MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by microtonal | 2025-05-15 09:15:59+00:00
According to Meta, their personalized advertising alone generates over $0.5 trillion of economic activity per year.

Why should I care that they make a boatload of money while making the life of everyone else crappier? Advertising turns everything into shit.

Crapware pre-installed onto your brand-new phone or laptop [1]? Advertising. Pervasive tracking added to Windows? Generating profiles for advertising. Smart TVs sending regular screengrabs to Samba TV? Analytics for advertising. Like your $2000 smart fridge? It's going to be much worse because Samsung is piloting advertising. Every tech product is getting infected by this disease, both shoving unwanted ads into your face and tracking your pervasively.

Of course, someone is going to argue that we cannot have 'free' products without advertising. In the end the consumer is paying for advertising as part of (increased) product prices.
by guidedlight | 2025-05-15 09:16:30+00:00
I remember working in a large corporate on a central integration broker (from memory it was Java based).

The CPU required for marshalling and demarshalling JSON and SOAP was easily over 80% of the workload. And yes, you are right SOAP is worse.

I always thought is probably an opportunity to create hardware accelerators for this type of workloads.
by DGPRIME | 2025-05-15 09:16:36+00:00
The wait is nearly over — Kingdom Hearts Missing Link is on the horizon, and anticipation is through the roof. Whether you’re a series veteran or a newcomer eager to dive into the next chapter of Sora’s journey, one thing’s clear: preparation is key. That’s why we’ve put together the Kingdom Hearts Missing Link Pre-Launch Mastery Kit — a free, comprehensive bundle that will transform you into a bona fide insider long before launch day. Packed with lore primers, character breakdowns, a pre-order checklist, and exclusive wallpapers, this SEO-friendly guide ensures you won’t miss a beat. Read on to discover everything inside, and learn how you can claim the kit by completing a quick survey!
Show HN: A community leaderboard for indie makers on Twitter
by chrisBHappy | 2025-05-15 09:16:56+00:00
I made a simple site to highlight indie hackers building cool things on Twitter What it does: • Shows a live community leaderboard of makers on X (Twitter) • Anyone can login, vote & add new players to the board • Top 3 makers are shown on top with Gold, Silver & Bronze medals
by forgotoldacc | 2025-05-15 09:18:30+00:00
That's a byproduct of being a site made by an English speaker.

Kind of hard to make a site about things you don't know from languages you don't speak. It's completely possible for people from other places and speakers of other languages to make their own versions of this site.

And I don't mean that in a dismissive way. Every culture has their own history. It's worth recording.
by namaria | 2025-05-15 09:19:10+00:00
> I think another good historical analogy is the invention of writing. In Phaedrus[0] Plato argued that it may make people dumber.

No, he doesn't. Plato quotes Socrates quoting a mythical Egyptian king talking with the god that had supposedly created writing and wanted to gift it to the Egyptians. The entire conversation is much more nuanced. For one, writing had existed for three millennia by the point this dialogue was written, and alphabetic Greek writing had existed for several centuries.

Plato does make the point that access to text is not enough to acquire knowledge and it can foster a sense of false understanding in people who conflate knowing about something with knowing something, which I think is quite relevant when you see people claiming than can learn things from asking LLMs about it.
by sebstefan | 2025-05-15 09:19:50+00:00
It's always "revolutionizing our internal workflows" or "30% of code at Microsoft is AI now" but never improving a codebase you can actually see

Making a significant improvement to the state of the art of one particular algorithm is one thing, but I've seen new tools do that since the 80s

I'll be convinced when LLMs start making valuable pull requests, non-obvious corner cases or non-trivial bugs in mature FOSS projects
by therockhead | 2025-05-15 09:20:15+00:00
I need to think about this a bit more, but I think I would love a thread feature in ChatGPT, so that it has the context up to the point of creation but doesn’t affect the main conversation. It would help in two ways, it keeps the main topic from getting poisoned , and allow me to minimise text clutter when i go off on tangents during the conversation.
by pjc50 | 2025-05-15 09:20:38+00:00
Well, yes. Once you demonstrate that a good idea works and the doom doesn't come to pass, it gets copied. It's easy to claim that something doesn't work when nobody's doing it. Making the same claims when someone nearby is doing it and it works requires a higher level of reality-denial. Now, there's a lot of reality-denial to go round in politics these days, but occasionally a good policy slips through.

