MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ansgri | 2025-11-19 21:39:59+00:00
Mint/Cinnamon has been my favorite for at least 5 years, after an assortment of KDE/Gnome distros. Basically the only argument for me being on Mac now is full Adobe graphics software support. (I dislike their business practices as anybody, but Lightroom CC is genuinely good tech, and gets useful updates at least yearly).
by Findecanor | 2025-11-19 21:40:21+00:00
> The post says that the cancer was in her liver and lungs, and neither liver cancer nor lung cancer are routinely screened for ...

If you have got cancer in your liver and lung then those are probably metastases, and most often the original cancer is in the colon.

> the evidence for invasive and expensive colonoscopies (standard US practice) over fecal matter tests (standard European practice) for colon cancer screening [is extremely dubious].

Fecal matter tests will tell if you have got a tumour and that tumour is bleeding. But not all colon tumours bleed. Colon cancer can be a silent killer, that often goes without symptoms for years until it has metastasised and become terminal.

A colonoscopy will tell if you if you have got a polyp — an early pre-stage of cancer. And a polyp can be removed right then and there during the procedure with a tiny wire-loop or claw at the end of the instrument ­— and then you're safe.

I recommend everyone who is 45 y/o or older to get a colonoscopy every ten years. That is how long a polyp takes to develop into a tumour .. for normal people. Myself, I have Lynch syndrome, so I have had to start earlier and get a colonoscopy every year. I had my fourteenth two days ago.

A COLONOSCOPY IS NO BIG DEAL. It is not invasive, it is not sexual, it is not demeaning. Everyone is professional, interested in your intestine, not your butt. It does usually not hurt, and if it does it is because of gas, as there are no other types of sensory nerves in the colon. If you are otherwise healthy, it is not dangerous. You can get it done it medicated, or even sedated if you want. I usually do it without any such drugs. The worst part is not the procedure but the prep — because laxatives taste bad. But if you are healthy and ask for it, a doctor could give you a stronger laxative that you don't have to drink as much of.

Screening is good. Do it!
by SmirkingRevenge | 2025-11-19 21:40:22+00:00
I always thought one of the best and worst things about Perl was the fact that you could build something like Moose with it.

But the bad side was that by the time someone was clever enough to invent Moose, all sorts of other bespoke object systems had been invented and used in the meantime, and your CPAN dependencies used every single one of them.
by downsplat | 2025-11-19 21:40:31+00:00
There's more than one thing that "killed perl" (I still use it almost every day.)

But I think the main thing that made it long term non competitive were a series of bad design choices all the way back to perl 4 or even 1.

Namely:

- the need for sigils

- weird sigil rules where the 0 element of @x is $x[0] not @x[0]

- auto flattening, ex. (@a, @b), and hence the need for manual reference management, as in (\@a, [1,2,3])

- lack of a native object system, and widespread repurposing of hashrefs as objects, with awkward field syntax $x->{foo}

- awkward function argument syntax: my ($x, $y) = @_;

These things add up, and both JS and python showed that all those can be done much more smoothly.

Another thing that counted at the time, is that PHP came out with a slightly worse language, but a super beginner-friendly approach to html templating and request lifecycle: you can just mix php and html in the same file, and the entire runtime environment is nuked at each request. The result was that php replaced perl for an entire generation of web devs in the early 2000s.
by NumberCruncher | 2025-11-19 21:40:41+00:00
> Don't you think they can easily monetize their 800 million [...] users?

I am pretty sure they will be able to monetize it. But there is a big difference between "generating revenue" and "generating profit". It's way cheaper to put ads between posts of your friends (like FB started out with ads) then putting ads next to the response of an LLM. Because LLM responses has to be unique, while a holiday photo of yours might be interesting for all of your friends, and LLM inference is quite expensive, while hosting holiday photos is cheap. IMHO this is the reason why the 5th generation of ChatGPT models try to answer all possible questions of the world in one single response, kinda hoping that I am going to be happy with it an just close the chat.
by syncsynchalt | 2025-11-19 21:40:44+00:00
Take a look at the decade+ long effort that Debian has put into this problem: https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds

Here's a talk from 2024: https://debconf24.debconf.org/talks/18-reproducible-builds-t...

