MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rsedgwick | 2025-04-19 20:22:04+00:00
I think tech can still be beautiful in a less grandiose and "omniparadisical" way than people used to dream of. "A wide open internet, free as in speech this, free as in beer that, open source wonders, open gardens..." Well, there are a lot of incentives that fight that, and game theory wins. Maybe we download software dependencies from our friends, the ones we actually trust. Maybe we write more code ourselves--more homesteading families that raise their own chickens, jar their own pickled carrots, and code their own networking utilities. Maybe we operate on servers we own, or our friends own, and we don't get blindsided by news that the platforms are selling our data and scraping it for training.

Maybe it's less convenient and more expensive and onerous. Do good things require hard work? Or did we expect everyone to ignore incentives forever while the trillion-dollar hyperscalers fought for an open and noble internet and then wrapped it in affordable consumer products to our delight?

It reminds me of the post here a few weeks ago about how Netflix used to be good and "maybe I want a faster horse" - we want things to be built for us, easily, cheaply, conveniently, by companies, and we want those companies not to succumb to enshittification - but somehow when the companies just follow the game theory and turn everything into a TikToky neural-networks-maximizing-engagement-infinite-scroll-experience, it's their fault, and not ours for going with the easy path while hoping the corporations would not take the easy path.
by zoogeny | 2025-04-19 20:22:08+00:00
I agree with this in the general sense but of course I would like to minimize the thrash.

I have become obsessive about doing git commits in the way I used to obsess over Ctrl-S before the days of source control. As soon as I get to a point I am happy, I get the LLM to do a check-point check in so I can minimize the cost of doing a full directory revert.

But from a time and cost perspective, I could be doing much better. I've internalized the idea that when the LLM goes off the rails it was my fault. I should have prompted it better. So I am now consider: how do I get better faster? And the answer is I do it as much as I can to learn.

I don't just want to whine about the process. I want to use that frustration to help me improve, while avoiding going bankrupt.
by fossgeller | 2025-04-19 20:22:41+00:00
I’ve been just thinking about the last point you made, on video games being more engaging than most other forms of media.

It’s quite weird how gaming is still looked down on by the general public. While watching movies and TV shows is considered to be “more mature” hobby, even though it requires less engagement. Wonder what the effects of binge watching are on the brain in the long term, especially compared to gaming’s. If we think about it the latter is much more similar to solving puzzles or reading.
by reconnecting | 2025-04-19 20:23:11+00:00
Residential IP proxies have some weaknesses. One is that they ofter change IP addresses during a single web session. Second, if IP come from the same proxies provider, they are often concentrated within a sing ASN, making them easier to detect.

We are working on an open‑source fraud prevention platform [1], and detecting fake users coming from residential proxies is one of its use cases.

[1] https://www.github.com/tirrenotechnologies/tirreno
by sxp | 2025-04-19 20:23:34+00:00
"Abuse" is such a vague term. For context, the amount is 100+ canisters/day

> Most patients also had psychiatric symptoms. Nearly every patient estimated using 100 or more canisters of nitrous oxide per day in the months before being seen. Four patients also reported engaging in B12 supplementation (both oral and parenteral), aiming to circumvent the harmful sequelae of prolonged nitrous oxide misuse.
by norseboar | 2025-04-19 20:23:42+00:00
> the list is very informative and meant to force the "invisible hand of the market" (its a pun, relax) to pay for better studies if they truly believe it is not harmful but studies are inconclusive

To make sure I understand right: you're saying a good way to run things is: publish a list of a bunch of things that could be true or false, and then if industry cares enough, they should spend time/money debunking it?

I think that would be an extremely slow/conservative way to run just about anything, and is not the way we handle basically any claim. I can see an argument for "don't do something until you prove it's safe", useful in some very high-risk situations, but "warn that all kinds of commonplace things could cause cancer until somebody proves it doesn't" is misleading, not just conservative.

