MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cherry_tree | 2025-04-05 18:20:53+00:00
In most societies in the world today you must have a job to survive and to support the survival of one’s family. Imho it is not morally wrong to do anything you need to do to achieve gainful employment so that you and your family can survive, and I would go so far as to say it is immoral to be scolding people engaged in a fight for survival that they aren’t doing it properly.
by refulgentis | 2025-04-05 18:20:55+00:00
An outright ban on advertising makes for a compelling thought experiment, but ultimately it's too simplistic to work as a real-world solution. The fundamental issue isn't advertising per se; rather, it's the aggressive exploitation of personal data, invasive tracking, and addictive attention-maximizing techniques that power today's ad-driven business models.

Banning ads altogether wouldn't automatically eliminate incentives for manipulative or addictive content—platforms would quickly shift toward subscriptions, paywalls, or other revenue streams. While this shift might alter harmful dynamics somewhat, it wouldn't necessarily remove them altogether. For instance, subscription models have their own perverse incentives and potential inequalities.

Moreover, completely removing ads would disproportionately hurt small businesses, non-profits, and public service campaigns that rely on legitimate, non-invasive ads to reach their audiences effectively.

Instead of outright banning ads—an overly blunt measure—we'd likely achieve far better outcomes through thoughtful regulation targeting the actual harmful practices: invasive tracking, dark patterns, algorithmic manipulation, and lack of transparency. A better approach would aim at reforming advertising at its source, protecting individual privacy and autonomy without crippling a large segment of legitimate communication.
by em-bee | 2025-04-05 18:21:23+00:00
i can sympathize. all the things you don't like about traveling, i don't like either. thankfully it is possible to avoid many of them. at least in europe you can travel by train, which is a lot more comfortable than airplanes. when i go somewhere i make contact to locals in advance which often means that i get picked up, so i don't have to navigate tourist traps, or at least i get the local instructions how to get to the city. i spent two weeks in paris with local friends, and we didn't do a single day of sightseeing. no museum, and i don't remember if we even went to see the eiffel tower. the only true sightseeing that i enjoyed was the great wall in china which i was able to visit while living in beijing. and again, thanks to locals i got there on public transport instead of a tourist bus.

and yes, you can do a lot of exploring locally too.

to your last point going to a concert with a friend, i think the important part here is the reason you did that, not the distance or even the destination. not even the concert. for me, having such a reason makes traveling all the more worthwhile.
by graemep | 2025-04-05 18:21:33+00:00
I am pretty sure that if people had to find away to make things profitable they would.

There are plenty of payment mechanisms already used online.

IMO it would be well worth paying for things so I am the customer instead of the product.

Many things could be replaced. My use of FB could be replaced by forums, for example. I would quite happily pay the bills for old style forums that replace the FB groups I admin (although not the costs imposed by the Online Safety Act, but that is a UK only problem).
by Eavolution | 2025-04-05 18:21:45+00:00
I actually in principle have no fundamental problem with advertising, but it's execution on the internet I have many, many issues with. Putting an ad in a newspaper, or on the side of a building, or during a break in a tv show seems perfectly reasonable to me.

What I absolutely have issues with is targeted advertising, having to modify content to make it advertiser friendly (i.e. reasonable people on YouTube having to avoid swearing/use infuriating euphemisms for self harm or suicide etc in case it makes the video not advertiser friendly), and the frankly offensive and unjustifiable amount of tracking that goes along with it.

I wish we could ban dynamic advertising (can't think of a better term, as in targeted, tailored advertising that is aware of what it's being advertised against) and just allow static advertising.

I also wish it could be codified in law that what is shown to me on my computer is entirely up to me, and if I want to block advertising on my computer, that is my choice, in the same way I can make a cup of tea during the ad breaks in tv, and skip over the advert pages on the paper.
by Larrikin | 2025-04-05 18:22:01+00:00
Ring is a shell of its former self, has implemented a bunch of things nobody wants, has bricked other products, was giving away camera data to anyone in the government that asked, among other terrible things. It is a brand to be avoided and is never recommended anymore in the smart home community.

We would actually be better off if Ring had died as a company instead of being sold to Amazon.
by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF | 2025-04-05 18:22:20+00:00
Many lines are hard to draw but we benefit from trying to draw them. Worrying too much would be bikeshedding

The biggest example that comes to mind is gambling. Japan says it's not gambling if the pachinko place gives you balls and then you have to walk next door to a "different" company to cash out the balls. I say it sounds like their laws are captured by the pachinko industry.

