MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by troupo | 2025-05-15 07:48:58+00:00
lol at IAB's choice of headline: "Belgian Market Court Confirms Limited Role of IAB Europe In The TCF"

IAB was on the hook for the dreadful cookie "consent" popups that ruined the web (no, it wasn't GDPR that ruined it, it was a very deliberate action by "industry groups" like IAB).

The only reason the Market Court annulled the previous decision was on procedural grounds, while agreeing that IAB is responsible, and keeping the 250 000 EUR fine in place.

Too bad. I wish Market Court would've burned IAB to the ground, salted the earth and scattered the ashes.
by int19h | 2025-05-15 07:49:36+00:00
it has been worth it for me, ymmv of course.

also they have a pay-as-you-go tier now as well.

I pay the full $500 though. This month I'm going to blow past the base allowance and tap into 'gift credits'

speaking of which if anyone wants a referral code (gift creds for me, and for you) hmu
by mdhb | 2025-05-15 07:49:40+00:00
I was quite glad to see this quote in there:

> Dr Johnny Ryan said "Today's court's decision shows that the consent system used by Google, Amazon, X, Microsoft, deceives hundreds of millions of Europeans. The tech industry has sought to hide its vast data breach behind sham consent popups. Tech companies turned the GDPR into a daily nuisance rather than a shield for people."

I feel this so often gets lost in the conversation where a huge amount of people in communities like this one will loudly point out how annoying consent banners are but never give any thought as to why so many websites feel that just because you want to read a single article on their website that they are now entitled to sell your information often to hundreds and even thousands of different data brokers and that this is now so normalised that it’s almost every bit of content I consume now.

The original purpose of the GDPR was clearly to try and put an end to this kind of thing while still leaving cutouts for legitimate purposes with informed consent.

I’m so glad to see them come at this from a new angle entirely now to just firmly say that this surveillance capitalism bullshit is illegal and you can’t cookie banner your way out of it as some kind of legal protection.

Good, that makes me extremely happy as an EU resident and I wholeheartedly support whatever steps you need to take in order to enforce this. There’s no reason at this point to continue playing nice with US spyware companies masquerading as “data brokers”, let them deal with the mess they made but we don’t need it here.
by gorgoiler | 2025-05-15 07:49:59+00:00
”What do you get if you multiply six by nine? 42”

For the uninitiated, a famous comedy science fiction series from the 1980s — The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams — involves a giant, planet sized machine built by extra-terrestrials.

They already knew the answer to “the life, the universe, and everything” was the number 42. What they didn’t know — and what the machine was trying to find out — was what is the question?

The machine they built was Earth.

It has to be said that not only was Adams way ahead of us on this joke, he was also the star of the original documentary on agentic software! Hyperland (1990): https://vimeo.com/72501076
by sshine | 2025-05-15 07:50:08+00:00
> the question is largely, can the LLM results be used for human learning and human training, or is it purely a shortcut for skills

I agree. And I think everyone who uses them does a combination. The biggest danger lies with new learners who mistake immediate completion of a training task with having learned something.

I will drive a stick-shift once a year, and automatic every other day. Surely my skill will atrophy, but the convenience is worth it.
by antfarm | 2025-05-15 07:50:15+00:00
I got redirected here via this (only) post in the discussion of a news story on TechCrunch that looked like saying that the article is already being discussed in a different thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43991641

I didn't check the title and was under the impression that this discussion was also about the TechCrunch story, thus my question why this discussion was flagged.

TechCrunch story: https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/14/grok-is-unpromptedly-telli...
by palata | 2025-05-15 07:50:38+00:00
I use Yubikeys as my passkeys, and in terms of security it's strictly superior to passwords.

