MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by greatgib | 2025-04-21 15:28:07+00:00
I got exactly the same kind of things with Xiaomi security camera.

I used to have one and it was not like that, but now you need to pay a monthly plan to have the last day of events available "in the cloud". It might be ok for me if it was just in the case that you store things in the cloud, but it looks like that if you don't take the subscription, even if you store things on a local sdcard, when there is an intruder alert, you will just receive the alert but you will not be able to see remotely the 10s video of the event like what is done when you use their subscription.

Also you have nag screen for the subscription everywhere. And obviously, there is no way to store things in the cloud anywhere else than using their own service. And especially not using common standard protocols.

What pisses me off is that Chinese brands, like Xiaomi, used to be "you just buy a device", no frill, good value and no need to rely on Chinese services and co.

Now, DJI, Xiaomi, they are following the trend of American and European crappy products selling you licence to products that you don't really own but that requires an all time one connection and subscription to Chinese services.

I saw the change coming hard when used to buy Xiaomi phones regularly, before you got the phone with a very light OS, crap free, it was a big relief coming from Samsung phones.

Now it is probably worse than Samsung, you have hundreds of mandatory apps by default for useless games and utils like bubble war, candy crush, facebook things, and dozens of nag screen to share your data or take subscriptions...
Show HN: Relative – Your gateway to unbiased news
by idriskhenchil | 2025-04-21 15:28:28+00:00
Hi HN! A couple of friends and I recently built our first app together - Relative News, a news reader designed to help you stay informed without feeling overwhelmed or misled.

We were frustrated with how chaotic and exhausting most news apps can be. Instead of bombarding you with endless headlines, Relative groups related articles from multiple sources into "Stories." This way, you can easily follow a topic and see how different outlets are reporting on it. By presenting multiple perspectives side by side, we aim to reduce bias and help users form a more balanced understanding of the news.

Key features include:

- A clean, uncluttered feed that focuses on clarity.

- The ability to follow specific stories and receive notifications when there are updates.

- A straightforward interface that lets you compare coverage across various publications.

We're a small team passionate about improving how people consume news. This is our first app, and we know there's still a lot of room for improvement.

We'd genuinely appreciate any feedback or suggestions you might have.
by dheera | 2025-04-21 15:28:43+00:00
> This lets subsequent logic decide whether the interpolation results need any special escaping before concatenating them with the strings around them

This sounds like unnecessary fluff in what was supposed to be a simple language. I'm worried Python is turning into C++42 with 65535 ways to do one simple thing.

Why not just:

f'SELECT * FROM `{esc(table)}` WHERE name = "{esc(name)}"'

Nice and simple.
by ivape | 2025-04-21 15:29:19+00:00
If we go with this analogy, we don't have advanced mech suits yet for this. To think an IDE is going to be the "visor", and to think copy-and-pasting is going to be jury-rigged weapons on the Mech is probably not it. The future really needs to be Jarvis and that Iron Man suit, whatever the programming equivalent is.

"Hey I need a quick UI for a storefront", can be done with voice. I got pretty far with just doing this, but given my experience I don't feel fully comfortable in building the mech-suit yet because I still want to do things by hand. Think about how wonky you would feel inside of a Mech, trying to acclimate your mind to the reality that your hand movements are in unity with the mech's arm movements. Going to need a leap of faith here to trust the Mech. We've already started attacking the future by mocking it as "vibe coding". Calling it a "Mech" is so much more inspiring, and probably the truth. If I say it, I should see it. Complete instant feedback, like pen to paper.
by NobodyNada | 2025-04-21 15:29:34+00:00
I can't speak for the author, but I when I release code as open-source I think carefully about the license that I use (usually either MIT, GPL, or CC0). If I choose MIT, then it's because I'm fine with companies "taking advantage" of my code. I'd probably mainly feel glad that I created something useful to someone.

