MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Daviey | 2025-04-10 14:03:47+00:00
> We have calculated that the cost of converting the JSON file in the export into a human readable format and then extracting only the information in the dataset ‘held’ by the Secretary of State on behalf of the department (that is, information relating to Peter Kyle’s official role as Secretary of State) will cost more than the £600 cost limit for central government departments, therefore engaging section 12 of FOIA.

3 days worth of work apparently. :/

Buuuuut... When asked without talking about export, they were able to answer it:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/foi2025-00120-pla...
by chneu | 2025-04-10 14:04:01+00:00
I would actually wager that benefits dont matter to them anymore. If it's government, it's bad. Full stop. Conservatives don't really have any real stances. They are obstructionists at this point. They anti-. That's it. If someone proposes something they will obstruct and disagree because they didn't come up with it.

There are clear benefits. They just refuse to see them. You can show a mountain of evidence based on peer reviewed research and they'll hand waive it away and say "Private enterprise could do it better" or some nonsense.
by wpietri | 2025-04-10 14:04:18+00:00
Turns out this varies widely by culture. In many places, it's taboo: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_meat

If you'd like a different example that gets the same feeling, try substituting something else considered treif in your culture, like "roasted eyeballs" or "a human hand". My point being that people who are used to eating some kinds of meat see it as perfectly reasonable, but that has a lot to do with what they've been socialized to. In contrast, raised in vegetarian cultures often find eating any meat equally horrific. Which is the position I find intellectually most rational.
by dagw | 2025-04-10 14:04:30+00:00
As a new and naive parent I thought I would get my kid into hacking and computers by giving them a laptop with a basic Linux install as their first computer. I had visions of teaching them how to program and doing cool things with Arduino and kinds of awesome hacker projects.

All I achieved was to convince them that computers are hard and stupid and not fun, and that iPads and Playstation are superior in every way.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-04-10 14:04:38+00:00
Ironically, I can make the case that programming killed Real(TM) technical competence.

"Back in my day you had to solve dense differential equations to design a circuit to get a filtered output on a amplifier! And then you had to manually build it! Nowadays these kids just use libraries and pass it variables to get the output they want!"

I don't think technical competence goes away, it just changes form from what you recognize as technical competence.
by 34679 | 2025-04-10 14:05:17+00:00
Who in America is China copying with their high speed rail? Who are they copying with their drone displays? What about their skylines that more closely resemble our sci-fi films than anything we've actually built?

The truth is, China is already the most advanced country in the world and if we ever manage to modernize our infrastructure and manufacturing, we will be copying them.
by 9rx | 2025-04-10 14:05:24+00:00
> Now try that sentence with "leg of a dog".

If that's the best choice in front of me, sure. I'm not going to starve to death just because it is dog. Are you?

> I also don't think he was talking about activists.

There was said to be support. That requires activism of some sort. You don't have to gather in the streets in mass promotion, wear certain colored hats, or fly party flags, but there has to be some kind of activity to suggest that the support is there. That isn't someone quietly eating a burger (or dog leg) in the corner.
by lukaslalinsky | 2025-04-10 14:05:36+00:00
I don't know how things could be worse than 30-40 years ago. Not many people had access to computers, and it they had, it was either for business, or for playing games. In both cases, it was just going through a well-known path to achieve the goal, no exploration, no experimenting. Only a very small minority of kids were interested in programming. The fact that we have more accessible technology now doesn't change the fact that only a small minority of kids are interested in programming. The difference these days is that if they are interested in programming, they have so many resources available. YouTube videos on every single topic, AI chatbots capable of answering programming questions. If I had these tools as a kid, not having to rely on the 5 books in the local library, I'd learn so much more.
by mdaniel | 2025-04-10 14:05:45+00:00
> (I can’t name names because they were never public, but if you probe ChatGPT to see if it knows about these efforts, it somehow knows specific details.)