The EU ICE phaseout is set for 2035.
by pbmonster | 2025-05-15 09:22:23+00:00
>> Why do LLMs need user data to operate?

> Training data?

What purpose would user data serve in your training set? What's the application of the LLM after it's done training?

I'm sure we all understand why the user doesn't want his private data in the training set, but I also don't understand why BigAI would want to train on this data. Except for AI-enhanced advertising, of course. But maybe... nobody should do this anyway?
by briandear | 2025-05-15 09:23:56+00:00
> 2. Makes the rest of the internet worse (e.g. people show MORE ads because they are less effective because they show me boats and I hate boats)

Back in the olden days, if you read a boat magazine, you’ll see ads for boat stuff. This was always fun for me — if I’m ready a motorcycle racing magazine, I’ll see ads for cool things that I had no idea existed and that would be useful to me. With “targeted” ads, it becomes an echo chamber — I see ads that are “tailored” for my alleged current interests, but nothing that helped me discover new things that I could become interested in.

What’s wrong with context-based ads? If I’m reading about Thailand travel, then the publisher should sell ads related to SE Asia travel.

Why am “I” being customized to rather than ads being relevant to the content?

If you want to reach boat enthusiasts, then advertise on content related to boats (or perhaps water sports, etc.) You then don’t need to track “me,” but instead you can track “boat content. That takes the personal data out of it. This keeps me from being followed around the web trying to sell me a vacuum cleaner I already bought.
by TheDong | 2025-05-15 09:24:27+00:00
You're talking about the 21TB captured to the arctic code vault, but that 21TB isn't "all of public github"

Quoting from https://archiveprogram.github.com/arctic-vault/

> every *active* public GitHub repository. [active meaning any] repo with any commits between [2019-11-13 and 2020-02-02 ...] The snapshot consists of the HEAD of the default branch of each repository, minus any binaries larger than 100KB in size

So no files larger than 100KB, no commit history, no issues or PR data, no other git metadata.

If we look at this blog post from 2022, the number we get is 18.6 PB for just git data https://github.blog/engineering/architecture-optimization/sc...

Admittedly, that includes private repositories too, and there's no public number for just public repositories, but I'm certain it's at least a noticeable fraction of that ~19PB.
by imiric | 2025-05-15 09:26:00+00:00
> IMO data should be radioactive for companies, especially if it approaches PII.

That's an idealistic, but highly unrealistic, thought.

As long as a market exists that can profit from exploiting PII, and is so large that it can support other industries, data will never be radioactive. The only way to make it so is with regulation, either to force companies to adopt fair business models, or by _heavily_ regulating the source of the problem—the advertising industry. Since the advertising industry has its tentacles deeply embedded everywhere, regulating it is much more difficult than regulating companies that depend on it.

So this is a good step by the EU, and even though it's still too conservative IMO, I'm glad that there are governments that still want to protect their citizens from the insane overreach by Big Tech.
by richa_flutr | 2025-05-15 09:26:32+00:00
We’re launching Gauss v2, a browser-native, batteries-included physics engine powered by AI.

It lets you simulate complex physical systems — from human motion to fluid dynamics — straight from text prompts. Think “Unreal Engine for physics,” but accessible through a browser tab.

Built for developers, roboticists, educators, and anyone obsessed with the physical world.

