MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JimDabell | 2025-11-16 15:15:29+00:00
Reputation plus privacy is probably unsolvable; the whole point of reputation is knowing what people are doing elsewhere. You don’t need reputation, you need persistence. You don’t need to know if they are behaving themselves elsewhere on the Internet as long as you can ban them once and not have them come back.

Services need the ability to obtain an identifier that:

- Belongs to exactly one real person.

- That a person cannot own more than one of.

- That is unique per-service.

- That cannot be tied to a real-world identity.

- That can be used by the person to optionally disclose attributes like whether they are an adult or not.

Services generally don’t care about knowing your exact identity but being able to ban a person and not have them simply register a new account, and being able to stop people from registering thousands of accounts would go a long way towards wiping out inauthentic and abusive behaviour.

The ability to “reset” your identity is the underlying hole that enables a vast amount of abuse. It’s possible to have persistent, pseudonymous access to the Internet without disclosing real-world identity. Being able to permanently ban abusers from a service would have a hugely positive effect on the Internet.
by oneplane | 2025-11-16 15:16:10+00:00
Only if you boot into macOS and connect it to the internet. iBoot2 never changes by itself, you, the user, decides if you want to boot into recovery or macOS and run an update.

So can Apple stop signing new iBoot2 versions? Sure! And that sucks. But it's a bit of FUD to claim that Apple at arbitrary points in time is going to brick your laptop with no option for you to prevent that.

Granted, if you boot both macOS and Asahi, then yes, you are in this predicament, but again, that is a choice. You can never connect macOS or recovery to the internet, or never boot them.
by mindslight | 2025-11-16 15:17:28+00:00
I definitely agree with this point. I'd say food is a special case though, where the US really did have much more than Europe after WWII. Why do most Americans seem allergic to spices and flavor? I wish I knew. And this applies even to food that is supposed to be flavorful like burritos when scaled to national chains - eg Chipotle/Qdoba/Fresh City.

But economics shapes culture, too. There are certainly no shortage of subcultures trying to swim against the grain - buy American, local/organic food, German tool enthusiasts, even the tech community's libre software and anti-cloud. It feels like they remain subcultures because they're fundamentally fighting an uphill battle against top-down prices/advertising/etc set by large market makers. Which is why I initially took issue with your comment, framing it solely in terms of individual choice.

But the dynamic extends other places too, say the housing market with everything "move in ready" being beige, spec grade fixtures, and "fancy" appliances bought from a market for lemons. Trying to chew on that it still feels like not exactly what people prefer, but rather what people don't disprefer - the least offensive option to enable economies of scale (which once again comes down to monetary policy supporting the housing bubble, but I'm certainly not trying to ram the whole topic back into that)
by KronisLV | 2025-11-16 15:17:57+00:00
SteamCube would have honestly been such a cool name.

My current PC has a Ryzen 7 5800X and an Intel Arc B580 and I don't really have the need for a device to connect to a TV (which I also don't have), but I can definitely see the appeal to something that is both okay at games, as well as has hardware that the software works really well with, with minimal amounts of driver weirdness. Not everyone views building or buying PC as non-intimidating, especially because of how many different parts of different specs and vendors are there.

I ended up getting a MacBook (M1 Air) and an iPhone (SE 2022) for some work stuff a while back, and while my use cases of those particular devices are a bit limited, I appreciate how most of the computing and updates out of the box... just work (at least for now, in contrast I got a bit unlucky with Windows updates on my main PC so I had to mess around with where the disk partitions are, otherwise it refused to boot after one update, no idea what's up with that).

Plus maybe it'll push developers in the direction of optimize their games a bit more (or at least add more performance oriented presets).

I just hope that they won't pull an Intel Core Ultra with the pricing, which will probably make or break the Steam Machine as something that'd see widespread usage.
by throw0101a | 2025-11-16 15:18:39+00:00
> I suspect that the push for civilian SMRs is a disguised subsidy for the naval reactor programme.

Ontario, Canada is building a bunch of BWRX-300 SMRs and don't really have a desire for a naval reactor programme:

* https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/carney-ford-announce-...

