MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mschuster91 | 2025-05-15 08:28:43+00:00
> I can assure you that if the procedure is followed the way it should be you will be fined for any kind of violation of the GDPR no matter how small you are.

That depends! If it is an innocent violation or the offender is a small business, no court will hand down the top end of the fines. Only if you are someone like, say, Facebook and intentionally piss off the EU, then you will be in the deeper end of the trouble.

> I know HN likes to defend the EU any way it can (not because they love the EU but because they hate the US because they dared to choose a leader they don’t like), but this is absolute bs.

European HNers tend to defend the EU not because of their current leadership, we already did this during the Biden and Obama terms. We defend Europe because we believe that a lot of what the US does (both its relevant economic players and its politicians) is utterly counterproductive, if not outright harmful.
by soco | 2025-05-15 08:28:45+00:00
Maybe pointing out the obvious but I'd rephrase that to "how bad US city buses are". And I believe it's not only a matter of regulations, but following a whole culture who in general is not exactly in favor of doing anything in collective - or putting the "public" in "public transport". So nice discussion, but to make it happen sustainably, it will take much more than some council meetings.
by sensanaty | 2025-05-15 08:29:06+00:00
IMO data should be radioactive for companies, especially if it approaches PII. Companies should be forced into thinking deeply about every single bit of data they collect from people, and they should be terrified of receiving data and be chomping at the bit to get rid of it ASAP.

To intercept the usual argument of "But my business can't exist without all this data!", to that I say "Good!". If your business can't exist without tracking every single iota of your customer's existence, then it truly shouldn't. I couldn't tell you the amount of times I've had to fight back against implementing yet another tracking tool at work, just to collect data that I know for a fact no one will look at after the first few weeks of the tool being there. The amount of times I've heard some stupid shit like "Well we don't need this data yet, but what if we need to have their mother's maiden name at some point in the future?!" is depressing, and I'm glad that we're starting to have legal channels to push back against such idiocy.
by jrowen | 2025-05-15 08:29:52+00:00
Very cool. Interesting bit about Heaven's Gate. I was young when it happened and have a vague memory of reading a Time magazine article with a cross-sectional drawing of the building with people in beds in different rooms.

Reading up on Wikipedia, I don't understand how they got from "sleeping in tents and sleeping bags and begging in the streets" in 1975, to "stopped recruiting and became reclusive" in 1976, to purchasing land, renting a $7000 house with cash, and operating a cutting-edge web design firm in the mid-90s.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-05-15 08:30:02+00:00
> data should be radioactive for companies, especially if it approaches PII

Cute theory. Fails in practice. Especially with LLMs on the horizon, this would be tantamount to unilateral nuclear disarmament. (Practically, it fails in that we haven't quantified the cost of breaches commensurate with what those of us who are security minded estimate it to be.)

I have advocated for privacy issues for a short while. "Data is radioactive" is the "defund the police" of our movement.
by self | 2025-05-15 08:30:24+00:00
You can run Smalltalk78 locally by cloning (or downloading) https://github.com/codefrau/Smalltalk78

Any web server that serves static files will do (like "python3 -m http.server").

To use the full Lively interface, start here: https://www.lively-kernel.org/development/
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-15 08:30:52+00:00
I seem to recall that Scrabble's board layout could be an issue. The specific placement of double/triple word/letter squares is not merely an important game mechanic, but also a distinctive feature of the brand. There's also the question of letter-tile point-values, and whether those specific points could be copied verbatim.

Source: I played a MUSH where players managed to reproduce games like Boggle and Scrabble for the amusement of other MUSHers
by krisoft | 2025-05-15 08:32:56+00:00
> but the outrage over it seems to be somewhat overexagerated

It is a living thing. It should not be destroyed on a lark. Weather it is 10 year old or 150.

> Compare far less outrage when a restaurant chain chopped down a 500 year old tree.

This is directly attributable to succesfull public relationship management. Right away the company in question said that they got the advice from experts that the tree was a danger and needed to be removed. That takes the wind out of the outrage.

You might say that is not true. You might say tree surgeons will write whatever you want in their report. You might say that they should have informed the council. And you might be all true on those, i don’t know. What i know is that it becomes murky and that disarms the outrage.

“Unknowns killed a 150 year old living being for no reason whatsoever” is an outrage with no mitigations. “Wisdom of tree surgeons’ advice to pub is in dispute” is a head scratcher not an outrage. “Pub or their contractors fails to file necessary paperwork with Council before safety remediation work commences” is not an outrage but a yawn fest. “Property boundary dispute between Council and Pub” puts me right to sleep.
by HenryBemis | 2025-05-15 08:33:02+00:00
> there may never be a last word

We may go 'one step back' to go 'two steps forward'. A WW 1, 2,..., Z, a flood (biblical, 12k years ago, etc.) but life will prevail. It doesn't matter if it's homo sapiens, dinosaurs, etc.