I'm going to laugh if Google joins the NYT in suing OpenAI for copyright infringement from having trained on proprietary data. That said: I also wonder how that actually made it in
by allan_s | 2025-04-10 14:06:14+00:00
first, at the end the effect is the same (XSS which can be used to extract information), the difference is "how someone can get to it" and "how you protect yourself from it"

1.to be honest you should refrain yourself from loading resource outside of domain you control 2. even if you do, you can protect yourself from somebody replacing jquery.js by something totally different by using <script integrity='the_hash'> 3. if it's a CDN your control it's usually quite hard to inject something into the resource because a potential hacker has no obvious input on it (and you still can protect it by using the above script integrity= 4. so then most people feel safe and forget that inline script can still be dynamically created if you have a hole in your libraries generating DOM code, so this path of attack need to be blocked completly (forbidding inline script at all) or protected (using nonce)
by autocole | 2025-04-10 14:06:29+00:00
Thanks for sharing! I think I started working on large teams around the same time using Angular 2 (shudders).

It’s so nice to see the learning from a multi year UI development project and the evolution of how to communicate good patterns across teams and people. It usually turns into 50% technical thinking & 50% political respect to ensure others help champion your ideas with you
by jfengel | 2025-04-10 14:07:30+00:00
Ah, I was addressing the first sentence in particular, about the conflation of anti-Israel sentiment and antisemitism.

As for Columbia... no, there's zero reason to think they supported Hamas. There might well be antisemitism in the roots of this somewhere -- left-wing antisemitism is a real thing and didn't appear in response to Israel's treatment of Palestinians.

But there is zero reason to think that the people being harassed are antisemitic. That is a right-wing belief that all Muslims are terrorists.

Just to be clear about my perceptions: Israel does face serious terrorism from Muslim countries, and I think that this reaches American young people by being "washed" through anti-semitic (white) intellectuals. But attacking university students for their sincere and non-violent beliefs is horrific (even if I think that some of their beliefs are wrong).
by balivandi | 2025-04-10 14:08:07+00:00
About 30 years ago in a creative 2-week fit I wrote a mini-symphony. I’ve always envisioned expanding it into a full-length orchestral piece but don’t have the skills to do so.

I would love to use a music model that could help me do that.

I’m imagining feeding it my score and then iterating with it to create the final piece I’ve had stuck in my head all this time.
Tell HN: ProtonVPN Partners with TorrentLeech
by boramalper | 2025-04-10 14:08:07+00:00
I just received the following email from TorrentLeech, a BitTorrent tracker for piracy. While I'm not all against piracy, I find pretty desperate that Proton partners with BitTorrent trackers to push its product.

https://imgur.com/a/m9vRAMZ

> Hey $username,

> We live in crazy times, and protecting your online privacy has never been more important.

> That’s why we've teamed up with one of the biggest names in the VPN space—ProtonVPN—to bring you an exclusive deal: 64% OFF their plan plus 6 months of TorrentLeech VIP access, completely free.

> It’s the ultimate upgrade for speed, security, and peace of mind—all in one package. Why ProtonVPN is a solid upgrade:

> * Dedicated IPs = consistent, reliable connections

> * Zero speed loss during torrenting

> * 500+ servers in 63+ countries

> * Bypasses ISP throttling & buffering

> * Free remote install support

> * Connect up to 10 devices

> * Optimized for high-speed file transfers

> * Port forwarding available – no more undiscoverable errors

> If you’re ready to boost your speed and privacy with this limited-time offer, don’t miss it.
by wpietri | 2025-04-10 14:08:40+00:00
No, you can still find hypocrisy in politics.

A person can vote for a party while not agreeing with every one of their platform points. They can also vote for a party and then criticize it later for not following through. As long as they're honest about the divergence and can justify it as an overall better choice, it's not hypocrisy, just being an adult.

The hypocrisy comes in when somebody claims to hold beliefs, votes for a party, and then either ignores a contradiction or spouts the new party line.
by nickpeterson | 2025-04-10 14:10:28+00:00
I think a lot of it is goals/rewards. I got into computing as a kid because I wanted to play games that I saw in screenshots in magazines. Then I wanted the game I got running to run faster. Then i’m losing online so suddenly I’m learning about ping/networking.

Fast forward a decade and I end up being a programmer. Most people won’t learn technical things just for the hell of it.
by londons_explore | 2025-04-10 14:11:06+00:00
I just don't understand how the decision of which bits of a project need rebuilding can be so complex.

