MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sigmarule | 2025-04-23 11:24:01+00:00
> especially if it wasn’t expensive to maintain

Okay, so we’ve established that the cost of the endeavor is low.

> it’s the global catalog that helps everyone organize and talk about vulnerabilities

I would argue that leading and controlling the organization that provides the world with the single most ubiquitous cybersecurity resource justifies what you characterized as a meager cost in reputational capital alone.

> this is the follow up question to every headline and won't be seen as controversial later, so why bother treating it as controversial to say now

It’s not controversial, just a bit aloof.

Control of something like the CVE registry is essentially a geopolitical concern at this point, i.e. there has been anxiety brewing about China’s vulnerability disclosure laws for a bit now, much of which is warranted as China has been preventing the disclosure of vulnerabilities and instead stockpiling 0days and leveling up their APT groups. Even if the US wouldn’t exert such blatant influence or control over the program, the fact that vulnerability disclosures are being sent to US entities, or even just traveling through IP space we control, may be alone enough for value to be extracted.

This pattern could basically be viewed as the DOGE fallacy at this point.
by Hamuko | 2025-04-23 11:24:55+00:00
The barrier of entry for me is having to pay $99/year just to notarize and sign my macOS applications that me and maybe three other people use. Just a lot easier to link to instructions on how to bypass Gatekeeper or make them compile it themselves from source.

Although I think my go-to instructions at https://disable-gatekeeper.github.io/ are not being kept up to date?
by tim333 | 2025-04-23 11:25:22+00:00
Likewise in school it was a bit of a "lifeless recitation of names".

The good thing though in biology as opposed to physics and chemistry is knowledge is advancing quickly - since I went to college in the 1980s physics and chem are much the same but all sorts of new stuff has been figured out in biology and it's rapidly moving forward on things like how does the dna sequence turn into a given body design, how did life start, how do you make covid in a lab, is there likely to be bacterial life on Mars and so on. An interesting thing I learnt recently is bacteria may have partly shaped/made the continents. The idea, roughly, is they live deep in the crust and kind of rot it so part collapses into the magma.
by memsom | 2025-04-23 11:25:30+00:00
Gaelic arrived in Scotland within 100 years of English arriving in England. They are both attested to arrive in around the 4th - 5th AD century IIRC. Before that Scotland spoke Pictish (which is not known in the modern era and may/maynot have been a Brythonic language) and a language related to Welsh in the Lowlands. Gaelic is a very interesting language and should absolutely get championed and preserved, but it is not the ancient language of Scotland, and hasn't really been spoken there much longer than the English language was in the UK.
by rglullis | 2025-04-23 11:26:02+00:00
> What is important that there is one company you can go to who does all of that for you.

This is what gets us in this mess in the first place.

> Running a government institution and having 20 different vendors to make your basic IT system work is a nightmare.

Then scale down the bureaucracy and bring back the decision-making power down to the leaf nodes. Have each institution working as a "microservice" which is responsible only for defining the interfaces on how to interact with them, but leave the internal implementation completely up to the department. You can of course have some collaborative structure where these departments can use as a reference guide, but they are completely free to override those decisions when it best suits them.
by roelschroeven | 2025-04-23 11:26:30+00:00
Wouldn't it be easier to use WSL? Microsoft has done al the hard work in getting native Linux code to run on Windows. I don't know how bare-bones you want it to be, but if you install Debian in WSL without extra packages, that seems pretty bare-bone to me. And it seems to me you avoid unnecessary friction from switching from OpenBSD to Linux later on.

WSL requires Windows 10 or 11 though.
by meindnoch | 2025-04-23 11:27:19+00:00
"The computer is huge, you know, I told Elon the other day, and by the way I was the first one to say this, the computer is tremendous, tremendously important. Baron, you know, he's so good with the computer, and that's what I said many times, you know, good genes, good genes. A friend of mine, great guy, very smart guy, told me the other day, Donald, the computer, and by the way, this is what most people don't realize in our country, [...]"
by onli | 2025-04-23 11:27:46+00:00
It's not completely unwarranted. According to the article, Facebook was fined for their model of asking for pay or accept tracking. Which is exactly what almost all publishers do, e.g. all big German newspapers. It's absolutely clear that this is against the law - they could show ads, but can't invade the users privacy for that, so no tracking ads - but they do it anyway and got away with it in various decisions. And now Facebook gets a huge fine for the same behaviour.