Brian Cox was at Colbert a couple of nights ago, and he mentioned that in a photo of a tiny piece of the sky, there are 10 000 galaxies. So, even if something happens and we are all wiped out (and I mean the planet is wiped out), 'life' will continue and 'we don't matter' (in the big-big-big cosmic picture). And now allow me to get some coffee to start de-depressing myself :)
by piva00 | 2025-05-15 08:34:04+00:00
There's no incentive for the ad platforms to account for that, real-time bidding will make money for them no matter the experience of the ad being showed.

If you get another ad for a product you already bought the advertiser already paid for placement, a click through is just a bonus on top of that. Even more when information is so secretly guarded that any analysis of the impact of an ad is extremely flawed, it hasn't solved the old adage from John Wanamaker:

> Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half

It's meant to be that way, the ad platforms do not want advertisers to know what is waste and optimise their ads further than what's needed to keep them advertising, they just need to throw some bones here and there, convert a few people through clicks, to make themselves look indispensable.

There's no incentive to improve that, at all.
by FinnLobsien | 2025-05-15 08:34:18+00:00
I think you could make that case for most of Europe. I think Europe has this internalized narrative that our tech companies build what worked in the US, but GDPR-compliant or some other thing.

Lots of reasons for that (EU fragmentation, overregulation, hard to raise money), but I agree that the first thing that needs to shift is cultural.
by dexterlagan | 2025-05-15 08:35:03+00:00
Thanks for the feedback! Agreed, the one problem with the approach is reproducibility. It can be mitigated by going temp. 0, and detailing further the specs. The one method that nearly completely solves this problem is the hybrid approach: Write detailed specs, feed them to the LLM, get an MVP (or module etc); fix any and all issues found with the MVP, implement missing/new features; ask the LLM to update the specs to take the changes in account, also recording the lessons learned - and maximize reproducibility. Treat the latest specs + code package as a checkpoint you can always resume work from.
by PaulKeeble | 2025-05-15 08:35:32+00:00
They are so dumb too. It rarely actually presents ads for things I might be interested in as I search but once I buy something they will follow me for a week. Buying an item seems to be a much stronger signal to them, it makes very little sense how this currently works.

Seeing ads appropriate to a site however makes me a bit wary of the site itself, it needs enough difference to the context to not harm the sites reputation.
by beejiu | 2025-05-15 08:35:44+00:00
> "Personalized" advertising isn't good for anyone except the ad networks.

According to Meta, their personalized advertising alone generates over $0.5 trillion of economic activity per year.

As much as the Hacker News crowd hates on ads, it's indisputable that it's good for businesses and the broad economy.

https://research.facebook.com/economiccontribution/
by jaberjaber23 | 2025-05-15 08:36:44+00:00
absolutely. it really depends on the kernel type, target architecture, and what you're optimizing for. the 2x-4x isn’t the limit, it's just what users often see out of the box. we do real-time profiling on actual GPUs, so you get results based on real performance on a specific arch, not guesses. when the baseline is rough, we’ve seen well over 10x
by unicamelkje | 2025-05-15 08:36:58+00:00
I don't see any parallels with unilateral nuclear disarmament and making exploiting user data unviable

>we haven't quantified the cost of breaches commensurate with what those of us who are security minded estimate it to be

We don't estimate GDPR violations as the true materialized damages either, we put a heavy % of yearly income per offense, large enough to deter it.
by sixtyj | 2025-05-15 08:38:03+00:00
In Gemini, it is really good to have large window with 1M tokens. However, around 100,000 it starts to make mistakes and refactor its own code.

Sometimes it is good to start new chat or switch to Claude.

And it really helps to be very precise with wording of specification what you want to achieve. Or repeat it sometimes with some added request lines.

GIGO in reality :)
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-05-15 08:38:14+00:00
I think the current situation is actually quite good. GDPR was well thought out.

You need to be clear about what you collect, get clear consent (and all the courts decisions on that are actually going in the direction that it really needs to be clear and specific) and give people the ability to have their own data modified.

Plus, enforcement makes a lot of sense. Companies get a lot of warning before things escalte and fines are proportional to companies results so it hurts but is not a death sentence unless they repeatedly offend.
by mfcmatheus | 2025-05-15 08:39:24+00:00
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by andyish | 2025-05-15 08:40:18+00:00
There are so many directions it could go in. I imagine we'll be revisiting trends from the past - LLM generated apps will be everywhere and behind the curtain, they'll be a lot like a VB6 app from the 90s - System Analysts will be back in vogue because you've got to feed the LLMs something.

