MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by josephg | 2025-04-24 00:04:50+00:00
> Does it really make sense for legacy states to be able to bind transacations on the internet?

Yes.

We have a problem right now where the only place democracy, sensible laws and due process take place is in meatspace.

The internet - insomuch as it’s a real place, is a feudal society. It’s made up of small fiefdoms (websites) and some larger kingdoms which exert tyrannical power within their borders. They watch everything you do - usually to advertise to you. And they can banish you at a moments notice if doing so would result more profit for their rulers.

There’s an interesting argument you can make that the internet should be its own sovereign space. “Information wants to be free” and all that. Maybe if the internet was created 200 years ago, during the period of time when constitutions were being written everywhere, we would have created one for the internet. And then, maybe, the internet could have policies and courts and rules that uphold the rights of people. But that hasn’t happened. We have, through our collective inaction, delegated judicial oversight of the internet to sovereign states in meatspace. And thank goodness. Somebody needs to tell internet companies that my personal data is not for sale. Or tell Apple that they aren’t entitled to 15-30% of Netflix’s revenue after already selling a user their phone. (And don’t they dare redirect users to their website!)

If us technologists won’t govern ourselves, we delegate that important job to the state of California. To the European Union. To Australia’s department of fair trade & ACCC. And so on. It means we get a fractured Internet. But people have inalienable rights that need to be defended. Those rights must not be undermined just because we’re online and there’s a profit to be made.
by jdietrich | 2025-04-24 00:04:55+00:00
Bakelite is a phenol-formaldehyde polymer. Wood is substantially made of lignin, a cross-linked phenolic polymer, and cellulose, a long-chain saccharide polymer.

"Plastic" is an incredibly fuzzy category. Bakelite is a plastic by any reasonable definition of the word and I would staunchly defend the argument that wood is a fibre-reinforced plastic composite. The stuff we'd definitely agree are plastics - petrochemical-based synthetic polymers - are a hugely diverse group of materials with vastly different chemistries. Plastic materials that look and feel almost identical often have completely different chemical structures, e.g. PC and PMMA.

As a polymer enjoyer, I just don't know how to make sense of the popular understanding of (and panic around) plastics. I can't imagine a similar tenor of discussion around metals, which is at least a category we can usefully define. Is there anyone out there who is terribly afraid of zinc or tin because they're right above cadmium and lead in the periodic table? Is anyone afraid of tungsten because it looks and feels just like uranium?
by ars | 2025-04-24 00:05:18+00:00
You aren't inventing a new letter shapes - letters already exist. You are modifying how they look, and that's not considered creative enough.

There are lots of things that can't be copyrighted.

For example you can't copyright an anatomy drawing: https://www.skeletaldrawing.com/licensing (i.e. the layout of the bones, etc) but you can copyright your specific drawing - but someone else could draw in the same style and not violate your copyright.

Same here: You can't copyright the shape of the letters, but you can copyright you specific ttf program (expression), but someone else can make the same letter shapes if they want.
by defrost | 2025-04-24 00:06:42+00:00
Cheers for the link and the notes.

FWiW he was a prolific writer all his life, as a pre computer civil servent he would have written at length all through many of his days at work .. the rules of the day demanded he be circumspect in regard to public opinion:

Given the desperate poverty of Ireland in the 1930s to 1960s, a job as a civil servant was considered prestigious, being both secure and pensionable with a reliable cash income in a largely agrarian economy. The Irish civil service has been, since the Irish Civil War, fairly strictly apolitical. Civil Service Regulations and the service's internal culture generally prohibit Civil Servants above the level of Clerical Officer from publicly expressing political views. As a practical matter, this meant that writing in newspapers on current events was, during O'Brien's career, generally prohibited without departmental permission which would be granted on an article-by-article, publication-by-publication basis. This fact alone contributed to O'Brien's use of pseudonyms, though he had started to create character authors even in his pre-civil service writings.

