MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pmontra | 2025-12-08 07:32:26+00:00
Desktop and mobile: Firefox and uBlock Origin.

Mobile: Blockada to prevent apps from reaching their ad servers. NewPipe.

Desktop: Freetube.

uBO has the bonus to have an element picker that I use to remove the empty areas where ads would show. I do it for sites that I use often. I also remove some useless menus and headers. I particularly hate sticky ones.
by solumunus | 2025-12-08 07:32:26+00:00
This utility is what helps stabilise its value, but the side effect of that is that it is a good store of wealth. These two facts make BTC go up. People say Bitcoin isn’t used for anything when in reality it’s being used every day to store and move wealth between big financial players (many of them being organised crime). Why wouldn’t they continue using this useful technology and therefore why won’t its value hold/increase? Is it moral to piggy back off this? That’s for you to decide. It’s worth considering that many major banks have been involved with organised crime since forever…
by Jean-Papoulos | 2025-12-08 07:33:05+00:00
>Palantir would need to grow its revenues roughly 15-fold (yes, 1,500%) over the next quarter century, implying sustained annual revenue growth in the 35% range over this time frame.

That's actually a pretty reasonnable ask for a tech company, if you believe Palantir can grow to the level of FAANG.
by mmooss | 2025-12-08 07:33:36+00:00
> on Windows you have a system where the default way is to let the user control the software and install random things, and you need to patch that ability away first.

That's certainly not the default in a managed corporate environment. Even for home users, Microsoft restricts what you can install more and more.

And restrictions are not implemented via patch, but via management capabilities native to the OS, accessed via checkboxes in Group Policy.
by solatic | 2025-12-08 07:35:35+00:00
> But then your various managers have the ammunition to decide what to do next - allocate more resources to the project, descope the project, push back the release date, etc.

In your view, is this a good thing or a bad thing for developers? In other words, are developers incentivized to update their tickets because it gives their managers "ammunition" to make project changes?

I find that this is usually more evidence of organizational dysfunction.

Sometimes, its developers who don't have enough ownership - someone higher-ranking filled out all the tickets for them and left no room for interpretation, so changes require trashing a bunch of irrelevant tickets and writing a bunch of new ones, making for more communication overhead and less time spent in development. Developers are disincentivized to update tickets since doing so just becomes write-amplification for more bureaucratic overhead.

Sometimes, it's a communication breakdown. Tools like Jira are necessarily asynchronous, and decisions about what to build are necessarily political. Politics and asynchronicity don't mix, such discussions need to be held face-to-face. If they're held face-to-face, then having developers update Jira is pure overhead. Developers are disincentivized from updating Jira because either it's a one-sided conversation (lag in getting notified that your ticket was closed and the work on it should be thrown out, PMs don't always follow through with issue links from the closed issue to the newly opened issues, so developers lack context on what decisions were made on replacements), which is emotionally draining, or the conversation happens outside of Jira, in which case updating the ticket is a formality/not actual communication, in which case it feels like a waste of time.

For most development work, I'd argue that developers shouldn't be making changes in Jira, their managers should be, on the basis of frequent, synchronous communication with the developers they manage.
by colinstrickland | 2025-12-08 07:35:59+00:00
Do you not think O'Reilly Associates fits some of that role? It seemed like Perl had more commercial backing compared to the other scripting languages if anything at that point. Python and JavaScript were picked up by Google, but later. Amazon was originally built out of Perl. Perl never converted its industry footprint into that kind of advocacy, I think some of that is also culture-driven.
by kragen | 2025-12-08 07:36:03+00:00
That is not what happened.

EPIC development at HP started in 01989, and the Intel collaboration was publicly announced in 01994. The planned ship date for Merced, the first Itanic, was 01998, and it was first floorplanned in 01996, the year Java was announced. Merced finally taped out in July 01999, three months after the first JIT option for the JVM shipped. Nobody was assuming that JIT compiled languages were going to dominate the new century at that time, although there were some promising signs from Self and Strongtalk that maybe they could be half as fast as C.
by derriz | 2025-12-08 07:36:12+00:00
How exactly can you send a billion dollars to someone in Uganda using Bitcoin?

