MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ecocentrik | 2025-05-18 12:18:48+00:00
Cryptocurrency also empowers kleptocrats, dictators and warmongers to bypass sanctions and international banking controls, making it more likely that politically and economically oppressive states will thrive and persist for longer. The benefit to the individual is marginal compared to the benefits to actors that might limit that individual's other freedoms. Also, foreign exchange controls aren't the only form of taxation and there's nothing stopping governments from increasing taxation on something else to make up the difference.

Most arguments for cryptocurrency are just as weak as this one.
by antasvara | 2025-05-18 12:19:54+00:00
I can speak to some of it.

When items like this go up for auction, sellers often set a "minimum" price. If that isn't met, the item isn't sold and remains the property of the original owner.

As you've highlighted, the reserve price doesn't have to be guaranteed by the auction house. So if this price isn't met, nobody gets the item (unlike the standard which is that the auction house will buy the item for the reserve price).

The 50% is probably the guy rounding the estimate to make a point.

As for why 64.25 wasn't enough but 70 would have been, I don't know. My understanding is that a lot of pieces sell for above their high estimate, so I'd guess that the seller was expecting/hoping for that? I do also think that 35% versus 40% matters a lot more when that difference is 6 million dollars in absolute terms.
by faitswulff | 2025-05-18 12:20:03+00:00
> Rust projects are easier to hack on and contribute to.

This was actually the subject of a study at the University of Waterloo:

> We find that despite concerns about ease of use, first-time contributors to Rust projects are about 70 times less likely to introduce vulnerabilities than first-time contributors to C++ projects.

https://cypherpunks.ca/~iang/pubs/gradingcurve-secdev23.pdf
by Zanfa | 2025-05-18 12:20:15+00:00
> It prevents centralized entities being the gatekeepers to the modern financial world.

In theory, but it doesn’t in practice. Most crypto transfers never make it to the blockchain, they happen entirely in SQL databases of exchanges.

Also, Tether has complete control over USDT and can block or reverse any payment or freeze any account it wants. No bank or payment processor in the world has such centralized control over the traditional financial system.

If anything, crypto is more centralized by comparison. Both in terms of payment processors as well as wealth distribution.
by aikinai | 2025-05-18 12:20:40+00:00
That doesn't make any sense. It's supported on local phones for both iOS and Android. What iOS does that's special is enable FeliCa for all regions globally. It only affects people from outside Japan traveling there.¹

Since it's not free for them, I assume they determined the amount of people in their key demographic that visit Japan was worth providing a stellar experience. Considering 2.7 million Americans visited last year, it was probably a bet that's paying off.

¹ Or, incidentally, people who live there but purchase phones overseas to avoid an obnoxious camera shutter sound forced on at all times.
by Squeeeez | 2025-05-18 12:21:01+00:00
From the graph there, it seems like traffic peaked in 2013, and has been declining ever since. Blaming AI sounds a bit contrived IMHO.

And from having tried to contribute on several of their sites, it felt like they did not welcome casual helpers, but wanted significant investment upfront.

Not sure how much help a rebranding is going to bring at that point.
by stared | 2025-05-18 12:21:02+00:00
Every language rewired my brain, as you need to think in a different way. But nothing felt like using PostScript. I guess if I tried to use Assembly (well, my only experience is through playing Shenzhen I/O), the difference would be even more profound.

For many people, functional languages were a big paradigm shift. For me, not so much — my background is in mathematics and theoretical physics, so the functional way is the default way of doing things. So, for me, the functional approach (be it in JavaScript or Rust) brings comfort rather than enlightenment.

It’s always contextual, based on what you already know. Maybe if someone speaks German natively, PostScript comes more naturally — who knows.
by arh68 | 2025-05-18 12:21:15+00:00
I feel like the prices have gone up for years & years. I thought my Spyderco was a cheaper alternative to Benchmade, but now they're basically all $100+. $65 is now $130 or so.