Video game loot boxes are technically legal but most of us don't want children gambling. Even if the game company doesn't pay you for weapon skins, there's such a big secondary market that it constitutes gambling anyway. Just like the pachinko machines.
by UncleEntity | 2025-04-05 18:22:29+00:00
Ok...

First, it is 100% free speech.

Second, the government isn't allowed to make laws prohibiting the exercise of free speech based on the content of said speech. Nor can it take actions which are arbitrary or capricious.

Third, restrictions on free speech MUST fulfill some overriding public good like yelling "fire" in a crowded theater or words meant to incite violence. Slander, libel, &etc.

Fourth, why is it even necessary to explain this?
by vaindil | 2025-04-05 18:22:44+00:00
I feel that this is a very black and white view of the issue. I don't want to see billboards as I drive down the freeway, but I have no choice (in the US) if I need to get somewhere far away. Several states have banned outdoor billboards, should those governments be dissolved?

At some point the public interest overrides an absolute freedom of speech. We can debate where that line is, but "it's not open for discussion" is objectively incorrect.
by knowknow | 2025-04-05 18:22:58+00:00
> The financial incentives to create addictive digital content would instantly disappear, and so would the mechanisms that allow both commercial and political actors to create personalized, reality-distorting bubbles.

...

> But humanity had been free of current forms of advertising for 99.9% of its existence. Word-of-mouth and community networks worked just fine. First-party websites and online communities would now improve on that.

Humanity had hatred and insular bubbles a millennia ago just fine without advertisements. There was genocides and wars before the current form of ads ever emerged. It's a shame that so many people think that changing a financial policy is all that is needed to change an ingrained human behavior.
by 999900000999 | 2025-04-05 18:24:05+00:00
What's the actual point of the paid product if I still have to host my own stuff?

Does it just manage things?

Is it actually open source with usable instructions, or is it magic like Superbase that requires digging through GitHub issues to find the secret truck to getting things to work.

How does it compare to Captain Rover ( which was awesome until it just stopped working one day, luckily my backup script captured my blog before this happened).

At this point I'll just give Render 7$ a month.

When it's 3am I don't want to figure this out by myself. In a Corp environment I'll let the dev ops team sort it out.
by renewiltord | 2025-04-05 18:24:06+00:00
This is something I explain too. I’d gladly pay maybe 10 cents for IntelliJ but it’s the Pirate Bay otherwise. Just set the pricing appropriately. It costs $0 to make a copy so it’s an infinite margin. Same with most SaaS. About 20 cents per month should be the maximum. Any more than that is gouging.

Hiring engineers is even worse. I think about $20/hr should suffice but there’s this big fuss kicked up about “they’re not willing to pay enough”.
by lukev | 2025-04-05 18:24:07+00:00
I disagree. Advertising is a zero-sum game. If nobody advertised, every solution would be equally discoverable via search and word-of-mouth.

It's only when some actors start advertising that the others must as well, so they don't fall behind. And so billions of dollars are spent that could have gone to making better products.

It's basically the prisoner's dilemma at scale.
by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF | 2025-04-05 18:24:10+00:00
> It also promotes fairer market competition by giving smaller players a shot at visibility,

That's what they said about patents, and so far it just means players with more money buy up more patents. Do they not buy up more advertising too? Coca-Cola and Google spend huge amounts on advertising just to make people feel okay with the amount of control they have over everything
by gist | 2025-04-05 18:24:17+00:00
I don't think it should be referred to as a 'necessary evil' (by the following definition of that term):

"something unpleasant that must be accepted in order to achieve a particular result"

For one thing the term 'advertising' is broad same as many words (ie 'Doctor' or 'Computer guy' or 'Educator'). Second it's not unpleasant although like with anything some of it could be. (Some of it is funny and entertaining).

> Advertising has consequences

Everything has consequences. That is actually a problem with many laws and rules which look only at upside and not downside.

Unfortunately and for many reasons you can't get rid of 'advertising' the only thing you can do is potentially and possibly restrict certain types of advertising and statements.

As an example Cigarette advertising was banned in 1971 on FCC regulated airwaves:

https://truthinitiative.org/research-resources/tobacco-indus...
by jchw | 2025-04-05 18:24:23+00:00
As far as I know, the camera barely works on any device, including snapdragon 845 phones. Now I'm not saying the snapdragon 845 is unusable as a daily driver, but it is getting a bit long in the tooth, especially since the majority of what you run on a phone is browser engines, and web sites and web applications are not getting less demanding over time.
by t-writescode | 2025-04-05 18:24:36+00:00
How about "with the rapid ascent and descent of tariffs against trade partners and allies heretofore unseen in their magnitude, as well as the frequent changes in directions to those tariffs - seeming to use them as threats - again, to our allies and trade partners", the United States has changed its behavior in a way that most people would see as untrustworthy (and if they were a friend or dating partner, most would recommend a temporary cutoff)?