> seemingly no one besides maybe Bitwarden supports exporting them. Which seems pointless, because I don't know of any platform that supports importing them

That may still change in the future :-). The thing is that the technology allows it, which is good, right?
by PaulRobinson | 2025-05-15 07:50:54+00:00
A lot of the UK did this in the 1980s and it’s turned into such a disaster, most mayors and local authorities are trying to move to the London model: companies can bid a flat rate to deliver a bus service (effectively, they commit to providing drivers to deliver the timetable). TfL collects all fares. They also - I think - supply most of the buses to ensure they are of a certain standard, but the companies need to lease them, and maintain them.

This means you get private companies trying to lower costs and so costs are privatised, but the profits (if any) are socialised into a public authority.

This then allows TfL to offer system-wide passes making bus travel over all 43 boroughs cost effective.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-05-15 07:51:09+00:00
The problem is, they don't even let most people have actual offices at the office.

Even if productivity is better this way, isn't there an advantage to being able to hire people from a wider geography, access to a larger talent pool?

I read @paulg and other leadership type YC people support return to office as well. I recall startups competing for talent desperately. That was why silicon valley startups always had crazy perks. If talent was how my business disrupted and dominated, I would want the most access to talent and give them the best working conditions. Perhaps a subtle pivot in priority has happened? Tech companies no longer believe in a talent-centered strategy? Or there is an over abundance of talent?

I'm just trying to give people the benefit of doubt, that this isn't just cruel people unhappy at the sight of improved quality of life for others.
by stephenr | 2025-05-15 07:51:26+00:00
It's a little disappointing that BugsEverywhere/BE (https://github.com/aaiyer/bugseverywhere) never gained popularity.

I appreciate that tools like Git Bug are not tied to a single repo host but they are tied inherently to a single VCS (git). BE was not reliant on a specific VCS, and it's a *really* simple format on-disk too.
by teekert | 2025-05-15 07:51:30+00:00
This is a rather new stance, history books may one day label it as enlightened (I believe they will). We are not there though, and your stance is not obvious to the majority of people. I do experience that this is sentiment is growing. I personally see it as the moral high ground (both from the animal well-fare as the environmental perspective), whereas I didn't only a couple of years ago.
by blackbear_ | 2025-05-15 07:51:38+00:00
This idea was already picked up and elaborated in the 50s and 60s by the Frankfurt school:

> Consumption of the easy pleasures of popular culture, made available by the mass communications media, renders people docile and content, no matter how difficult their economic circumstances are used to manipulate mass society into passivity.

> Adorno and Horkheimer theorized that the phenomenon of mass culture has a political implication, namely that all the many forms of popular culture are parts of a single culture industry whose purpose is to ensure the continued obedience of the masses to market interests.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_industry
by voidnap | 2025-05-15 07:52:25+00:00
My usage isn't high. I was rate limited to like 5 requests per minute. It was a repo with several small files.

And seriously if they keep this up, with limits on their web interface but leave unauthenticated cloning allowed, I'd rather clone the repo than log in.

GitHub code browsing went south since microsoft bought them anyway. Having a simple proxy that clones a repo and serves it would solve problems with rate limits and their awful UX.
by gilleain | 2025-05-15 07:52:32+00:00
Mostly overlapping definition of what a 'complex system' is with :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_system

although I understood the key part of a system being complex (as opposed to complicated) is having a large number of types of interaction. So a system with a large number of parts is not enough, those parts have to interact in a number of different ways for the system to exhibit emergent effects.

Something like that. I remember reading a lot of books about this kind of thing a while ago :)
by _el1s7 | 2025-05-15 07:54:05+00:00
Yea, not really. It also writes:

"Some among the machine society see this as potentially amazing...Others see it as a threat."

That sounds like a human society, not machine society.

But what really is a machine society? Or a machine creature? Can they actually "think"?

A machine creature, if it existed, it's behaviour would be totally different from a human, it doesn't seem they would be able to think, but rather calculate, they would do calculation on what they need to do reach the goal it was programmed.

So yes, the article is not exactly logical. But at least, it is thought provoking, and that's good.
by rottc0dd | 2025-05-15 07:54:45+00:00
Are cells not computers in some way? We are made of cells and cells work with chromosomes. Chromosomes are coded with ATGC pairs and each triplet is capable of creating proteins.