Purchase and sale of bitcoin is highly regulated and obviously tracked - and the blockchain itself provides little privacy - I’m guessing state-level actors have already attached identities to most of the wallet addresses out there.

So if I hand you access to $1 billion dollars - cash or in a bank account - how could I practically get $1 billion dollars to an individual in Uganda so that they could spend the dollars?
Show HN: Lockenv – Simple encrypted secrets storage for Git
by shoemann | 2025-12-08 07:36:45+00:00
Hi!

I got tired of setting up tools I can't explain to a team in a few words like sops or git-crypt, just to store few files with environment variables or secrets, so I built lockenv as a simple alternative.

It's basically a password-protected vault file you commit to git. No gpg keys, no cloud, just lockenv init, set a password, and lock/unlock the secrets.

This tool integrates with OS keyring, so you're not typing passwords constantly. Should work on Mac/Linux/Windows, but I tested it only on linux so far.

I am not trying to replace any mature / robust solution, just making small tool for simple cases, where I want to stop sharing secrets via slack.

Feel free to try, thank you!
by altmanaltman | 2025-12-08 07:37:15+00:00
Yeah, that makes sense. If people don't see uses for AI, they shouldn't use it. But going out of the way to imply that people who use AI cannot think is pretty stupid in itself imo. I am not sure how to put this, but maybe to continue with your example, I like a lot of indie stuff as well, but I don't think anyone who watches, say, Fast and Furious, cannot think or is stupid, unless they explicitly make it the case by speaking, etc.

So my issue is that you shouldn't dismiss AI use as trash just because AI has been used. You should dismiss it as trash because it is trash. But the post says is that you should dismiss it as trash because AI was involved in it somewhere so i feel that's a very shitty/wrong attitude to have.
by WalterBright | 2025-12-08 07:38:12+00:00
> Legal protection and structural advantages for landlord interests over tenant interests.

Rent control is not in the landlord's business. In Seattle, the other legislation against landlords is pushing them out of business.

> Pushing the tax burden for upkeeping society off people who own more shit than any of us ever will onto people who have to work for a living.

1% pay 40% of the federal income tax.

Google [percent of federal government spending spent on wealth redistribution] says: "A significant portion of U.S. federal spending, around 60-70%, goes to social insurance and safety net programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Income Security, which function as wealth redistribution by supporting retirees, the needy, and vulnerable populations, though the exact "wealth redistribution" percentage varies by definition but centers on these large mandatory spending categories. In FY 2024, Social Security and Medicare alone were 36% of the budget, with Income Security adding another ~9-10%."

> Legal protection and structural advantages for employer interests over employee interests vis a vis wage theft, worker safety, worker injuries, etc.

The legal advantage again is for the employee. For example, wage theft is illegal and is aggressively prosecuted.
by jstummbillig | 2025-12-08 07:38:27+00:00
To me, 100-500x higher death rates are simply not a detail that I can get past. Since we are basically of the same genetic makeup (which is also the cornerstone of you argument) that simply seems incompatible with a better life. It's possible I am lacking vision for how it all gels into the good existence you think it does.

What I think makes this idea interesting: We are not as fantastically happy today as we should be, if progress on the tangibles translated into happiness. So there's definitely something that is off and I can totally see what you are describing being part of it.
by qart | 2025-12-08 07:38:35+00:00
You're right. MISRA is a cult. Actual studies[1][2] have shown many of their rules to be harmful rather than helpful. I have worked in multiple safety-critical industries. MISRA is almost always enforced by bureaucrats who don't understand source code at all, or by senior developers who rose up ranks as code monkeys. One such manager was impressed with Matlab because Matlab-generated C code was always MISRA compliant, whereas the code my company was giving them had violations. Never mind the fact that every function of the generated, compliant code had variables like tmp01, tmp02, tmp03, etc.

