MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by squarefoot | 2025-04-06 08:40:37+00:00
Thought about that years back, and went to the conclusion that you can't kill advertising and political propaganda without strict rules that every big business and their owned politicians would fiercely fight against. Also, advertising is the way they keep barely alive an economic system almost entirely based on overproduction of unnecessary goods built to not be durable; take out advertising and you'll see millions of people bankrupt; not thousands: millions. Advertising doesn't scale anymore: from a handy tool to discreetly let people two blocks away that a new barber shop just opened, has transitioned to a weapon businesses use to fit their product between a thousand others, grabbing more and more space from every free second or square millimeter, in the hope they capture the attention of someone who doesn't give a damn about them; and it can only get worse. I'm all for killing it, but be warned that if you take it out, you take out the entire business universe built around it that depends on it to be kept afloat. It'd probably need a few decades, not even years, to become reality if someone decided to start the process in a harmless way. But would first need a very different political environment to be accepted: more power to the state, less to corporations, and probably that would conflict with ideas that some propaganda, that is, advertising, stuck in the mind of so many people several decades ago, and those are quite hard to undo.
by DoingIsLearning | 2025-04-06 08:40:49+00:00
> In Europe, apart from TGI Fridays, they were never a thing. And they were seen as just simply fast food.

The discussion and the article is US specific, but as general point 'Europe' is a big generalization akin to 'Africa' or 'Asia'.

These places are too heterogenous for blanket statements.

As a point of anecdata between around the 1960's and early 2000's in most mediterranean countries, middle class would indeed sit down for lunch in nearby restaurants for an affordable lunch. Many of these places would serves as cafes during the day and affordable bistro at lunch.

Most either ramped up prices or went bust.

It is either grab a coffee and go or white cloth restaurant prices. The middle ground business model has indeed vanished or really downgraded their offering, in most countries around the mediterranean.
by cookiengineer | 2025-04-06 08:40:50+00:00
> Rust, Go and others have been building WASM 0.2 support for many years, they currently have a “just works” support...

Can confirm. I was pretty stubborn and wanted to use Go to build a UI in a webview/webview using local app, but oh my, js.Value in Go is so much pain to deal with. A lot of things in the JS world don't integrate nicely with Go as a language (e.g. the difference of Go channels and JS Promises, or magical enum values _and_ URL patterns on the same properties like in the Fetch API)

Long story short, I am now around 3 months into building a WebASM bindings and components framework, and it's still a lot of work until I am on the functionality level of TSX files. [1] All those Web/DOM/Browser APIs are kinda hard to integrate into the Go world, especially if you're as stubborn as me and want to have a real typed bindings API that uses Go's native data types.

[1] https://github.com/cookiengineer/gooey
by Nevermark | 2025-04-06 08:41:54+00:00
Where does specialization end?

Personally, I would like to vicariously YouTube double with a “friend” on our private jet. For about four hours, then another hour looking out the window, listening to said friend continuing to work, while I enjoy a well earned inflight (I.e. home made) cocktail before we land on a tropical island.

Someone would like to host videos like that for a living.
by aucisson_masque | 2025-04-06 08:41:56+00:00
Interesting but the issue is that you can't just ban advertising because it has many aspects.

20% discount or tv ads are a form of advertising, easy to spot. What about sponsored content ?

It's already trickier to detect, and even then there are sponsored content where someone is paid to showcase, review or straight up lie about a product quality.

If I make a great job with a customer and I tell him, make everyone you know aware how great I am. That's also a form of advertising.