We’re opening up early access + community feedback via Discord: https://discord.gg/EdC9EnND

Would love to jam with other HN folks building the future of physical intelligence.
by socalgal2 | 2025-05-15 09:26:44+00:00
Rented 25 Airbnb’s . half were bad. by bad I mean they were not as advertised. Claimed to have parking for my car. didn’t. claimed to have wifi. didn’t. claimed to be at a particular location on a quiet street, were actually several blocks away on a busy street. been to ones who’s hvac was so loud as to be unusable, etc…

I stopped using them. will not got back
by tialaramex | 2025-05-15 09:27:15+00:00
> For example, how would you use a Vec using stack memory for elements, instead of the heap? For the equivalent data structure in Zig (std.ArrayList), it's just a matter of using a stack allocator instead of using a heap allocator, which is an explicit decision either way.

In Rust it would likewise "just" be a matter of using the allocator we want. In this specific case we can see that's nonsense - there's a single stack pointer in the CPU so while it's perfectly possible to make two growable arrays (Vec or ArrayList depending on the language) on the heap, if we use the stack instead they're both obliged to somehow share that single stack pointer when growing, thus whether Zig or Rust this idea can't actually work, but for examples which do work the Rust and Zig doesn't look that different.
by neom | 2025-05-15 09:27:21+00:00
I go back and forth on the usefulness of considering morality particularly other than accepting it as a race condition/updater system/thing that happens. I have some more unique and fairly strong views on karma and bardo that would be a very long comment to get into it, but I think Vedic/Vedanta(Advaita) is good, I think this is a good doc: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyPwBIOL7-8
by senko | 2025-05-15 09:27:51+00:00
I hate tracking with a passion. I browse internet in incognito mode with ublock origin.

That said, I don't understand how TC String can be considered PII.

I haven't been following this case so probably miss a lot of context, but my understanding is that the TC String encodes user's preferences for which advertises to share your info with. For example, I visit example.com and deselect everything. This information then gets passed around so that advertisers know I don't want their advertising.

Isn't that kind of the point? I want them to know I don't want them. I'd rather setup that once and then not do it again for every site under the sun. Is the issue here that you can somehow be identified based on your tracking preferences alone?

The ruling here is confirmation of an earlier ruling where TC String was considered personal data. As an effect, the organization coordinating all this tracking (IAB) is considered data processor.

Is the ruling just a technicality (the fine is pretty low) because IAB isn't listed in data processor lists for all the sites I visit, or is there a deeper consequence arising from the ruling?
by jeroenhd | 2025-05-15 09:29:15+00:00
LLMs need too much data to ethically source their data sets. That's why they rely on aggressive scraping, user-provided prompts, and of course straight-up piracy to fill their datasets.

Outcry made Adobe and other such companies put (opt-out) user controls for gathering training data, but writers, especially writers on the internet, are usually ignored. I've seen even the angriest "AI is stealing my art if you use Dall-E you're a bad person" people use ChatGPT, because they don't seem to consider writing to be art or expression as much as they do their own works.

Textual data just doesn't seem to be valued, and as a result data scrapers often don't care about annoyances such as "ethics" or "consent" when it comes to gathering training data.
by voidspark | 2025-05-15 09:31:42+00:00
Are you employed at Google or OpenAI? Are you working on these frontier models?

In the case of medical questions it needs to know further details to provide a relevant diagnosis. That is how it was trained.

In other cases you can observe its reasoning process to see why it would decide to request further details.

I have never seen an LLM just ask questions for the sake of asking. It is always relevant in the context. I don't use them casually. Just wrote a couple of handbooks (~100 pages in a few days). Generating tens of thousands of tokens per session with Gemini.
by vman81 | 2025-05-15 09:32:09+00:00
> As long as a market exists that can profit from exploiting PII, and is so large that it can support other industries, data will never be radioactive.

The EU bureaucracy machine can be slow moving, but has the potential to fix this. The stricter the rules, the simpler the implementation. You could cut a LOT of the administrative burden by specifying what data is allowed to be stored at all, instead of what isn't.

Big tech needs to be put in their place, and as others have commented; if this kills your business model, your business model doesn't deserve to exist.
by immibis | 2025-05-15 09:33:05+00:00
The purpose of reCaptcha is to enhance your Google user profile and to deny legitimate users. How does this alternative accomplish those things?