And the activation and deactivation of some triplet happens on response to presence of proteins. So, chromosomes are code and input and output is proteins. So, if our fundamental building blocks are computable in nature, what does it make us?
by int_19h | 2025-05-15 07:54:52+00:00
They were hypocrites even before they succeeded, since one of their main grievances was that free states did not enforce the Fugitive Slave Laws, which were a case of the feds overriding the states on that matter to begin with. No surprise that, once they had their own government, they took those same laws to 11 by mandating slavery throughout.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-15 07:55:01+00:00
Sadly, in the post-WWII decades, it seems that the American Dream has consisted of getting the hell away from your parents, and/or getting the hell out of this podunk rural town and into the Big City.

Now both of those can be tragedies in their own way. In the 1970s there was a notorious upheaval in TV programming known as "The Rural Purge": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_purge

Basically, a lot of TV series which were set in rural or pastoral settings, were outright canceled in favor of urban shows, including "fish out of water" fare such as The Beverly Hillbillies. And prime time TV has never been the same since then!

So it was inevitable that there have been waves of urbanization, and commensurate de-ruralization. As people got into STEM, they needed to get off the farm. If it was no longer possible to make a living on a ranch, then people needed to get into the cities. Including minorities such as Black Americans, who may find more opportunity on the fringes of society, and less discrimination or injustice, after a while anyway.

And there has been a streak of independence as well. American kids are raised to resent their parents and long for something else. Sometimes they don't know what that is, just that they can't find it at home. So an American kid, especially the boys, they're conditioned and poised to leave home as soon as they're 18. Go far away to college and stay away. Leave the nest behind and make it on your own [even if your family already lived in a nice big city.]

Even I was infected with this so-called "American Dream", and not realizing how good I had things at home, I wanted to get out of there, get far away, make it on my own, but I couldn't. I couldn't fend for myself and I crashed and burned; I hit rock bottom without my family's support. I never should have left in the first place, but now the deed is done.

In the 1950s the propaganda supported the "Nuclear Family" concept, and extended families started splintering. It's often not cool for parents to live with their married, adult children, or to have a large family house that fits everyone. The kids go away and they hole up in 1BR apartments alone, to fend for themselves independently, for better or worse. Women enter the workforce, willingly or unwillingly.

I would say at this point, that whoever has purchased a home and the land underneath it, they're done moving. Perhaps fewer are looking to purchase homes far away from where they already are. I myself decided I'd never relocate again, back in 1999, because it just wasn't worth it anymore, and also because I found myself in a really ideal location that offered no reasons to leave.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-05-15 07:55:41+00:00
I agree. At first the problems that you try to solve need to be verifiable.

But there's progress on many fronts on this. There's been increased interest in provers (natural language to lean for example). There's also been progress in LLM-as-a-judge on open-ish problems. And it seems that RL can help with extracting step rewards from sparse rewards domains.
by frabonacci | 2025-05-15 07:56:47+00:00
Yes, Lume supports running macOS Big Sur as a guest on Apple Silicon (M1 or later) hosts running Monterey or newer, as long as you’re using an ARM64 build of Big Sur.

However, App Store sign-in is currently not supported inside macOS VMs due to how Apple handles hardware entitlements and secure boot in virtualized environments.

That said, with macOS Sequoia, Apple has relaxed some constraints — you can now sign into iCloud inside a VM, which enables direct downloads of stable or beta Xcode installers without needing the App Store. More details here:

https://eclecticlight.co/2024/07/12/sequoia-virtualisation-a...

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/usi...

https://xcodereleases.com/
by parsabg | 2025-05-15 07:57:10+00:00
I've been thinking about this (funnily, also while building a browser use type agent [1]) and I think this is a solid direction to explore. My implementation stores tuples of (context, task, tool_sequence) after a successful task completion, e.g.: (Instagram.com, "check the user's notifications", [browser_click, browser_read_text, ...]).