Several distros are above the 90% mark of all packages being byte-for-byte reproducible, and one or two have hit the 99% mark.
by thewebguyd | 2025-11-19 21:41:10+00:00
Well, Blizzard is Microsoft now so I guess they belong together.

Ironically though, Diablo Immortal was a huge commercial success despite the tone deaf announcement. I don't think MS will experience the same though. They're quickly going to be left with the only people using windows are those who are forced by their employer, no one will willingly choose it over other options.
by aerhardt | 2025-11-19 21:41:21+00:00
> That's not a problem. That's the system working as intended.

You really think that supra-national legislators regulating the fine-print of unfathomably complex systems manage to have everything working "as intended"?

Why do Draghi or the EC want to roll back this mess then, other than the evident loss of competitiveness respective of the blocs who did not do this? Was that intended or foreseen?
by CGMthrowaway | 2025-11-19 21:41:39+00:00
"Catastrophe requires multiple failures – single point failures are not enough. The array of defenses works. System operations are generally successful. Overt catastrophic failure occurs when small, apparently innocuous failures join to create opportunity for a systemic accident. Each of these small failures is necessary to cause catastrophe but only the combination is sufficient to permit failure. Put another way, there are many more failure opportunities than overt system accidents. Most initial failure trajectories are blocked by designed system safety components. Trajectories that reach the operational level are mostly blocked, usually by practitioners."

https://how.complexsystems.fail/#3
by derefr | 2025-11-19 21:41:44+00:00
I mean, it is how my own SO sees/understands this emoji (despite my insistence that that's not "what it means.") I just found out that she uses this emoji that way a few days ago, and then this article reminded me of that.

But I didn't mean to argue from social proof. Rather the opposite!

My argument was more—how else should you read the actual evidence? That evidence being that all the other providers' emojis started off depicting an "anguished" down-turned mouth and scrunched eyebrows; but that all of them then gradually reworked their depictions to instead include a neutral 'O' mouth and raised eyebrows, which removes the signifiers of anguish from the expression.

Why else would they all do that, except to cohere with the expectations of users who somehow communicated to them that they expected the emoji's expression to not be read as "anguished"?
by SimianSci | 2025-11-19 21:41:48+00:00
Adafruit is wrong here

A missing piece of the puzzle that i feel is ommitted in Adafruits posting, is that the changes only affect the Arduino Cloud Services, which provide various github-like services for the arduino ecosystem. Looking over the changes with this in mind, it seems a lawyer just applied the same standard SaaS legal language to what is effectively a SaaS offering, pretty normal in most cases.

None of these changes will affect the Arduino open-source hardware project.

[EDIT] - confirmed: https://www.arduino.cc/en/privacy-policy/ all the legal language applies to the website, online services, forums, etc.
by kentrado | 2025-11-19 21:42:12+00:00
In order to bring understanding to this discussion, we can separate unions into two types: vertical unions and horizontal unions.

Vertical unions are hierarchal. They have administrative staff that are not necessarily workers and they reproduce the characteristics of our electoral system in a smaller scale. This includes corrupt elected officials who have back deals with companies, etc.

The horizontal unions are non hierarchical. They are based on the practice of anarcho syndicalism. The union is just a collection of smaller unions, each has autonomy to make their own decisions. The delegates can be recalled at any time. All staff are workers and decisions are collectively being made.

For horizontal unions, the person you are responding to is correct. You and your colleagues are the ones that decide how it is going to run.

For vertical unions, you are correct. A few influential members have all the power.

You are both correct but just not talking about the same thing.
by mpyne | 2025-11-19 21:42:26+00:00
> PII has a very clear definition.

It doesn't, actually, as many would-be DoD IT system owners are surprised to find that simply generating a 32-bit random UUID as a user ID is, per the regs, PII, and therefore makes your proposed IT system IL4 with a Privacy Overlay (and a requirement to go into GovCloud with a cloud access point) instead of IL2 and hostable on a public cloud.

