MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by freedomben | 2025-12-12 20:39:09+00:00
Yes, although I've had terrible experience with their wifi. I'm sure it depends on the store, but coverage is usually terrible and highly spotty, so if you're walking around or standing in the wrong area, it stops working.

At one point I also had to disable wireguard because I think it was triggering some sort of anti-abuse thing they had. It wasn't even using an exit node, just bridging me to my home network so I could access self-hosted services. I get the desire for anti-abuse, but that felt pretty draconian and I don't expect the average person to consider they might have to disable a VPN to get it to work, especially nowadays when many average people do have VPNs running.
by solarengineer | 2025-12-12 20:39:27+00:00
I am a small-time investor in renewable energy businesses, but I am also a believer in nuclear energy.

Consider a city like Mumbai that needs about 3.8 GW per day. One would need lots of windmills and large solar farms that would need to be positioned in a different state having more sunlight throughout the year. Mumbai often experiences cloudy weather and intermittent wind. I cannot imagine only wind and solar supporting the needs of Mumbai.

There are countries other than the US who do not take 20 years to build a reactor. Out-dated regulations, punitive paperwork, and perhaps poor project management are the reasons for the oft-cited delays in the US. Other countries complete their builds in 6 to 7 years. https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/chinas-impressive-...
by stogot | 2025-12-12 20:39:55+00:00
I’m looking forward to this. Especially reading old classics, or catching up on an old series and trying to figure out “is this character the sister or niece of the main protagonist? Outline their character development”

I used to have to read fan wikis to figure this out.

But it will especially be useful for all the textbooks I’ve bought years ago. Being able to ask it questions (to the content itself) is better than asking ChatGPT or Gemini because they don’t have the content (they’re summarizing summaries found on the web)
by mapontosevenths | 2025-12-12 20:40:01+00:00
Cars breakdown. Bodies become injured. The weather gets bad. Babysitters get ill or quit.

Many things can leave a person temporarily or permanently unable to fetch their own groceries. Many of those things happen to the poor more frequently. They at least have more severe consequences when a person is poor.

For example, a middle class person can just buy a new tire when one goes flat. A poor person may have to walk for a few paychecks.
by ux266478 | 2025-12-12 20:40:05+00:00
I want to preface this with "This isn't a gotcha".

I think you make an important oversight with these claims, which is that you can enforce logical safety over a memory unsafe language and have a much higher degree of safety than memory safety. Formally verified C doesn't change the language, you can in principle take C code run through compcert and compile it elsewhere. It's still a memory unsafe language, but we can express a much higher degree of safety than simple memory safety.

Another aspect to consider is that all garbage collected languages are memory safe. A language like Python actually has a far greater degree of memory safety than a language like Rust because it offers no ability to break memory safety (without calling into foreign code), while Rust lets you do it within unsafe blocks using raw pointers. That being said, anybody who would suggest using Python over Rust in a security-focused context is completely out of their mind.

In serious places where security is critical and margin for error is low, formal verification has existed for decades and is the standard. Any operation - specifically in the context where security is critical - which is not formally verifying its software is a mickey mouse operation, because they're fundamentally compromising on security to an unacceptable degree. I think it would be nice to have a formal verification toolchain and language extension for Rust to allow for full logical safety, but last I checked this area was still a work in progress for the language.

I know anytime Rust is brought up, someone brings up logical safety, and patterns are annoying. Rust obviously has a lot of tricks up its sleeve to automatically detect issues that a language like C++ cannot. Naive Rust is preferable over naive usage of a memory unsafe language. The problem is that in a serious security critical context, "naive" is completely unacceptable. If security is a core goal, there can be no replacement for fully blown logical safety enforcing strict behavioral and structural guarantees in every single facet of the codebase. I know the line, that logical safety is excruciatingly labor intensive and so the tradeoff with using Rust is that it affords some of the safety of formally spec'd and proven code. The problem is that the amount it affords you is completely marginal. The safety gap between C and Rust is much smaller than the safety gap between Rust and formally proven correct SPARK. It's just the reality. I'm loathe to see a future where marketing hype sees a degeneration of tools because it was presented as a serious alternative.
by steveklabnik | 2025-12-12 20:40:35+00:00
Do you think the sibling comment was flagged to "protect me" whatever that means, or is it because "Are you high on Prozac?" is not really a productive comment?

