MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by HEmanZ | 2025-04-17 13:54:30+00:00
I find some Marxist-ish ideology always wants to blame these things on the material conditions, wealth. My personal network is a sea of trump worshipers (quite literally, like my cousins say a prayer for trump at every dinner since 2016), and I think the analysis that this is a wealth thing is wrong.

Everyone has pet theories. Mine is that a section US society, urban coastal highly educated elites, coalesced around one set of ideas (I’m not exactly sure why, but probably in part because this group is less religious and very urban) and formed a very powerful ideological block that wasn’t in the US pre 1980s. This Trump thing is a reaction of the people who don’t fit into this political block (religious, less educated, rural, culturally not urban) against them.

It’s fundamentally identity politics, not some material conditions thing. People have a hard time believing this, because some people think the world is all about money, and ideas and identity mean nothing to people, but I really think the money-only view of human politics is flat wrong.

I say this because of my personal network of family, friends, and acquaintances from my hometown. When I try to gently get to the bottom of it, what I really find is a deep deep hatred for the coastal elites. They feel belittled and marginalized, not monetarily but culturally. They feel no one from those backgrounds has any right to tell them what to do. They feel that a coastal expert has no right to contradict their feelings on a topic, because that expert is not “one of them”, not because that expert is wealthy.

The network I have does not feel this way because they are economically struggling. Europeans often imply this is the case, but in my experience after 40 years in America, it is just not. Many of the people you see wearing maga hats and waving maga flags at rallies have mansions, 5 trucks, a vacation home in Hawaii, etc. my extended family and network has plenty of money. But they feel anyone who is an educated, coastal liberal is out to destroy them. They feel so completely culturally and identity wise different from the coastal elites, that they bristle under the thought that someone with an “education” could know more about something than them.

I think Republicans gained power in the last few years because of the economy, and Trump gained control of the republicans because of identity. This isn’t going away by “solving” the wealth gap.
by bluGill | 2025-04-17 13:54:30+00:00
Tramiel arguably mismanaged Atari worse than Warner brothers. Sure Tramiel cared about computers, but his management style was hostile to getting anything done.

I agree that the custom chips were a dead end. However the ST line could have beat the mac if management was any good. (as could/should the Amiga, though I was Atari locked at the time and so I didn't pay attention to what they were doing)
by thrance | 2025-04-17 13:55:17+00:00
Between Trump and Harris, yes, Trump is uniquely bad and extreme. While I do not hold the democrats in my heart, their party holds much milder views that those of Trump.

Indeed, being friendly to Harris would make you "not a centrist", hence why I think it's weird how we're able to stick that label to obviously pro-Trump people.

The GOP received the lion share of financial aids during their last campaign, and it has been so for quite a while. Let's not even speak of dark money. That is not to say the democrats relied on 100% grassroots initiatives, far from it.

Can we stop this whataboutism and bothsideism from polluting the discourse? It is hardly relevant.
by inglor_cz | 2025-04-17 13:55:30+00:00
Do you think that this can be done without introducing massive security weaknesses into systems that cannot have them?

Also, there is a question if you believe the authorities that without decrypting data, they can't investigate crimes.

Imagine an analogical assertion that without torturing suspects, law enforcement is stymied. Someone might assert that, but we still say no, for all sorts of fundamental reasons. Same with American Miranda rights and others.

Myself, I don't believe in that assertion at all. Most crimes leave a massive real world trace that cannot be encrypted. The ones that don't, maybe should not be crimes in the first place.
by lamename | 2025-04-17 13:55:36+00:00
Your story does a great job at highlighting the small but profound every-day experiences of working in a lab with living beings as test subjects. It's hard to put into words the strength of wonder you can acquire for life working as a scientist or animal handler -- you have immense depth of understanding of the microscopic scale biology while simultaneously seeing it at work in real time in the whole animal (or society of animals) on the macro scale. It's the biology equivalent to the "pale blue dot" sentiment.