There are many areas of software where bureaucracy requires MISRA compliance, but that aren't really safety-critical. The code is a hot mess. There are other areas that require MISRA compliance and the domain is actually safety-critical (e.g. automotive software). Here, the saving grace is (1) low complexity of each CPU's codebase and (2) extensive testing.

To people who want actual safety, security, portability, I tell them to learn from examples set by the Linux kernel, SQLite, OpenSSL, FFMpeg, etc. Modern linters (even free ones) are actually valuable compared to MISRA compliance checkers.

[1] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/4658076

[2] https://repository.tudelft.nl/record/uuid:646de5ba-eee8-4ec8...
by littlestymaar | 2025-12-08 07:38:51+00:00
> LLMs and human brains are both just mechanisms. Why would one mechanism a priori be capable of "learning abstract thought", but no others?

“Internal combustion engines and human brains are both just mechanisms. Why would one mechanism a priori be capable of "learning abstract thought", but no others?”

The question isn't about what an hypothetical mechanism can do or not, it's about whether the concrete mechanism we built does or not. And this one doesn't.
by Glawen | 2025-12-08 07:38:53+00:00
So they drop the voltage to mimic an engine cranking, and they are surprised that the ECU behaves like it is cranking. When engine cranks, voltage drops below minimum voltage required by ECU to keep SW running (SW resets). To counter these, ECUs keep outputs to the max. Normally I would expect an electrical loop with the crank signal though.
by KolmogorovComp | 2025-12-08 07:38:59+00:00
> Many EU countries are falling over each-other to buy it

They are not buying it for its capabilities though, but to please their US ally/bully which would have retaliated economically otherwise.

See the very recent Swiss case were theirs pilots had chosen another aircraft (the french Rafale), only to be disavowed by their politics later on.
by musicale | 2025-12-08 07:39:30+00:00
Switch is more like smartphone hardware, though with differentiation and innovation in the form factor, hybrid docking design, and joy-con controllers; and it's clearly still a game console, running a custom OS and software and supporting game cartridges.

The influence goes both ways however - both the Steam Deck and Steam Machine are attempts to build a PC that resembles a game console (the former being Switch-like and the latter as something of a "GabeCube.") Steam Deck's Game Mode UI and Steam's Big Picture mode try to provide a console-like experience as well.
by voodooEntity | 2025-12-08 07:40:24+00:00
THanks for sharing this. Partly because i forgot about this great website :D also because i would never thought of giving this as an LLM task because its so simple that i prolly just had hacked it down myself :D

I recently experimented alot with agentic coding (mostly with gemini+ intellij plugin, copilot intellij plugin and intellij's own junie) and also condsidered to give it a try and feed images to the AI, but than all tasks i tried so far were pure backend-ish so it never came to the point.

Im really curious how especially junie will act and i will give it a try with the very same task you gave it. We gonne see how it ends :D
by tatersolid | 2025-12-08 07:40:31+00:00
That might be from a Microsoft feature to prevent phishing that blocks display name spoofing. I get hit with that when I email from my personal to work email… the display name portion of the FROM address matches my work so it trips this filter.

Obviously they can only do this for unique-enough names and so this filtering could never work for “Joe Miller” but it does stop the dozens of phishes we see per day that are FROM our CEO’s first and last name but with a Gmail email address.
by HaZeust | 2025-12-08 07:40:34+00:00
>"Others have shown why most of your other points are wrong or don't need blockchain"

Answered them. Introducing 0 knowledge proofs was a good point but blockchain can still be a medium to utilize these possibilities. I don't believe a conventional database or transparency log can meaningfully substitute the decentralized nature of blockchain for such an operation, though; and I said as much in my replies.

>"This is completely false. In fact, at the scale of a country, almost no one can actually do this. 95+% of the population doesn't have the knowledge required to do something like this and understand why it works."

Why can't I apply this logic to current election systems? You can memorize and regurgitate a usa.gov or National Archives article to articulate it - but 95% of the populace doesn't actually know about those ballot counts, ballot transportation, result tallying, transmission and communication of said results, implications of Independent State Legislature Theory and how challenging it - at least on originalist grounds - can cause 50 different processes for each of the 50 different states, etc etc etc.