And it doesn't even work -- lots of places have spent time/money debunking e.g. negative claims about aspartame, but claims about how unsafe it is persist. And it all comes back to dosage. There is no good evidence that aspartame, at the levels found in a normal soda, cause any issues for humans, but this gets drowned out by studies either showing effects from massive doses on rodents, or indirect effects (e.g. it makes you hungrier, so if you eat more refined sugar as a result of that hunger, then yes it's bad for you, just like more refined sugar is almost always bad for you).
by mzajc | 2025-04-19 20:23:54+00:00
In the case of Android, εxodus has one[1], though I couldn't find the malware library listed in TFA. Aurora Store[2], a FOSS Google Play Store client, also integrates it.

[1] https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/trackers/ [2] https://f-droid.org/packages/com.aurora.store/
by denysvitali | 2025-04-19 20:24:31+00:00
Can confirm. Once dang pinged me directly by email saying that my story was re-upped. The story went again to the frontpage and the date was adapted (IIRC), but the comments were kept:

---

Hi denysvitali,

The submission "PostmarketOS-Powered Kubernetes Cluster" that you posted to Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42352075) looks good, but hasn't had much attention so far. We put it in the second-chance pool, so it will get a random placement on the front page some time in the next day or so.

This is a way of giving good HN submissions multiple chances at the front page. If you're curious, you can read about it at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 and other links there. And if you don't want these emails, sorry! Let us know and we won't do it again.

Thanks for posting good things to HN!

Daniel (moderator)
by UtopiaPunk | 2025-04-19 20:26:26+00:00
It's one thing for a librarian to call a teen over and say "hey, you should look at this book. It's full of ***." But if a teen wants to check out a book that has sexual content in it, then the librarian shouldn't prevent them. I think it would be prudent for the librarian to have a short conversation with the kid if they suspect the kid might be getting in over their head, but the kid can check out whatever they want.

I think checking out any* book, without a parent's explicit consent, is potentially subverting the parent/child relationship. Families are unique - there's no clear agreed upon standard of which books are "good" and which books are "bad." And without such a standard, it is, in my opinion, the library's responsiblilty to make literature and information as accessible as possible with few, if any restrictions. It's not the library's responsibility to choose which books are somehow "appropriate," that's the parents' job. And if kids are sneaking out to library behind their parents' back, idk, that seems pretty wholesome. Seems a lot better than sneaking cigarettes or booze or whatever.
by Matchy-Matchy | 2025-04-19 20:27:01+00:00
I built Matchy-Matchy after seeing too many people miss out on life-changing opportunities-not because they weren’t qualified, but because they didn’t know where to start, who to ask, or how to navigate the process.

It’s a platform that connects people to mentors, training, and university or career opportunities in a more intuitive way. Think of it as part matchmaking, part guidance system. We help with everything from university applications and visa support to mentorship and career transition-especially for those who don’t have easy access to insider knowledge or strong networks.

The idea came from years of seeing talented people fall through the cracks.

It’s still early, and I’d love to hear your thoughts-what would you want to see in a platform like this? What’s missing in the opportunity-matching space that we should be thinking about?
by xurias | 2025-04-19 20:27:07+00:00
> keeping in mind the First Amendment?

The first amendment doesn't apply to companies. Shutting down TikTok doesn't prevent you from exercising free speech. That's not how it works. Like, I'm not going to bother with this conversation if this is the direction you're going to take it.

And the fact that "Instagram, Youtube, etc." will just do it shows that regulations and laws are required. Systems that prevent companies from doing whatever they want in controlling the opinions of citizens in other countries. How is that compatible with the first amendment? Do you even understand the issue? Do you even understand the first amendment?
by AdamJacobMuller | 2025-04-19 20:27:27+00:00
Sure, gmail.com might be excluded, but its still a massive hole for a few reasons.

This would affect ANY email provider who offers public email addresses. While I agree gmail.com is probably excluded (and maybe this doesn't bypass CAA -- maybe it does) there's a whole additional surface of anyone who has an email at any big enterprise getting a certificate for their domain.

