MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by BrenBarn | 2025-05-11 05:20:13+00:00
> If Google was broken up 20 years ago, nearly ALL the services listed above would not have happened.

And that would be fine. To me this is like saying "if we had jailed those meth makers and dealers 20 years ago, all these meth labs today would never have existed". If these services cannot exist without a business model built around transparent, bounded transactions (e.g., no hidden data harvesting), then they should not exist. The problem is precisely that Google and others of its ilk have essentially gotten millions of people addicted to "free" services whose true costs are hidden.

> The reason Google is the size it is today is because it provided better services at better prices than all the competitors.

No, they've just been better at hiding the costs, exploiting legal loopholes, and exploiting their privileged position to raise barriers to entry for other participants.
by chii | 2025-05-11 05:20:36+00:00
> regular employees who were asked to not record

i think this should not be possible to be asked.

For example, an employee might want to record to cover their own ass (e.g., if being asked to do some morally questional things, which the employee could record then use as protection against the company going back on their word).

Having the ability to _control_ whether an employee can keep records independently of the company only serves to move more control away from the employee.
by lolinder | 2025-05-11 05:21:20+00:00
I'm not sure where you got that I'm trying to impose anything on anyone—sounds like you latched onto a side note and decided to reply to what you thought the side note was implying instead of the substance of my comment?

The argument has nothing to do with values or imposing them on others, it's simply this: These things are not and never were free. Google wants you to think they're free, but either the ads are effective at driving revenue and consumers are paying for Google's products in the form of increased consumption or Google is a parasite that lies to businesses about the efficacy of their ads and consumers are paying for Google's products in the form of the parasitic Google tax. Most likely it's a bit of both.

Either way, Google offering these products for "free" did not have a positive effect on consumer wallets and paid solutions emerging to replace Google if it actually does dissolve will not have a negative effect.
by FilosofumRex | 2025-05-11 05:21:33+00:00
They're too big to fail argument of Obama, is now they're too big to break up.

No, they are not, by historical standard. When the Standard Oil Trust was broken up in 1911, it controlled nearly 80% of gasoline market in the US and kept prices too low, so no one could enter the market.

Exxon, Mobile, Chevron, Texaco, Amoco, Gulf oil, and 30 other oil companies emerged. Today only 4 are still around, because anti-trust enforcement has been guted by both parties since WWII. Google babies will merge and raise, yet again.
by balazstorok | 2025-05-11 05:22:11+00:00
I have to agree. There is a clear pattern indicating what she thinks is "the best way to live". Be open and be happy. Be otherwise at your own demise. It also sounds a lot like she is trying to convince herself she is striving for the right way of living. First it seemed she has a point, later in the post I felt she lacks intellectual humility, a "healthy" level (oh the irony) of doubt.
by gyesxnuibh | 2025-05-11 05:23:31+00:00
Rewriting hundreds of thousands of lines of code just isn't really feasible honestly. Maybe you just mean the actually bottle neck can use C bindings or whatever. Or, maybe you can migrate some microservices and hope it goes smoothly. But, typing does more than performance.

It basically helps a ton of engineers work together efficiently which honestly is bigger than the compute cuz you can always throw more compute at all problem these days anyway.

I don't think typing is necessarily to prevent bugs either. It's to reduce the cognitive load of writing code. Others mention that intellisense and LLMs work better with types. Types do a lot more than catching a runtime error of a method not existing.

I am curious about Odin, I'm mostly a go dev so getting something without the GC and go schedule that writes similarly is really interesting to me.
by avs733 | 2025-05-11 05:23:47+00:00
The funniest part to me is these comments exclude something even more basic: joining a teams meeting on your phone. Notice the platforms mentioned ITA?

I regularly, as do many of the people here, join meetings from my phone. I often do so so I can squeeze a run in. I especially do so in the types of all hands or large meetings where I’m in listen only mode and things are shared that would be hard to trace back to any individual in the room.

I’m not carrying a second phone to take a picture of a slide - but I regularly take screenshots in those meetings to remind myself of something or to show someone when bitching.

