MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by philipallstar | 2025-05-29 12:34:53+00:00
> And then you wonder why so many young people flirt with communism or want to see the capitalist system burn to the ground

That's not why, particularly. They do so for various reasons:

- they compare the reality of capitalism with a nonexistent nirvana, rather than the reality of the alternatives. They haven't run the real counterfactual

- they gravitate to any philosophy that they're familiar with instinctively: most students are young, and they conceptualise "fairness" in terms of a loving parental figure with resources meting things out to them, and they think of the government in a similar way

- they believe countries they have heard are nice to live in, normally Scandinavian countries, aren't capitalist

- they don't know the realities of real non-capitalist countries such as the USSR or pre-capitalist China, or present-day Venezuela (not truly non-capitalist, but the central planning around their oil is their main problem), or East Germany, or Cuba

- they have gone to university, the only place where bad ideas can survive and be propogated out into the world
by gilbetron | 2025-05-29 12:35:12+00:00
> Facebook seemed like a way to stalk college students.

I was about your age (35) when Facebook came out - it was a crazy fun experience pretty much immediately, reconnecting with all kinds of people that I hadn't talked to in years. It was really fun for almost a decade and then it became not fun. Same with the iPad/iPhone - it seemed like the future had arrived and was exciting, all the apps and funny ideas and new things you could do.
by krapp | 2025-05-29 12:35:13+00:00
They still are a thing to be fair. Every social media platform is also a link aggregator and your browser still supports bookmarks.

Typing a URL into the bar directly is always going to be a lousy way of doing things, however, especially since they no longer map to remote directories and files as they're meant to. URLs are like telephone numbers but worse (and no one memorizes phone numbers anymore.)
by ssivark | 2025-05-29 12:35:20+00:00
> I doubt many people at all would have expected even the success of LLMs before Google's attention paper. NLP experienced a huge jump

AI doing fantastically better on AI benchmarks is different from AI greasing the wheels of the economy towards greater productivity. Acemoglu doesn't have much to say about the former (he's an economist, after all) and is focusing on the latter.

It is argued even whether and how personal computing has influenced productivity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox

Suffice to say that even though these technologies might change life to feel radically different -- it remains to be seen how that finally snowballs into overall productivity. Of course, this is also complicated by questions of whether we're measuring productivity correctly.
by nilirl | 2025-05-29 12:35:21+00:00
The whole argument hinges on one claim: We were censored not because of content but because of who we are.

Strongest evidence in support: Drop in traffic coincided with google algorithm update.

Biggest lack of evidence: Nothing that shows it's because of who they are and not their content. Author defended their content by pointing out the cost and labor that goes into making their content.

Was the content really authentic and useful? This is hard to prove (and I suspect hard even for an algorithm to discern), and so I had a look:

- Each article did have that human feel to it with photos of the author in the locations they were talking about. Articles also included small personalized evaluations about topics.

So, yes, I did think it was authentic and useful. But how did it compare to the 1000s of other sites who can replicate this? Human writers aren't rare, and travel isn't a small interest to our species.

And that's the crux of it: Even if you're useful and authentic, search engines have to rank you among other sites that are useful and authentic.

You could be amazing and still end up on page 30 because you're not alone in being amazing on the internet.

I don't know what a fair algorithm looks like, and if a fair algorithm would make everyone equally happy.

For now, someone has the power to direct how the algorithm chooses. Who should have that power is a fair question, but I don't think anything will mitigate the problem of being ranked low even with quality content. It's a ranking against the rest of the internet, not just an evaluation of quality.

