MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by MBCook | 2025-11-20 02:57:18+00:00
So? Are you suggesting banning all money?

Crypto has uniquely allowed the huge uptick in ransomware.

Before they had to figure out some way to get paid using the banking system without getting caught. These days maybe they would be asking for $50 million in iTunes gift cards, I don’t know. But it was a hurdle.

Once Cryptocurrencies started to get well known ransomware embraced it incredibly strongly. A far far more anonymous payment method that any random company or person could pay through?

Seriously. https://static.wixstatic.com/media/9e72ec_52b812bb082b4fdebd...

You think that’s just a coincidence? Crypto is a huge driver for the ransomware industry.
by kwoff | 2025-11-20 02:57:21+00:00
- weird sigil rules where the 0 element of @x is $x[0] not @x[0]

'@' and '%' indicate containers, while '$' is a scalar (which containers can contain). So '$x[0]' is referring to a scalar within the '@x' container. If you operate on a container, like 'push @x, 2', it uses the container sigil.

I guess "weird" triggered me a bit, heh. I know it's subjective.
by btilly | 2025-11-20 02:58:28+00:00
They are mostly not convincing the people who have to do the work. Instead they convince decision makers higher up, who in turn tell some group to go do the work.

For that, it helps to have good sounding ideas, some existing successes that can be claimed, and to have good people skills. These things wind up being more important in the end than technical competence.

(I gained an appreciation for these dynamics from working at Google back in 2010. Everything that I've seen since has confirmed the importance of this dynamic.)
by treetalker | 2025-11-20 02:58:31+00:00
Full title: Telecom-wavelength quantum teleportation using frequency-converted photons from remote quantum dots

From the abstract:

> A global quantum internet is based on scalable networks, which require reliable quantum hardware. Among them are quantum light sources providing deterministic, high-brightness, high-fidelity entangled photons and quantum memories with coherence times exceeding the millisecond range. Long-distance operation demands quantum light sources emitting at telecommunication wavelengths. A cornerstone for such networks is the demonstration of quantum teleportation. Here, we realize full-photonic quantum teleportation employing semiconductor quantum dots, which can fulfill all the aforementioned requirements.
by scottlamb | 2025-11-20 02:59:07+00:00
I think you're describing technology that has existed for 15+ years and is already pretty accurate. It's not even necessarily "AI"/ML. For example, I think OpenALPR (automated license plate recognition) is all "classical" computer vision. The most accurate facial/gait/etc. recognition is most likely ML-based with a state-of-the-art model, admittedly, and perhaps the threshold of accuracy for large-scale usefulness was only crossed recently.

The guard rails IMHO are not technological but who owns the cameras/video storage backend, when/if a warrant is needed, and the criteria for granting one.
by alganet | 2025-11-20 03:00:15+00:00
We had upstarts in the 80s, the 90s, the 2000s and the 2010s. Some game, some website, some social network, some mobile app that blew up. We had many. Not funded by billions.

So, where is that in the 2020s?

Yes, code is a detail (ideas too). It's a platform. It positions itself as the new thing. Does that platform allow upstarts? Or does it consolidate power?
by margalabargala | 2025-11-20 03:00:18+00:00
Honestly the scenarios where this becomes likely are dwindling with the advent of solar and batteries. Offline knowledgebases and the ability to use them long term are getting increasingly stable, and the likely low point in a societal collapse is probably getting high enough that a slide rule would not be necessary.

I have a Casio fx-991ES calculator, and twenty years later I have yet to need to replace the button cell in it thanks to the tiny solar cell.
by array_key_first | 2025-11-20 03:00:49+00:00
Performing an experiment yourself means literally nothing. You're just a dude, and your mental state is your mental state. Not all mental state.

For people with certain conditions, like ADHD, the obvious best thing for 'brain fog' is not lifting weights. I'm sure it helps, but that's not top of the list.