If I edit 50 lines of code in a 10GB project, then rebuild, the parts that need rebuilding are the parts that read those files when they were last built.

So... The decision of what to rebuild should take perhaps a millisecond and certainly doable locally.
by bfone | 2025-04-10 14:11:17+00:00
IT infrastructure security is what most managers still don't even understand the basics of. As devs it's hard to explain all of it and not sure if you want to.

So we've put together an ultimate guide for managers to understand important aspects of IT infrastructure security giving an overview and basics of aspects on several levels.

Saving you time to do all the explaining yourself :)
by jmull | 2025-04-10 14:11:20+00:00
That's just a for-instance.

The general point is that additional cash is tied up in shoes which cannot do something else. Who bears the burden of the loss of that additional cash changes over time (Nike to Footlocker to consumers) but the burden is bourn.

(And that's before you count the impact of the inevitable reduction in unit sales. There're various kinds of overhead that don't scale linearly units sold, or that have a long lag before scaling, or have a significantly-sized step function in the scaling.)

BTW, where did the cash go? Oh yeah, into the hands of the US federal government. We have a word for that: tax.
by WillAdams | 2025-04-10 14:11:25+00:00
I'm faintly surprised that the Raspberry Pi hasn't made OS-experimentation more of a thing.

There are:

https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/risc-os-for-raspberry-pi/

https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Installation

https://9p.io/wiki/plan9/Raspberry_Pi/index.html

as well as a couple of RTOS options: https://all3dp.com/2/rtos-raspberry-pi-real-time-os/ and QNX: https://pidora.ca/qnx-on-raspberry-pi-the-professional-grade...

and TRON: https://www.tron.org/blog/2023/09/post-1767/ (but that's only on the Pico? I'd love to see it as a desktop OS on an rPi5)
by bccdee | 2025-04-10 14:11:34+00:00
This whole article has a really weird tone.

> She handed me her MacBook silently and the look on her face said it all. Fix my computer, geek, and hurry up about it.

> [...]

> Normally when someone spouts this rubbish I just nod and smile. This time I simply couldn't let it pass. 'Not really, most kids can't use computers.' (and neither can you - I didn't add.)

I wonder if she recognized the look on your face when you internally condescended to her about the network proxy which you have not adequately documented for end users?
by tw04 | 2025-04-10 14:11:46+00:00
I would guess if you were starving to death you wouldn’t think twice about killing a cow.

There’s nothing wrong with fundamentally valuing life but also consuming it for sustenance. I’m guessing you wouldn’t vote for a law to torture cows while also saying you value a cow’s life.

That is essentially what the outdoorsmen are doing when voting for a politician that’s trying to remove environmental protections.
by jeffbee | 2025-04-10 14:12:02+00:00
I find anyone this dismissive of Java hard to take seriously. Java is a cutting-edge language platform where the achievable performance at the limit is on-par with C++. Also, the article's hook didn't grab me. My laptop is way, way more powerful than any "beefy workstation" they ever assigned me at Google, starting with a dual-core 2400MHz Opteron. Bazel's server performance on my laptop or workstation are total non-issues. There are issues with Bazel of course, that's just not one that smells right to me.
by wruza | 2025-04-10 14:12:10+00:00
It's unlikely because people don't get why jump through so many hoops when you can

new = copy(old) new.foo.bar.baz = new_baz return new

It won't come out of Haskell because it's uniquely a solution to a specific Haskell problem. Mutating a fresh copy through a "lens" when you have `=` is a level of geekage that cannot become mainstream.
by lblume | 2025-04-10 14:12:59+00:00
> When they hit eleven, give them a plaintext file with ten-thousand WPA2 keys and tell them that the real one is in there somewhere. See how quickly they discover Python or Bash then.

I wish this would still work. Today's kids would instantly use AI to solve it.

