MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by unyttigfjelltol | 2025-11-14 19:52:03+00:00
But imagine all the data, tech and data center companies simultaneously go into receivership. Farfetched, but indulge the fantasy.

At that moment what choice would the government have but to conduct a rescue that at least keeps the lights on, and probably more? What’s the alternative? Extensive data losses, business interruptions— if just a couple of those key companies spontaneously stopped operating, chaos.
by klabb3 | 2025-11-14 19:52:21+00:00
This can backfire bigly for the EU. The whole union is sustained on shared values and interests. Sneaking in surveillance is extremely offputting for the sentiment towards EU in many circles. Every member state has plenty of skeptics who want to brexit and this is gasoline for them. And rightly so. This isn’t a fluke from some misinformed non-technical stray politician who ”wants to save the children” (yes, they exist too), but rather a deliberate anti-democratic sabotage of core human rights.

In a nation state, it’s easier to pull off authoritarian shifts, because citizens will not usually revolt over such things alone. But the EU relies on sustained support and a positive image. There are already at the very least 10s of thousands EU skeptics created from the last wave alone, and probably much much more to come.

Zooming out, I think this is the time when the EU is needed the most, given the geopolitical developments. Both Russia and China are drooling about a scattered Europe consisting of isolated small states. That makes it more infuriating. Someone, ideally the press, needs to dig into the people behind this and expose them.
by lxe | 2025-11-14 19:52:25+00:00
I've done something similar for Linux and Mac. I originally used Whisper and then switched to Parakeet. I much prefer whisper after playing with both. Maybe I'm not configuring Parakeet correctly, But the transcription that comes out of Whisper is usually pretty much spot on. It automatically removes all the "ooms" and all the "ahs" and it's just way more natural, in my opinion. I'm using Whisper.CPP with CUDA acceleration. This whole comment is just written with me dictating to a whisper, and it's probably going to automatically add quotes correctly, there's going to be no ums, there's going to be no ahs, and everything's just going to be great.
by smatthewaf | 2025-11-14 19:52:49+00:00
Sorry for the late reply! To be honest I hadn't considered it because when I wrote this it was originally to solve a specific problem and that situation always has them in lat/lon rather than lon/lat, but what I'll add to the future to do list is maybe a toggle so if you have them in lon/lat order you can society that and feed them in that way.

I get your point on "DD" being cryptic, I will consider that. Maybe rather than DD, DM, DMS, DecDeg, DegMin, DegMinSec or something slightly more descriptive. Hm.
by kccqzy | 2025-11-14 19:53:07+00:00
> what I hear is a group of scared developers who have been able to coast on their knowledge base for years or even decades

That’s certainly not the case for C++. The C++ language has evolved quickly, with a release every three years or so. One could coast, but they would be writing outdated C++ that no newcomer likes. That is, the entire organization needs to also coast for this behavior to be viable.

Instead I see most of the bad faith criticisms of Rust coming from aficionados of other languages in roughly the same space such as Zig or Nim, or occasionally Go. They whine because they think Zig or Nim should take the place of Rust.
by michaelsbradley | 2025-11-14 19:53:18+00:00
My wife and I bought a house in 2022. It's an old home (built in the late 1800s) that underwent a gut rehab by a real estate firm in 2018-19, and which they subsequently ran as an Airbnb for several years owing to the pandemic and its effects on the housing market.

By 2024, it became apparent that while the rehab squad had done a really amazing job on most of the house, they also cut corners here and there and made some costly mistakes... well, costly to us.

We needed two major jobs done on the house, both for the exterior. I got several quotes from respected contracting firms in the St. Louis area, and the best price for Job A was around USD $40k while the best price for Job B was around $20k. Those were all multi-employee firms and promised to get the jobs done in just a few days once they could get started (booked solid for 5+ months).