Also, lifting weights is just one type of exercise. A lot of studies are actually focused on exercise as a whole, and some only aerobic exercise. I'm sure lifting weights is great, but is it better than, say, running? I'm not convinced.
by WolfeReader | 2025-11-20 03:00:56+00:00
"No you're not ignoring it because it's irrelevant. You're trying to do so because you're afraid of what you'll find if you did seriously try to answer it. Because it brings shakes a foundational idea that human life is to be held sacred above all."

Of the arguments you think I'm afraid of:

1. A person sacrificing their life for others is not mentally ill (assuming the sacrifice directly achieves the goal - i.e. taking a bullet for someone). It's an action which proves how much they value the lives of others. ...which has nothing to do with your suicide.

2. No species has evolved immortality because the goal of evolution is for each organism to live long enough to pass its genetic material to another generation. ...which has nothing to do with your suicide.

You gotta understand, I'm not trying to win an argument with you! If that was all I wanted, I'd wait 10 years and win by attrition.

Your brain is ill, and this then caused you to sever social connections and become suicidal. I am telling you to seek medical advice from medical professionals.

You claim to be operating just fine, so how about you go verify it in person with a doctor? Tell them what you told me, and see which of us they agree with?

If you don't, then we know which of us is "afraid".
by dgfl | 2025-11-20 03:04:04+00:00
Absolutely. Even in extended thinking mode it was thinking for only a few seconds in prompts that used to take minutes. Much faster token/s in any mode and significantly worse, exactly as you describe.

It seems like they might still be heavily nerfing / quantizing the models in production a couple weeks before a new release, like they have always (unofficially) done.
by __david__ | 2025-11-20 03:04:25+00:00
I love tcl. My absolute favorite thing about it is that `man tcl` [1] gives a dozen paragraphs that completely describe the language itself. Its simplicity always astounded me since it seems really simplistic but at some level it’s just as malleable as lisp. I wish it had caught on more (outside the hardware community which seems to have fully embraced it).

[1] https://www.tcl-lang.org/man/tcl9.0/TclCmd/Tcl.html
by GCUMstlyHarmls | 2025-11-20 03:04:31+00:00
Sometimes you see developers posting on /r/linux_gaming and generally the consensus from the community is mostly "just make sure proton works" which is pretty telling.

It's sort of a philosophical bummer as an old head to see that native compatibility, or maybe more accurately, native mindshare, being discarded even by a relatively evangelical crowd but,

- as a Linux Gamer, I totally get it - proton versions just work, linux versions probably did work at some point, on some machines.

- as a Developer, I totally get it - target windows cause that's 97% of your installs, target proton cause that's the rest of your market and you can probably target proton "for free". Focus on making a great game not glibc issues.

I mostly worry about what happens when Gabe retires and Valve pivots to the long squeeze. Don't think proton fits in that world view, but I also don't know how much work Proton needs in the future vs the initial hill climb and proof-of-success. I guess we'll get DX13 at some point, but maybe I'll just retire from new games and just keep playing Factorio until I die (which, incidentally does have a fantastic native version, but Wube is an extreme outlier.)
by noduerme | 2025-11-20 03:05:01+00:00
Taking a longer view of history...

One metric of change would be that statutory (underage) rape wasn't a crime anywhere 200 years ago. In some countries, it still isn't. Mass rape and kidnapping is going on right now from Nigeria to Sudan. Wealthy old men can still marry 12 year olds across much of the Middle East. The fact that sex with minors has become relegated to something like a luxury designer drug for the elite hypocrites in the US and UK, and the fact that they're now being exposed for it, is in many ways an unexpected victory for humanity. The previous 5k years of recorded history, and probably the whole million years before that, were wall to wall with war, slavery and raping children. As well as the elites having such rights as prima nocta and simply executing anyone they wished. So I think we are making progress.
by YouAreMammon | 2025-11-20 03:05:18+00:00
Why wouldn't they? If the company is healthy the dividends paid will reflect macroeconomic inflationary processes.