* https://www.opg.com/projects-services/projects/nuclear/smr/d...

* https://www.gevernova.com/news/press-releases/ge-vernova-hit...

Canada is currently looking at new submarines, and the final two candidates are both SSKs (and not nuclear SSNs):

* https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2025/08/28/canada-shortlis...

* https://www.canada.ca/en/public-services-procurement/news/20...

As an Ontario resident I wish they chose to build more CANDUs (which, AIUI, they are planning to do as well) rather than SMRs: our grid is in more need of 'bulk power', and SMRs are better suited to small grids (like the Canadian Maritimes) or small sites (like in Poland: replacing previous smaller scale coal plants).
by kayodelycaon | 2025-11-16 15:18:42+00:00
My life got infinitely easier when I realized the normal way of doing things will never work for me. Even with medication, my brain is too broken to have discipline. I can’t form new habits by repeatedly doing something. Flat out doesn’t work.

What has worked for me is getting ahead of my brain and setting myself up for success before it gets there.

I’ve also completely given up on the idea of thinking before speaking. My solution for this is anticipating mistakes before I get into a conversation and not making the same mistake twice.
by Rotundo | 2025-11-16 15:18:46+00:00
Anything and everything you do on a work computer can (and often will be) monitored. Only use it for things that you would be comfortable doing with your boss looking over your shoulder.

Give them no reason to dig up dirt if they eventually want to fire you. "Sorry, we have to let you go as you used company property to order lunch way back in 2016". If you think that's paranoid, I'm speaking from experience.
by tpoacher | 2025-11-16 15:18:51+00:00
> If this thing is way cheaper than a regular computer of the same spec, corporations will just buy up Steam Machines by the palette load and use them as office machines or whatever

On one hand, this would be a problem.

On the other hand, if the Steam Machine doesn't support windows, businesses fleeing from MS Windows en masse because the Steam Machine is cheap would be a VERY interesting turn of events, and I'd be VERY curious to see how it all unfolds.
by luckylion | 2025-11-16 15:18:59+00:00
It's not necessarily going through a Russian or Singaporean node though, on the sites I'm responsible for, AWS, GCP, Azure are in the top 5 for attackers. It's just that they don't care _at all_ about that happening.

I don't think you need world-wide law-enforcement, it'll be a big step ahead if you make owners & operators liable. You can limit exposure so nobody gets absolutely ruined, but anyone running wordpress 4.2 and getting their VPS abused for attacks currently has 0 incentive to change anything unless their website goes down. Give them a penalty of a few hundred dollars and suddenly they do. To keep things simple, collect from the hosters, they can then charge their customers, and suddenly they'll be interested in it as well, because they don't want to deal with that.

The criminals are not held liable, and neither are their enablers. There's very little chance anything will change that way.
by oconnor663 | 2025-11-16 15:19:15+00:00
I still wouldn't call it GC in that case. It's pretty much exactly the same as std::shared_ptr in C++, and we don't usually call that GC. I don't know about the academic definition, but I draw the line at a cycle collector. (So e.g. Python is GC'd, but Rust/C++/Swift are not.)
by teleforce | 2025-11-16 15:19:15+00:00
Why choose DECT NR+?

a) LOW COST OF OWNERSHIP: DECT NR+ allows you to own your own private 5G network, meaning no base stations, no SIM cards, and no subscriptions.

b) SCALABLE AND RELIABLE: A DECT NR+ network can scale from 100 to 1 million nodes in a single square kilometer and offers high reliability with technology built on proven cellular technology standards.

c) LICENSE-EXEMPT FREQUENCY: DECT NR+ gives access to the dedicated, license-exempt 1,9 GHz DECT band, which offers less interference than other available bands and is (almost) globally allocated.

[1] Why choose DECT NR+?

https://www.nordicsemi.com/Products/Wireless/DECT-NR
by skydhash | 2025-11-16 15:20:40+00:00
There’s a reason almost every good editor (on unix) have the pipe to/from shell feature. With that you have the whole power of the os at your disposal. And in vim, you get the quickfix list for fast navigation according to the output of a grep/build tool.