This appears to be a proof-of-work, like Anubis. Real captchas collect much more fingerprinting data to ensure that only users with the latest version of Chrome, the latest version of Windows, and an Nvidia graphics card, can use the site.
by Adambuilds | 2025-05-15 09:33:15+00:00
In the healthcare industry, there have been instances where vital patient data was either lost or improperly handled due to lack of proper systems and oversight. In one case, a hospital that had relied on outdated paper records for years faced a crisis when an employee accidentally deleted critical data. It wasn’t until the hospital implemented an integrated digital system that could track and back up data that they regained trust with patients and stakeholders.
by sensanaty | 2025-05-15 09:33:21+00:00
> 1. Entrenches Google, Facebook, etc. because they are the only people that have enough money to comply with the regulation.

The article we're commenting on makes it clear the big guys aren't complying. Also, I reject the notion that you have to spend inordinate amounts of resources to comply, in fact it is the opposite. You don't spend money on data you don't store, after all.

Co. I used to work for is microscopic in comparison to FAANG, and we didn't have a single cookie banner or anything of the sort and have absolutely no problem complying with GDPR because we track nothing and collect nothing more than what is strictly necessary, mostly because of individuals like myself who push hard against any data collection that doesn't have a well thought out reason. Hell, even Github with their massive scale has no problem with not having cookie banners or anything else of the like. This is a problem of will, not resources.

> 2. Makes the rest of the internet worse (e.g. people show MORE ads because they are less effective because they show me boats and I hate boats)

Perhaps, but we're already drowning in them as-is. The internet is unusable without uBlock and DNS-level adblocking.

> 3. Makes data brokers even more important because companies can't get data anywhere else.

If we make data radioactive, then data brokers wouldn't be able to exist. What we need is stringent and broad laws that limit data gathering, period, regardless of the source. Whether you collect it yourself or pay someone else to collect it for you is completely irrelevant, both should be made equally painful. I'd also have no qualms with making sharing any data that you do collect even more of a pain in the ass and a nightmare for everyone involved, this whole gray market has net negative benefits to everyone.

> 4. Reduces competition because the incumbents will always have more data than startups (Nike knows I wear a size X and the startup can't ever get that data)

Why would Nike have this data in the system we're talking about (data radioactivity)? How is this data even useful to anyone, other than for tracking purposes to make a unique profile out of you? Companies shouldn't have this data unless it's a podiatric clinic or something like that, whether it be Nike or this imaginary Shoe startup that needs feet sizes for whatever reason.

I guess I could see there being genuine usefulness for people who have feet sizes that aren't the norm to find footwear that fits them, but there's no reason they have to have their entire essence tracked by every company on the internet for that.
by eftpotrm | 2025-05-15 09:33:43+00:00
I can't help thinking more startups need greybeards around. (Of which, realistically, I'm now one.)

Largest table 100 million rows and they were paying 6 figures for database services annually? I have one now that sits happily enough on an 8yo laptop. I've worked on systems that had similar scale tables chugging along on very average for 20 years ago MSSQL 2000 boxes. There just isn't a need for cloud scale systems and cloud scale bills for that data volume.

The problems they're describing should never have got that far without an experienced hand pointing out they didn't make sense, and if they'd hired that greybeard they'd have spotted it long before.
by literalAardvark | 2025-05-15 09:34:06+00:00
This is the part that I'm most confused about. How can it possibly be useful to try to sell me another fridge?

Sure, it might be useful to try to sell me another burger, or another nicotine gum, but something went very wrong in the data processing if I'm being resold on lifetime goods.

And it happens way too often.
by seviu | 2025-05-15 09:35:14+00:00
I still think they have full right to charge an amount. Apple doesn’t hold a monopoly.

That 30% is however ridiculous. But they can raise it to 90% if they want to find out. The user is not really hurt, just the developer. Eventually they won’t have developers.

No apps, no iPhone.

Not sure what the monopolistic take is. There is a lot of alternative smartphones with way more ram and great specs, that rival the best iPhone.