Just being myself is advertising for myself, if I'm good at something, I can take part in a talent tv show and purposely avetise my skills to tv viewer.
by shakna | 2025-04-06 08:43:26+00:00
Attributes, mostly. Which have become so common that defer is very likely to be in the next C standard. [0]

bool function_with_cleanup(void) { // Allocate first resource int* buffer1 __attribute__((__cleanup__(free))) = malloc(sizeof(int) * 100); if(!buffer1) { return false; } // Allocate second resource int* buffer2 __attribute__((__cleanup__(free))) = malloc(sizeof(int) * 200); if(!buffer2) { return false; } // Open a file FILE* file __attribute__((__cleanup__(fclose))) = fopen("data.txt", "r"); if (!file) { return false; } return true; }

[0] https://thephd.dev/c2y-the-defer-technical-specification-its...
by spit2wind | 2025-04-06 08:45:20+00:00
Rather than stream noise over the network, I've generated it locally with either Sox or Chuck. I've since lost the Chuck script, but this is one for Sox:

sox --no-show-progress -c 2 --null synth 3600 brownnoise band -n 1500 499 tremolo 0.05 43 reverb 19 bass -11 treble -1 vol 14dB fade q .01 repeat 9999
by barnabee | 2025-04-06 08:45:38+00:00
Publishing factual information in a place people expect to find it is not advertising.

Listing a house for sale on an agent’s website: not advertising.

Promoting that listing or the agent on the home page of a local news site: advertising

etc…

Some cases will be harder, all are decidable. We are talking about law not code, so there’s no need for a perfect algorithm, the legal system is designed precisely to deal with these sorts of question.
by suzzer99 | 2025-04-06 08:45:51+00:00
I don't necessarily need someone there all the time. But talking it out really helps when I need get over that hump and get going on some annoying problem.

I've also found it helps sometimes to have the TV on in the other room, on some mindless sports pundit show that I can half-listen to.

When I have some task I don't want to do, especially if it's something no one is expecting me to do right away but I still need to get it done, I go to Starbucks and don't leave until it's finished.
by timewizard | 2025-04-06 08:46:06+00:00
> These are just slightly glorified fast food. In Europe,

In my opinion it's a drinking culture thing. These places also served alcohol which is more tightly distributed than it would be in Europe. There's less of a reason for them to exist there.

I also think that's the reason for their decline. The day drinking crowd simply aged out of the business lunch segment. It was inevitable. COVID probably accelerated it some but the writing was on the wall.

> Proper restaurants

Yea, which is why I think it's about the drinks, these restaurants all used a common major supplier (Sysco) that makes restaurant ready foods that are mostly just microwave and serve. It was never about the quality of the food.
by inkyoto | 2025-04-06 08:46:16+00:00
> As things now stand, FreeBSD represents many of the benefits of Darwin and the open source nature of Linux.

No. FreeBSD has committed the original sin of UNIX by deliberately dropping support for all non-Intel architectures, intending to focus on optimising FreeBSD for the Intel ISA and platforms. UNIX portability and support for a diverse range of CPU's and hardware platforms are ingrained in the DNA of UNIX, however.

I would argue that FreeBSD has paid the price for this decision – FreeBSD has faded into irrelevance today (despite having introduced some of the most outstanding and brilliant innovations in UNIX kernel design) – because the FreeBSD core team bet heavily on Intel remaining the only hardware platform in existence, and they missed the turn (ARM, RISC-V, and marginally MIPS in embdedded). Linux stepped in and filled in the niche very quickly, and it now runs everywhere. FreeBSD is faster but Linux is better.

And it does not matter that Netflix still runs FreeBSD on its servers serving up the content at the theoretical speed of light – it is a sad living proof of FreeBSD having become a niche within a niche.

P.S. I would also argue that the BSD core teams (Free/Net/Open) were a major factor in the downfall of all BSD's, due to their insular nature and, especially in the early days, a near-hostile attitude towards outsiders. «Customers» voted with their feet – and chose Linux.
by derriz | 2025-04-06 08:47:03+00:00
I'm claiming that its semantics are simple, not that they've made great choices in the design of the language. For example, I've barely used Javascript, but I think I would have scored fairly highly if that javascriptwft page was turned into a quiz. Most of the examples are fairly transparent once you know the implicit casting rules. I've read certain wtfs associated with C++ or even Java far more puzzling despite years of experience with them.

