MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by BobaFloutist | 2025-11-21 18:03:52+00:00
>Petty homeowner renovation stuff is basically a weird tax in disguise.

Where I live, in California, that's a direct response to a state constitutional amendment that strangled property taxes (and pretty much any other taxes). Because permits are fee-for-service, they're not considered a tax in the same way, and can be increased freely. Permitting costs ballooned predictably.

So, yes, it's literally a tax in disguise, because, ironically, we've over regulated municipalities abilities to raise tax revenue in the most straightforward, fair, intuitive way possible, so every service has to pay for itself or find a weird oblique source of revenue, and services pursued by people with money (such as modifying a property you owned) get to pay for other things too.
by bronco21016 | 2025-11-21 18:04:01+00:00
Are our eyes, ears, nose (smell), touch, taste, and proprioception not just inputs to our brains?

Every time I try to think hard about this subject I can't help but notice that there are some key components making us different from LLMs:

- We have a greater number of inputs - We have the ability to synthesize and store new memories/skills in a way that is different from simply storing data (rote memorization) - Unlike LLMs our input/output loop is continuous - We have physiological drivers like hunger and feedback loops through hormonal interactions that create different "incentives" or "drivers"

The first 3 of those items seem solvable? Mostly through more compute. I think the memory/continuous learning point does still need some algorithmic breakthroughs though from what I'm able to understand.

It's that last piece that I think we will struggle with. We can "define" motivations for these systems but to what complexity? There's a big difference between "my motivation is to write code to accomplish XYZ" and "I really like the way I feel with financial wealth and status so I'm going to try my hardest to make millions of dollars" or whatever other myriad of ways humans are motivated.

Along those thoughts, we may not deem machines conscious until they operate with their own free will and agency. Seems like a scary outcome considering they may be exceptionally more intelligent and capable than your average wetware toting human.
by breckinloggins | 2025-11-21 18:04:11+00:00
No.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F

One of the primary issues with Nagel's approach is that "what is it like" is - for reasons I have never been able to fathom - a phrase that imports the very ambiguity that Nagel is attempting to dispel.

The question of what it would feel like to awake one day to find that - instead of lying in your bed - you are hanging upside down as a bat is nearly the complete dual of the Turing test. And even then, the Turing test only asks whether your interlocutor is convincing you that it can perform the particulars of human behavior.
by brabel | 2025-11-21 18:04:41+00:00
I agree with most of what you said but there’s zero possibility Russia will take over all of Ukraine. Even Putin never claimed they would, this seems like a fantasy some people like to propagate to instigate fear in Europe or something. They spent three years on a gruesome fight to take less than a fifth of the territory and the rest is much harder as the further West you go, the more nationalist Ukrainians are. Check the maps of political opinion on Russia before the war started. Looks pretty close to the current frontline where the divide between pro and against Russia lies. Attacking a NATO country would mean the end for Russia and both sides know it perfectly well even if they may say otherwise publicly to either scare people into supporting their militarism or to gain political points.
by prewett | 2025-11-21 18:04:41+00:00
That is an interesting way of thinking about UI design, and I think I tend to agree.

I was talking about the programming level, though. The code using a text entry box should not need to know the details of the position of the selected text rectangle(s), or the color of the selection, or the position of scrolling if the text is too long. You probably want to expose the selection in terms of start and end indices, but the cached coordinates that are used for drawing the rectangles are internal details that are not useful outside the class.

Actually, I think saying "hiding state" was actually incorrect on my part, I think one typically says "encapsulating state". The object provides a nice way of bundling all the necessary information into one place and code outside the object does not need to worry about it, and can only interact with it through a well-defined interface (the methods).
by lotsofpulp | 2025-11-21 18:05:22+00:00
https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/private-equitys-appetite-for-h...