~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flann_O'Brien

He had an extended family to support after all.
by arghwhat | 2025-04-24 00:07:41+00:00
A big feature like this will be at most 20-30% done when you open a PR, because the rest of the work is in collaboration to suit upstream which will as always require notable changes and rewrites.

Spending manweeks to manmonths on new upstream work that won't see any practical use until half to a whole year later, after getting legal to work things out, is a significant investment in new development.

This has nothing to do with suppliers or partners. They are not dumb enough to measure a product roadmap in number of random PRs, but will look at first party software and hardware roadmap.
by tpmoney | 2025-04-24 00:07:48+00:00
To steel man the policy, one thing it helps avoid is the free rider problem. Apples store terms are than free apps don’t pay a commission to Apple. But someone has to pay for the costs of developing the SDKs and the platform. We no longer live in an age where Apple or Microsoft gets away with charging for multi thousand dollar per year per seat developer license for their platforms, but that doesn’t mean those platforms don’t cost money to develop and maintain. So the idea is, if you make money on the platform, so does Apple. But free apps + in app downloads is a giant loophole in that plan. Sure we all think of Netflix or Kindle apps when we think of this, but without a policy that charges for IAP and discourages or outright forbids steering off the platform, we would see a new category of “freemium” apps where the app is “free” on the App Store, but is effectively just an empty downloader shell that you then have to buy the “real” app through. Unscrupulous devs steer you to their own outside store or put some ridiculous inside the App Store price (think 300x+ markup) with a link to the outside store with the cheaper price and all those customers are transacting, and Apple gets no money for funding their platform.

And yes I know we can all scoff and say “oh poor multi-billion dollar Apple can’t get paid but getting paid is exactly how Apple is a multibillion dollar company. So if they don’t get it from IAP and app sales fees then they’re going to extract it either from hardware prices, or for charging those per seat per year dev licenses again.

Personally I think Apple is big enough now and the App Store is popular enough now they can revisit this but somehow they are going to want to solve the free rider problem, and whatever they pick, people won’t be happy (see also core technology fee)
by bitpush | 2025-04-24 00:08:00+00:00
I don't even understand the logic.

All search engines look like Google search

All calendar apps look like Google calendar.

All maps app look like Google maps.

All email clients look like GMail

I'm not saying Google invented any or all of these but it sounds like you don't like it the colors or font but that's different from your larger point.

Show me an instance where Google's UI is radically different from industry norms and then you'll have a point.

Some of this shit is complex and complex things look complex.
by badsectoracula | 2025-04-24 00:08:22+00:00
IIRC the whole parsing performance issue was because the original code was written for the SP campaign of GTA5 that only had a handful of objects to parse data for. That was barely a blip in terms of performance impact and AFAIK was written years before GTAOnline was made (where it became an issue - and even then only became an issue much after GTAOnline was first made).

Writing some simple code that works with the data you expect to have without bothering with optimizations is fine, if anything it is one of the actual cases of "premature optimization": even with profiling no real time is spent on that code, your data wont make it spend any time and you should avoid wild guesses since chances are you'll be wrong (even if in this case it could be a correct guess, it'd be like a broken clock guessing the time is always 13:37).

The actual issue with that code was that, after they reused it for GTAOnline and started becoming a performance issue after some time as they added more objects, nobody thought to try and see what is wrong.
by galangalalgol | 2025-04-24 00:08:38+00:00
And in some cases FDR's abuse of executive power. If we manage to get... Someone, I don't know who which is depressing, elected that is interested in preserving democracy above all the other current issues, I'm sure there will be a lot more laws to safeguard this happening again. Personal recommendations, nox the filibuster it creates incentive, use federal money to get all the states to switch to ranked choice voting for all federal positions. And MMP for house and electoral college. Maybe nix the filibuster as the last item of business so that the first Congress without it will have more than two parties (due to those electoral changes which lead to 4-8 parties usually).
by TrueDuality | 2025-04-24 00:09:30+00:00
I was with you until this paragraph:

> The broadest possible interpretation of this ruling is that any website that downloads any digital asset–cookies, javascript, heck maybe even HTML–onto a California resident’s computer can be sued in California, even if the website doesn’t know where the users are. If this is correct, the majority effectively would be saying: if you place a cookie on a reader’s device, you’ve done something more than passive publishing (i.e., you can passively publish without the cookie) and must accept the jurisdictional consequences.

