MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by qwertox | 2025-04-05 11:44:15+00:00
I've been thinking about this some time now. But not from the aspect of sovereignty.

Assume a group builds a social network just like Twitter, but with verified users, actually verified, possibly via personal ID / passport maybe at the town hall, no alias allowed, but the legal name, people will know who you are. All publicly readable without account.

This would give politicians, companies, journalists and citizens a way to have public "conversations", near real-time news updates just like on Twitter, but without the huge amount of garbage that comes from bots and people eagerly destroying the public discourse. Illegal comments (my mistake, criminal content) lead to direct consequences, maybe also with the one of setting the account to read-only mode.
by gcp123 | 2025-04-05 11:45:39+00:00
What makes this fascinating isn't just what it says about storytelling, but what it reveals about our relationship with truth in media. I worked in public radio for 7 years, and TAL's influence was impossible to overstate - every producer wanted to craft stories with that perfect narrative arc.

The Daisey episode still haunts journalism programs. We used it as a case study in our ethics workshops. The truly unsettling part wasn't just Daisey's fabrications, but how perfectly those lies fit into TAL's storytelling template - dramatic scenes, sympathetic characters, narrative tension, and a tidy resolution that makes you feel something.

Glass wasn't wrong about storytelling's power to make people listen. But the Daisey incident showed its dangers - when your format rewards emotional impact and narrative elegance, you create incentives for sources to deliver exactly that, truthful or not.

The saddest part is that real stories about Foxconn's labor conditions existed that could have been told without fabrication. But they wouldn't have had that perfect "old man touching an iPad for the first time" moment that makes for such a perfect radio beat.
by banqjls | 2025-04-05 11:46:25+00:00
The article talks about manipulation from the US, but the examples are: Cambridge Analytica (which was British, not American), Querdenkers (who were German), and Éric Zemmour (who is French). I mean is this seriously advocating for the censorship of protests coming from the German public?

What these people want is censorship that only allows progressive arguments to flourish. They already have all the laws that make non-progressive speech forbidden, but they are struggling to apply them to companies that are the other side of the pond. Having social networks here would allow them do to so easily. To that I have to say no thanks.
by briandear | 2025-04-05 11:46:38+00:00
The average person doesn’t care about this. The ones complaining about “influence” are the ones in power who don’t want that power threatened. Our motorcycle racing group in Spain — they’re all on Insta and WhatsApp and perfectly fine about it. They aren’t saying “we need to get off these platforms because of Brexit or whatever.” They use these platforms to talk about and coordinate among people with shared interests. X works very well in Catalonia as well — usually where people get breaking alerts and information on freeway closures, weather alerts, etc. it works great — most people don’t care about the politics.
by necovek | 2025-04-05 11:47:20+00:00
This is a logging setup being done top-level in an auxiliary module "utils": you might import it into one command and not another, and end up surprised why is one getting the logging setup and the other isn't. Or you might attempt to configure it and the import would override it.

As for getting a lot of code that was vetted by senior engineers, that's not so hard: you just have to pay for it. Basically, any company could — for a price — consider sharing their codebase for training.
by diggan | 2025-04-05 11:48:39+00:00
> but its fragmentation makes it harder for the continent to gather the capital and the consumers to make it possible for big tech companies to be created and thrive

Compared to what? Europe isn't as fragmented as it used to be, and that it isn't possible to create big tech companies actually sound like a benefit to me, I don't want that. I personally prefer smaller companies, even if they don't take over the world, and it's a fairly popular sentiment at least around me in south-west Europe.
by ALLTaken | 2025-04-05 11:49:44+00:00
If you look at releasing "everything" from the perspective of a quant and purely so, then the objective to dominate a metric relevant to the quant is obviously the motive. But it's impossible to prove and a very strong assumption with little to no data. If DeepSeek's parent company traded on the data and release of DeepSeek with quant models that target affected firms with shorts before release, then that's a whole new level of WOW and honestly great funds do that. But this is a too big and bold of a move to underpin motive.