Someone could make a config to make vim/emacs beginner friendly. But there’s a reason there’s no beginner friendly truck or plane.
by crazygringo | 2025-11-16 15:21:46+00:00
I think there are points on both sides.

I think you're right that the BBC is being irresponsible in putting "my mum was a 17-year-old free spirit" in the headline -- even though it's a quote, it does imply a level of BBC editorial agreement with the characterization. It makes her sound like she was just an innocent hippie or something.

On the other hand, this wasn't vandalism for vandalism's sake. It was political protest against a dictatorship. It's not like she was engaging in criminal acts for the fun of it or for personal gain, so the snippet you choose is similarly misleading without the context of why.
by ronef | 2025-11-16 15:21:51+00:00
Jotting down a few quick thoughts here but we can totally go deep. This is something Michael Brantley started working on a few months ago to test out how to make it super easy to ease and leverage existing Nix & Flox architecture. One of the core differences from my quick perspective is that it specifically leverages the unique way that Flox environments are rendered without performing a nix evaluation, making it safe and optimally performant for the k8s node to realize the packages directly on the node, outside of a container.
by jerf | 2025-11-16 15:22:13+00:00
It looks like Boa has Unicode tables compiled inside of itself: https://github.com/boa-dev/boa/tree/main/core/icu_provider

Brimstone does not appear to.

That covers the vast bulk of the difference. The ICU data is about 10.7MB in the source (boa/core/icu_provider) and may grow or shrink by some amount in the compiling.

I'm not saying it's all the difference, just the bulk.

There's a few reasons why svelte little executables with small library backings aren't possible anymore, and it isn't just ambient undefined "bloat". Unicode is a big one. Correct handling of unicode involves megabytes of tables and data that have to live somewhere, whether it's a linked library, compiled in, tables on disks, whatever. If a program touches text and it needs to handle it correctly rather than just passing it through, there's a minimum size for that now.
by HacklesRaised | 2025-11-16 15:22:16+00:00
I suppose it's the problem with AI in general. It's an interesting technology looking for a business model that just isn't there, at least not one that comes even close to justifying the cost.

I hate the fact that it has sucked all the oxygen from the room and enabled an entirely new cadre of grifters all of whom will escape accountability when it unfolds.
by mholt | 2025-11-16 15:22:16+00:00
I get the whole scarcity thing -- and I've even asked Andrew about this -- because if I'm willing to give him my money after saving up for it, but it sells out first, wouldn't he make more money if he took mine then?

But, I guess we just have to have an art budget with some money already set aside if we want to jump on opportunities when artists do this. I respect it, but yes it's a bit inconvenient.

PS. The full, uncropped shot is even more incredible IMO: https://cosmicbackground.io/cdn/shop/files/Overhead_black_li...
by jasonjayr | 2025-11-16 15:22:27+00:00
A digital "Death penalty" is not a win for society, without considering a fair way to atone for "crimes against your digital identity".

It would be way to easy for the current regime (whomever that happens to be) to criminalize random behaviors (Trans People? Atheists? Random nationality?) to ban their identity, and then they can't apply for jobs, get bus fare, purchase anything online, communicate with their lawyers, etc.
by Retric | 2025-11-16 15:22:30+00:00
Storage is cheaper than peaking power which is why it’s common to add huge battery bank to solar power plants. It’s simply more profitable to add storage.

Net result renewables currently save you money until ~80% annual electricity supply. At which point adding more batteries and generation to cover overnight demand is cheaper than adding nuclear to the mix. In such a mix, Nuclear saves a little per kWh overnight and cost way more per kWh during the day, net result it’s more expensive as baseload. But, operating nuclear only at night drives up per kWh costs above storage.

Due to plant lifespans, new nuclear is already a poor investment which is why it’s rare, which then drives up construction costs. It’s a viscus cycle which ultimately dooms nuclear without massive subsidies which become hard to justify.
by mainde | 2025-11-16 15:22:50+00:00
This is also my experience, it's not necessarily Apple fans, people just get used to some garbage but necessary workflow/ritual and forget they are doing it. I witnessed multiple colleagues and friends, who are avid and experienced MacOS users, struggle with basic tasks like ..finding the window of an open application after it was minimised, fullscreening applications, screensharing. Yet, somehow, none of that registered for them and their experience was still reported as flawless.
by 59nadir | 2025-11-16 15:23:29+00:00
> [...] proper development box [...]