Which is good in a way, maybe it will lead to a behaviour correction also for the smaller publishers. But it's of course not an equal treatment.

Apple on the other hand completely deserves its fine, without a question. They got clear rules and did everything to circumvent them. The Apple's Core Technology Fee was obviously illegal. Don't know why they expected to get away with that, there wasn't even a minimal chance of that working. Idiots.
by exceptione | 2025-04-23 11:28:16+00:00
It is a matter of whether you prefer transnational organized crime or not.

Businesses, Science and individuals thrive in societies that are democratic, with separation of powers and independent judiciary. The better they function, the harder it is for crime.

On the other hand, if you allow organized crime to prosper, take control of it, and on the other hand have the judiciary in your grip, you can play both cards against your political/business enemies.

This is the model of Russia, where the State is deeply connected to transnational organized crime. The Kremlin powers really wanted Viktor Bout free. Now, if the power brokers in the media landscape wanted to tell you the big picture instead of hyper focusing on the day to day circus... (that is also why journalism /= actualities).

So these are just necessary steps to clear roadblocks for crime networks. The same for IRS. In Russia you cannot get power without Kompromat on yourself. Like the maffia, the boss needs a kill switch on everyone.

From a higher perspective, it is a bit unfortunate that these transgressive steps were foreseen in academia, those despicable expertise centra in the EU and other democratic countries, while the general public is kept in the dark by media houses.

I am not sure if it still suitable for HN or that the Overton Window shifted too much already, but the other things that were forecast are the capturing of conservatism by the same networks. We expect also to see further normalization of law breaking, power abuse, power concentration and state capture by non-elected bodies. Yes, this was a normalization process of decades. But now on full acceleration. As an aside, it is not entirely a coincidence that "Accelerationism" is the ideology of associated power circles.

And now you also know how Tech Bro's and Conservatism could share the same campaign. Their intended outcomes differ on some points, but they agree on the path to their respective ideals. The extreme destruction that follows will not touch them personally. To ensure that last thing they unlock powers for them self: become the law.
by robviren | 2025-04-23 11:28:44+00:00
Every time I try to use Python I get this mixed feeling of liking how few guard rails there are between me and the logic I am making and this lingering worry that my code looks like fools attempt to use Python. So much exists as convention or loosely followed rules. Whenever I read articles like this I am wowed by the depth of things I didn't know about Python or how much has changed. It makes something like Go feel like a comfort blanket because I have reasonable certainty code I write won't feel deprecated or left behind a year or two later. Excellent article showing off even more I didn't know.
by MrBuddyCasino | 2025-04-23 11:28:58+00:00
> The demand for software is so high.

What is interesting in these kinds of discussions is that intuitively, nobody really beliefs in the law of supply & demand. On an emotional level, people always think that effort and difficulty should be rewarded on their own - which is actually correct from a social and ethical POV, and yet:

markets are markets operating under the iron law of supply and demand.
by viraptor | 2025-04-23 11:29:14+00:00
It's a pretty well self regulating issue, isn't it? If there is no maintainer available, there's no market either, so it could be dropped. If there's enough people to develop for this expensive uncommon system, then surely there's enough money going round to pay someone.