And yes I do believe that writing an interpreter for Javascript would be no more difficult than doing one for Scheme (which I had to do as a student) - the parser would be more difficult admittedly.
by xzjis | 2025-04-06 08:47:41+00:00
In France, I had watched a video on the subject more than 10 years ago, and since then I have been in favor of banning all forms of advertising, including and especially IRL in the streets. I've been using an adblocker on each of my devices ever since I saw that video, and I no longer see any ads (I use ReVanced etc. for X, YouTube, etc.), except unfortunately in real life since there are still ads in the streets, but at least from an activist standpoint, the online advertising industry should take a hit.

If any French speakers are interested, I believe it was this YouTube channel (which is very interesting anyway for discussions about fascism, advertising, manipulation, etc.): https://youtube.com/@hacking-social
by alephnil | 2025-04-06 08:48:17+00:00
Some of the heavy metals are likely from the fire retardant, and some are likely from the fire. Look at zinc vs lead for example. There is little lead in the unused sample vs the environmental samples, thus most of the lead is likely not from the fire retardant. I would guess the most likely source is lead from roofs of burning houses.

Zinc on the other hand is present in all samples in about the same amount, including the unused one. That means that the zinc is likely from the fire retardant rather than the environment. Other metals are present in slightly higher amounts in the environmental samples, and often only in some of the samples. In that case both the fire retardant and the fires/environment are likely to contribute.

To me it seems like copper, lead and manganese are mostly from the fires, while zinc and chromium seems to be from the fire retardant. Then there is the sample from the Franklin fire, that seems to be higher in everything.
by tiborsaas | 2025-04-06 08:48:42+00:00
There is no line, to fully and strictly ban advertising we basically have to abandon democracy and capitalism. Advertising and capitalism a so tightly related that you can't have one without the other.

You want no ads? Cool, let's familiarize yourself with North Korea.

People might want to rather opt for ethical ad standards and regulations, something fundamental like... GDPR.
by astrobe_ | 2025-04-06 08:48:52+00:00
Yes, it's not markup but typesetting [1]. Well before 2013 people used to use stars, _underscores_ or /slashes/ in Usenet forums or mailing lists to mimic typesetting, which lead to Markdown.

The name still maintains the confusion as it tries to be an alternative to markup systems such as HTML which had the purpose to introduce semantic clues for computers.

We all know how it went; the semantic part was entirely thrown away and markup was thoroughly abused for layout (HTML tables before CSS - CSS which also has little to do with "style" and more to do with typesetting and layout), as no browser today can just show a table of contents based on the HTML title tags.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typesetting
by giorgioz | 2025-04-06 08:49:00+00:00
This sort of thinking is exactly why Big Tech shifted from being left Democratic in Obama's time to being center-right Republican in Trump 2024 election. Demonizing ads comparing it to Heroin and tools of authoritarian regime is a MASSIVE hipérbole. Go to look at heroin addicts. Go to look at people that click on a personalized ad with cookies that knows they want to buy a new fridge. They are very far apart. It's like claiming the electricity company holds you slave. Go look at what slavery was. The simple truth is that Big Tech is incredibly powerful because they earned it. They made incredible technology that helped humanity moving forward. Yes there is a great power imbalance now. Yes it would be better if that power was less concentrated. But it also wrong to demonize Big Tech, to paint them as evil Machiavelli's dealing drugs. What we need is a new generation of Google/Facebook/Microsoft/Apple. Yes Steve Jobs in order to build Apple in his own time painted IBM as evil, but it was done in an ad (paradoxically) and it wasn't the whole government passing laws against IBM just to reduce it's power. I'm European and GDPR in Europe was in my opinion a very bad move. I don't think third party cookies are that bad. And people that think that they are bad they usually don't know how they work. Companies shouldn't directly export your plaintext data to others. Third part cookies didn't do that. So stop painting ads like heroine. Once you destroy Google you will have destroyed also the income that allowed Google to give us free (g)mail, free maps, chromium and then node, Android and a ton of other products I'm not remembering right now.
by imiric | 2025-04-06 08:49:08+00:00
It's remarkable that you put all that thought into coming up with holes in my one-line argument, and no thought into steelmanning it.