EDIT: And now that I've scrolled down, I see you've left this comment many times as random replies. I'm sure those will get flagged, but for spam reasons, not due to some grand conspiracy.
by squigz | 2025-12-12 20:41:01+00:00
I'm an avid reader. I'm reading The Silmarillion right now. There have been countless times where a short summary of an area/character/etc has been helpful. Luckily, in this particular case, there are very good Tolkien fan dictionaries that serve well.

As another example, I read the Aubrey-Maturin series earlier this year. Many times I would have liked a quick summary of a previous voyage or of a political plotline or something.

Don't be so judgemental.
by javawizard | 2025-12-12 20:41:05+00:00
You know the fun thing is, something like the Allwinner A133 - which is one of the most popular SOCs in lower-end tablets today - is like $5, or $3 in quantity.

It turns out it's actually not as hard as you'd expect to whip together your own board with one of those + LPDDR4 RAM + eMMC storage + fixings, and get yourself something like what you're talking about for... I dunno, sub $50? Maybe even sub $20 depending on how much RAM you put on it and what other capabilities you give it.

I'm in the middle of designing just such a board right now. Totally recommend taking a stab at it if you have any EE chops at all (or want to learn!)
by nanolith | 2025-12-12 20:41:27+00:00
Sadly, I did not. I have the source code on an old laptop somewhere. I was disheartened when I considered productizing it and discovered just how deep of a patent tarpit I was dealing with.

It's on my list to revisit in the future. At this point, most of the patents are coming up on expiration, and it would make for a great open source project. Hardware has gotten much better over the subsequent years; there are nicer lower power solutions with integrated Bluetooth LE as well as other low power wireless technologies.
by dcre | 2025-12-12 20:41:55+00:00
It's not that direct a counterexample. We have no idea what underlying data from the Fallout show they gave to the model to summarize. Surely it wasn't the scripts of the episodes. The nature of the error makes me think it might have been given stills of the show to analyze visually. In this case we know it is the text of the book.
by ami3466 | 2025-12-12 20:42:01+00:00
I see many of you asking about the differences between using this versus web_fetch. The main differences are the quality of the data and token usage.

1. Standard web_fetch tools usually dump raw HTML into the context (including navbars, scripts, and footer noise). This wastes a huge amount of tokens and distracts the model. toMCP runs the page through a readability parser and converts it to clean markdown before sending it to the AI.

2. Adding a website as an MCP Resource pins it as a permanent, read-only context, making it ideal for keeping documentation constantly available. This differs from the web_fetch tool, which is an on-demand action the AI only triggers when it decides to, meaning the data isn't permanently attached to your project.
by jcalx | 2025-12-12 20:42:15+00:00
Also see A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry's series of fortifications [0] regarding castles and their strategic importance, especially on how they were essential to local control of the area as opposed to "just" FOBs for military campaigns. (Incidentally the term "tyranny of the wagon equation" linked in the article also eventually leads to a different ACOUP series.)

[0] https://acoup.blog/2021/12/10/collections-fortification-part...
by cyberax | 2025-12-12 20:42:30+00:00
It does? The idea was to staple the DNSSEC chain to the TLS, so that clients wouldn't have needed to do the whole DNS pointer chasing themselves.

The problem is that the MITM-ing adversary can just strip the DNSSEC chain and then replace the certificate. Without having a DNSSEC-enabled resolver, the client can't detect that. So stapling doesn't provide any additional security over the self-signed certificates.

The only proposed fix was to pin the DNSSEC-enabled URLs, using TOFU (Trust On First Use). And nobody wanted that.

