MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cbeach | 2025-11-18 10:55:37+00:00
Assuming you're arguing in good faith, then please help me understand your perspective.

1. If it wasn't a single judge (Kathaleen McCormick) that ruled on this case, please let me know which other judges contributed to the ruling

2. How much compensation did Elon Musk receive from Tesla during the ten-year period in question, if not zero?

3. Which information were the voters missing? Bear in mind that after the very high profile court case where McCormick claimed the board was corrupt, shareholders were able to consider her opinion, and they still rejected it, and voted for the pay deal again.

4. Musk was previously a Democrat voter, but I would suggest that in supporting small-state libertarian values (and, in fact, heading up the effort to shrink the state), supporting rightwing parties in Europe, and supporting Trump, he is probably a conservative in all the ways that matter.

5. It's not irrelevant that the activist judge was Democrat-appointed, unless you believe the false premise that as soon as someone becomes a judge, all their human nature and political loyalties are immediately and permanently supressed.

6. Musk's political worldview is very relevant here. As Biden showed throughout his term in office, he wanted to see a heavily partisan, heavily Republican Elon Musk disempowered and excluded. Biden made no secret of this, excluding Musk from offical events around electrification of transport (where Musk is the world industry leader), and those instances where Biden made the false claim that legacy automakers like GM were "leading" auto electrification. Biden made repeated threats to use government agencies to investigate Musk (i.e. lawfare) for spurious reasons. Other establishment Democrats undoubtedly felt the same way - they feared Musk and wanted him disempowered.
by helsinkiandrew | 2025-11-18 10:55:56+00:00
> by exploiting compromised home routers and cameras, mainly in residential ISPs in the United States and other countries,

Presumably it’s possible to log the residential IP of the source of these packets.

Why isn’t there any industry group pushing for the ISPs to a) send the owners an email telling them or b) blocking off all traffic for a period to get them to do something - or is the economic cost higher than caused by the DDoS attacks?
by kldg | 2025-11-18 10:56:03+00:00
agreed, though I think the issue more is that these systems, deployed at scale, may result in widespread/consistent unexpected behavior if deployed in higher-stakes environments.

an earlier commenter mentioned a self-driving car perhaps refusing to use a road with a slur on it (perhaps it is graffiti'd on the sign, perhaps it is a historical name which meant something different at the time). perhaps the models will refuse to talk about products with names it finds offensive if "over-aligned," problematic as AI is eating search traffic. perhaps a model will strongly prefer to say the US civil war was fought over states' rights so it doesn't have to provide the perspective of justifying slavery (or perhaps it will stick to talking about the heroic white race of abolitionists and not mention the enemy).

bias when talking to a wide variety of people is fine and good; you get a lot of inputs, you can sort through these and have thoughts which wouldn't have occurred to you otherwise. it's much less fine when you talk to only one model which has specific "pain topics", or one model is deciding everything; or even multiple model in case of a consensus/single way to train models for brand/whatever safety.
by raducu | 2025-11-18 10:56:12+00:00
> You're right that, for people with ADHD and related disorders, stimulant medication sort of just adjusts their baselines so they can pay attention like a "normal" person.

I have ADHD and take metylphenidate(I've tried many kinds of stimulants as well) -- and the NO2 analogy is an imperfect but better analogy than saying stimulants simply adjusts the baseline of people with ADHD to function like "normal" persons.

I feel there is a narrow window of dosage and time where it might feel that way -- i.e. stimulants at the onset might calm you down, reduce anxiety, but all stimulants are very broad hammers.

For me it feels like it's impossible to re-create chemically exactly the neurotypical focus that I've seen in other colleagues.

Like spending 5-6 hours of continous work where you drill down just enough, get back on track, don't get distracted, don't get too anxious, don't get hyperfocused AND do that consistently, day after day after day.

My non-chemical modes are either hyper focus for 2 weeks on a problem, immerse myself but then completely lose interest, most of the time without showing much for it OR procastinate it a long way, get extremely anxious and work really hard on the problem.