Does anyone have an idea for a challenge that will instill some level of technical literacy without being instantly gameable in the era of omnipresent LLMs?
by damnesian | 2025-04-10 14:13:27+00:00
>largest publisher in human history

You are of course correct, as far as scale, but I can't help feeling skeptical about how equivalent its effects are when compared to old media. On VJ day, practically every American read the headline in one of a handful of the nation's biggest newspapers. Today, we'd find this news from a post by our favorite influencer, with a built-in twist to boost engagement. There's no doubt social media has blanketed our society in its influence. but the signal has been completely scattered, lost in the sea of noise. In terms of simply learning new things, it's in one ear and out the other. You can learn all kinds of things through social media, but it requires a great deal of effort to weed out the torrent of irrelevant, useless junk data.

Not a linear scale, really.
by nkrisc | 2025-04-10 14:13:36+00:00
> How many kids/teenagers know what 0x20 is these days without doing a WEB search ?

I mean I still had to stop for a brief moment and do the arithmetic in my head as I do when reading any number in a base other than 10.

Unless you mean recognizing "0x" as a prefix indicating the following number is in base 16?
by milesrout | 2025-04-10 14:13:36+00:00
Computer programming and all that is quite difficult. I don't think kids are likely to get it before about 10-12. I was a very bright kid, into computers from an early age, but programming came much later. I found the ideas of computers interesting though. When my dad explained how microkernels and monolithic kernels differed to me I was fascinated.

maybe you are pushing them to do things with computers too early and you would have more success if you focused more on trying to capture their wonder.
by dirtybirdnj | 2025-04-10 14:13:36+00:00
I feel like this is really to the heart of "your vibe attracts your tribe".

It's kinda risky to but something like this in the comments, what if nobody ever sees it? What if it never beeps?

It's just weird enough people (like myself) would do it. I would have if I saw it, but I missed it.
by RajT88 | 2025-04-10 14:13:53+00:00
> I eat cow while I'd be horrified to eat horse or dog.

Horse is good, and while they are noble and majestic, so are cows (which are also cute to boot). I think the same of fish, and while less cuddly, I still feel a tiny bit conflicted about taking one's life just to eat when I do it.

Dogs are family for me. I'd probably be OK with wolf or coyote or similar.

I don't begrudge anyone how they want to align their morals with how and what they eat.
by like_any_other | 2025-04-10 14:13:54+00:00
> The vulnerabilities they found enabled them to use the infotainment system’s Bluetooth capabilities to infiltrate the car’s internal network.

How is it that I, a layperson, know that infotainment should be airgapped from critical car functions, but a 91 year old $87 billion/year revenue multinational car manufacturer doesn't?

Eventually this kind of repeated reckless disregard for security has to be treated as malicious.
by potato3732842 | 2025-04-10 14:14:10+00:00
It's because they're too indoctrinated by modern culture to say "when it actually comes down to it I'd rather live in a prosperous but polluted society, at the end of the day like the necessity of making ends mmeet more than the luxury of bass fishing" which is basically what they're getting at with the sum of their beliefs but is an opinion that is fairly taboo to voice without a ton of beating around the bush.
by apitman | 2025-04-10 14:14:15+00:00
> I’d imagine you can set this up and run it easily from a NAS at home if you want, but I opt to keep my data safely protected in Switzerland, so I subscribe to about $100 monthly of server time to run my websites and all my integrations

This part confused me a bit. Wouldn't running the NAS at home be more safe and secure? Or are they talking about backup safety?
by foobarian | 2025-04-10 14:15:04+00:00
It seems that given the options of 1) staying awake and active as normal during the night and 2) using the night period to run various maintenance task but without awareness the second option apparently turned out to be the winner as far as evolution is concerned.

What's interesting to me is how many animals beyond humans do it - so it's not purely tied to the human cognitive functions like higher order thinking etc.
by Covzire | 2025-04-10 14:15:12+00:00
We shouldn't need any new laws since it's so fundamentally and blatantly explained in the first amendment that no government official shall tell anyone what they can or can't say. SCOTUS has carved out certain language about credible threats of incitement of violence and the like and I'm ok with that.

Where it gets muddy though is during COVID+Social Media, we found a new threat against speech, e.g. the suppression of "reach" which accomplishes the exact same goal as suppressing speech, but it's legality is clouded by semantics.

