MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ibizaman | 2026-03-06 08:56:43+00:00
> The challenges we face are neither technical nor legal. The only solution is to educate our children about life with digital abundance. Throwing them into the deep end when they’re 16 or 18 is too late. It’s a wonderful and weird world. Yes, there are dark corners. There always will be. We have to teach our children what to do when they encounter them and we have to trust them.

This resonates so much with me. I don’t want to control my kids. I will never be able to protect them from everything. I hope I won’t be able because I want to die before them. I want them to be able to navigate in the world and have all the cognitive tools necessary to avoid being fooled. I want to rest in peace knowing they can in turn educate their own children. I want to trust them and be relieved that I can focus on some tasks of my own without needing to constantly worry about them.
by piaste | 2026-03-06 08:57:06+00:00
> Other Email providers such as Tuta which also offer encrypted emails, were forced to install a backdoor. As soon as the police arrive, every future email sent to the account in question is copied unencrypted without the person being informed.

Important caveat: Tuta was required by a court to provide police with access to a customer's _unencrypted_ emails (ie regular SMTP mail). The police had also asked for a backdoor to Tuta's E2E emails, and that request was rejected by the courts.
by ivan_gammel | 2026-03-06 08:57:49+00:00
It gives unfair advantage to incumbent parties by shaping the political agenda and manipulating public opinion. When you look at the housing crisis in big cities and what Wahl-O-Mat displays as the options on the table based on political programs, it is very easy to think that the selection of options is exhaustive. Public is effectively pushed into discussing only those options, none of which is a good solution. Yet solutions exist, the only problem: political center is dead and they do not fit into populist right or populist green/left platforms. At least half of the items on Wahl-O-Mat is feel-good populism scoring points for one or another party, not least because scoring points, not real change is for most of them the primary objective. And the tool simply reflects that, because German political system is designed to stabilize status quo, not to challenge it.
by bob1029 | 2026-03-06 08:58:37+00:00
> Claude is extensively used for coding, Computer Programmers are at the top, with 75% coverage

I think there are some advantages to being first.

It's time to re-evaluate strategies if we've been operating under the assumption that this is going to be a bubble, or otherwise largely bullshit. It definitely works. Not everywhere all the time, but often enough to be "scary" now. Some of my prior dismissals like "text 2 sql will never work" are looking pale in the face today.
by pazimzadeh | 2026-03-06 08:59:30+00:00
Gotcha, I haven't actually seen the movie I just meant the concept of tricking and silo'ing genius kids to make them think they are playing a game when they're actually doing war/genocide is similar to the Ender's Game book. I don't know if this was just an idea floating around in the air or if it was inspired by Ender's Game, just interesting
by tialaramex | 2026-03-06 09:00:01+00:00
You can choose in Rust to explain the representation you want for your data type. Unlike C or C++ that's not a non-portable vendor extension it's just part of the language, look at the repr documentation: https://doc.rust-lang.org/nomicon/other-reprs.html

So if you want "what C does" you can just repr(C) and that's what you get. For most people that's not a good trade unless they're doing FFI with a language that shares this representational choice.
by latentsea | 2026-03-06 09:00:34+00:00
> I agree. I also agree with S76 that some laws regarding how an operating system intended for wide use should function are acceptable. How would you react to this law if the requirement was only that the operating system had to ask the user what age bracket it should report to sites? You get to pick it, it isn't mandatory that it be checked, and it doesn't need to be a date, just the bucket. Is that still too onerous?

What's the point in doing any of this if it doesn't result in materially better outcomes?
by shevy-java | 2026-03-06 09:00:39+00:00
> Denmark being a case in point. Its international reputation may be free-living liberal-Scandi, but it's communitarian, place-based and in many ways conservative.

Conservative is relative. Germany is a lot more conservative than Denmark, for instance. And many areas in the USA are about 100x more conservative than an average German.