Since we're coming up with hypothetical laws and loopholes, here is a simple addendum to my original argument:

- Only applies for companies, and only to those with more than $100,000 ARR.

There. That avoids penalizing most of the personal advertising scenarios you mentioned. Since laws are never a couple of sentences long, I'm sure with more thought we'd be able to find a good balance that prevents abuse, but not legitimate use cases for informing people about a product or service.

Again, the goal is not to get into philosophical discussions about what constitutes advertising, and banning commercial speech, or whatever constitutional right exists. The goal is to prevent companies from abusing people's personal data, profiling them, selling their profiles on dark markets, allowing mass psychological manipulation that is threating our democratic processes, and in general, from corrupting every communication channel in existence. Surely there are ways of accomplishing this without endless discussions about semantics and free speech.

But, as I've said in other threads, this is all wishful thinking. There is zero chance that the people in power who achieved it by these means will suddenly decide to regulate themselves and kill their golden goose. Nothing short of an actual revolution will bring this system down.

> And finally, advertisement in some form is kind of important for making customers aware your product exists.

Agreed. In the olden days before digital ads, product catalogs worked well. Companies would buy ad space in specific print media, and consumers interested in buying a product would consult the catalog for the type of product they're looking for. Making ads pull rather than push solves this awareness problem proponents of advertising deem so important. The reason they prefer the push approach is because it's many times more profitable for all involved parties. The only victims in this system are the people outside of it. The current system is making a consumer of everyone every time they interact with any content, when the reality is that people are only consumers when they're actively looking to buy something. Most of the time we just want to consume the content we're interested in, without being sold anything. It's the wrong approach, with harmful results, and the only reason we stuck with it is because it's making someone else very rich. It's absolute insanity.
by aucisson_masque | 2025-04-06 08:49:22+00:00
> The best way to learn about new products is through influencers/reviewers/experts in their field. I'd even say its superior, which is why advertising companies ~sponsor~ bribe influencers to promote their products.

In the same sentence, you give a possible solution and the reason why it wouldn't work.

Ban ads and companies are going to pay more and more for sponsored content to the point you can't differentiate what is legit from what is not.
by libertine | 2025-04-06 08:49:36+00:00
> The part that really struck me was framing advertising and propaganda as essentially the same mechanism - just with different masters.

The main difference between advertising and propaganda is that advertising usually is obvious and loud, and in many countries is required to be declared: people need to know they're watching an ad. You have specific placements for ads that are clearly defined: tv breaks, outdoors, even banners. It's true that there are active efforts to blurr those lines, but still.

The problem of propaganda is that it's mainly being done covertly, no one is saying they're speaking on behalf of someone or of an ideology.

> Try this thought experiment from the article - imagine a world without advertising. Products would still exist. Commerce would still happen. Information would still flow.

While this concept sounds good, it doesn't seem to work in the real world. For example, could shops have billboards on their property? What about businesses that didn't have prime locations? How would people know they existed? How would small businesses compete with big retailers?

One of the things the internet brought, for better and worse, was to lower the barrier of entry—you wouldn't need to be a massive brand that could afford to have its product placed on TV Shows or even to have sales teams selling door to door.
by bendigedig | 2025-04-06 08:50:00+00:00
> It means you can’t say something like “the numbers are only higher because more adults are living together”, as that is already being adjusted for. In theory.

I think it muddies the waters because it's possible that the numbers are higher because people are choosing to have fewer children (which may be driven by affordability), or more people are living in HMOs. It makes it much harder to argue about cause and effect. Are these equivalised incomes rising because people are having fewer children, because there are more people living in HMOs - or are more people doing these things because of a crisis of affordability?