There was no real discussion about adding the stapling in _addition_ to CA-signed certificates. Because at that time there was no point in doing that, no CA wanted to provide free signing.

This is changed now. The self-signed certificates are no longer status quo.
by nine_k | 2025-12-12 20:42:38+00:00
France in particular connected a new nuclear power station to the grid as late as 2024 [1]. But the previous reactor was put online in 1999 or so.

Three more were built in EU since 2000: one in Finland (Swedish/Finnish design) and two in Slovakia (Soviet/Russian design).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
by autoexec | 2025-12-12 20:42:54+00:00
> There are lots of outcomes where having the wages the company can profitably offer are far better than having zero wages.

Like sweatshops for example. The idea that getting anything at all is far better than getting nothing is not new or compelling. It's exactly that kind of race to the bottom mentality where workers are expected to shut up and take whatever scraps their masters give them that causes labor movements to rise up and start demanding better.
by Manuel_D | 2025-12-12 20:42:57+00:00
> Employer-bound health insurance in the US

Benefits are part of an employees compensation package. A competing offer could have even better healthcare than Id.

> Industry blacklists to exclude uppity employees and union members.

This is illegal and the last time SV companies were found doing this the government punished them

Is there any evidence that this is happening to Id employees?

> Noncompetes

Illegal in CA where ID is based. NDAs don't prevent you from working at competitors, only from taking confidential info.

> Extremely localized jobs and an ever-shrinking number of larger and larger conglomerates as employers.

Id is located in the Bay Area, probably the place with the greatest concentration of software jobs in the country if not the world.
by prepend | 2025-12-12 20:43:26+00:00
No, GP is right. Check out the urban/rural populations in 1900 [0].

Cars allowed for suburban sprawl but the country was already really spread out before cars.

Maybe if cars didn’t exist we would have eventually consolidated into dense population centers.

You’re right that US cities were large and well populated, but that’s not where most people (60%) of Americans were.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_Sta...
by echelon | 2025-12-12 20:44:10+00:00
The film case is kind of wild.

Amazon, Netflix, et al. flew domestic crews to Europe to train their crews how to work. This wasn't unusual, because a lot of movies filmed on-location overseas. Nobody questions that. Par for the course.

Except they trained local crews how to do everything - they trained their replacements in person. And now there are no US domestic crew flights to Europe and Asia.
by phendrenad2 | 2025-12-12 20:44:17+00:00
Institutionalized racism. Police immune to prosecution. Government-backed monopolies. Oligarchy based on proximity to the supreme. Scapegoating various classes of people. False flags. Surveillance economy. Seems to me that whatever we have now is functionally indistinct from fascism. But if it makes you feel better to keep calling it democracy...
by Dylan16807 | 2025-12-12 20:44:22+00:00
Here's what they actually said: "We are going to need to increase our memory pricing soon, but we won’t use this as an excuse to gouge customers like @Dell apparently has and that @Apple does as their norm."

No hypocrisy there.

They were replying to a screenshot showing a huge price per GB on Dell's site, but it looks like that screenshot was wrong? So a mistake on framework's part for not checking sources, but they've had a consistent and reasonable position on pricing.
by foxyv | 2025-12-12 20:44:37+00:00
Is the "clerk" scanning the books an digitizing them to generate other products using an LLM under the guise of "Answering Questions?" I believe this is the question being asked.

Companies like Amazon and Google have some really sticky fingers when it comes to intellectual property and personal data. I think it's worth asking these questions and holding them accountable for exploiting data that doesn't rightly belong to them.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-12-12 20:45:03+00:00
That's probably not a great example given that the rust belt was thick with unions.

And in general the US has a cost of living problem because the various levels of government keep getting captured by people who want regulations that make costs to go up because they're the ones getting the money. That makes US workers less competitive because of the corruption-induced regulatory costs, which is exactly the opposite of markets working as they should, except insofar as "industries move out of countries with high corruption and inefficient laws" is supposed to apply pressure to countries to get more efficient rules.
by prepend | 2025-12-12 20:45:09+00:00
> This, of course, will require some kind of centralized control over entire convoys, and a way to coordinate them. Railways and airways definitely can offer examples of how to handle that.