Long story short, we ended up hiring a local solo contractor (never has helpers) with 40+ years experience who only takes cash and is something of a perfectionist (and dare devil!). Watching him work and talking to him about his work, it's clear he considers his efforts to be labors of love and a kind of art to which he is deeply devoted. He got the work done in a timely manner and was careful to abide by all the rules of the neighborhood association related to exteriors of historic homes. He charged USD $8k and $5 for the jobs, a massive savings for us! I'm not sure what we'll do in 20 years when we'll likely need another round of work and this guy is in his late 80s.
by kragen | 2025-11-14 19:53:33+00:00
I'm skeptical about that. Helion in particular might work (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlNfP3iywvI) but all the other fusion-energy companies' plans are to convert fusion energy to thermal energy and then convert the thermal energy to electrical energy in the usual way, using steam engines. That's never going to be cheaper than thermal energy powering steam engines, because thermal energy powering steam engines is part of it.

But solar energy is.

Helion's strategy is to directly convert the hot plasma's expansion into electrical energy by, basically, pushing against a powerful magnetic field. This is potentially higher efficiency than steam engines (because it's working at a higher temperature) and potentially higher power density and reliability. So it could at least theoretically get to be cheaper than steam engines. But I think it's more likely to be far more expensive for the next several decades.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-11-14 19:53:53+00:00
>as I said, 7 consoles.

4 consoles 2 handhelds, and a hybrid (switch). I have no clue if the gameboy and DS were actually sold at a loss. These were pre-smartphone devices sold more like toys, so I can see them being manufactured for very cheaply in a pre-smartphone era with minimal peripheral requirements.

> That practice started with PS1 / XBox and ended with PS4/XBone.

Okay, fair enough. Atari and NES were very expensive for their time. Nintendo had a few generations to itself to revive the industry and I'm thankful, but I'm also glad their blunder ended up creating competiton in the market.
by mindslight | 2025-11-14 19:54:42+00:00
Yes, I get that the legal system can be horrible and adds some pretty ridiculous overhead and costs. I was just pointing out there is a path to actually clear this thing up - a process to give the possible-rightsholders notice that they have to actually respond with concrete evidence or drop the matter, rather than lazily sending "we might care" nastygrams. And doing that that would certainly be much less than being on the receiving end of a lawsuit with damages after paying for development.
by cmnzs | 2025-11-14 19:54:49+00:00
I actually thought this was going to make the point that just because you are poor, doesn't mean that you have the skills to fix things on your own. It's great that the author is able to work on their own cars (but doesn't have the money). I think probably more common is that you don't have the money AND you don't have the skills.

And I don't think that's the fault of the individual. The world is more complicated than ever. Even cars that may have been possible to work on yourself 20 years ago, it's becoming less easy to do this.
by berkes | 2025-11-14 19:54:55+00:00
Yes it is wasteful.

But I presume you light up Christmas lights in December, drive to the theater to watch a movie or fire up a campfire on holiday. That too is "wasteful". It's not needed, other, or far more efficient ways exist to achieve the same. And in absolute numbers, far more energy intensive than running an LLM to create 9 clocks every minute. We do things to learn, have fun, be weird, make art, or just spend time.

Now, if Rolex starts building watches by running an LLM to drive its production machines or if we replace millions of wall clocks with ones that "Run an LLM every second", then sure, the waste is an actual problem.

Point I'm trying to make is that it's OK to consider or debate the energy use of LLMs compared to alternatives. But that bringing up that debate in a context where someone is creative, or having a fun time, its not, IMO. Because a lot of "fun" activities use a lot of energy, and that too isn't automatically "wasteful".
by rzerowan | 2025-11-14 19:55:30+00:00
Whose sovereignity though? And to replace it with what? As almost all 6G kit builds on 5G kit which is at most 40% Huawei FRAND patented.So whatever the path HW gets paid.

As an aside the whole OpenRAN debacle to replcae 5G kit seems to have peterd out after the initial hype. This move also ignores economies of scale - if the rest of the planet is on HW kit lowerig cost even with razor thin margins.The opps Nokia/Ericsson would either have to get massive subsidies to make financial sense or have a worse cost/benefit ratio.

