I quickly commented "you should not consider me a cryptographer for the rest of this meeting."
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-11-20 20:48:11+00:00
> I’m not vilifying you, it was just a poor choice of words.

You're not being honest here. Questioning someone's belief and calling it gross is vilifying, regardless of any agreement or lack thereof from a broader community. Additionally, finding the one disagreeable point and harping on that instead of any of the rest of the points they made is another means of vilification.
by mrkpdl | 2025-11-20 20:48:32+00:00
I laughed out loud at this part, perfect Aussie humour:

“Chilean Australian artist Juan Davila painted a work titled Picasso Theft and offered to donate it to the National Gallery of Victoria in place of the stolen painting. Davila wrote that "mine is a real one".[25] Davila's Picasso Theft was exhibited in the Sydney Avago Gallery, and then itself was stolen.”
by thaumasiotes | 2025-11-20 20:48:33+00:00
> 1) being restricted to exact matches in input is definition of Markov Chains

Here's wikipedia:

> a Markov chain or Markov process is a stochastic process describing a sequence of possible events in which the probability of each event depends only on the state attained in the previous event.

A Markov chain is a finite state machine in which transitions between states may have probabilities other than 0 or 1. In this model, there is no input; the transitions occur according to their probability as time passes.

> 2) LLMs are not Markov Chains

As far as the concept of "Markov chains" has been used in the development of linguistics, they are seen as a tool of text generation. A Markov chain for this purpose is a hash table. The key is a sequence of tokens (in the state-based definition, this sequence is the current state), and the value is a probability distribution over a set of tokens.

To rephrase this slightly, a Markov chain is a lookup table which tells you "if the last N tokens were s_1, s_2, ..., s_N, then for the following token you should choose t_1 with probability p_1, t_2 with probability p_2, etc...".

Then, to tie this back into the state-based definition, we say that when we choose token t_k, we emit that token into the output, and we also dequeue the first token from our representation of the state and enqueue t_k at the back. This brings us into a new state where we can generate another token.

A large language model is seen slightly differently. It is a function. The independent variable is a sequence of tokens, and the dependent variable is a probability distribution over a set of tokens. Here we say that the LLM answers the question "if the last N tokens of a fixed text were s_1, s_2, ..., s_N, what is the following token likely to be?".

Or, rephrased, the LLM is a lookup table which tells you "if the last N tokens were s_1, s_2, ..., s_N, then the following token will be t_1 with probability p_1, t_2 with probability p_2, etc...".

You might notice that these two tables contain the same information organized in the same way. The transformation from an LLM to a Markov chain is the identity transformation. The only difference is in what you say you're going to do with it.
by soiltype | 2025-11-20 20:48:52+00:00
#2 is not relevant, and it also seems basically untrue.

So your belief is that the global scientific community broadly agrees that "intelligence" has not been rigorously defined because the global scientific community is trapped in religious mysticism?

I am going to be honest, and I'm not saying this as a jab - this is starting to sound completely disconnected from reality. The people who study intelligence are not, as a rule, mired in metsphysical hand-waving.
by Hizonner | 2025-11-20 20:49:14+00:00
Try sixty-something with an adult child.

There is a disease going around among the "youngsters" who are parents these days. I'd call it overprotectiveness, but it doesn't actually protect anybody, just stunts them and actually makes them vulnerable. What it is is what's known as a purity spiral, a dangerous form of groupthink in which people compete to be the most extreme.