MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tennis_80 | 2025-04-06 08:22:08+00:00
In the UK there’s a lot of screens on pedestrian walkways, and small adverts on roundabouts but very few motorway (highway) adverts.

On the motorway there’s signs for services (rest stops) with all the major brands logos on, and maybe one or two billboards every 30 / 40 miles outside of city centres, then more as you come into a city centre.

I’ve also recently noticed a massive vertical screen on the side of a building near a busy interchange in my city (Manchester).

Public transport is littered with small adverts - on underground’s / metros there’s a lot of posters on escalators and buses have a lot inside, plus usually a big banner on the side (or a full skin of the bus but they’re fairly rare at least in my city).

Political advertising is capped at £20 million per party, but our newspapers do most of the real political propaganda come election time in terms of what stories they cover / who they endorse in their editorials (or sometimes they allow a major candidate to write one). The BBC also lets all parties with some traction do a 5 minute party political broadcast.

When I’ve watched some live US TV channels I’ve been amazed by how many “Vote X for Y, paid for by Z PAC” adverts there are and am thankful UK parties can’t spend anywhere near the same amount.
by card_zero | 2025-04-06 08:22:55+00:00
Some discussion of this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meganisoptera

* There was at least one giant dragonfly-thing alive at a time when oxygen levels weren't all that elevated.

* Maybe they could kind of sort of breathe! By expanding their tracheal tubes.

* Subsequently they began to be predated by birds and mammals. Prior to that they may have been locked into a race (against their prey) to be the biggest, like that giant Italian goose and its giant barn owl predators: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garganornis
by pjmlp | 2025-04-06 08:23:55+00:00
Meanwhile, all major OEMs, and OS vendors routinely use BSDs and Linux distributions in some form, yet it is the same business as usual as 30 years ago, reverse engineering hardware support.

The only "Linux Desktop" ready desktops and laptops to find at local shopping mall for normies are Android and ChromeOS devices, likewise in out-of-the-box experience for hardware support for peripherals.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-04-06 08:26:02+00:00
There are also facts and observations to support the contrary hypothesis. Statistically significant hormonal and behavioral differences between men and women have long been well-established. It should also be intuitively obvious that cultural differences can affect the choices people make (that's what cultural differences are), but studies have shown the same thing there as well.

Which leaves the question of which is the dominant effect. But for that anecdotes are useless, because "I've seen this happen myself" doesn't tell you if it explains 5% of the difference or 95% and people have a tendency of jumping to conclusions without having all the information. If Alice made bigger sales to fewer customers and Bob made smaller sales to more customers and Alice is white and Bob is black, then if Alice gets the promotion the boss is a racist because Bob made more sales but if Bob gets the promotion the boss is a sexist because Alice made bigger sales. Or so you would think by only listening to the one complaining about not getting the promotion.

So then you'd want someone to do a study and we're back to anyone publishing a study that challenges the prevailing dogma getting punished for it.
by _diyar | 2025-04-06 08:27:02+00:00
There's much discussion about what constitutes advertising in the comments, with some dismissing this question as either solved or not crucial. Note however that seriously banning advertising requires a clear definition of it.

My 2 cents: Ban payed advertising online, including banner ads, search ads, and pre-roll / inter-roll ads (e.g. youtube and instagram).

This is a clearly defined market and probably causes a plurality of the negative impact of adverts (especially when connected with the incentive to algorithmically addict users to show them more ads).
by 1oooqooq | 2025-04-06 08:27:02+00:00
yeah, this is confdir 101...

but i guess learning is better late than never type of thing.

also what confuses people more on this is that openssh is properly designed, so configs are first seen wins. exactly so that file 0_ wins from 99_... but most people see badly designed software where 99_ overrides 0_. openssh way is exactly so it works best with confir or ssh/options where it matches by hosts and you can place the more important stuff first without fear defaults will override it.
by mike_hearn | 2025-04-06 08:27:17+00:00
With respect, argh! Lol.

That link is neither analysis nor reporting on outcomes. That's more predictions. This is the exact problem I'm talking about!

To analyze outcomes you must look at the actual data. There's a report that does so here but you can look up the raw data too if you prefer:

https://iea.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Perspectives_5...

From the summary:

"Contrary to initial concerns, Brexit has not had a major detrimental effect on UK–EU trade.

● Trade data doesn’t support the Office for Budget Responsibility’s claims that Brexit has caused significant negative impacts on the UK economy.

● Data from 2019 to 2022 indicates that the trade in both goods and services between the UK and EU hasn’t shown a discernible Brexit effect."

You can look up more recent numbers but the story hasn't changed.

