MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-04-06 11:28:27+00:00
<< the violent hatred of advertising is by far one of the most misguided.

I am willing to give you that there is hatred. I don't know if it is violent, but there is actual hatred. I do not believe it is misguided. As the OP mentions, a lot of people on this site saw how the sausage is made.

<< Human attention is scarce.

True, but each ad makes it even more scarce as humans instinctively try to filter out noise suggesting that ads do not belong in our vicinity.

<< Demand for that attention is endless.

I disagree, but I do not want to pursue this line of argumentation, because it is a deep rabbit hole with a lot that can trip it ( and I sadly do not have time this Sunday ).

<< meaning you must use brutal authoritarianism to disrupt it entirely

You may be onto something. Current breed of corporations are effectively nation-states that require focus of an entity nearly as singular. Hmm.

<< no market at all guarantees unfairness.

Meh, I saw the fairness and I think I am ok with its absence from the world at large.

<< generally trends toward making the highest value messages for both the audience and advertiser get seen over lower value messages in any given situation

Hardly, "make your penis bigger" likely being most obvious example.

<< please respond with all of your “all these times it didn’t work like that!” throw-the-baby out-with-the-bathwater Anecdotes.

I think you are misunderstanding something. The reason OP even considers such a drastic move is because throwing the baby out with the water is easier than attempt at gentle removal. I will add one more thing though. I was in a meeting with non-technical audience yesterday and, oddly, advertising and face tracking in apps came up. This is all starting to trickle down to regular people, which does suggest some level of correction is coming.

<< we should regulate advertising to ensure it doesn’t get out of control

It is already out of control, but adtech managed to normalize it.

<< But to ban it outright would require an extreme policing of all speech at all levels of society.

Hardly, maybe you could argue for freedom of association as we are talking mostly third parties, but the business would still be able to huff and puff as much as they want.
by bsenftner | 2025-04-06 11:29:08+00:00
This is going to sound like nonsense, but the best books that really teach how to think, how to handle complex thoughts and logic, and how to reason multiple steps in advance, and expand that into all the possibilities and still resolve all of that mess into a logical course of action... this process is documented, in story narrative form over and over again in literature. This is how a novel gets nominated for a Nobel Literature award: they depict a situation, typically a dire tragedy, and the individuals facing that situation and how they logically navigate to success. The characters typically begin without the critical thought capacity to succeed in their situation, and the novel is the story of their piece-wise transformation into the critically aware individual operating with reasoning multiple steps ahead of themselves. These novels are not math, are not anything technical, yet they teach their readers a critical skill that math and anything technical requires to master: critical thinking in an unknown space where one needs to make predictions with unknown information, and how to manage that. It's literally a literature "formula".
by johnisgood | 2025-04-06 11:29:10+00:00
> Ultimately we all end up reading the manual. I'd still prefer if I didn't have to remember how a certain C stdlib function works vs. what seems intuitive.

Intuitive is highly subjective, it might be intuitive to you, but not for others, and vice versa, and it is part of the job to read the "manual instruction".

> But that's a lost cause with a lot of people. They'll happily point out how "intuitive" differs among different groups of people and all that, merrily missing the point on purpose

What is your point? Are you arguing against documentation? You told me you are not averse to reading the documentation, yet you are complaining about it and bringing "intuition" into this. I am confused. Could you clarify your point?
by tssva | 2025-04-06 11:29:25+00:00
You are talking about two cometelt different technologies. You are talking about 10BASE2 Ethernet which runs over RG-58/U coax cabling and as you mention requires termination at each end. It ran at a speed of 10Mbs. It could be unreliable for a variety of reasons such as connections coming lose, someone deciding to move their computer disconnecting a cable and breaking the continuos connection between stations that is required or a large number of Ethernet collisions because if either misbehaving nics or too many stations on a segment.

Currently there is MOCA hardware which supports speeds up to 2.5Gbs. The standard for 10Gbs has been released but no hardware for it is currently available. At least not to consumers. MOCA runs over the coax that is often already installed in homes to support cable, satellite or over the air antenna TV. It uses different frequencies and thus can coexist with these on the same cable. MOCA is not Ethernet. It is a half duplex shared medium protocol using time division multiplexing. It was originally developed to distribute IP TV without the need to run additional wiring in a house. Today it is mostly used to bring broadband internet connections into a home or to bridge Ethernet connections through a home. Different frequencies are set aside for each purpose and so both can be done at the same time. It is very reliable. I use it to extend my network to several out buildings on my property which had coax run to them many many years ago.
by clan | 2025-04-06 11:29:52+00:00
Nope. As you say yourself: Possibly an antenna connection.

Exactly that. When we redid the floors i our apartment we renewed the electrical wiring and added ethernet and coax. The coax was intended for radio/tv.

There is however an overlap of people who have the foresight to add coax cabling also add ethernet a well.