>The long and short: In 2010, private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management purchased Caritas Christi Health Care, a struggling eastern Massachusetts hospital system, from the Archdiocese of Boston, converting it from non-profit to for-profit and rebranding it as Steward Health Care. In 2016, after years of continued financial instability, Steward signed a sale-leaseback agreement with Medical Properties Trust (MPT), selling the land and buildings occupied by its hospitals to the real estate investment trust then leasing them back. Steward made $1.25 billion from the agreement—enough to steady its financial footing, pay off Cerberus, and fund a growth spree. The next year, the company purchased 26 more hospitals across the country. But with the agreement came what many viewed as inflated rents.

Then read below "Consequences of cost-cutting".
by hypeatei | 2025-11-21 18:06:07+00:00
What are the chances of that, though? The same could happen if you wait X amount of days for the version to "mature" as well. A security issue could be found five minutes after you update.

EDIT: Github supports this scenario too (as mentioned in the article):

https://github.blog/changelog/2025-07-01-dependabot-supports...

https://docs.github.com/en/code-security/dependabot/working-...
by nonameiguess | 2025-11-21 18:06:23+00:00
This is a great point, but even more basic to me is that LLMs don't have identity persistence of their own. There is a very little guarantee in a web-scale distributed system that requests are being served by the same process on the same host with access to the same memory, registers, whatever it is that a software process "is" physically.

Amusingly, the creators of Pluribus lately seem to be implying they didn't intend it to be allegory about LLMs, but dynamic is similar. You can have conversations with individual bodies in the collective, but they aren't actually individuals. No person has unique individual experiences and the collective can't die unless you killed all bodies at once. New bodies born into the collective will simply assume the pre-existing collective identity and never have an individual identity of their own.

Software systems work the same way. Maybe silicon exchanging electrons can experience qualia of some sort, and maybe for whatever reason that happens when the signals encode natural language textual conversations but not anything else, but even if so, the experience would be so radically different from what embodied individuals with distinct boundaries, histories, and the possibility of death experience that analogies to our own experiences don't hold up even if the text generated is similar to what we'd say or write ourselves.
by MisterTea | 2025-11-21 18:06:38+00:00
> both GNOME and KDE have shortcomings when compared to that UI

One persons shortcomings is another persons normal work flow. To me this is simply a matter of adjusting to a different environment.

I went form Windows 7 to Linux and the key part was that I always use open source software where possible such as FreeCAD, KiCAD, Libre Office, Firefox, Krita, Gimp, etc. This makes transitioning very painless. I also dont customize, no dotfiles, media managers, themes, prompts, shells, or reliance on OS features, etc. I keep it primitive.
by syawaworht | 2025-11-21 18:07:14+00:00
Phenomenal consciousness as being raised here, and probably in most people's minds, is probably taken to be the self or at least deeply intertwined with the concept of a separate self. The article tries to define it left and right, but I think most people will look at their own experience and then get stuck in this conversation.

"Consciousness" in the traditions is maybe closer to some of the lower abstraction proposals put out in the article.

I don't think the idea of illusory is necessarily the right view here. Maybe most clearly the thing to say is that there is "not" self and "not" consciousness. That these things are not separate entities and instead are dependently arisen. That consciousness is also dependently arisen is probably more contentious and different traditions make different claims on that point.
by woodruffw | 2025-11-21 18:07:34+00:00
I wrote TFA, so I can ensure you that this is what I meant :-)

(Can you say more about what you found unclear in the post? The post definitely does not say "thou shall not update before the cooldown," the argument was that cooldowns are a great default. Engineers are fundamentally always expected to exercise discretion because, per the post, there's no single, sound, perfect solution to supply chain risks.)
by dylan604 | 2025-11-21 18:07:36+00:00
"the only reason an officer is able to even search for a suspect at a protest is because ALPRs collected data on every single person who attended the protest."

No. This is simply not accurate. They collected data on every single car that attended, but there easily could be more people at the protest that rode in the same car, lyft/uber, took a bus, walked, or any other methods of getting there without a car.
by margalabargala | 2025-11-21 18:08:07+00:00
You're using the same words to talk about different things.

