MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Hetzner_OL | 2025-12-08 14:14:44+00:00
Hi there, (I am not trying to be critical. I am genuinely curious what could have gone wrong in your case.) Are you sure that they were asking for a *piece of paper*, or for a confirmation number for the bank/wire transfer? Our team will sometimes ask for the confirmation number to help speed up the process on our end. Some people also underestimate how much time it can take for a payment like this to arrive at our billing team. When you sent the payment, did you include your Hetzner customer number or invoice number in the reason for the payment when you filled at the form for the bank/wire transfer? If you didn't do that, it is much more difficult for our team to process that payment. --Katie
by glhaynes | 2025-12-08 14:14:54+00:00
It’s my understanding that Chan Karunamuni was largely responsible for leading the iPhone X home buttonless interface, which, I agree, is fantastic and probably the best bit of UI to come out of Apple in years. Also, the Dynamic Island, which is less impactful, but really good and clever! Anyway, he’s excited about Lemay, so I am too. https://9to5mac.com/2025/12/05/acclaimed-apple-designer-says...

Here’s a video with him discussing the iPhone X interface around its introduction in 2018 that I find fascinating https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2018/803/
by matthewowen | 2025-12-08 14:14:54+00:00
Ironically, grand juries refusing to indict frivolous political charges has been in the news quite a lot in the past couple of months.

It's true that jury trials have a less than perfect history of applying justice (though of course I think it's fair to say that the judges presiding over those trials exhibited similar trials so the counterfactual of a bench trial may have been the same outcome). That said, my understanding is that jury trials are just generally favorable to defendants compared to bench trials.

FWIW jury trials are arguably less vulnerable to corruption, which is a benefit. Would be hard to pull off https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal#Criminal... (which wrongly put thousands of children in jail for the financial benefit of judges) with juries.

I think calling it 'American exceptionalism" is a little reductive. The idea that a jury trial is a protector of civil rights in a system that upholds the law as something no-one is above literally dates back to Magna Carta. Suggesting that this throughline of civil liberty is "silly theater' is not a serious proposition.
by Propelloni | 2025-12-08 14:15:27+00:00
Yes, you can, if you consider that liberty and freedom are functions of society and not nature. In this sense, dying from old age is not being unfree.

To stay with your example, one is bascically the absence of limitations (negative freedom), ie. the freedom to walk the street. The other is the presence of possibilities (positive freedom), ie. there needs to be a street to walk it.
by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | 2025-12-08 14:15:32+00:00
That's exactly the point of smart contracts.

The contract can hold the money in escrow such that it can only be sent either to the seller or returned to buyer.

The seller and buyer can then both walk the contract through a state machine on agreement (i.e. confirm shipping, confirm delivery, potentially also confirmation for a return process) and when the buyer and seller come to a disagreement (ex: seller attests they've shipped the product and it should be delivered but the buyer asserts they havent/the tracking on shipping is invalid) or one of the participants is non-responsive for a certain amount of time then the contract moves into arbitration.

In arbitration one or more third parties then step in to serve as arbiters/oracles that decide in the favor of one party or the other and commit those decisions to the contract and the contract then derives consensus from those decisions and proceeds to the corresponding state/action of the contract (i.e. refund vs close).

Now your arbiters/oracles/third parties have reputations and you can reason about how trustworthy they are before you enter into the contract.

This means all parties can evaluate their risk tolerance and trust levels before entering the contract/on agreement.

-------

TLDR: Trust is inherent to any system reliant on the physical world. The point of smart contracts, etc is to formally encode those trust assumptions and the procedures of the contract in as trustless of a way as possible and to allow distribution of that trust across parties with most of the coordination overhead being automated/abstracted away.

And importantly smart contracts provide an extremely low friction happy path. In the happy path where all parties are satisfied, it's extremely efficient and responsive. But in every other path, the conflicts, incentives, and resolution procedures are clearly defined for all parties involved.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-08 14:15:34+00:00
I want to love these, mostly because they're FOSS and Office/Google Spreadsheets seems to get more and more bloated, and subsequently slower.

