MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cshimmin | 2025-05-25 01:38:13+00:00
One thing you need to keep in mind is that in the US things are stacked against people who would want to protest or engage in any kind of activism.

Take a day off work to go to a rally or peaceful protest? “At will” employment means you can be fired the next day, no reason given. You got fired? Virtually all workers in the US get their health insurance through their employer, so now you and your family just lost access to medical care. It’s a really rough job market in many sectors, so it could take a few months to get a job. But since you got fired without cause, you can at least try to claim some unemployment benefits. In California, that maxes out at something like $450 a week.

Meanwhile in France if they want to fire you they have to give like 3 months notice (or pay you out for that time). Healthcare is socialized so no worries there. And if you still can’t find a job in a few months IIRC there’s fairly reasonable social benefits available.
by Matheus28 | 2025-05-25 01:38:54+00:00
How about: each user creates an account with their legal ID. Obviously unique so they can’t create multiple using the same ID. Before the sale, everyone signs up. Once the sale is started, tickets are distributed using a lottery system for the users who signed up (so refreshing like mad doesn’t give any advantage). Can only buy up to 2 tickets per person (their own and an anonymous companion). ID must be shown and would be verified at entrance.

If you wanna be even more strict: You could allow up to X companions, but they must not have signed up with their own account (so they don’t have an advantage for doing so). And they must provide their ID before the event as well and arrive as a single party.
by cvoss | 2025-05-25 01:39:06+00:00
This tragic, horrifying, and truly disgusting story is now going to be my go-to whenever I have to rebut all those people on HN who insist that if the perpetrator successfully acquired the bitcoin, 1) he in no way "stole" it, 2) he morally and legally owns it now, 3) his other actions don't forfeit his title of ownership, 4) any attempt by an authority to recover the bitcoin is unjust, and 5) the Ledger is the infallible source of Truth and, thence, Morality.
by arthurcolle | 2025-05-25 01:39:24+00:00
Thank you for the feedback. Those 'transformation examples' are definitely one thing that I was sloppy with. All of the nice outputs are actually derived from pet photos that are legitimately "visibly similar" to the outputs, but I really wanted to push this out so I didn't do my proper diligence.

Here is a video walkthrough to show you some of the meat around image generation / sticker packing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xcn8dSt7CcQ

I have been working on more advanced features like 1) splitting images into separate images, and 2) re-packing into a single image sheet after validation that the 'biometric color palate' and the 'specific physical attributes that make this thing the thing it is' passes are both sufficiently high in terms of confidence level.

I wanted to initially just have a plain vanilla canvas that you plop images into and then have a "Loom" like experience for regenerating images / creating pseudo-pipelines with just touch/mouse commands and more, but I found that users said it was too opaque and required too much 'obscure prompt engineering experience' to click around to make outputs "pretty" (direct quote).

thank you for taking a look @wlesieutre, I really appreciate it
by janalsncm | 2025-05-25 01:41:53+00:00
> Those will issue you a Penalty Charge Notice (PCN) and points on your licence for a moving violation if you exceed the speed limit

That seems good? Either we think speed limit laws should be enforced or we don’t.

In the bay area where the speed limit seems to be infinity the effective speed limit is around 80mph even if the posted limit is 65.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-05-25 01:41:59+00:00
Eh. Not "vague-booking." Interesting appellation. Hadn't heard of it before.

There's fairly practical reasons for not disclosing these specifics in public. Some folks here would probably understand, quite well.

Like I said, I think that people oversharing on TikTok has gotten folks thinking that they have the authority to demand intimacy from anyone they want. If someone doesn't share their secrets, then "what are they hiding?" or "They are being fake."

Can understand it, but I'm not particularly sympathetic to that mindset. I certainly don't think that of others. I'm 63, and not interested in impressing anyone. I can share more than many, because I'm no longer looking for work, but I couldn't care any less, about being some kind of tragic archetype.
by throwaway843 | 2025-05-25 01:42:20+00:00
Google doesn't matter anymore.

