MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kidmin | 2025-11-28 14:12:02+00:00
Some minor/trivial corrections:

- gTLD stands for "generic TLD"[1], not a short form of global, comes from their "generic" usage. Both two categories of TLDs are in the domain namespace which is globally resolvable.

- Almost all of two-letter ASCII ccTLDs reflect the ISO country codes, from ISO 3166-1 alpha-2, but there are a few exceptions: the United Kingdom (GB) has ".uk"[2], Ascension Island (now part of SH) has ".ac", etc. (Yes, there are more non-ASCII ccTLDs: .新加坡, .УКР, etc.)

If you want to briefly take a look at how TLD registries structure their second/third level such as "k12.or.us" or "chiyoda.tokyo.jp", see "ICANN DOMAINS" section of the public suffix list[3] (note: it is not complete)

[1] https://icannwiki.org/Generic_Top-level_Domain

[2] https://cddo.blog.gov.uk/2022/11/15/is-it-time-to-retire-the...

[3] https://publicsuffix.org/
by sgerenser | 2025-11-28 14:12:57+00:00
Sounds like it didn’t go so well: In 2020, the system started showing signs of deterioration resulting in significant maintenance issues. System components, knowledge, and technical expertise for repairs were becoming increasingly challenging to find. In response to system failures, the Drake Landing Solar Company added redundancies to the system to be sure that homes in the community were receiving heat… In 2024, a decommissioning process for the Drake Landing Solar Community began, where the majority of the 52 homes were converted to natural gas-fired furnaces.

Nowadays, solar thermal collectors are completely obsolete except in very niche applications. Solar PV is so cheap that it’s literally cheaper (not to mention much less maintenance) to wire a bunch of PV panels to a resistance hot water heater than it is to directly heat the water with thermal collectors!
by mikkupikku | 2025-11-28 14:13:00+00:00
Granting the premise, the fungus gets energy (but not mass) from the natural decay of radioactive particles. It doesn't accelerate that decay, the decay happens at the same pace it would have without the fungus. Just like planting more plants doesn't make the sun burn out any faster. The fungus itself is made of carbon and all the other usual stuff life is made from.
by cbeach | 2025-11-28 14:13:18+00:00
I wonder if your statement was ironic, as the article you posted does not describe Reform as far-right?

From the article:

> In March 2024, the BBC called the party far-right but soon retracted its statement and apologised to Reform UK, writing that describing the party as far-right "fell short of our usual editorial standards".[219] Commenting on the incident, the professor of politics Tim Bale wrote that labelling Reform UK as far-right is unhelpful, and that it "causes too visceral a reaction and at the same time is too broad to be meaningful". Bale noted the importance of distinguishing between the "extreme right" and "populist radical right", and stated that parties described as far right should instead be "more precisely labelled".[220] Reform UK itself rejects the descriptor, and has threatened legal action against media using it.[221] In May 2025, Ross Clark, writing in The Spectator, argued Reform is "now a left-wing party", by attracting disillusioned Labour voters with stances on restoring welfare benefits, nationalising the steel industry with 50% of utilities and increasing government spending (including the NHS).[222]
by nickpsecurity | 2025-11-28 14:13:34+00:00
MIT licensed code is a gift. A gift indeed doesn't require the recipient to give back anything related to the gift.

A "gift" requiring GPL-like conditions isn't really a gift in the common sense. It's more like a contractual agreement with something provided and specific, non-negotiable obligations. They're giving while also asserting control over others' lives, hoping for a specific outcome. That's not just a gift.

People doing MIT license are often generous enough where the code is a gift to everyone. They don't try to control their lives or societal outcomes with extra obligations. They're just giving. So, I'm grateful to them for both OSS and business adaptations of their gifts.
by embedding-shape | 2025-11-28 14:13:34+00:00
> Just because something didn't work out doesn't mean it was a waste

One thing to keep in mind, is that most of these people who go around spreading unfounded criticism of LLMs, "Gen-AI" and just generally AI aren't usually very deep into understanding computer science, and even less science itself. In their mind, if someone does an experiment, and it doesn't pan out, they'll assume that means "science itself failed", because they literally don't know how research and science work in practice.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-11-28 14:13:35+00:00
They may be on paper, but I can't imagine taking one every time you have a runny nose or a sore throat. Everyone from your employer to social insurance[0] will start looking at you funny. It's just unexpected, even though it's how you're supposed to be handling infectious diseases to prevent spread.