But the UX is just a lot worse, and it isn't easy to go from one application to another because they're slightly different enough that your productivity takes a hit from all the small papercuts.

I'm waiting for some FOSS spreadsheet solution that doesn't just try to copy Office, but comes up with something better. Then it'll feel like it's worth it to learn a whole new program and its UX, rather than just suffering through it because you wanna use FOSS.
by benterix | 2025-12-08 14:15:46+00:00
While I agree, there is no reason NOT to use a perpetual license (e.g. for Excel 2016), unless you really, really need the subscription-based version.

You may notice the last edition of softwares that had perpetual licenses but moved on to subscription model tend to be very expensive today as they are no longer sold and people know how to count. So, let's use the opportunity while it lasts as I don't believe the end of perpetual licensing for Office (or Windows for that matter) is far away.
by agumonkey | 2025-12-08 14:16:40+00:00
when LLM popped out and people started to say 'this is just markov chain on steroid and not thinking' i was a bit confused because a lot of my "thinking" is statistical too.. I very often try to solve an issue by switching a known solution with a different "probable" variant of it (tweaking a parameter)

LLMs have higher dimensions (they map token to grammatical and semantical space) .. it might not be thinking but it seems on its way we're just thinking with more abstractions before producing speech ?... dunno
by Angostura | 2025-12-08 14:16:46+00:00
I'd disagree in terms of the cloud capabilities. When it is used properly. The cloud stuff is very useful. I currently have a document that is going through multiple versions with about 8 people, with different expertise collaborating. Some have edit privs, some only have review. The ability for everyone to work on it simultaneously, with version history and no more document-v12-copy3_FINAL_FINALv2 is most welcome.
by closewith | 2025-12-08 14:16:56+00:00
Yes, your maths is off by roughly an order of magnitude because the starting assumptions are wrong.

> The mwh price is 80–90$, so 3 gwh (3000mwh) would be about 240K $

You’re effectively designing around ~3GWh for an ocean leg, but a large container vessel at 40–60MW continuous draw burns roughly 1–1.5GWh per day at sea.

A 20–30 day crossing needs on the order of 20–40GWh of shaft power, not 3GWh. 5,000t of HFO actually corresponds to ~50–60GWh of chemical energy and ~25–30GWh delivered to the propeller at realistic engine efficiencies.

> The mwh price is 80–90$

$80–90/MWh is a generation/LCOE number, which you're comparing to $500/t HFO delivered, stored, with global bunkering logistics already in place.

You're not accounting for the cost of delivering tens of GWh at hundreds of MW into a hull, in a tight port stay, via infrastructure that simply doesn’t exist. Even if you grant free electricity at the fence, the capex for multi-hundred-MW substations, converters, cabling, connectors, etc completely dominates.

> A shipment of 7-9K EVs at 50kwh each, pretty much gets you there. That's the capacity of some of the new ships that BYD uses for transporting their EVs around the world. 2000EVs is basically about 1 gwh of power.

2,000 EVs * 50kWh ≈ 100MWh. 9,000 EVs * 50kWh ≈ 450MWh. That’s still one to two orders of magnitude below what a long-range deep-sea vessel actually needs on a single leg.

> We'll know in a few years how wrong you or I will be.

Anyone in or close to the maritime industry knows now. Not even the most bullish consider economic transoceanic shipping by battery-powered vessels by the 2040s remotely possible. Realistically pure-battery transoceanic cargo ships will never happen, because other superior zero-carbon options will become viable long before batteries close the energy density and infrastructure gap.

We'll obviously see batteries in tugs, ferries, short-sea and hybrid ECA work become the standard much sooner.
by kspacewalk2 | 2025-12-08 14:17:11+00:00
It's all dependent entirely on scale. If a bajillion customers have major problems (whether actually major or in their mind), you have to triage and the first tier won't be experts with excellent command of English. Support is fucking expensive. Everyone wants bespoke service, but if you are not a customer, or if the amount of business you bring does not justify the expense, the support level you want cannot be provided in the long run.
by graemep | 2025-12-08 14:17:15+00:00
The UK's three biggest ethnic minorities do have some autonomy in their territories - Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

The idea of giving minorities that do not have a well defined territory is a complete non-started, and there is no demand for it.