But believing a man could achieve such a feat alone is inspiring to be frank.
by alkonaut | 2025-04-05 11:50:05+00:00
Depends on whether they are reasonably independent. This works pretty well for e.g NRK, YLE, DR etc. Government can’t have a say in short term (less than an election cycle) funding, or who’s leading the Public Service company or similar. There can be no possible leverage from politicians, that’s the key. . The job of public service like any media is to be critical of power. The first sign of a country sliding towards being a non-democracy is political tampering with public service.
by necovek | 2025-04-05 11:51:24+00:00
Logging configuration is done at import time for "utils" module.

Imagine code like this:

main.py:

import logging logging.basicConfig(...) logging.info("foo") # uses above config if __name__ == "__main__": import utils # your config is overridden with the one in utils logging.info("bar") # uses utils configuration ...

Or two "commands", one importing utils and another not: they would non-obviously use different logging configuration.

It gets even crazier: you could import utils to set the configuration, override it, but a second import would not re-set it, as module imports are cached.

Basically, don't do it and no unexpected, confusing behaviour anywhere.
by mhitza | 2025-04-05 11:52:06+00:00
> And to achieve that they need to realize that all the regulation they aimed at facebook can only be satisfied by entities that have facebook's money.

I disagree with your claim. Can you tell me why you think that is?

You can still sell advertisement without collecting and processing large amounts of personal data. I would claim that it's even better if your ads are based on the in-page content, than users' personal information.

At the same time, legislation such as Digital Markets Act applies to large entities (currently singled out), and further compliance is going to apply to new platforms when they become "large enough".
by diggan | 2025-04-05 11:52:07+00:00
> Cambridge Analytica (which was British, not American),

Saying that the manipulation was done by the UK because Cambridge Analytica happens to be Brittish completely misconstrues what happened.

> Cambridge Analytica was working for United States Senator Ted Cruz using data harvested from millions of people's Facebook accounts without their consent

> Facebook later confirmed that it actually had data on potentially over 87 million users, with 70.6 million of those people from the United States.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...

It was very much a story of manipulation in the US being done by Americans, even if there were Brittish people involved too.
by LinuxBender | 2025-04-05 11:52:36+00:00
Put a simplified and unified UI in front of Usenet with RGB LED's and put it on everyone's refrigerator, car infotainment accident distraction panel, smart watch, smart toilet. Have Carls Jr. fund it. Implement text-to-speech and speech-to-text. Talk to all your family and friends over Usenet via the smart watch, toilet, etc... What devices did I miss?
by roenxi | 2025-04-05 11:53:03+00:00
Free ad-supported European platforms would probably be acceptable. The issues are:

1) The EU would probably reject US-style moderation. They don't have the same level of tolerance for speech they disagree with. HN is up to what, its 3rd public moderator? The EU would probably have some sort of law that there must be some maximum number of mods per user if they had big social platforms. What if right-wingers say something without a mod looking over it? Europeans wouldn't stand for that sort of laxity or dang's obvious moderate bias.

2) The ad-supported aspect is likely to be problematic in the EU. The regulators seem pretty suspicious of that sort of thing.

3) A lot of the interesting people who were in Europe seem to get brain-drained to the US. Most of the interesting Europeans I know are US citizens because in the US they get paid well.
by ghusto | 2025-04-05 11:54:34+00:00
I try not to be cynical, but I honestly don't think they even care about that with all things being equal.

I'm talking about the 90+% of people, not the people we all probably know. It's not about elitism either, it's just human nature. People care about the ends, not the means.

Even with all things being equal, if you offer X covered in shinies, you will win over someone just offering X. Companies like Meta are very good at covering their products with shinies, and governments are not.
by assimpleaspossi | 2025-04-05 11:55:18+00:00
As a very young boy in the 1950s or 60s, I bought a new flavor of Life Savers candy and enjoyed this new flavor so much I wrote the company complimenting them on the great flavor. Some time later, they sent me a box containing all their flavors of Life Savers.