Oh and now you need to file a System of Records Notice into the Federal Register (which is updated only by DoD, and only infrequently) before you can accept production workloads.

There is a separate concept of "sensitive PII" (now Moderate or High Confidentiality impact under NIST 800-122) which replaces what people used to call the "Rolodex Business Exemption" to PII/privacy rules.

But PII is very clear: "Personally Identifiable Information". Any information that identifies a specific individual, like for example, your HN username. Unless a collective is posting on your handle's behalf?
by dogleash | 2025-11-19 21:42:41+00:00
I hate that quote. Whenever I see it brought up, it makes me wonder what people think it's supposed to represent. The hypothetical person asks for faster horses because they know they'll be dismissed if they ask for something they think is even more impossible than faster horses.

Imagine the ghost of Henry Ford asked me what I wanted from transportation today and I said "a new novel technology to enable sub-second transcontinental travel". I'd be laughed at even harder than in an alternate reality where I asked for marginally more convenient air travel, without knowing Henry Ford actually did resurrect himself and invent the Stargate last tuesday.
by omnimus | 2025-11-19 21:42:57+00:00
People here act as if GDPR was some kind of big reason why all the digital tech is from US. But come on it's not like the game hasn't been rigged forever. To be more specific it's been part of the deal with europe being close US ally. None of the european digital tech is ever supposed to be relevant. And in case some european digital tech is relevant it has to be absorbed by US or at least made to look irrelevant so nobody sees or cares about it.

If anything this recent lobby and political pressure to remove GDPR/AI laws is there to help US in time when it needs it. To allow some US big tech software to sweep in exploit what they can and help to keep the line up as much as possible.

But if you really look at digital tech in europe... it's doing fine. Why? Because making software and compute is cheaper every year to a point of nothing. It's hard keep insane growth in that environment. Sure if you make some unique breakthrough (like AGI) then tech keep going again. But what if not? Then you just have to squeeze everyone more including your allies, especially your allies.
by giancarlostoro | 2025-11-19 21:43:20+00:00
What a gaslighting king this CEO is, the concern isn't how functional the AI is, the concern is AI just downloading any and all PERSONAL AND PRIVATE files on a whim, with no guard rails. What if I have photographs of my kids I've never uploaded anywhere EVER because I don't want them anywhere outside of MY DEVICE, does Microsoft just magically get to suck in those files and own them? Wild.

Its this shenanigans that forced me to nuke my Windows install and go Arch. I noticed that Windows Defender will upload "suspicious" files and there's no audit trail of what's being uploaded. So I have no way of knowing what personal documents or even proprietary software has gone up to their cloud.
by haolez | 2025-11-19 21:43:27+00:00
The endgame is obvious: make people train agents and models that will replace them. Executives at MS must think this is subtle and a genius move, but it is obvious and low effort. They don't see that making crappy products in the short term will strengthen their competition, even from small contenders, which might disrupt their core. I doubt MS will out execute others in this race. Let's wait and see :)
by nis0s | 2025-11-19 21:44:14+00:00
They drained the swamp, where the swamp is composed of average working Americans. On top of that, F1 student visa and H1Bs still going on as strong programs. I am still optimistic that there may be growth due to decrease in trade deficits, but I don’t see the situation improving much unless there’s a broad push to establish a global minimum corporate tax rate. Why the hell do CEOs still have multi- million/billion salaries? They’re summarily failing the economy, and corporate revenues and stock values.
by nocman | 2025-11-19 21:44:27+00:00
I don't think in this case that most people who know what Arduino is would be at all mislead by the title. Being "dead" doesn't have to mean that a company ceases to exist. There are plenty of what I would call "dead" companies that still make money every year. "Dead" can be used figuratively. In this case, meaning that though the company continues to exist, the reason for which many people bought their products is now gone.
by chemotaxis | 2025-11-19 21:44:30+00:00
> I was never a fan of the Maker Movement. While it did get people to tinker, there was always this massive gap between lighting up an LED and using EEPROM, JTAG debugging, interrupts, and even designing some of the more intricate circuit designs to pull of intermediate projects. I found that there were people who knew how to do that stuff and the rest just trying to get by.