There is no more wasted time, energy, or blind trust than in the current system, and at least introducing zero knowledge proofs, blockchain (or another system) and cryptography to the electoral system can be rooted in the pragmatic AND be abstracted to a layman from any given savvy person, of which there's many. Even in the long term. As it its, it's not like independent researchers or cryptography nerds haven't called out institutional-wide folly; it's what happened with Dual_EC_DRBG, and was promptly laughed out the door for any serious cryptographer and highly publicized.

As for the rest, it's well known that the data is collected and retained on voter information as it is. We're seeing states like Colorado, just this past week, deny giving the current federal administration voter data from the previous election. You can reasonably predict roughly half of America's voting anyway; when their timeline of party affiliation AND the knowledge of whether they voted or not is already public information.
by GRiMe2D | 2025-12-08 07:41:11+00:00
Okay, let's image that I've sent you 100 BTC. Now, can you tell me how exactly you would convert the "money" I've sent you into bread and milk?

Because, most of the time people say that just in the context of the blockchain. In that sense I can also say that you can control vast majority of money by just having knife and glove skins in Steam (for the game Counter Strike). You also can trade/send/receive. But the moment you decide that you want to convert to "food" all sorts of problems arise that are worse than what banks offer.

I'm telling you as a person who received salary in crypto while living under sanctioned country
by tsimionescu | 2025-12-08 07:41:29+00:00
The correct term here is pseudonimity - you know the immutable, stable wallet id of who mined the coin, which is a pseudonym for a real person. Anonymous systems are ones in which it's impossible to associate an identity with the work item.

For example, if I send cash through the post office, and I don't sign the envelope, that is a form of anonymous payment - it's impossible to tell who sent the payment (assuming there is no footage of the post box where I deposited the envelope, and I left no DNA on it, etc). If you receive a second payment, it's impossible to tell whether it came from the same person or someone else.
by p0w3n3d | 2025-12-08 07:41:50+00:00
LLM stands for large LANGUAGE models, so I guess you could succeed if you had a correct LANGUAGE. Maybe radial coordinates? Or turtle graphics? I myself tried to generate an SVG with twelve radial dots as in a clock in chatgpt, and failed (a year ago). Now I think it would succeed, however still the question is does it succeed because people trained it to do so.

Also I have noticed that AI generates things close to what you want, and it sticks really hard to that "close" qualifier, not wanting to cross any borders to get too close, so I'd be happy with the effect you have shown, as it is what AI does
by jjav | 2025-12-08 07:42:04+00:00
Brakes will always overpower the engine unless the braking system is severly damaged. This is simple physics. Cars decelerate far faster than they accelerate, which is to say, the brakes can generate far more horsepower than the engine can.

(Apparently the Rimac Nevera, with about 2000hp, can accelerate faster than it brakes. So that one might be the only exception. So unless you're driving a 2000hp car, the brakes will always overpower the engine, that is not debatable.)

Brake fade is irrelevant here. Brakes fade when overheated beyond their operating range, either due to fluid boiling and/or the pads overheating. This is nearly impossible to achieve in street driving, but can be experienced on the race track. None of the claimed acceleration accidents involved extreme repeated braking prior to the incident.
by wseqyrku | 2025-12-08 07:42:05+00:00
> it's because I've lost control of them. I don't understand the code that was written well enough to work on it myself any more. So now I'm at the mercy of the AI to maintain it.

That's eerie. So basically this is the same walled-garden formula but this time directly targeting your intelligence, rather than your data like it has always been.
by drdeca | 2025-12-08 07:43:08+00:00
For some senses of “wanting things”, I think it might be hard to make a powerful AI that couldn’t be easily modified to produce one that “wants things” in some sense.

So, if it would be bad thing for one to be made that “wants things” in any reasonable sense of the phrase, then it would probably be bad for J Random to be able to take a copy of a powerful AI and modify it in some way, because someone is likely to try doing that.

