MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by FrankWilhoit | 2025-11-28 19:58:16+00:00
The obstacles to exploitable fusion will not be overcome. There, I said it, I own it, come back and beat me with it if I turn out to be wrong.

In order to see this, by way of contradiction, suppose a stable, sustained reaction.

1. How much of the heat is exchanged, and how is the rest dissipated? (How would you design a conventional steam generator if the ignition temperature of coal or gas were millions of degrees?) 2. How refuel? (Stars don't need to refuel: how far down does that scale?) 3. How small a breach of containment would destroy the apparatus?
by kazinator | 2025-11-28 19:58:40+00:00
sprintf can be safely used.

- For some conversions, you can establish an upper bound on how many characters they will produce. E.g. a positive decimal integer not more than 9999 does not consume more than four characters.

- It's possible to specify truncation. e.g. "%.64s" prints at most 64 characters from the string argument.

- There are enirely static cases that can be worked out at compile time, e.g.

char big_enuf_buf[BIG_ENUF_BUF_SIZE]; sprintf(big_enuf_buf, "%x-%04x-%04x", MAJOR, MINOR, BUILD); // preprocessor constants

Even if the buffer isn't big enough, and the behavior is formally undefined, it is entirely analyzable at compile time and we have support for that: the compiler can work out that the conversion needs, e.g., 13 bytes, including null termination, but the buffer only has 12.

The reasons for analyzing to it wouldn't necessarily just be for diagnostics, but possibly for compiling it down to a literal:

char big_enuf_buf[BIG_ENUF_BUF_SIZE] = "A1-0013-000A";
by mrguyorama | 2025-11-28 19:58:55+00:00
The Voyager probes were built with many course corrections and maneuvers in mind. They carried 100kg of Hydrazine fuel at launch, and it is almost all used up. That was about 1/8th of total craft mass at launch, which is significant.

Midcourse corrections are a standard and planned part of lots of probe missions.

I think we even did midcourse corrections for the moon missions.
by poemxo | 2025-11-28 19:59:23+00:00
> I told my friend about an erotic encounter I’d just experienced and very much delighted in, in which I had my hair brushed at the same time by two very beautiful women at the hair salon — one was teaching the other how to do it a certain way. When I finished my story, my friend looked at me, horrified.

I would look at her in horror too. My aversion to touching, being touched by, or even being in a close space with other people comes from exactly this sort of worry, that my presence is being used for some sort of sexual experience unbeknownst to me.

Some lines from the article gave me the ick.

> It is beautiful, unplanned and does not judge itself because it is an inert sensation, unimbued with premeditated meaning. This should liberate rather than frighten us.

I don't need to be told to free my mind just because I don't conform to your gooner sh*t.

> Only when we are unafraid can we begin to let desire flourish.

Oh okay, if I disagree with the author then I am just ~afraid~

It really seems to me that the author is internally dealing with sexual feelings and rationalizing them as social commentary, transforming her views into a critique of society and cancel culture, while simultaneously backing out and promising that MeToo was valid and that she was definitely not trying to say that MeToo was an overreaction (nice save author!)
by surgical_fire | 2025-11-28 19:59:28+00:00
I tried the same questions on multiple different threads, to multiple different imbeciles posting the same bullshit.

You will never get an answer from them. But we should keep asking it anyway.

I always wondered if they live on the EU and are genuinely too stupid to understand how the bloc their country joined works or, most likely, live outside of it and the idea of the EU as a political entity offends their sensibilities or heighten their anxiety.
by port11 | 2025-11-28 19:59:41+00:00
So we're blaming parents now? I don't know a single parent that understands what a VPN is or why the government needs to be on top of that.

This is 100% a crusade against online anonymity and a bid for control. Children aren't using VPNs, adults are, and politicians are quite convinced that that's where dissidence and danger lies.
by gruez | 2025-11-28 20:00:04+00:00
>It's open in the sense that anyone can use it. Without restriction. And there's no way to be banned from it. Since anyone can just drop off an anonymous letter in the post. You don't have to enter a service agreement. Just dump you satchel of letters with stamps on them, in the nearest mail box.