I also don't think "scandinavian" works very well on the fine details. They are too different if you compare e. g. Denmark Sweden Finland Norway. They may be closer to one another than, say, spain or germany, but there are so many differences that the term liberal-Scandi is just too strange. With the same argument you can ask why the judicial system in Sweden prosecuted Assange. I am pretty certain this would have been much harder to do in Denmark or Norway or Finland. Are swedes thus more conservative?
by Frieren | 2026-03-06 09:00:45+00:00
As it should be. All corporations must follow the law. If the police has an order signed by a judge then it is lawful and a necessity for society to work to follow the law.

What is horrifying are big corporations giving access to all user data without recourse. That my data in Europe is send to the USA and accessed without limits by their goverment is a crime and a very dangerous situation.

- Fighting crime in an open criminal case with judge oversight is a very good thing and part of keeping the rule of law.

- Collecting data from all users without probable cause is a crime and will have nefarious consequences for all of us.

Know the difference.
by wao0uuno | 2026-03-06 09:01:00+00:00
I feel the same way. Looks like online "privacy" and "anonymity" will cease to exist within our lifetime. It's already starting with those "privacy respecting" solutions like zero trust age verification but that will quickly be deemed insufficient and because the legal framework will be already present it will very quickly and smoothly turn into full blown surveillance and censorship.
Time to setup I2P on my server and donate some bandwidth but I'm sure they'll make that illegal too.
by Animats | 2026-03-06 09:01:18+00:00
Probably.

Most US military installations, since 9/11, have a remotely raiseable crash barrier some distance past the checkpoint. Standard procedure is to hit the button to raise that if anybody doesn't stop at the the checkpoint. This solves the "do I shoot, or not" problem.
Then guards can go after the vehicle.

This is a normal part of military life now. "“When you see a car hit the barriers it’s an intense moment because you think you might get in trouble,” the anonymous airman said. “But the overall feeling would still be ‘crap that’s even more paperwork.’”"[1]

[1] https://taskandpurpose.com/news/air-force-security-forces-ba...
by troupo | 2026-03-06 09:01:35+00:00
It routinely can't "connect dots" on a 10 kloc project with design notes right there in the same project.

It routinely cannot read files more than 2k lines long.

You can't even provide detailed CLAUDE.md instructions because "file is too large and will affect context".

But sure. "Just give it access to a magnitude more info and it will be able to do stuff".
by pantulis | 2026-03-06 09:02:06+00:00
Back in the day, in Operating System Design class I dared to suggest the teacher that for some obscure inode related problem the system should ask the user what to do.

His answer was "We are designing an operating system, not a messaging solution".

This was circa 30 years ago of course, and the essence and complexity of what an OS is today is different, but the idea still resonates in my head every time macOS deploys one of these prompts at me.
by ithkuil | 2026-03-06 09:02:26+00:00
Being a skeptic doesn't make one an irrational hater (surely such people exist and might be noisy and taint all skeptics as such)

I am learning how to make good use of agent assisted engineering and while I'm positively impressed with many things they can do, I'm definitely skeptical about various aspects of the process:

1. Quality of the results
2. Maintainability
3. Overall saved time

There are still open problems because we're introducing a significant change in the tooling while keeping the rest of the process unchanged (often for good reasons). For example consider the imbalance in the code review cost (some people produce tons of changes and the rest of the team is drowned by the review burden)

This new wave of tooling is undoubtedly going to transform the way that software is developed, but I think jump too quickly to the conclusion that they already figured out how exactly is that going to look like
by andy12_ | 2026-03-06 09:03:15+00:00
It's not a rumor; you can just test it.

Ask the router "What model are you". It will yap on and on about being a GPT-5.3 model (Non-thinking models of OpenAI are insufferable yappers that don't know when to shut up).