I don't think "you don't want to beat inflation?!?!?!" is a good faith interpretation of what I'm talking about higher up in the thread - which is rampant speculation for the publicly traded companies, and behavior tantamount to rug pulls in the case of private equity.
by hedora | 2025-11-20 03:05:31+00:00
I’ve definitely seen agents add null checks to a computed value in a function, but then not change the return type to be non-null. Later, it adds a null checks at each call site, each with a different error message and/or behavior, but all unreachable.

For bonus points, it implements a redundant version of the same API, and that version can return null, so now the dozen redundant checks are sorta unreachable.
by liznbuster | 2025-11-20 03:06:05+00:00
Fiat: an arbitrary order or decree

Crypto values are arbitrary decree of crypto holders

We're just creating techno religious sects preaching from their pulpit

The only thing unique about anyone is their biology. Same old gibberish coming out their mouth, keyboards; not their values! My values! My line go up! Not their line!

Ooh yeah "fiat money" you mean. An arbitrary decree to constrain the definition. Infinitely endless arbitrary rhetoric. Incompleteness theory of primate language.
by ndiddy | 2025-11-20 03:06:07+00:00
I've used the official nVidia drivers, they definitely don't work well compared to AMD/Intel on Linux. They're usable and more or less stable, but on my computer I was seeing stuff like window contents freezing, graphics stuttering, screen tearing on video playback, the mouse cursor lagging when there was high CPU usage, etc. and it all went away when I switched to an AMD card. Everyone I've talked to has has the same experience: weird performance hiccups or glitches that go away as soon as you stop using nVidia.
by db48x | 2025-11-20 03:07:03+00:00
Haber invented the process for artificially creating ammonia. Since ammonia is a critical fertilizer, this invention has fed billions of people. On the other hand, it’s also critical for the manufacture of explosives. His work on chemical weapons was practically irrelevant by comparison. This was an astounding feat of chemistry, and well worth rewarding.

But fundamentally I don’t think we should make moral judgements over things like chemistry. A chemical process to create ammonia is a tool, and tools can always be used for good or evil. Even explosives are just tools that can be used for good or evil. Sometimes those explosives are even the same substance that is used for fertilizer. The morality of the use of the tool is provided by the user of the tool, not the creator of the tool.

We can celebrate the people who make the tools while saving our condemnation for the people who use tools for evil.

I agree about the Peace prize though, that one’s generally worthless.
by nis0s | 2025-11-20 03:07:03+00:00
I want to understand how this pattern of deal making is necessarily different from previous ones, for example how businesses moved money between themselves and a handful of cloud service providers. Maybe everything to do with AI is getting more scrutiny than it deserves, especially with trying to pass AI state laws moratorium. You can’t know what might be better or worse unless you let states experiment and find by creating their own set of laws.
by this_user | 2025-11-20 03:07:10+00:00
That is such a fallacious argument that crypto bros love to trot out. If you look at the ratio of crime to total transaction, then crime makes up a tiny portion of what is happening in real money. Meanwhile, the situation in crypto is the other way around: Actually useful transactions are almost negligible, while >99% of what is happening is speculation, gambling, and crime. If you could shut down the entire crypto ecosystem, literally nothing of value would be lost.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-11-20 03:09:22+00:00
But why integrate AI so deeply into Windows instead of

1. keeping Windows as small and lean as possible, and let it do the things an operating system is for,

2. offering some AI applications that can be installed optionally by the users who want them, i.e. turn their AI applications into external software that can be installed/used or not, like Microsoft Office.
by slowmovintarget | 2025-11-20 03:10:35+00:00
> AI failed at Microsoft...

Let's be fair. Microsoft has not succeeded at mainstream consumer AI products... yet.

To say AI failed at Micrsoft when CoPilot (the real one, for developers) was, last I heard, the most subscribed generative AI tool for software developers is not a failure. It's wild that most developers in a corporate environment pay Microsoft to use Chat GPT, Gemini, and Claude. Their other gen-AI components in Office, like Powerpoint and Word, are pretty darn good. But again, unless you're a corporate user in a work setting, you probably don't care.