Does that sound less "partisan"?
by fixprix | 2025-04-05 18:24:43+00:00
This makes no sense. I build a great product. How the hell am I supposed to tell anyone about it outside of my immediate friends and family? Am I supposed to rely on the network effect to reach an audience? That sounds insane.

Capitalism depends on advertising to let people know of the product or service that is more cost effective than existing solutions. The advertising budget is dependent on knowing your product is actually good enough to justify the expense. Without advertising, competition itself doesn't work.
by hedayet | 2025-04-05 18:24:54+00:00
1. Discovery For known problems, sure! we probably don’t need ads anymore. But for unknown problems, we still do. When you're not even aware that a solution exists, or that your current approach could be improved, advertising can spark that initial awareness. At that stage, you don’t even know what to search for.

2. Competition If you know better alternatives might exist, yes, you can search for them. But how do you search for better deals, services, or products for every little thing in your life? You don’t. Nobody has the time (or cognitive bandwidth) to proactively research every option. When done right, advertising helps level the playing field by putting alternatives in front of customers. And in doing so, it also pushes businesses to keep their offerings competitive.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-04-05 18:24:57+00:00
Well some of this is a gray area right? If you have a listing website for example that lists all the electricians in a given geographic area, that's technically an ad, but you'd assume someone wouldn't be looking at the page unless they were looking for an electrician. I wouldn't call that intrusive or unpleasant or worthy of a ban and I don't think anyone would.
by ksec | 2025-04-05 18:25:12+00:00
>Btw, other researchers that were in the LeCun side, changed side recently, saying that now "is different" because of CoT, that is the symbolic reasoning they were blabling before. But CoT is still regressive next token without any architectural change, so, no, they were wrong, too.

Sorry I am a little lost reading the last part about regressive next token and it is still wrong. Could someone explain a little bit? Edit: Explained here further down the thread. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43594813 )

I personally went from AI skeptic ( it wont ever replace all human, at least not in the next 10 - 20 years ) to AI scary simply because of the reasoning capability it gained. It is not perfect, far from it but I can immediately infer how both algorithm improvements and hardware advance could bring us in 5 years. And that is not including any new breakthrough.
by andrewstuart | 2025-04-05 18:25:39+00:00
Most people who protest oil use cars, roads and plastics, all made of oil.

And people who object to advertising live in a world in which their daily lives are provided for by companies that depend on advertising to exist.

As PT Barnum said "Without promotion, something terrible happens... nothing!" and all the companies that make up our economic ecosystem depend on things happening …. sales, which don’t happen without promotion.

Advertising has been around since Ancient Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago and will be around in 5,000 more years.
by philipwhiuk | 2025-04-05 18:25:59+00:00
> First, it is 100% free speech.

It's speech for sure.

> Second, the government isn't allowed to make laws prohibiting the exercise of free speech based on the content of said speech. Nor can it take actions which are arbitrary or capricious.

Except that they can and do, as you outline below. All laws are arbitrary.

> Third, restrictions on free speech MUST fulfill some overriding public good like yelling "fire" in a crowded theater or words meant to incite violence. Slander, libel, &etc.

Firstly, the fire thing is a myth. Secondly, so we're just quibbling on "overriding" then?

> Fourth, why is it even necessary to explain this?

Well because none of your points are that conclusive?
by renewiltord | 2025-04-05 18:27:02+00:00
Well, personally, I think you shouldn’t even tell your friends and family. That kind of “native advertising” is ruining human relationships. People should stumble upon your product. If someone mentions it to someone else, that alone should be grounds to shutter your company. Even so-called “catchy domain names” are a deep evil that we didn’t have in the heyday of the US: the ‘70s. Your product should be named exactly what it does and your company should be named as the concatenation of its products.

In this way we can eliminate manipulative marketing and rely purely on quality.

Should parents even be allowed to name children or should the state choose a descriptive name based on their appearance and behaviour? Hard to tell but I think we need to think long and hard about manipulative naming in more than just the corporate sphere.
by sejje | 2025-04-05 18:27:20+00:00
The early internet, which I was a part of, and think of fondly, didn't have anywhere near the utility of the modern internet. It was fun to explore, but you couldn't DO much.