> but the constant refrain of “living standards are collapsing” and “no one can afford a house” just doesn’t match the data IMO.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/housing/...

The price of housing in England has doubled relative to the median income since 2000.
by artpar | 2025-04-06 08:50:43+00:00
This is super amazing. I also go the "Failed to ..." etc error messages initially ( waited about 3-4 mins that time). Just checked once more after about 1 hour and it did generate the whole documentation.

Fairly readable and doesn't seem wrong ( havent gone in depth yet)

https://gitsummarize.com/daptin/daptin
by southernplaces7 | 2025-04-06 08:51:01+00:00
One type of restaurant that would be a great import into the U.S: The "comida corrida" places of where I live in Mexico. Basically, they're tiny, family-run sit-down joints with simple setup (sometimes being run right in the lower floor of someone's home or in their garage, repurposed with a kitchen addition) and simple but essentially home cooked and balanced fare. For the equivalent of 3 to 7 dollars, you get a starter, main course and desert for lunch (in some cases they also serve breakfast) The food isn't fancy, but it's freshly made and filling.
by ablob | 2025-04-06 08:51:20+00:00
Surprise is also based on convention. What could be surprising to you might be just a stroll in the park for others. In Japan people would be surprised to see others wearing shoes in a house while it's perfectly normal for people of other countries. Reading the manual is something to prevent surprises and only takes one sentence to explain. I'd go for that any day of the week!

> ... a well designed system wouldn’t do this. ...

A well designed system would be able to explain their decisions and document that somewhere. Perhaps in the manual.
by pjmlp | 2025-04-06 08:51:46+00:00
I love that it goes both ways, about plus and minus of both languages, including rewriting back into C++ when it made sense, and the side joke about rewriting existing CLI tools in Rust.

While C++ isn't perfect, has the warts of a 50 year's old language, and probably will never match Rust's safety, we would already be in a much better place if at least everyone used the tools at their disposal from the last 30 years.

While I would advise to use Rust for some security critical scenarios, there are many others where it is still getting there, and there are other requirements to take into account other than affine types.
by squiggleblaz | 2025-04-06 08:51:54+00:00
I'm trying to brainstorm an answer. My best guess is that SSH is obsoleted by disposable instances. You can spin up a new instance for every version of your configuration, transition to it, and dispose of the original (or set it aside or whatever). That way, you could probably have a reasonably complete tech career and only ever use ssh as an implementation detail of git.
by CWIZO | 2025-04-06 08:52:48+00:00
> Coming from this direction, the addition of commas feels like an evil plan to have more syntax errors, with no obvious benefit

It helps to learn your history before you criticise something and claim it is useless.

JSON is the way it is mainly because it is just JavaScript and that meant that every browser in the world already supported it before JSON was even invented. It is THE reason why it is as popular as it is.
by voxgen | 2025-04-06 08:52:50+00:00
> It's interesting that there are no reasoning models yet

This may be merely a naming distinction, leaving the name open for a future release based on their recent research such as coconut[1]. They did RL post-training, and when fed logic problems it appears to do significant amounts of step-by-step thinking[2]. It seems it just doesn't wrap it in <thinking> tags.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.06769 "Training Large Language Models to Reason in a Continuous Latent Space" [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12lAM-xPvu8 (skip through this - it's recorded in real time)
by lordnacho | 2025-04-06 08:53:12+00:00
> Try this thought experiment from the article - imagine a world without advertising. Products would still exist. Commerce would still happen. Information would still flow. We'd just be freed from the increasingly sophisticated machinery designed to override our decision-making.

We would no longer be tricked into buying a bunch of crap that doesn't make us happy.

But because GDP is what it is, we will have a recession. Quite a big one, because a lot of the economy is reliant on selling people stuff they could do without. Perhaps people would be happier once things settle down, but we have locked ourselves into measuring things that are easy to measure, and so we're all going to think it was a failed experiment.