1. GMail's sticky for mail. 2. YouTube exists as YouTube. 3. Maps is monopoly bundled into Android.

While on the backend, Google may suggest everything's integrated plus how wonderful the free lunch GCP is, the above three distinct products are all there is left.

AI killed search, it's a zombie that's well on the way to Yahoo! Yellow Pages relevance. Google killed everything else it had.

OP may find they're ahead of the game as they were forced to look beyond Google early.
by ShroudedNight | 2025-05-25 01:43:07+00:00
This is highly reminiscent of work I was exposed to in grad school on recombining library versions from different binary distributions in an attempt to diversify the attack surface of a system, but at a much more granular level:

https://people.scs.carleton.ca/~soma/pubs/bfoster-gecco-2010...
by BenoitEssiambre | 2025-05-25 01:43:31+00:00
I feel this article misses the main reason (unless it falls under "Build a better wheel") which is to build a wheel that is tailored and stays tailored to your purposes.

How often do I see people metaphorically trying to use a car tire on bicycle with thee excuse of not re-inventing the wheel. There can be great benefits for the parts of your system to be tailor made to work together.
by lolinder | 2025-05-25 01:44:55+00:00
It can be a science fiction result and still not actually result in time saved for the human operator on the whole. For me the jury is definitely still out on whether it results in net time saved and it's not for lack of trying.

Whether it ends up getting good enough in the near future that it does become a net positive both isn't the question being discussed and still remains to be seen.
by chubot | 2025-05-25 01:45:07+00:00
I like the production values, and the narrator is especially good at leaving spaces. When I watch other videos, it seems like they are trying to recite facts as fast as possible, and they don't take enough time to explain the terms / names / stories

And the sources

But IMO the main thing that sets it apart is the contextual knowledge, especially of geography, agriculture, materials, historical weather patterns, etc.

I was saying that I felt like I had a big hole in my knowledge.

But it also occurs to me that the field of history has advanced greatly since I was in high school in the 1990's, so it probably wasn't possible to make Fall of Civilizations then

I think all the technologies adjacent to say "Google Maps" (fine-grained global mapping, historical data sets) have increased our knowledge of history

And a lot of that tech is not very old at this point
by jsnell | 2025-05-25 01:46:05+00:00
> So what’s left?

If the profit per successful abuse event is $200, the author's suggestion of limits on credit card numbers or phone numbers won't work either. Those are only effective against scaled abuse up to something like $1 / event. Bank accounts would almost certainly be more robust, but that seems quite hard to implement outside of a handful of countries where the online auth ecosystem is built around banks.

With generic abuse background, but not knowing anything about the ticketing abuse ecosystem, is doing the sales on a first-come-first-serve basis an absolute necessity from a business perspective? There would be a lot more tools available if the problem was reframed from "decide instantly whether to sell this buyer a ticket" to "decide which 10k of these 100k intents of purchase received during the first 24h to sell the tickets to". And by more tools, I mean offline analysis and clustering, not just a lottery.

(You'd still want to combine that with strongly personalized tickets though. It'd be how you address for bots-as-a-service, not how you address buying tickets to resell.)
by anonymousiam | 2025-05-25 01:46:57+00:00
Thanks for asking. Yes, the calculator itself was the first "computer" that I owned, and there was nothing else to connect it to, or to emulate it with. (I had my own PDP-11 at work, and I had previously done batch-mode programming on an IBM 370.) I bought my 41C in 1979 (made in the US!), and spent several thousand dollars on peripherals over a period of about three years. It was a big investment in a platform that did not interoperate with anything else, and I ended up giving it all away. I didn't keep any of it, including all the programs I had written and stored on magnetic cards (a fine example of extinct storage media).

I may still have a spiral notebook, in which I did all of the code development. It would be a hard-copy of all the code I wrote. If I do still have it, I have no idea where it is. It sort of reminds me of the end of Citizen Kane.