At the moment, if two sites are somewhat equally useful, being profitable to Google probably gets you a bump.
by flenserboy | 2025-05-29 12:35:32+00:00
the funniest part here is that if G+ is part of the reason, they still don't understand why people didn't want to use it, making any decisions which follow wrong &/or misguided. while I'm not terribly in favor of breaking up companies, there is far too much incentive for Google, given its ad business (which is really what the company now is), to have any voice in the future of the Web. Chrome must be spun off, & firewalls put in place between the ad side & the search side of things (unless, of course, they really are just a govt subsidiary & this has been the plan all along, but there would have to be tangible proof of that).
by bhouston | 2025-05-29 12:35:47+00:00
Steve Jobs is responsible for the iPhone, the iPod and the iPad because he allocated resource to these initiatives. People did give him credit for these. He wasn't the first to think of the smartphone but he did create the iconic realization that also got mass adoption.

Jeff Bezos does get credit for Amazon's work like Amazon, AWS and Kindle among others. Because he did allocate the resources to this and manage the company in this direction.
by em-bee | 2025-05-29 12:35:53+00:00
even as a fan of s-expressions (see my other comment), i have to agree. but the problem here is the formatting. for starters, i would write the s-expression example as:

(urn:ietf:params:acme:error:malformed (detail "Some of the identifiers requested were rejected") (subproblems ((urn:ietf:params:acme:error:malformed (detail "Invalid underscore in DNS name \"_example.org\"") (identifier (dns _example.org))) (urn:ietf:params:acme:error:rejectedIdentifier (detail "This CA will not issue for \"example.net\"") (identifier (dns example.net))))))

the alignment of the values makes them easier to pick out and gives a visual structure

but, i would also argue that the two examples are not equivalent. what is explicitly specified as "type" and "value" in the json data, is implied in the s-expression data. either format is fine, but it would be better to compare like for like:

an s-expression equivalent for the json example would look like this:

((type urn:ietf:params:acme:error:malformed) (detail "Some of the identifiers requested were rejected) (subproblems ((type urn:ietf:params:acme:error:malformed) (detail "Invalid underscore in DNS name \"_example.org\"") (identifier (type dns) (value _example.org))) ((type urn:ietf:params:acme:error:rejectedIdentifier) (detail "This CA will not issue for \"example.net\"") (identifier (type dns) (value example.net)))))

or the reverse, a json equivalent for the s-expression example:

{ "urn:ietf:params:acme:error:malformed": { "detail": "Some of the identifiers requested were rejected", "subproblems": [ "urn:ietf:params:acme:error:malformed": { "detail": "Invalid underscore in DNS name \"_example.org\"", "identifier": { "dns": "_example.org" } }, "urn:ietf:params:acme:error:rejectedIdentifier" { "detail": "This CA will not issue for \"example.net\"", "identifier": { "dns": "example.net" } } ] } }

a lot of the readability depends on the formatting. we could format the json example more dense:

{"urn:ietf:params:acme:error:malformed": { "detail": "Some of the identifiers requested were rejected", "subproblems": [ "urn:ietf:params:acme:error:malformed": { "detail": "Invalid underscore in DNS name \"_example.org\"", "identifier": { "dns": "_example.org" }}, "urn:ietf:params:acme:error:rejectedIdentifier": { "detail": "This CA will not issue for \"example.net\"", "identifier": { "dns": "example.net" }}]}}

doing that shows that the main problem that makes json harder to read is the quotes around strings.

because if we spread out the s-expression example:

(urn:ietf:params:acme:error:malformed (detail "Some of the identifiers requested were rejected") (subproblems ((urn:ietf:params:acme:error:malformed (detail "Invalid underscore in DNS name \"_example.org\"") (identifier (dns _example.org) ) ) (urn:ietf:params:acme:error:rejectedIdentifier (detail "This CA will not issue for \"example.net\"") (identifier (dns example.net) ) ) ) ) )

that doesn't add much to the readability. since, again, the primary win in readability comes from removing the quotes.
by abduhl | 2025-05-29 12:35:55+00:00
>> Trump is knee-deep in negotiating with foreign countries on trade deals using the tariffs as leverage.

This statement is completely speculative. There is no evidence that substantive negotiations are happening on any trade deals.

>> There’s currently a circuit split on whether MQD even applies to the president.