I'd really like to understand the psychology of this phenomenon better. I don't mean this as any personal criticism because it's good that you're asking, but the fact that every time I bring this prediction/reality conflation up I get a rebuttal with more predictions in it is fascinating.
by rini17 | 2025-04-06 08:28:03+00:00
If you're doing mutations, you're supposed to explicitly use transactions anyway, with well defined logical units of work. "DELETE FROM table LIMIT 10" does not look like anything well defined.

In case of connection issues you can check whether it was all actually committed or rolled back. Often it was propagated to the user, they got error message, refreshed and checked and retried and all was okay in the end. That's probably why the DB engines did not bother micromanaging individual SQL statemens.
by pjmlp | 2025-04-06 08:28:18+00:00
Maybe that is exactly the problem, stop using a language designed in 1970's that ignored on purpose the ecosystem outside Bell Labs, unless where it is unavoidable.

And in such case, the C compiler doesn't have a limit to write functions and better modularize their implementations.

bool function_with_cleanup(void) { int *buffer1 = NULL; int *buffer2 = NULL; FILE *file = NULL; // Allocate first resource buffer1 = malloc(sizeof(int) * 100); if (!buffer1) { return false; } // Allocate second resource buffer2 = malloc(sizeof(int) * 200); if (!buffer2) { free(buffer1); return false; } // Open a file file = fopen("data.txt", "r"); if (!file) { free(buffer1); free(buffer1); return false; } // Do work with all resources... fclose(file); free(buffer1); free(buffer1); return true; }

Ah, but all those free() calls get tedious can be forgotten and mistyped

bool function_with_cleanup(void) { int *buffer1 = NULL; int *buffer2 = NULL; FILE *file = NULL; // Allocate first resource buffer1 = arena_alloc(&current_arena, sizeof(int) * 100); if (!buffer1) { return false; } // Allocate second resource buffer2 = arena_alloc(&current_arena, sizeof(int) * 200); if (!buffer2) { arena_reset(&current_arena); return false; } // Open a file file = fopen("data.txt", "r"); if (!file) { arena_reset(&current_arena); return false; } // Do work with all resources... fclose(file); arena_reset(&current_arena); return true; }

Can still be improved with a mix of macros and varargs functions.

Or if using language extensions is a thing, the various ways to do defer in C.
by barnabee | 2025-04-06 08:29:11+00:00
> IMO the idea of removing advertising entirely would essentially entrench the status quo even further.

This doesn’t seem correct to me.

Products would still be searchable, but the wealthiest companies could no longer pay for placement or pay to have their brand name repeated endlessly so it’s on the tip of your tongue but you don’t know why.

People would still talk in their communities and share recommendations.

Reviews (unpaid) would still be a thing.

Markets (real and virtual) where you can compare competing products and make a decision wouldn’t go away.
by saghm | 2025-04-06 08:29:33+00:00
> They line people up in rows, put headphones on their heads and wire them up to Teams and Jira to spend the whole day in isolation. Because taking a walk to another floor of building to talk to someone like a normal human being is too wasteful, but somehow forcing everyone to spend hours commuting isn’t.

Sure, this is pretty much exactly what I'd expect from companies; wasting the employee's time doesn't matter, but wasting the _company's_ time is anathema. In the absence of something to push back against it, companies will always make decisions like this. We're only a bit over a century and a few repealed regulations from another Triangle Shirtwaist Factory after all.
by DidYaWipe | 2025-04-06 08:29:38+00:00
Let's not forget the absurd insistence on "will change" semantics in onChange() instead of the far-more-useful notification "did change."

And of course the brain-dead design of withObservationTracking, which only fires on the FIRST change of a value. I mean... by what definition is that "tracking?" It's goddamned useless, unless of course you implement the clumsy workaround of re-establishing observation tracking every (first) time it fires.

Then there's the bizarre hypocrisy of evangelizing the "single source of truth" while telling everyone to prefer structs over classes in Swift. But structs are COPIED everywhere, which of course breaks the "single source of truth" on the first function call.

I wasted so much time trying to conform to these "best practices" until I finally realized that the people promoting them don't know WTF they're doing. Then I went back to classes, injected the "single source" everywhere it was needed, and got to work adding functionality.

And let's not even get into the half-assery that is SwiftUI... still, all these years later.
by rendall | 2025-04-06 08:30:24+00:00
> Someone can firmly believe that the existence of the state of Israel is a mistake that should be corrected while still also believing...