My guess is collectors that'll buy at almost any price. Some knives from the '80s that used to cost $25 are simply eye-watering today (well past 10x).
by bobflorian | 2025-05-18 12:21:25+00:00
What can you do in PyCharm that you cannot do in VS Code? I recently switched from PyCharm to VS Code to maintain a project with 250k LoC in Python (Django) and VS Code has been like a breath of fresh air. While you may need to install some plugins to get it "just right", it's more extensible. PyCharm is more "batteries included", and maybe that's the rub here.
by mplanchard | 2025-05-18 12:21:44+00:00
Every county in Oklahoma, including the ones containing their cities, went for Trump in 2024. What you’re saying is often true, but GP is exactly right about some of the midwestern states.

The popular vote went ~2/3 in OK to Trump.

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_president...
by entropie | 2025-05-18 12:22:16+00:00
Pretty OT: A few month ago I tried to marry my simple note system with anki. My goal was to be able to send simple front/backside cards to an api and it would get integrated and I can use it immediately. Ofc, when I edit cards via my notes-backend, the cards in anki should update too.

Long story short: not possible with anki. It took like an entire day for me to realize its just not possible without diving deep into ankis sqlitedb and having the client installed on my server to interact in a horrible way with decks. I wrote my own space repetition [1] backend in a week and never looked back to anki. Ill intergrate FSRS in my software.

1: https://github.com/entropie/ha2itat/tree/main/plugins/entrom...
by Macha | 2025-05-18 12:22:56+00:00
I do think that Wanikani and Bunpro are kind of in a catch-22 on this compared to Anki. They've built their gamification features and UI on the idea that cards have specific buckets that they're in and something like FSRS is a lot more varied than that. Especially Wanikani, which has a system of unlocking more items based on your current items reaching a specific stage.
by surgical_fire | 2025-05-18 12:23:08+00:00
> The history of crypto is pretty much a story of technical people creating something interesting with a cyberpunk/ open ethos - then the financial industry realizing it can be exploited to make money in ethically dubious ways, while simultaneously destroying the philosophy behind it

This is not 1995 anymore, when there was an air of naive optimism about technology, and everyone thought that would only be a force for progress and good.

When crypto was on the rise, many people warned against it. There were many who were skeptical.

Those who were building it were in on the grift. Gesturing to some shadowy cabal of people that subverted crypto into something it was not meant to be is just giving a pat on the head to people that were willingly building something very destructive for their own damn benefit.

"I was just summoning demons because they look cool, I didn't expect those evil cultists to sacrifice a child in a pentagram" is not a valid line of defense.
by sigwinch | 2025-05-18 12:24:32+00:00
The inevitable bailouts will be breathtaking. We’re in a quadratic adoption phase to legitimize a currency faster than the public discovers its downsides. The first bailout will be in this administration and won’t look like an inflection point. It’ll look like printing fiat into a dark, lucrative, inaccessible hole.

Among average Americans, the biggest advantage for promoters is the widespread susceptibility to scams. FartCoin, $TRUMP, and BitCoin are equally buoyant unless you know just a little about the technology and culture. Demographics might change this before education does. That’s the second inflection point.

The third inflection point is how the politically-connected holders will manipulate hard forks, say due to a quantum breakthrough in Grover. Once we start seeing forged signatures, will we roll Ethereum back to last June? Or back to Tuesday?
by lordnacho | 2025-05-18 12:25:02+00:00
> Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did.

Heh, I told my kid this today on the way to dropping him off with a friend. We were listening to The Rest is History, about the Rolling Stones. They made the point that this common cultural experience started to become a thing roughly in the 60s.

When I was a kid, there were things that you just could not avoid. It was the same in many places: there was a national broadcaster, and maybe a second and third TV station. There were only so many things you could watch. Whatever TV series, music, or sports were on, you could be sure everyone else was also watching it.

It started changing in the 1990s where I grew up, completely changing from the start to the end. You got a bunch of channels. You could watch news from America and other places, which maybe deserves a footnote about immigrants being able to watch something from faraway for the first time. More options everywhere, but there was still momentum. You still watched the national news on the main stations, and sports was still there too. They also tended to curate the "best" foreign shows, so you didn't have to wait to get your dose of America.