There is some extent to which religious groups can (as anyone one can) use arbitration for some disputes (but that is ultimately subject to secular law) as some Jewish and Muslim groups do or have procedures to decide matters for purely religious purposes as Catholic and Anglican canon law tribunals do (e.g. annulments and internal decisions).

I have no idea why you think anything more is even remotely likely.
by Mintaras | 2025-12-08 14:17:22+00:00
This hits a real pain point. I've been on teams with hundreds of endpoints but maybe 10% had any tests beyond "does it return 200?" — and those inevitably rot as the API evolves.

Generating tests from a single cURL is smart because it meets devs where they already are. We're already firing off cURL commands during development; turning that into a test suite with zero extra effort is a nice DX win.

A few edge cases I’d love to see: Rate limit testing (verify proper 429s with Retry-After) Idempotency checks for POST/PUT endpoints Unicode edge cases like : emoji, RTL characters, null bytes in strings

The ChatGPT API finding is a great proof point. Nothing sells a security tool better than “we found something in production at a major company.” Will try this on some internal APIs this week.
by wisty | 2025-12-08 14:17:31+00:00
I'm not sure what you mean by "deals in facts, not words" means.

Llm deal in vectors internally, not words. They explode the word into a multidimensional representation, and collapse it again, and apply the attention thingy to link these vectors together. It's not just a simple n:n Markov chain, a lot is happening under the hood.

And are you saying the syncophant behaviour was deliberately programmed, or emerged because it did well in training?
by troupo | 2025-12-08 14:17:49+00:00
Lol. All you have to do is think about five seconds without going into rants about over consumption.

Let's take Bitcoin. It has a predefined limited supply. That is, it already has an artificial deficit built-in. On top of that, obtaining bitcoin becomes exponentially more expensive over time (until it becomes impossible once all the bitcoin has been "mined"). Now you have to spend many magnitudes more resources to obtain even a tiny fraction of a bitcoin.

So even in the absence of any external world to compare to (e.g. without denominating Bitcoin in USD) why would anyone spend a limited resource they obtained? Especially considering that even today getting even a single bitcoin through traditional mining is nearly impossible except for the filthy rich miners running industrial-scale data centers.
by wlesieutre | 2025-12-08 14:17:58+00:00
My favorite is when it bounces back and forth between the same two wrong answers, each time admitting that the most recent answer is wrong and going back to the previous wrong answer.

Doesn't matter if you tell it "that's not correct and neither is ____ so don't try that instead," it likes those two answers and it's going to keep using them.
by jqpabc123 | 2025-12-08 14:17:58+00:00
Computer code is highly deterministic. This allows it to be tested fairly easily. Unfortunately, code productionn is not the only use-case for AI.

Most things in life are not as well defined --- a matter of judgment.

AI is being applied in lots of real world cases where judgment is required to interpret results. For example, "Does this patient have cancer". And it is fairly easy to show that AI's judgment can be highly suspect. There are often legal implications for poor judgment --- i.e. medical malpractice.

Maybe you can argue that this is a mis-application of AI --- and I don't necessarily disagree --- but the point is, once the legal system makes this abundantly clear, the practical business case for AI is going to be severely reduced if humans still have to vet the results in every case.
by sneak | 2025-12-08 14:18:01+00:00
Way more convenient for the FAA702 users, too.

If you have absolutely nothing in your documents that you wouldn’t mind giving the FBI to read without a warrant or probable cause, it is possible you are wasting your one and only life.

A good example would be anyone in the state-legal cannabis industry. This is still a federal crime (Schedule 1!), and giving cloud providers (and thus DHS without a warrant thanks to FAA702) concrete detailed evidence of same is, from a criminal liability standpoint, the same thing as mailing the FBI photos of your meth lab with your return address on it.
by hoistbypetard | 2025-12-08 14:18:10+00:00
For legacy spreadsheets, you're 100% correct. I'll need to keep a version of Excel around forever. If they price me out of 365 by making me pay for Copilot shit I don't use or want, a perpetual license to Office 2019 runs about $20 and will do that job for me.