If I was was re-doing today I would add more empty pipes and fiber.

Cabling ahead has a very high WAF (Wife Approval Factor) when adding new gear :-)
by bruce511 | 2025-04-06 11:30:07+00:00
Not really. The company's not really paying bribes out of their own money though. They're paying it out of the revenue flow from that sale.

In other words "give me this govt contract and I'll route n% of it back to you". n% has to be "reasonable" or there's no commercial point in offering the bribe to begin with.

If there's a cash-flow issue (you gotta pay the bribe before getting the contract) then I guess it favors deep pockets.
by rvz | 2025-04-06 11:31:36+00:00
Another bad standard designed by those who don't consider security as important. Which is why we have this excellent article. Essentially it's somehow fashionable to have remote-code-execution as a service by dumb agents executing anything they see when they use the MCP.

Once one of those exploits are executed, your keys, secrets and personal configs are as good as donated to someone else's server and also sent back to the LLM provider.

This shows that we can also see how dangerous widely used commands like curl | bash can be, despite the warnings and security risks.

The specification might as well have been vibe-coded.
by iambavith | 2025-04-06 11:31:58+00:00
I built the image compression for imgfiber using CompressorJS as the base. It’s a reliable library by Feng Yuanchen (https://fengyuanchen.github.io/compressorjs/), originally designed for lossy compression. I wrapped and modified it to meet our specific needs, tweaking the code so the results differ from the default - you won’t get the same file size or optimization when using it out of the box. Full credit for the core library goes to the original author; my work was to modify it for our usecase. to solve our own personal pain point.
by libertine | 2025-04-06 11:33:22+00:00
> "Risk assessments conducted by the US Environmental Protection Agency and others have concluded that the hazardous constituents in inorganic fertilizers generally do not pose risks to public health or the environment."

What I believe you're missing is where this might be coming from. We live in an Institutional crisis, where for years propaganda was spread and amplified by internal and external actors (like Russia) to undermine institutions, with lies and conspiracy theories.

Bold claims were made that organizations and the government were captured by private interests, completely disregarding that actual qualified people are working to make sure things are safe, like products we consume.

Just for context, RFK Junior is the US Secretary of Health and Human Services.

So, to circle back to your quote, the Risk assessment made by the US Environmental Protection Agency could be easily dismissed by the following unfounded and unsupported claim, "yeah the US Environmental Protection Agency is serving the big companies; they should be dismantled."

Like it would be the easiest thing for Russia to start a trend to sway people to demand a ban on phosphate. They did similar things with regard to Ukraine, to the point where the US Administration is amplifying russian talking points.

To be clear, I'm not saying this article is a propaganda piece; what I'm saying is that this sort of opinion from someone who doesn't seem to fully understand the subject is a prime example of something that could be amplified for propaganda and contribute to institutional demise.
by lll-o-lll | 2025-04-06 11:34:06+00:00
> The uncomfortable truth: most of us in tech understand that today's advertising systems are fundamentally parasitic.

Which was obvious at every step of the journey. Google was, is, and always will be an advertising platform. Advertising was, is, and always will be the manipulation of human emotions and desires for the purpose of corporate profit. This is not a good thing! How did you ever justify this to yourself?

I’ve had recruiters push the poker machine jobs, the ad jobs, the high frequency trader jobs… You get to look at the business before taking the job; work for better people. No shade on anyone who’s there because they just need a job, but if you have a choice, pick something better.
by bondarchuk | 2025-04-06 11:35:33+00:00
Quite an interesting idea tbh, however if you want to frame it in commodity terms then you should also admit that currently, this very valuable commodity is taken from its owners without their consent. You could compare it to e.g. human labour, maybe: sure, there will always be a market for it, yet we allow labour to be extracted from people only in a heavily regulated framework and don't just let it be taken by force from them. Or property: there is a near infinite demand for physical objects, yet when I own a physical object you nevertheless can't just take it from me. So it should be with our attention.
by lelanthran | 2025-04-06 11:36:13+00:00
> Yes? I can't use the licensed model to train content?

Well, that's the point; free software does not mean "no restrictions". Most of the FLOSS licenses come with restrictions too, just different ones. That doesn't make them "not FLOSS".

If you're arguing that licenses can't be FLOSS if they have restrictions, then you're going to have an uphill battle to convince people that the GPL isn't FLOSS.
by atombender | 2025-04-06 11:36:37+00:00
It has nothing to do with ORMs. It's the same issue if you don't use an ORM. It's about connection pooling, as I explained.

Postgres has no native awareness of connection pooling, and so you need to issue certain reset commands to ensure that the connection is "clean" for the next piece of code that claims it. It should be possible to do things like "SET SESSION statement_timeout" without worrying about who the next user of the connection is.
by scarface_74 | 2025-04-06 11:37:25+00:00
I’ve been working for almost 30 years across 10 jobs. I worked in office between 1996-2020. After a couple of months to at most a couple of years, those “friendships” fade.

