MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by furyg3 | 2025-04-11 12:19:47+00:00
The TikTok-ification of advertising supported platforms is terrible, but makes sense to me. LinkedIn pivoted from making money on subscriptions and fees for job postings to ads, which mean the leading drivers are 'engagement' e.g. time you spend doom scrolling on their platform. This will end in disaster for the platform as a place to find jobs or employees.

Netflix I understand much less. They make money from subscriptions. If you perceive having a fantastic experience on the site by just going there, finding something you enjoy watching, and leaving... they win. Why they would foster a doom-scrolling experience I really can't really explain, other than imagining some dark pattern like they have to pay per view and want you to watch C grade movies? More time spent looking for something to watch means less time streaming?

I don't get it.
by moefh | 2025-04-11 12:20:18+00:00
> I see that as the smallest and most likely concession for you to make, assuming you can be intellectually honest, not because the fine being disproportionate is the full extent of my stance.

That would make sense for someone with all the relevant context about this story. While I agree with you that "most other information [I] want to know could be researched online", that would take a lot of time (I can't read German) and energy which would be best spent learning about way more important stuff happening in the world right now.

I've often seen people criticize scientists for not engaging with crackpots, with the argument if what they're saying is really dumb it should be easy to show that. I see that as naive -- there's only so much time in the day, you can't disprove every crackpot, so pick your battles.

This case feels like the same thing -- it started with someone claiming that a journalist was jailed for sharing a meme, then I learned this is a complete distortion. So I assume I'm dealing with a crackpot (not you, but the person who made the original claim), and so I refuse to spend more energy on this.

And if I'm being honest, I'm only writing this reply because it doesn't feel good to read "assuming you can be intellectually honest" while engaging in what I assumed was a cordial exchange, so I can't help but defend myself -- which I think I'll stop now and just let go.
by ltbarcly3 | 2025-04-11 12:20:26+00:00
Of course it's better to be poor, uneducated, and free than it is to be poor, uneducated, and a slave. It's not even comparable. However, it's better still to have access to education and economic opportunity. Laughing at the south for being poor and uneducated is literally laughing at the descendants of slaves for being uneducated and poor.

Glib comments about 'the end of slavery' miss the point completely. The south isn't the great great grandchildren of plantation owners complaining about being poor and suffering the consequences of the Civil War. Those people are doing quite well, look at how good the schools are in the rich, almost entirely white suburbs of Jackson, Mississippi - a city where you can't drink the tap water.
by zozbot234 | 2025-04-11 12:20:37+00:00
The point of functional, "sans I/O" style is to separate the definition of I/O from the rest of your logic. You're still doing I/O, but what sorts of I/O you're doing has a clear self-contained definition within your program. https://sans-io.readthedocs.io/how-to-sans-io.html
Show HN: NoLinkPreview - Share links without triggering previews
by santah | 2025-04-11 12:20:47+00:00
I built this simple tool that lets you share links without triggering previews or thumbnails on social and chat platforms.

I often wanted to share a link without drawing attention, breaking the layout of a conversation or leaking content (coughRickRollcough) through preview crawlers - but I couldn't find a tool that did that. So I built one.

Created with CloudFlare Workers and Pages, it basically appends your URL to https://nolinkpreview.com (so it doesn't cloak or obfuscate the destination).

When bots or crawlers follow the link, they receive a plain response with no metadata, thumbnails, or Open Graph tags - nothing to preview. When a user clicks the link, they're immediately redirected to the original URL.

There are no ads, tracking, logging or storage of any kind for the generated links or traffic. There is a single Cloudflare Web Analytics snippet on the homepage - just so I can tell if anyone is using the tool at all.

Would love any feedback, critique or edge cases you think I should handle.
by whizzter | 2025-04-11 12:21:06+00:00
Reading/hearing talks from people doing server backends there is many half insane things being done to keep servers and persistence in check, and everyone still a different custom solution.

A common scenarios:

- "Game-server" using "regular" server+DB frameworks, often works but seldom in real-time scenarios.