This push to lease you your own computer is what hasn't worked very well so far. I dearly hope it pushes more people to Linux (though more likely they'll flee to Mac, which is a more palatable version of the clumsy crap MS is trying to do).

So consumer AI... perhaps that has failed. But the money isn't in you and me paying for a Windows license. The money's in big corporations paying for ten thousand seats at a time for their suites.
by kamaal | 2025-11-20 03:11:50+00:00
>>Nothing forced anyone to abandon Perl 5 code, and I suspect most Perl 5 wasn't abandoned for its own sake;

Perl, Lisp, Haskell, Prolog etc.

I was there when Perl ruled the world, I used it myself to rule the world. The scene was always managers going to the C++/Java teams and asking them an estimate to a get a project done. They would often come back with timeline spanning 1 - 3 years.

Perl teams would get it done in like a week.

Needless to say most non-Perl programmers wanted Perl gone for this one reason alone. Too powerful, people who know how to use it make too much progress compared to everyone else. Smaller teams making larger progress shrinking the head counts, which top bosses didn't like.

Programming world is a sea of mediocrity, good things mostly don't make it here.
by thomasfromcdnjs | 2025-11-20 03:11:51+00:00
Sounds better suited for a "Political Mode"

So people who want/ask a lot of politics, they can switch into this mode, and give feedback on it and try to improve it.

My two cents is that peoples personal politics is never swayed by "knowledge" anyway, just by the experiences they gather throughout life, age and the march towards death being front and center.

Most people will just seek to confirm bias where ever they feel like, the few who seek deeper understanding and facts will just have to persevere as they always have done, hence why sometimes throughout history we greatly respect that archtype.
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by strken | 2025-11-20 03:12:33+00:00
I burst out laughing when I read the following excerpts, one after the other:

> The measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality.

> ...

> I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. Only the lamentable facts that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable industries (transport, electrical generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world welfare enhancing trade in air pollution and waste.

It's obvious to me that this is an argumentum ad absurdum indictment of the way the "cost" of pollution is calculated. It has about as much subtlety as "why don't we eat the starving Irish kids?", although its form differs from A Modest Proposal.

If he didn't also hang out with a paedophile and argue that women are biologically bad at science, he'd be a funny guy.
by idiotsecant | 2025-11-20 03:13:31+00:00
That's interesting, I'd say that it's no business of my government who I decide to transact with. If I'm buying or selling something illegal, charge me with a crime.

I think the bigger problem is not people selling naughty things. It's the absolutely reckless approach governments (and one government in particular) have taken when we give them the lever and dials that control the financial system. The modern fiat financial system is designed to transfer wealth from the least powerful to the most powerful, nothing more and nothing less.
by mxuribe | 2025-11-20 03:14:24+00:00
I used to consider myself a HUUUGE matrix fanboy....while i still respect what the teams have done over time, I have been feeling a little, i don't know, deflated maybe? Maybe its the UX/UI aspect, i don;t know...i have not run a homeserver since like maybe 2019 or so? But nowadays, i have less interest in running a homeserver, and as far using the various clients: meh. Element feels bloated, and others either might be more snappier but might have an odd bug, or don't implement all features that might be expected, etc.

So, last year i tried to play briefly with Prosody server to re-acquaint myself with xmpp...and it wasn't so bad. Not as great as i expected for this day ana age, bbut not terrible. The server setup felt like i needed to study a bunch of different docs...and ultimately was smoother than expected....so i think documentation is either outdated, or was written a little less clear than expected. That being said, the low resource usage was ridiculously pleasant compared to matrix homeserver! The fact that an xmpp server allows for such scalability on such low resources is a great testament! And, that was prosody, which some folks state is not even as performant, scalable as ejabbered....so they say...so wow, that's impressive if that's true. Regardless, xmpp servers that can run on such low resource hardware but enable so many users to chat...is quite awesome!!! The client side of xmpp was a different matter; i wasn't so happy. I blame myself because maybe there might have been plugins that maybe i didn't install correctly on server side, i don't know...but it felt not as easy as i expected. The clients were a little disappointing; again not terrible but not great.