"Proper" is very subjective here. My entire workflow for developing 3D engines is covered a couple of times over with the announced Steam Machine specs. In fact, even when I was working in web backend development it would've covered it as a dedicated development machine and that was with some pretty pathological dev setups, language servers that ate up way too much memory, etc..
Show HN: Minivac 601 Simulator - a 1961 Relay Computer
by gregsadetsky | 2025-11-16 15:24:10+00:00
Hey HN!

I'm very proud of sharing this project with you all, after ~2 years of starts and stops, and about 5 different attempts at making it.

Context/history: In 1961, the Minivac 601 [0], an educational electronics kit - somewhat similar to those "300 circuits in one" you may have had growing up as I did - was created by none other than Claude Shannon.

The Minivac is disarmingly simple: it consists roughly speaking of 6 relays, 12 lights, 6 buttons, and a motorized wheel. You'd think that it couldn't really do much.

Well, amazingly, it can do a lot. You can wire up the components in a way that will make the Minivac play tic-tac-toe, or OCR-detect 10 digits... The sample "demo" circuit I chose for the homepage shows a binary counter that counts up to 7.

Another amazing thing about the Minivac is definitely its manuals [1]. Their spirit is what I hope to capture in the coming (years?) as I keep improving this project. The manuals are generous and well-written and are not only an amazing gradual introduction to relay-based logic - they touch on computing at large. With amazing 1960s graphics/cartoons, of course.

That's probably what got me to work on the Minivac. I learned about the device a bit before going to the Recurse Center, fell in love with the manuals, and was frustrated that I couldn't try out the circuits or play around with the device! I thought that creating a JavaScript-based emulator would be an "easy" way to get there. Turns out that correctly simulating electricity isn't "easy". :-) But I'm very proud that it now seems to be doing the right thing for most circuits that I've tested from the book. Yes, this Minivac Simulator has a TypeScript testing suite!

Looking forward to hearing from you all. Cheers

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minivac_601

[1] https://minivac.greg.technology/manuals/1961-minivac601-book...

Repo: https://github.com/gregsadetsky/minivac/
by kakwa_ | 2025-11-16 15:24:10+00:00
I think Apple has kind of a culture problem where the whole organization has to look-up way too much to its chief to make key decisions.

This could have worked in Jobs times, because of the personality & vision of the latter, plus a rapidly evolving market.

But this was no longer possible once the dust settled, specially with a logistician/beam counter like Tim Cook.

Every bet he made was an abject failure, from the Apple Car to the Vision Pro.

His only success was the M series macs, a really good but by no mean revolutionary step-up on a now minority segments of Apple's main market (i.e. internet terminals).

Even the chaos relating to Apple's AI efforts seems to clearly indicate a clear lack of leadership and vision.

For me, he will probably be remembered like Apple's Steve Ballmer. But even with a Nadela-like replacement, Apple needs probably a good hard look at itself and its internal culture.
by Closi | 2025-11-16 15:24:21+00:00
> This is shortsighted because [...] electricity renewables are cheaper than nuclear

This is an oversimplification - Renewables are cheaper than nuclear, but they are also less reliable than nuclear in the sense that when the wind stops blowing, power stops being generated. Also if you include the cost of energy storage to survive a week or two without substantial wind, suddenly it's not the cheaper anymore.

A mixed nuclear + renewables grid would reduce the total cost because nuclear can provide a stable base load which isn't affected by seasonality. Modern plants can also ramp up/down to some extent to balance the overall system.