- Realtime Game-servers (with in-memory state, sometimes supporting rollback,etc) that then has persistence more or less as an afterthought (duplicating state management between client<->server<->persistence)

What spacetime tries to do (and my current experiment) is to merge the server and DB to move persistence _performance_ concerns into the backend process.

We _rightfully_ moved databases out of server processes for easier management and safety in the 90s, but since f.ex. SQLite has been a bit of a resurgence because the usercode was in a managed language and wasn't as likely to cause a corruption issue.

WASM is a great enabler here because it allows the server/DB to sandbox the logic-code even in "unsafe"/realtime languages from the more precarious DB parts of the process so we don't have to risk data-safety even as we move back to co-locating server-state and persistence data within the same process.
Show HN: I built an AI extension to protect your wallet from sneaky clauses
by debschillin | 2025-04-11 12:21:29+00:00
I got tired of slogging through walls of legal text whenever I had to sign something important, so I built a Chrome extension that uses AI to:

- Spot red flags and suspicious clauses – It automatically highlights risk areas in real-time as you read through an online contract.

- Score the contract’s safety – Based on industry-standard risk parameters, it gives you an at-a-glance score so you can see how risky the document might be.

- Simplify the jargon – It generates a quick summary of the key points, saving you from reading every paragraph in detail.

No more signing on hunches or bets!

Right now, it’s in Beta, and I’m giving out 50% off on launch day for anyone who joins the waitlist. It’s been super helpful for my own sanity—especially for those multi-page eContracts that feel designed to keep you scrolling forever.

I'll appreciate any feedbacks or your thoughts on this so I can make it more valuable.
by chii | 2025-04-11 12:22:06+00:00
> More time spent looking for something to watch means less time viewing?

or, if you're presented with more random 'clips' or movie snippets, this turns on your gambling reward center. It's like a slot machine - where you "win" by finding a good series to watch after searching. And because this is random, you end up getting addicted to looking thru the list/snippet, trying to encounter a perfect series to watch.
by cjs_ac | 2025-04-11 12:22:24+00:00
For any given thing or category of thing, a tiny minority of the human population will be enthusiasts of that thing, but those enthusiasts will have an outsize effect in determining everyone else's taste for that thing. For example, very few people have any real interest in driving a car at 200 MPH, but Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches are widely understood as desirable cars, because the people who are into cars like those marques.

If you're designing a consumer-oriented web service like Netflix or Spotify or Instagram, you will probably add in some user analytics service, and use the insights from that analysis to inform future development. However, that analysis will aggregate its results over all your users, and won't pick out the enthusiasts, who will shape discourse and public opinion about your service. Consequently, your results will be dominated by people who don't really have an opinion, and just take whatever they're given.

Think about web browsers. The first popular browser was Netscape Navigator; then, Internet Explorer came onto the scene. Mozilla Firefox clawed back a fair chunk of market share, and then Google Chrome came along and ate everyone's lunch. In all of these changes, most of the userbase didn't really care what browser they were using: the change was driven by enthusiasts recommending the latest and greatest to their less-technically-inclined friends and family.

So if you develop your product by following your analytics, you'll inevitably converge on something that just shoves content into the faces of an indiscriminating userbase, because that's what the median user of any given service wants. (This isn't to say that most people are tasteless blobs; I think everyone is a connoisseur of something, it's just that for any given individual, that something probably isn't your product.) But who knows - maybe that really is the most profitable way to run a tech business.
by dijit | 2025-04-11 12:22:26+00:00
I don't really know how to form this into words on a short-form text medium like this. So please read charitably.

I'm by no means a conspiracy theorist, however as I've risen the ranks of my chosen technical field I see more and more that what George Carlin said was really poignant. "You don't need a formal conspiracy when incentives align"[0].

And incentives align really easily.

Every company has some form of market analysis going on. CEO's will be invited to rub shoulders with the same groups of people. Conglomerates will have information sharing of some kind across all subsidiaries.