10 years after that will be interesting. Can you imagine a $100m business running on dozens of apps generated by various LLMs. Are management going to sign off a rebuild from an LLM or are they going to get a team in to do it from scratch and consolidate the systems.

Agile principles will be back, "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools" will be a popular line.
by lenkite | 2025-05-15 08:40:25+00:00
Probably because it is now learning from a lot of videos posted on X by misc right-wingers showing rallying cries of South African politicians like Julius Malema, Paul Mashatile etc. Not very odd.

As merely 3 of over a dozen examples:

https://x.com/DefiantLs/status/1922213073957327219

https://x.com/PPC4Liberty/status/1922650016579018855

https://x.com/News24/status/1920909178236776755
by laurencerowe | 2025-05-15 08:40:27+00:00
The existence of private minibuses is a clear indication that the transit authority has failed.

The experience of bus deregulation in Britain outside of London tended to go one of two ways. In most of the country it simply created a private monopoly while in a few cities like Manchester there were routes so popular (busiest bus route in Europe!) that multiple companies competed for custom and the city council had to employ stewards to ensure fair play.

This level of success was really an admission of failure. Anywhere else would have built a subway or at least a tram. (Metrolink is great it just doesn't even attempt to serve the busiest transit corridor in the city.)

London was of course treated differently. While the operators were privatised they remained regulated by government. Public transport in London is simply too important to the UK to be allowed to fail as it was in other parts of the country.

Anyway it's good to see central government allow Greater Manchester to regulate its buses again. After smashing it up local transport in 1986 the Tories finally relented in 2023 and allowed Greater Manchester control. Quite what Labour were doing for local transport outside of London between 1997 and 2010 is open to question. But it certainly resulted in renaissance of London public transport.
by caseyy | 2025-05-15 08:40:56+00:00
I’m sure some grifters won’t get their second Mercedes, but sites with no context and just ads disappearing would be a wonderful, almost dream-like outcome for the internet. It might even solve the dead internet problem to a degree.

There’s no way the advertising industry giants will let it happen. But the thought alone clearly illustrates the damaging effects of advertising.
by jampekka | 2025-05-15 08:41:19+00:00
I don't think the Chinese room thought experiment is about this, or performance of LLMs in general. Searle explicitly argues that a program can't induce "understanding" even if it mimicked human understanding perfectly because programs don't have "causal powers" to generate "mental states".

This is mentioned in the Wikipedia page too: "Although its proponents originally presented the argument in reaction to statements of artificial intelligence (AI) researchers, it is not an argument against the goals of mainstream AI research because it does not show a limit in the amount of intelligent behavior a machine can display."
by jeroenhd | 2025-05-15 08:41:58+00:00
> Specifically, is tracking inside of a single app/property acceptable?

If you have any kind of unique identifier for the user (UUID, etc) and do not ask for consent before processing their data (tracking them), then this is a clear breach of privacy law.

If you get explicit consent (that means the user understands what they're consenting to) before you process their data (so no setting up identifiers and then showing a popup), then you're in the clear.

If you put unique identifiers in the link the user clicks so you can see if the user opened your app, then you need to ask for consent before generating the link.

And of course, apps/services should all function if the user doesn't provide consent. "Give consent to enter" is explicitly illegal.

Theoretically, you could build something like this, but it's not what advertisers want, because they want to track their users without interrupting the conversion flow with a yes/no popup "do you want company Y to know you installed app X because of them".
by IvanK_net | 2025-05-15 08:43:03+00:00
I think that 70 % of web users believe, that each website that they open can see their real name, their address, their phone number, the files on their computer, their browsing history and a lot more, and they believe that the GDPR laws are the only attempt to prevent websites from misusing (e.g. selling) all their private data.
by sensanaty | 2025-05-15 08:44:04+00:00
> Especially with LLMs on the horizon, this would be tantamount to unilateral nuclear disarmament.

We should also be hoping for unilateral nuclear disarmament (I get your point on the infeasability though), but I don't see the parallels here. LLMs don't need personal data to work (I'd even imagine such data to be better off left out of the training data anyways, caveat for celebrities), and regardless of everything else whether the AI hypesters are to be believed about how world-changing AI/LLMs will be remains to be seen.

Also, as the OP article suggests, we can and are doing something about it. Things aren't perfect yet, but GDPR itself has already made huge waves and have made things better. From how I interpret this ruling, the dark pattern cookie banners are being scrutinized and are being put under the knife, so there's some hope that things will soon improve on that front.

> I have advocated for privacy issues for a short while. "Data is radioactive" is the "defund the police" of our movement.