1. So this sounds like the section 230 debate all over again? eg. "Facebook can ban people from facebook messenger, so if they're not banning scammers they should be on the hook for it"?

2. What about ISPs? The internet might be open, but ISPs certainly aren't. People get banned for AUP violations or alleged copyright infringement all the time. If ISPs reserve the right to ban users for various ToS violations, should they be on the hook of scammers turned out to be using their connection?
by yason | 2025-11-28 20:00:05+00:00
For a lot of things, zero value would be a high peak. Often the value is negative. Thus:

You don't update anything if it works and it's not connected to internet.

If it works and is connected to internet, then disconnect it from internet if possible.

For the rest, delay updates for long enough without having heard complaints that there's sufficient confidence on the update not breaking anything.
by nuancebydefault | 2025-11-28 20:00:08+00:00
30 years ago it was rather normal that a manager would touch the behind of a coworker, which is clearly a bad thing. Nowadays looking in their direction a bit too long seems to be labeled 'not done'.

Some time ago I said to a coworker who I consider as a friend : 'I enjoy your company'. Another (younger, italian) coworker told me to be careful after I said to him 'she has such a soft voice'.

I really did not expect that reaction. To my feeling, no line got crossed and the fact that we are still friends and at times even share our thoughts about love and relationships in general, proves that we trust and respect each other.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-11-28 20:00:17+00:00
I imagine that someone asking for advice isn't trying to take any comment wholesale. It's to help answer one of the above questions that they currently cannot right now.

For an internet forum, I've found it easier to ask direct, actionable questions like "should I buy this couch" than "is [couch brand] good?". Even if what I really wanted to get at was the former. Maybe the brand isnt good but the price is a steal. Maybe the brand is so utterly trash that you couldn't give it away. But putting the brand into the question instead of a direct 'thing' changes the discourse.
Show HN: Open-source AI Codemaps written in Rust
by RohanAdwankar | 2025-11-28 20:00:19+00:00
Hey everyone happy to share this newest release which enables codemaps where nodes in the diagram are connected with your codebase. This includes AI support with commands like `oxdraw --code-map ./ --gemini <api>` in order to generate a codemap.

Would love to hear some feedback on whether this looks like something you would use, and if not, suggestions for improvements!
by austin-cheney | 2025-11-28 20:00:30+00:00
That's not accurate.

This is debatable but subprime loans were mostly accurately rated. They were rated very low. That low rating was the ultimate precursor to the crash, because it means banks carrying those poorly rated vehicles needed to balance them with different highly rated vehicles to keep their own rating high enough to qualify carrying and lending other financial assets on their books. There were so many of these shitty loans that they had to repackage them to dilute their value/rating against their other highly rated assets, because there are limited number of highly rated assets any given bank could acquire at a moment.

That dilution was called a credit default swap, which is bundling under the guise of an insurance vehicle. This magnified the problem for two reasons: First these shitty assets can now be traded in large bulk and secondly any given bank can now carry more of them before further eroding their value. That proved catastrophic because this toxic debt could not be moved fast enough by anybody that held them. Its like hot potato or musical chairs, like Bitcoin. The only real difference between those credit default swaps and Bitcoin is only that everybody knows Bitcoin is intrinsically worthless and only exists as an instrument of speculation while many people actually thought these credit default swaps were real financial assets and that they were insured.
by angoragoats | 2025-11-28 20:01:13+00:00
He needs to sue A16Z for libel. Or maybe he already is in the process of doing that, given this sentence from the article: “This is a factual assertion that is (a) false, (b) easy to fact-check, and (c) casts my work ethic, and that of my editors, in an unflattering light.”

These shitty VCs with their LLM-generated garbage need to be held accountable for their actions.
by jt-hill | 2025-11-28 20:01:14+00:00
Author here. I thought was doing what I was supposed to do by using Decimals heavily in my credkit[0] Python library, but I did some testing and discovered it wasn't worth the pain for me. Test code [1] is available for the curious.

The moral of the story is that "best practices" are not a substitute for using your brain.