--

[0] - Or whoever is backing the free healthcare in your country.
by garyrob | 2025-11-28 14:13:51+00:00
As someone born in 1956, I and everyone I knew were great enjoyers of Peanuts, and I still appreciate those strips when I see them.

There's a combination of solace in the face of cruelty, humor, gentleness and truthfulness there that unique. Certainly, when I was older, I came to also love Watterson's and Larson's work. They have an edge that Shulz's work didn't. But his work had something theirs didn't.

I can understand how it could be hard for people who didn't grow up with Peanuts make their way into it. For people used to an edginess that Peanuts doesn't have, it looks merely cute. But it really isn't. There is a depth to the feelings Schulz portrayed.

Perhaps to really enjoy Peanuts, one had to have experienced the new strips coming out each day, which added a depth of knowledge about the relationships between the characters which was an essential background that is just not there when one sees a couple of strips now.

Watterson wrote:

> “The wonder of ‘Peanuts’ is that it worked on so many levels simultaneously.… Children could enjoy the silly drawings … while adults could see the bleak undercurrent of cruelty, loneliness and failure, or the perpetual theme of unrequited love, or the strip’s stark visual beauty.

(Regarding that last, Peanuts was displayed at the Louvre....)
by tomhow | 2025-11-28 14:14:14+00:00
> Its easily googlable or ChatGPT-able. Dont be intentionally dense. You are just making your "side" look dumb.

This is an unacceptable comment on HN. It breaks several guidelines, including those listed below. Please read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them whenever participating here. We've had to ask this of you multiple times previously.

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer...

Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by vacuity | 2025-11-28 14:14:42+00:00
You may be right. I made too strong of a statement; there is too much variability even if some good predictive features are used. I believe that it is not too difficult to identify groups where one group has significantly higher risk of being abusive than another group. In particular, people tend to be sexually abused by people close to them[0]. Especially in the context of family, there are probably some people who know and cover up the abuse. I don't believe that most people can hide their inner selves from everyone. For instance, I sometimes hear that celebrities who are rotten on the inside were actually known to be so for years by staff and some ordinary people. If we could conduct honest interviews of people, I imagine a lot of not-so-secrets would come out.

[0] https://womens-safety.com/blog/rapists-often-familiar-faces-...
by NebulaStorm456 | 2025-11-28 14:14:44+00:00
We're proposing semantic steganography using LLMs as encoder/decoder pairs where startup strategy discussions appear as recipe exchanges. Unlike traditional crypto, security emerges from semantic complexity rather than mathematical hardness - the LLM maps between concept spaces (e.g., "fermentation time" ↔ "development cycles") using its world model. Both parties share a seed phrase that deterministically generates the same bidirectional mapping, eliminating key exchange over insecure channels. The core insight: natural language is already an encoder (concepts → symbols), so we're just adding a second semantic layer that looks like normal Layer-1 communication to observers. Main challenges are LLM non-determinism requiring error correction and the tradeoff between information density and plausibility. The approach essentially weaponizes the LLM's semantic understanding to create a regenerable codebook rather than storing/transmitting it.
by f1shy | 2025-11-28 14:15:00+00:00
Well, that means hardly anything. Is up to us, and the moderators, to choose what we want HN it to. I find politics interesting, and often are pretty much on topic, e.g. politics related to protecting personal information. But often are not, and full of ad hominem "arguments"