The only similar deep, profound awe at life I've had outside of the lab was when my son was born. This might be the most common way people achieve this state of being. In all honesty this was one of the best parts of lab work. For me it happened every day; you're reminded of the insane complexity and the high degree of frailty of life. The terribly large power difference between yourself and a small animal in your hand. The deep similarities between humans and other animals, and at the same time, the worlds of difference. For me these experiences in the lab day after day put many other things in life on a lower rung, for better or for worse (like sustaining grad student pay and living conditions perhaps). But I wouldn't trade having that experience for anything.

Your story hints at this beautifully, and I hope others get the chance to feel that feeling.
by xpe | 2025-04-17 13:55:40+00:00
> One important caveat: We explicitly exclude military AI from our analysis, as it involves classified capabilities and unique dynamics that require a deeper analysis, which is beyond the scope of this essay.

Important is an understatement. Recursively self-improving AI with military applications does not mesh with the claim that "Arms races are an old problem".

> Again, our message is that this is not a new problem. The tradeoff between innovation and regulation is a recurring dilemma for the regulatory state.

I take the point, but the above statement is scoped to a _state_, not an international dynamic. The AI arms race is international in nature. There are relatively few examples of similar international agreements. The classic examples are bans on chemical weapons and genetic engineering.
by hattmall | 2025-04-17 13:55:49+00:00
The layers of work arbitrage are incredibly deep. It's all about connections, I do a lot of Shopify freelancing and I'm typically the 3rd or 4th layer away from the actual business. It's typically something like the business hires a marketing agency, the agency hires a development company. The development company then hires a freelancer. Now I actually do the work myself, but it seems like a ton of those freelancers simply rehire another freelancer in a cheaper country. Then it seems in many cases that foreign freelancer isn't even a developer but just someone who speaks English well enough and then hires the actual non-english speaking coders locally.

It's not much different in other industries though, so many layers of subcontracting to finally get to a potentially illegal immigrant that does the actual work.
by tdaltonc | 2025-04-17 13:56:05+00:00
This is my roman empire, and I go back and forth on my conclusions at least once a day.

On one hand, clarity and structure make a platform that's easy to build and collaborate on. If the system enforces the rules, and the rules are a good model of reality, everyone knows what to expect. Pushing the world forward one ISO standard at a time.

On the other hand, greatness can't be planned. By the time we know enough to make a plan, the really important stuff has already happened. "Everyone" expected solar to always be a somewhat marginal energy source, so why spend a lot of time standardizing formats?

And it's not like this is a just a thing in tech. Buildings used to be fine tolerance artifacts built by craftsman. Now we slap them together prefab parts and just add more caulk until it works.

I'm genuinely shocked that the electrical grid works. And the more I learn about how it works, the more shocked I become.

Are we losing our attention spans as a rational response to a world that changing faster and faster; or is our lack of attention creating a less stable world?

Ultimately, we make progress not when the code runs fast, but when the humans run fast; but sometimes that means the code needs to run fast too.

And thank you for the well wishes!
by goranmoomin | 2025-04-17 13:56:05+00:00
From my understanding, you really need only one image – the article is just providing four for your tastes (Fedora/Ubuntu, aarch64/x86_64). The images are linux installers, which “understand” cloud-init (because it’s “industry standard”), so if you place the {user,meta}-data file in the right place (a volume named CIDATA, it seems[0]), they can configure your installation without really having to go through the tedious process of configuring through the installation process, install packages, and so on.

I don’t understand why anyone would go to the route of emulation in 2025, but if someone wants to run an x86_64 image with UTM, well that’s the only route – I’d suggest just going to an aarch64 image. Things were a bit more rough back in 2020, but stuff got much better and I don’t remember any compatibility problems these days.