Later on, I also got rid of my Synertek SYM-1 and all my CP/M platforms, except for one IMSAI 8080 S-100 box, which I eventually gave away to someone else. I didn't realize at the time (nearly 30 years ago) that the IMSAI 8080 was quite collectable, and was going for about $800 on eBay. Still, I didn't regret it much.

The old systems evoke a sympathetic nostalgia, but actually using them is an exercise in patience, and eventually evokes a desire for more modern systems.

I've still got some emulated retro hardware and some old software emulators, but I don't really use them much.
by nzp | 2025-05-25 01:49:03+00:00
I was looking to replace it for quite some time now due to the Safari extension and also the website being very buggy with tags for too long. I didn’t have time to investigate alternatives, so this announcement came as a relief for me — it forced me to finally address the issue. Can’t say I’m surprised with this move, since it felt like abandonware for years now. Switched to Goodlinks and am very pleased with it for now.
by waltbosz | 2025-05-25 01:49:13+00:00
I've played it with my kids. It's a simple and fun tycoon type game. You buy seeds, plant them, harvest crops, sell crops, repeat. Upgrade your crops, etc. There are gacha eggs that grow into pets that you buy with free game economy money . The few items that cost robux (which you buy with real world money) are not heavily advertised.
by nicole_express | 2025-05-25 01:49:40+00:00
"Grey is just closely spaced black/white lines" is an interesting problem to have; grey on the Apple II is always closely spaced lines, but the usual expectation is your TV will process it out (or just won't be high enough dot pitch to see the lines). So it seems like you might need a worse capture device?

These days I've been using a standalone AVerMedia ExRecorder 330 for HDMI captures, that's how the ones in the blog were captured (via the 5X, of course). The older blog posts I link to I think I was still mostly using an Elgato but it didn't work at all on Mac, so I can't imagine their Linux support is much better.
by skissane | 2025-05-25 01:50:55+00:00
> the X.500 directory system, a system from the 20th century which was never actually deployed

X.500 really was deployed – never at the scale the designers originally intended, as a single global directory system – but, as an enterprise directory system, yes it was – and it still survives in that role today, albeit as a legacy niche.

LDAP is a direct descendant of X.500 – it was basically taking the X.500 Directory Access Protocol (DAP, X.511), simplifying it somewhat, and porting it to run on top of TCP instead of OSI TP. Many early LDAP servers were just X.500 DAP servers with LDAP support added as an additional feature–and if you read the LDAP RFCs, large parts of them were written with that assumption, and don't make much sense unless you understanding the X.500 underpinnings

Nowadays, the most popular LDAP servers never implemented X.500, and few bother to implement the full set of X.500 semantics which LDAP supports – although one of the infuriating things about LDAP is that every implementation is a slightly different subset of the X.500 feature set.

X.400 survives in some applications–it is the basis of the NATO standard Military Message Handling System (MMHS) and also the Aeronautical Message Handling System (AMHS) used by commercial aircraft – and X.400 and X.500 were designed to be used together. I know vendors like Thales Group still sell X.500 directory servers for use with AMHS (and probably MMHS too)

Isode still sells M-Vault which supports both LDAP and X.500 DAP (X.511) – primarily for military applications
by frabcus | 2025-05-25 01:51:43+00:00
The option that strikes me as missing, is making users pay a cost before they are randomly entered in a lottery for the ticket.

So, for example, everyone pays $0.01 on their credit card, or does a holding charge on their credit card, or registers their identity. All in a 5 minute (or 1 day!) window. And then after the window, tickets are randomly distributed amongst every card which so registered.

You could check multiple things - phone and card and Government ID if necessary (lowering the privacy).

This also feels fairer and less stressful - instead of a lottery based on your internet access, or ability to run lots of browsers at once.

This feels harder for scalpers to do to me, as they need more fake identities, but I'd be curious about the actual ratios when trying it. What goes wrong?