The relevant xkcd here is decryption by wrench (538) - the problem being solved is not battling 1337 hackers, it’s herding normally distributed loan officers at a mid regional bank.
by RainbowcityKun | 2025-05-11 05:26:14+00:00
I want to clarify first: I'm not trying to defend "evolutionary theory" itself — what I'm pointing out is:

> Mutation, chaos, and randomness may actually be the fertile ground where biological diversity emerges.

At the same time, I fully agree with your key point:

> "The adaptive, complex, self-replicating systems we see > don’t persist just because of pure randomness."

In my view, this doesn’t necessarily mean a “God” designed it in a human-like way. But it does point to a deeper structural order and cosmic regularity.

Maybe we can call it a kind of “design of laws,” rather than a personal designer.

After all, nature seems to operate within a set of elegant, consistent rules:

- F = ma (Newton's 2nd Law): A foundational rule in classical mechanics. - E = mc² (Einstein): Energy and mass are interchangeable. - V = IR (Ohm’s Law): Governs how voltage, current, and resistance relate. - a² + b² = c² (Pythagorean Theorem): Geometry’s timeless backbone. - Entropy always increases (2nd Law of Thermodynamics): Order tends toward disorder unless something resists it.

So maybe we can say:

- In religious terms, this is “God’s design.” - In philosophical terms, it’s the “underlying order of the universe.” - In scientific terms, it’s the “laws of nature, structural stability, and the boundary conditions of evolution.”
by Zorass | 2025-05-11 05:27:30+00:00
She wrote, “seeing someone is like noticing their internal structure” — that line made me pause for a while. As a kid, I used to think everyone could pick up on those tiny things in people — like the hesitation behind a sentence, or the way someone's eyes seem like they’re trying to escape. Turns out, not everyone “sees” like that. Watching people is more like passive resonance. Sometimes you’re just passing by, but your body has already picked up the entire vibe of that person. No words, just a quiet read.
by BrenBarn | 2025-05-11 05:28:13+00:00
That's only true up to a point. If I say "more plastic in the ocean = more junk", you can say "oh, that's just you pushing your values, if someone else would rather have a disposable plastic water bottle than a clean ocean, that's their choice". But, as with (physical) pollution, the costs of this kind of ad pollution and covert data harvesting are not transparent to consumers, so it's not possible to say they have actually given informed consent to it.

More insidiously, the proliferation of this type of "junk" crowds out other business models, meaning that increasingly people can't even "test" whether they would prefer something else. It's basically the tyranny of small decisions. It's not just a matter of "I will trade you five minutes of my eyeball time for 6 months of email", because every such transaction increase the likelihood that in the future you will find yourself with no option other than to engage in such a transaction in order to, say, pay your electric bill.

It's my claim that my viewpoint is actually in accord with a majority of people's values, in the sense that if we considered an alternate universe with less ad junk, more people in that universe would look at ours and say "Wow, I'm glad I don't live there" than vice versa. It's just that there are lots of clever boiling-frog ways to get people to act against their own values without their being fully aware of it. The mere fact that something has happened doesn't mean most people actually wanted it to happen, or are happy it happened, or even realize they would in fact be happier if it hadn't happened.
by the_plug | 2025-05-11 05:29:16+00:00
I built Focus2Flow because I was tired of watching 20+ minute videos for a single useful explanation.

What it does:

You type a study question like "What is the Lagrangian in physics?"

It analyzes YouTube

It returns direct links to the most relevant timestamps in videos, and code snippets

If nothing exists, it uses GPT to generate its own clear explanation

Bonus: it gives you AI-generated flashcards, a study playlist system, and lets you take timestamped notes

It now even lets you quiz yourself after each session

Works for any subject, not just STEM — law, medicine, finance, philosophy.

I’d love feedback from this community — and if anyone wants to help integrate more open educational data sources, I’m game.
by ses1984 | 2025-05-11 05:29:37+00:00
T he raw bits of the base pairs is just one component of the information, but it’s like a maximally compressed version of the info.