Even if I work at google.com, therefore have a google.com email, I should absolutely not be able to get a certificate for google.com just by getting an email at that company.

I doubt it's even /that hard/ to buy an email account at a big company like that in the underground world, it seems like they are valuable generally and any company with 200k employees is going to have some leaks. This massively increases the attack surface of a simple leaked email account (which might otherwise have very little or no access).

Crazy crazy oversight that has huge implications and is so easy to carry out that I would not be surprised if this was actually exploited by bad actors.
by thomassmith65 | 2025-04-19 20:27:32+00:00
There's some failure to comprehend the ubiquity of espresso in Italy here.

When I was a kid, espresso was practically unavailable outside Southern Europe. In Italy, every household had, as they still do, a stovetop espresso maker. In Italy, every city corner had, as it still does, a bar serving espresso.

Whatever Italians consider good espresso, we - who grew up on filter coffee, which Italians do not drink - probably ought to defer.

Is there a better espresso somewhere? Perhaps.

Is it conceivable that Italian espresso is terrible? Nope.

The proposition is as absurd as claiming that Japanese sushi is subpar, or that Swedish dammsugare are the world's worst.
by jqpabc123 | 2025-04-19 20:28:51+00:00
So it seems like Telsa in their best year had about 2% of global vehicle sales.

Yes. I revised my post above to show that 14 million in 2023 was EV sales only.

So a company with 2% of total vehicle sales and 12% of EV sales had a market cap larger than all the other auto manufacturers in the world COMBINED.

Absolutely OUTRAGEOUS!. So much for the efficient market hypothesis.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/efficientmarkethypothes...
by aaaja | 2025-04-19 20:29:09+00:00
What would be the point of that? I'd be surprised if it got past an ethics committee.

Aside from this, the male pelvis isn't shaped to accommodate a womb, and males don't have the hormonal milieu to enable pregnancy.

The closest that researchers have come to having a male gestate a foetus was in rats. But they had to connect the bloodstream of the male rat to a pregnant female rat, where both were implanted with embryos at the same time. Even then, it worked less than 5% of the time.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-04-19 20:30:17+00:00
Appreciate this.

> “Offspring emissions” — is that just lifetime emissions of one child, or multiple generations (kids + grandkids)?

One generation, as it is difficult to predict with certainty multigenerational fertility (due to social and cultural effects: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03135...).

> Should fertility rate be treated as a simple multiplier, or model population growth (e.g. TFR^n)?

Simple multiplier, again modeling future fertility is challenging (although it appears it will remain on a declining trajectory per https://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/our-research/dependency-and-dep...).

> Do you want attribution across generations (50%, 25%, etc.)?

Unnecessary at this time.

> Include discounting or just raw totals?

I am open to your thoughts on this. Raw totals are helpful to me immediately from a valuation perspective, but discounting might be interesting from a visualization perspective. The challenge here is how fertility rate and annual estimated emissions might change over time, the latter based on country level decarbonization/per capita CO2 emissions rate of change over time, forward looking.

> Outputs — just total cost, or also show emissions and breakdown?

Both please.

> Are values user-supplied, or should I include presets (e.g. emissions per person by region)?

User supplied is fine, as that would be the least amount of effort I believe, but if you wanted presets, I can provide most recent total fertility rate and per capita CO2 emissions by country.

Thanks again for your help with this experiment. The goal is to create a valuation modeling tool for fertility through the carbon markets.
by pessimizer | 2025-04-19 20:30:54+00:00
> you'd have to be a linguist to describe even one distinctly Oregonian accent, let alone dozens.

You could definitely describe two or three, but you picked a new, far flung, low-population state as an example. Britain has 14x the population of Oregon. If Oregon had two accents, you might expect Britain to have 28.