Right now it looks like they have enough first party support and third party dyi efforts to at least give it a go.
by lesostep | 2025-04-23 11:31:55+00:00
Does he need that much? I'm pretty sure 5-6 generations ago the most muscular and the strongest man in my region ate turnips and grains with the occasional meat. The only other big source of meat were beans and realistically people at the time didn't eat more then 50-70 grams a day of them. Eating meat everyday is a very recent development. Why we suddenly need so much protein that we struggle to find it in a basic food that is more rich and varied then a few hundred years ago?
by jasongill | 2025-04-23 11:32:00+00:00
One good test of geocoding API's is to put in a PO Box-only ZIP code like 22313. If you get back Alexandria VA near 38.82 N -77.05 W then you've found a decent geocoding API. If you get no location back or if you get some other place, you're going to have a bad time in production, based on my experience.
by mattlondon | 2025-04-23 11:32:22+00:00
I think there is "playing the long game" and there is "flogging a dead horse".

I still can't believe that both apple and meta bet the farm on VR and screwed up so spectacularly. It was fairly clear that VR was never going to be mainstream for the same reasons that 3D movies and TVs vanished after all that fanfare and marketing a few years ago: people don't want to wear the glasses, and they don't want to pay extra either. We've been there and tried this - people are happy with 2D screens and don't see any real benefits of 3D glasses/headsets worth paying for (...apart from the nerdfactor).

Sure there might be some sort of market for "smart glasses" and people are continually releasing various iterations of those (and I'd be up for a pair too FWIW), but if the vision pro is any indication of what the tech is capable of today, we're a very very long way away from normal-glasses-style form factor units (i.e. size, weight, battery life, discreetness, price, nausea etc).

Tl;Dr - nice try doing something new, but if I were an apple investor I'd prefer they went back to what they knew and not waste further billions upon billions "playing the long game" on a dead-end because they can't accept they made a mistake.
by chaostheory | 2025-04-23 11:32:30+00:00
My guess is that they were overtly trying to show Russia that we aren’t a direct threat to them anymore in the vain attempt to avoid fighting a two front war in the upcoming global war. Unfortunately, Putin is likely going to keep invading up to Germany’s Fulda Gap. If we’re still a part of NATO, we would have no choice but to declare war.
by 3np | 2025-04-23 11:32:39+00:00
You may have short-term volatility but a stable trend. Average monthly year-to-year tempuratures are more predictable than the dailies a month from now. But yeah: Any weather forecast for the next few centuries will probably not fare much better than guesswork on average.

There's still some severe selective bias going on with what matters, what probabilities are discounted as insignificant, assumptions on cause and effect, etc.
by tom_ | 2025-04-23 11:33:05+00:00
Menu items on Windows can have 2 shortcuts - a keyboard shortcut like the macOS equivalent, that can activate the item when the menu is closed, and an access key, that can be used to activate it when the menu has keyboard focus. See https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/...

(The access key concept applies to many other types of control. Anything with a text label can have one, pretty much.)

The shortcut is indicated towards at the side of the menu bar, like macOS. The access key is indicated by an underlined letter. For example, in Firefox, the File > Save Page As... menu item has a shortcut key (Ctrl+S), and an access key (A). The A in As is underlined to indicate the access key, and there's a right-aligned Ctrl+S in that row of the menu bar to indicate the shortcut.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-04-23 11:33:50+00:00
Chromium would be hard to relicense due to copyright but trivial to fork.

So, chromium won't go away. Those 1000+ people are the main resource here. Effectively they work mostly on chromium and not on chrome. What happens to chromium if that stops?

My guess is MS might step up and hire people.
by os2warpman | 2025-04-23 11:34:55+00:00
> What am I missing?

People don't work for free. Industrial-grade items are expensive.

You can't just seal some components. You have to seal those components then conduct rigorous and extensive testing of those components to make sure they're actually sealed. Then you have to document the process.

An alternator on a steam locomotive isn't a little thing you can hold in your hands and get from an auto parts store for next to nothing.

Here is one of the two new "alternators" installed on 60163 Tornado: https://www.a1steam.com/tornado/news/tornado-details/doublin...

I'm a hardware guy. The number 1 thing software guys don't get about hardware is that everything you do costs a shit-ton of money. You can't just download a hardware IDE, register a hardware domain, and vibe code your way to a hardware startup.

Well, you can, but the technical term for that is "kickstarter scam".