From my POV, there is no doubt HN is getting more and more involved in politics and more and more polarized, which IMHO is not good. But I'm just one of many users... if it keeps going that way, I may have to leave. Is ok. In the meantime I will keep giving my opinion, as that is the very least what I expect from such a site: to be able to give an opinion (respectfully) without being instantly attacked, verbally or downvoted to oblivion. As can be seen in this case, we are reaching the point where that is not possible anymore... Let's see if the honest people or the trolls win the "battle".
by andriamanitra | 2025-11-28 14:15:37+00:00
Complicated, sure, but opaque? EU is incredibly transparent – the amount of information on the European Council website [1] is daunting. There are vote results, meeting schedules, agendas, background briefs, lists of participants, reports, recordings of public council sessions, and so on and so on. All publicly available in each of the 24 EU official languages for whoever cares enough to look. And it's not just the council! The EU Treaties and Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU gives any EU citizen the right to access documents possessed by EU institutions, bodies, offices and agencies (with a few exceptions for eg. public security and military matters) [2].

The problem is mostly the sheer amount of things going on, you couldn't possibly keep up with it all.

[1] https://www.consilium.europa.eu/

[2] https://www.ombudsman.europa.eu/en/document/en/163352
by cb321 | 2025-11-28 14:15:52+00:00
Indeed. One of the main reasons STL defaults to a non-moving hash table is because "deleting in the middle of an iteration" was viewed as an important property. Like it or not (I do not), the entire container part of the original 1990s Stepanov STL was oriented around "iteration/iterators" as the high priority abstraction.

Trying to think like a DB engineer is probably helpful here. Point or range query workloads absolutely afford different optimization/specializations than full table scan iterations.

Any mistake here is more in thinking "one size fits all workloads". That may as much be a mistake of user communities as of language designers. (E.g. 'expert' advice like "just always use X" instead of "well, it depends...".) So, the charitable reading of tialaramex's "most people" is a weakly articulated assertion about workloads (though I absolutely agree with your specific point).
by tim333 | 2025-11-28 14:15:55+00:00
I think maybe a better solution for long distance trucks is swappable batteries like Jauns https://fullycharged.show/episodes/this-giant-electric-semi-...

There's a difference with cars in that people want elegant things for their car. With a heavy truck you can just kind of load a large battery pack onto a platform with a fork lift, or similar.
by imiric | 2025-11-28 14:17:32+00:00
A gift where the recipient can remove the freedoms that they've been enjoying themselves is a bad deal for ensuring those freedoms are available to everyone. A permissive license is a terrible idea for a F/LOSS kernel.

This is the paradox of tolerance, essentially.

Also, seeing F/LOSS as a "gift" is an awful way of looking at it.
by robot-wrangler | 2025-11-28 14:17:46+00:00
It's not about "every dollar spent" being a waste of time, it's about acknowledging the reality of opportunity cost. Of course, no one in any movement is likely to listen to their detractors, but in this case the pioneers seem to agree.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtePicx_kFY https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy7e7mj0jmro
by sigmoid10 | 2025-11-28 14:18:10+00:00
While cats are a certified plague on wildlife, they actually suck as pest control. [1]. Mostly because they tend to go after easier prey. And animals like rats merely get more careful about showing themselves in the open, which may have led to the erroneous belief that cats lower their population.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327915473_Temporal_...
by 0xbasinas | 2025-11-28 14:18:18+00:00
Hi all — I’m the creator of 0xBasinas CyberNotes, a focused notes + lab manager made for people learning and practicing cybersecurity. Why this exists: When learning or doing CTFs/HTB boxes I kept losing context across screenshots, labs, and notes. This app keeps everything together: notes, labs, attachments, and structured templates so you can reproduce findings later. Key features: Rich markdown editor with syntax highlighting and [[link]] autocompletion between notes and labs. Lab management (statuses, learnings, next steps) and lab-specific templates. Knowledge graph and backlinks to visualize relationships between notes. Powerful full-text search with saved queries. Attach files (PCAPs, screenshots): Free tier supports 15 attachments at 10MB each; Pro raises limits and enables larger uploads and the interactive graph. Free plan specifics: Up to 50 notes, 20 lab notes, 15 tags, 3 collections, 5 saved searches, and 15 attachments (10MB each). Pro plan: $12/month — unlimited notes, larger uploads, advanced search, and interactive graph. What I’m asking from the community: Try it out: notes.0xbasinas.dev (or see first comment if links aren’t allowed). Tell me one workflow you’d improve. If you find anything confusing or any privacy concerns, call them out — I want to make this safe for investigative work.
by tzury | 2025-11-28 14:18:25+00:00
There was a time when posts at HN where at the quality of a printed magazine. And so was a guy, named Lim Cheng Sun who was designing and printing (!) and shipping the best reading material, best stories from the startup ecosystem.