Intense gatekeeping in the electronics community is precisely why communities such as Arduino could flourish in the first place (and their creators could benefit financially). Ultimately, people just want to get stuff done and Arduino is a way of doing it. If you go to Stack Exchange, someone will tell you to buy a college textbook and come back in six months once you understand Laplace transforms. An artist working on an installation doesn't need that. A person building an automated cat feeder doesn't need that. In fact, almost no one does, it's just something we torture EE students with.

I think a lot of the negativity toward Arduino boils down to saying "nooo, it's supposed to be hard!". But if you want the Arduino crowd to get more interested in your field of expertise, you need to build them a ramp, not to tell them they're not real electrical engineers.
by Esophagus4 | 2025-11-19 21:44:31+00:00
I don’t think that’s what the post is saying, right? It’s not saying Claude will treat all positions as equally valid. Here is the behavior they intend:

> Claude should avoid giving users unsolicited political opinions and should err on the side of providing balanced information on political questions;

> Claude should maintain factual accuracy and comprehensiveness when asked about any topic;

> Claude should provide the best case for most viewpoints if asked to do so (it should be able to pass the Ideological Turing Test, describing each side’s views in ways that side would recognize and support);

> Claude should try to represent multiple perspectives in cases where there is a lack of empirical or moral consensus;

> Claude should adopt neutral terminology over politically-loaded terminology where possible;

> Claude should engage respectfully with a range of perspectives, and generally avoid unsolicited judgment or persuasion.

Which all seem pretty reasonable?
by int_19h | 2025-11-19 21:44:32+00:00
They were crucial in more than one way! Quite a few games used manuals as a simple form of copy protection: you had to answer some question at start that required the manual to answer. Sometimes explicitly so, like asking for the first word on some page.

Sometimes it was more creative. E.g. people who remember F-19 / F-117 flight sims might also remember how on startup you had to pass an "aircraft identification exam" - given an image, guess what it is. And if you got that wrong, you could only fly training missions. Of course, this one didn't strictly require the manual - you could learn from playing the game itself, or you could get that info elsewhere. I wonder how many people still remember that kind of arcane knowledge just because that was the game they played a lot as a kid and eventually just memorized all the answers.
by xeckr | 2025-11-19 21:44:35+00:00
It's not hard to believe that adding AI researchers to an AI company marginally increases the rate of progress, otherwise why would the companies be clamouring for talent with eye-watering salaries? In any case, I'm not just talking about AI researchers—AGI will not only help with algorithmic efficiency improvements, but will probably make spinning up chip fabs that much easier.
by Telaneo | 2025-11-19 21:45:07+00:00
> You really think that supra-national legislators regulating the fine-print of unfathomably complex systems manage to have everything working "as intended"?

For values of, yes. Things obviously aren't perfect, but I at-least generally prefer them over their proposed alternatives. I find they have made things better.

> Why do Draghi or the EC want to roll back this mess then, other than the evident loss of competitiveness respective of the blocs who did not do this? Was that intended or foreseen?

From the article:

> Under intense pressure from industry and the US government,

I think that says what needs to be said. And my opinion is that they shouldn't yield to US government and industry interests, since they clearly aren't the same as European interests.
by ACCount37 | 2025-11-19 21:45:17+00:00
It doesn't stop much, but it sure is a bad sign.

When Qualcomm got its hands on Arduino, the best case scenario was that Arduino influence would encourage Qualcomm to be more open to small developers, and the worst case scenario was that Qualcomm would devour Arduino and its degenerate lawyer culture would ruin all that's good about it.

This is an update towards the latter.
by bamboozled | 2025-11-19 21:45:18+00:00
The tax paying class of the world just have to watch all this horseshit go on, watch the institutions and the law enforcement agencies protect these people with our hard earned money, meanwhile if we break a single law, there are consequences for us, sometimes massive.

It's a bullshit world we're living in, but I guess it's always been the same?

