MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by caseyy | 2025-05-15 13:48:38+00:00
All these fines are coming, but corporate lawyers stall as much as they can. Then, they appeal first-instance court decisions to stall some more. And they do get fined, 3-7 years down the road. Then, they change tactics just enough to violate a different law. If they were to change the nature of the crime more often, they'd open themselves to more prosecution.

But big tech can handle a few government penalties every decade. It even creates moat - artificial barriers to market entry. The multiplicity of penalties is insurmountable for new market entrants, but pocket change for the established ones. For example, the UK Online Safety Act is putting all the small social media sites out of business in the UK, but it won't change moderation standards at Facebook. Ergo, it has become Meta's moat. "If a fine is set for a crime, then it's only a crime for poor people".

Tech is full of clever and fast people who run circles around slow-moving government bureaucracies (even judicial). These courts need to resolve these cases every week. If it's 1 week for first-instance, 1 week for appeals, that's the pace that would stop big tech. Twenty-seven fines with a bite a year would have the intended effect.

But we're talking about a "landmark" GDPR win in this thread that took about 5 years. And the fines so far are less than 500 euros per data collector (250k euro fine / 600+ companies in IAB). It will not even warrant a footnote in GAAP financial statements at the end of the year for these companies; they'll just put it in operating expenses (along with the 1,500 euro office coffee machine, 3x more expensive than the privacy violations). A small blogger collecting analytics data incorrectly may not have much to eat in the month they get fined 500 euros (not that they will have had much to eat in the months of expensive court proceedings), but of course, they also risk the full extent of the penalties.
by taeric | 2025-05-15 13:48:46+00:00
I keep meaning to play with both. I don't know how to structure a project around it, though. :(

For fonts, I think it would be fun to basically make a tiling font where you can basically make something like a dragon tiling by just playing with the letters.

And kudos on that calculator! Sounds fun. Boo on the TA for giving you a C. Presumably it could be executed. When I was a TA in college, that would go a log way to getting a better grade. My not understanding something was a problem on me, not any student.
by ecb_penguin | 2025-05-15 13:48:51+00:00
You don't have to be an attorney to be absolutely sure only providing SMS is not discrimination.

> I'm not talking about unreliable SMS delivery

Why? That's what this is about. Everyone, including hill people, have the same problems with the same technology. Ergo, not discrimination.

> I'm talking about banks not accepting other options like passkeys, software/hardware OTP keys which are more secure than SMS

I'm going to sue Apple for not adding satellite to my iPhone. It's discrimination that when I go into the mountains, I don't have reliable coverage.

See how silly that is?

> I'm not an attorney

Then why are you confident about the outcome of court cases?
by superkuh | 2025-05-15 13:49:03+00:00
I do not think that more in-house cloudflare-only "standards" open washed through their IETF employees, both of which raise the friction to participation in the web even higher for actual humans, are the way to go. Especially setups which again rely on centralized CAs and have tiny expiring lifetimes. Seems like pretty soon there'll only be one or two browsers which can even hope to access sites behind cloudflare's infrastructure. They might as well just start releasing their own browser and the transformation to AOL will be complete.
by throwanem | 2025-05-15 13:49:15+00:00
> Er, that word does not mean what you are saying. "Antithesis" would be closer.

No, I meant specifically the opposing point on a globe, and chose the correct word to denote that concept. Metaphor is not error.

To the rest, knowledge of the concept of orthogonality would have saved you several paragraphs. So would exhaustively defining your terms. You've cast hard/soft as orthogonal to rigorous/fantastic and I can imagine no intuitively less coherent thesis; much work remains to make it make sense.

It has not escaped my notice that you've implicitly projected from my metaphor's three dimensions in a sphere, into two on a flat plane. I think that has so far escaped your own notice. Let's see if pointing you directly at the error helps you find the root cause.

Also, while HN's markup does not predate Markdown, it fails to emulate. Delimit with asterisks, not slashes, for emphasis.
by 7thaccount | 2025-05-15 13:49:21+00:00
With Python I can often do some task in like half a page of code with zero boiler plate. Just some loops and a couple of objects and a library call. I don't even write classes most of the time and the state is all global. In Java, there is just sooo much more for the equivalent Python code. Maybe asking an LLM will save some time, but yeah ...there really is a lot more ceremony with Java.

Of course Python has some restrictions due to the garbage collector. Good catch on that as it is if course true and limits you in other areas I don't care about. I was mainly referring to scripting needs where some languages really do shine above others. There's a reason Python is ubiquitous in that area and Java is not. Just like there's a reason Java and C# are ubiquitous in large enterprise software and Python is not.