For new work that I might have otherwise done in Excel, there are good options. Collabora works. Libre Office works. Google sheets works. And Grist is quite good, and self-hostable.
by yetihehe | 2025-12-08 14:18:21+00:00
It doesn't. It's "promise" based, not "communicating sequential processes". Erlang has more preemptive scheduling, a "thread" can be preempted at any time, here you can only be synchronized when you wait for result. It is called "actor-based", because only functions tagged as "actor" can call waiting functions.

This is more node.js-like communication than erlang.
by zepan | 2025-12-08 14:18:57+00:00
Thanks to everyone for following the discussion on NanoKVM security. I think most of you will know exactly what to make of this article the moment you read the complaint that it 'runs a heavily stripped-down version of Linux that lacks systemd and apt.'

Most of the claims in the article are not real vulnerabilities. Some harmless behaviors were indeed easy to misinterpret if viewed with bias, but we actually changed those behaviors and implementations over 10 months ago. It is surprising to see this article coming out today instead of last year.

As for the onboard mic, it is not 'hidden.' It is a component that has been clearly documented and explained in our Wiki: https://wiki.sipeed.com/hardware/en/kvm/NanoKVM/introduction... We believe open source lets the facts speak for themselves. Thanks to the NanoKVM community for using your technical common sense to help clear this up!
by maest | 2025-12-08 14:19:33+00:00
While I get your frustration, the root cause of the issue is not shareholder value maximisation, it's the failure modes of the free market.

Monopolies, lack of transparency, lack of competition, regulatory capture, failure to price in externalities are what allows this to happen.

And these failure modes are allowed to persist due to lobbying, normalised corruption, and the desire for a small/weak government.

The latter is useful for corporations, as it limits regulation, which is the main way these failure modes are supposed to be managed. Yes, too much/bad regulation is detrimental, but so is no/weak regulation.

The more baffling thing is that the modal American voter supports lax regulation and pro-corporate rules at their own personal expense.
by ForHackernews | 2025-12-08 14:19:43+00:00
You've mentioned some places in the world that have economic problems. You've provided zero evidence to support the idea that "crypto payments are now prevalent" in any of those places.

As a counterexample, El Salvador adopted bitcoin as an official currency, provided state-subsidized infrastructure for citizens to adopt it, and still achieved only minimal usage:

> The October 2022 “Encuesta Dinámica Empresarial” from FUSADES registered that 97¾ percent of business have not made even one sale in Bitcoin. NBER and Chamber of Commerce and Industry surveys show similar results.

https://www.elibrary.imf.org/view/journals/002/2025/068/arti...
by jsheard | 2025-12-08 14:19:50+00:00
I think the only way to get the no-Copilot version now is to already have the Copilot version and try to cancel your subscription, and only then they'll offer the "Classic" version sans Copilot as a last ditch retention effort. If users actually wanted this stuff they wouldn't need to bury the option to not pay for it.
by joseda-hg | 2025-12-08 14:19:53+00:00
The store usually* doesn't demand it, but your ID is tied to your cards via your bank's KYC obligations anyway

* It's becoming more common for sites to ask for ID, I've gotten prompted for it buying a cellphone online, to access an old Facebook account and even Hetzner (Before ever using it) because I got flagged as high risk
by Aurornis | 2025-12-08 14:20:10+00:00
Excel is the best spreadsheet software in my experience when you have to move beyond the basics. I’ve even tried hard to use the open/Libre alternatives.

Hacker News is a different world than the target customer base for these products. If your use case for spreadsheet software is putting things into tables with some formatting and some light formulas then all of the products will do the same job.

For professionals who use these tools, suggesting they use LibreOffice or something is the equivalent of someone coming to you and suggesting you give up your customized Emacs or Visual Studio Code setup in favor of Notepad++ because they both edit text and highlight code.
by hoistbypetard | 2025-12-08 14:20:45+00:00
Have you tried grist[0]?

It's self-hostable (and the community version is FOSS I think), and really useful in a way I find better than just a spreadsheet.

It's no good for importing complex excel things, but I've found it very useful for new work.