I live in Europe though, and over here Android dominates the market, and people use WhatsApp for messaging. A totally different world.
by dmos62 | 2025-05-15 09:35:26+00:00
It's a win, because people will not fear Google shuttering their experiments, and thus will be more likely to use them. It's also a win, in that it furthers a common good: if Google abandons a venture, why would they be upset if someone picks it up and succeeds? It's also a win, in that it boosts the open-source community (or industry, whatever you want to call it), which is also a win-win. If you want to by cynical, it would also be a win in that you could spin a narrative about how Google's monopoly-fueled profits trickle-down via open-source projects and thus unregulated capitalism works.
by OtherShrezzing | 2025-05-15 09:35:30+00:00
I find using tools like LMStudio, which lets you edit your chat history on the fly, really helps deal with this problem. The models you can host locally are much weaker, but they perform a little better than the really big models once you need to factor in these poisoning problems.

A nice middle-ground I'm finding is to ask Claude an initial conversation starter in its "thinking" mode, and then copy/paste that conversation into LMStudio and have a weaker model like Gemma pick-up from where Claude left off.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-05-15 09:37:51+00:00
Yeah, the market loves growth and services have been their growth lately so that being hit is a big deal for the stock price (and execs are bonused on stock price).

Additionally, because they control all of the payments on iOS they can provide much better targeting to advertisers for purchases, which open payment processes would reduce the value of.

But they've played this so badly that they are going to lose most of their app store revenue at this point. Sucks to be them I guess.
by koyote | 2025-05-15 09:38:37+00:00
> most people choose public transport over driving

Is that true? I was surprised when looking at the actual stats (most people in Sydney drive to work), but maybe there are many more people working in places other than the CBD skewing this.

When I was cycling in from Balmain, there were a huge number of cars stuck in traffic getting into the CBD every morning. Despite it only being an easy 15 minute cycle (or a 15 minute bus ride) from the peninsula.
by presentation | 2025-05-15 09:38:43+00:00
That’s a problem if the public transit system is solely geared towards sending people to the center. As a counter example there are lines in Tokyo that take different paths, like JR Musashino and Nambu lines, which do a big arc in the outskirts, or the Tokyu Oimachi Line, that does a line through southern suburbs, to name a few. Buses also fill in connections between lines that lack a direct rail connection (or you can go with scooter/bike shares)
by kaliqt | 2025-05-15 09:38:59+00:00
I think you fundamentally misunderstand the stack. Their main usage of the platform has to do with a E2E solution with avatars, audio, etc. all synced without issue. These features ship with the client and other private repositories wrapping the core.

However, for usage to HN users they would be (likely) more interested in the SDK, the core, the underlying system, and how it can fit their use cases.

If you want to understand a small part of the scale of this project, you are welcome to check out:

https://github.com/vircadia/vircadia-web https://github.com/vircadia/vircadia-web-sdk https://github.com/vircadia/vircadia-native-core
by rstuart4133 | 2025-05-15 09:39:07+00:00
> Much of the reasoning is to take away the tools

I'm missing something. The tool they are taking away in this case is the web browser. They are a dime a dozen. To wit: I am (somewhat) plugged into Google's ecosystem, and I don't use Chrome. Removing Chrome will do nothing to loosen Google's grip on me.

Yes, I'm sure Google used Chrome to shepherd a whole pile of features into the standard. Perhaps we would not have things like video, webrtc and drm if Google had not Microsoft owned the desktop. Microsoft tried valiantly to prevent it happening for years with IE6. But, it's more or less over now - modern browsers let web sites do most things once reserved for the desktop, and besides Microsoft has discovered it quite likes it's customers renting it's software running in their cloud instead of purchasing it outright. The horse has bolted, closing the gate now would be mostly a symbolic gesture.

Lets say Google is forced to divest Chrome anyway. I'm sure they would like to maintain the few proprietary hooks they do need for password management and the like. One way would be to continue to fund Firefox, and add make their own proprietary extension available for it. If they do that, what's the point?