To summarize though, I think I understand your point, but we're getting lost in semantics haha.
by AndrewDucker | 2025-05-15 13:49:29+00:00
The modern mortgage market is largely based around multiple people with jobs.

Once you have a kid either one of those people is taking 5 years out of work or they're paying nursery fees for the next 5 years. Either of which is incredibly expensive (£15k per year in the UK for full-time childcare).

So a lot of people decide "Well, I didn't fancy children that much."
Show HN: Merlin – an AI executive assistant that triages your inbox and calendar
by adeolaadeoti | 2025-05-15 13:49:50+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Merlin because I was overwhelmed trying to stay on top of email, meetings, and Slack while leading frontend at a fast-paced startup. I just wanted something that could help me figure out what actually mattered — and act on it, fast.

Merlin connects to Gmail, Google Calendar, and Slack. It: • surfaces your highest-impact priorities (e.g. VIP emails, missed follow-ups, urgent meetings) • drafts replies in your voice • accepts or declines meetings based on context • builds your daily plan before you open your laptop

You can interact with it like a chat assistant. Think of it as an AI chief of staff — focused, proactive, and built for founders and busy professionals.

We’re launching today and looking for early testers. Would love your feedback — brutal or kind.

Live site: https://merlin.computer

Happy to answer any questions!
by Rochus | 2025-05-15 13:49:52+00:00
Interesting article, thanks. I'm also a Gen X guy and still don't own a smartphone ;-)

Not sure whether it has indeed anything to do with smartphones, but I've noticed that in the last five years, more and more posts start with "I"; in the past, people posted titles like "A new software that does this and that"; today, you increasingly see titles like "I developed a software"; so there was indeed a significant move from things to personalities.

Interestingly, anonymity is growing at the same rate, so that, for example, on Spotify, more and more people are selecting music solely based on playlists or mood, as if it were a commodity, and they don't care at all who the composer or musician is.

It is also interesting to note that during the same period the decline in the value and respect accorded to achievement and authority has accelerated. I still remember a time when a doctorate in science carried a certain amount of public recognition and authority. Instead, today companies behave as if university degrees did not exist.

I would say that in order to remedy the "ego pandemic" postulated by the author, people need to start appreciating the achievements and experiences of others again.
by PopAlongKid | 2025-05-15 13:50:25+00:00
I was inspired by this comment to install Netscape 7.02 from my installer archive.[0] It too has a logo with meteors, but it is circle-shaped instead of square, and the meteors follow a more winding path from top to bottom.

Interestingly, when I first tried to install, it said something like "A version of Netscape is detected already running", which is because as you state Firefox was based on Netscape code. Here is the "About" description:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.2; en-US; rv:1.0.2) Gecko/20030208 Netscape/7.02

[0] I tried earlier versions, but they all wanted to download the full install from an FTP site that is no longer responding.
by drabbiticus | 2025-05-15 13:50:33+00:00
The specific cherry-picked examples from GP make sense to me.

data + plural = datasets data - plural = datum

If +/- plural can be taken to mean "make explicitly plural or singular", then this roughly works.

king - crown = ruler

Rearrange (because embeddings are just vector math), and you get "king = ruler + crown". Yes, a king is a ruler who has a crown.

king - princess = man

This isn't great, I'll grant, but there are many YA novels where someone becomes king (eventually) through marriage to a princess, or there is intrigue for the princess's hand for reasons of kingly succession, so "king = man + princess" roughly works.

king - queen = prince queen - king = woman

I agree it's hard to make sense of "king - queen = prince". "A queen is a woman king" is often how queens are described to young children. In Chinese, it's actually the literal breakdown of 女王. I also agree there's a gender bias, but also literally everything about LLMs and various AI trained on large human-generated data encodes the bias of how we actually use language and thought patterns. It's one of the big concerns of those in the civil liberties space. Search "llm discrimination" or similar for more on this.

Playing around with age/time related gives a lot of interesting results:

adult + age = adulthood child + age = female child year + age = chronological age time + year = day child + old = today adult - old = adult body adult - age = powerhouse adult - year = man

I think a lot of words are hard to distill into a single embedding. A word may embed a number of conceptually distinct definitions, but my (incomplete) understanding of embeddings is that they are not context-sensitive, right? So averaging those distinct definitions through 1 label is probably fraught with problems when trying to do meaningful vector math with them that context/attention are able to help with.

[EDIT:formatting is hard without preview]
by mr_toad | 2025-05-15 13:52:03+00:00
The mathematical concept is symmetry (which differs a bit from the layman’s definition).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symmetry_(physics)

Much of the universe, and the laws of physics are symmetrical. But condensed matter exhibits forms of asymmetry, and emergent behaviour. Organisation reduces the possible microstates of a system, and thus breaks symmetry.
by pimlottc | 2025-05-15 13:52:07+00:00
The tagline is a bit confusing. Saying a movie is “on” a website strongly implies the film is directly watchable on that site (e.g. “best films on Netflix this month”). So at first I thought maybe this was perhaps about the best illustrative video clips uploaded to Wikipedia, or public domain films.