The president is not a party to this suit so I don’t understand what this statement has to do with anything.
by simne | 2025-05-29 12:36:03+00:00
Yes and no.

Main problem of C optimization, C is not expressive language, and using it tends to quantize problem to tiny chunks, so lost overall picture.

So yes, probably LLVM approach with optimizing already coded something similar to bytecode, could got some speedup, but with using higher level languages, speedup could be magnitudes better.

I think, future belongs to some hybrid approaches, good known domains create, or better word - handcraft with C or even on Assembly, but for less known use something like Prolog solver.
by aspenmayer | 2025-05-29 12:36:08+00:00
I think that if you're an unpaid open source developer, then if you no longer want to maintain your project, donating it to something like CNCF might feel like better stewardship than nothing at all, and donating it to "the community" is ambiguous. I can see how one would want their project to do right by its users, but due to bus factors and so on, one person might need to step away indefinitely at little notice. As someone can accidentally find themselves steering an open source project that becomes larger than they ever intended, so too can someone accidentally become their own boss, which was kind of what my analogy was getting at, that it can be thankless work, and that there are likely good reasons that people donate their projects to groups like CNCF or others.

A lot of open source software is developed by people employed by large tech companies, so that complicates ownership structures. I can see companies may view projects that are led by nonprofit orgs, trusts, or other durable formations of collaborators as more stable than those led by individuals or small groups, but perhaps they prefer these structures because they are easier to exert control over by those groups seeking to do so, like CNCF may be doing in the case of OP?
by Aachen | 2025-05-29 12:36:58+00:00
I actually wrote about speech but thought it distracted from the question and removed it again

No, in speech we seem to get by without spaces, and that's in every language that I'm aware of, but then we also don't have commas, parentheses, apostrophes, or capital letters. Somehow, intonation and emphasis must replace these (or rather, writing encodes our speech somehow) but I'm not sure how they map exactly. Question marks indicate a rising tone for example, that's about the extent of what I know

As a child learning to write, I had a phase where I put whole sentences together because that made sense to me as the next step after we learned to write letters together to form words. It took quite some convincing before I believed that adults don't secretly do this and they're only telling us to add space because they think we're not ready for the next step. I guess I innately thought words belong together and we only add a pause between sentences

There is one speech pattern where spaces can be heard though. Like in English, when you enunciate very clearly because the person isn't understanding (for example, if their English is very poor, or when you're shouting across a long distance), similarly in germanic languages I'd add time between each word, and nearly none if it's a compound word. Like how you'd pause between "get" and "out" if you want to make yourself extremely well understood, but afaik not/barely between "handy" and "man" or "quag" and "mire" because the parts haven't the same meaning, or aren't understood at all anymore, in isolation

Now I'm curious actually, might English native speakers also add less time between compound nouns/adjectives in this speech mode? So not like "quag" and "mire" but something that's commonly written apart, like "bottle cap". Do they (you?) identify and indicate things that form one concept also by separating them less, and only the written encoding is different between the languages, or do they feel like the words are fundamentally separate things in the same way that "go" and "home" are separate parts of speech?
by fidotron | 2025-05-29 12:37:03+00:00
I'm going there: I think the same is becoming true here.

A couple of days ago one of the web games in my profile frontpaged here, and while it generated a lot of traffic it was nothing like previous times. I have had much more trouble with large private mailing lists linking to things, which also leads to a more condensed rush when everyone looks at once.

Organic traffic generally appears dead, Google or not.
by severusdd | 2025-05-29 12:37:29+00:00
Xenon isn’t a new magic. Russian athletes were rumored to use it in the 2014 Sochi Olympic, and WADA banned it shortly thereafter: https://www.aip.org/inside-science/catching-some-xes-has-str...

It spikes HIF-1α → EPO for a day or two, but meta-analyses still doesn't show a real performance bump, let alone safety at 8 km. Feels less like innovation and more like mountaineering’s own carbon-plate shoes, except the failure mode here is cerebral edema, not a slow marathon time.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-05-29 12:37:29+00:00
>That only works if: 1. they see it coming

Zuckerberg saw them coming though. That's why he owns a social media empire now, and wants to either own or destroy Tiktok as well. Musk saw it coming with Twatter, hell, even Bezos saw it coming, that why Amazon bought Twitch.