You're right, in the world we would like to live in, this wouldn't be a thing. People shouldn't expect that a business sale means a quality drop. That would be a good reality.

However, next to that good reality is the one we live in. Where people should expect quality to drop on a business sale, because that's the structure of the world we live in. Wishing the world were different isn't sufficient to make it so.
by phantasmish | 2025-11-21 18:08:16+00:00
I’ve never been able to get another family member to successfully use XMBC/Kodi. Most folks have low tolerance for “this thing has wasted a whole-ass minute of my time trying to do something basic”.

I tried this several times, for months at a time. Nobody but me ever used it.

Even I sometimes used to manage to get lost in some editing-mode or end up with my movie still playing in the background but the whole XMBC UI overlaid on it at like 80% opacity and struggled to figure out how to get back.

And no, alternative skins never improved that any.

Official Jellyfin client on Roku, and Infuse on Apple TV, have had no such problems. Spouse, kids, guests, all pick it up and use it with zero coaching and only very rarely needing any help.

I think XBMC/Kodi made a mistake having the editing-stuff use case live so close alongside the watching-stuff use case. Among other problems.

Anyway, since switching to Jellyfin my working-on-my-setup to watching-stuff ratio finally isn’t terrible (great, actually) and other people can use the system.

[edit] one generalizable lesson from Kodi should probably be not to have two buttons that both sort-of mean “back” but in different ways. :-/
by barbazoo | 2025-11-21 18:08:16+00:00
Checked out the map, there is one near me on a parking lot with this OSM data

> camera:type fixed

> direction 340

> man_made surveillance

> surveillance:type ALPR

Which results in "Operated by: Unknown, Made by: Unknown". What am I supposed to do with that info I wonder. How would I find out if it's actually Flock or if law enforcement would actually have access to this particular camera.
by mopsi | 2025-11-21 18:08:44+00:00
> What would Russia hope to gain?

Reversal of what Russia sees as a great injustice. The 2021 ultimatum[1] issued on the eve of the war can be summed up as a return to the Europe of 1989 with everything that it entails.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_ultimatum_to_NATO
by 1970-01-01 | 2025-11-21 18:09:42+00:00
I pinned where it went wrong. It was obvious at the time yet criticism was ignored. Firefox 4 in 2011. The rapid-release model. That's the exact point in time when they decided to increment version numbers over quality, and everything began to rot from the inside out.

https://blog.mozilla.org/community/2013/08/12/milestone-fire...
by breckinloggins | 2025-11-21 18:10:14+00:00
Let's say a genie hands you a magic wand.

The genie says "you can flick this wand at anything in the universe and - for 30 seconds - you will swap places with what you point it at."

"You mean that if I flick it at my partner then I will 'be' her for 30 seconds and experience exactly how she feels and what she thinks??"

"Yes", the genie responds.

"And when I go back to my own body I will remember what it felt like?"

"Absolutely."

"Awesome! I'm going to try it on my dog first. It won't hurt her, will it?"

"No, but I'd be careful if I were you", the genie replies solemnly.

"Why?"

"Because if you flick the magic wand at anything that isn't sentient, you will vanish."

"Vanish?! Where?" you reply incredulously.

"I'm not sure. Probably nowhere. Where do you vanish to when you die? You'll go wherever that is. So yeah. You probably die."

So: what - if anything - do you point the wand at?

A fly? Your best friend? A chair? Literally anyone? (If no, congratulations! You're a genuine solipsist.) Everything and anything? (Whoa... a genuine panpsychist!)

Probably your dog, though. Surely she IS a good girl and feels like one.

Whatever property you've decided that some things in the universe have and other things do not such that you "know" what you can flick your magic wand at and still live...

That's phenomenal consciousness. That's the hard problem.