Going to older eastern parts of the country, you can usually tell where people are from within probably 100 miles. You can tell Chicago from Milwaukee from Detroit from Pittsburgh from Boston. You can tell Northwest Arkansas accents from Western Arkansas accents. You can hear a parent's Texas in the accent of somebody you grew up with in Kansas. You can even tell south Jersey accents from Baltimoreans if you ask them both to say the word "Orioles." Literally impossible for a Baltimorean to say. Orirols? Orals?

California has hella accents too.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-04-19 20:31:35+00:00
I didn't but I would have. It appears to be dragging the discussion towards political flamewar. It doesn't present any substantial observations or reasoning, just ideological talking points that we've all heard countless times by now.

If there had at least been some attempt to tie things back to the headline article in a nontrivial way then maybe I'd be more sympathetic.
by MinimalAction | 2025-04-19 20:31:44+00:00
You're right. I didn't consider the funding angle at all, but only the accusation of "enshittification" which usually comes from a VC or an entity that wants to generate more profits by expanding. On the other hand, I do think Simons Foundations would not let arXiv die. Also, I don't agree that arXiv's media presence has ulterior motives after all. It might just be that it's getting its share of fame.
by RetroTechie | 2025-04-19 20:32:17+00:00
Spend enough time in virtual worlds, especially (near-) photo realistic ones, and for some people, what's real / what's virtual may start to blur. Or aspects from the game leak into real life. Creepy indeed.

Although not quite what's discussed in the article, reminds me of the movie eXistenZ (1999). Well worth a watch if you don't know this one.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120907/
by hkpack | 2025-04-19 20:32:19+00:00
> First, the assumption that Russian propaganda works on the West. There are no signs of that.

Wow, that is the statement. I would say that Russian propaganda is the mainstream now in conservative media and among republicans. Half of Joe Rogan's talking points is spreading russia propaganda, half of Lex Fridman opinions - is russia propaganda. Elon Musk retweets and amplifies russia propaganda all day every day.

The problem is - you just don't know when you hear it since you don't have a frame of reference.

It is the same as I don't recognise Chinese or North Korean propaganda. Sometimes I see an obvious example of it on reddit, but in general, I cannot immediately recognise it when I hear it (since half of the top reddit commends are bots - I have problem to sometimes understand what their goals are).

I don't know whether they understand the west or not, but my intuition is that the understanding is not required. With modern social media you have enough feedback to perform complex information operations and have the desired outcomes.
by EA-3167 | 2025-04-19 20:32:32+00:00
To wit, consider the case of Charles Parsons, inventor of the steam turbine engine. He was able to do this because of the lifetime work of Henri Victor Regnault (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Victor_Regnault) characterizing the behavior of steam under pretty much every possible regime. At the time Regnault's work was largely ignored, and later forgotten, since it was only of minor academic interest.

It was only years after his death that Parsons would use his work to determine the necessary geometry of the rotors and stators in his new and revolutionary engine. Regnault certainly didn't see that coming, the people who overlooked his work didn't either, but that pure science for the sake of science helped to change the world.

So as you say, we often don't realize what we're going to do with the results of pure science until engineering catches up, sometimes decades or centuries later. Still without the pure science we'd never get the engineering.
by armchairhacker | 2025-04-19 20:32:44+00:00
> I am now of the opinion that every form of web-scraping should be considered abusive behaviour and web servers should block all of them. If you think your web-scraping is acceptable behaviour, you can thank these shady companies and the “AI” hype for moving you to the bad corner.

Why jump to that conclusion?

If a scraper clearly advertises itself, follows robots.txt, and has reasonable backoff, it's not abusive. You can easily block such a scraper, but then you're encouraging stealth scrapers because they're still getting your data.

I'd block the scrapers that try to hide and waste compute, but deliberately allow those that don't. And maybe provide a sitemap and API (which besides being easier to scrape, can be faster to handle).
by austinallegro | 2025-04-19 20:32:52+00:00
The 28 Player version was resident at the Namco Wonder Egg theme park for years. Not sure what happened to it.