Another one I predict is that you can't buy digitally. For examples, the Lewes fireworks display you have to buy tickets in person in a bookshop in Lewes. Doesn't help if you make a digital ticketing system though!
by johnea | 2025-05-25 01:52:29+00:00
I think we're agreeing actually. because:

> Mostly people are just apathetic

and

> OF COURSE the monopolistic corps should know everything

Are, de facto, equivalent.

Not caring allows the profit-motivated non-human legal entity to pursue whatever course of action it desires.

Not caring is granting permission for that action.

I'm going out on a limb here, and I hope I don't ruin my argument with this stretch analogy:

This reminds me of the situation people enter into when they are legally married. They agree to the legal terms and liabilities of a contract without disclosure of those terms. People are informed by family, peers and society that marriage is an expression of their love and devotion to each other. Then, those unfortunate enough to find themselves in a contentious divorce, discover that the many volumes of their state's family legal code don't actually contain any language at all about love and/or devotion.

There is a lot of language about who gets the money and/or the kids.

They're now subject to the rules that they agreed to when they said "I do", even though they had no idea about those rules at the time.

Is this analogy just bitter divorce vitriol? Yes, yes it is. And I hope you never have to experience seeing things from this perspective.

But to explicitly complete the analogy: the owners of, whatever snoop device, cared enough to buy it, they cared enough to AGREE TO THE EULA!, they cared enough to let that thing monitor their home conversations for years, but they were apathetic about the long term consequences of allowing a profit-motivated no-human legal entity all the rights granted in that many paged EULA that they so eagerly clicked OK to without reading.

Now we get to see a little glimmer of the consequences of that OK. And trust me, this story is by no means the end of those consequences.

This is facilitated by, and will continue to get worse, because: Mostly people are just apathetic
by stingraycharles | 2025-05-25 01:52:29+00:00
Fun fact: if you ask an LLM about best practices and how to organize your prompts, it will hint you towards this direction.

It’s surprisingly effective to ask LLMs to help you write prompts as well, i.e. all my prompt snippets were designed with help of an LLM.

I personally keep them all in an org-mode file and copy/paste them on demand in a ChatGPT chat as I prefer more “discussion”-style interactions, but the approach is the same.
by codethief | 2025-05-25 01:53:15+00:00
I find it quite astonishing there is no go-to build system / task runner yet for handling small to medium-sized monorepos across ecosystems.

I want a tool that

- allows me to define tasks with inputs (+ secrets) and outputs. Inputs can be files & folders from the repo, Docker images, build parameters / env vars, outputs from other tasks, … Typical tasks I have in mind are setup/build/test/deploy, which of course will typically depend on one another, thereby forming a pipeline or dependency graph.

- sandboxes/containerizes tasks by default (in particular: no access to repo file system / working copy, env vars, … beyond what's specified as inputs) but does provide easy escape hatches (for deployment pipelines, sharing venv/node_modules between task and working copy / IDE, …),

- by default automatically caches a task's output & logs for a given input, unless I explicitly tell it not to (again, deployment tasks!). Then, when running a task upon the user's request, it automatically figures out the dependency graph and runs only those tasks that have not been cached before. This includes the case of the task definition itself having changed. (Many tools allowing you to define tasks in a full-blown programming language struggle with detecting this reliably.)

- comes with monorepo support, so supports collecting definitions of e.g. the "test" task across subfolders/projects and running them all in parallel (as far as the dependency graph allows),

- is language-/ecosystem-agnostic, so that I can invoke whatever tool or shell script inside a given task.

- provides a sane configuration language (not YAML) – ideally a lightweight functional language that makes side effects very explicit,

- can be run both in CI and locally, without much setup effort. In fact, since the tool should be used as task runner for everything else in the repo, it should be easily bootstrappable after cloning the repo.

- can be integrated somewhat nicely with Github/GitLab/Azure DevOps/… (actually not that easy).