You can see some of them archived here:

https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22Hacker+Monthly...
by Fnoord | 2025-11-28 14:18:33+00:00
If it was submitted 14 hours ago that is start of night in Europe (the target market). So the 9-5 target market was mostly asleep, while USA was getting home from work. China was getting awake. If the article was submitted 5-6 hours earlier or 7-8 hours later, the outcome would've differed.

Since it seems like a French company, I can think of various European customers who would be interested in using their hardware, or even investing in this company. For starters, government, defense industry, IT (including infosec). European defense industry is a goldmine right now, the sky is the limit.
by bluescrn | 2025-11-28 14:20:09+00:00
Yelling 'racist' at Farage for over a decade hasn't got rid of him. Maybe 4 more years of doing the same thing will do the job?

Can't see the Tories bouncing back in a few mere years. Labour are heading rapidly into the same unelectable territory.

Which leaves us with Reform vs a Green-LibDem coalition?

But the Greens have chosen to embrace their own form of populist lunacy. And some will never forgive the Lib Dems for their last coalition.
by chuckadams | 2025-11-28 14:20:10+00:00
Yes, it's routine to hire background-checked cleaning crew, and some higher-security operations even require the company to put up an extra bond. One only needs a clean enough record, but I've known a few people in housekeeping with old drug convictions who still had no problem working in secure areas at defense contractors. When they would go into the secure area, there would literally be a flashing light with someone loudly announcing "INSECURE!", and everyone working there would lock their screens and basically go on coffee break. Obviously not a thing a server room has to do, but those have cameras watching the every move of the cleaner, the racks are in locked cages, and the cleaner has to leave any electronic devices they have in a bin at the door. It's not like they search them thoroughly, but there are severe consequences for getting caught, and they don't have or need much time to clean the server rooms anyway, let alone get away with espionage.

There's still a lot of mischief you could pull off with a cleaning crew, but facilities maintenance beyond housekeeping has a lot more opportunities.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-11-28 14:20:28+00:00
Some fungi are already the largest organisms on earth at >200 km^2

Armillaria ostoyae ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armillaria_ostoyae )

Consider when organisms must pass, that these ancient fungi likely still consume the host... Thus, on a 8000 year timescale most fungi doesn't necessarily need to pursue food that naturally dies in around a century.

Yeasts are already sharing your body along with numerous other organisms that are often harmless or even beneficial. Best not think about it too much if you are uncomfortable with seeing yourself as a mini ecosystem. =3
by willvarfar | 2025-11-28 14:20:48+00:00
OLAP and batch analytics is just getting so much more common. Thinking back 30 years ago, column stores were rare and SQL was all about OLTP CRUD. It still does all that, but it's also become mainstream as the data science and analytics becomes ever more routine and approachable too.

And the dialects of the language itself, SQL keeps getting more relaxed and interoperable and forgiving. With WITH and CTEs and things it keeps getting easier and cleaner to express things, so it's going steadily in the right direction. There are still a few slight differences in the syntax for window functions between bigquery and duckdb, for an example I fight often, but they are all a lot closer to each other today than they used to be back 30 years ago when you had to use SQL differently and construct complicated queries differently just to run on Oracle vs MySQL vs Postgres.
by sneak | 2025-11-28 14:21:12+00:00
So, the problem with all of these proposed replacement systems (such as IRV, for example) is that "democracy" is a meme. People, en masse, believe in these systems-as-written (for better or worse) - critically - even if that isn't how things actually work on the ground in the real world.

So many people believe that, for example, the stuff written on the paper currency of the United States is legally binding. (It's irrelevant whether it is or not - people believe it, because they hear, believe, repeat, and teach the meme.)