The laws of physics are another component.

From there you would need to simulate nature to be able to decompress all the data, like how computer programs can use procedural generation.

Imagine a game like Minecraft. You can generate practically infinitely many screenshots of Minecraft worlds, but all that data can be derived from the game code and the jvm.
by ChuckMcM | 2025-05-11 05:29:47+00:00
I see it a bit differently, many (most?) web sites explicitly deny scraping execept for Google. Further Google has the infrastructure to crawl several trillion web pages and create a relevant index out of the most authoritative 1.5 trillion. To re-create that on your own, you would need both the web to allow it, and the infrastructure to do it. I would agree that this isn't an insurmountable moat but it is a good one.
by nine_k | 2025-05-11 05:30:01+00:00
Maybe they are safe from being laid off, though you never can tell [1]. But it does not mean they enjoy the tension, the demands, the disagreements, etc that likely crop up. At their position, they can afford to not put up with that, not hold onto the enviable salary, like many others doubtlessly and begrudgingly do.

[1]: https://nerdy.dev/ex-googler
by KawaiiCyborg | 2025-05-11 05:30:35+00:00
I've been using Fastmail.com since December, 2014 now and I'm still very happy with them. I use them with a few of my own domains and I've never had any issue sending or receiving any email. Recently, they even got a 1Password integration that allows you to directly create a masked email for a service from my 1Password UI. Search works perfectly, labels feel good to use and the filters are very flexible. If the UI doesn't allow you what to do, you could even directly write your own Sieve scripts.
by habinero | 2025-05-11 05:30:49+00:00
It's fine if the US wanted to encourage onshoring of certain key industries for national security reasons.

You do that through strategic investment. Silicon Valley is where it is because of government investment here.

You don't do it through sudden high tariffs and angering our other allies. You don't need to be an economist to know it's a terrible idea.

You only need to know how tariffs work to understand it's an insanely stupid idea that'll crash our economy and put American businesses into bankruptcy.
Tripping
by elcc | 2025-05-11 05:32:09+00:00
Ok so I just discovered who invented and wrote Bitcoin. I'm shaking and it hit me like a bag of bricks. Watching this YouTube video 2 minutes ago they mentioned something about this person being in a Belgium classroom receiving a specific copy of this book or papers. This is one dangerous man that nobody knows. I'm not a f*** snitch so I won't say nothing or even hint as to who it is because he's that knowledgeable and powerful. He's a walking Crystal school I shit you guys not and this guy is the ultimate black hat of hackers. Just so you guys get a little context of what I'm talking about he started an online pharmacy decades ago and that's how he made his first millions. He didn't even use his actual name and I'm thinking that's where the idea was born. Finding a way to cash out from those I'll gotten gains. The FDA wasn't even regulating online at the time! This is all coming together too fast and I'm not going to be the guy that downfalls bitcoin. It's not the guy that passed away either ..That's all I can really say. What would anybody do if they were in my shoes? I swear to God I'm not lying. I'm really religious.. I was just remembering something he mentioned somewhere one time. That he could program a specific way using a sound card to mine faster 'then any current methods or hardware out there' It's funny as hell because you use something of his that he created a very long time ago every single day. Believe me or f*** not... If there's a name or person attached to bitcoin then it can be taken down and destroyed, but even before he made it he was into his millions and hundreds of millions of dollars so it's just ridiculous to think why he would even try to cash that out or be made aware if staying off the grid was his number one objective to begin with.
by fakedang | 2025-05-11 05:33:35+00:00
I mean, it's not so easy getting a perfectly knowledgeable English speaker in China. Heck, if you see some of the interviews of the insanely viral Tony from LC Signs, his English outside of his skits is actually very Chinese-flavored. One of my friend's exes who was Chinese and studied at Oxbridge had a very similar strong Chinese twang, and often made grammatical mistakes while writing, even though the British would easily call her fluent.
by phire | 2025-05-11 05:34:07+00:00
> is they promoted the myth that ISA has no impact on performance

IMO, Intel (and AMD) did prove the impact of a legacy ISA was low enough to not be a competitive disadvantage. Not zero, but close enough for high-performance designs.