In theory, someone might distinguish between opposing the state of Israel and supporting Jewish rights. But in practice, that distinction tends to collapse. History shows that denying Jews a national homeland often leads to denying their safety and identity as well. Before 1948, Jews were stateless and vulnerable, culminating in the Holocaust. After Israel's founding, over 800,000 Jews were expelled or fled from Arab countries where they had lived for centuries. Efforts like the 1975 UN resolution equating Zionism with racism blurred the line between criticism of Israeli policy and rejection of Jewish nationhood. During the Second Intifada, what began as political resistance often turned into violence targeting civilians and Jewish institutions. More recently, anti-Zionist protests have featured explicitly anti-Jewish chants like "Khaybar, Khaybar ya Yahud," invoking historical violence. The Western assumption that "Free Palestine" implies peaceful self-determination doesn't reflect the goals of many movements where "freedom" often means dismantling Israel entirely and expelling Jews or allowing them to live only in a state of dhimmitude. In reality, it's nearly impossible to separate these ideas cleanly.
by perching_aix | 2025-04-06 08:30:59+00:00
> You never use phrases that imply moral superiority or a sense of authority, including but not limited to “it’s important to”, “it’s crucial to”, “it’s essential to”, "it's unethical to", "it's worth noting…", “Remember…” etc. Avoid using these.

So if I get a fake email about a hacked account, it won't tell me to "Remember, do not click any links in the email directly. Instead, navigate to your account settings independently."?

Such a great feature, worth owning the libs with it for sure.
by jychang | 2025-04-06 08:31:08+00:00
How old are you?

Are you familiar with broadcast TV that is supported by "viewers like you"? And historically TV advertising was banned until the FCC allowed it. And you do realize that news used to be paid? You'd be surprised that... people used read the newspaper with their morning breakfast, which cost a few cents and was delivered by a paperboy.

Really, you're trying to imply that society wouldn't function without advertising- when it was the default until the last 100 years or so. Perhaps you should watch Mad Men on HBO, which depicts the 1960s era when sociopaths of the advertising industry decided to redefine advertising as a necessity of modern living.

> Right now, poor and even homeless people can get smart phones for free with data (or use WiFi) from the government.

If the government is willing to subsidize Google Android phones running on a network like AT&T or T-Mobile for poor people... what's to stop the government from also subsidizing Google Search for poor people as well? It's not like Google's gonna care much about poor people, people who are that poor tend not to be good advertising targets anyways. The juicy ad market is elsewhere. Similarly, have you gone to any library recently? Libraries already offer stuff like access to a NYTimes or WSJ subscription, or even things like LinkedIn Learning. Adding Google to the list as another subscription that they offer to library card holders for free is a nonissue.

Honestly, it just sounds like you've been brainwashed into being unable to visualize a society without advertising.

Frankly, nobody gives a shit if EU or whatever websites continue to do their thing. US porn sites have negative political capital anyways, XVideos continuing operate as before impacting the US porn industry would make any hypothetical law EASIER to pass, not more difficult.
by keiferski | 2025-04-06 08:31:09+00:00
I wish the concept of a milk bar would spread to America from Central/Eastern Europe. They are essentially a mix of an American diner and a cafeteria, where you can get cheap, good food that is already cooked (with a few exceptions like pierogi.) Think Chipotle but with local specialities and with an 80s communist-era vibe. It is usually fast but is much healthier than typical fast food chains.

Milk bars were started during the communist era and are still popular amongst the older (70+) crowd, but modern versions are a go-to for younger people too. And so you'll usually get a very interesting mix of society sitting side-by-side. Not quite a family dinner restaurant, but is a social restaurant concept nonetheless.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar_mleczny
by johnisgood | 2025-04-06 08:31:47+00:00
Every time I say RTFM (like in the case of strtok), I get down-voted. Some tools really cannot be dumbed down, and they should not. I do not know why people have an aversion to reading documentation. It is bad.

In the case of strtok, I am not going to implement my own if strtok does what I want it to do, and behaves how I know it does. Why would I?! Sometimes what I need is strtok, sometimes strsep, sometimes I may use strtok_r.
by barnabee | 2025-04-06 08:32:48+00:00
> Advertising has a purpose; it's how I find out what products and services are available, and at what cost.

When I am unable to avoid it (which I’m relatively successful at), it’s how I explicitly decide what to avoid. See an ad, penalise the company.

But yet I have no trouble finding and evaluating products when I actually need something.

Search engines, real and virtual marketplaces, word of mouth, reviews all exist already, and all can work without paid shenanigans.

There’s no need to replace advertising, we can just ban it.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-04-06 08:33:03+00:00
The EITC is supported by significant majorities of both parties and economists. It's opposed by politicians because it's a tax expenditure that doesn't provide any opportunity for graft.

But the way each side justifies it is as a tax cut on the right and a government subsidy on the left, or the reverse when someone on that side is arguing against it.
by bubblethink | 2025-04-06 08:33:12+00:00
>How is it that sneaky fees were ever legal?