One thing that gets glossed over though , is that the end user speeds/stability arent the main driver for 5/6G advancement (even though thats where all the marketing hype went) of course mobile device connectivity is growing and most users interaction online is primarily mobile. The big draw use case is the industrial and automation applications, where HW has a signifiant lead - from autiomated ports that aut load/unload to automated 'dark factories' that run without human intervention.Thats where the 'real' application is. The other use case for end users most likely will be in the autonomus cars and humanoid robots once they take off to any significant degree.

The only other way to make up the requisite volume from such an endeavor is one that Brussels was floating about a month ago. The Global Gateway funds to assist developing countries will come with ano HW clause.Might just be the final nail in the coffin in EU efforts to retain friends and influence with the rest of the planet.Whose main concern is living a modern life with the infra not requiring you mortgage your childrens future.
by danudey | 2025-11-14 19:55:43+00:00
If you assume that the only benefit of using rust is built-in valgrind, sure, but there's more to the language than preventing off-by-one errors.

If people don't want to use the language then that's fine, no problem, but a lot of people do want to use the language because it's just a great language to use as well as having memory safety.
by Atlas667 | 2025-11-14 19:55:56+00:00
This is a false dichotomy.

The problem isn't that there is equality in the eyes of the law. The problem is what that means in practice.

A poor citizen has the right to use their money as they see fit. <spoiler>A poor citizen has the right to: lobby, to fund think tanks, to advertise their interests, to sway research through funding, to fund the careers of politicians, to gift resources to local police departments, to fund ballot initiatives and referendums, to acquire media outlets, to fund documentary films, to buy bots online, to fund lawsuits against the corporations, to host fundraisers with high net-worth individuals.</spoiler>

How many poor people are able to do this? Very very very tiny amounts. These rights are nearly exclusively actionable by a certain class of people.

And you may argue about the philosophical implications of 'equality of opportunity' vs 'equality of outcome'. But the thing is this so called "neutral legal framework" leads to a monopoly of power by the rich, because the law pretends both of these kinds of people are the same.

The very framework is in negation of itself because it leads power in the hands of a few.

That is the true problem of this framework. And to suggest that the alternative must be "equality of outcome" is a false dichotomy. The "neutrality of the government" is more like "a broken clock is right twice a day" kind of thing.

The founding fathers were already aware of this, in fact I think they made the state in their own interests seeing as during the founding of the US the vast majority of Americans at the time were illiterate farmers/workers and/or slaves. In a very real sense the state was made for the rich by the rich, but with lingo that pretended it was for everyone.

This is why class politics is the most important aspect of politics in our lives. We live in class society where there are fundamental differences between classes of people. This difference is not strictly and categorically based on the amount of money they have, but on HOW they fund their lives which allows them to have extra rights. Effectively we can't afford all the rights. This is the classic "All animals are equals, but some animals are more equal than others".
by PeaceTed | 2025-11-14 19:55:57+00:00
I did discover a lot of great stuff like that. The funny thing is that there were a few titles that I discovered, absolutely loved and yet apparently were considered bad games. Oh well, I saw the good side of it.

One that I grabbed for $10 was Adrenix, a 'Descent' clone that has very few mentions around and reviewed fairly averagely. I loved it!

As for modern adaptions of games, if they can do it either like 3D Realms retro style like with Ion Fury, or go into the full re-imagined space like they did with Doom 2016. But any middle ground seems to lead to disappointment.
by Aurornis | 2025-11-14 19:56:29+00:00
> That's a lot smaller than the general homelab niche, or those who want a small, efficient, quiet computer for some purpose.

The homelab niche always surprises me for how many people are willing and able to buy hardware they don't really need.

I'm sure it's still a small niche, but I wouldn't be surprised if minisforum was selling a lot of devices to homelab builders looking for the next toy to add to their collection.
by wredcoll | 2025-11-14 19:56:37+00:00
I don't think anyone is seriously arguing that what you did is impossible, merely unlikely.

You, presumably, worked extremely hard at things you thought would help you long term. You also, presumably, got lucky at some points. One does not diminish the other.

