MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by swi | 2025-11-16 22:31:12+00:00
Chris Wilson released a video on this topic yesterday - "Dark Patterns: Are Your Games Playing You?". He has an interesting perspective having been the lead of Path of Exile. A free to play, decade long, popular, action role playing game.

While opinions vary on the correct use of these patterns, the video is a helpful and easy to digest, reminder of them. The video description contains additional links.

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"Dark Patterns: Are Your Games Playing You?" - https://youtu.be/OCkO8mNK3Gg
by jasonlotito | 2025-11-16 22:31:24+00:00
Softbank sold all of Nvidia in 2019. Look how that turned out for them.

> SoftBank’s Vision Fund was an early backer of Nvidia, reportedly amassing a $4 billion stake in 2017 before selling all of its holdings in January 2019. Despite its latest sale, SoftBank’s business interests remain heavily intertwined with Nvidia’s.

Further, ″[SoftBank] made a point of saying that it wasn’t any view on NVIDIA. ... At the end of the day, they are using the money to invest in other AI related companies,” he said.

Make of that what you will, but asking "are they irrational?" needs to answer with more than just "Softbank sold all of Nvidia again."

Both of these come from the link you provided.
by aerostable_slug | 2025-11-16 22:32:24+00:00
Why would a stop for an outstanding warrant have negative value for your community? If word got out that OPPD will come down hard on anyone with warrants, perhaps people with warrants would stay away from your community. I'm not sure I see the downside; deterrence is a good thing.

Analogy: criminals know Target stores have a policy to prosecute all shoplifters, so when there was still a shoplifting subreddit that fact would be regularly trotted out and criminals were warned by their peers (the best kind of testimonial) to stay away. I would love it if my neighborhood had that reputation.
by buu700 | 2025-11-16 22:32:40+00:00
The existence of network-connected robots or drones isn't inherently a security vulnerability. AI control of the robots specifically is a problem in the same way that piping in instructions from /dev/urandom would be, except worse because AI output isn't purely random and has a higher probability of directing the machine to cause actual harm.

Are you saying you're opposed to letting AI perform physical labor, or that you're opposed to requiring safeguards that allow humans to physically shut it off?
by _heimdall | 2025-11-16 22:33:27+00:00
Louisiana refused federal highway funding for long enough that their highway system went to shit. They refused due to a federal mandate that the drinking age be raised to 21.

It isn't common, but states have absolutely forwent federal funding to stand their ground, and in my opinion they should do it more often. Its a huge weakness in our federal system that states are so dependent on federal funding for long lived programs.
Show HN: A ready to use Stremio account for non technical friends and family
by anonbuddy | 2025-11-16 22:34:33+00:00
I built Own Your Stream to help people who want Stremio but give up as soon as things look technical. Many of us can follow a GitHub readme, but our parents or less technical friends usually cannot. They end up asking for step by step help or just stick with expensive streaming subscriptions.

What it is: a simple paid setup service for Stremio. You either get a ready made Stremio account with everything already configured plus the first thirty days of the streaming helper service I connect for you Real Debrid or you book a call where we set it all up together on your devices. Who it is for: people who just want to click, sign in, and watch. No forums, no Discord, no hunting for add ons or wondering which tutorial to trust. You send them here, they pay once, and they get a working setup they can use on their TV, phone, tablet, and computer. What you get: • A Stremio account that is already configured for everyday use • Clear instructions on where to sign in and how to change the password • The first thirty days of Real Debrid already connected so streams actually work well • Optional one on one call where I guide you live until everything is running Business model: one time payment for the account plus thirty days of streaming helper service, and a higher tier for people who want a personal call. Basic analytics only, no dark growth tricks. I would love feedback from HN on what feels confusing, what sounds risky, and what you would change for the crowd that says I do not care how it works, I just want to press play and be done.
by arcanemachiner | 2025-11-16 22:34:42+00:00
If, for whatever reason, all the mining power switches to the other chain, it will become the de facto "Bitcoin".

