MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by neilv | 2025-05-11 20:50:43+00:00
Please continue to be conscientious in which directions that you do and don't go with this, especially for rentals.

(When renters might be deciding entirely from photos, or be over a barrel when they arrive in town the last week of August, and are told to show up for a 5-minute tour with their checkbook in hand).

I'm starting to see people using photo enhancement for old apartments here in Boston, to obscure the condition of the apartment.

Originally, it was just the superwide shots that made the space look much bigger than it is. (Incidentally, be careful when removing distortion cues that this is going on, or you might make it even more deceptive.)

Then it started doing generated "staged" furniture and decorations, which are still fairly innocuous, although they can potentially cover up problems with condition and quirky architecture.

But now, with all-out "AI-filtered" "photos" (or sometimes 3D renders, like for new-construction apartment floorplans), you can't necessarily tell that a $3K 1BR is 150 years old, and minimally maintained, with grime that can't be cleaned, and suspended ceiling panels hiding the collapsed original ceiling, and the only renovation in the last few decades was a can of paint sloshed onto unfinished sheet of plywood wall from a budget apartment conversion.
by pjmlp | 2025-05-11 20:51:09+00:00
To note that even the latest editions of the famous Petzold book, before the C# edition, switched to using the common C subset from C++ and compiling with Visual C++ in C++ mode, instead of plain old C.

Already by Windows 95 timeframe, only C diehards would be writing Windows applications still in C instead of VB, Delphi and C++, as the more mainstream languages, there were obviously other ones to chose from as well.
by jodrellblank | 2025-05-11 20:51:20+00:00
Because that's conceptually simple. With your idea, you cannot clone the domain 'gmail.com' so one of these must happen:

- one company gets control of gmail.com and the other has to register a new domain nobody has ever heard of.

- the companies share control of gmail.com and users see no changes.

Anyone who must upend their digital life (email, contacts, Android login, YouTube login, analytics, 'login with Google' around the web, payment data, etc. etc.) has a problem, the company which gets the domain has a massive advantage. If they share it how are they competing with each other, which one can change the Gmail experience or pricing scheme?

Similar with GCP, which split gets to run a big customer's services? The customer isn't going to pay twice for them to be cloned. Does the customer have to update all their logins and API keys and contracts and payment details?

Who owns all the Exabytes of pre-existing YouTube data and what happens to all the ISP peering and CDN server hosting contracts which run it?

What happens to the legal contracts, tax deals to have offices in certain countries, employee visas, paying the datacenter maintenance bills or office cleaning bills? If the employees sit next to each other and now one works for Google_A and keeps everything the same, the other works for Google_1 and has to move to a new office which hasn't been built yet... same problem as Gmail but internally, one company gets a big advantage the other gets a big disruption.

What happens when you algorithmically split employees 'to avoid chaos' but one company ends up with no senior people who have access to a certain system?

Since we didn't ask for our accounts to be copied to Google1, do hundreds of millions of us have send Google1 a 'delete my account' request to get rid of them? If I delete my account from GoogleA do they have access and legal right to delete the copy from Google1 as well? If they don't, does my deleted login to GoogleA still work backed by the copy of my account on Google1, because there is only one GMail.com domain and it has to keep working?

It's conceptually easier to say maps.google.com is under control of a new company, not subsidised by Google Advertising income, and it needs to compete with other map providers, even if technically it's hard to extract the accounts and data from Google's server infrastructure.
by haswell | 2025-05-11 20:51:37+00:00
I agree with the conclusion that we need safer software from the start.

But we also have to deal with the reality of the situation in front of us.

I will maintain that the differences between the implications of revealing a crack in a bridge vs. prematurely revealing a vulnerability to literally the entire world are stark. I find it pretty problematic to continue comparing them and a rather poor analogy.

> There are large numbers of state funded exploit groups and otherwise blackhat organizations that find and store these vulnerabilities

This underscores my point. What you’ve been describing is a scenario in which those organizations are handed new ammunition for free (assuming they don’t already have the vuln in their catalog).
by ZoneZealot | 2025-05-11 20:51:53+00:00
> The screenshot clearly shows a valid HTTPS certificate, so either they don't do DNS blocking but instead implement the block on their loadbalancer side or they mis-issue HTTPS certificates. The former is only possible when the target site is also served by Cloudflare (which leaves the question what Cloudflare does for domains that are targetted by a court order but not using Cloudflare loadbalancing), the latter would be a serious breach of how HTTPS certificates should be issued.

Cloudflare's statement in that screenshot:

> Given the extraterritorial effect as well as the different global approaches to DNS-based blocking, Cloudflare has pursued legal remedies before complying with requests to block access to domains or content through the 1.1.1.1 Public DNS Resolver or identified alternate mechanisms to comply with relevant court orders. To date, Cloudflare has not blocked content through the 1.1.1.1 Public DNS Resolver.