The fees are still visible to you before you purchase; they are only visible at the last step. So you are giving consent. Nothing obviously illegal per se, just a poor experience. At least in the US, Biden was unable to anything about it. Whether it was lack of will or incompetence, he didn't achieve anything. At the local level, CA tried to pass some laws to similar effect, but they also didn't go anywhere and were ultimately watered down to create carve outs for the most profitable junk fees.
by Joshringuk | 2025-04-06 08:34:12+00:00
@lerno is a ganedev himself so should be able to answer your question there

Some links

https://c3-lang.org/getting-started/

https://c3-lang.org/getting-started/design-goals/

https://c3-lang.org/faq/compare-languages/

The blog is on the internet archive https://web.archive.org/web/20250330145704/https://c3.handma...
by camgunz | 2025-04-06 08:34:44+00:00
I see this dynamic in tech all the time:

"We'd like to pay/invest in you tremendous amounts of money to make X more efficient": yes, absolutely we know what X is and we understand scaling it is immensely valuable and fundamentally changes everything.

"We'd like to regulate X, making it safer, and therefore harder or even impossible to do": that's ridiculous, you could always do X, what even is X anyway, don't tread on me, yadda yadda.

It's so transparent to me now, and I've passed this curse onto you.

Nothing else in law works this way. No definition is ironclad. This is what legislators, agencies, and courts are for. We all know this.
by phire | 2025-04-06 08:36:13+00:00
> It could have and should have.

From a technical perspective, yes. You are basically talking about the Nokia N800 but with a cellphone modem and a bit of effort spent shrinking the bezels down.

But from a product design perspective, I suspect it was impossible to make that leap. We are talking about the point when cellphones were at their very smallest. The 1st gen iphone with it's 3.5" display was considered to be large for a phone. Nobody thought mainstream users would be happy pocketing a phone with a "massive" 4.13" display.

And Nokia were only happy excluding the keyboard from the N800 because it was considered to be a content consumption device. At that time, smartphones were regarded as productivity devices (for email) and the physical keyboard was essential, which would have bulked out the device (See N810).

I don't think we could have gotten to today's large smartphones without first creating a viable browsing experience on an iphone sized display.
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by rc55 | 2025-04-06 08:37:03+00:00
There is a tech scene in Exeter for sure, check out these:

- https://techexeter.uk - they've been running events for many years now, 1500 members and monthly meetups.

- https://bsidesexeter.co.uk - Infosec events - some members formerly of the local DEFCON group (those events were fun).

- Shameless plug https://novaparty.org - Annual demoscene event (this year will be 13-15th June) run in collaboration with Tech Exeter.
by jim-jim-jim | 2025-04-06 08:37:50+00:00
Like other bad ideas (TDD) it seemed to rise to prominence during the heydey of Ruby and untyped JS, when it was so much easier to fuck everything up. I think lots of managers haven't written a line of code since then and still hold such a cargo cult mentality about prescribing it.

It does a massive disservice to everybody involved, especially juniors who are never given the chance to prove themselves.
by camgunz | 2025-04-06 08:38:53+00:00
Political messaging is more than TV ads and mailers. There are rallies, online groups, town halls, organizing, basic human communication stuff.

---

The way we reign in government isn't by having no rules (the argument you're making reduces to "any rule can be weaponized against political opposition"), it's political checks to ensure weaponization doesn't happen. Or put another way, there is no system of rules that constrains a regime defined by its rule breaking.
by v1ne | 2025-04-06 08:40:00+00:00
If it's not a user-space, but a driver issue, I found powercfg /sleepstudy pretty helpful to determine why a W11 machine didn't enter or exited sleep too often, after the fact.

On my laptop, this led me to discover that my Qualcomm X55 WAN is a real standby drain and that my Lenovo Thunderbolt dock really likes to disable its sleep mode after some big Windows updates, leading to a standby drain after the first time I plugged it in. I'm still surprised how many pitfalls there are with standby, even on Windows.
by pydry | 2025-04-06 08:40:08+00:00
It's about maintaining a feeling of control, it's not about collaboration. Thats just the lie they tell to RTO.

Ive worked in:

1) collaborative in office

2) uncollaborative in office

3) collaborative wfh

4) uncollaborative wfh

Personally i found 4 to be the most tortuous (because of ADHD), but 2 isnt much better.

1 and 3 i think are roughly equally good while you're there but wfh has so many ancillary benefits like not commuting that it wins overall.

After experiencing 4 and before I experienced 3 I actually desperately wanted to RTO.

I think a collaborative environment is only quite tangentially related to inhabiting the same space, though. It's more about culture, trust and shared goals.
by chii | 2025-04-06 08:40:16+00:00
> The reality is that more often than not these messages are self serving and profit driven

the reality is that all messages, even those you think ought to be a grassroots message, are all self-serving. It's just self-serving for you as well as the message deliverer. And those "advertising" messages are self-serving, but not for you (or your tribe).

Therefore, this is just a thinly disguised way to try suppress the messages of those whose self-interest does not align with your own, rather than an altruistic reason.