I don't know what the specific mechanism would be, but I would bet that it relates to the billions of dollars backing the current ecosystem, and the interests of the people behind them. If the right event or crisis comes along, then people could be compelled to switch over to something else.

I'm sure there's someone out there still mining blocks on that chain with the exploit from 2010, but that's not where the mining power is. If the right series of events occurs, the miners will switch.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-11-16 22:34:42+00:00
> How do you tell when you've hit a cycle?

https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~cymen/misc/interests/Bacon01Concu...

TLDR there are heuristics which can give you a hint. And then you trigger a local trace to see.

> Why?

Because then you incur the cost of a trace -- and potentially paging in from slow-slow disk -- vs a simple atomic refcount.

Even just a localized trace on live objects is a pointer-chasing cache & branch prediction killer.
by cycomanic | 2025-11-16 22:36:25+00:00
Completely agree the transition between continuous and discrete domains is often glossed over and people use DFT, FT, DTFT and FFT almost interchangeably (I certainly have been guilty of that myself, and you are correct the FFT and DFT are equivalent for this discussion).

An interesting fact (somewhat related to your mentioning of the DTFT) is that one can consider the DFT as a filter with a sinc transfer function. That's essentially how you can understand the spectrum of an OFDM signal. You perform a block based FFT on your input bit/symbol stream, so you have waves at different carriers. However, because the stream is timevarying you essentially get sinc shaped spectra spaced at the symbol rate (excluding cycling prefixes etc.). So your OFDM spectrum is composed of many sincs spaced at fb, which is very squarish which is one of the reasons why OFDM is so advantageous.
by thomascountz | 2025-11-16 22:36:58+00:00
The book content itself is deliberately free of AI-generated prose. Drafts may start anywhere, but final text should be reviewed, edited, and owned by a human contributor.

There is more specificity around AI use in the project README. There may have been LLMs used during drafting, which has led to the "hallmarks" sticking around that some commenters are pointing out.
by tptacek | 2025-11-16 22:37:57+00:00
A failure to appear warrant is generally someone not showing up to court to pay a traffic ticket. It's essentially municipal debt collection work. I'm not saying it's bad to catch people with outstanding warrants; i'm saying that OPPD curbing a car and making an arrest has a simple logistical cost, and that cost swamps the minuscule value of helping a neighboring suburb collect ticket revenue.

Our police have real work to do. If we had a special magic beepy device in all the police cruisers that lit up when someone with an outstanding warrant drove past, we would not prioritize that enforcement work to the exclusion of the real work. But since OPPD doesn't know that they're going to end up burning 5 hours on a failure-to-appear warrant when they curb a car on a Flock alert, that's what Flock essentially had us doing.

I honestly think this argument is probably pretty portable to a lot of different municipalities. It's not a function of anything Flock itself deliberately does, but rather a simple function of pretextual or preemptive stops on cars: you are probably going to end up making a whole bunch of failure-to-appear arrests. And I think in pretty much every community where killing camera contracts is on the table, failure-to-appear enforcement will be perceived as net-negative, a distraction from preventing serious crime.

The thing I like about this argument is that it's insensitive to people's priors about law enforcement. Whether or not you like your PD (I very much like OPPD), this argument should have weight!

The key observation here, again, is that any arrest has a very high fixed cost.
by jclarkcom | 2025-11-16 22:37:58+00:00
My first thought was someone they tied a blockchain transaction to my name and then traced it backwards. But they also knew my ETH and BTC balances, and date the account was opened. You might be able to figure out the open date by looking at the blockchain but I could never determine how they would know balances for two unrelated cryptos without some kind of coinbase compromise.
by gabriel666smith | 2025-11-16 22:38:13+00:00
An old joke that I was thinking about recently: Two local government consultants - tasked with seeing if it'd be financially beneficial to dig a new tunnel so that cars don't have to drive up and down a mountain - dig two small holes on opposite sides of the mountain then stand at either end.