[0] https://cloudinit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/reference/datasou...
by bluefirebrand | 2025-04-17 13:56:28+00:00
I think the problem I have is that it still doesn't feel like society has really caught up to the impact that The Internet and Smartphones have had, and we keep getting disrupted faster and faster it seems

I know that there have always been disruptive technologies, but I the the rate of "technologies that are disrupting everything" as opposed to "technologies that are disrupting just one thing" has been kind of crazy
by e40 | 2025-04-17 13:56:33+00:00
If you don't get cravings for sweet stuff, then you're lucky.

I, and many others, associate chocolate with desserts and sweets. Having a small amount of this 90% chocolate does what I said, reduces my cravings for harmful sweets with LOTS of sugar.

Fruits are great, but they contain a LOT more sugar (per serving) than 4g. I do eat fruit (with plain yogurt and nuts) once a day, to balance my diet. And, I do feel having it after dinner is a good dessert replacement. It's not enough, though, to reduce my cravings for sugar.
by taeric | 2025-04-17 13:56:57+00:00
One of life's great annoyances to me, is how incredibly effective "just doing something" tends to be. To that level, the act of tracking things is a strong something that almost always shows results. Be it lists on how often something has been cleaned, or procedural checklists on things that need to happen.

I'm convinced, at this point, that there is something mental on it, too. Getting you to think of something gets your body and mind to act differently towards it.

Part of this was obvious to me when I had kids. If they fell, they would immediately look to the reaction of others around them. If people looked scared, they would feel more hurt than if people didn't react at all. If people were encouraging what they were doing, they would sometimes not realize something might hurt.

But, back to my annoyance. As someone that hates tracking lists... why do they have to be so effective? :D
by rdm_blackhole | 2025-04-17 13:57:05+00:00
> Governments (good ones!) are rightly complaining that criminals are using encryption to commit particularly awful crimes.

For starter I don't know a lot of good governments. So you'll have to define how you differentiate between a good one and a bad one.

> Governments (good ones!) are rightly complaining that criminals are using encryption to commit particularly awful crimes.

Secondly, criminals use public transport and roads built with taxpayer money to commit crime. Some even say that they breathe the same air as us honest citizens.

They also live in homes with 4 walls that you can't see through either.

I am being facetious but you can see where I am going with this.

If you think that the governments will stop at spying on criminals once this backdoor is in place, then I have a bridge to sell you.

Do you want your kids to grow in world were everything they do online will be analyzed, categorized and reviewed by some random government employee somewhere?

What if this government turns bad in the future as it has happened countless times in the past? What do you do then?

> I feel we should as a community support is some fine-grained legal process that would allow limited access to user information if justified by a warrant.

The problem with this line of thinking is that it doesn't hold up in the real world. Once you grant access to something like say your browser history to the government or any entity, what's to stop them to ask for more next time?

It's not a big deal right, they can say, well you gave us access to A, now we want access to B. Then in 3 years they will come back demanding access to C, D and E until your entire privacy has been taken away from you.

And every time, they will use the same excuses, fighting crime, fighting drugs, child grooming and terrorism.

> Competent jurisdictions allow this for physical search and seizure.

That is not even remotely comparable.

In those cases, you need a judge or someone to approve the seizure. With a backdoor that can be opened at any time, you should consider that nothing will be private because there is no one who is going to be monitoring it 24/7 to make sure that there are no abuses.
by wulfstan | 2025-04-17 13:57:24+00:00
I'm not sure I follow. Obviously the application itself needs to support the business logic described, in the same way as your web browser needs to notice that a certificate has expired and tell you there's a problem with a website you're visiting. What I'm exploring is why requiring certain applications to support the same sort of thing to decrypt user data in certain circumstances to support law enforcement is a problem.
by coldpie | 2025-04-17 13:57:25+00:00
> seems to be advocating for products to be lead free & I think that's a perfectly reasonable position to take

Is it? What harms would that prevent? How much would preventing those harms cost? Is the cost worth the gain?