Now that's finished. Everything is private now, you can watch whatever you want on your own screen (TVs got really cheap. When I was a kid, people would congratulate you when you bought a new one, like it was a car. Now I have more TVs than I can use.) You don't have to watch things at the scheduled time anymore, and you don't have to arrange your life around when the episodes come out.

The kids now watch a wider variety of content. There's still "local" fads that are maybe restricted to friendship groups, instead of being national phenomena. For instance my kid and his friends ended up watching One Piece, a Japanese production. But I never ran into other kids who were into it.

I also dare to say that the kids now watch lower quality content. This was already a thing when we got flooded with channels in the 1990s. There was a heck of a lot of mediocre crap on those 100 extra channels. But now it's a whole new world of terrible. Yes, I'm an old man. But it does seem like having curation would mostly bubble the good things to the top, and so when the curation went away, you got more stuff, but worse stuff. Similar to consumer products, the items at your department store tended to be reasonable, but when there's a webshop where you can buy anything at all, you have to sort through a pile of low quality stuff yourself.
by ddimitrov | 2025-05-18 12:26:18+00:00
If you don't like fiat there is always gold. If you really care about value, independent from the monetary system (post-apocalyptic safety), buy tools, grain, generators and oil, though many of these things are perishable and storage comes at a cost.

One must ask whether the Bitcoin valuation has raised 1000% because the fiat has inflated as much, or is it mostly driven by speculation. For reference point, the buying power of fiat currency has not changed dramatically during the same period.
by cableshaft | 2025-05-18 12:26:22+00:00
Certain fields need it more than others. Graphics and vide game development needs more math than web app development (well, usually. Sometimes you need to implement a formula), including trigonometry.

I used a bunch of trigonometry when I was making 2D action games, getting characters to move about the screen and move smoothly at all sorts of angles, for one example. I also used Sine functions a lot for UI animations, making things looks like they're hovering or oscillating up and down.

I think one of the benefits of these classes, though, and university classes in general, is that even if you don't use or really remember the specifics decades later, you're at least aware of how these problems can be solved, and can look up and verify potential solutions much quicker than if you hadn't ever been exposed to it at all.
by netsharc | 2025-05-18 12:26:25+00:00
If it's Android, you can install NewPipe.

For my Kodi box that is connected to a 24" monitor in my bedroom, the Youtube plugin used to work, but it got slower and slower. I've now created a PHP wrapper to yt-dlp, I load the webpage (hosted on my NAS) on my phone, paste the video URL, click download, and a while later the video is an MP4 video stored on my NAS, ready to view on Kodi.
by trustsafe | 2025-05-18 12:26:29+00:00
I'm not so sure that cyberpunk is dead, it's just that Billy Idol has better things to do with his time than try to co-opt something his manager read about in WIRED. The broken-circuit-boards-and-leather NiN aesthetic lasted for so long that it can't really be revived, which is 100% fine. I think now that a ten year old laptop that can run Linux, tor, and i2p is worth $20 means that now is more cyberpunk than ever.
by mdp2021 | 2025-05-18 12:26:49+00:00
It must be an epidemic of imbecility (to the non IE speakers: "inability to use tools from the lever ("baculus") on"), because I find systems I can ask questions to extremely empowering for learning.

Of course - as I have said frequently like Cato spoke of Chartago - I want them to be reliable, and substantially intelligent, and engineered through solid intellectual criteria (aiming towards truth and depth) - but even very humble LLMs have been able to occasionally return illuminating responses, when asked to explain an obscure phenomenon. Even very humble LLMs could be a leap forward when studying.

That some people fail in the ability to count because they were given calculators is certainly not inherent, not necessary. Again and again, these societies must focus on the roots - not "condemn heavy books that could cause trauma when used as projectiles".