With stimulants it's a bit like: - dosed just right:it evaporates anxiety, stressful situations feel easy to deal with, BUT there's always increased heart rate, grinding teeth and some tension at the end of the day - some stimulants make mundane things wildly interesting (on isopropylphenidate I spent a few hours playing with a PLSQL debugger because I thought it was really cool), but no sense of "GO, GO, GO, do it". - some make things seem urgent enough and help stay on track -- like the metylphenidate I'm prescribed. - some make going into a flow-like state easy and fun (like methamphetamine and phenmetrazine). - some are pure energy and urgency -- like modafinil.

All of the stimulants have the potential to give me euphoria, all of them temporarily increase libido I still have to be mindful of not focusing on the wrong thing, the "normal" feeling is very fleeting, it's very easy to get hyper on stimulants, all of them feel like wear & tear at the end of the day, some more than others.
by npteljes | 2025-11-18 10:56:30+00:00
Consider moving to another operating system. Honestly, I don't think there can be that much privacy on Windows. Windows is basically remotely managed by Microsoft, especially if you think of it in terms of years. There is also no indication that they will let go of this kind of control in the future.

In short: if you feel that you can't at least reluctantly agree with Microsoft, Windows is not for you.
by flexagoon | 2025-11-18 10:56:56+00:00
I'm not sure where you found this idea - I don't know any EAs claiming there is a single best optimum for the world. In fact, even with regards to charities, there are a lot of different areas prioritized by EA and choosing which one to prefer is a matter of individual preference.

The real world has optimums, and there's not a single best thing to do, but some charities are just obviously closer to being one of those optimums. Donating to an art museum is probably not one of the optimal things for the world, for example.
by tovej | 2025-11-18 10:57:41+00:00
For very much money, as in, let's say, more than 1000x the median person in the wealth distribution, I'd say it's obviously true.

You cannot make 1000x the average persons wealth by acting morally. Except possibly winning the lottery.

A person is not capable of creating that wealth. A group of people have created that wealth, and the 1000x individual has hoarded it to themselves instead of sharing it with the people who contributed.

If you are a billionaire, you own at least 5000x the median (200000k in the US). If you're a big tech CEO, you own somewhere around 50-100,000x the median. These are the biggest proponents of EA.

The bottom 50% only own about 2% of the wealth anymore, the top 10% own two thirds of the wealth, the top 1% owns a whole third and it's only getting worse. Who is responsible for the wealth inequality? The people at the right edge of the Lorenz curve. They could fix it, but don't, in fact they benefit more from their workers being poorer and more desperate for a job. I hope that explains the exploitation.
by rldjbpin | 2025-11-18 10:57:59+00:00
the op keeps highlighting how these actions affect rss feeds, including references to previous instances such as:

> when Mozilla bent over to Google's pressure to kill off RSS by removing the “Live Bookmarks” features from the browser

if hypothetically the browsers stop supporting the format, nothing stops dedicated rss/atom/json feed readers to work as normal. might be my myopic point of view but most users to still use the standard has predominantly used this approach since google reader days.
by businessmate | 2025-11-18 10:58:42+00:00
Large language models behave like cooperative conversational agents, but this surface impression is misleading. LLMs do not know facts, do not maintain internal consistency, and do not reference a stable version of reality. They generate statistically plausible language based on hidden internal states.

This architecture introduces structural failures that create measurable commercial, regulatory, and reputational exposure for enterprises.
by pjc50 | 2025-11-18 10:59:15+00:00
No, I think this is just about the difference between Effective Altruism (tm), altruism that is actually effective, and the hidden third option (tax the rich).

EA-the-brand turned into a speed run of the failure cases of utilitarianism. Because it was simply too easy to make up projections for how your spending was going to be effective in the future, without ever looking back at how your earning was damaging in the past. It was also a good lesson in how allowing thought experiments to run wild would end up distracting everyone from very real problems.