Dagger comes pretty close in terms of general idea but I'm not sure I like it so far.
by frazbin | 2025-05-25 01:53:53+00:00
yep totes. good style is sometimes proximate to good ideas because both indicate the author has spent lots of 'thinking tokens' on the thing, which is a costly and therefore sometimes-more-reliable signal. but i believe it falls apart under intensive selection -- the things we read are popular, and so on average are selection-survivors, which means they'll approach the optimal ratio of thinking token spend on style/vs substance for survival, which may not be the same as the best ratio for precise or insightful communication.

but the best communication survives too because it touches universal truths by connecting them with specific real phenomena. the worst (most harmful) communication survives because it frantically goodharts our quality evaluation process, even when it contradicts truth or reality. e.g. Orwell on the good side, L Ron Hubbard on the bad side. Unfortunately these categories are often not well sorted until after the principals are all dead (probably because everyone has to die before you can tell whether the values are universal or just generationally interesting), and there's a style-bar that has to be cleared before you even get to join the canon for consideration; interestingly this this would tend to increase the illusion that style is associated with substance, especially in older writing.
by tptacek | 2025-05-25 01:53:54+00:00
Bear in mind: different buyers and different price structured. You can get more selling a vulnerability to CNE shops (say: every intelligence organization in Germany), but you'll be accepting more risk --- the payments are effectively tranched (or, equivalently, back-loaded on "maintenance" fees), and if the vulnerability dies you're S.O.L. Apple also won't make you build all the reliable exploitation enablement tooling a CNE buyer will. So: they pay less.
by the_af | 2025-05-25 01:53:55+00:00
I think emails summarizing meetings, or making a case for something, or describing something, match the kind of writing PG means in his essay.

And like the commenter you're replying to, I think that LLMs today can write far better than your average coworker (assuming they don't go on a hallucinated tangent; then again some coworkers also do!).

So it's fair to compare LLMs and work emails.

Not to speak of work wiki pages (Confluence etc) describing technical things, decisions, policies, etc.
by gblargg | 2025-05-25 01:54:57+00:00
I think you need to invent it first, so you have no pre-existing ideas. Then you get the "doing it my way" out of your system and come to understand the challenges. Then when you see how it's done, you can see the wisdom of experience. Where it seems like it's poorly done, if you study you can see benefits to that.

A huge benefit to not re-inventing is that standardization is a big value. Compare auto tires to phone batteries (back when they were replaceable). Auto tires are standardizes whereas every phone used its own slightly differently shaped battery.
by dangus | 2025-05-25 01:55:17+00:00
Dude at least 80% of these activities you listed cost a significant amount of money.

Musical instruments are the opposite of cheap, knitting materials and art materials (even the cheap stuff) costs money, you can’t legally form a NPO for free and you won’t be able to volunteer very well if you can only physically travel to the center of town on rural public transit or bicycle your way around a wide rural area.

The kind of biking and hiking at the amount of distance and time we are talking about isn’t free either, a decent bicycle that can do heavy mileage will cost money to buy and maintain. Plus all these sports will cause you to burn more calories necessitating more expenditures.

(Also have fun riding a bicycle everywhere on country roads with two narrow lanes and 55mph speed limits)

Cooking creatively for a group isn’t really a part of a $300 survival meal planning budget, and it’ll get pretty boring without some of the kitchen equipment that helps with that hobby.

In addition to that a lot of stuff that is cheap was not actually budgeted by the author of the article. In his example there’s no home internet or water budget, so even washing clothes or playing a game online isn’t in the budget.
by dylan604 | 2025-05-25 01:56:16+00:00
I enjoy hearing about how kids are doing things like this. I'm also very jealous of the resources available to them. I started learning 3D modeling when Lightwave came bundled with the Video Toaster. There was no YouTube. The internet wasn't even a thing yet. Resources were very limited to me, to the point that I got frustrated with not being able to get past very rudimentary models but I kept playing. The thing that really killed my interest was the incredibly long render times on that 8MHz CPU. If you told me back then that real time rendering would be possible, I'd have laughed in your face.

If I had access to Unreal type 3D then, you wouldn't have been able to pull me away from the computer. So probably a good thing for me it wasn't!