And more to the point, now that you're "successful", do you think society should pay for more/better systems to help people like you achieve what you did?
by nmeofthestate | 2025-11-14 19:56:44+00:00
I guessed the term Chat Control had to be made up by opponents of the legislation, so searched for the real name. The official name of the legislation is: “Proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council laying down rules to prevent and combat child sexual abuse” (COM/2022/209 FINAL). It is often referenced more simply as the “Child Sexual Abuse Regulation” (CSA Regulation).
by amazing_stories | 2025-11-14 19:56:49+00:00
Poverty is a spectrum. Naturally, abject poverty is worse than regular poverty. I see too many people say "you're not poor, you have a phone" or "you're not homeless, you aren't sleeping on the sidewalk" (both of these have been said to me). There is a mismatch between what people imagine as poor and what poverty is, and of course, things could always be worse.
by saghm | 2025-11-14 19:56:50+00:00
I think that's kind of their point; if no one else is being aggressive, than being in the one car driven aggressively might be viewed as an advantage. A more civic mindset might prefer a driver doesn't try to take advantage of this because of how it might affect others and a pragmatist might be concerned with the potential to influence others to do the same and ruin the status quo, but I think empirically there are a sizeable number of people who would view it as an opportunity rather than something to avoid .
by hombre_fatal | 2025-11-14 19:56:51+00:00
That paper makes the opposite argument than you thought it made. Even from a freshwater perspective it’s more water-efficient to get calories/protein/fat directly from crops than from animal products.

Since you like their work, the authors of your paper answered that question more generally here https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10021-011-9517-8 where they conclude "The water footprint of any animal product is larger than the water footprint of crop products with equivalent nutritional value".

You make some often debunked claims, like we'd have to plant more crops to feed humans directly if we stopped eating meat.

This shouldn't make intuitive sense to you since animals eat feed grown on good cropland (98% of the water footprint of animal ag) that we could eat directly, and we lose 95% of the calories when we route crops through animals.
by chasd00 | 2025-11-14 19:57:02+00:00
if it's a corporate 401k you can move it to something very conservative and probably protect yourself from the worst of it. I've built up a decent college fund for my boys in a standard issue vanguard brokerage account and one of their SP500 index fund. I'm going to go mostly to cash on Jan1 and wait a year and see what happens. I need that money in 2 years (my oldest will be starting college then) so I don't have a lot of time to recover from a full on crash.
by reincoder | 2025-11-14 19:58:02+00:00
Thank you for mentioning us. I work for IPinfo. We perform a combination of a ping and a traceroute to understand how packets travel through the internet so that we can determine the location of the IP address. Our objective is to map the entire internet.

However, ideally, we should have a PoP in Seychelles. Some of our recent expansions have been in offshore territories.

https://ipinfo.io/probe-network
by Frannky | 2025-11-14 19:59:07+00:00
I wonder how many people actually believe this is for the kids and not for population control.

The bad people can use encrypted services just like they use guns, even if they are illegal. But then there's a spike in arrests for posting on social media if people express opinions or content contrary to preferred narratives.

Fortunately, there are people exposing NGO money flows and who favors them.Fortunately, the US keeps free speech sacred.

I'm immensely grateful to the founding fathers and their ability to come up with something so helpful so many years down the line
by qudat | 2025-11-14 19:59:43+00:00
To pile on, if I wanted an actual language to do config work I would prefer bash for simple scripting. I started using riverwm and I love its take on config. Use whatever language you want because configuring it is just running a sequence of riverctl commands. I found it very ergonomic since i can test config in the cli, I can just use a bash script to run commands — and some extra daemons like mako, waybar, and wlsunset
by jay_kyburz | 2025-11-14 19:59:46+00:00
>and creates a level of desperation that is incredibly dangerous.

I came into the comments looking for this sentiment.

We have a fairly good safety net here in my country, I've lived on study and unemployment benefits when I was young.