I interpret this part of what Cloudflare said to mean, that so far every domain they've been asked to block has either been appealed successfully or they were using Cloudflare's CDN, DDoS mitigation & WAF services therefore they could just selectively block the visitors with HTTP 451. If they were asked to block a domain that wasn't using Cloudflare, I'm sure that would be the first instance of them having to modify the DNS response - but they would have to, or stop doing business in that jurisdiction like what OpenDNS did.

Cloudflare is quite notorious about not policing the content being fronted by their service, and are quite popular with less than legal (but still clearnet) sites.

In the example cases, they already had TLS certificates issued and were using them for the legitimate traffic of that domain as it was fronted by Cloudflare.
by coldpie | 2025-05-11 20:52:24+00:00
> or simply think it’s not a viable solution to stop the economy, or not treat sick people with grid-taxing medical equipment, or deny automobiles to people who must commute to earn a living, or ban certain foods, and so on and so on.

At least in the US, pretty much nobody of any consequence is advocating for any of those things.

> How can we live how we want to live, whatever that means individually, in a way that is sustainable and avoids a system of state rationing?

It's an extremely complex problem, but for the most part what we need to do is understood. Stop burning fuel for energy by implementing renewables and nuclear, and retiring coal and NG; and switch to electric cars, trucks, and trains. Those two things alone would almost eliminate half of US carbon emissions. There's a long tail of much more difficult problems to tackle after that, but accomplishing just those two would buy a ton of time to address that long tail. That's why everyone serious is focusing on those two problems and not like, artificial meat or whatever.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-05-11 20:52:51+00:00
Even in the US freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences. quite the opposite. I'm sure in Nazi times in europe, being critical of the Nazis wasn't allowed speech. Both then and now in the US, nazis prosper because we didn't use free speech to fend them off enough, we were complacent. You can see trump trying to retaliate by firing people, banning journalists, cancelling contracts, etc.. for anyone critical of his administration. speech is how fascists gain power, but opposing speech across europe (look at UK and France) is also how they just recently fended of right-wing fascists.

In a democracy, the government gets its power from the people. if it can silence the people in certain contexts, then in those contexts the people lost their power. When politicians with bad intent take power, they'll use this crack in the system to tear it apart.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-05-11 20:52:56+00:00
Anyone who disobeys Abrahamic "ten" commandments 0, 1 and/or 2 (depending how you count them) – that is, anyone who does not worship the Abrahamic God as the first and foremost deity.

I'm not sure whether atheists count as pagans. (Buddhists probably are…? But really, the term was designed for the religious practices of southern and (north-)western Europe that the early-ish Christian church wanted to wipe out.)
by Loughla | 2025-05-11 20:52:58+00:00
I don't think we can live the way we want to live without extreme weather, disease, and/or famine killing a good share of us. The modern human way of life is simply unsustainable.

The problem is that no one wants to willingly sacrifice their own wants or needs for the greater good, which makes sense. Why should I suffer for 8 billion people I don't know? The scale is just too large to comprehend as a basic human.

We need to focus on fixing our local area and living as much within what it can provide as we can. It's easier to understand. It's easier to see the impacts.

But it doesn't solve the problem of human caused climate change.

Maybe I'm too pessimistic, but I don't see a way out of this that ends with anything but the complete and utter collapse of civilization as we know it before 2100.

I believe that we will no longer possess the technology to access this comment well before that time, and we'll see a return to feudal/tribal lifestyles with a much diminished population.

I just hope it happens after my bloodline has already died out, and none of my kids or grandkids will have to experience the shit show. But I have little faith of that. I think the collapse will come within my kids' lifetime, and that's very depressing.
by wim | 2025-05-11 20:54:39+00:00
We're building a collaborative IDE for tasks and notes [1] from scratch without frameworks/dependencies.

Not saying frameworks are never the right answer of course, but it's as much a trade-off for complex apps as it is for blogs. Things like performance, bundle size, tooling complexity, easy of debugging and call stack depth, API stability, risk of hitting hard-to-work-around constraints all matter at scale too.

[1] https://thymer.com/
by insin | 2025-05-11 20:55:44+00:00
Web Components don't solve the problems I do have and add new problems I don't want.