In the end an agency devoted to spending money to save lives of poor people globally (USAID) got shut down by the world's richest man, and I can't remember whether EA ever had anything to say about that.
by eimrine | 2025-11-18 10:59:19+00:00
In my country the Government requires any salesman to have some computer for the sake of sending the info about any sell preferably immediately. I don't know why does they need this, maybe it is making easier for them buying the gold toilets. For example we still have corona-style limitations like no paying with card if the country is bombed somewhere or the businessman risks to be fined. The thing is that nobody wants to buy something more expensive than Pentium 4 or Core2duo especially because most of accounting software still does not support multithreading. So we the businessmen use to mass-buy that cheap hardware, then we install W7 as a good enough OS with no irrigating/pesky/unneeded nanny notifications. The used motherboard if dies it makes no problem, it costs $10. Believe me, the 7 is a perfect OS for self-spying to our Governments and if you want to lobby Rust into this business you have to support W7 somehow.
by graemep | 2025-11-18 11:01:13+00:00
The "if you need it" is important.

1. People take it as a study drug, without prescription.

2. There may be over medication. Doctors will sometimes feel pushed to prescribe (as is known to happen with antibiotics)

3. At an individual level that is true, but you may need it because of your society and environment. Both ADHD rates and treatment varies between countries (even between regions and states within countries) and has varied a lot over time, which implies some external factor affects it.
by GJim | 2025-11-18 11:01:27+00:00
See donating blood.

Very common and widespread in the UK across all social classes. It is done purely altruistically (you will save a life) and the NHS makes life easier by providing pop-up donation clinics in shopping centres and works car parks.

In the US, people are paid to donate blood (!). This makes the whole transaction feel scummy and is, unsurprisingly, something many people avoid doing leaving only the poor to donate for money.
by seritools | 2025-11-18 11:01:32+00:00
Author here -- previous discussions/blog posts:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23313577

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31112273

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37787161

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38810782
by samkitjain17 | 2025-11-18 11:02:04+00:00
Hi HN Community, I’m Samkit, founder of MCPfy

Super excited to finally share what we’ve been building — and to launch MCPfy with all of you today!

For the last few months, we’ve seen MCP (Model Context Protocol) emerge as the cleanest way to connect tools to AI agents. But building a production-ready MCP server is still… a grind.

You write glue code. You secure it. You handle hosting, auth, analytics, logs, scaling — all before you even ship your first tool. Most people give up before they get to “Hello, MCP”.

We built MCPfy because every business should be able to expose their APIs to LLMs in minutes, not weeks.

What is MCPfy?

“Your API → Your MCP Server in under 1 minute.”

Just drop your API spec, and MCPfy turns it into a ready-to-use, fully hosted MCP server with: • Built-in authentication • Usage analytics & logs • Secure hosting • Auto-generated MCP tool definitions • Easy distribution to your users

No infra. No boilerplate. No vibe-coding gymnastics. Just… an MCP server that works.

Who is it for? • AI builders — Need to expose tools to LLMs without scaffolding dozens of files. • Product teams — Want to make their internal APIs usable across agents instantly. • SaaS companies — Want to give customers an official MCP integration without engineering heavy lifting. • Indie devs & founders — Shipping faster when everything “just works”.

Real use cases

Turn your CRM APIs into an MCP server → Create an MCP server for your SaaS in 60 seconds → Expose internal tools to your company’s AI agent →

Why this matters

We believe MCP is the missing bridge between AI agents and real software. And tools only win when they’re accessible. MCPfy makes the protocol usable for everyone.

Less infrastructure, more building. Less setup, more shipping.

Would love your thoughts

What do you want your MCP server to do for you? What tools are you excited to expose to LLMs?

Thanks for checking us out — and excited to build the future of MCP with you!
by freespirt | 2025-11-18 11:02:04+00:00
The UK Health Security Agency stopped publishing deaths-by-vaccination-status data in June 2022, after publishing it regularly before. A recent FOI request to resume publication was denied under Section 38 (would endanger health) - the irony of using a health protection law to withhold health data.

The stated reason: releasing the data might cause “distress or anger” to bereaved families if a link to vaccination were discovered.