Of course, perhaps the best way to make sure that J Random doesn’t have the ability to do that, is to make sure no one does.
by Animats | 2025-12-08 07:44:17+00:00
Kolko talks about that in the context of scaling social/charitable solutions.[1] There's a cite to Marshall, who talks about it in an industrial context.[2] But Marshall wrote in the days before computers and the Internet. There was a time when big companies had enormous clerical plants and corporate headquarters operations. Some paperwork and management operations scale O(N log N) or even O(N^2). At some point, corporate overhead became too large.

But we got past that. Walmart, Amazon, Samsung, McDonalds, Starbucks, Foxconn, and BYD all have hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of employees, but don't seem to be hitting scaling limits. There may be an optimal size limit, but it's above planetary scale now. Computers have made this possible.

This leads to monopoly or oligopoly being reached before any natural limit to growth appears.

[1] https://www.jonkolko.com/writing/notes/13

[2] https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/economics/economies-...
by cess11 | 2025-12-08 07:44:29+00:00
It was released 25 years and four days ago, and is still around. Simple enough to still work I'd bet, though the last official release was in 2017 or so.

https://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/

http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/ratpoison

I used it for a while back then, before switching to IceWM because it was more fun to configure. Prepared me well for a much later move to i3.
by krackers | 2025-12-08 07:45:00+00:00
Gemini 3.0 might do well even without web searches. The lesson from gpt 4.5 and Gemini 3 seems to be that scaling model size (even if you use sparse MoE) allows you to capture more long-tail knowledge. Some of Humanity's Last Exam also seems to be explicitly designed to test this long-tail obscure knowledge extraction, and models have been steadily chipping away at it.
by WalterBright | 2025-12-08 07:45:09+00:00
Obamacare is of no use at all for the wealthy. So why do those in power support it?

Everybody says that money buys elections. But consider that Hillary outspent Trump 2:1 and lost, Harris outspent Trump 3:1 and still lost. Bloomberg poured money into his presidential bid, and he didn't garner enough votes to be a blip on the radar.

Campaign money does buy you a stage, but it doesn't buy the votes.

Nobody has ever bought my vote. How about you?
by Ekaros | 2025-12-08 07:47:36+00:00
Finland did that even simpler more than 50% of work days you get 750€. Ofc, hard part is to calculate 50% of your internet bill. And then any technology you buy for remote work. Not chair, desk or lamps though, those are in the room part...

Thankfully(\s), they are simplifying it even further next year and removing whole thing. Now you only get to deduct money if you actually rent an office...
by skepti | 2025-12-08 07:48:43+00:00
Why require that companies use a specific programming language instead of requiring that the end product is good?

> And the F35 and America's combat readiness would be in a better place today with Ada instead of C++.

What is the evidence for this? Companies selling Ada products would almost certainly agree, since they have a horse in the race. Ada does not automatically lead to better, more robust, safer or fully correct software.

Your line of argument is dangerous and dishonest, as real life regrettably shows.[0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_flight_V88

> The failure has become known as one of the most infamous and expensive software bugs in history.[2] The failure resulted in a loss of more than US$370 million.[3]

> The launch failure brought the high risks associated with complex computing systems to the attention of the general public, politicians, and executives, resulting in increased support for research on ensuring the reliability of safety-critical systems. The subsequent automated analysis of the Ariane code (written in Ada) was the first example of large-scale static code analysis by abstract interpretation.[9]
by HaZeust | 2025-12-08 07:49:03+00:00
I see what you're saying now, I was imagining the type of transparency log that's usually run by a single institution and audited by a few others.

Even if every voter gets a hash and can check that their vote is in the log, you still have a bunch of places where a central actor can misbehave: Deciding who gets to write to the log in the first place, rate-limiting or dropping submissions, or running split-view logs in the event that there's not a ton of replication - hoping that wouldn't be the case in an election.

With a (properly designed) blockchain, you at least push those assumptions into a consensus layer with many writers/validators and game-theory penalties for rewriting its history. It's still not magic; but for something like elections, I'd rather minimize the points where a single operator can tilt the playing field, which is why I was thinking "blockchain" instead of "centralized transparency log"