What I'm not OK with is a company doing that without attribution. If XYZ company's product is built on code I wrote, I want to be credited -- both so that I can show it to potential employers, and so that users of XYZ company's product are aware that some of the code in it is something they can use for free and modify for their own purposes. If the attribution wasn't important to me, I would have chosen CC0 instead of MIT.

So yeah, if I was the author, I'd probably feel a lot better about if MS re-added the correct attribution. I'd probably still feel miffed that they tried to pull one over on me in the first place -- but I wouldn't be offended by the fact that they're using my software.
by palata | 2025-04-21 15:29:36+00:00
Microsoft does credit the authors on their README. Maybe it's not exactly the right way to do it, but they do it.

Now if it's not the right way to do it, what about opening a PR and asking to change it? Instead of writing a blog post to complain about them?

Now maybe those engineers thought they did well, will get issues internally because of the bad publicity for Microsoft, and next time they want to use an open source project their legal department will be even more of a pain in the ass because if they aren't, then random people on the Internet use that to do bad publicity for the company.

Why not assuming that they are in good faith here? There are enough reasons to hate Microsoft other than this one.
by pc86 | 2025-04-21 15:30:46+00:00
I'm not trying to launder anything, I think it's pretty obvious that Western culture in general is superior to others. Case in point: the linked article here. No laundering necessary. But even if you disagree with that, there's nothing preventing anyone from acknowledging my actual point, as well as the fact that belief in inalienable human rights does not by definition require any particular religion or belief in any particular God or gods. It simply requires acknowledgement that all humans are worthy of those rights.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-04-21 15:30:57+00:00
> I also think there's different use cases than an ssh app. If you just need an ssh app, then why even bother with Termux (because .ssh/config is a pretty well known is somewhat of an answer but still doesn't require termux).

You still need to run your ssh client somehow, and last time I looked termux+openssh was straight-up a nicer experience than anything else I could find on Android (which I always found funny, but there it is).
by alabastervlog | 2025-04-21 15:31:40+00:00
> but on LinkedIn itself you have to confront the reality that these people, often colleagues / former colleagues etc. are being serious

I doubt many are being serious.

Business culture (at least in the US) is so steeped in lying and general fake-ness that in-group signaling as "real business person" involves public performances of bullshit.

It's what you're supposed to do in interviews: bullshit just the right way, to show you understand the game and are willing to debase yourself to play it. Otherwise you're "risky", either due to excessive commitment to ethical principles or to being too clueless or inept to play the game right. That's what's going on, on LinkedIn. "Humility" and "realness" even have to be faked just the right way.

It's incredibly gross.
by Capricorn2481 | 2025-04-21 15:31:43+00:00
> What's more, superficially at least, it makes more sense to believe in a supreme, essentially divine creator than it does to believe visibly enormous complexity deriving from a mostly unknown nothing.

We would come from nothing in the same way God came from nothing. There's little reason to conclude the universe was ever non-existent.

> Though, the idea of being the creations of a tremendously powerful and conscious being that created a universe hospitable to our use and for our potential given by all our evident cognitive and material tools seems to me a lot more plausible than being subject to an accidental existence in a gargantuan ice cream environment.

I actually thought you were going to say the first clause is less probable than whatever the second upcoming clause would be, because it sounds so improbably specific and human-crafted.

I think the belief that we were gifted our cognitive superiority (if that even is something unique to us in the history of the universe) by a divine entity is not meant to be an explanation of where our cognition comes from, but a method of assuaging our guilt. Because if God gave us the tools to debase, kill, maim, and roast ourselves on this rock, then surely it is meant to be, and will add up to something meaningful.

In fact, it's much more likely giving monkeys the ability to talk was an act of The Devil, not God.
by jjulius | 2025-04-21 15:32:49+00:00
>... but I’ve also felt a bit of a mourning period not being reminded about acquaintances’ lives.

We don't need to be reminded of acquaintances lives - what people I barely know do in their free time has zero bearing on my life. They're acquaintances, not friends, so their actual importance/impact to my life is next to nil.