I’ve compiled a comprehensive analysis examining:

• Why they stopped publishing data they previously published

• Historical precedents (contaminated blood scandal, thalidomide, Tuskegee)

• The pattern: every government health cover-up follows the same trajectory

• Why “protecting people from information” always fails

• Global survey: no Western democracy is transparent on this

• Legal/technical mechanisms that could force disclosure

The technical question: If the data shows vaccines are safe, why not publish it to prove that? The suppression itself is the signal.

This follows a pattern where initial transparency turns to opacity precisely when excess mortality signals emerge. Same timeline, same justifications, across multiple Western countries.

The repository includes the full investigation with citations, historical evidence, and analysis of why institutional self-preservation trumps transparency every time - until it doesn’t.
by npteljes | 2025-11-18 11:02:13+00:00
Try LTSC in case you haven't already. It's the essence of Windows, without most of this user-facing bullshit. They release it for environments where people expect their things to actually work, "like hospitals or kiosks". But, I can attest that it works for gaming as well.

Activation can work with Massgrave, or by you spinning up your own activation emulator, or by pointing your Windows to the myriad other activation emulators across the web. You download the image from Microsoft, install, a bunch of console commands, and you're good to go. Long support and no bullshit.
by Archelaos | 2025-11-18 11:02:44+00:00
In what world are you living that you not have heard about nuclear accidents? Here is a reading list for you:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident

With regard to nuclear waste. Here is an example, how it can went quickly out of control:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine
by Vera_Wilde | 2025-11-18 11:02:54+00:00
An interactive simulator for visualizing how false positives explode in mass screenings for low-prevalence problems. Relevant across diverse domains including security (e.g., Chat Control; iBorderCtrl), medicine (e.g., mammography; PSA testing), and so much more.

The purpose is to begin to more easily visualize how prevalence, sensitivity, specificity, investigative capacity, and strategic behavior interact to shape real-world outcomes.

Interactive tool: https://verawilde.github.io/rarity-roulette/

Would love feedback, critiques, and ideas for improvements.
by adwn | 2025-11-18 11:03:00+00:00
When you construct an object containing a mutex, you have exclusive access to it, so you can initialize it without locking the mutex. When you're done, you publish/share the object, thereby losing exclusive access.

struct Entry { msg: Mutex<String>, } ... // Construct a new object on the stack: let mut object = Entry { msg: Mutex::new(String::new()) }; // Exclusive access, so no locking needed here: let mutable_msg = object.msg.get_mut(); format_message(mutable_msg, ...); ... // Publish the object by moving it somewhere else, possibly on the heap: global_data.add_entry(object); // From now on, accessing the msg field would require locking the mutex
by pjc50 | 2025-11-18 11:03:12+00:00
After a couple of decades I've concluded that you need both. Virtue ethics gives you things like the War on Drugs and abortion bans; justification for having enforcement inflict real and significant harms in the name of virtue.

Virtue ethics is open-loop: the actions and virtues get considered without checking if reality has veered off course.

Consequentialist is closed-loop, but you have to watch out for people lying to themselves and others about the future.
by rldjbpin | 2025-11-18 11:04:07+00:00
does it matter much when in the end pricing is decided by merit-order system [1]? i.e. when you are dependent on other sources or neighbouring markets with very different composition.

not to say it is remains costlier than conventional sources, albeit not accounting for externalities.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merit_order
by masfoobar | 2025-11-18 11:04:38+00:00
Glad I am off Windows (officially)

I've been a Linux user since 2006-7 but still had a Windows PC around just incase I needed it. The odd games or in relation to work.

Windows 11 was just sloooow. It would take 5-20 seconds to load some of my popular programs and I never understood why. I am open to accepting there could be other factors at play rather than claiming "It was Windows" but considering all the other fluff I DO NOT WANT -- I have reached a point of never wanting Windows near my home again.

In the past, with my gripes with Microsoft/Windows, there was always a spot for XP, Vista, 7, or 10. Now, it's just bloat. I laughed when I saw CoPilot in Notepad!