Many of the 25 mentions of Shadow DOM in the Components Page and 14 mentions of it in the Styling page are about solving problems you now only have because the site recommended you use Shadow DOM, and the problem Shadow DOM itself is _trying_ to solve is one I don't have in components written specifically for my app, which will only be used in my app.
by behnamoh | 2025-05-11 20:56:09+00:00
Why does Apple behave like there are no other operating systems or devices in the world? for a long time, even in their keynotes they would compare the new iphones with the last year model, not the flagship androids. and their standards mostly work for themselves, not the rest of the world. for example, most keybindings in Pages are totally different than Word and the rest of the text editing apps (CMD-E is supposed to center things but it doesn't). they created a language (Swift) and kept it closed source for a long time, and then didn't extend support to other OS's. presumably they do this so devs who wanna make iOS apps have to purchase Macs, but quite honestly this is just lazy corporate shenanigans. There are far more important reasons to buy a Mac, and anyone who uses Linux isn't suddenly going to convert to macOS just so they can build iOS apps (they probably have more fundamental issues with non-FOSS software anyway).
by immibis | 2025-05-11 20:56:38+00:00
Alice missed the $25 payment because her balance was zero, triggering a $7 late payment fee, $30 failed payment fee and $30 overdraft protection fee. Alice used the service more than once, so she missed not just this payment, but 20 simultaneous payments, having $1340 taken from her in total, eating her whole next two paychecks. During the time of those next two paychecks, it will be time to pay the next two instalments, triggering the same fees each time.
by FjordWarden | 2025-05-11 20:57:56+00:00
I don't find WebComponents a good replacement for what in other web frameworks are called components. For one thing they don't support complex values like Objects and Arrays as attributes. The amount of boilerplate you have to write is way too high, and you still don't have reactivity. I do vanilla-ish JS using signals[1]. Not everything the W3C releases should be canon, XHTML is a testament to that.

[1] https://wrnrlr.github.io/prelude/
by conception | 2025-05-11 20:59:51+00:00
There’s a hidden cost in web applications as well: you lose the value of the operating systems application language. Every website and thus electron app suffers from this. There’s no standard place for settings, buttons and windows don’t behave normally. There’s a lot of value in native apps in usability just in it sharing the same UX language as the operating system. Sadly this is mostly dead for new applications.
by edmundsauto | 2025-05-11 21:00:09+00:00
Have you considered your price point? I work for bigger companies, we would never go with someone whose base plan is so cheap. This is because it takes a lot of effort to make a purchase, and going to accounting for $10/month for something as important as regulatory compliance or antifraud just doesn’t vibe.

Smaller vendors in your price target might have the budget but not the mindshare to implement.

I’d be curious if you 100x your pricing.
by FreakLegion | 2025-05-11 21:00:27+00:00
It's a useful realization, too, since ways of approximating kernel functions are already well-studied. Google themselves have been publishing in this area for years, e.g. https://research.google/blog/rethinking-attention-with-perfo...

> To resolve these issues, we introduce the Performer, a Transformer architecture with attention mechanisms that scale linearly, thus enabling faster training while allowing the model to process longer lengths, as required for certain image datasets such as ImageNet64 and text datasets such as PG-19. The Performer uses an efficient (linear) generalized attention framework, which allows a broad class of attention mechanisms based on different similarity measures (kernels). The framework is implemented by our novel Fast Attention Via Positive Orthogonal Random Features (FAVOR+) algorithm, which provides scalable low-variance and unbiased estimation of attention mechanisms that can be expressed by random feature map decompositions (in particular, regular softmax-attention). We obtain strong accuracy guarantees for this method while preserving linear space and time complexity, which can also be applied to standalone softmax operations.
by cdrini | 2025-05-11 21:01:00+00:00
I mean, the article addresses exactly your point like one line down?

> In a separate interview last week, Zuckerberg said “the average American has three friends, but has demand for 15” and AI could plug that gap.

And I think we should definitely look on this tech with scrutiny, but I think another angle to look at it is: which is worse? No therapy or AI therapy? You mention suicide, but which would result in a reduction in suicide attempts, a or b? I don't have an answer, but I could see it being possible that because AI therapy provides cheaper, more frequent access to mental care, even if it is lower quality, it could result in a net improvement over the status quo on something like suicide attempts.
by ghaff | 2025-05-11 21:01:01+00:00
>German system is pretty class-based and forces kids to make big career decisions at a younger age then necessary

At some level I think that's true in a lot of places. I'm not sure, in the US, if you really know what kind of engineering (or whatever) you want to go into. High school pretty much didn't give you a good sense of that in a lot of cases. Perhaps, on this board, there is a disproportionate number of people who always knew they wanted to program. But sure wasn't the case for me growing up. And would probably have done something different than mechanical engineering but--whatever--didn't really matter.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-05-11 21:01:03+00:00
There is such a thing as negative value, if you do something that is a commodity poorly, then you are actively less valuable relative to competitors that do a good job of the same thing.