So we desperately need new laws clarifying that government officials may not suppress 'reach' just because they don't like what a person or persons are saying, and most importantly we need it crystal clear that this applies even in the face of a pandemic, so that the government's embedded rent seekers can't once again force a lying narrative on the people that nobody can find their way out of, save for those who engage in 'conspiracy theories' and listen to 'conspiracy theorists'.
by 9rx | 2025-04-10 14:15:21+00:00
> Sorry, but I don't think anybody in this discussion is starving to death.

We were talking about making tradeoffs amid the choices available to you, where a burger was supposed, for the sake of discussion, to be the best choice available. I assume you haven't randomly changed the subject.

If you can choose between a hamburger and a dog leg, then, sure, a hamburger, at least to my taste, would be the better choice. I would choose it. But that doesn't mean I would never eat a dog leg. Where the dog leg is the best choice, why wouldn't you eat it?
by wpietri | 2025-04-10 14:15:43+00:00
The original post was talking about cognitive dissonance in other people. My point was that we all experience things like this. Food is a convenient example, because the few people who aren't hypocritical about it in some way are very familiar with how other people are.

My goal is to get others to realize that cognitive dissonance is not an us vs them thing. I freely grant that MAGA followers, as part of a cult of personality, are notably worse. But it's a human problem.

Does that clear it up for you?
by tpm | 2025-04-10 14:16:36+00:00
I don't even remember Java 8 to 9 (our platform vendor updates his product and after that we have to update ours in a fairly short timeframe, so it must not have been too painful), but I think there is a breaking change in every recent release, most recently we had to rename javax.mail to jakarta.mail and some other stuff like that when upgrading to Java 21. I don't mind but would not describe that as hassle free.
by watwut | 2025-04-10 14:16:40+00:00
I do not want to kill a cow personally, but I am aware meat I eat comes from cows. I would be against law that would make cow killing illegal. Not wanting to do something personally and accepting it happens for food is not cognitive dissonance. In general, I am ok with killing animals for food. If you killed a cow just for fun or sport, you are an asshole and I am against it. I feel no cognitive dissonance here.

Likewise, I am pro cleaning shit out of places. I prefer when someone else does it.
by frankosaurus | 2025-04-10 14:17:03+00:00
My neighborhood school issues Chromebooks to all kids starting in sixth grade.

It's been an interesting, um, pedagogical experiment.

In my kid's friend group (now 7th grade), the usage is all over the map. Some kids write C++ code or do Tinkercad. Others watch YouTube from 8am to the closing bell, during class and lunch. Still more spend their lesson time on Minecraft Educational edition.

(YouTube is a bit of a loophole... Since some teachers use it for lesson material, the school's WiFi leaves it unblocked. So YouTube Shorts stands in for IG Reels and TikTok, which are blocked.)
by chneu | 2025-04-10 14:17:24+00:00
This is false. The cost of building is going up because of tariffs. It isn't going to be profitable to build new wells. Wells, right now, are about 30% more expensive to build vs pre-tariffs, but this is likely to keep changing.

Add in that oil is dropping in price to the point where many wells are going to be shut down because it isn't profitable to operate them, and this is going to have the opposite effect. ~$60/barrel seems to be that point right now. We're trading at/around $60 right now.

Oil and Gas are going to become less attractive to investors because of this. Solar and wind are already dirt cheap, tariffs aren't really going to change that THAT much. They'll still be cheaper and a better investment than Oil/Coal/Gas.
by whstl | 2025-04-10 14:17:26+00:00
Yep, that's also my experience, my current job uses it for some products.

I find it that if you accept Supabase as-is, it can get you pretty far and save a lot of time and money.

And for edge cases, it's like you said above about ORMs, we don't have to throw it out, we just handle those cases separately.
by bob1029 | 2025-04-10 14:17:28+00:00
I learned that you can often make a lot more money by not chasing it directly.

Any chance you get to trade some capital for a better relationship or network, you should seriously consider it.

Being completely inflexible with others regarding direct and immediate exchange of value for labor is not a good way to get in deep with revenue sharing and ownership agreements. This is also colloquially known as "being an asshole".

Building a reputation sometimes means doing great things for free.