Today, I have five people I stay in touch with that I’ve worked with. Three I stopped working with around 2016 and one I stopped working with two years ago. Oh yeah and the fifth I stopped working with in 2011. She is sleeping right next to me now - I married her in 2012.

But to answer your questions, I work for one reason - to exchange labor for money. My work self is “looking from the 1000 foot view”, “taking things to the parking lot” and “adding on to what Becky said”. My personal life is completely different.

It’s tiring having to “code switch” with coworkers because the real me is completely different.

And if you’re working 50 hours a week, you’re doing it wrong.
by acabal | 2025-04-06 11:37:40+00:00
Editor-in-chief here, happy to answer any questions, as always. We also recently celebrated Public Domain Day with an especially notable crop of books, including The Sound and the Fury, All Quiet on the Western Front, John Steinbeck's first novel, some Hemingway, Gandhi, two Dashiell Hammett novels, and more: https://standardebooks.org/blog/public-domain-day-2025
by grandempire | 2025-04-06 11:37:50+00:00
All good things come from God and God’s greatness shines of all the earth, and anything that ever happens is because of God, but for you it’s the State.

Just because a good thing exists does not mean I’m indebted to it. The city may build a really nice park on the other side of town. That doesn’t mean I’m being subsidized or dependent.

The people of Maine did not benefit from the Hoover Dam.

> You can't simply build "community structure" and expect everyone to buy in.

You’re right that we can’t magically recreate communities that were destroyed, but this is actually the default human behavior. Small community cooperate together for common good.

> If that were possible, we wouldn't need laws at all

This doesn’t follow. People’s short term behavior may not align with their long term values.

Crime/sin is traditionally when your passions get the best of you.
by thrance | 2025-04-06 11:38:09+00:00
There are stones best left unturned, I feel. I don't think we want a world where parents need to spend $100K+ in genetic meddling to ensure their child can compete in the future market.

I'm all for treating genetic diseases, but what is described in this article resembles eugenics a lot. And there are good reasons why this has been a taboo since WW2. Let's just say, there are other traits some people might want to select for than IQ. Ones you might not be confortable with.
by emptysongglass | 2025-04-06 11:38:39+00:00
"Some of my" post history? Do you realize how many comments I've made here? How far back did you have to go? Did you also get to the part where I have repeatedly stood up for Ukraine's sovereignty and presented arguments against anyone defending Russia's invasion of Ukraine? How for one second do you think the way you've conducted yourself with me is acceptable?

Linking to vulnerabilities in a protocol that hasn't been used for 8 years and misrepresenting that fact by omission is simply unethical.

Attack my arguments with reasonable, evidence-based arguments. Do not make personal attacks. That is in the HN rules.

You've presented falsehoods and unfounded conspiracy theories. I've called you out on them. I expect better from any human being on Hacker News and I will continue to, whatever the topic.
by bondarchuk | 2025-04-06 11:39:01+00:00
In Amsterdam there are posters at bus stops, roughly similar-sized billboards by the side of the road, some of them are video screens. There are video screens at train stations at well. At busy highway interchanges there are towers with billboards on top, strongly lit at night. It may not be as bad as in the US but there is advertising like this in most major cities in Europe.
by inkyoto | 2025-04-06 11:39:10+00:00
Whilst I do agree with most of your insights and the narrative of historic events, I also believe that BSD core teams were a major contributing factor to the demise of BSD's (however unpopular such an opinion might be).

The first mistake was that all BSD core teams flatly refused to provide native support for the JVM back in its heyday. They eventually partially conceded and made it work using Linux emulation; however, it was riddled with bugs, crashes and other issues for years before it could run Java server apps. Yet, users clamoured to run Java applications, like, now and vociferously.

The second grave mistake was to flatly refuse to support containerisation (Docker) due to not being kosher. Linux based containerisation is what underpins all cloud computing today. Again, the FreeBSD arrived too late, and it was too little.

P.S. I still hold the view that FreeBSD made matters even worse by dropping support for non-Intel platforms early on – at a stage when its bleak future was already all but certain. New CPU architectures are enjoying a renaissance, whilst FreeBSD nervously sucks its thumb by the roadside of history.
by metalman | 2025-04-06 11:39:11+00:00
Ha! Women can hear,see, smell, better than men, and have finer motor control, higher pain tolerance, better ability to survive extream cold, and are longer lived. There are distict cognitive differences as well, most pronounced(that I know of) is that women remember ,face/names and details of 10x the number than men do, 4000 vs 400. I read one study, where women were examined in an MRI, and asked to think about various things, with an interesting result that the same brain region lit up when thinking about there pets, and men, but not others.,.....
by adrian_b | 2025-04-06 11:39:31+00:00
I do not think that "security" is the appropriate name for such features.