Not at all. A simple peer to peer protocol based on proximity and mixing in traffic data distributed like the national weather service will do just fine.

These convoys seem like a perfect example of swarm algorithms fitting well where you don’t need a central coordinator.
by jchw | 2025-12-12 20:45:14+00:00
Fine, but then my critique moves over: the article should do a better job of conveying what the argument is and why it matters.

It opens with rms complaining about the names in the emacs ecosystem not being descriptive enough. OK. But the author argues (in these comments) that their argument isn't against names that aren't descriptive, it's just that the name ought to be relevant, and the reason why is because that is more professional.

Now I am paraphrasing so maybe I am not understanding the argument correctly, but I don't think that strengthens the case for this at all. If anything, it begs the question... why? (And I'm not sure rms would particularly buy this argument either, given that he beckons from hacker culture and seems perfectly happy to break social conventions. rms does not hit me as someone who is highly 'professional' in a traditional sense. This is not an indictment.)
by nodamage | 2025-12-12 20:45:37+00:00
Not necessarily.

For starters, small companies are paying 15%, not 30%.

I'm also not sure where a small company can find a payment processor that will only charge 1%. Stripe charges 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction.

If you have a $4.99 in-app purchase that will cost you 44 cents per transaction to use Stripe vs 75 cents to use Apple's IAP.

But Stripe does not act as a merchant of record so you are responsible for remitting sales tax yourself. Registering for and remitting sales tax in every jurisdiction where you have nexus adds huge administrative overhead to a small company.

If you want to avoid this overhead, Paddle will act as a merchant of record for you, but then you're paying 5% plus 50 cents which adds up to 75 cents on a $4.99 purchase anyway.

Linking to external payments also reduces conversion rates (https://www.revenuecat.com/blog/growth/iap-vs-web-purchases-...) compared to using IAP.

Taken all together, depending on their pricing structure, small companies may very well be financially better off sticking with IAP rather than linking to external payments anyway.
by rimunroe | 2025-12-12 20:45:58+00:00
> Not GP but, processing payments absolutely does not require a network connection. Doing so is absolutely not nearly as convenient, but in my adult lifetime it was pretty normal for retailers to pick up a phone, give a customer service rep and/or automated call handler CC info and dollar amounts and get appropriate confirmations.

I forgot about phone payments, but that doesn't change my argument. If it's a built in listing of products, it presumably needs to be updated occasionally too, which I'm not sure how you'd do without mailing disks if you didn't have a network connection. I also don't know how you'd make room for the bundled software. My memory of my Windows 3.1 machine involves a lot of wishing I had more space on my HDD.

> As for a business without an OS interface not being a "store," that's ridiculous on its face.

That indeed would be absurd. Fortunately, I never argued this. I argued that without taking payments or distributing the software through the "store", I don't think it would qualify as a store but would qualify as a catalog. I think of a store as somewhere you go to exchange money for goods/services. If it's doing neither of those things is it still a store?

> Touch grass, friend.

I don't know why you felt this hostility was warranted. Did I slight you in some way?
by brucehoult | 2025-12-12 20:47:08+00:00
> Qualcomm acquired Nuvia in order to bypass the licence fees charged by ARM

Both Nuvia and Qualcomm had Arm Architecture licenses that allowed them to develop and sell their own Arm-compatible CPUs.

There was no bypassing of license fees.

If Qualcomm had hired the Nuvia engineers before they developed their core at Nuvia, and they developed exactly the same core while employed at Qualcomm, then there would be no question that everyone was obeying the terms of their licenses.

Arm's claim rests on it being ok for Nuvia to sell chips of their own design, but not to sell the design itself, and not to transfer the design as part of selling the company.
by pacoWebConsult | 2025-12-12 20:47:08+00:00
The schemas for Amazon and Walmart's product information are absolutely bonkers and constantly missing features that they demand be provided.