A clearer description might be “Discover the best movies through Wikipedia” or “via Wikipedia”. Or perhaps some like “Using Wikipedia to discover the best movies”.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-05-15 13:52:32+00:00
Except computers attempt to model mathematics in an ideal world.

Unless your problem comes from something side effects on a computer that can’t be modeled mathematically there is nothing technically stopping you from modeling the problem as mathematical problem then solving that problem via mathematics.

Like the output of the LLM can’t be modeled. We literally do not understand it. Are the problems faced by the SRE exactly the same? You give a system an input of B and you can’t predict the output of A mathematically? It doesn’t even have to be a single equation. A simulation can do it.
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-05-15 13:52:43+00:00
Finding a dropped yubikey and immediately having access to someone’s google account is simply reasonably a bridge too far if that ever became commonplace. Someone decided not to allow that footgun to the public.

It’s no inconvenience though since the yubikey with a button to press and a yubikey with a biometric button to press work the same.
by neogodless | 2025-05-15 13:53:19+00:00
I agree in some ways, that phone software pushing itself into the dashboard is more worrisome. Just today I was skimming an Equinox EV review that said there's a weird interplay between the center screen and dashboard, where you'd have to reach over to the center to "push" certain modules into the dashboard.

What I guess I don't agree with is that Apple has a monopoly on car interfaces. There's a similar duopoly here between Google and Android.

Still I think the ideal might be... light integration with the automotive operating system, with that mostly controlled by the automaker, while the entertainment center is largely user-controlled, including options to use the phone-provided in-screen systems like CarPlay and Android Auto.

It hasn't, historically, been a strength of automakers to make great integrated automotive operating systems, but it is somewhat of a differentiator for buyers so we can hope that competition improves things. If someone like Mazda continues to make a fast, fluid, intuitive operating system that also supports Android Auto and CarPlay, that's great.

But... the auto sales model, I think, works against proper competition. Because there are other major factors that buyers use to make their decisions. While every GM electric car article has a few vocal "no carplay, no buy" comments, GM is still steadily increasing their EV market share. It'll never be fully... discrete.

(Not like when it was more popular to rip the whole radio out of the dashboard and put your own Pioneer/JBL/etc system in there.)
by yobbo | 2025-05-15 13:53:26+00:00
I suspect (in a common pattern) the main thing that blocks making performance a priority is that it equates to reordering various ranks among developers and product managers.

When performance supersedes "more features", developers are gatekeepers and manager initiatives can be re-examined. The "solution" is to make performance a non-priority and paint complainers as stale and out-of-fashion.
by AudreChad | 2025-05-15 13:53:53+00:00
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by coldpie | 2025-05-15 13:54:04+00:00
It's been so bizarre to see that spike in popularity in the past couple years. I was big into Touhou in high school in the early-mid 2000s. I listened to Bad Apple and the rest of the IOSYS Touhou library on burned CD-Rs in my car (yeah I was super cool). Then, 20 years later the tune is suddenly everywhere, hahah.
by paulddraper | 2025-05-15 13:54:12+00:00
Depends on the read/write workload and row size, but yeah after 100-200m rows PostgreSQL vacuums can take a while. And index rebuilding (which you have to do on an active table) too.

It all depends though, sometimes 1b is passe.

But 100m is a good point to consider what comes next.
by alamsterdam | 2025-05-15 13:54:35+00:00
Yes, I was wondering what is to stop you replaying the same PoW multiple times. All I can find is:

To prevent the vulnerability of “replay attacks,” where a client resubmits the same solution multiple times, the server should implement measures that invalidate previously solved challenges.

The server should maintain a registry of solved challenges and reject any submissions that attempt to reuse a challenge that has already been successfully solved.

This doesn't seem very scaleable? Or am I missing something?
by aaronbaugher | 2025-05-15 13:54:35+00:00
Right. Some of us are old enough to remember Jesse Jackson's Rainbow/PUSH Coalition in the 90s[1]. One of the ways they attacked racism was to find a large corporation where the racial diversity of the employees didn't match that of the local community. They couldn't just sue the company yet then, so they would start a media campaign, promising boycotts and demonstrations, unless the corporation changed its ways. Many large corporations did, signing agreements with Jackson's organization promising to do better, and making a kind donation to the organization to help to continue the work.

So even before disparate impact became a legal threat to corporations, executives were feeling the pressure to comply with whatever the current expectations were on the matter.