Everyone is acting independently, but towards the same goal. It's actually quite shocking to have been part of (and hearing about) meetings between CEOs where "new information from CMK (consumer market knowledge) indicates that smaller dev teams all onsite are the best way to do things" - and everyone gets the same "information" at the same time, and thus the entire market moves in that direction, as if it was a fixed horse race and they were acting on a secret tip they heard from their uncle...

I'm a bit counter-culture in my missive, so take what I'm saying with a grain of salt, but a little nudge across a limited population seems to be enough - and it exists.

Controversially: Blackrocks DEI initiatives are perfect public example of what I mean, no matter if you are pro or con, you can't deny the impact.

[0]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=XE3sYUJASLY
by hobs | 2025-04-11 12:23:58+00:00
Have you ... done enterprise sales? The idea that a group of people working for a multi-billion dollar business having no idea what they want and no understanding of capabilities of new technologies is ... standard?

I have seen it personally ... dozens? of times? Its the reasons startups can even succeed at all given the enormous momentum and cash reserves of these bigger companies - their goals, management, approach - it all becomes more diffuse and poorly executed.
by Bluecobra | 2025-04-11 12:24:04+00:00
> Most immutable distros (this included) are developed with the idea that you'd run local commands on the machine, and update a single OS image in place. That gets pretty unwieldy to manage across a fleet of devices.

This is how it always has been on enterprise network devices like switches, routers, etc. It’s pretty trivial to automate updates.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-04-11 12:24:39+00:00
Netflix is winning, see net income trends:

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NFLX/netflix/net-i...

Maybe it is winning despite what Netflix leaders are choosing to do, and maybe their choices will cause them to falter soon. And maybe Netflix could be doing better than they are. But it is always easier to pontificate than execute.

I don’t buy Netflix solely because they don’t integrate with the search in the iOS/macOS TV app.

Unfortunately, based on media trends before streaming and Netflix was a thing, lots of people like C grade productions. If you recall, “reality” TV shows were taking over in the 2000s. People like the Tiktok-ificiation (or otherwise lowering of quality).
by lionkor | 2025-04-11 12:24:40+00:00
Systems Programmer

Location: NRW, Germany

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: C++, Rust, C, C#, Git, GitHub/GitLab/Gitea pipelines, SQL, Linux, Golang, Networking (TCP, UDP, QUIC, ...), concurrency/async/threading/synchronization technologies

Resumé: GitHub: https://github.com/LionKor LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lion-kortlepel

Email: hn@kortlepel.com

I'm a low-level/applications/networking/backend developer with 5+ years of experience. I specialize in concurrency, low level development, mostly with C++, Rust, C, but am a bit of a jack of all trades. I speak both German and English fluently. With an active open source portfolio, a decent job history, and a degree, I'm now looking for a position where I can grow and learn more.
by euroderf | 2025-04-11 12:25:11+00:00
> Imagine some theoretical technological advancement. Now take it out of context, put it in the worst possible circumstances, and imagine it appeared into a society like ours without any prior thought or discussion about the possible downsides of that technology.

Isn't this the premise for the original Terminator ? Sure it was "unnecessarily" pessimistic, but man oh man it really hit a nerve and it set a tone for (all?) subsequent societal conversation.
by 52-6F-62 | 2025-04-11 12:27:29+00:00
And so then the moral impetus changes to “it is right to lie to your investors and clients and utilize underpaid manual labour where you claim you have intelligent machinery to get rich?”

It’s tens of millions of dollars lol.

The emperor just took off his socks and is starting to do a little uncoordinated “sexy” dance
by bmacho | 2025-04-11 12:27:31+00:00
> but I fail to see why it is a functional programming concept.

"Functional programming" means that you primarily use functions (not C functions, but mathematical pure functions) to solve your problems.

This means you won't do IO in your computation because you can't do that. It also means you won't modify data, because you can't do that either. Also you might have access to first class functions, and can pass them around as values.

If you do procedural programming in C++ but your functions don't do IO or modify (not local) values, then congrats, you're doing functional programming.
by nobodyandproud | 2025-04-11 12:27:31+00:00
Starting with the packaging is the easiest and most effective place to start.