Representative government is the same way. There are much better systems, and anyone can easily think up a few of them. The problem is going from A to B, also known as "the tyranny of the installed base".

No proposed new form of government or representation is worth the paper it's printed on unless it comes with a viable migration path from the status quo.
by wongarsu | 2025-11-28 14:22:02+00:00
The organic matter that was once a forest has to go somewhere. If you put it in a big plastic bag and sterilize it that'd be CO2 neutral, but if you leave it to decay or even burn it you release most of the carbon in the plants as CO2

It's a one-time process. But so is forests absorbing CO2 as they grow bigger and denser, and we commonly consider that a carbon sink. Makes sense to do the same for the reverse
by elviejo | 2025-11-28 14:22:08+00:00
Eiffel is the language you are looking for. It's pre-conditions and post-conditions prove the properties of the code that you actually are executing.

The book that does the equivalent but with the properties checked at runtime is: Object Structures (like data structures but with objects).

Here is the link:

https://openlibrary.org/works/OL2979696W/Object_structures?e...
by andy99 | 2025-11-28 14:22:23+00:00
Stephenson doesn't just write sci-fi, he writes operating manuals for the future. His books predicted cryptocurrency, the metaverse, and distributed computing before most of us knew what TCP/IP stood for. Warning: his endings are notoriously abrupt, like a segfault in the middle of your favorite function.

This really is a study in AI slop. At least they had the good sense to change it.
by f1shy | 2025-11-28 14:23:38+00:00
I remember laughing so hard the first time I saw the video, and he said:

"... the nightmare scenario here is: you've got this super powerful pump, you know, making 30 or 40 PSI, at gallons per minute flow rates of hot ferric chloride; and if one of those things bursts, I mean the mess is just going to be beyond spectacular.

okay let's press the start button..."
by bbor | 2025-11-28 14:23:44+00:00
I always love a Marcus hot take, but this one is more infuriating than usual. He’s taking all these prominent engineers saying “we need new techniques to build upon the massive, unexpected success we’ve had”, twisting it into “LLMs were never a success and sucked all along”, and listing them alongside people that no one should be taking seriously — namely, Emily Bender and Ed Zitron.

Of course, he includes enough weasel phrases that you could never nail him down on any particular negative sentiment; LLMs aren’t bad, they just need to be “complemented”. But even if we didn’t have context, the whole thesis of the piece runs completely counter to this — you don’t “waste” a trillion dollars on something that just needs to be complemented!

FWIW, I totally agree with his more mundane philosophical points about the need to finally unify the work of the Scruffies and the Neats. The problem is that he frames it like some rare insight that he and his fellow rebels found, rather than something that was being articulated in depth by one of the fields main leaders 35 years ago[1]. Every one of the tens of thousands of people currently working on “agential” AI knows it too, even if they don’t have the academic background to articulate it.

I look forward to the day when Mr. Marcus can feel like he’s sufficiently won, and thus get back to collaborating with the rest of us… This level of vitriolic, sustained cynicism is just antithetical to the scientific method at this point. It is a social practice, after all!

[1] https://www.mit.edu/~dxh/marvin/web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/pa...
by leetrout | 2025-11-28 14:24:09+00:00
The query languages that aren't SQL keep popping up and they're honestly nicer to read/write in application code in many contexts but none have the ecosystem/maturity or "every BI tool speaks it" advantage. Until there's a single non SQL language that runs efficiently everywhere from my laptop to the datacenter and every tool between SQL wins.

SQL forever? Maybe but please let me stop writing it as strings in my actual application code. Sqlc is a hope for me. It is almost like treating your DB as an RPC.
by wtcactus | 2025-11-28 14:24:16+00:00
Makes sense. Cats don’t have use for hunter-gatherer populations. Dogs do.

But when we joined into bigger and bigger agricultural based societies, cats became very handy to control pests.

I remember when I was a kid, there were these stray cats where I lived. One of them - this old scraggly looking black cat - would spend hours on the prowl, in front of a sewer right outside my parents house. When a rat came out, he would go for the kill - and for its only meal.