Google leadership just doesn't understand social media, otherwise they would have bought a rising platform instead of building one from scratch that flopped with zero user base. Social media platforms are all about the existing user base, not about the tech behind it. That's why G+ failed despite being technically superior in some aspects.

>I know for a fact that a number of old googlers are still frustrated over Google Video got stomped, and Google having to buy Youtube in the end

It's irrelevant what old googlers think. Google has a responsibility to their shareholders to make line go up, not make some of their programmers feel good by keeping them working on dying platforms with no user base wile their competitors steam ahead. Buying youtube was the right business decision because it was the more popular platform, instead of trying to make Google Video happen, as it would have had the same faith as G+, and those old googlers would have probably been laid off instead of being moved to work on Youtube. Programmers don't always make good business decisions.
by ttoinou | 2025-05-29 12:37:39+00:00
Feature idea for another product based on the exact same stack tech : replace private information that are less private than secret keys but still not for public release (filepath files folders names in file system, user accounts names etc.) so that developer can easily make product screen recording / screenshot to showcase their product to the public. Then replace those strings by dummy strings generated by AI. You could sell it for more. I need this.
by oftenwrong | 2025-05-29 12:37:40+00:00
I am excited to learn of this project. I started working on something quite similar recently. It's a surprisingly unaddressed niche.

One thing your tool appears to be missing (IMO) is execution sandboxing. This is useful, as you likely know, for avoiding undeclared dependencies and for avoiding dirty builds due to actions polluting the source directory, among other things. I was playing around with allowing configurable sandboxing, with symlink forest and docker as two intial options.
by eviks | 2025-05-29 12:38:35+00:00
> Google tunes its algorithms and lets the chips fall

This is even more sloppy and could be easily applied to any real censorship, where some (censored) lose and some (not censored) win

If you're "tuning" your algorithm with the goal of blocking all small independent websites, then yeah, you're doing the shadow (if you don't tell the sites about it) banning. By ignoring the intent of the policy and replacing it with a truism you don't really have a terminology counter argument
by EGreg | 2025-05-29 12:38:47+00:00
I have to say, this really resonates with me.

I walked away from a full time job making $180K a year for 2 hours a day because the consulting company renting out my time wanted me to put 8 hours. I felt like I was helping them somehow fleece the client, even though the client probably had over a trillion dollars under management. In retrospect I was very foolish.

In the free market you have to learn sales, to do well. And most sales techniques are about making people realize they may need something (called “building the gap”) and then offering your solution. But your solution usually isn’t any good unless you raise money first.

In my case, I was too honest to overpromise to investors, or create fake volume for tokens, etc. So most investors walked, and it took years for me to build the products. Now I have them. But I am far behind those who overpromise and raise money fast, or create appearances of momentum, and act as if — they fake it til they make it. (Doesn’t need to be all the way as bad as Elizabeth Holmes.)

I have discovered a lot of ethical hacks over the years involving group dynamics, but in the meantime I had taken on hundreds of thousands in debt and repaid it. All for what… because I was too honest to stretch the truth too much.

If I was willing to do it, though, people downstream of me would have been much happier. And people diwnstream of you include your employees and your family and friends. It is a dog eat dog world out there… I have learned that total honesty has a price — you cannot overpromise to people downstream of you, either, otherwise they’ll be left holding the bag. It is better to overpromise to people upstream of you if you have people relying on you. It’s just not a perfect system.

I would have much rather been in a society which has UBI, free association and everyone has some discretionary income and isn’t always just trying to survive. Much more honest. And they wouldn’t even have to fake stuff to stay on disability or qualify for means tested stuff.
by kayo_20211030 | 2025-05-29 12:39:35+00:00
I do sympathize with OP's situation, but there's a dissonance also.

