MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by derektank | 2025-04-17 15:42:41+00:00
Trump and the right wing engage in cancel culture. Ben Shapiro tried to cancel James Gunn, Bill Ackman tried to cancel Ivy League graduates that protested in support of Gaza, there are many examples. The American right wing simply just doesn't have the cultural cachet in major institutions such as academia, Hollywood, publishing houses, and generally in major US cities to enforce their cancellation attempts.
by simonw | 2025-04-17 15:43:03+00:00
> We conducted a nationally representative survey of 1,006 Gen Z young adults (ages 18-27). We asked respondents to tell us, for various platforms and products, if they wished that it “was never invented.” [...] and the most regretted platforms of all: TikTok (47%) and X/Twitter (50%).

Ouch, Gen Z really hate Twitter.
by SoftTalker | 2025-04-17 15:43:06+00:00
I wouldn't take it that far, individual rights are important but so is functioning society. Counterculture is often a cyclic/youthful reaction to things that have been established as "better" or "proper" by older generations. Most rules for life such as the 10 Commandments have sort of a "deny youself some pleasure because it's better for the group" vibe that have been learned and re-learned over many centuries.
by pixl97 | 2025-04-17 15:43:15+00:00
War gaming and anything related to war really seems to have a pull into videos that tend to "Hello, would you like to become a Nazi".

My typical viewing on YT sounds kind of like yours. Wood working, AI, Astro, some rebuilding of heavy equipment. That's all fine. It's when you get into any war tech that it quickly spirals off into some rather insane conspiracy crap, even if the videos you watch are just reasonable documentaries.
by OhMeadhbh | 2025-04-17 15:44:18+00:00
Also... we're throwing around words like "crime" and "terror" and talking about shadowy quasi-governmental organizations encroaching on civil rights to privacy. I offer this commentary from the Eurythmics' score to Michael Radford's 1984 film "1984" to serve as background music for our discussions.

https://youtu.be/IcTP7YWPayU
by entropicdrifter | 2025-04-17 15:44:25+00:00
>as a hacker without children because i got priced out of the market, why should i care about what tiktok does or ceases to do?

Because you want to live in a society where people have the attention spans necessary to e.g. drive cars safely without distraction and you want people to not be so vastly ignorant at scale that they collectively endorse or tolerate fascist behavior from governments and corporations?
by hahajk | 2025-04-17 15:44:28+00:00
Children still need to be able to explore the world themselves, I would say most of the time kids spend above 3yo should be without a parent facilitating their activities.

Also, adults have lots of responsibilities other than making sure children are playing constructively. Requiring over-the-shoulder collaboration for all online activity isn't realistic, especially when you have more than one child per parent.

Banning youtube has been a no-brainer for me. The loss of the "smart" shows is a cost well worth reducing attention addiction.
by throwanem | 2025-04-17 15:44:31+00:00
Yeah, I see this as a side effect whenever I drop a YT link into a private tab that I don't want even theoretically influencing what happens on my actual account.

Usually links like that come from here. It's quite eye-opening, like turning on showdead in your profile and just rolling around in the [flagged] [dead] "politics" for awhile.

But you will want to take a shower after, and you should; when Nietzsche said it looks back, this is what he meant, and it will ruin you if you let it. We all eventually become what we pay enough attention to, and we always pay a great deal of attention to what we hate. That's why it's worth so much money to get us doing it.

(I know I'm not saying anything new to you the extremely veteran commenter to whom I reply, of course. But as of course you also know, there are always young 'uns here who hadn't seen it said so plainly yet.)
by washadjeffmad | 2025-04-17 15:44:38+00:00
Recall the recent deluge of tech promoters and influencers suddenly sharing "Will iPhones get 34% MORE EXPENSIVE??" articles and videos. Odd, wasn't it, that that "reporting" benefited exactly one company.

I doubt that every reader thought to themself, "this doesn't imply that non-Apple products will not be affected by the tariffs. I should look more deeply into this so I can make a more important purchase that offsets a greater future cost" before charging out the door to buy more expensive iPhones.