Not the same thing but a comment on what things were like back in the day.
by marcusb | 2025-04-05 11:56:05+00:00
> If you have a modern iPhone and don’t want the crazy hacks, a very very simple but effective tip is to power off your iPhone when exiting the aircraft. When the device powers up it is in “before first unlock” mode and is severely restricted in what it can do. The attack surface area is significantly reduced.

From a comment in the article:

"Schneier’s border crossing opsec advice is characteristically thorough, but the recommendation to simply ‘turn off your phone’ undersells modern forensic capabilities. As a security consultant who’s testified in border device seizure cases, I’ve seen CBP’s Cellebrite tools extract data from ‘off’ iPhones up to 72 hours post-shutdown via remnant charge in memory chips (see 2024 DEFCON demo). The article’s Faraday bag suggestion works, but only if activated before entering the 100-mile border zone – we’ve documented RFID sniffers in airport limo services."
by Gaming8392 | 2025-04-05 11:56:09+00:00
That and the fact that most of those AI-generated web sites are clones of the thousand of applications that already exist, except that they now require an internet connection and a Google account for some reason.

His tool looks like a sticky note application with some Markdown inside. I'm pretty sure there are plugins that already can do this on Obsidian or any other text editor. It's funny to try to "vibe it" yourself but it's really useless in the long run since you'll be the one who will maintain it compared to the other projects with a good community behind.
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-04-05 11:58:36+00:00
Lately the field of psychology is having a reproducibility crisis, but not these psychologists! This Time the study is not subject to any factors about the test set at all! Nothing about culture, age, socioeconomic status, health, weather, life events, or conversation partners is gonna stop these researchers from making blanket statements about 49 and 51% of humanity, respectively.

Thankfully they call out how inconclusive their conclusions are.

I would not recommend saying to friends “did you know they did a study and women speak more than men?” Because it’s only true for the population in the study (with all their cultural characteristics) and only for the moments the word detection apparatuses were on.
by sureIy | 2025-04-05 11:59:19+00:00
Here's the thing. You can't force people to use a social network. Literally no one cares about this stuff.

There's a reason why there are like 5 social networks while thousands of people want to "make the next Facebook."

If Meta is a threat, then ban it. People will cry and maybe then new alternatives may emerge. But you still need skilled people who'd rather work for you than accept Facebook's $400k offers. Good luck with EU funding.
by OJFord | 2025-04-05 11:59:58+00:00
That's a good summary, I basically agree. It's hardly describing a current and ongoing 'crisis' that the US hopefully doesn't deteriorate from its present position to the level of, though, is it?

I think if I were American I would be longing for the day that <insert Trump thing> 'remains a topic of debate because we haven't seen the promised benefit of it'!
by dr_dshiv | 2025-04-05 12:00:20+00:00
Not sure if you are joking, but that’s not a clear summary of platonism.

Platonism does believe that forms exist separate from material instances; like, perfect spheres or triangles are “real,” even if there are no perfect spheres or triangle in the material world. That is a statement for the reality of the immaterial world, for platonists.

However, there are more than just these idealized forms in the immaterial world of forms. There aren’t just right triangles or perfect spheres, there are also forms that have complexity exceeding anything in the material world.

The world of forms might be thought of as the world of information, if that helps. However, it is subtlety different, since information is materially instantiated — and there appear to be hierarchies within the world of forms that somehow take precedence. Eg, the concept of 1 takes precedence over 363279.

The point is that there are forms of individual people, too, in platonism. Plato is vague about this in dialectic, but I believe Plotinus addresses it directly.
by ghusto | 2025-04-05 12:00:20+00:00
Other than the points already made in replies, there's the fact that the only thing discussed in those places is how terrible the thing they're trying to replace is.