One can imagine an agent-to-agent marketplace where agents publish and consume such memories, standardized by canonical references to the MCP tools they've used, and possibly put a price on it based on how much work it would take another agent to "discover" that useful computational path. Then the consuming agents can make a "build vs buy" decision.

The core issue is in creating meaningful notions of "context" across the universe of tasks and environments. I'm skeptical of embeddings for that reason, and I think reducing false positives/negatives for cache hits is more important than efficiency in the short term, so perhaps a rich textual description of the context is a good short term compromise.

[1] https://github.com/parsaghaffari/browserbee
by pixelfarmer | 2025-05-15 07:58:03+00:00
If I look at one of the photography books in my shelf, they are even talking about 18 stops and such for some film material, and how this doesn't translate to paper and all the things that can be done to render it visible in print and how things behave at both extreme ends (towards black and white). Read: Tone-mapping (i.e. trimming down a high DR image to a lower DR output media) is really old.

The good thing about digital is that it can deal with color at decent tonal resolutions (if we assume 16 bits, not the limited 14 bit or even less) and in environments where film has technical limitations.
by namaria | 2025-05-15 07:58:34+00:00
I'll speak for myself, for me it's illustrated by the spam sketch from Monty Python. It crowds out everything, including my mental space. The hype and disconnect from reality make it intriguing to my brain so I am very likely to end up reading the comments about it, but it's usually a waste of my time. Software does what it does and my opinions (or anyone else's) just don't matter. I should focus my time on learning and building instead of trying to understand hype.
by mschuster91 | 2025-05-15 07:59:24+00:00
> The court says, the logic holds, but the advertisers will not be fined.

That's common in European jurisdiction. We tend to operate on a "first strike is free" principle, especially in contested / purposefully left unclear legal environments. Only when the case law is clear, it can be shown that a law was intentionally exploited or broken or it's a repeat offender, then we bring the hammer down.
by akomtu | 2025-05-15 08:00:50+00:00
It's the assumption that in our world, a machine civilization is an almost certain end. This might explain the Fermi paradox that we haven't seen other civilization in the universe: each builds an AI that decides to go radio offline for self-preservation.

As for MWI, I'm assuming that the world lines may split, or fork in Unix terms. What causes such splits is an open question. The splits cannot be detected with certainty, but can be guessed by side effects. Here I'm making another guess that inhabitants of MWI must be in one world line only, so when a split happens, inhabitants choose one of the paths, often unconsciously based on their natural likes and dislikes. But what happens to their body in the abandonded branch of MWI? It continues to exist mechanically for some short period of time, and then something happens to it, so it's destroyed, i.e. its entropy suddenly increases without the binding principle that has left this branch of MWI. In practice, one half of inhabitant would observe a relatively sudden and maybe peaceful extinction of the other half, while that other half simply continued their path in the other world line. And that other half will see a similar picture, but mirrored. Both halves will be left wondering what's just happened.
by urban_winter | 2025-05-15 08:01:57+00:00
The preliminary report seems to suggest that the yacht's construction was at fault.

I don't understand the following: "The study indicated that if the wind was blowing directly onto Bayesian’s beam and the yacht was in the ‘motoring’ condition, a gusting wind speed in excess of 63.4kts would likely result in the vessel capsizing"

...but it didn't capsize - it sank (due to water coming down the main stairs, reading between the lines of the report).

The angle of vanishing stability, in the configuration in which it sank, was estimated as 70 degrees - and the videos I saw seemed to show it blown further over than that.

Anyway, the report makes an interesting read (as do all the MAIB incident reports - they are addictive reading if you're interested in boats).
by fenomas | 2025-05-15 08:02:07+00:00
I see, thanks for clarifying!

> Would you think doing this live in a screen sharing session adds more value?