They may be right that the limits are too high! Lead is really bad! But an article telling me that toothpaste is within the limits considered acceptable by the FDA, with no argument that those limits are too high, is not answering the questions I'm interested in.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-17 13:57:31+00:00
> The registrar for .us (GoDaddy) is in fact the “root dns for .us”

“root DNS” has a very specific meaning, and you’ve misused it again.

Root DNS means ‘.’ and only ‘.’ There is no other “root”. That’s why it’s called “root” to be unambiguous.

In fact, in recent history, the root name servers use their own domain for convenient forward DNS resolution: ‘root-servers.net’ GoDaddy doesn’t run this either... Surprise, surprise!

> Your company doesn't run the Internet

Yeah well as a fragment, the statement makes sense, more or less, because there’s no “term of art” being abused there in your reductio ad absurdum.

Indeed you can run your own private root DNS, if you don’t want to interact with the real Internet, but your private roots are different from your private/hidden/split-horizon TLD. Another thing GoDaddy isn’t running. Did you know that GoDaddy doesn’t run news.ycombinator.com? Not even a subsidiary!

GoDaddy doesn’t run any “root DNS”, and they never have: period, full stop. [Pun intended]
by epolanski | 2025-04-17 13:58:02+00:00
> That's a very charitable view on vBulletins. Do you not remember threads with 100 pages that are impossible to surface any information from?

There's rarely reasons for that.

Example on MBWorld:

https://mbworld.org/forums/e-class-w212-109/

Example from HWUpgrade (italian hardware forum):

https://www.hwupgrade.it/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=13

I regularly read many forums to date and they are a great fit for long running discussions.

They are less confusing than slack/jira but easier to consume than email threads.

> it's not suitable for tickets (jira)

You can literally open a thread per ticket, same way you would open an issue on GH.

With good organization and barely any moderation you can go far.

I swear 20+ years ago we organized 80+ people World of Warcraft guilds all through forums (progress, economy, race-specific discussions, meetings, politics, website development, extensions, etc) and nobody ever felt like "yeah, it would've been better with a reddit/hn-style board or in a chat". Ever.

Yet today I'm split across 4 inefficient communication channels, plus another two/three different softwares for issues like GH/GitLab, documentation (confluence) involving half a dozen people lol.
by mdaniel | 2025-04-17 13:58:07+00:00
This trope comes up every time bash is mentioned, without fail. Unless your team enjoys reading this, then no, a general purpose programming language is not a good replacement for what is effectively a "subprocess orchestration language":

from subprocess import run, PIPE home = os.getenv("HOME") try: os.chdir(f"{home}/dev") except FileNotFoundError: sys.exit(1) out = run(("git ls-remote https://github.com/%(repo)s refs/tags/%(tag)s" % {"repo": shlex.quote("myorg/myrepo"), "tag": shlex.quote("v1.2.3+deadbeef")}).split(" "), stdout=PIPE, stderr=PIPE)

The line noise is outrageous as compared to a language built for changing directories and running commands

That's not even getting into the pty portion, where the progress of the output isn't visible until the end of it, which is terrible DX
by nirvael | 2025-04-17 13:58:10+00:00
I was also confused by this. I think you're right, but in the original text they specifically mention a 'static background' that they remove, so it's not just a simple 'wrong way round' error, it's a fundamental misunderstanding of what's happening. Makes me wonder if the author actually knew what they were doing, or just using an LLM to vibe-code everything.
by nickslaughter02 | 2025-04-17 13:58:15+00:00
> Clearly the pressure on government to write these laws is coming from somewhere

Software surveillance vendors.

> Chat control: EU Ombudsman criticises revolving door between Europol and chat control tech lobbyist Thorn

> Breyer welcomes the outcome: “When a former Europol employee sells their internal knowledge and contacts for the purpose of lobbying personally known EU Commission staff, this is exactly what must be prevented. Since the revelation of ‘Chatcontrol-Gate,’ we know that the EU’s chat control proposal is ultimately a product of lobbying by an international surveillance-industrial complex. To ensure this never happens again, the surveillance lobbying swamp must be drained.”

https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/chat-control-eu-ombudsman-c...
by Workaccount2 | 2025-04-17 13:58:25+00:00
I know people personally with strong gripes about AI "infringement" (in quotes because I believe people are just confused about how these models work), and every single one of them -100%- have a stash of pirated media they casually accumulated over the years.