Conversion 2 will be less expensive than 1, conversion 3 will be less expensive than 2, and by the time they get to the 500th conversion it'll be practically cheap.
by cess11 | 2025-04-23 11:36:03+00:00
Installing WSL was much harder than 'download and double click EXE' when I last did it. The 'app' shop installed something botched I now can't easily get rid of and then I had to do a few Powershell incantations to actually get an install that boots a Linux-like terminal. If I had to use Linux under Windows more than a few hours per year I'd Hyper-V it instead.

I'd also guess 'telemetry' pumps out all one does in WSL, while this might leak less of what the kids are doing.
by xvector | 2025-04-23 11:36:13+00:00
Spotify conveniently falls outside of the scope of this law when any artist would tell you it should absolutely be covered.

The DMA is gerrymandered to exclude domestic businesses. Whenever the EU faces budget shortfalls, they know they can just make up some bullshit law and fine US tech.

> EU are basically enforcing market capitalism by disallowing monopolistic practices.

Users are free to just not buy iOS devices. Users are free to just not use Meta services.

There is no monopoly here. This is all much ado about nothing.

No real-world user is meaningfully harmed by the current state of Apple App Store/Meta Ads, but plenty will be harmed once spyware/piracy sideloading becomes common. Many small businesses will collapse due to ineffective advertisement (large businesses will love it though - it becomes a winner-take-all market).
by grumpy-de-sre | 2025-04-23 11:36:28+00:00
In the meantime public sentiment toward cats in Australia is becoming really toxic (due to the consequences of a long-term ineffective feral control program). I swear one day when the chemical baits turn out to be worse than the cats themselves the pendulum will swing hard in favor of cats once again. They really are an indispensable tool and a big part of humanities agricultural success.

FWIW I'm in favor of dropping a few billion AUD into cat control programs and deploying technologies like felixer everywhere. Up until now it's just been an underfunded borderline volunteer affair.
by righthand | 2025-04-23 11:36:48+00:00
Totally agree, I stopped visiting Ars Technica because a lot of the "journalism" is reports on Elon Musk and reposts from Hacker News. It is very clear some of their writers just watch for what is popular on this site then write about it (which is not bad in itself, they just don't put more effort than the original report on it).
by jbverschoor | 2025-04-23 11:36:59+00:00
Ahhh Khronos. Lovely Fahrenheit where Microsoft strung SGI along to make Fahrenheit fail (now Open Scene Graph) and incorporate the IP in Direct3D.. Shitty tactics.

It's a miracle they actually allowed Microsoft to be a member of the Khronos group.

I should try an make an image of Fahrenheit's beta cds some day.
by bsenftner | 2025-04-23 11:37:30+00:00
I remember we were not given names for the pieces and parts, just these paragraph or three descriptions of what the written code would receive and what it would output, and what CS fundamentals we should use in that assignment. A good portion of the class's difficulty was in these weird assignments with these really weird I/O requirements. It was explained that companies that work in assembly are often working on DoD contracts, and these were the nature of one's work assignments: obtuse I/O requirements with no idea what they plug into or are used for... clever indirection.
by jamincan | 2025-04-23 11:38:12+00:00
At the peak period of DOGE activity when it was the biggest political news story, I never once saw stories about it on the front page here. Someone relying on HN as their primary news aggregator would be entirely clueless to what was going on in Washington. I actually tried searching for them at last, because it seemed implausible to me that nothing was being posted and gaining traction and it was only then that I realized that there were tonnes of stories, but they were being flagged and buried.

I don't necessarily know that it's moderator malfeascence so much as people abusing HN tools to bury stories that they don't like, but I do think that there should be some consideration about how those tools are being abused and how that abuse can be effectively countered.

I get the impression that an effort is being made to correct the situation, but I've given up on the front page and only visit /active now, so I might be completely wrong.
by whynotmaybe | 2025-04-23 11:38:54+00:00
I guess that after "In god we trust" on the bank notes, it's now "god helps those who help themselves" for the rest.