Every so often I get curious about something like Mastadon or Bluesky because it comes up here again. So I head over to see whatsup, and it's just post after post about how terrible Twitter is, and how badly it's doing now. Okay, I get it, you moved from Twitter because of blah, can you move on to all the things you _wanted_ to post on Twitter now?
by dorianniemiec | 2025-04-05 12:00:22+00:00
Go has larger ecosystem of libraries for building web servers. You have FrankenPHP for running PHP, Lego for automatic TLS, etc. For Rust there is `tokio-rustls-acme` crate (used by Ferron) for automatic TLS. While for PHP there is a `php` crate that depends on unsupported PHP version. Ferron uses FastCGI for communicating with PHP-FPM daemon instead. However, Go uses a garbage collector, unlike Rust, which has a borrow checker to ensure memory safety.
by ALLTaken | 2025-04-05 12:00:33+00:00
You've not made an honest negative Google Maps review in Europe yet. I've received a takedown notice with threat of Lawyers.

Also, the UK/French and possibly other governments want to be able to read private messages and have law-enforcement tools made for free for them.

Public Opinion is free to issue in the EU, but doesn't go unpunished. Here an example and long legal battle most of us can't afford this famous talk show moderator had to face due to "Insulting a Majesty", the turkish president.

Don't even think of encryption, governments will request you build in backdoors for them. Social Networking is strictly controlled and locked down in the EU, hard to develop and maintain a product that you as a founder can goto jail for, if your users insult a majesty in some country.

A law had to be "cancelled" to repeal the extradition of Jan Böhmermann into prison in Turkey.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%B6hmermann_affair

- https://www.bundestag.de/webarchiv/textarchiv/2017/kw22-de-m...
by pas | 2025-04-05 12:01:03+00:00
isn't London still paying more taxes than what's spent there?

though of course it's not surprising, productivity is vastly higher in cities. but that's an argument for allowing and helping them to grow more.

urbanization started many hundreds of years ago, it's nothing new.

in fact, instead of committing to economically (and ecologically) sustainable high-density cities (and withdrawing from the crazy American Dream/Nightmare suburbs)

letting people piss away their lives in shitty none of the above places
by aziaziazi | 2025-04-05 12:01:33+00:00
> The womb-like tissue of endometriosis is able to grow new nerve cells – the cells that transmit pain sensations – and make existing nerve cells more active. The pain signals this sends to the brain are increased even more by inflammation – an overreaction of the immune system. It is this inflammation that could be tackled by dietary changes, experts believe.
by thinkingemote | 2025-04-05 12:01:47+00:00
There seems to be two kinds of irony here going in two ways, I feel.

The anti-globalists by their actions seem to be creating a reaction which is leading to less global collaborations. Note the title uses the word "Sovereignty". Sovereignty is becoming more important as a reaction against the anti-globalism movement by those who want to support everyone anywhere working together over thin borders between peoples. In other words, isolationism breeds an isolationist reaction. We might see a stronger European identity versus others as a reaction against America's declaration of their identity over others.

Secondly, on an environmental front, we are seeing a move towards the reduction in global trade and travel between nations, and a reduction in developing world pollution as developed nations manufacture more things closer to home. So there's an irony in that the anti-environmentalists are causing a reaction that will help the global environment!
by gorjusborg | 2025-04-05 12:01:48+00:00
Web forums are not social media, but I can see how they might be confused.

HN is more link aggregator / web forum than what the term social media has come to represent. I will grant you that the term 'social media' literally could cover any media that is social, but that's not historically how it has been applied.

Here there is no algorithmic bubble curated by engagement algorithm. Any attention is managed by the human brain, which is way healthier for the individual as they aren't being manuipulated into addictive engagement and groups as it tends less to form highly refined group think bubbles.

He's right, social media is the a big cause of the current unrest, not something that must be saved.

I would agree that communication platforms should probably not be open to spying or manipulation, but end-to-end encryption goes a long way there. The remaining problem is access being turned off, which can be solved by not relying on government controlled infrastructure (like electricity grid, networks, etc.).

So the person is right. The answer isn't a new site, it is more in person comms as redundancy.
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-04-05 12:02:15+00:00
His argument is pretty circular, which is e.g. not that Americans would work for Vietnamese wages but that we'd produce automation that can do the same work. But in that case: why aren't we doing that today?