In fact, I actually think the need to continue supporting the legacy x86 ISA was a massive advantage to Intel. It forced them to go down the path of massively out-of-order μarches at a point in history where everyone else was reaping massive gains from following the RISC design philosophy.

If abstracting away the legacy ISA was all the massive out-of-order buffers did, then they would be considered to be nothing more than overhead. But the out-of-order μarch also had a secondary benefit of hiding memory latency, which was starting to become a massive issue at this point in history. The performance gains from this memory latency hiding were so much higher than the losses from translating x86 instructions, which allowed Intel/AMD x86 cores to dominate in the server, workstation and consumer computing markets in the late 90s and 2000s, killing off almost every competing RISC design (including Intel's own Itanium).

RISC designs only really held onto the low power markets (PDAs, cellphones), where simplicity and low power consumption still dominated the considerations.

------------------

What Intel might have missed is that x86 didn't hold a monopoly on massively out-of-order μarch. There was no reason you couldn't make a massively out-of-order μarch for a RISC ISA too.

And that's what eventually happened. Starting in the mid 2010s. We started seeing ARM μarchs (especially from Apple) that looked suspiciously like Intel/AMDs designs, just with much simpler frontends. They could get the best of both worlds, taking advantage of simpler instruction decoding, while still getting the advantages of being massively out-of-order.

------------------

You are right about Intel's arrogance, especially assuming they could keep a process lead. But the "x86 tax" really isn't that high. It's worth noting that one of the CPUs they are losing ground too, is also x86.
by odyssey7 | 2025-05-11 05:34:10+00:00
I don’t buy it. I suspect that a reason Google Cloud remains a laggard in market share is that Google’s core business, as an advertiser that feeds off user data, gives parts of the available market the heebie jeebies.

The monopoly is possibly self-defeating at this point. Maybe the reason for the Google graveyard is that too big to fail has somehow turned into too big to succeed.
by fsckboy | 2025-05-11 05:34:15+00:00
>The compiler leverages undefined behavior by allowing optimizations to not have to care about code that exhibits such undefined behavior.

that's pure maliciousness. if the programmer has written code that exhibits undefined behavior, it should be flagged as an error so it can be changed to code that does not exhibit undefined behavior.

programs need to have one unambiguous meaning, and it should be the meaning intended by the programmer. if meanings can be detected as ambiguous or as not what the programmer intended, that should be flagged, not magically swept under the carpet because it's "faster".
by zzrrt | 2025-05-11 05:34:42+00:00
Maybe the journalists have no answer because the government didn’t provide any information about him. We should invent a process by which the government presents facts and arguments to the public so that we know “who” they are deporting and why before they do it. There will be rules for what evidence can be presented and what type of arguments can be made, and an expert could preside over it, “judging” if you will, the validity of the facts and arguments and deciding what should be done. We could call it immigration court. Oh wait! it already exists, and this administration just ignores it, because nothing they would present there would justify disappearing someone to a foreign prison in a country they have never been to with no criminal conviction. That and they lack the resources to follow the rules while also making their quotas, and ~every lawyer with integrity and competence has quit or been fired.

There is perhaps some “reason” this happened to him that the news doesn’t know yet, but it can’t possibly be a good enough reason to do this. I think it’s unlikely many of these men are violent criminals, but even if they are, the law should be followed and their family and lawyers should know where they are.