My laptop, which was running Windows 11, is now running Debian. Same program mentioned above open within 0.1-3 seconds. Best of all -- I have great control!

Not to mention how easy it is to install Steam and Epic (Heroic) !!

A few years ago people laughed at the thought Linux would eventually take over. While it may never reach 50% share - I think the numbers will get suprisingly high in the next 10 years. The biggest hit will be when a mid-scale corporation decide to move away from Micrsosoft on end user client machines.
by skywhopper | 2025-11-18 11:05:11+00:00
There may be multiple types of “therapy” being mixed up here. I think it’s important to accept that therapy is never going to “fix” the differences in brain function that folks with ADHD experience. Any attempt at behavioral therapy to “fix” an ADHD brain will fail.

But talk therapy can help some folks come to accept the differences that their ADHD means in terms of how to relate to other people or to better understand why how ADHD impacts their own behavior and self-perception.

I myself have found it’s much easier and happier to shape my life around my particular ADHD than trying to change my behavior (something that’s destined to fail and only compound the negative emotions associated with ADHD).
by d3Xt3r | 2025-11-18 11:05:47+00:00
I wasn't allowed a soldering iron as a kid, so I ended up just chopping and splicing a regular serial cable and turned it into a null modem, all so that I could play OMF2097 with my friends without having to share the same keyboard (we would always fight over right side, which defaulted to using the arrow keys for movement - and so the person who got the right side generally had the advantage, as back then arrow keys were the default movement keys, unlike these days where WASD is default.)
by westurner | 2025-11-18 11:06:06+00:00
> What are some possible carbon-based, compostable, inflammable alternatives to polyurethane elastomers for wrapping (multi- or just plain) single wall carbon nanotubes that store energy without loss?

I found this article the next day; from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45963395 :

> ScholarlyArticle: "Additive Manufacturing of Molecular Architecture Encoded Stretchable Polyethylene Glycol Hydrogels and Elastomers" (2025) https://advanced.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adma.20...

Propylene glycol > Environmental impacts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propylene_glycol
by thyristan | 2025-11-18 11:06:25+00:00
It might not be as bad as it sounds. A few comments over someone had a preliminary permit application which described the technical details.

The gist of it is, the reactor is a 500MW pressurized water reactor, Gen3/3+. Not any fancy new Gen4 thing that you usually hear about when talking about small modular reactors. No molten salt, no high temperature gas cooling, no weird moderators, no heap of crumbling carbon/uranium spheres, no liquid lead/bismuth/natrium, no thorium.

So I guess it could actually be possible to keep that timetable, because it is actually old, boring and proven technology, just a little smaller and maybe more prefabricated than the usual 1GW to 1.5GW PWRs that were built in the last 4 decades.
by Vera_Wilde | 2025-11-18 11:06:49+00:00
I'm especially interested in feedback on the modeling choices — prevalence curves, specificity sliders, and whether (and how) to add correlated errors or adversarial behavior.

If anyone works in health tech, security, or trust & safety, I'd also love to hear how this maps to your practical experience with low-prevalence detection.

If you test the simulator, I'd love to hear what surprised you most — especially if something behaved differently than you expected. Thanks in advance!
by aurareturn | 2025-11-18 11:07:24+00:00
They consistently have the best or second best models.

They have infrastructure that serves 800 million monthly active users.

Investors are lining up to give them money. When they IPO, they'll easily be worth over $1 trillion.

There's price competition right now. They're still surviving. If there is price competition, they're the most likely to survive.
by K0balt | 2025-11-18 11:07:47+00:00
While I certainly agree that it is an example of poor judgment and perhaps weak character to be broadly judgy about cosmetic efforts in general, I can understand the theoretical plight of someone who might be taken in by a deceptive person in that regard.

If you steelman the argument you can see the point, but it’s also unreasonable to assume that a person is living the steelman version of life (and being a deceptive person) just because they had a facelift.

OTOH, if you are admiring people’s genetics using their appearance as a proxy, I can see why it might seem like “cheating”