The punchline, which I can't remember, is something about the two holes being, according to the two consultants, an MVP of a tunnel: "Just stand at either end of it."
by jchw | 2025-11-16 22:38:44+00:00
I'm definitely not trying to dissuade anyone from using Cloudflare, just making sure people realize the potential privacy implications of doing so. It isn't always obvious, even though some of the features pretty much require it (at least to be handled entirely on Cloudflare's side. You could implement similar features that are split between the endpoint and the coordination server without requiring full TLS stripping. Maybe Tailscale will support some of those as features of the `serve` server?)

> client-less access

JFYI, Tailscale Funnels also work for this, though depending on your use case it may not be ideal. Ultimately, Cloudflare does handle this use case a bit better.
by mikehall314 | 2025-11-16 22:39:23+00:00
I agree 72 characters is plenty for most circumstances. However, as the blog points out, this is a byte limit not a character limit.

Some of the family emoji can be > 20 bytes. Some of the profession emoji can be > 17 bytes. If people are using emoji in their passwords, we could quite quickly run out of bytes.

I think it’s a limitation worth being aware of, even if “unsafe” is perhaps overstating it.
by weitendorf | 2025-11-16 22:39:59+00:00
We're basically right about to launch this at my company right now. It's going to be one of the first platform products we launch and will be based on our static site generator called Statue https://github.com/accretional/statue. We styled the default Statue site as a SaaS landing page because that's what we needed when we started working on it, but I really want to explore a more Myspace/Blog oriented UX

Actually, making a second web is not so hard, that's arguably what Facebook is, it's making a web that is able to occupy the same privileged position on the Internet that is difficult. DNS, Domains, CAs, and IP allocations are all de-facto centralized. You could in theory convince a bunch of friends to use different DNS/Domains/CAs but IP touches real infrastructure so you need it for anything of notable size. But regardless, go ahead. Unless people can make HTTP GET requests to your Domain A/CNAME records and receive HTML it'll probably be like your web doesn't exist.

Our network includes identity as a first-class citizen, and when you make internal-internal requests, terminates both ends of the connection, so it does do crazy stuff to cache/serve/resolve data, including site contents. It's kind of like a "shadow realm" for the Internet because it only lives in datacenters and whatever "wormhole" connections you make into that network from outside of it. That does allow us to evade the icy grip of Big Internet Protocol, but not the ghost of internet protocol past and present.

Actually the problem with the web is that nobody wants it in its current form, I think. Partially maybe because it got polluted/embrace-extend-extinguished as a consequence of platforms like Reddit, Google Search, Facebook, etc. But also because the cost and time complexity is too high for regular people, or even most technical people, to make full use of it on a personal basis. My hope is that we/someone can make it dead-simple and cheap to setup, create, and host non-trivial websites used by real humans to do real human things besides marketing and the content that enables marketing.
by cbondurant | 2025-11-16 22:40:34+00:00
This feels like a very indirect way of saying "yes the fourier transform of a signal is a breakdown of its component frequencies, but depending on the kind of signal you are trying to characterize for it might not be what you actually need."

Its not that unintuitive to imagine that if all of your signals are pulses, something like the wavelet transform might do a better job at giving you meaningful insights into a signal than the fourier transform might.
by ajross | 2025-11-16 22:41:12+00:00
The news is that a whale is dumping, not that the whale is making a rational decision. We all know the market isn't rational in the short term, merely efficient in the long term. And we all suspect (as does Thiel!) that NVDA is unsustainably priced.

So if the whale is dumping, maybe smaller investors will dump too. Maybe we should too.
by lithocarpus | 2025-11-16 22:41:41+00:00
So sprayed metal particles from airplanes for weather modification are only "chemtrails" if it's done covertly.

Language sure is interesting.