Everything else? "Mere" engineering.
by tracker1 | 2025-11-21 18:10:38+00:00
Definitely make sure to adjust your defaults if you decide to dip your toes into nntp... I hate some of the defaults there... namely the reply/respond button defaults. Usually you want to respond to the group, not send an email to the poster.

That said, NNTP is so dead at this point, outside some active BBSes that offer NNTP access. Usenet definitely feels like a wasteland when I've looked around the past couple years.
by sixdimensional | 2025-11-21 18:10:46+00:00
I like Fastmail with my own domain for personal email, but the reality is nothing is a complete replacement for a Google account, given how tied in it is with auth and the whole Google ecosystem. I still have to use Google for work.

Proton is another one people often suggest. Hey.com sometimes too. No experience with those myself.

There are other options (such as the big guys, iCloud mail or Outlook.com), but aside from self-hosting (which I don't want to spend time maintaining just for my personal mail), I personally haven't seen much outside of those ones that are recommended often.
by madaxe_again | 2025-11-21 18:11:03+00:00
I fondly remember modding my first Xbox to install it, and it just being so much better than anything else available at the time that I immediately retired my… man, I can’t even remember the brand. They did a nice line in network attached media players in the early 2000s.

I ended up assembling a few XBMC systems with rack mount NASes stuffed full of hard drives for use on yachts, with easy means to rip or copy new media - clients couldn’t believe what they were seeing compared to the previous world of bootleg DVDs, and one system I know of was in use still 15 years on.
by clydethefrog | 2025-11-21 18:11:24+00:00
Frequently is false. Netanyahu only visited one European country after the ICC arrest order - it was Hungary because Orban explicitly managed he wouldn't be arrested.

Also, if look at the exact plane movements of his visits, they specifically avoid the air space of countries that do take the ICC seriously.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_international_prime_mi...

[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/netanyahus-jet-largely-avoid...
by walterbell | 2025-11-21 18:11:26+00:00
https://www.etymonline.com/word/main

main(n.) Old English mægen (Mercian megen) "power, bodily strength; force, violent effort; strength of mind or will; efficacy; supernatural power," from Proto-Germanic *maginam "power" (source also of Old High German megin "strength, power, ability"), reconstructed to be from a suffixed form of PIE root *magh- "to be able, have power." The original sense of "power" is preserved in phrase might and main. Also used in Middle English for "royal power or authority" (c. 1400), "military strength" (c. 1300), "application of force" (c. 1300).
by bitwalker | 2025-11-21 18:11:33+00:00
Nobody is out here arguing that privacy is important because they want to make it easier to get away with things that are immoral or criminal. The importance of privacy is in retaining as much control over what information you share with others as possible, especially with the public at large, corporations, and the government. The information you wish to control is typically the kind that is sensitive in nature: PII; browser history, authentication secrets; what banking institution(s) you use; what accounts you have and their identifiers; financial information (what assets do you have, what are they, and how much are they worth, likewise with debts); spending patterns (where you shop, how often, how much do you spend); political affiliation and activities; religious beliefs and activities; how often do you travel, where do you go, and how do you get there; what is your daily routine/schedule, and how frequently do you deviate from it, etc. The list goes on and on.

Some of that information you might be totally fine with anyone knowing, such as your political leanings or religious beliefs. Others might be deeply uncomfortable with that being shared with just anyone. I assume you'd agree with me that at least some of the information I listed above is unambiguously of the variety that deserves privacy, i.e. you control who has access to it, and when.

Some things that should be generally private (e.g. financial activity), might need to be conditionally shared with certain parties (e.g. the government) - you might be fine with the IRS knowing details about your financial activity for purposes of taxation, but be understandably pissed if you found out that they were then making that information freely available to anyone that asked - because they have taken away your control over that information. I'm not saying that is actually the case, it is just an example.