[1] https://www.rainbowpush.org/push
by buggeryorkshire | 2025-05-15 13:54:48+00:00
We've had issues with Carplay and AA over wired and non wired connections in our motorhome (camper van for you yanks)

So we've got a 5g router with wifi in there - if that's on whilst you're driving the phone, whether iphone or android, will not connect to the headunit so no Carplay / AA.

These things are still extremely buggy which is hilarious considering how long they've been around.

(not to mention losing the connection on both AA and Carplay when going through a toll booth in France)
by alphabettsy | 2025-05-15 13:55:23+00:00
I thought it might be satire, but you’re worried about the poor car companies?

You’re right that phone giants have too much power, but car companies are already selling our data and injecting ads or preferred partners into the infotainment. It’s CarPlay that currently lets you avoid the abysmal and often subscription-based experiences they’re pushing.

I would love to see more open systems that would allow third-parties or users to provide software for vehicles.
by gwbas1c | 2025-05-15 13:55:28+00:00
They were hooked until the end. It was quite late for them, but school vacation so I didn't push them to bed.

I didn't know the story going in.

At least if I was their age, I wouldn't have reacted to the end. I didn't become sensitive to tragedy until I was in my 20s, except that I cried when I read Bridge to Terabithia when I was 10 or 11.
by FinnLobsien | 2025-05-15 13:55:53+00:00
Would love for this to be true, but how much of this is an intellectual writer talking about how other intellectuals (a novelist, Patrick Collison) liking literature?

I'm not saying it's not happening outside of that bubble. But I will say that most people aren't novelists and taking a metro in a big city (a decent proxy for a cross section of society, at least in that city), I see about 30 people scrolling TikTok/Reels for each person with a book.
by the_af | 2025-05-15 13:55:54+00:00
Very cool.

Some of these I had never heard of, and some of course are early internet history that happened when I was too young. It's crazy how some still seem very recent in my memory, like Homestar Runner. It still feels like yesterday.

Never heard of the helicopter game though. An early "Flappy Bird"!

I wish the series continued past 2007, since there are some interesting artifacts beyond that date.
by politelemon | 2025-05-15 13:56:22+00:00
Well I didn't expect to be this interested in the details. Quite a few things I don't know about.

Is suspend to RAM the same as hibernate or something else?

It isn't clear to me but is the author indicating that Linux kernel support for 2.5GbE is still early stages, would it be better to wait a while before getting a motherboard with 2.5?

There's a diff being presented between two lshw outputs? How is that diff shown?
by _verandaguy | 2025-05-15 13:56:29+00:00
I know enough about 3D rendering to know that Gaussian splatting's one of the Big New Things in high-performance rendering, so I understand that this is a big deal -- but I can't quantify why, or how big a deal it is.

Could you or someone else wise in the ways of graphics give me a layperson's rundown of how this works, why it's considered so important, and what the technical challenges are given that an RGB+D(epth?) stream is the input?
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-05-15 13:56:50+00:00
>We're already under 1080p surveillance 90 percent of our waking lives out of the house.

Who's "we"? This is not the case where I live. I live in an EU country with very strict laws for privacy and restrictions on video surveillance. You aren't allowed to film random people on the street without their consent, except with some exceptions.

AR glasses would require retooling of such laws, not to mention gaining the public's trust as "send all public images to some megacorp's severs without their consent" is not a popular public opinion here. In Germany for example Google street view was not allowed for a long time also because privacy laws and public outrage(justified and not).

I also dislike your defetist line of thinking "well, we're under 24/7 surveillance anyway, so we might as well allow Apple and Google to spy on us in public now while we're at it". How about NO, how about they can fuck right off.

Though I think long term enough into the future, it's inevitable that governments, even within EU, will allow these corpos to have this surveillance as long as the data is processed and hosted in the EU, and the EU gov gets front door access to the data to spy on its citizens to prevent us from voting right wing candidates.
by brookst | 2025-05-15 13:57:02+00:00
Are all contributors to open source under a lifetime obligation to never change their level of investment?

Kind of a rhetorical question I guess, for a while I maintained a small open source project and yes, I still get entitled “why did you even publish this if you’re not going to fix the bug I reported” comments. Like, sorry, but my life priorities changed over the intervening 15 years. Fork it and fix it.
by Dpbm | 2025-05-15 13:57:33+00:00
Recently, I had a class about hill climbing and local optima in college. The subject was kinda magic for me, and it became even better when a challenge was given to us.

During our class, we approached the N-Queens problem using this algorithm, and latter our task was to improve this implementation to escape the local optima.

As I was super excited, I spent my entire weekend implementing my solution and documenting it.