I never smoked but often hung out with smokers outside on their lunch breaks. If an acquaintance is truly important to us, we can be reminded of our acquaintances lives by making an effort to turn them into real friendships that interact with each other in meatspace.
by palata | 2025-04-21 15:33:03+00:00
Maybe the engineers did not go through a 12 months process with their legal department and did it wrong.

And with the bad publicity coming back to Microsoft, maybe those engineers will now understand that they should just avoid re-using open source projects when possible. And the next HN post will be about "BigTech reinvents the wheel in order to have control".

We're all nitpicking here: they mentioned the original project in the README. Peerd is quite different from Spegel, it's not just a copy with a small patch.

Sure, they should do it right. But really, a polite, small PR fixing that would probably be a good first step.
by troyvit | 2025-04-21 15:33:06+00:00
> The first amendment doesn't apply to companies.

It does apply to corporations (https://reason.com/video/2019/09/05/corporations-and-the-fir...).

While Tik-Tok writes the algorithms that allows advertisers and influencers to manipulate people, it's the advertisers and influencers who are doing the manipulating, and it's their speech that would be affected by any laws.

So yeah I guess we aren't going to be continuing this conversation. We just disagree on what is systemic and how to go about fixing it.
by slowmovintarget | 2025-04-21 15:33:27+00:00
Question, but perhaps, open your heart to recent research... There is neural tissue in and around the heart. There are studies showing personality changes and memory inculcation as a result of heart transplants. Recipients end up with memory and sometimes traits of the donor.

Are we sure? No. But neither should you be. Question but be open to answers you may not expect.
by mrkeen | 2025-04-21 15:33:41+00:00
> Put application state and data in dozens of queues that make the application prone to failures, race conditions and incorrect results

In 2025 I literally have no way of verifying if a system is in the correct state other than to hold the events in my left hand, the current state in my right hand, and ask, "do these add up?". Trying anything else is like operating directly on bank balances instead of keeping a list of transactions.

Yes, while two DebitEvents are in flight through the system, different nodes will see varying balances. If they're quick enough, they might even break an invariant you had hoped to maintain (debiting an account below zero). But the nodes (and the programmer) have something to compare to.
by kelnos | 2025-04-21 15:33:44+00:00
While "progressive", "conservative", etc. are commonly used as political labels, they are general terms that describe how a person wants to see the world work. All people, regardless of their job or function, can have these sorts of terms ascribed to them.

And the Catholic Church exists on the world stage, and is involved in politics. Its leadership can be and is political.
by jmount | 2025-04-21 15:33:45+00:00
I'd worry a bit about the summary of what is being reported.

> Facebook and Instagram deactivation improved emotional state index by 0.060 standard deviations (p < 0.001)

The link didn't click through to the appendix. This seems off, as small effects (the small number of standard deviations) tend to be associated with undesirable high p-values, not low ones. Though also, the 0.060 itself seems lower than the visual graphs indicate.
by gsf_emergency | 2025-04-21 15:33:57+00:00
[I wish HN could host more long-running threads like SO as these topics require substantial back & forth]

Lasers? Information theory? Transistors?? Silicon tech in general? If you think hype-&-wishful-thinking-driven Google now or ever can be compared with Bell Labs.. you might just be a recent immigrant. The atmosphere at BL, I'm told, was way different. More an indefinite excitement (what can we do with quantum??) rather than the definite, closely guarded, superstition of Thiel ("quantum computing is the next big secret!!")

(Or maybe it's just that old subdued Jewish atheism of the East Coast vs the neurotic ambitious religiosity of California!)

I'm less biased against your low-hanging fruit framework.. still, I suspect that a rival framework based on the minimal attention paid to teaching undergrads at American universities would surpass it. I.e. materials science knowledge base has been spreading only about as quickly as the Baumol cost disease

2 other issues,

Even if there are low-hanging fruits in STEMM (of which I think there are still aplenty), infotech and especially advertising fruits are thought to be strewn all over the floor.