Most software development is a lot of low value commodity stuff that you just have to do properly just in order to do whatever it is that makes whatever it is you do valuable/unique/desirable. You can' charge anyone extra for doing this commodity stuff right. But if you do it wrong, your product becomes less valuable.

A good example of something that is both a commodity and a common source of friction is all the signup and security friction that a lot of software providers have to do. If you do it poorly, it creates a lot of friction, hassle, and frustration. And support overhead. It's literally costing you money and customers. Doing it right isn't necessarily directly appreciated but it results in less friction, frustration, and overhead.

That's why good UX is so important. It's a commodity. But there's plenty of opportunity for turning that into friction by doing a poor job of it.
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by chrisweekly | 2025-05-11 21:01:14+00:00
This is a great resource.

IMHO everyone building for the web should understand how it works and know how to use the foundational web stack, leveraging the web platform per se. Then, by all means use a build system and your preferred frameworks at your discretion, remaining aware of tradeoffs.

For my part, one of the things I like best about Remix (/React-router v7+) is its explicit philosophical alignment with leveraging web standards and doing more by doing less (e.g. mutate server data using... the HTML form tag).

I also highly recommend https://every-layout.dev which showcases eye-opening, mind-expanding techniques for implementing performant, accessible, flexible web layouts using only browser-native CSS.

Context: I've been professionally involved with web development since 1998.
by MrJohz | 2025-05-11 21:01:33+00:00
Sure, that's what we did in the good old days, and there's good reason that most of us, when building more complex components, switched to better state management systems.

The main issue is that, typically, if you're storing data directly in the DOM, you're storing redundant data. For example, if you've got an input that should have a green background if the input is one string, and a purple background if the input is another string, what state should you store here? Fundamentally, there's only one thing that's interesting: the input's value. Anything else — say, the class used to set the background colour — is derived from that value. And therefore we always want our data to flow in one direction: the input value is the source, and any other state or UI updates are based on that.

But in practice, it's usually hard to maintain that strict flow of data. For example, you'll probably have multiple sources that combine in different ways to create different derived data. Or you might have multiple different ways of updating those sources that all need to perform the same updates to the derived data. Or you might have multiple levels of derived data.

It's definitely possible to build applications like this — I started out this way, and still use this for simple projects where the state is fairly easy to manage. But as projects get more complex — and as the state gets more complex — it almost invariably leads to weird glitches and broken states that shouldn't exist. Hence why state management is the core of most modern frameworks — it's the most important problem to solve.

N.B. `useMemo` in React has nothing to do with the DOM — React will never thrash the DOM with unnecessary changes, that's the point of the diffing process. `useMemo` is instead about reducing the number of times that React builds its own VDOM nodes.
by linsomniac | 2025-05-11 21:02:12+00:00
I'm curious if they'll get much traction at this price point. While there is a lot of money in a real estate transaction, agents seem to be (in general) pretty thrifty with spending. For example, their Starter plan is around what an agent's MLS fees will be. My company often buys third party tooling for all our agents use, but this price-point isn't even in the ballpark where we'd even consider it.

My impression is that the people that would be willing to pay for this, are the top producers who are likely to have a professional photographer doing it anyway. And the people who need it the most are the ones who seem to be the most thrifty -- the long-tail that aren't top producers. Maybe there's a middle ground in that grey area there that they're targeting?

(For reference: I'm head sys admin for an MLS; in the arena but not directly working with agents)
by hshdhdhj4444 | 2025-05-11 21:02:57+00:00
https://transport.ec.europa.eu/transport-themes/smart-mobili...

Can you explain why these protections are not sufficient for privacy?

> 112 eCall is not a black box. It does not record constantly the position of the vehicle, it records only a few data to determine the position and direction of the vehicle just before the crash and these data are only transmitted to emergency call centers if there is a serious crash.

> eCall cannot be used to monitor motorist's moves. The SIM-card used to transmit the eCall data is dormant, i.e. it is only activated in case the vehicle has a serious accident (e.g. the airbag is activated).
by photonthug | 2025-05-11 21:02:58+00:00
> answer seems to be yes regardless of where one sits on the political spectrum

Yes, the ugly truth is that it’s hard to find people that have static or principled values on anything, and most are kind of transparently looking for ways to force things on others.

A place where you can see this very clearly is issues of bodily autonomy: one side of the political spectrum wants to force the other side to get vaccinated and the other side wants to force people into unwanted child birth. These are of course very different things, but both are ultimately coercive, so it’s not about the right to choose in either case.

States autonomy vs federalism, bail outs, are similar. Almost no one has any real preference for it one way or the other on principle, it just depends on how they think they might be able to use it as a cudgel and how it will increase or diminish their own bottom line.