This feels so close, but a little off my interpretation. In Collin's concurrence, he specifically calls out that the required parties "minimum-contacts" in the transaction were both in the state as part of the reason for the unambiguous jurisdiction, with Stripe being a third unexpected party to the information. To insert themselves is in effect inserting themselves into the jurisdiction as well. This paragraph:

> When a State specifically regulates the conduct of electronic systems with respect to transactions within its borders, the as-intended operation of those systems within that State is the relevant tortious conduct for minimum-contacts purposes, and that conduct is attributable to those persons who deliberately intended that such systems reach into that State and operate in that manner when they do so...

For me, this implies that third-party services not required or expected when a user interacts with a site that run scripts or set cookies for anything outside that "minimum-contacts" requirement is liable for what they do with that data, access, and what that code does.
by twic | 2025-04-24 00:10:22+00:00
And yet, there is a good chance that C++ will start doing exactly this [1]. Because [2]:

> The performance impact is negligible (less that 0.5% regression) to slightly positive (that is, some code gets faster by up to 1%). The code size impact is negligible (smaller than 0.5%). Compile-time regressions are negligible. Were overheads to matter for particular coding patterns, compilers would be able to obviate most of them.

> The only significant performance/code regressions are when code has very large automatic storage duration objects. We provide an attribute to opt-out of zero-initialization of objects of automatic storage duration. We then expect that programmer can audit their code for this attribute, and ensure that the unsafe subset of C++ is used in a safe manner.

> This change was not possible 30 years ago because optimizations simply were not as good as they are today, and the costs were too high. The costs are now negligible.

[1] https://github.com/cplusplus/papers/issues/1401

[2] https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2023/p27...
by Spivak | 2025-04-24 00:10:56+00:00
As someone who has done signature collection this is mostly correct but it ignores what the actual barrier is which is proof of work which is proof of money. The idea that a ballot initiative that's just a good idea someone had winding up on your voting paper will never happen because no one has money to collect signatures from millions of people and the annoying ceremony related to it. And this is working as designed because citizen ballot initiatives are despised by legislatures because the only reason to need them is because your representatives are fucking up that badly. So there's two kinds of ballot initiatives generally

* Coalition of nonprofits desperately trying to actually represent the will of the people in defiance of the legislature. Good recent example would be abortion amendments that pass without too much trouble in red states. Democrats might need to adjust their barometer on how Americans actually feel about immigration but Republicans have refused to acknowledge the Overton Window on abortion is passing them by.

* Cash grabs because some financially interested party realized the money to get legislation this way is worth the investment.
by supernova87a | 2025-04-24 00:11:58+00:00
Genuine question for debate: iPhone app store is a private club to which businesses can choose to belong, if they want to sell their product to certain customers. Membership in the club comes with the condition that you not talk about alternative ways to buy the same product, while selling via the club. Membership in the club is not a monopoly; there are many other channels through which to sell a company's products.

Why is is against the law?
by lukifer | 2025-04-24 00:12:43+00:00
It’s a problem with representation generally. The political theorist Benjamin Studebaker uses an analogy of getting into a hot air balloon: there are ways you can be of service to those below, giving them an overhead view, maybe warning them of danger, etc. But the further up you go, the less you have skin the game, and the less the little ant-people can truly be real to you.