Ask it now "What model are you. Think carefully". It concisely replies "GPT-5.4 Thinking".

https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-5/

> GPT‑5 is a unified system with a smart, efficient model that answers most questions, a deeper reasoning model (GPT‑5 thinking) for harder problems, and a real‑time router that quickly decides which to use based on conversation type, complexity, tool needs, and your explicit intent (for example, if you say “think hard about this” in the prompt)
by yread | 2026-03-06 09:03:24+00:00
> Of course they don't call them golden ages as they're happening. "Golden age" is a term people use later, after they're over. That doesn't mean that golden ages aren't real, but rather that their participants take them for granted at the time. They don't know how good they have it. But while it's usually a mistake to take one's good fortune for granted, it's not in this case. What a golden age feels like, at the time, is just that smart people are working hard on interesting problems and getting results.

Is he talking about software development here? Are we going to call the pre-LLM era the golden age where relatively limited set of individuals had to be paid a lot to craft artisanal "code" which with LLMs became super cheap?
by onli | 2026-03-06 09:04:01+00:00
Funnily enough, marking content that's harmless as only for adults was also punishable, though that might have been in context of a different law. That would be censorship, blocking people under 18 from accessing legal content, was the reasoning. Welcome to German bureaucracy.

But you are right. It's an argument that the "just mark content accordingly" is also not a better solution, not that ID requirements are in any way better. The only solution is not to enable this censorship infrastructure, because no matter which way it's done, it will always function as one.
by idle_zealot | 2026-03-06 09:04:50+00:00
> Instead, the service should be telling your device the nature of the content. Then, if the content is for adults and you're not one, your parents can configure your device not to display it.

That makes sense for purely offline media playback, but how could that work for a game or application or website? Ship several versions of the app for the different brackets and let the OS choose which to run? Then specifically design your telemetry to avoid logging which version is running?

You'd also not be reporting your age, you'd be sending a "please treat me like an adult" or "please treat me like a child" flag. That's hardly PII. More like a dark/light mode preference, or your language settings (which your browser does send).
by TheDong | 2026-03-06 09:04:51+00:00
Unfortunately, it has been ruled that the president is immune to legal prosecution on this matter, regardless of whether it is legal or not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._United_States

> the Supreme Court ruled in a 6–3 decision that presidents have absolute immunity for acts committed as president within their core constitutional purview

It turns out that "checks and balances" meant "the president is unchecked and unbalanced".
by kranke155 | 2026-03-06 09:04:52+00:00
So my understanding - from a friend at WPP who told me the same and from a freakonomics episode - is that advertising was wildly oversold before digital.

When the metrics arrived with digital, they saw that advertising, in some ways, was just not as effective as they’d hoped. In some ways the ROI wasn’t there. Seth Godin agrees. He says that advertising in the digital era could be as simple as just having a good product. I think this is Tesla’s position on it - make the best product and the internet takes care of it.

Legacy companies have kept large ad budgets but those are diminishing. From what I spoke with my friend at WPP, he said their data science team showed that outside of a new product or a product that is not recognised by consumers, the actual outcomes from ads are marginal or incremental. Thats what he told me. If your product is already known to consumers, the ROI is questionable.
by wao0uuno | 2026-03-06 09:06:30+00:00
But does the majority want that change? If they want it, are they entirely aware of its potential impact on their freedom of speech and access to information? Or were they conditioned to think it's good for them because well funded corporate entities and governments spend money on promoting that image? Democracy does not work when majority is stupid and uneducated because people like that are easily controlled. I wish we were putting as much resources into education as we're putting into cheap entertainment and ads/marketing.
by alexfoo | 2026-03-06 09:07:37+00:00
Indeed, you can get a sense of the scale on the Dinorwig wikipedia page and the pages it links to.

It has a storage capacity of about 9.1GWh.

The upper reservoir (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marchlyn_Mawr) holds 9.2 million cubic meters of water.

So 1 million cubic meters of water provides ~1GWh.