I hosted my own site, in my bedroom. I hosted a counter-strike server, too. Comcast hadn't shut hosting down yet.

Anyway, that has nothing to do with online banking, services, security, apps, media. Let's just use youtube--one of the greatest sites of all time, hands down. Huge utility, huge entertainment. Free, via advertising. Would have never happened without it.

There's so, so much trash, webspam, etc on the modern web. I hate it, too. I don't even have warm feelings about youtube anymore. But advertising opened a lot of doors.
by mbesto | 2025-04-05 18:27:22+00:00
I wanna believe everything you say (because you generally are a credible person) but a few things don't add up:

1. Weakest ever LLM? This one is really making me scratch my head. For a period of time Llama was considered to THE best. Furthermore, it's the third most used on OpenRouter (in the past month): https://openrouter.ai/rankings?view=month

2. Ignoring DeepSeek for a moment, Llama 2 and 3 require a special license from Meta if the products or services using the models have more than 700 million monthly active users. OpenAI, Claude and Gemini are not only closed source, but require a license/subscription to even get started.
by EasyMark | 2025-04-05 18:27:34+00:00
that doesn't work for me. I need reddit, hkrnews, lemmy, etc. I don't mind it when accounts get lost there. I don't have any ego or personal advertising in this, i just like the community. Most people don't care if you know who they are in real life, I find only tiktokers, instagrammers, twitchers want that stuff. Mostly ones build around video and photographs. There is a clear distinction in online "social media" groups.
by kiicia | 2025-04-05 18:28:22+00:00
There are two ways of trying to achieving goal. One is to start from big picture, think if we even want to do something, then plan how to go there. Second is to start from technicalities and probably immediately go nowhere.

You are starting from technicalities before you even took the moment to actually think of goal is worth it.

If it is worth it and we would indeed be better off - plan how to go there, it may not be easy, but it will be possible this way or another. If it is not worth it after all - just say it, no technicalities needed, redirect time and effort elsewhere.
by arrosenberg | 2025-04-05 18:28:26+00:00
It’s not speech that needs to be regulated, it’s broadcast (which should not have 1A protections at nearly the same level). Even if a waiter is giving recommendations, those are limited to the people at the table and there is clearly a mutual exchange of value. Broadcast (aka Industrial) advertising is something we accept, but not because it particularly benefits the viewer. It benefits the broadcaster and advertiser and makes the viewer into a product.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-04-05 18:28:26+00:00
In the last 40 years how many millions of man years have been put into manipulating people/breaking down their internal barriers by the ad agencies? By social media companies? By media companies? In the hundreds of thousands of man years at least (but more likely in the millions to tens of millions). There have been around 80 billion human years of output in that time and sales are a huge part of civilization so easily in the 10s of millions of human years of energy put into how to better manipulate/break down/re-train people.

If I go play chess against a rando at a park and lose, your above argument makes sense.

If I go play chess against someone who spent 150,000 man years studying how to beat me, to say 'well, it was all up to your mental strength, same as it's always been forever, and you just weren't strong enough' is BS.

Edit: The amount of focused research, science, practice, experience in manipulation humans is unprecedented. Never before have millions to tens of millions of human years been dedicated to things in such a continuous, scientifically approached way. Yet we act as if the world is basically the same as 1980 except we have smart phones/the internet.
by pastor_williams | 2025-04-05 18:28:53+00:00
I use ublock origin on Firefox and next dns on my router with a block list. I pay for ad free YouTube. My kids had a lesson in how annoying commercials are during a trip where they tried to watch a BBC animal documentary and had to see the same commercial five times in a row because I guess not enough advertisers signed up with the provider. I don't like billboards. I'm pretty sympathetic to getting rid of advertising and do so as much as possible in my own life.

That said this article glosses over the first amendment which absolutely needs to be considered because (at least in the United States) that is the big barrier to any sort of restriction.

Also the idea of what constitutes an ad. Billboards? What about large signs showing where a store is? Are people with big social media accounts allowed to tell us about their favorite products? Only if they don't get money? What if they get free products? We'll have financial audits I assume to make sure they aren't being sneaky. No more sponsored videos? What about listing the patreons that made the video possible?

How will this be sold to the people that need ads for their small business? We'll need a majority support to pass a constitutional amendment.

Anyway, this seems impossible but good luck!
by seabass-labrax | 2025-04-05 18:28:56+00:00
I find these kinds of projects really exciting. Does anyone know if the people behind this project have any connection to #ScanAllFish[1], which was also featured on Hacker News last year[2]?

[1]: https://www.adamsummers.org/scanallfish

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40021458