MAGA say stuff like “if you want to immigrate here or seek asylum, there’s a process; don’t do it illegally.” The same is true of deportation. While I don’t think it should be a big priority, I would be a lot less angry about deportations if the law and basic human decency was being followed while doing it.
by WesBrownSQL | 2025-05-11 05:35:20+00:00
That's what you don't get. You aren't just watching ads. You are giving them data about you, a lot of data. That data is used to heavily manipulate you. This isn't like the old days of broadcast TV where ads air and you aren't directly tracked. If you ever find a product that is free, it isn't. You are the product that is being sold.
by Joker_vD | 2025-05-11 05:36:14+00:00
> you can use emoji domains right now

ICANN, by the way, heavily discourages such domain names, even though it can't actually prohibit them: yes, RFC 5892 explicitly prohibits emoji code points in internationalized domain names but so what? If registrars allow (and many acually do allow) registration of such names that only means that they violate some RFC and they already violate quite a lot of them. Who cares! Just pay the money and we will delegate you whatever names you want.
by anon7000 | 2025-05-11 05:36:27+00:00
Half the point of MCP is just making it easy for an LLM to use some language in a standard way to talk to some other tool. I mean MCP is partly a standard schema for tools to interact and discover each other, and part of it is just allowing non-webserver based communication (like stdio piping, especially useful since initial the use case is running local scripts
by no_time | 2025-05-11 05:39:51+00:00
Windows does have an API for this that is not tied to the DRM protected video path I think.

My guess comes from the fact that KeepassXC turns black/totally transparent when viewed through a VNC server on windows.

Edit: here it is https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winuser/...
by rixed | 2025-05-11 05:40:43+00:00
That's quite a judgment about the author, based on a single blog post.

You could argue that one reveals much more about their personality on a blog post that's about their though process, than one does when walking in a room and behaving during a wedding reception but... I'm actually not sure it's true, considered the former is the fruit of conscious reflection and the later is mostly not filtered by consciousness.
by s1artibartfast | 2025-05-11 05:41:39+00:00
Most countries do exactly that. determine how much they will pay for a drug based on person years of increased health span. The term you are looking for is quality adjusted life years (QALY). Many European countries will pay up to around €80,000, and sometimes more for cancer treatments. I think France will pay 300k or so for oncology.

Cures are hard. No companies are suppressing cures that would make them tens of billions of dollars out of long term self interest. You take the cash and move on to the next one (or not).

The time value of money means that profits more than 10 years or so into the future are essentially irrelevant compared to money today.
by RajBhai | 2025-05-11 05:41:44+00:00
I remember hotmail before gmail. Attachments had a 2 MB limit. I couldn't even share HQ photos using hotmail. And the whole inbox had a 25 MB capacity. I do believe there were paid alternatives with more storage.

Gmail came in with 1 GB storage and grouping emails as conversations. To me, both of these aspects were revolutionary, and other email providers shortly followed suit.
by pzs | 2025-05-11 05:43:26+00:00
This trend of overengineering is apparent now in cars, too. An innocent failure, like a headlight going out can turn into a major systemic issue, like the engine refusing to start through a chain reaction inside an inadequately tested software control system.

I wonder if this is a one-way street, that is, if a realization will come at some point that simple solutions to simple problems can be more robust...
by pacaro | 2025-05-11 05:46:21+00:00
There are so many ways to produce sierpinski gaskets.

It you specify n points and the pick a new point at random, then iteratively randomly select (uniformly) one of the original n points and move the next point to the mid point of the current point and the selected point. Coloring those points generates a sierpinski triangle or tetrahedron or whatever the n-1 dimensional triangle is called
by jjav | 2025-05-11 05:49:14+00:00
> If Tesla sales are down, the Cybertruck is an unmitigated failure and now they are losing money on insurance, then why on earth is the Tesla stock not going down?

Great question. Tesla's latest quartely report was very negative across the board. Normally stocks tank after a report even half as bad. But Tesla has been on a wild rally since the report came out. No, I can't explain it.
by mattkevan | 2025-05-11 05:50:19+00:00
Confirmation bias. We only hear about the heroics that worked. Plenty of heroes end up in unmarked graves. Teams move forward through trust, clear goals and good processes. Individuals may want to be heroic once those elements are in place but it’s not going to work without.

Companies die when the sort of managers take over who see their job as to manage, taking pride in not knowing about the product or customers, instead of caring deeply about delivering a good product. The company may continue for years afterwards, but it’s a zombie, decaying from the inside.