That's why you need an energy mix rather than just putting all your eggs in a single source.
by nomarv | 2025-11-16 15:24:33+00:00
In der kalten Jahreszeit bleiben die Fenster oft geschlossen. Die Luft wird «dick»: Die Luftfeuchtigkeit steigt häufig über 60 %, was dem Wohlbefinden schaden und zu Schimmel führen kann. Gleichzeitig erhöht sich der CO₂-Gehalt in der Luft, was sich negativ auf die Konzentration auswirkt. Darum habe ich einen Raumluft-Monitor entwickelt, der so lange unauffällig bleibt, wie alles im grünen Bereich ist. Wird ein definierter Schwellenwert überschritten, wird er bewusst auffällig. Für meinen Bedarf an Statistiken visualisiere ich die Messwerte zusätzlich in einem übersichtlichen Dashboard.
by wild_egg | 2025-11-16 15:25:20+00:00
There's some OO design fallacy here but not sure what to call it.

The reason the aqua-plane broke the inheritance tree is because the modeling is being done backwards.

Objects should be defined by behaviour first and only incidentally contain whatever state is required to support that behaviour.

A well designed object is much more similar to a closure than it is to a data structure.
by wat10000 | 2025-11-16 15:25:38+00:00
Experts tend to greatly underestimate the importance of friction.

By the time you’ve finished saying “gcc and a custom toolchain” you’ve lost most of your potential audience. If you’re a professional or even an experienced hobbyist, it’s no big deal. But if the idea of programming embedded systems is new to you, it’s a lot of effort. And it’s not clear how much effort it will be, or if you’ll even be capable of it. It’s not fun to be knee deep in a complicated install and have no idea if you’ll ever be able to get it working. Lots of people will find something else to occupy their time rather than attempt it.

That then leads to community and better tools, and maybe it becomes a good choice even for experts. And even if it never does, it provides a great stepping stone, since trying and failing to set up the more complicated tools is a lot more tolerable if you can fall back to the simple IDE you’ve been using.
by crazygringo | 2025-11-16 15:25:44+00:00
Then by your logic no words can be true synonyms, because sounds themselves inherently evoke meaning [1]. And then the concept itself becomes pointless.

So I'd prefer to stick to concepts that actually do mean something, where "synonym" is two words that have the same primary functional meaning. Splitting hairs over whether autumn is "cozier" than fall does not change the fact that they are synonyms by any reasonable definition, or change the point that English has a hugely larger number of synonyms than any other language, for certain historical reasons.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect
by bccdee | 2025-11-16 15:25:47+00:00
True; I suppose I could concede the idea that inheritance has its place if we recognize that that place is quite small and out-of-the-way. My problem is that "everything has its place," without any qualifications, is effectively a blank cheque to use inheritance anywhere and then just go, "well that was its place."

Interfaces are great; I wouldn't consider them inheritance.

Sure, good stuff has been written with inheritance, but good stuff has been written with C, and that doesn't make C unproblematic. If Postgres were being written today, the authors would probably choose something other than C—we just have better, safer languages for that kind of work now.
by dan-robertson | 2025-11-16 15:25:58+00:00
One advantage nuclear may have in the UK is in the per-Megawatt planning applications required, purely by the energy generation being more concentrated. Of course, while people hate wind turbines and solar panels, they _really_ hate nuclear, but this can mean nuclear has some chance of getting special permits from central government.

Another potential advantage is building energy generation closer to where it is needed as Britain is unable to build good interconnection infrastructure. I think this doesn’t actually happen so much – the main places you need power are where there are people, which is bad in the ‘people _really_ hate nuclear’ front, and regulators are very conservative and more wary the more people live nearby.

Wind+batteries is a bit viable (and helps with interconnect too in that if you can max out interconnect utilization by transferring energy from generation to storage near usage even when there is no immediate demand, you can move more energy with a given interconnect per day than if you only used it to directly move energy from generators to users) but estimates of battery storage required still seem potentially prohibitively high.
by KyleVlaros | 2025-11-16 15:26:08+00:00
Toolkit for building reproducible Debian-based container images with minimal base layers. Includes extendable recipes (Java, Node.js, Python, CUDA), CI/CD workflows, security signing (cosign/GPG), and structure tests. Simple Makefile/Dockerfile flow, clear examples, and modular scripts make it easy to adapt and extend.