But the trend is evident of an unduly "delegation to the machine": some symptoms friends of mine are dealing with right now are reliance on "negative blood tests" when the patient is bleeding, reliance on "car computer diagnostics" when the vehicle is sputtering...
by patchymcnoodles | 2025-05-18 12:27:12+00:00
I have a very different experience. For me the algorithm works pretty well. And I use youtube a lot since many years. Also have the paid subscription so no ads anymore (beside sponsor ads of course).

I get a lot of content I want and interested in, but I also have a long list of subscriptions. Sometimes I run into a rabbit hole, where I watch some completely different content and youtube then shows that for me for a while, even after I'm not interested anymore. But that is just for some days and then it stops showing it on my home feed.

So for me it does exactly what I want it to do.

Now I wonder, why is there such a massive difference in the experience?
by marcusb | 2025-05-18 12:27:18+00:00
Yes, but service technicians that are paid by the job often find ways to do a job in far less time using a different approach than the manufacturer suggests.

An example: I used to own a Saturn S-series. The manufacturer estimate for replacing the alternator was something like 4 hours of labor, and involved removing the power steering pump (which was above the alternator.)

It was possible to replace the alternator in about 30 minutes by removing the front passenger wheel and mud shield, and then accessing the alternator directly.
by safety1st | 2025-05-18 12:28:20+00:00
Speaking as someone who had a passion for journalism and wanted to become a journalist when I was in high school at the end of the '90s, these days I am comfortable with that industry being completely eradicated.

How did we get here? The Telecom Act of 1996 legalized cross-media ownership and an unprecedented degree of consolidation across all forms of media, news and otherwise. Those rules existed to promote local journalism and independent voices. We now have no local journalism and no independent voices that are staffed and budgeted for doing real, investigative journalism.

Now journalists say what their corporate parent tells them to say; the ones who refused were fired years ago. The ones who stuck around work really hard to obscure this fact because they're clinging to their jobs in a declining industry. We went from a press that was the envy of the world to a cartel of decaying shills. Either reform the industry and break up the monopolies or just terminate it and fire everyone.
by nayuki | 2025-05-18 12:29:03+00:00
I retained approximately one ticket in Japan. It was due to walking through a transfer exit gate at some station of the Tokyo Metro, which lets you walk through a non-fare-paid area to re-enter another station.

I also retained all the Shinkansen seat reservation tickets (特急券) back when I had the old-style JR Pass, where you always had to enter/exit stations with help from the station attendant - and not use automatic ticket gates. I haven't tried the current style of JR Pass (since maybe 2022?), but I imagine that the exit gate would eat your seat reservation ticket, just like if you had bought the ticket in cash.
by greatgib | 2025-05-18 12:29:04+00:00
Ground to earth opinion, it is crazy the disconnect of our world where people might afford or spend such an amount of money for a simple sculpture that is not that much beautiful or even unique, but just because of collector FOMO or investment based on name dropping of the author.

Imagine that it is the equivalent of 7 millions McDonalds meals, or 1000 years of an average US worker salary. All of that just for a decoration object that you will put on top of a chimney. And it is not even like that the original author is rewarded for his own work!
by rollcat | 2025-05-18 12:29:40+00:00
> Only fools would speak about crypto so confidently without doing a minimal investigation into its utility.

Only fools would speak about a technological solution without understating the reality, that technology still leans on society, power structures, and ability to enforce laws.

Civil disobedience works as a means to shift the rules, the balance of power; you can't maintain it perpetually. P2P eventually shifted the attention of the recording industry to online distribution. People jumped to Netflix and iTunes, because they became more convenient, while providing good value for the money.
by m0rde | 2025-05-18 12:30:20+00:00
This looks fun, thanks for sharing. Will definitely give it a shot soon.

I read over the repo docs and was amazed at how clean and thorough it all looks. Can you share your development story for this project? How long did it take you to get here? How much did you lean on AI agents to write this?

Also, any plans for monetization? Are you taking donations? :)
by croes | 2025-05-18 12:30:23+00:00
I highly doubt that the majority things AI is used for is useful.