In my experience, hugely yes. Above all else I really like that the time commitment is fixed on both sides - no homework for the candidate, and we're not asking them to invest any more time than we are.

Also doing things interactively gives a lot of leeway for adjusting and avoiding wasted time. If somebody's got one section basically solved, I might cut in and say "yeah that bit is great, let's call it finished and look at this other bit". If they're obviously having a lot of trouble, I might ask about their current work and maybe switch tasks if there's a better fit. Or if they're obviously coasting easily I might cut in with "how would you scale this?" questions that give more signal than watching them finish up the loose ends.

Another thing I like is that we can keep the task specification simple, like what you'd get from a PM, and it's up to the candidate whether they want to ask questions or jump in. I imagine that with take-home tasks you either need to give out pretty specific requirements, or else have people interpreting the task a variety of different ways.

> How would you prepare the candidate for this?

We explain at the beginning that the goal is write code for an hour and watch how they work, and there's no hard requirement for what needs to be finished by the end. And they're welcome to search the web, use AI, or anything else they'd typically do while working.

And I've only done a few dozen of these, but personally I've never seen anybody get particularly nervous. I think nerves are a bigger issue with HR style "pass all the tests within the time limit" tests, where the danger is that somebody can hit a wall and never get past it. That doesn't happen with my format, because if somebody is stuck I just give them hints until they're unstuck (since I get no signal from watching somebody scratch their head).
by DeusExMachina | 2025-05-15 08:02:19+00:00
> Perhaps you, a human, read this and think: Well, this world sounds kind of boring. Some of the machines think so, too.

> Most of the machines got bored of the project. But, all of a sudden, things began to get interesting.

> The result was like nothing the machines had ever seen. It was wonderful

> Machine society began obsessing over this development.

> The machines were impressed. And a bit scared.

Boredom, interest, wonder, obsession, being impressed and scared are all emotions that the machines in the story should not be able to experience.
by jeroenhd | 2025-05-15 08:03:51+00:00
Tracking has no legal basis, but it's still permitted with consent. The problem with IAB Europe (and other similar ad providers, as well as IAB's customers) is that IAB Europe didn't obtain consent; it tried to hide its tracking by using supposedly non-personal identifiers, which wouldn't necessitate consent, but the court ruled that these identifiers were actually PII. IAB also tried to weasel its way out of its responsibilities, but preventing that seems to have failed.

As a result, data collected through IAB about European customers was collected unlawfully, and third parties must delete that data. IAB also can't smuggle consent like this anymore, and needs to pay a fine that was handed down a few years ago.

The legal publication can be found here (translated into various languages, though I believe the original may have been Dutch or French as it was the Belgian DPA that started the suit): https://curia.europa.eu/juris/documents.jsf?num=C-604/22 and here https://www.dataprotectionauthority.be/the-market-court-rule...

I very much doubt ad companies will actually delete the illegally obtained data, but IAB and other companies in the cyberstalking industry this can be a problem, because they need to actually comply with the law.
by mrweasel | 2025-05-15 08:04:42+00:00
The "problem" is that oh so many sites have no context. They exist solely to host ads, the content on their pages provide no actual value and is rehashed press-release, direct copies of reporting from Reuters, 10 ten lists written by interns or AI junk.

If this works it will be good for everyone, the many issue with today's internet is the perverse incentives to get views or "engagement" so you can sell ad space. The ads are the goal, not the message.
by iowahansen | 2025-05-15 08:05:39+00:00
I had the same experience. For years, like clockwork I had monthly episodes of debilitating back/neck pain that only my chiropractor could "fix".

After reading Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection by John E. Sarno ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/144873.Healing_Back_Pain ), I recognized that my body was trying distract me from my troubled relationship at that time. On my next painful episode, I mentally said "F*ck it, there is nothing wrong with me physically" and the next day the pain was gone, never to resurface again. The whole thing coincided with my relationship finally ending, so that might have had a positive impact as well.

It still blows my mind though, how much grief my brain gave me over the years.