Rather than trying to force a round peg into a square hole, I’d say this a case for refactoring bicameralism: one house of professionalized legal specialists and technocrats, another house chosen by rotating lottery for short stints of public service by random citizens (sortition).
by ivape | 2025-04-24 00:13:19+00:00
Yeah I get it, Jensen Huang worked at Dennys too (I sound nippy, but I'm not trying to be). I just don't think these people stayed in those environments long enough, but her upbringing definitely sounds "for real". If you are out into national politics before 30 you are out of any normalcy imho. Some people are bartenders for a lot longer if you catch my drift.
by ryandrake | 2025-04-24 00:13:50+00:00
The good designers, yes. I'm sure there are plenty of other designers who think their opinion is better than the likely thousands of person-years of UX research that the major OS vendors (combined) have invested into their interface guidelines.

For each of the major platforms, following the guidelines will at least make your app consistent with the other apps on the user's device, which is a decent-enough baseline. Going wild and re-inventing how a drop-down should look or how scrolling should work is probably just going to annoy the user.
by PaulHoule | 2025-04-24 00:14:18+00:00
They look different to Chinese people and they look more different to me than the syllables sound in speech but I've been looking at them for a while.

On the other hand, the Material Design icons are supposed to be used in mass market products that people can use right away and I can say they still look the same to me despite looking at Android on and off for more than a decade. (Chinese kids learn thousands of characters in 10 years of school!)

I agree with the author that the interface for Google Drive, Google Docs and other facets of their monolith (they're really the same system and shouldn't be presenting under different names at all) is atrocious. Google knows that I am logged in when I visit the "Google Drive" page and presumably knows everything about me [2], such as the fact that I frickin' use it for work and have no reason to ever click on "Try Google Drive For Work" -- ever!

Then there are all the twisty little things to click on the left hand side that all look the same like "shared folders", "shared with you", ... The one thing that's constant is it is always hard to find what I'm looking for whatever I am looking for whenever I am looking for it.

I've been laughing at the fanboys (or shills?) who want to get their bathroom done in Material Design or want to get a Material Design tatoo or have an Itasha [1] in Material Design. Gets me voted down a lot but go ahead, I've got the karma to lose.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itasha

[2] like that time I clicked on a YouTube short where a Chinese girl transforms into a fox on American TV and now it wants to show me hundreds of AI slop videos of Chinese girls transforming into everything
by skissane | 2025-04-24 00:15:01+00:00
The problem with prosecuting them – they are employees of a White House office, doing what their bosses told them to do, and it is clear their bosses are carrying out the President's wishes.

If Joe Blow off the street walks into a federal agency and takes all their data – open and shut case, throw the book at them, see you in a few decades.

If someone from the White House walks into a federal agency, tells the agency leadership "the President wants me to take all your data", and the agency leadership replies "sure, go right ahead" – not a scenario people were expecting, so the existing laws haven't been crafted to clearly criminalize it. Maybe some enterprising prosecutor can find a way to map it to the crimes on the statute book, maybe it is just too hard. But even if the prosecutor overcomes that hurdle, it will be far from easy to convince the jury / trial judge / appellate courts that the legal elements of the crime are actually met – and if it actually gets as far as a conviction upheld by the appellate court, what do you think the conservative SCOTUS majority are going to do with that when they get it? And many prosecutors, foreseeing those low odds of ultimate success, will stop before they even get to an indictment.

So, I think the odds of anyone ultimately being convicted over this are low, even if Trump never pardons them.

Maybe, Congress might pass a law to make it more clearly illegal, which might make it easier to prosecute if a future administration repeats the same behavior.

EDIT: if people are downvoting this because they think my analysis of the likelihood of successful criminal prosecution is wrong, it would be great if they could reply to explain where they think I got it wrong
Show HN: My from-scratch OS kernel that runs DOOM
by UnmappedStack | 2025-04-24 00:15:22+00:00
Hi there! I've been on-and-off working on TacOS for a few months, which follows some UNIX-derived concepts (exec/fork, unix-style VFS, etc) and is now able to run a port of Doom, with a fairly small amount of modifications, using my from-scratch libc. The performance is actually decent compared to what I expected. Very interested to hear your thoughts. Thank you!
by jasonjmcghee | 2025-04-24 00:16:35+00:00
Interactivity and liveness in programming deserves to be discussed far more often than it is on front-page of hacker news, but excited there are multiple ongoing threads!