Lastly, the more information about yourself that is effectively public information (either because you don't keep it private, or someone else has made it public without your consent), the easier it is to uncover other things that you do consider private. If someone can monitor everywhere you go, they can build a picture of you as an individual. Maybe you don't share your religious beliefs with others unless asked, but if someone knows that, e.g., you go to a specific church every Wednesday and Sunday, they now know your specific denomination and that you are more involved than the sort of person that only shows up on Sunday mornings, or only once a month, or only on holidays, etc. That information can be used to target you, either for innocuous purposes like advertising products to you that sell predominantly to that demographic - or for more malicious purposes, like running a scam against you that appeals to your specific beliefs, or in some cases, violence. That may seem unlikely to you, but you may also benefit from not being a minority that is prone to being targeted in such a way - the right to privacy ensures that we retain control over the information that can be used to target or hurt us according to our own risk tolerance.
by camillomiller | 2025-11-21 18:11:48+00:00
I think no product comes close to the penetration of the iPhone, though. How would you compare that to what an iPod used to do? That's the fundamental difference with previous cycles. I think the smartphone in general is such a universal device, and nothing comes close to how much it can cover thousands of digital needs. Take the AI pin style devices: what are the incentives in going from a perfected device like the iPhone to something that limits you to a single type of interaction, that technically the smartphone can already cover?
by graemep | 2025-11-21 18:11:56+00:00
> "You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' - lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower."

True for now.

Smart devices might well be controlled by people who hate you. Even if they just do not care about you, its very different from a lawnmower not caring about you.
by pcaharrier | 2025-11-21 18:12:09+00:00
It's a voluntary dismissal (Federal Rules of Civil Procedure Rule 41(a)(1)(A)(ii)). There's a subtle difference between that and the colloquial idea of a "settlement", but it's one that often makes a difference. You can read the filing here: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67927585/securities-and...

The opinion from last July, in which a judge dismissed a number of the claims the SEC made, is also worth reading for anyone who wants to think about the relative merits of the lawsuit: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=221524756372871...
by bentley | 2025-11-21 18:12:27+00:00
> I missed my slipstick. Dad says that anyone who can’t use a slide rule is a cultural illiterate and should not be allowed to vote. Mine is a beauty—a K&E 20″ Log‐log Duplex Decitrig. Dad surprised me with it after I mastered a ten-inch polyphase. We ate potato soup that week—but Dad says you should always budget luxuries first. I knew where it was. Home on my desk.

Robert A. Heinlein, Have Space Suit—Will Travel (1958)
by actinium226 | 2025-11-21 18:12:51+00:00
It doesn't look like they've made any drastic changes that would impel anyone to leave Arduino tomorrow, or in the foreseeable future, but if they keep going down this route I imagine the community will move to RPi. They've always been vastly more performant than Arduino and they can run linux, which is somewhat more approachable than the concept of programming a microcontroller and only being able to talk to it over serial.
by sinker | 2025-11-21 18:12:56+00:00
I can't tell for sure without knowing exactly what's happening, but one reason is that if you create a sketch from the Sketcher workbench, it will not be added to the active body.

If you create the sketch from the Part Design workbench, then it will be added to the active body.

A Body is specifically a Part Design concept, and FC doesn't presume you'll be working in PD, so this makes sense in a way - it works on the presumption that the Sketcher workbench works with other workbenches and not just PD specifically.

One thing to note is that creating sketches from Sketcher and PD is different. Sketcher offers attachment options to faces, edges, etc., while PD only offers to attach the sketch to base plane (XY, XZ, or YZ).

There is a good reason for this also. The reason is that in designing parts, especially complex parts, it is highly discouraged to use faces or edges (i.e., features) as attachment points because it makes your model very brittle against changes.

This is more of a general CAD philosophy than a FC thing. It's better to set where a sketch attaches based on variable values. For example, if you have a cylinder with a height 20 and you want to attach a box to the top of the cylinder - rather than attaching to the top face of the cylinder, it's better to create a variable h=20, and set the cylinder to height h, and set the box's z-value also to h.

In FC, I use VarSets for this. I used to use the Spreadsheet workbench, but found it clumsy.