Sega G-Loc 360 and WEC Le Mans (the blue cabinet version is rarer than the red one), Namco Drivers Eyes (the full F1 Car cabinet) and the Sega Hologram Time Traveller machine were all great arcade machines bitd too.
by toast0 | 2025-04-19 20:33:36+00:00
I would expect them to be able to report on certificates issued based on this validation method. That's a basic CA capability and other CA incidents often include these kinds of reports.

Depending on what was logged during the validation, it might be tricky to determine if it was abuse or not. If the DNS content wasn't logged, they could pull a live record and report if the current record would support validation or not.

My guess is that use of this method should be low... If you're updating DNS to add a TXT record, you might be more likely to add a direct verification value rather than an email. But that's speculative; I'm not a CA, I've just been a customer of several... IIRC, I've validated domain control by controlling postmaster@ (or the whois address when that was public) or adding direct TXT verification records or ACME http validations.
by rsyring | 2025-04-19 20:36:27+00:00
I'm a skeptical adopter of new tech. But I cut my teeth on LLMs a couple years ago when I was dropped into a project using an older framework I wasn't familiar with. Even back then, LLMs helped me a ton to get familiar with the project and use best practices when I wasn't sure what those were.

And that was just copy & past into ChatGPT.

I don't know about assistants or project integration. But, in my experience, LLMS are a great tool to have and worth learning how to use well, for you. And I think that's the key part. Some people like heavily integrated IDEs, some people prefer a more minimal approach with VS Code or Vim.

I think LLMs are going to be similar. Some people are going to want full integration and some are just going to want minimal interface, context, and edits. It's going to be up to the dev to figure out what works best for him or her.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-04-19 20:36:57+00:00
Why use various proxies at all? Most of the group differences seem to largely share poverty as a primary root factor, and this impacts plenty of sub-groups within the supposedly advantaged groups as well. So why are we not simply addressing that directly?

A refrain I've been seeing a lot lately is that the outcome of a system is its purpose. Perhaps that reasoning should be equally applied to an analysis of the implementation choices made by various social programs and the solutions espoused by various political movements.
by rdtsc | 2025-04-19 20:37:49+00:00
> my advise to him was not to do anything about it, or to say anything about it while he was in Israel.

That’s a good advice. You’re a good friend. The universities’ international students affairs office should be telling these students the same. Yeah, let citizen students protest. If they break a rule, they’ll get a ticket or a slap on the wrist, international students get sent home and significantly lower their chances of getting another visa.
by satiric | 2025-04-19 20:38:04+00:00
"No steam locomotive in the world had ever been run with in-cab digital signalling – until now."

The word "digital" is doing a lot of work here: here in the US, the Pennsylvania Railroad had in-cab signaling back in the 20s. Here's an article about it [pdf] https://www.jonroma.net/media/signaling/railway-signaling/19...

With the recent mandate of Positive Train Control on all mainline trains in the US, some steam locomotives have been retrofitted with PTC, notably UP 4014 and CPKC 2816 (which seems to the be basically the US version of what the brits are doing here).

But regardless of pedantry, it's neat to see the reassurance that they'll be able to operate on modern mainlines safely.
by doodlebugging | 2025-04-19 20:38:19+00:00
>Unpopular opinion: global internet access is more important than pretty pictures of the sky.

You're right about one thing - It is an unpopular opinion. You're wrong about global internet access being more important than being able to take "pretty pictures" of the night sky.

Global internet access has become a tool for homogenizing opinion. It has become the most useful tool for propagandists and others who would push false narratives as facts in order to steer readers/listeners towards conclusions that are not based on facts. It has been subverted by well-funded groups with an agenda that does not serve the people out in the broad audience.

It could've been a critical part of bringing global societies up to speed on relevant issues that affect their lives and futures. Once the deep pockets with destructive agendas began funding tools to infect others with their world-views it became a weapon, not a tool.

Those of you who work in the industry should rebel against this subversion. I think many won't since the whole software industry appears to be trapped in a cycle of greedy grifts and subscriptions for worthless apps.