I'm a very strong supporter of interactive blogposts as well. Obviously https://ciechanow.ski/ is leader here - being able to mess with something to build intuition is huge.
by uejfiweun | 2025-04-24 00:17:23+00:00
What a basket case this lady sounds like. The venn diagram of people who are OK with a relationship with a polyamorous sex worker who brags about getting gangbanged for her birthday, and the group of stable, emotionally secure, successful men that she would be interested in, might as well be two circles. Best of luck to her looking for a possibly nonexistent needle in a haystack.
by alganet | 2025-04-24 00:17:50+00:00
I don't understand your reference. Care to explain?

My mention of the Red Skull speech is referring to the blog post. It is sort of a "guide to good men", and has that soul sacrifice thing all over the text, and it is spoken in a poetic gloomy doomy tone.

She could have the soul stone anytime she wants, but she must lose that what she loves most. C'mon, it's hilariously prophetic.
by neilv | 2025-04-24 00:18:15+00:00
Not long after ads started appearing on the Web, there was research showing that Web browser users quickly learned to visually filter them out.

So, when Material Design came out, and it wasn't even distinguishing the extents of UI elements (e.g., transient UI object with same background as what it partially overlapped, with no border), it violated much of what we knew about HCI (i.e., in the interests of the user or task), and it looked like a brochure (i.e., in the advertiser's interests) more than anything else... Occam's Razor needed only to mutter the words "advertising company".

I know that some percentage of the people who have to work atop Material Design are doing good HCI despite it, but they're fighting against sabotage, and we all are dumber and less effective for it.
by lovich | 2025-04-24 00:19:57+00:00
Bruh, do you think people are pissed about the deportations just because they’re immigrants?

Deport them all if they came here illegally and that was _proven_, but the government just skipped all due process and as we’re seeing and as the government already admitted, people are being mistakenly deported to these camps and then the same government says they can’t do anything to reverse it.

You can’t be waxing poetic about the rule of law and how we need to enforce everything when they can’t even follow due process
by halfcat | 2025-04-24 00:23:07+00:00
> practically impossible because you need to keep all the layers in mind…

> …with the MVC/MVVM approach. Every layer has a specific concern…

Do we need to keep all the layers in mind, or not?

Separation-of-concerns is not a virtue. It’s a trade off between separation-of-concerns and locality-of-behavior. SoC can be a benefit, if it matches your team structure. But also, any abstraction has a cost of increased cognitive load (and even worse is premature, wrong abstractions).

If I have to look at 5 files instead of 1, the 5 files better pay for itself in some way (and in a small team, there’s almost no room for that to happen).

I can’t prove this obviously, but if I were betting, I’d expect more businesses have failed due to lack of velocity from over-engineered SoC apps, while the LoB monolith that’s easy for a small team to reason about found the right abstractions and won the market share (and later got rewritten as a SoC app, e.g. Instagram).
Ask HN: Best boards for 9-5 mid-senior swe roles?
by mertleee | 2025-04-24 00:23:39+00:00
Obviously the market is a bit tenuous right now, but I'm looking for jobs at established companies with a real product and half-decent expectations (or at least professional expectations) for hours.

I've been sourcing within my network but LinkedIn and Indeed seem atrocious. I've had some luck on HN / Wellfound, however many of these listing appear to pay well below market and have goofy expectations of "commitment" and hours.

Does anyone have any other specific websites or listing boards they've had luck with?

NOT looking to be a founding engineer, frankly don't even care about equity. Doing this to make $$ and establish a few consistent years on my resume.