When someone writes something that singles out a particular company, group, or individual, we might not understand the subtext and interests at play, but we must at least allow others to account for the purpose and effects.

In this case, the author wasn't implying that industrialized harm to children was a new or unique problem with Tik Tok and has written several articles with similar titles about other social media to highlight that this is a bigger problem that should be acknowledged and addressed at a higher level. That alone makes it not just reasonable, but desirable to bring up that there are other members of that industry.
by pfdietz | 2025-04-17 15:44:41+00:00
That depends on the scale of human society, doesn't it? Grow the population in the solar system enough and it becomes a smaller fraction of gross output than many trivial and frivolous things are today.

I'm arguing here that if non-interstellar space colonization is possible, interstellar colonization is a natural and feasible extension. You might argue that even colonization in the solar system will not occur, and I admit that's a defensible position.
by dingnuts | 2025-04-17 15:44:51+00:00
> the entire appeal of Claude Code is that it does everything itself, like figuring out what files to read/change

how is this appealing? I think I must be getting old because the idea of letting a language model run wild and run commands on my system -- that's unsanitized input! --horrifies me! What do you mean just let it change random files??

I'm going to have to learn a new trade, IDK
by bfenster | 2025-04-17 15:44:56+00:00
Someone from Stytch here! We’re spending a lot of time tackling the challenges of letting delegated AI agents act on a user’s behalf. This post does a good job of sharing our approach- treating agents as separate OAuth clients with scoped tokens, consent flows, and revocation—to prevent overreach or data leaks.

Curious how others are approaching agent permissions, especially in multi-user or enterprise contexts. Would love to hear what’s working in the wild.
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-04-17 15:44:58+00:00
Ostracization is an absolutely critical tool in the marketplace of ideas.

I'm sympathetic to the argument that the dynamics of the Internet have made some tools more or less suitable for purpose as what they used to be, but the idea that we can just assert "no ostracization" is flatly insane and totally antithetical to the marketplace of ideas.
by torginus | 2025-04-17 15:45:11+00:00
I don't have any particular feelings for or against Linux, and even if I had, they would be irrelevant for the sake of this argument. I'm just saying for something to be the objectively being 'best' at something, means it makes little sense to use anything but that thing, excepting niche cases.

Which is why you could make a credible case for Linux being the 'best' server OS, but you couldn't make the case for it in other spaces (consumer, embedded etc.), because the alternatives are preferred by huge chunks of the market.
by RKFADU_UOFCCLEL | 2025-04-17 15:45:17+00:00
How do I pretend to fit in here, what is the actual number one proof that some random websites are "causing serious harm" to children? I had to stop reading to stop my blood from boiling at the quote below, before making it to the slew of legal pontification.

> As one internal report put it:

>> “Compulsive usage correlates with a slew of negative mental health effects like loss of analytical skills, memory formation, contextual thinking, conversational depth, empathy, and increased anxiety,” in addition to “interfer[ing] with essential personal responsibilities like sufficient sleep, work/school responsibilities, and connecting with loved ones.”1

This doesn't prove or imply anything. They can believe they are killing people (and probably do, especially with the "large amount of users = woah, i'm god" effect). It still won't be true unless they actually are (which I doubt, but I have never seen this supposedly ground breaking social media webpage before). There are companies causing actual harms on the internet and those are the ones censoring everything and spying on users (coincidentally, not to be a point against this thread) and making false narratives of why everyone needs to buy their spying product and put it on their web page and require using google chrome or mozilla firefox to view the website to be compatible with their spyware.

Edit:

I just scrolled through and only read the CSAM part because that's the only big enough bait to get me to read it and:

> PARA 112: these leaders knew about agencies that recruited minors to create Child Sexual Abuse Material and commercialized it using LIVE.

That sounds incredibly unlikely, when you interpret it at face value. So you're saying some good boy CS grad like everyone on HN - the most milquetoast people on the planet - just went from being afraid of even publishing easily rebukable misinformation, to knowingly assisting people in the most punishable crime on the planet?