I see lots of spam videos, pictures and texts that flood insta, Youtube etc. to monetize on ad revenue or simply scam people.

I think cryptocurrency aren’t any better if you compare legit uses vs criminal ones.

> Should we not consume energy at all?

No need for a strawman. Prevention of wasteful use doesn’t mean no use at all.
by yenda | 2025-05-18 12:30:24+00:00
yeah for me it's a capital starvation issue, 5 years ago I got millions to fund a vague idea and would hire left and right for the price you'd give, didn't matter. Now I'm building a sustainable business with the little funding available and growth and success is severly limited by the lack of capital, 150k/year would be almost half our entire company salaries. I won't mind increasing salaries for everyone including myself as we grow and become profitable, but right now that would just be suicide. Appart from big corps that are just increasing profit margins and dividends, I wouldn't be surprised if lots of small businesses are in a similar situation where they would love to hire seniors but the pool that was dumped by big businesses is just too expensive for them. Would be interesting to see the job market as a stock market I'm pretty sure atm lots of these 150k/year profiles would now be 75k/year max since the big corps dumped their stock. Smaller businesses don't have that kind of capital since VC dried up.
by saretup | 2025-05-18 12:30:33+00:00
From my experience, YouTube recommendations on Apple TV suck compared to the home feed you get when you open YT on iOS. I was pleasantly surprised when I opened YouTube on mobile after a long time, it actually felt like what YouTube used to be with a wide variety of new and interesting videos (plus added shorts and posts).

I think Google needs to look into optimizing it better for those of us who prefer watching YouTube on TV.
by martin-t | 2025-05-18 12:30:54+00:00
Because the people who control the narrative are _redistributors_, not _builders_.

Broadly speaking, I divide people into builders and redistributors according to their primary approach to life - not just their job but their belief system - both how they seek to keep themselves fed and what they enjoy doing.

The thing is, builders are driven by the need to create and that's what occupied most of their time and energy. Sure, they publish their stuff but that's not their primary driver.

Then redistributors notice what they've built and see ways to make money off of it. And because good advertising is way more effective at convincing people to give you their money than simply having a good product, in the end it's them who end up building the narrative because it's them who invest way more time into publicizing the thing.

---

(Note I am not saying all redistributors are bad, there are plenty of honest and socially positive jobs which don't build stuff but have a positive outcome for everyone involved. But I feel like increasingly more and more of the population is preoccupied by how to make the most money with the least effort.

Maybe I need better terminology and split redistributors into two categories.)
by jadamson | 2025-05-18 12:31:19+00:00
Their changes are so bad that someone made a browser extension to jump straight to your subscriptions so you never see the homepage (my watch history was off already and I didn't like the homepage telling me to turn it on).

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/ytmysubs/

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/lfoephndcoilebphhdb...
by wongarsu | 2025-05-18 12:31:21+00:00
A skilled artist can imitate a single art style or draw a specific object from a single reference. But becoming a skilled artist takes years of training. As a society we like to pretend some humans are randomly gifted with the ability to draw, but in reality it's 5% talent and 95% spending countless hours practising the craft. And if you count the years worth of visual data the average human has experienced by the time they can recreate a van Gogh then humans take magnitudes more training data than state of the art ML models
by keiferski | 2025-05-18 12:31:50+00:00
Maybe a better way to rephrase my point: money won and took over other sources of value. Technology became the biggest section of the economy.

Case in point: this site is called Hacker News and it’s run by a venture capital investment firm. Those two things (hacker/cyberpunk culture and VCs) would probably have seemed almost antithetical in the 90s.
by aspenmayer | 2025-05-18 12:31:57+00:00
> AI is a state issue because it can be contained within a particular state. It works like pornography bans. If you are in a state that bans pornography you can't distribute it nor consume it regardless of whether it originated on a computer outside the state.

I think the first amendment preserves the right to read and write, including arbitrary computer programs, dare I even say pornographic ones. I agree the rest of your post though.