Here's the XML Schema Definition for "Product" on Amazon [1]

This is joined on each of the linked category schemas included at the type, of which each has unique properties that ultimately drive the metadata on a particular listing for the SKU. Its wrought with inconsistency, duplicated fields, and oftentimes not up-to-date with required information.

Ultimately, this product catalog information gets provided to Amazon, Walmart, Target, and any other large 3rd party marketplace site as a feed file from a vendor to drive what product they can then list pricing and inventory against (through similar feeds).

You are right that the control McMaster-Carr has on their catalog is the strategic and technological advantage.

[1]: https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/G/01/rainier/...
by mothballed | 2025-12-12 20:47:09+00:00
It's laughable to think Milton Friedman wasn't picking up the tools to try and bring at least the form of freedom he envisioned. Most likely, he's done more than you've (or I) ever done or ever will do. I could bring out the fact I literally fought in a civil war to help retain liberalism for some populations, I've been shot at for trying to bring liberalism, of course no one will believe that and I have nothing to prove, so I'll just let whoever wants to believe that is a lie believe that. A lot of the people I met, well, they were just killed by ISIS, maybe even some of their family trapped behind lines of various jihadist militias and things get even worse.

It is because I've "picked up the tools" and seen how so often things turn out, that I came to find that Milton's words were so accurate. It is a beautiful thing when freedom works out. More often than not, it doesn't. Sure, you should still try. And then be prepared for the possibility things might get even worse.

Milton's assessment was that things have been getting progressively less liberal in the USA since at least the latter portion of his life. I believe especially so since 9/11. The populace keeps voting harder and things just get worse. We recently passed a budget bill, which magically banned hemp (something ~no one wanted) and basically gave gobs of money to politicians for having their cell phones monitored in ways the common populace constantly has their monitored with no recourse. As time goes on, I see the government is getting more leverage and the people less and less, I hope it changes and I hope people try to change it but I will be prepared for the possibility it does not do much good.

I remain prepared for the possibility the initial circumstances allowing classical liberalism to come about, no longer exist (one of my theories is that in the 19th and 18th century violent force was at its most decentralized point in history-- the ~modern firearm was the pinnacle of warfare and there was not a huge difference in effectiveness between a peasent and a government conscript which is a huge difference between prior times of it taking years to train say an archer or modern era where government has fighter jets and ballistic missiles -- this meant the general populace had as much or more leverage than the government) , and that the technological and social landscape are not particularly amenable to its recreation. There are a few pockets of remarkable freedom in the world -- good on them, I hope they keep it and I hope we see more of it.
by drob518 | 2025-12-12 20:47:11+00:00
Still a lot of software involved in controlling the aircraft. The 737 Max incidents were eventually tracked to software quality issues, IIRC. All those old designs are being upgraded with modern avionics, so even if the airframe and linkages are old-school, the inputs are being driven by digital computers. At least that’s my understanding. I confess to not being a “plane guy,” though I have spent a lot of time traveling in planes, and I have stayed at a few Holiday Inn Express hotels.
by cogman10 | 2025-12-12 20:47:11+00:00
Unions are about building worker rights and protections into the business expenses. When they are industry wide, it prevents any company from gaining an advantage by exploiting their workers.

A strong market economy is orthogonal to the treatment of workers. For example, the economy of the early US was both very competitive and had slavery. Same for islands like Jamaica.

The ideal is government regulation ensuring worker rights. Barring that, unions fill the role. Unions exist to fill a void created by a low regulation market. They are the libertarian solution.
by nephihaha | 2025-12-12 20:47:26+00:00
Drone swarms are seen as a more cost efficient way of gathering intel than one or two larger ones. Not all the drones reported are cheap according to some reports and may have been perceived as UFOs by civilians.

I take the point about satellites. That is completely valid. However, one thing military industrial complexes are good at is creating jobs and gobbling up money. Russia's is no different from the west's in that regard.

There is evidence China does this too.