[0]: https://github.com/jt-hill/credkit

[1]: https://gist.github.com/jt-hill/839e1a6c51d28cbcb8fc69e61431...
by anonzzzies | 2025-11-28 20:01:40+00:00
I agree with you but until we speak the same language, this is going to take a while. I am Dutch, speak Dutch, French, German, Spanish and Portuguese (and Mandarin) rather well, but I speak mostly English to prove a point as I believe we should pick a language (does not have to be English but seems the most obvious). I won't see this in my lifetime, nor my childrens or grandchildren.

With easily accessible and massive funding by the EU for issues like this would get a lot of uniting done without more federating. I easily can point out 1000s of people who would spend their time working on EU sovereign/open source office 365, ai, aws etc etc the rest of their working lives and beyond, but it needs to make money and there is no money. Both investor money and EU money are incredibly hard to secure here for these type of efforts. Not impossible but very hard.
by franga2000 | 2025-11-28 20:01:45+00:00
Database encryption isn't comparable to the keyboard drama. Protecting against malware in your keyboard can be done by using a different meyboard and is of course out of scope.

But if my phone gets taken and an exploit is used to get root access on it, I don't want the messages to be readable and there's nothing I can do about it. It's not like I can just use a different storage backend.

It's also a very simple solution - just let me set an encryption password. It's not an open-ended problem like protecting from malware running on the device when you're using it.
by CGMthrowaway | 2025-11-28 20:01:55+00:00
The five anti-patterns (or remedies, rather)-

1. Don't re-send info you've already sent (be resourceful) 2. Play to model strengths (e.g. generating an image of text vs generating text in an image, or coding/executing a string counter rather than counting a search string) 3. Stay aware of declining accuracy as context window fills up 4. Don't ask for things it doesnt know (e.g. obscure topics or outside cutoff window) 5. Careful with vibe coding
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-11-28 20:02:42+00:00
Yes. Note that I mentioned that, in my comment.

BTW: I didn't actually make that much money. Kids coming out of college, make more than I ever did, at my peak. I just lived very frugally, avoided personal debt, and saved and invested as best as I could.

I guarantee that a lot of folks here, would sneer at the way that I lived, and live now.
by anonym29 | 2025-11-28 20:02:49+00:00
You're absolutely right that the appropriate level of security does depend on someone's threat model, but I do want to point out that you don't need to be an activist to benefit from privacy.

I'm a really big fan of the airport bathroom analogy. When you use the restroom in the airport, you close the stall door behind you.

You're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide, and everyone knows what you're doing. But you take actions to preserve your privacy anyway, and that's good.

Everyone deserves privacy, and the psychological comfort that comes with it. Dance like nobody's watching, encrypt like everyone is :)
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-11-28 20:03:28+00:00
Unfortunately Lobsters might claim to be non political but is actually quite political. Because the moderators and increasingly the remaining community identifies with American progressive left values, a pretty common thing to see on the site is political posts along those lines getting upvoted and other political philosophies being flagged as political.

It's probably the most deeply unpleasant part about the site IMO. I don't think there's anything wrong with moderators all sharing certain politics. On Lobsters though, there's this hugely disingenuous gaslighting culture where the political ingroup can break rules while the outgroup can't but it's never explicitly acknowledged by the moderators or the community.
by internetter | 2025-11-28 20:03:58+00:00
Conversely, hn gets a lot of content which simply isn't intellectually stimulating. Like on the front page atm is pocketbase—a git repo which currently has 53k stars which I've known of for many years, and a surface level article on RAG titled 'So you wanna build a local RAG?' ~~which seems to mostly just exist so the author can plug their company in the first line.~~ which doesn't really contribute much niche knowledge you can't obtain anywhere else. As a blogger myself I can't claim superiority—I've done this plenty, but this content just doesn't seem to do as well on lobste.rs as compared to really niche content which is directly relevant to very few people, but as a result required a great deal of research and time and very possibly is of great utility to a rare few.