> PARA 114: TikTok has long known that virtual gifting is used as a predatory grooming tactic on LIVE. TikTok has internally acknowledged that “perpetrators tend to use tactics such as gift giving, flattery, and gifting money to win the trust of minors.”

Are we supposed to conclude that "gifting" causes child sexual abuse? Okay, then what about the fact that being able to communicate at all does?
by JoshTriplett | 2025-04-17 15:45:27+00:00
> They don't even have basic reading proficiency until age around age 7 or 8.

Some develop advanced reading proficiency well before that, and the more they read the more likely that is to become the case.

Every child is different, but the more you assume they can't do certain things, the more you'll find that to be self-fulfilling.

(That said, that makes an argument for extensive access to reading materials, not videos.)
by bdcravens | 2025-04-17 15:45:34+00:00
("Genius, Billionaire, Playboy, Philanthropist")

Everything else. Cloud provider, operating systems, browsers, hosting business apps, phone licenser, Internet provider, smart home manufacturer, and various moonshots. Their ad company is a monopoly because of those other services.

Google as an ad company that can't leverage those other lines of business to gain an advantage over other ad companies still has a viable ad business. They can compete on the basis of that lone company's strengths.

("If you're nothing without this suit, then you shouldn't have it")
by Ajedi32 | 2025-04-17 15:45:38+00:00
> pays good money to make sure that their internet connection is not being subjected to MITMs

Is that actually true? I mean, obviously CAs aren't validating DNS challenges over coffee shop Wi-Fi so it's probably less likely to be MITMd than your laptop, but I don't think the BRs require any special precautions to assure that the CA's ISP isn't being MITMd, do they?
by CodesInChaos | 2025-04-17 15:46:36+00:00
I wonder why redis won't be updated in AUR. There are plenty of AUR packages for closed source software, like Discord or Steam. A not-quite-open-source license like redid uses doesn't seem problematic by comparison.

Or will a second AUR be added for relicensed redis, so people can easily pick which one they want?
by spacebanana7 | 2025-04-17 15:46:42+00:00
Google can't cancel it right now because then otherwise Bing would bid for it. Antitrust rules which prevented anyone from bidding it would protect against this.

A historical parallel is when tobacco advertising was banned, and cigarette companies because more profitable. Advertising greatly affected which cigarettes people smoked but had a smaller (though still real) impact on whether they smoked. So the companies kept most of the revenue with none of the advertising cost.
by variadix | 2025-04-17 15:47:30+00:00
I would really like to see some exploration of alternative site structures, ways to design new social media sites with better systems of incentives, for users and for mods. There is very little diversity in how social media sites are driven by users and moderated by admins (engagement or vote driven post recommendations, opaque administration decisions). I think a small fixed cost per post paid in XMR has potential to significantly improve post quality for anonymous platforms. Moderation is trickier, especially if the owner doesn’t take a back seat and rein in the mods occasionally, but more transparency into moderators and their moderation decisions (public ban log with detailed justification, pseudo anonymous account tracking per mod) with some accountability from the user base e.g. meta discussion board around site policy with engagement from mods and owner.
by zoogeny | 2025-04-17 15:47:40+00:00
It reminds me of Plato's Apology. It is the dialogue where Socrates is on trial for corrupting the youth. The end result is the citizens of Athens convict him and his options are to drink hemlock poison or ostracization. He chooses death.

I think it is worth deeply pondering why a man as wise as Socrates would choose death over ostracization.
by erelong | 2025-04-17 15:48:01+00:00
> In this post we argue that Americans should welcome the disappearance of TikTok because the company is causing harm to children, adolescents, and young adults at an industrial scale.

protip: this isn't the reason people are trying to ban the app, and it shouldn't be banned. Currently I think you have to be 13+ to go on the app. If you think it's harming kids as the reason to ban it, you could advocate maybe for 18+ access instead. The fact this isn't the advocated change, to me suggests that's not the reason why people are trying to ban it (concern for children's well-being). If this were the case, you'd also have to ban probably the other U.S. social media. It's probably also important to note how much good social media does by freely sharing valuable information (while people focus on the negative info that's shared).
by vaxman | 2025-04-17 15:48:17+00:00
Time to get working on a new 300 mile segment between Vegas and Phoenix..It's mostly flat geography, undeveloped and devoid of animals BUT is filled with NOS (Naturally Occurring Asbestos) and reaches lethal temperatures early in the Summer days, remaining very warm until after sunset, so it needs to be a fast one-hour (MAG-LEV) trip.