I guess there's also a spectrum of what covert means. If a government does this but only announces it in places where only a few people hear about it from the official source, I guess that still counts as public and so not chemtrails.
by iLemming | 2025-11-16 22:41:48+00:00
> one click gives you a perfectly modern fast editor with a smorgasbord of great extensions that just work

I use over 300 hundred packages in my Emacs setup. I honestly not sure if I can install even half of that number of VSCode extensions and expect it to still run smoothly, maybe people do that, I just don't know.

They are called "packages" and not "extensions" for a reason - an extension that e.g., ships with a browser has limitations. In Emacs I can reuse functions of one package in another - in VSCode they have to be explicitly exposed via public API, must be activated in order, they need to be aware of their extension IDs, there's no discovery mechanism - in Elisp, I don't have to deal with any of that.

in Emacs I can explore, modify and bend the source code of any package - built-in or third-party. I can do it in a way that is simply impossible anywhere else. I can granularly change selected behavior of any command without having to rewrite it fully.

That "just works™" part I don't ever buy it - all software is faulty by nature. In Emacs, when something fails - I know exactly how to troubleshoot it, to the specific line in the specific package code; I can profile; debug and trace it. I can modify code in question in a scratch buffer and immediately check how it affects things. Not only I don't have to restart anything, I don't even have to save that code anywhere.

You call it "a legacy editor" without the slightest clue of what Emacs hackers are capable of doing - for what the most "modern" alternatives simply have no answers.

I agree, Emacs is not for the faint-hearted - many people (maybe most) lack the patience required to grok it. Yet make no mistake, those who have tamed this beast are not staying in it simply because "they don't know any better". They know - something better is yet to be made, if ever. VSCode is great, yet still not better.

Learning Emacs has liberated me from experiencing tool-FOMO ever again - I can switch to VSCode without abandoning Emacs, and I can even probably figure a way to control one from another if I get annoyed enough; I just never found a pragmatic reason to use VSCode more. So really, I have zero envy or crave to even become a full-time VSCode user; if anything, I might be forced into it by circumstances, but that's a different story.
by buu700 | 2025-11-16 22:42:19+00:00
I read that as a cynical view of the motivations of corporations, not humans. Even if individuals have good faith beliefs in "AI 'safety'", and even if some such individuals work for AI companies, the behaviors of the companies themselves are ultimately the product of many individual motivations and surrounding incentive structures.

To the extent that a large corporation can be said to "believe" or "mean" anything, that seems like a fair statement to me. It's just a more specific case of pointing out that for-profit corporations as entities are ultimately motivated by profit, not public benefit (even if specific founders/employees/shareholders are individually motivated by certain ideals).
Show HN: Engineered doc accuracy at LinkedIn, made the truth layer for docs
by aa_y_ush | 2025-11-16 22:42:41+00:00
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Technical writers/ PMs can immediately leverage the platform by uploading reference documents and checking their new work against these docs for free.

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by thrwaway55 | 2025-11-16 22:43:08+00:00
I agree that is what it would take to get a high score on their site but I think it's an unrealistic expectation to suggest that the developer should be on the hook indefinitely for content. Each card game set is functionally a new game with some costs amortized thanks to it's previous sets.

We have seen the forever sticker price in mega hit indies ala Stardew Valley or Terraria but I don't think that is really healthy to expect for gaming as a whole and is more that small teams hit a home run.
by Rochus | 2025-11-16 22:43:33+00:00
Well, there must have been a good reason why you don't like the book. I didn't see good reasons in this whole discussion so far, just a lot of pedantry. No commenter points to technical errors, inaccuracies, poor code examples, or pedagogical problems. The entire objection rests on subjective style preferences and aesthetic nitpicking rather than legitimate quality concerns.
by spopejoy | 2025-11-16 22:43:39+00:00
Not really? APTs would seem to be either criminal enterprises or state-sponsored because SOMEBODY has to be paying the big bucks.

So yes, probably 100% of criminal enterprises are paying off officials, but if that's the definition of "state sponsored" then the term loses any meaning.