We can see how that compares in terms of raw GPE (Gravitational Potential Energy):

1 million cubic meters of water = 1E6 * 1E3 kg = 1E9 kg

There's roughly a 500m vertical drop between the upper and lower takes at Dinorwig so:

1E9 kg * 500 m * 9.8 m/(s^2) = 4.9E12 J =~ 1.36GWh

As for water towers, if you look at something like the Roihuvuori tower in Helsinki (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_tower) which is one of the largest:

Height: 52m, Capacity: 12000 cubic meters

If we are generous and say that all of the water is stored at the maximum height then:

12000 * 1E3 kg * 52m * 9.8 m/(s^2) =~ 1.7MWh

You'd need over 5000 of them to match what Dinorwig can provide.
by kranke155 | 2026-03-06 09:08:42+00:00
My exit is storytelling. I think that’s the only thing that will remain. I suspect humans will still want to hear stories about and from other humans.

There’s something about AIs that feels wrong for storytelling. I just don’t think people will want AIs to tell them stories. And if they do… well not my concern. I believe in human storytelling.
by gchadwick | 2026-03-06 09:08:54+00:00
> Also we found the formal waiver analysis tools to be very effective for waiving unreachable code, in case you aren't using those.

Yes we had used them just never got it slickly integrated into the verification dashboard. We had used this kind of analysis for internal sign off. You could generate the waivers manually and check them in but that suffers from the problem discussed above. Plus as OpenTitan was a cross company project you run into EDA licensing issues where not everyone has access to the same set of tools and a UNR flow could be running fine on one partner's infrastructure but isn't workable everywhere for multitude of reasons.

The ideal would be the nightly regression would do the UNR flow to generate the waivers and apply them when generating coverage but as ever there's only so much engineering time to go around and always other priorities.
by iugtmkbdfil834 | 2026-03-06 09:09:21+00:00
Sadly, the only real response here is non-compliance. Recently, credit card company wanted me to provide ID upon login ( I was amused -- while my setup may not be common, it has not changed for years now ). So I didn't and just ignored it. I checked on it this month and it suddenly was fine. But then.. one has to be willing to take a hit to their credit and whatnot.

The point remains though. They have zero way to enforce it if we choose to not comply. Just saying.
by adelie | 2026-03-06 09:11:24+00:00
I'm not in translation, but a number of close friends are in the industry. Two trends I've noticed in the industry, which I think we're seeing mirrored in tech:

1. No one cares about quality. Even in fields you'd expect to require the 'human touch' (e.g. novel translation), publishers are replacing translators with AI. It doesn't matter if you have higher-level knowledge or skills if the company gains more from cutting your contract than it loses in sales.

2. Translation jobs have been replaced with jobs proofreading machine translations, which pays peanuts (since AI is 'doing most of the work') but in fact takes almost as much effort as translating from scratch (since AI is often wrong in very subtle ways). The comparison to PR reviews makes itself.
by Nevermark | 2026-03-06 09:11:32+00:00
> downloading an HD film takes only seconds.

My apprehensions about living in GSO are over!

The rate that comms are colonizing orbit, or I should say the acceleration rate, feels like it can’t last for more than another decade or so before hundreds of thousands of satellites become each others Kessler nightmare.

But somehow, I expect systems will evolve to get much denser.

it’s probable not too early to consider future ring structures, for mounted satellites? Or an optimized distribution of long parking “star-bars”. As apposed to the free for all?

I expect reserved altitude shells, for space stations, depots and rocket/ship orbital maneuvers without the dodgeball.
by NoOn3 | 2026-03-06 09:11:32+00:00
You cannot rely on a closed source "AI" in someone else's cloud for your work. After all, it can be disabled for you at any time. "AI" can easily steal all your technological secrets. At the request of the owner, "AI" can easily mislead you and insert backdoors into your products. "AI" can even easily incorrectly answer some questions specifically for you if the owner of "AI" wants to remove your competition. And you may not even understand it.
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-03-06 09:12:11+00:00
> It's just a bunch of clicks

I promise there are people who can't figure out how to do it.