Clothing is an interesting problem; silk and wool can provide superior alternatives but are costly and so it’d be a shift into quality.

That in turn requires a mindset shift away from changing trends every year to something perhaps more generational.

Are the wealthy trend setters willing to do this?
by mrkeen | 2025-04-11 12:27:48+00:00
> Somehow haskell and friends shifted the discussion around functional programming to pure vs non-pure

In direct response every other language in the mid 2010s saying, "Look, we're functional too, we can pass functions to other functions, see?"

foo.bar() .map(x => fireTheMissiles()) .collect();

C's had that forever:

void qsort(void *base, size_t nmemb, size_t size, int (*compar)(const void *, const void *))
by russellbeattie | 2025-04-11 12:27:56+00:00
One doesn't have to invoke Turing or Church to show all languages can do the same things.

Any code that runs on a computer (using the von Neumann architecture) boils down to just a few basic operations: Read/write data, arithmetic (add/subtract/etc.), logic (and/or/not/etc.), bit-shifting, branches and jumps. The rest is basically syntactic sugar or macros.

If your preferred programming language is a pre-compiled type-safe object oriented monster with polymorphic message passing via multi-process co-routines, or high-level interpreted purely functional archetype of computing perfection with just two reserved keywords, or even just COBOL, it's all going to break down eventually to the ops above.
by djoldman | 2025-04-11 12:28:32+00:00
(31:20)

> now if you want to actually run like a full stack USBC PD communication not USB or whatever just just to negotiate the power, what's on the other side or if you have any display port, prepare yourself 40KB of flash and 4KB of RAM, which is by the way the same amount that the Apollo guidance computer has...
by geenat | 2025-04-11 12:28:51+00:00
Rails, PHP, a lot of Python stuff (WSGI is CGI wrapped in a dict).

It's not only just about separation of concerns, but also separation of crashes/bugs/issues. FastCGI servers can run for years without restarts.

Thread creation/teardown/sleeping has gotten a lot faster as well in linux.

https://php-fpm.org/about/ it may be old but PHP-FPM is still one of the best FastCGI servers from a pragmatic point of view... ex: the ability to gracefully hot reload code, stop and start workers without losing any queries... all in production.
by numpad0 | 2025-04-11 12:29:33+00:00
No, I'm thinking that we need something fundamentally different, "locked-open" decentralized... The system should be so built that information relaying happen at discretion of individual users, not of benevolent mega-instance operators, so that the acts will be interpreted in context of local moral, ethical, and legal standards(that I believe to be roughly universal anyway, but sometimes do show conflicts).

In my opinion, as long as there would be hubs of information in the network, like Mastodon instance and its "core" networks, there will be constant asteroid impacts. Therefore the system needs to be able to ingest, sign, share, metricize data without relying on broadcasts from fault- and manipulation-prone tight mesh core structures.

I think abuse and/or legal problems should be able to be handled at edge just fine, with such means as phone-sized ML models, user discretion to share or not, voluntary flagging, reporting, and source blocks, as well as tipping to classical police law enforcement, etc. Ordinary people should be good at spotting and reporting illegal activities anyway.
by INTPenis | 2025-04-11 12:29:52+00:00
It's miles better than what we used to have. Imho fedi is exactly where I want to be.

I was active in vbulletin/phpbb/punbb boards for years, and I always wished I could participate in all of them with one user account. That's exactly what I can do now.

I think the marketing of Mastodon is what skews the image of the fediverse. We need to stop marketing as a Twitter, or a Bluesky, and more like individual communities that are able to communicate with each other.

Set more realistic expectations.

The USP is still that it's easy for anyone to run a node, it's still for the people, not for the millionaires with tons of resources.
by sanderjd | 2025-04-11 12:30:07+00:00
I guess my thing with LinkedIn is that there's just no reason to use the feed. It's still a place to connect with people I've worked with and keep up with what they've been doing. It's incredibly useful for that. I really don't find the feed to be either a boon or a hindrance in that use case. I know it's there, I know it annoys some people, but it's just irrelevant to me.
by avalys | 2025-04-11 12:30:09+00:00
What do you think the regulatory standard should be set to? It is currently set to 10 ppb (parts per billion).