The answer is that it's still more advantageous to pay Vietnam to make our clothes.

It's basically just no free lunch theorem: we can afford the CapEx of doing such a thing today precisely because we have better alternatives. If there were no better alternatives and we had to produce our own garments, we wouldn't be able to afford the CapEx to do it in a dramatically more labor-efficient manner.
by beloch | 2025-04-05 12:02:32+00:00
Facebook's engagement algorithms directly contributed to the Rohingya massacre in Myanmar[1]. Meta refused to take responsibility and argued that it's up to governments to regulate social media, not Meta. Then they opposed all efforts to regulate them.

People didn't care.

However, the current poop-storm the U.S. has caused is making a lot of people wake up care about precisely this sort of thing. e.g. Canadians have finally realized that being more economically engaged North-South with the U.S. than East-West with other Canadian provinces is a very dumb thing that makes Canada extremely vulnerable to a foreign power that can no longer be relied upon. Measures that have been long viewed as "good ideas" are finally being enacted.

Don't say, "Nobody cares about FOSS alternatives to American social media." They haven't, until now. Now is a unique moment in history and the perfect time to switch.

Social media platforms are online communities. Their biggest asset is not algorithms or servers, but the people using them. What is Facebook or Twitter or Reddit without the users? Nothing. Invest your time and effort in the alternatives now. This is a rare opportunity.

[1]https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
by coldpie | 2025-04-05 12:04:56+00:00
Yeah I don't know either. Thanks to modern medicine, we already have enormous and growing problems with the accumulation of power and wealth in individuals. Currently, death is the only (legal/ethical) check we have on the people who have accumulated so much power that they are above the law. If we remove natural death, how can we ever get out from under the thumb of the uber-powerful? I'd really like to see more thought put into solving these problems before I could be convinced that longevity research is ethical.
by voidhorse | 2025-04-05 12:06:02+00:00
This analogy is so thin and your statements are so general that you're basically saying nothing in so many words. We should be critical of new technologies and endeavor to understand how they best suit us. The purported use cases of a spellchecker and an LLM completely differ. Their modalities differ. Their effect differ. Their implications for society differ.

Handwaving away any attempt at analysis and criticism or developing nuance and understanding is even lazier than my original snark comment.

The locomotive is an amazing invention that brought a lot of benefit to society. It also brought the train crash and radical transformation of various other social practices and functions. No technology is simply a "productivity enhancer" and nothing else. They all bring all sorts of new dynamics and unintended consequences.
by kjellsbells | 2025-04-05 12:06:03+00:00
Another excellent example of the TAL format gone wrong: the Caliphate podcast series by the New York Times. Conpelling narrative, hot topic, built on quicksand.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caliphate_%28podcast%29?wprov=...

You can still find it on Spotify, with a mea culpa attached.

https://open.spotify.com/show/1QLjI1ptUhPEIYaaiJgZlh?si=1XK5...
by qwertox | 2025-04-05 12:06:12+00:00
No DM, no need for encryption of messages. All conversation is public. Takedown notices will be from a real company or a real person to another real entity: if they're right, it has to be taken down. If not, not. I mean, the law would be pretty clear on that and if not, that would be a good time to set a precedence.

If Böhmermann wants to publish attacking satire, I guess it would stay up until courts decide otherwise.
by raffael_de | 2025-04-05 12:07:41+00:00
Who is people and why wouldn't they want to deal with him when they'll at least short term benefit from it?

All those supposed "people" are like your celebrities who promised to leave the country if Trump gets elected. Nobody left.

This is also a good example of a bad strategy from a game theoretic perspective.

They want X and threaten: if I don't get X then I'll do Y which is going to be bad for you and me. They don't get X and think: well, what's the point of sticking to my threat if I lost anyway. And that's a bluff. Trump would do X nonetheless and by that prove he's willing to suffer himself just to make you suffer as well. This is going to be remembered next time he makes a threat.