Brightline is currently constructing a 200mph bullet train to connect Boring Company's "Vegas Loop" to the commuter train service in Los Angeles over a complex route through the Sierra Nevada Mountains, expecting to be done before the 2028 Olympics by running mostly down the center of the existing I-15. A MAG-LEV from Phoenix, stopping only in Bullhead City and Boulder City, then heading along the undeveloped side of the McCullough Mountains to the planned Ivanpah Valley Airport site and the new Brightline/Vegas Loop station would be much easier and faster to construct. BLM clearance, finance and getting the Japanese MAG-LEV "trains" (and maintenance facility) would be another matter. Brightline is using German bullet trains made in New York, btw. Their maintenance facility will be in Sloan, between the Ivanpah Valley Airport site and the Brightline/Vegas Loop station.
by rpgbr | 2025-04-17 15:48:20+00:00
This post[1] is highlighted by Techmeme:

>I'm obsessed with o3. It's way better than the previous models. It just helped me resolve a psychological/emotional problem I've been dealing with for years in like 3 back-and-forths (one that wasn't socially acceptable to share, and those I shared it with didn't/couldn't help)

Genuinely intrigued by what kind of “psychological/emotional problem I've been dealing with for years” could an AI solve in a matter of hours after its release.

[1] https://x.com/carmenleelau/status/1912645771955962300
by jgeada | 2025-04-17 15:48:22+00:00
Like I said "Not saying this as a value judgement, just that this practice is ancient."

Heck, downvotes here in HN are basically the same thing. If a statement doesn't comply with both the explicit rules and implicit assumptions and culture here, it will be downvoted to oblivion. And it is one of the major mechanisms that HN uses to ensure this site remains useful and relevant even with the large number of participants.
by TechDebtDevin | 2025-04-17 15:48:33+00:00
Pretty crazy how this case gets the full support of thr DOJ, along with actions against Harvard, Colombia ect. I dont mind Google being broken up, but how am i supposed to respect the law when the same DOJ lets out ponzi schemers and bond villians because they donated 500k to a Trump friendly super pac.

If im Google or anoother tech company im going to be Divesting from the United States as much as possible.
by OhMeadhbh | 2025-04-17 15:48:50+00:00
There was a question mark at the end of the sentence, indicating a question.

"Are you suggesting that family courts in Colorado should be barred from hearing info from psychologists about the impact of dead-naming?"

It is a simple question. I think it tells more about your viewpoint than you may think that you consider discussions of trans issues "a strawman."

I also appreciate how you have decided that you know my thoughts on a complex subject simply by me asking you to provide more detail as to what you were saying.

It's entirely possible I'm not attacking you. It's possible I don't understand what you're saying.
by somenameforme | 2025-04-17 15:48:56+00:00
There's also what it's taking the place of. Even if it's not directly harmful, and I think that's one hugeeee if, it's a massive timesink that they would otherwise spent doing other things. And it's difficult to imagine anything that could be worse except maybe just sitting in front of the TV. Though even there, TV has the benefit of being much more boring, so the kid may be more inclined to voluntarily seek other entertainment; so perhaps even TV isn't worse.
by 1-more | 2025-04-17 15:49:40+00:00
Longmont, CO has had municipal fiber since 2013. In 2005 the state passed a cable industry-sponsored bill requiring all municipalities to pass a ballot measure before they could build municipal broadband over 256kbps. Longmont had such a measure in 2009 and it failed due to campaigning by private ISPs. It passed later, and in the years since the speed cap has been removed. But yeah, it was a fight against private industry to use infrastructure _built and owned by the city_ for its only possible use.

https://coloradosun.com/2023/05/24/municipal-internet-sb-152...
by hackingonempty | 2025-04-17 15:50:00+00:00
STM happens inside the STM monad while regular effects happen in the ZIO monad. If you try to do ZIO effects inside an STM transaction you'll get a type error.