[0](https://www.getgrist.com)
by gtirloni | 2025-12-08 14:20:47+00:00
> most use it for compatibility sake

Which kind of is on Microsoft for not fixing the situation and just carrying cruft every release. They could have a separate tool to fix/migrate to whatever modern format they are using nowadays (or to some "light" format that doesn't allow all the features 99% of users don't care about).

Their subscription could be much cheaper.
by therealpygon | 2025-12-08 14:20:55+00:00
Definitely, and hence the reason that structuring requests/responses and providing examples for smaller atomic units of work seem to have quite a significant effect on the accuracy of the output (not factuality, but more accurate to the patterns that were emphasized in the preceding prompt).

I just wish we could more efficiently ”prime” a pre-defined latent context window instead of hoping for cache hits.
by rglover | 2025-12-08 14:21:01+00:00
The low-agency masses will always choose the incorrect way to use something (especially money). Nothing about what happened re: speculation in crypto should be a surprise. The technology is neutral, but basic human traits like greed will always prevail over the popular mind. That our previous cohort of financial demons has now slid into frame should be even less of a surprise.

You didn't waste time, you just spent eight years removing your rose colored glasses.
by TheJoeMan | 2025-12-08 14:21:04+00:00
They also are actively decreasing the value by sunsetting Publisher in October 2026 [0]. Hilariously, the suggested replacement is PowerPoint, despite it being unable to natively open .pub files. The solution for that? Run a powershell script to convert all your publisher files to (uneditable) PDF.

There are many memes about inserting photos into Word, and the content flying around and breaking. My pet theory is that the younger generation never realized Publisher existed or was included in M365, and used PowerPoint as an everything-is-a-hammer crutch, and have now gotten jobs at Microsoft and are sticking with it.

Also, as far as I can tell, Publisher is the only application where the color-picker includes Pantone colors which is a must for professional poster production. I assume Microsoft is paying a licensing fee for this, and I wonder if they'll remember to cancel it.

Perhaps Affinity can eat their lunch and release a word-processor.

[0] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/microsoft-publish...
by js8 | 2025-12-08 14:21:16+00:00
I am not sure if this is what the article is saying, but the paperclip maximizer examples always struck me as extremely dumb (lacking intelligence), when even a child can understand that if I ask them to make paperclips they shouldn't go around and kill people.

I think superintelligence will turn out not to be a singularity, but as something with diminishing returns. They will be cool returns, just like a Brittanica set is nice to have at home, but strictly speaking, not required to your well-being.
by bachmeier | 2025-12-08 14:21:24+00:00
> Their average customer is probably demanding it and at risk of switching products if the AI integration is not as good as a competitor’s.

There's no substance to this comment. It's pure speculation. If you actually want to look at evidence, look at the recent news that Microsoft has cut AI sales targets in half.

> The Venn diagram of their customer base and Hacker News commenters doesn’t have much overlap.

Ironic that you posted this as a comment on HN.
by Archelaos | 2025-12-08 14:21:38+00:00
I never expected LLMs to be like an actual conversation between humans. The model is in some respects more capable and in some respects more limited than a human. I mean, one could strive for an exact replica of a human -- but for what purpose? The whole thing is a huge association machine. It is a surealistic inspiration generator for me. This is how it works at the moment, until the next break through ...
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-12-08 14:22:35+00:00
I am not a fan, simply because of the screen real estate that needs to be sacrificed.

Other phones tend to have it on the back, and I have heard there's good progress in having embedded thumbprint readers in the screen.

I have, however, really come to like Face ID.

[UPDATED TO ADD] I think that it's interesting that folks ding comments they disagree with. I upvoted all the responses to my comment, even though they may disagree with me, because they were made in good faith, and contribute to the discussion.
by gwbas1c | 2025-12-08 14:23:26+00:00
That's just the money cycle. Ray Dalio explains it in his new book, "How Countries Go Broke, Principles for Navigating the Big Debt Cycle, Where We Are Headed, and What We Should Do" (https://www.principles.com/)

The short explanation is that every major currency goes through a cycle; and what you're seeing is the late stage in a currency.