Edit: though to be clear this is a spectrum with heavy overlap. Just general biases I've observed. Like on Lobste.rs there is an article titled 'Electron vs. Tauri' atm.
by merb | 2025-11-28 20:04:06+00:00
I don’t think that http/3 is easier to implement than http/1.1 especially since h3 is stateful where http/1.1 is not. Especially not when everything should be working correctly and securely because the spec does not always tell about these things. Oh and multiplexing is quite a hard thing to do especially when you are also dealing with a state machine and each of your clients can be malicious.
by pfannkuchen | 2025-11-28 20:04:26+00:00
Of course they installed more industrial robots than the rest of the world combined, most of the high volume factories are there.

I have nothing against the Chinese by the way, I just don’t think the fate of Europe should be so beholden to whatever they are doing with manufacturing. They are undercutting us in a way that hurts Europeans? Great, cut them off. Most Chinese products in the west are lower quality than what they replaced anyway.

The real answer is that the long period of Chinese outsourcing masked the inflationary impact of money supply expansion, which is super duper convenient for the people with power in the west. So this won’t happen absent some kind of revolution, or a recognition that the juice has been squeezed too much.
by asdfman123 | 2025-11-28 20:06:28+00:00
> I should state at this point that this is not an essay about “cancel culture going too far,” a topic which can now be historicized as little more than a rhetorical cudgel wielded successfully by the right to wrest cultural power back from an ascendant progressive liberalism

Well, maybe it should be. I'm a progressive but I'm tired of people trying to ruin my life over nothing, just as the author is.

I'm am against the far right, and as a result I feel we should not give the far right ammunition. A lot of people voted for DT because they saw him as the lesser a-hole, and the left badly needs to acknowledge that.
by antonvs | 2025-11-28 20:06:41+00:00
> The fact remains that consciousness is a physical function of physical brains--collections of molecules--and can definitely be the result of computation

Ok, so are LLMs conscious? And if not, what’s the difference between them and a human brain - what distinguishes a non-conscious machine from a conscious entity? And if the consciousness is a consequence of computation, what causes the qualitative change from blind, machine like execution of instructions? How would such a shift in the fundamental nature of mechanical computation even be possible?

No neuroscientist currently knows the answer to this, and neither do you. That’s a direct manifestation of the hard problem of consciousness.

> I've partied with David Chalmers

Sadly, not at an intellectual level.
by Kaxo | 2025-11-28 20:06:44+00:00
Yeah, doing it with OpenWRT and PBR is definately much simpler than this approach. However by using hard-coded IP addresses you are at risk of breakage if they change in the future.

Also fastly-hosted services are a bit awkard to configure IP ranges to cover whole blocks as they seem to not use normal CIDR-blocks for different customers.

But you use PBR's ntfset functionality to have your dns server automatically update a set whenever an DNS entry is resolved, then set the policy rules based on the set.
by martijn_himself | 2025-11-28 20:07:26+00:00
This is a great idea except for me (and for the author I suspect) I regularly come across attachment of Imgur hosted images on sites (like a post on a DIY forum but not all of them) so it wouldn't solve my issue unless I were to use your browser in the container all the time (I suspect the author also doesn't just 'surf imgur' but randomly comes across images hosted on imgur linked to from other locations).
by Zigurd | 2025-11-28 20:07:48+00:00
Ads have become safe and bland. Automotive parts and tools calendars ain't what they used to be. The sexual imagery of things like OF is the product, it's not selling a product. I've never seen one instance where trans visibility has been used in an ad. Closeted sexuality is a big source of society's problems. The combination of shame and power has terrible results. The era before Stonewall was certainly exciting for the police doing the beatings. But maybe those in the wrong people to ask.
by data-ottawa | 2025-11-28 20:08:07+00:00
I’m sceptical

The models seem to still (claude opus 4.5) not get things right, and miss edge cases, and work code in a way that’s not very structured.

I use them daily, but I often have to rewrite a lot to reshape the codebase to a point where it makes sense to use the model again.