> The phrase is often mistaken as a scriptural quote, though it is not stated in the Bible. Some Christians consider the expression contrary to the biblical message of God's grace and help for the helpless, and its denunciation of greed and selfishness.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_helps_those_who_help_the...
by berkes | 2025-04-23 11:39:06+00:00
Chrome is installed on (almost?) every Android phone. So they'd be buying much more than this.

Not a new "AI phone", which has to gain traction, find users, convince people to switch, compete in highly competitive (hardware( and duopolized (OS, Software) landscape.

I won't be suprised if amongst Android users, Chrome is one of the most installed apps - if only because many phones have it locked (i.e. its really hard or impossible to remove).

Maybe "Google Assistant" is installed more than chrome, IDK. But Chrome has the additional benefit that it is also installed on many iPhones. Sou Chrome would be a gateway into "making your iPhone an AI phone" too.
by fscaramuzza | 2025-04-23 11:39:27+00:00
New Gemini models are quite good, Gemini 2.5 Pro is 1st in the user-benchmarks [1]. They also have Gemma, very good model that can run locally [2]. Benchmarks are not oracles of truth, but I feel like Google is not a kid who arrived late at the party anymore.

[1] https://lmarena.ai/

[2] https://blog.google/technology/developers/gemma-3/
by ivape | 2025-04-23 11:41:01+00:00
I don't know what's going on here but it sounds like "Hey, I want to take your wife and have sex with her". Gotta read between the lines here. I think Google has a 14% stake in Anthropic. Along with Gemini, Chrome and Android as delivery vehicles, and search. The monopoly lawsuit is about this (the advertising ship sailed long ago, so what's this really about), and there's some nasty legal talk going on here. I think if they just give up the Anthropic stake and promise to allow any AI provider in chrome, then this nonsense will all end.

/tinfoil
by gaiagraphia | 2025-04-23 11:41:35+00:00
I guess they could effectively copy Kagi's model at mammoth scale - offering a premium internet browsing experience with a 'personalised assistant'.

Easy to convince at least 10% of the users to sign in to their browser with a verified credit card to 'protect the children', and governments around the world would give you full support.

At that point, would be trivial for them to track browsing habits, and then to start offering personalised assistants which save you time and eventually cost money.

Pretty sure you could save money throuh having a huge botnet of computers to tap into, and a huge amount of data to help cache and standardise common requests.
by jonasdegendt | 2025-04-23 11:41:43+00:00
> something more problematic of this smart bike is that it also requires an app to unlock.

It doesn't, assuming you have the PIN to the bicycle.

> from what I read they used many (low quality) custom parts for this bike which aren't available anymore.

I've worked on my two VanMoofs a bunch to keep them running and they're okay quality parts in my opinion. Additionally, they sold about 200k bicycles so there's plenty of second hand, and even new, parts out there.
by rglullis | 2025-04-23 11:42:10+00:00
I'm halfway there with Communick. I started with the focus on providing hosting for social media and messaging platforms, so I had to find my way around setting up LDAP for SSO, provisioning of object storage for separate services, etc.

But the most interest thing is that in the process I also wanted to remove my dependency on the other centralized SaaS, so I ended up setting up my own git repository (gitea), my own CI (woodpecker), my own project management tool (Taiga), my own knowledge-base/data sharing tool (Baserow).

On the one hand, I agree with you and think it could be a great business opportunity. On the other, the whole thing is so easy to be completely commoditized that I don't see a practical path to profitability. If I go to investors with the idea, they will say (rightly so) that there is no easy way to establish a competitive advantage. If I bootstrap (like I have been doing with Communick) I can not be fast enough to do both customer acquisitation and development.
by StrandedKitty | 2025-04-23 11:42:10+00:00
In the short term yes, but why would you as an end user of lovable and similar tools prefer expensive Supabase? If you already have an AI developer at your disposal you might as well make it figure out how to properly set up and maintain AWS, right? Maybe it can't do it now -- too complicated because there's no simple AI-accessible interface, and LLM models are simply not smart enough yet, but I imagine it will change soon.