With AI, both thinkers & doers get into this weird emo haze of hubris+laziness, expecting neuro-furniture rearrangement to turn magically into paradigm shifts
by saulpw | 2025-04-21 15:34:02+00:00
The OSS philosophy was conceived to help end users, not for-profit corporations. Then for-profit corporations co-opted the "Open Source"(tm) label to ensure they could benefit from all this free labor. You and many others are falling for it, and doing their work for them by scolding OSS developers for "going against the OSS philosophy".

So screw this corporate "OSS philosophy", and stop telling people what they "should" do. Those licenses exist and people can use them and this is what happens. We can and should also make different licenses which protect our interests as developers and we don't need corporate shills invoking some philosophical argument to discourage us.
by crazygringo | 2025-04-21 15:34:43+00:00
Sure, but it's just I don't have to do that anywhere else.

I never put an f in front of a string if I'm not putting variables within it.

And I'm generally used to Python inputs being liberal. I can usually pass a list if it expects a tuple; I can pass an int if it expects a float; often I can pass an item directly instead of a tuple with a single item. Regex functions take regular strings or regex strings, they don't force regex strings.

Being forced to use a single specific type of string in all cases is just very different from how Python has traditionally operated.

It's safer, I get that. But it's definitely less friendly, so I'll be curious to see how module maintainers decide to handle this.
by KlausKlein | 2025-04-21 15:35:00+00:00
Since two decades, 9 simple lines summarize modern physics, i.e., the combination of general relativity and the standard model, with massive mixing Dirac neutrinos. These 9 lines provide a complete description of motion, describing precisely all experiments and everything that happens with full precision. However, the origin of the last 4 lines – with all their apparently "arbitrary" choices for elementary particles, gauge interactions, and fundamental constants – is not understood. Therefore, the 9 lines are not unified.

In contrast, the strand tangle model is unified: a single fundamental principle implies all 9 lines describing modern physics. Inspired by Dirac, Battey-Pratt, Racey, and Kauffman, strands of Planck radius define the quantum of action ħ and explain and deduce the observed elementary particles, gauge interactions, curved space, least action, and fundamental constants, eliminating all alternatives.
by psychoslave | 2025-04-21 15:35:05+00:00
Thanks for the detailed answer.

I understand that string generation can be a hotpath, though I wouldn't take it as a general certain fact.

From what I understand here the benefit in term of performance is mainly due to partial application automatically handled by the interpreter. It's hard to me to jauge actual pro/con compared to Ruby which can also leverage on freezed string, lambda, miscellaneous lazy evaluation facilities for example. I'm not aware of anything close in PHP, to stay in the realm of popular interpreted languages. I didn't make any Lua for a long time, so no idea how it evolved on that matter.
by dfxm12 | 2025-04-21 15:35:13+00:00
I think the fact that "the algorithm" capitalizes on negative emotion has been known for a while. The problem is that Zuck (and Elon, etc.) is at best motivated by making money, at worst motivated by swaying public opinion, and certainly not motivating by improving the emotional state of the users of these services, or even giving them a good experience.

I think this goes beyond social media to all kinds of media.
by fnordpiglet | 2025-04-21 15:35:27+00:00
I would note the reverence isn’t as strong today as it was under the prior king. Most homes you’ll still find king Rama ix hung on the wall and I rarely see the current king. Indeed it’s a bit of a surprise when I do and it makes me wonder about their associations.

Thai people generally love the idea of democracy. But they’ve been under so many dictators for so long they’ve become jaded. Every Thai person has a strong political view more or less and people absolutely criticize the government, military, and even gossip about the royal family extensively - behind closed doors and with friends. Graft is rampant though, and the powerful with big last names can literally do anything they want and get away with it, the police don’t serve the people, and the individual is generally disenfranchised.