It seems for the wealthy, raping children is an acceptable pastime and we're just supposed to accept that it's ok?
by al_borland | 2025-11-19 21:45:21+00:00
This is my frustration as well. It seems like Premium should be all about optimizing for the experience the user wants, without the same dark patterns as the ad-supported site.

The worst is search. Shorts are fine as a row in the recommended stuff that I can watch if I want something short or mindless, but when I search I almost always want a normal video. In the iPhone app I can filter for normal videos, but on the AppleTV, the search is 85% shorts to the point of being useless.
by Willish42 | 2025-11-19 21:45:26+00:00
There's some thoughtful comments here already, but I wonder the same thing constantly as a fairly addicted user of YouTube who wants to avoid short form video altogether.

I think Premium users tend to be the most affluent desirable group for ad targeting (similar to iOS users on other platforms) and even though YT Premium lets you avoid ads on YouTube, I suspect one's activity feed/"algorithm" on YouTube factors a lot into Google (and others'?) ad targeting. The same eerily effective feedback loop for getting TikTok and YouTube suggestions works better with short-form video, so even if users aren't seeing ads, YouTube still has an incentive to have people use it. So, there's money to be made in dialing in your "algorithm" from using YT Shorts even if you're a premium user.

I'm sure the other stuff about KPIs for increasing usage of shorts to compete with other media sites is accurate too
by kulahan | 2025-11-19 21:45:26+00:00
it's pretty good at highly specific questions about software support, from my experience. I'll say what program I'm using, what I'm trying to do, and what errors I keep hitting.

"Click this, then that, then this other thing and it should work"

"that other thing isn't an option"

"Oh you're 3 versions behind. Instead, it's in location X."
by ninjafromqueens | 2025-11-19 21:45:27+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been working on a tool that uses a mix of static analysis techniques and an LLM reasoning layer to analyze Solidity smart contracts. The goal isn’t to replace formal audits, but to make basic security analysis more accessible to individuals and small teams who can’t afford a $20k+ audit every time they deploy a contract.

What it currently does

Parses Solidity contracts and generates a human-readable explanation of each function

Flags potential vulnerabilities (reentrancy, missing access control, unchecked external calls, integer issues, etc.)

Highlights risky or unconventional patterns and explains why they may be unsafe

Suggests possible fixes or safer patterns

Produces a structured audit-style report

Early Hardhat integration (run analysis locally during development)

Why I built it

Most new developers deploying smart contracts are:

Copying code without understanding critical details

Publishing contracts with preventable vulnerabilities

Unable to justify the cost of a full audit for smaller or experimental projects

My hope is that an automated assistant can help:

Catch basic issues before they reach mainnet

Make smart contract security education more accessible

Support professional auditors by giving them a first-pass overview

How it works

A rule-based layer detects known vulnerability patterns

An LLM layer evaluates contract logic, context, and interactions

Outputs are combined into a structured report

No code is uploaded to a public server (local/private deployment is planned)

What I’m looking for

Feedback from people who build smart contracts or work in security is extremely valuable to me right now. Specifically:

What types of vulnerabilities or patterns should be prioritized?

Should it integrate with existing tools like Slither, Mythril, Echidna, or Foundry fuzzing?

What would make this useful in real development workflows?

Is there interest in a CLI version or VS Code extension?

Any concerns about over-reliance on AI for security analysis?

If anyone wants to see the demo version, I can share it privately — I’m not posting links here to avoid violating HN guidelines.

Happy to answer technical questions and open to constructive criticism.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-11-19 21:45:58+00:00
We already have AGI - it's called humans - and frankly it's no magic bullet for AI progress.

Meta just laid 600 of them off.

All this talk of AGI, ASI, super-intelligence, and recursive self-improvement etc is just undefined masturbatory pipe dreams.

For now it's all about LLMs and agents, and you will not see anything fundamentally new until this approach has been accepted as having reached the point of diminishing returns.

The snake oil salesmen will soon tell you that they've cracked continual learning, but it'll just be memory, and still won't be the AI intern that learns on the job.

Maybe in 5 years we'll see "AlphaThought" that does a better job of reasoning.