Scala doesn't enforce purity like Haskell though so it wont stop you if you call some normal Scala or Java code with side effects. In practice its not a problem because you're wrapping any effectful outside APIs before introducing them into your code.
by throw0101d | 2025-04-17 15:50:11+00:00
> You don't adjust rates just because you want them to be lower, there's second order effects.

You can… in Turkey (Türkiye); from 2021:

> Erdogan is openly averse to high interest rates, claiming high rates cause inflation, which stands in opposition to mainstream economic theory.

> He has pressured the central bank to keep rates low to fuel borrowing and growth. Critics say the independence of the central bank has been severely damaged through political pressure.

> Erdogan’s decree on Saturday appoints Sahap Kavcioglu as the new central bank head. Kavcioglu is a banking professor and a columnist in a pro-government newspaper where he has argued for low interest rates.

* https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/3/20/turkeys-erdogan-sac...

More recently in 2024:

> The first woman to lead the bank, Erkan began raising interest rates when she was appointed in June last year, launching a 180-degree pivot away from years of low rates under Erdogan that had sent inflation soaring and foreign investors fleeing.

* https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/2/3/turkey-appoints-fati...

In 2024 a court ruled that the President could not just fire central bank heads:

* https://www.brecorder.com/news/40306881/turkey-court-loosens...
by toast0 | 2025-04-17 15:50:17+00:00
Writing protocol code in Erlang is nice, because the parsing is so easy and clear. And if you want to do something that's not so easy by spawning a command, then you may as well build it in Erlang. And it's fun and symmetric to build both a server and a client... I've not looked at OTP SSH code, but I'd assume the ciphering is still calls to external c libraries, as it is in the OTP TLS code.

Of course, easy protocol parsing doesn't do the whole job; state management is required too (and was missed here, clearly).
by rco8786 | 2025-04-17 15:50:29+00:00
The article is about exactly that.

The moat for AI products will be, as is so often the case, user data. In this case, your personal history of interactions with a given AI.

The author predicts a land grab where AI companies try to scoop up as much personal data on you as they can as fast as they can, which renders them significantly more personalized to you than other AIs. That's the moat.

Analogous to Facebook managing to scoop up your entire social graph. Other social networks popped up, but there was no incentive to use them because you didn't have your social graph setup there and it was really hard to rebuild.
by internetter | 2025-04-17 15:50:34+00:00
Thanks, I like the last quote. But I'm curious... Would it be preferable to have Google owning all of these services you listed—just not the ad company they depend on, or the inverse—all the companies are spun out?

I see your point, but also, if Google continued to own all these other things, it would still be a terrifyingly large spread, no?
by megaman821 | 2025-04-17 15:50:42+00:00
I don't think this article explains it well. Google sells ad space on behalf of the publishers and also sells the ads on behalf of the advertisers. It also runs the auction that places the ads into the ad space. See this graphic https://images.app.goo.gl/ADx5xrAnWNicgoFu7. Parts of this can definately be broken up without destroying Google.
by joeyh | 2025-04-17 15:50:57+00:00
Wise (nee Transferwise) requires a passport style photo taken by a webapp for KYC when transferring money. I was recently unable to complete that process over a dozen tries, because the image processing didn't like something about my face. (Photos met all criteria.)

On contacting their support, I learned that they refused to use any other process. Also it became apparent that they had outsourced it to some other company and had no insight into the process and so no way to help. Apparently closing one's account will cause an escalation to a team who determines where to send the money, which would presumably put some human flexability back into the process.

(In the end I was able to get their web app to work by trying several other devices, one had a camera that for whatever reason satisfied their checks that my face was within the required oval etc.)