I’m sure they’ll continue to get better, but out of a job better in 5 years? I’m not betting on it.
by YC9834689 | 2025-11-28 20:08:16+00:00
Most European countries barely have a standing military to defend themselves, they're completely dependent on the USA for defense through NATO. And their leadership is so docile and complacent that I can't see them being able to muster up a strong resistance to any incursion, most likely if there was an actual invasion of The Hague they would let America do what they need to and try to return back to business as usual as quickly as possible. Again, they're not the types to think beyond the status quo.
by willio58 | 2025-11-28 20:08:31+00:00
My partner recently bought a newer Subaru. It’s great, and when we looked it up we saw it had remote start. Turns out it’s behind a subscription. When I found that out I essentially wrote off Subaru as a brand for my future car purchases. Catch me driving my 2017 civic into the ground before I pay a freaking subscription for basic vehicle functionality
by matt-attack | 2025-11-28 20:09:46+00:00
Avoid vague terms like “size” when talking about a wheel. A car wheel all has a diameter, usually expressed in inches, and a width also usually expressed in inches.

It’s not clear to me which dimension folks are saying, has a relationship to brake size. I’m imagining width is the dimension related to wind efficiency, but I would nonetheless ask folks to use more accurate terms like wheel diameter or width.
by linsomniac | 2025-11-28 20:09:58+00:00
One of the big rules is you don't expose the unwilling public. Apologizing to the two women who were brushing the author's hair is a double-whammy: you're involving them in the sexualizing of this experience, and you're implicitly expecting them to be ok with it and forgive you.

If someone is going to demand you do this or they will end their friendship with you, you're "lowkey" better off losing that friend.
by mijoharas | 2025-11-28 20:10:12+00:00
I'm interested in the embeddings models suggested. I had some good results with nomic in a small embedding based tool I built. I also heard a few good things about qwen3-embedding, though the latency wasn't great for my usecase so I didn't pursue it much further.

Similarly, I used sqlite-vec, and was very happy with it. (if I were already using postgres I'd have gone with that, but this was more of a cli tool).

If the author is here, did you try any of those models? how would you compare the ones you did use?
by mr_mitm | 2025-11-28 20:10:13+00:00
Check out the Microsoft baseline security guidelines for Windows 11. It's about 400 entries. 400 settings that Microsoft themselves recommend changing from the defaults to achieve a baseline security.

Why does windows 11 show stock values in the task bar by default? Why does it show ads, games and yellow press headlines when you click on it? On the enterprise edition! Xbox services are installed and running by default. Why?
by kragen | 2025-11-28 20:10:17+00:00
They surely were not the best use of scarce resources. However, I don't know if you've ever tried to run a business in a poor country. It turns out that the decentralized economic systems they have are also not economically rational, systematically failing to provide functioning market mechanisms that support long-term investments such as highway systems, reliable electric grids, municipal water treatment, etc., even when those things would be highly efficient uses of scarce resources. Rather, generally speaking, they systematically squander their resources in order to stabilize the existing socioeconomic power structures.

Generally speaking, if you invest your money in a historically kleptocratic country, you can expect your investment to get confiscated if it's profitable, and possibly even if it's not, which is what happened to my retirement savings. Even if you make your investment at a time when the country is governed by non-kleptocrats, you will probably lose it after the next coup or election in which new kleptocrats come to power.

In that environment, where private investment in long-term infrastructure projects is irrational and languishing in poverty for many generations is the normal state of affairs, state capitalism frequently works.

I don't think moral arguments about atrocities are somehow orthogonal here. Power plants and electrical grids are often worthwhile investments, not because building monuments to Westinghouse is a pious sacrifice that pleases the electrical gods, but because they promote human welfare by providing material abundance. That's how we measure whether society is richer, not, as you say, by the amount of concrete poured. If human welfare is your yardstick, the possibility of economic catastrophes like the Holodomor greatly diminishing human welfare must necessarily weigh on the negative side of the balance. The inhabitants of Auschwitz and the Congo Free State were not enjoying even the material abundance they had enjoyed previously.

So we know that central planning carries risks to human welfare that decentralized systems do not. However, it also has opportunities to promote human welfare that decentralized systems do not. The variance is larger. I don't think we know enough to measure the expectation.