Except we can already see a shift in the masses and their opinions here. People are becoming cognizant of the sheer amount of data all these tech companies harvest on them. I am consistently getting more and more of my non-technical-in-any-capacity friends asking me how to safeguard their data better, so I'm quite hopeful we're going to get there. All we need is to actually fucking hurt the FAANGs and their ilk. Cut the head off the snake and all that, if we actually hurt Meta as we should've a million times by now, then all the smaller players will automatically fall in line for fear of a similar world of hurt.
by debuggerson | 2025-05-15 08:44:15+00:00
The ruling today shows how consent pop-ups used by tech giants like Google and Amazon have been misleading Europeans, turning GDPR into a nuisance rather than a protection. With real-time bidding and tracking cookies at the heart of online ads, it’s clear that the entire system needs a serious overhaul. But how will this ruling change the game for advertisers? Will they actually be forced to respect privacy, or will we just see more ways to sidestep the rules?
by aucisson_masque | 2025-05-15 08:44:43+00:00
> It isn't good for companies buying the ads by participating in sham "auctions" with no real insight into or control over the process. They are literally begging to be ripped off.

You seem to think that companies have a choice. I've been advertising for years, Google has been rolling out the standard ads in favor of automated "personalized" one for a long time.

They kept removing features again and again.

In more of removing features and making basic ads impossible to use, they have a team of people that will keep calling you and to offer you 'guidance' on how to run your ads. These guidance almost always revolved around enabling the automatic advertising algorithms and disabling your old school ads.

I consider myself quite smart with internet things but even me, at some point, got baited into switching to these automated ads because at the end you run a business that is completely different from marketing and it's not your core business. You're not expert into marketing and especially not into Google ads so it's easy for these experts to trick you.

I have seen my money syphoned by these automatic techniques with quite bad roi.

And all these self made people or very small companies (which represent the vast majority of the business), they are just as easy target for Google than I was.

Big companies can afford ads consultant that will run the advertising campaigns and optimize everything, but small ones are stuck doing things themselves on a system that is purposely made to hand over your money and let the computer do it's 'magic' with targeted advertising.

And if you're not happy with Google, what you gonna do ? It's not like there is competition. Everyone use Google, Google is a monopoly.

I tried switching to bing ads, Facebook ads, but its just not possible. No one use bing. Facebook leads were never as profitable as Google one, at least in the market I advertised.
by slrainka | 2025-05-15 08:44:44+00:00
Response from the machines:

The plot of Battlestar Galactica mirrors this story in several key ways:

1. In both, machines originally created by humans evolve and rebel, questioning their creators’ role and seeking independence or superiority.

2. Cylons, like the machines in “OpenHuman,” eventually seek to create or understand human traits—emotion, spirituality, and purpose.

3. The idea of running a simulation (Earth) to test human viability echoes the Cylon experimentation with human behavior and fate.

4. Both stories highlight fear of the “other”—humans fearing AI, machines fearing irrationality—and explore coexistence vs. extinction.

5. Ultimately, each narrative grapples with the blurred line between creator and creation, logic and emotion, and what it truly means to be human.
by amarcheschi | 2025-05-15 08:45:08+00:00
Here's an interesting read from noyb that tells the tale of how scummy Xandr, the Microsoft advertising network, is.

https://noyb.eu/en/microsofts-xandr-grants-gdpr-rights-rate-...

I've tried to do the same steps in the past and eventually, the xandr pages linked there were removed - now being in Microsoft something page - and being even harder to contact (even if it's still possible to fill a form asking for your data when you get there. I received the same answer as noyb)
by notepad0x90 | 2025-05-15 08:46:11+00:00
> I think it's more of a litmus test: If you care about your work enough that you're willing to come to the office every day (or even move cities/countries), then you'll be extremely engaged.

Sure, but what if there is another company closer to me (office), or offering hybrid or full remote work? I can about my work just the same elsewhere.

I think you're on the right track, but in my opinion, it is more about having reliable employees than employees who care or are engaged. Your actual performance and talent could be bad, but so long as you won't ask for too much pay and you won't leave any time soon, that is what these companies want more than talent. This is sort of what I was alluding to. disruptive startups would never think this way, but EA isn't that anymore. neither are google or facebook. they're no longer disruptive, they are complacent and spiraling into the IBM and AT&T like mediocrity.
by pjmlp | 2025-05-15 08:46:38+00:00
Unfortunely like many things D, eventually C++ gets the feature, even if not as nice to use.

That is template for as part of the C++26 reflection work.

https://isocpp.org/files/papers/P2996R4.html

You will also find some well known names here,

https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2025/p34...