In my opinion "security" should always refer to the security of the computer owners or users.

These Apple features may be used for enhancing security, but the main purpose for which they have been designed is to provide enhanced control of the computer vendor on how the computer that they have sold, and which is supposed to no longer belong to them, is used by its theoretical owner, i.e. by allowing Apple to decide which programs are run by the end user.
by bsenftner | 2025-04-06 11:39:49+00:00
Nice work, but... people do not want documentation, they want to ask someone that knows both the software they do not know and they want someone that knows what they are doing already, so the developer gets simply told what to do without having to think or do research on their behalf. Yes, this is lazy ass, this is dangerous, but it is how people behave.

I'd think something as dumb (for the user, but complex to make) as a GraphRAG system that already has a developer's code repo and design docs in the system, and is then able to be given "candidate libraries" which the GraphRAG+LLM reasoning agent then evaluates the candidate against the active project for compatibility. That would be one decent application, but the better one is once a "candidate library" is accepted, that GraphRAG+LLM agent can just-in-time explain to the developer how a library works and should integrate with their active code base than any documentation.
by macleginn | 2025-04-06 11:40:45+00:00
With some architectural modifications, such as FlashAttention and Ring Attention, we never need to "materialise" the NxN matrix, so the memory constraints have not been a real issue for a couple of years now. As for the processing, I suppose that models operating with larger context windows will impose some kind of block sparsity on the attention weights, so they won't have to do the compute for NxN weights either.

A less obvious, but in the limit more serious problem with such large contexts is the training data. There aren't that many documents with 10M tokens to give to the model at test time, let alone for training. The creators of the IBM granite model series had to use synthetic data to scale even to 128k tokens during training. Overall this looks more like a marketing statement to me.
by chneu | 2025-04-06 11:41:12+00:00
It's energy drinks specifically. Multiple studies have found that the combination of caffeine + other stimulants produce heart issues that caffeine alone does not produce.

1 in 3 American children drink at least one energy drink per day. 2/3rds of teens have had an energy drink within the last 3 months.

The US sees a weirdly high amount of hospitalizations related to energy drinks. It's a problem.

This stuff stresses the heart way more than necessary and by their early 20s a lot of kids are showing heart issues.
by joshvm | 2025-04-06 11:42:02+00:00
Unless I'm missing something - do the notes cover neutrino astronomy somewhere else? Aside from the general discussion on stellar evolution. Shame, because the detection of pre-optical neutrino emission from 1987A by Kamiokande (and others) was a fantastic theoretical confirmation. Essentially when the core collapses, the environment around the surroundings are optically opaque, but the neutrinos sail on through so you'd expect to see them before the photons.

https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1987ApJ...318L..63B/abstra...

I would recommend Telescope in the Ice as one of the best introductions to modern neutrino detectors - why and where they're built. Also provides a good insight into how a big collaboration is formed, funded and operates. I've worked for IceCube so I'm somewhat biased, but the book is great just for the history.

IceCube has an entire processing pathway (on ice) that is specifically designed to trigger on a supernova detection. One of the very few science results that would page us, and why uptime is absolutely critical to the experiment. On the one hand, we can't point the detector and we don't know where the signal will come from, so it's not predictable (and it's highly transient). On the other, becuase the burst happens shortly before the optical, we can use neutrinos to trigger optical observations as fast as possible - pretty much the whole observing community will drop what they're doing if a star blows up.

I believe we'd expect the whole flux through the detector to bump up above the background, at least at IceCube. PDF: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/309/1/0...
by Amekedl | 2025-04-06 11:43:24+00:00
Ever heard about benchmark contamination?

Ever tried to explain a new concept, like a new state management store for web frontend?

Most fail spectacularly there, sonnet 3.7 I had reasonable ""success"" with, but not 4.5. It faltered completely.

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Looking at training efficiency in this now, and all the other factors, it really is difficult to paint a favorable picture atm.
by Teleoflexuous | 2025-04-06 11:43:25+00:00
I come to shill my webapp for background noise because it has a twist not appearing in anyone's recommendations.

Whenever I'm switching between tasks (thinking vs reading vs writing) I'd either turn the sound off or on, given I needed more or less attention at the moment. Minor problem with that was that sometimes unexpectedly I'd stick with the new task longer than expected, start to get bored, but w/e background sound I had on didn't match the task, so I'd look for something else... Overall a bit annoying for some groups of tasks.

I'm experimenting with mixing music with podcasts with extra noise and turning it on and off, but I also made https://stimulantnoi.se/ (with extra reading on psychological basis of the design and link to open source standalone desktop app on https://incentiveassemblage.substack.com/p/why-is-nobody-ser...). It allows for mixing (including uploading additional) sounds into sets and binds switching between those whole sets to media keys for quick access.