Maybe i'm spoiled? Or, maybe i did too much wrong? But if that's the case, the maybe there's an opportunity for better documentaiton? I don't know....i really like both matrix and xmpp because both live in the realm of free and open source software.....so i really want both or either to succeed. I want to live in a world where we are not beholden to only proprietary options, like whatsapp, crappy sms/text messaging, etc. I want to give props to all the folks who made and maintain all aspects of xmpp...as much as i am whining, i don't want to take away from all the hard work that they have freely given; super props to them!!!

What i really want is a modern, free and open source version of IRC, with plenty of modern features (E2EE, file uploads, presence detection, etc.), decent desktop and mobile clients, easy server installation and management, and said server-side software would ideally not need such beefy hardware to run...Or, is my wish too far fetched?
by addy34 | 2025-11-20 03:14:45+00:00
Let's not forget this gem in a memo from Summers:

>Dirty' Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Least Developed Countries]? I can think of three reasons...

...I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that...

...I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summers_memo
by imperfect_blue | 2025-11-20 03:14:48+00:00
Imagine you're asked with building, say, a train network within your country. Domestic regulations demand that, because other countries are not certified up to your country's safety standards, you're not allowed to import any foreign technology from outside your country.

So - in order for you to build that train - you'd need to wait for industries to set up to build every single component up to local standards. And if nobody sets these industries up to manufacture the components you need, you'll have to build it yourself, somehow.

You'd rightfully call this out as protectionism. And the worst part is not even the protectionism - the worst part is that you'll likely get no trains, because in practice nobody except a huge incumbent company can build all the components they need themselves, and huge incumbent companies often have no incentive or no agility to do so.
by popol12 | 2025-11-20 03:15:46+00:00
I think you underestimate how much speculation, gambling and crime happens in the fiat ecosystem. The forex, just to name one thing, is $7.5T exchanged a day.

In comparison, it’s estimated that Americans spend about $10T per year. I don’t have the numbers worldwide but America is a big piece of the cake.

So, speculation is vastly higher than regular spending, even for “regular money”.
by tptacek | 2025-11-20 03:15:47+00:00
That's fine. You'll pardon me if I'm unwilling to trust my own safety to your Dell OptiPlex. Whatever you think about Signal, the fact is that Matrix --- which is what the thread is about --- makes decisions that serve the IRC/Slack use case at the expense of the "absolute most possible safety" use case. That makes sense: some of larger-scale group chat's goals are in tension with "absolute most possible safety".
by noduerme | 2025-11-20 03:16:14+00:00
>>Humans are on the verge of building machines that are smarter than we are. I feel pretty goddamned awesome about that. It's what we're supposed to be doing.

Have you ever spent any time around children? How about people who think they're accomplishing a great mission by releasing truly noxious ones on the world?

You just dismissed the entire notion of accountability as an unnecessary form of suffering, which is right up there with the most nihilistic ideas ever said by, idk, Dostoevsky's underground man or Raskolnikov.

Don't waste your life on being the Joker.
by anonymous908213 | 2025-11-20 03:17:28+00:00
> On August 20, 2013, a final article appeared on Groklaw, explaining that due to pervasive government monitoring of the Internet, there could no longer be an expectation of the sort of privacy online that was necessary to collaborate on sensitive topics. Citing the closure of Lavabit earlier that month, Jones wrote "I can't do Groklaw without your input.... and there is now no private way, evidently, to collaborate." and "What I do know is it's not possible to be fully human if you are being surveilled 24/7... I hope that makes it clear why I can't continue. There is now no shield from forced exposure."