People are in it for themselves. When you are young everyone has righteous ideals, but then trends of society eventually ebb, and you realize that just about everyone was simply virtue signalling, and few people are committed even to their own detriment.

2005: "End copyright! Trash IP law! Liberate media!"

2025: "Strengthen Copyright! Extend IP Protection! Protect makers!"
by ch4s3 | 2025-04-17 13:58:26+00:00
> The whole idea we allow “safe levels” of anything toxic is a concession to industry at the expense of the environment and consumers

No, it would be totally unworkable to do anything else. Plenty of normal from the ground food stuffs have low but safe levels of toxic substances in them. You wouldn't be able to preserve meat or smoke cheese. The list would go on forever.
by testing22321 | 2025-04-17 13:58:55+00:00
You just need to keep it simple. Every time you are hungry have an enormous glass of water, and eat all the vegetables you want, always. Snacks are carrots, cauliflower, snap peas, cucumber.

Avoid sugar and fat as much as possible.

Remain in calorie deficit and you will lose weight and get plenty of nutrients.
by owebmaster | 2025-04-17 13:59:01+00:00
> I stand by my point that Linux isn't particularly dominant in the consumer space

what if we add Steam deck? chromebooks? smartTVs, smartwatches, amazon echo, google home? GoPro and similar cameras? Maybe we should add some drones too. There are way more devices using linux in the hands of consumers than all other OS's together.
by ethersteeds | 2025-04-17 13:59:01+00:00
Playing devil's prosecutor, I would say that technology has simultaneously made telecommunication a nearly constant part of life while also enabling mass surveillance on a global scale, and the process hasn't reached an endpoint. The result is an extremely slippery slope from "targeted lawful intercept" to "AI assisted sentiment analysis of every iMessage". Or in the future, everything seen by your AR glasses, every thought encoded by your neuralink chip...

Your limited lawful intercept example is reasonable to most, but as you yourself acknowledged, that's not what politicians are seeking. Therefore even if the community supports and enables "just that", politicians will eventually demand their wildcard cert. It will be a national emergency, after all.
by hansvm | 2025-04-17 13:59:15+00:00
I didn't see a DSL anywhere, just normal JS code.

As to what it adds?

- It's more accessible to a wider audience (and looks like how you'd implement autodiff in most languages)

- It runs in the browser trivially (powering those demos)

- The author (potentially) didn't have to learn a new language just to get started

- Programs are not fully differentiable, or at the very least there are some crazy edge cases and dragons lurking if you attempt to make them so. A dedicated whitelist of supported operations isn't necessarily a bad design, contrasted with an implicit whitelist in Clojure (depending on the implementation of course, but there wasn't a lot of source-to-source boilerplate even in this example, so I assume the benefit of a functional language would be stripping away some of the characteristics I think are important).
by mrob | 2025-04-17 13:59:34+00:00
Something else you could send:

>Does dentifrice use help to remove plaque? A systematic review

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27513809/

"The cumulative evidence for this systematic review demonstrates that there is moderate certainty that toothbrushing with a dentifrice does not provide an added effect for the mechanical removal of dental plaque."

I also don't use toothpaste. However, I do replace my toothbrush regularly (every 3 months, which I believe most dentists recommend). Toothbrushes have microscopic texturing to help them clean, which wears out with use. Here's a video showing it under an electron microscope:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwN983PnJoA

A fresh toothbrush cleans noticeably better than a worn one. I think this is much more important than buying fancy expensive toothbrushes. Even the cheapest toothbrushes clean well when they're fresh, and the expensive ones wear out just the same.