But when the author mentions they can't just make $300 appear out of nowhere, I can't help thinking that it _is_ possible, its just dangerous.

update: That's why we have good safety nets. Its dangerous for everybody.
by wahnfrieden | 2025-11-14 19:59:47+00:00
You make it sound like it's ubiquitous and constant. Just to clarify what access means:

From Wikipedia:

> By December 2023 200,000 people living in Gaza (around 10% of the population) had received internet access through an eSIM.

> As of August 2024, according to a Palestinian source, over 70% of telecommunications have been rendered inoperable. As of June 2025, Paltel is still providing some internet and landline telephone services in southern Gaza. There have been at least 10 outages since the conflict began. The lack of reliable telecommunications has hampered efforts by first responders and humanitarian groups.

From the above it sounds like maybe 3% of the population have access (as of a year ago), and there are regular outages. It also says that access has been insufficient.
by lanewinfield | 2025-11-14 19:59:48+00:00
hi, I made this. thank you for posting.

I love clocks and I love finding the edges of what any given technology is capable of.

I've watched this for many hours and Kimi frequently gets the most accurate clock but also the least variation and is most boring. Qwen is often times the most insane and makes me laugh. Which one is "better?"
by telesilla | 2025-11-14 19:59:49+00:00
A close friend grew up in first-world poverty (meaning, warm house, state-supported education, health care) but experienced no luxuries. To this day, they will buy themselves a tub of ice-cream or chocolate and eat it all completely alone, almost hoarding it, because growing up they had to share everything with the many siblings. It's crazy how weird pathologies we humans have.
by ineedasername | 2025-11-14 20:00:15+00:00
>that comparison doesn't hold as data centers often use potable drinking water that wouldn't be used in agriculture or for many other industrial purposes.

I think you're still good on your original assertion, it seems many/most of the biggest players are using non potable in new facilities and also retrofitting some old ones to avoid potable water as well [1]

I think you'd be good either way: The distinction sounds like an important point until you realize that the cost of turning raw water potable is so vanishly small compared to the cost of these data centers. Some rough estimates place it as less than one single rack of a GB200 NVL72 to build enough-- or more economically, bolster the local existing plants for raw water processing. Even if they had to go to brackish water desalination the cost there looks to be mostly in ongoing electricity costs which amount to ~$3k per day such that their existing power plant build outs for these would easily cover it, or a few such new desalination plants to cover many many data centers.

I'm not unsympathetic to aspects of these overall concerns either, but critics have to do a lot better than concerns that are less hyperbolically expressed as the much less catchy "No AI!... without small and reasonable policies for covering proportional infrastructure cost increases!".

[1] https://datacentremagazine.com/articles/reclaimed-wastewater...
by keeda | 2025-11-14 20:00:39+00:00
> On what principle should that apply here and not elsewhere? Can your magic black box murder? Defame?

Good questions, and I think relevant to the current point. We're already seeing cases like that pop up with the libel suits or the recent, tragic AI-assisted suicides.

It's very clear that these models were not designed to be "suicide-ideation machines", yet that turned out to be one of the things they do! In these cases the questions are definitely not going to be about whether the AI labs intended these outcomes, but whether they took sufficient precautions to anticipate and prevent such outcomes.

One possible defense for the AI labs could be "these machines have an unprecedented, possibly unlimited, range of capabilities, and we could not reasonably have anticipated this."

A smoking gun would be an email or report outlining just such a threat that they dismissed (which may well exist, given what I hear about these labs' "move fast, break people" approach to safety.) But without that it seems like a reasonable defense.

While that argument may not work for this or other cases, I think it will pop up as these models do more and more unexpected things, and the courts will have to grapple with it eventually.
by cycomanic | 2025-11-14 20:00:48+00:00
Yes the argument that being poor is some sort of character flaw, while realistically it's just a lack of money, usually inherited from the parents. I would bet that most people who make these arguments (like everyone else) would end up permanently poor if one was to take away their money and networks.

All research (e.g. UBI trials, mirco loan experiments...) have shown that giving someone poor access to money allows them to dramatically improve their situation.