EDIT I guess there's also "legit" businesses like Palantir/NSO group, but I would argue any firm like that is effectively state-sponsored as they are usually revolving doors with NSA-type agencies, the military etc.
by rayiner | 2025-11-16 22:45:37+00:00
> Even bonobo monkeys and elephants understand empathy for others.

Empathy is an emotion. Emotions are real. You can see emotions in brain scans. But anger, desire for revenge, disgust, in-group affinity, etc., are also real emotions! It's rational to use people's emotions to guide what society should do. But most putatively secular people disagree with that approach! They're constantly telling people to put aside their emotions in favor of supposed universal principles that sound suspiciously similar to religious beliefs.
by scrps | 2025-11-16 22:46:12+00:00
Nonpersistent vm-based browser, I use qemu + cage + firefox and some glue logic to fire up a copy of a base image which gets deleted on exit. Fires up slower than a native firefox instance but runs all the same.

Can containerize for the less paranoid and less work but browsers touching host kernel gives me the ick as does the idea of trying to write ebpf policies for firefox to mitigate. Browsers are pain.
by pessimizer | 2025-11-16 22:46:21+00:00
It's so bizarre how a gay billionaire helping build artificial intelligence, owning a surveillance empire, and basically trying to put the mark of the beast on everyone is also yelling about the antichrist. If you were a bible-believing Christian, you'd think he was a top 5 candidate.

Mentioning the antichrist would probably move him up to at least top 3. Isn't the antichrist supposed to pretend he's fighting the antichrist in modern popular Pentacostal/Charismatic eschatology?
by charlie-83 | 2025-11-16 22:48:07+00:00
This feels useful even if the software don't directly tranlate to how "predatory" the game is and if scores can't be compared between games.

Sure, being unable to pause the game isn't necessarily the developer being evil, but it's good to have a website that tells you about it before you buy the game.

I think you just need to interpret a game having a low score as there being some parts of the game that you might want to know about before buying/playing rather than "this game is evil".

In the same way that, when a film is rated 18, I can check whether that means it's going to scar me for life or if it shows a nipple for 2 seconds.
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-11-16 22:50:06+00:00
You don’t need formal tools. You only need a bash tool that can run shell scripts and cli tools!

Overwhelmed by Sentry errors recently I remembered sentry-cli. I asked the agent to use it to query for unresolved Sentry errors and make a plan that addresses all of them at once. Zeroed out my Sentry inbox in one Claude Code plan. All up it took about an hour.

The agent was capable of sussing out sentry-cli, even running it with --help to understand how to use it.

The same goes for gh, the github cli tool.

So rather than MCPs or function style tools, I highly recommend building custom cli tools (ie. shell scripts), and adding a 10-20 word description of each one in your initial prompt. Add --help capabilities for your agent to use if it gets confused or curious.
by int_19h | 2025-11-16 22:50:55+00:00
Organizations don't have a notion of morality; only people do.

The larger an organization is, and the more bureaucratized it is, the less morality of individual people in it affects it overall operation.

Consequently, yes, it is absolutely true that Ford and BMW as a whole don't care about safety of actual people, regardless of what individual people working for them think.

Separately, the nature of progression in hierarchical organizations is basically a selection for sociopathy, so the people who rise to the top of large organizations can generally be assumed to not care about other people, regardless of what they claim in public.
by nearbuy | 2025-11-16 22:51:54+00:00
Your plan is to release the secret recipe that anyone can use to make a WMD in a few days to absolutely everyone and hope someone comes up with a countermeasure before some nutcase or terrorist decides to try out the new WMD?

The odds of us inventing and deploying countermeasures to a new bomb or chemical weapon or biological agent in a few days is miniscule. You're gambling with terrible odds to uphold a principle in a hypothetical scenario where it's totally impractical. What happened to responsible disclosure, where you fix the vulnerability before disclosing it to the public?