As a site owner they seemed to have been happy to play the SEO game under the old rules, winning a little bit, but unhappy to play the SEO game under the new rules, losing a little bit. Depressingly, it's Google's ball, so it Google's rules.

At the end of the post, OP's suggests some remedies for web users, but they seem either impractical or ineffective. The recommendations for the commission also tacitly assume that Google is either a) a monopoly, to be regulated as such, or b) a utility, to be regulated as such. Maybe a) will be proven, but b) seems like a real stretch goal. They're a private enterprise and without congressional action or administrative action to change the laws and regulations, they have wide latitude in how they behave for commercial reasons. I don't believe they can be forced to do anything they don't want to do without statutory or regulatory action.

I do sympathize, but what's lost for a consumer?
by pjmlp | 2025-05-29 12:40:03+00:00
As someone mostly focused on JVM, .NET and nodejs ecosystems, this won't cut it.

The problem with UNIX culture shops not picking up .NET has everything to do with the Microsoft stigma, and everything the management keeps doing against .NET team efforts, like VSCode vs VS tooling features, C# DevKit license, what frameworks get to be on GNU/Linux, and the current ongoing issues with FOSS on .NET and the role of .NET Foundation.

Minimal APIs and now scripting, which already existed as third party solutions (search for csx), won't sort out those issues.

They can even start by going into Azure and check why there are so many projects now chosing other languages instead of .NET, when working on the open.

This would already be the first place to promote .NET adoption.
by pacoWebConsult | 2025-05-29 12:40:07+00:00
LINQPad [1] is a terrific utility for this workflow with dotnet. I was part of a team where we built all kinds of runbooks, support utilities, and debugging tools with LINQPad using a common set of utility functions to dump (pretty-print) system-specific entities and even charts.

[1]: https://www.linqpad.net/
by bmacho | 2025-05-29 12:40:26+00:00
Tangential, but Windows Powershell kept nagging me to download PS6, so I did it, then I had to revert it to 5.1, because running a script had a ~1 second overhead. Very annoying. For one-off runs it's often the starting time what's matter, and Powershell just got worse at that. (In the end, I settled for .bat files in a cmd.exe window, chatGPT can write any of them anyway.)
by x187463 | 2025-05-29 12:40:40+00:00
FSD is incredible in that it works everywhere, most of the time. The problem is it works most of the time. I do not think the current FSD sensor suite (camera only) will ever be safely capable of true unsupervised FSD. I use FSD every day. I would seriously estimate FSD has put 95% of the miles on my car. I regularly encounter the following:

* treating red lights like stop signs

* completely ignoring flash reds

* stopping at flashing yellows

* ignoring school zones

* driving 10mph under the limit

* driving 20mph over the limit

* ignoring turn only lanes resulting in being dumped into oncoming traffic until it leisurely moves back into the correct lane

* waiting until the last minute to get into the correct lane to make a turn/take an exit

* ignoring signs indicating a lane ends and having to force its way into traffic

* ignoring signs a lane ends and changing into the lane only to have to change back immediately

* pulling out in front of cars, especially at night or other camera obscuring events

* ignoring cars merging onto the highway and blocking them until I take over and get out of the way

I treat it like cruise control. And based on the recent accident during which FSD decided to run itself off a perfectly straight, open, clear rode and into a tree, I keep my hand on the wheel.

Even in a geo-fenced environment, FSD is NOT going to work for unsupervised robo-taxi applications. Musk needs to get out of the way and let them stick LIDARs on these cars.

All that being said, it has also handled really complex driving in/around DC/Baltimore including some tricky merges/transitions that are hard to track as a human driver. It's knowledge of all of the surrounding vehicles allows it to make these maneuvers with far more confidence that I would. It also frees me up to track the bigger picture of traffic while not having to manage my speed/lane position. It's like driving with a friend who's not necessarily the best driver, but is basically competent. Let's just hope it doesn't decide to drive me in to a tree for no particular reason.