And again, the point of the lock on the door where you keep the porn is not to be robustly impenetrable to entry by a motivated 16 year old with a sledgehammer, it's only to make it obvious that they're not intended to go in there.
by bdangubic | 2026-03-06 09:12:43+00:00
Predidency is an Institution which needs to be protected at all costs. The checks and balances wasn’t meant to setup a system where Presidents can be sent to prison but to prevent “crimes” (for the lack of a better word) to happen to begin with. Of course our current “party over Country” system has practically killed any semblance of checks and balances…
by mschild | 2026-03-06 09:12:53+00:00
I know its effecitvely a vendor lock-in and not what you are looking for but I love the SimpleLogin integration that Proton made with Proton Pass.

I have it setup in my browser and phone. Whenever a website or app would like an email for an order or something else, it takes a single click to generate a named alias (using the website name) e
Which forwards emails to my normal inbox. Replying to any received emails also uses the alias.

The SimpleLogin interface could use some improvement though. Deleting unused ones is a bit tidious.
by nxobject | 2026-03-06 09:14:11+00:00
I mean, LyX has met my needs since 2019 - I don't particularly need to be optimistic about it. I was even able to bring in parts of my old LaTeX preamble with me, especially some utility macros. It was a pretty painless switch with immediate benefit.

(I've done everything in it from write honors theses and format CVs.)

I've been interested in Typst. But beyond report generation (which I avoid in general), I don't really have a general "document processing" tool, but multiple specialized ones, and given Typst's current jack of all trades/master of none status, I'm not sure what it'll replace. I use Quarto for a lot of my statistical computing, LyX if I need to do a lot of finicky math typesetting (e.g. if I need to break out \qquad), and Word - god forbid - for my non-technical collaborators.
by idle_zealot | 2026-03-06 09:14:53+00:00
The point is that I think it's one of a few things that if done together could result in better outcomes. First, it standardizes parental controls, which ought to be so easy to use that failure to do so is nearly always a proactive decision on the part of the guardian. It doesn't need to be perfect, just reduce friction for parents and increase friction for kids accessing the adult internet.

Second, it would signal to worried parents and busybodies that something has been done to deal with the danger that unmediated internet access might pose to minors. I don't think that it's a big issue, but a lot of energy has gone into convincing a lot of people that it is.

The other part of achieving a good outcome would be to disempower those in the political and private sphere who benefit from a paranoid and censorious public and have worked to foment this panic. That's the much harder part, but it's not really the one being discussed here. I'm pitching the low-intrusiveness version to gauge sentiment here for that easier part of the path.
by PunchyHamster | 2026-03-06 09:15:02+00:00
> Several years later I learned that Dell computers had larger-than-reasonable analog component problems because Dell sourced the absolute cheapest stuff for their computers; I expect that was also a cause.

Case in point: I was getting memory errors on my gaming machine, that persisted even after replacing the sticks. It caused windows bluesreen maybe once a month so I kinda lived with it as I couldn't afford to replace whole setup (I theoretized something on motherboard is wrong)

Then my power supply finally died (it was cheap-ish, not cheap-est but it had few years already). I replaced it, lo and behold, memory errors were gone
by weinzierl | 2026-03-06 09:15:04+00:00
"It is often impossible to gain consensus of all copyright holders since some may be unreachable."

How one feels about that is a matter of where one stands. The GPL first and foremost protects the interests of software users. Not developers. Not companies.

In that regard, the above should be seen as a feature, not a bug. I believe it is the most effective way to protect the user from being locked-in.
by hurfdurf | 2026-03-06 09:15:50+00:00
Why? Intel making and keeping it workstation/Xeon-exclusive for a premium for too long. And AMD is still playing along not forcing the issue with their weird "yeah, Zen supports it, but your mainboard may or may not, no idea, don't care, do your own research" stance. These days it's a chicken and egg problem re: price and availability and demand. See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29838403