Do you think it should be 0? 0.0000 ppb? No detectable lead whatsoever? What do you do if detection technology improves and the minimum detectable level decreases?

Even if you go live totally off the grid with your child and grow your own vegetables in your backyard with completely natural ingredients, you will still end up with some level of lead - which is a natural ingredient itself, after all.

At some point, you have to set a threshold and say that any lead below this level is not worth the cost of removing it or avoiding it. Would you pay 10x more for baby food at a 1 ppb level instead of 10 ppb? Do you think that would produce a net benefit for society?
by dgimla20 | 2025-04-11 12:30:49+00:00
I don't know why but that video on the homepage (third media item from top) split me up for how rude/brash it came across.

The mans thrusting his palm out in front of the colleague, slapping the top of his alarm clock, the woman's exaggerated third person glance and swift exit.

I can only imagine it's followed by a complaint to HR or gossip, with the man on the laptop quickly becoming a hate-figure in the office.

Surely a polite decline is the exact same thing.
by Robotbeat | 2025-04-11 12:30:57+00:00
There’s also lead in any random patch of dirt or gravel because it occurs naturally in granite at about 30 parts per million (and usually less in other rock types). https://www.science.smith.edu/~jbrady/petrology/igrocks-tool...

The “action levels” of lead in food (fruits and vegetables, etc) are 10 parts per BILLION, and stuff less than that is considered acceptable, because otherwise freaking everything would test positive because food grows in dirt which contains minerals from rocks.

Lead has higher allowable levels in things like nuts, again because they are grown in the dirt and have a lot of minerals. I think peanuts and stuff have 100-900ppb lead. https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s12011-024-044...
by tylermw | 2025-04-11 12:31:30+00:00
Funny you mention namespacing: R 4.5.0 was just released today with the new `use()` function, which allows you import just what you need instead of clobbering your global namespace, equivalent to python’s `from x import y` syntax.

e.g. avoid dplyr overriding base::filter

use(“dplyr”, c(“mutate”, “summarize”))
by yakkomajuri | 2025-04-11 12:31:45+00:00
I feel like this with my (current) bank of choice here in Brazil. They were one of the first to focus on being digital-first and allowed opening an account without going to a branch etc. They grew fast and became one of the largest banks in the country and generally considered pretty solid. I've been banking there for like a decade.

Now they've decided to be what they call a "SuperApp". This goddamn super app has a Twitter-like thing inside of it, shopping, and literally dozens of other products. Some core banking features are now hard to find but more importantly I had quite a few issues with investments as well. People who work there also tell me about messy problems on the financial services bits. It's very clear to me that in trying to become everything, they've deprioritized the fundamental products they offer, which are those related to banking. I want to store money, send and receive it, invest it, and have access to credit. But the experience of using those features has become significantly worse as new verticals sprouted up.
by weard_beard | 2025-04-11 12:33:29+00:00
Would you go and dig rocks out of a mountain and refine them into pure ore just because?

We are social animals. Art is storytelling. It has many utilities, but it is primarily education and entertainment.

A modern version of the cave painting is to distill complex and uncomfortable truths about the world for those who wish to thrive in a society built on lies.

If you want to go dig shiny rocks from the mountain at great personal risk to your mental and physical health for no benefit to society you are probably sick. If it heals you, that's its utility.

But if you find you're good at it and you want to use this skill for its intended purpose, you aught to be getting paid for it.

*Your mileage may vary. Just my take.
by lores | 2025-04-11 12:34:23+00:00
Violence is such a nebulous concept, though. There are forms of violence that aren't physical, even though the law typically only recognise those. Is publicly mocking people for having a different culture violence? Is calling for harm upon them? Is, through policy, causing harm to them violence? Is it violence if it's through willful inaction?

I think all the above are, although the trade-off line is somewhere above mockery.