There however have been and continue to be powerful democracy movements and political dissent - see the yellow shirt / red shirt riots, the democracy protests and mass killings by the military over the last 60 years, add in it the king Rama the ix personally advocating against the power of the government over its people and the importance of basic human rights.

I’d note that human rights isn’t an American concept but a basis in liberal humanism, which has been a conceptual framework evolved over thousands of years. Most my experience talking to people about liberal humanism and the status quo in South and Southeast Asia is “yes of course it’s self evident, but” where the but is effectively a powerlessness over the social structure of society. I’d note further that Theravada Buddhism is at its core liberal humanist as well, which is specifically relevant in Thailand. This is why ultimately with the Thai people the liberal humanist movement is quite popular and there continues to be considerable internal political problems - because the eightfold path dictates a liberal humanist philosophy and the people in power prefer the prior slavery based society before Chulalongkorn.
by rundmc | 2025-04-21 15:35:31+00:00
There are versions of this 'ROSCA' Tontine in most countries and continents in the world. In the past when formed among strangers they have proven to be super susceptible to scams.

Where they work is when each member of the group is known to each other and therefore would lose social status by defaulting on their obligations.

The benefit of these arrangements when run properly is that instead of saving $10 per month and after a year having the $120 to buy a productive asset (let's say a cow), they can get the $120 up front from the Tontine and pay the money back to the community group out of the earnings from the milk etc.

The persistance of these schemes everywhere indicates that this is a valuable means for the less well off to gain access to lump sum amounts for purchases without paying interest. Not everyone will be happy about the last part of course.
by atomicnumber3 | 2025-04-21 15:35:47+00:00
It's bizarre to me how, despite people criticizing the GPL and GNU as too ideological, the people you refer to - the permissive people - somehow seem even MORE ideological. The GPL to me seems pragmatic - sure technically a minimal license like WTFPL (ignore all its legal issues for now) is some kind of minimalist idea of pure objective freedom. But the GPL has some key "restrictions" that aren't really restrictions and produce an ecosystem that WORKS. Meanwhile the permissive ecosystem is just waiting to be scooped up by bigcos at their whim.
by zimpenfish | 2025-04-21 15:36:23+00:00
Yeah, I can see that they've gone for the "To install GotoSocial, first you must create the universe..." kind of approach to their instructions. Which is a shame because it's just "Download a release, unpack, edit the config, off you go."[0]

They could do with a pithy Quickstart page for people who already have domains, servers, etc.

[0] My installation is from source and I'd never really seen their installation instructions as they are now.
by Someone | 2025-04-21 15:36:28+00:00
I don’t think it’s possible to get that to work 100% of the time on typical modern hardware.

As an example, a disk block may be bad, requiring the OS to find another one to store that pre-allocated disk space. If you try to prevent that by writing to the preallocated space after you allocated it, you still can hit a case where the block goes bad after you did that.
by stuxnet79 | 2025-04-21 15:36:43+00:00
I wish I could upvote this twice. A strong product intuition with middling technical knowledge will take you a lot further than razor sharp technical skills.

Unfortunately technical knowledge is all the school system and the cottage industry of interview prep companies focus on. If you can't get an MBA later, 4 courses I would recommend every CS undergrad take are, accounting, corporate finance, economics and maybe theatre.
by slowmovintarget | 2025-04-21 15:36:47+00:00
Knowledge is well described (not necessarily explained, but described) in information theory. Intelligence, sentience, consciousness, even whether something is alive, are fuzzy concepts.

Biology has a working definitions of "living organism" that includes a way to calculate likelihood that something is a living organism, but it still is probabilistic.

Understanding is another concept that depends on philosophy of the mind as opposed to concrete physical processes.
by achierius | 2025-04-21 15:36:59+00:00
It's nevertheless interesting how LLMs seem to default to the 'fast thinking' mode of human interaction -- even CoT approaches seem to just be mimicking 'slow thinking' by forcing the LLM to iterate through different options. The failure modes I see are very often the sort of thing I would do if I were unfocused or uninterested in a problem.