MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by InsideOutSanta | 2025-06-21 08:56:45+00:00
“Think of how poorly the average person writes, and realize half of them write worse than that.”

(George Carlin or something, quote's veracity depends on what you mean by “average.”)

I think everybody could benefit from having something like Grammarly on their computer. None of us writes perfectly, and it's always beneficial to strive for improvement.
by kseistrup | 2025-06-21 08:57:30+00:00
I can only speak from personal experience.

People tend to have all sorts of reservations against DeltaChat, even if they haven't tried it, and I just haven't experienced those problems.

I have tried DeltaChat with my own mailserver, and with Gmail, FastMail and DeltaChat's chatmail, and it has worked flawlessly. If it hadn't, I wouldn't be a fan.

This is obviously only anecdotal, so other people may report other experiences.

If used as chat only, and with dedicated chatmail servers, the number of theoretical problems diminishes significantly. Using it as an email client and/or with standard email providers introduces potential points of failure, but not more than email to email.
by matsemann | 2025-06-21 08:57:35+00:00
Or we haven't played every game in the series. Like how most iPhone generations "are the same", but most people don't buy every year.

I last played Mario Kart on Nintendo Wii and enjoyed it. That's 17 years ago. I'll probably buy one of the newer versions at some point. And it will be very different from the game I played.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-06-21 08:57:39+00:00
Fear of change, or even just isles of stability, to help recuperate and reorient yourself whilst navigating the stormy seas of life.

Myself, I'm quite open to new forms of entertainment, as well as those previously unknown to me. Even within my favorite genres, I'm more than happy to explore - but I'm still gonna rewatch at least one Star Trek show each year.

It doesn't matter that I've seen most of those show 6-10 times each over the course of my life; it doesn't matter that I've watched some specific episodes 20+ times already. What matters to me is, each time I see those characters and those locations, it feels like coming home.

(And more so than actually coming home.)

People anchor to different things like this, not just TV shows. Sometimes it's a real place (or an event in that place - e.g. vacation), sometimes it's a club, sometimes it's a video game or an outdoor hobby.
by mar1n3r0 | 2025-06-21 08:58:09+00:00
Time to share what I have been working on for the past 6 months after a year of ideation.

In these troubling times where more than 1 million people have been layed-off in the tech sector it's time for the community to take things into its own hands.

Meet Cyber-gubi - your basic income for the cyber age.

Community owned, lead and driven.

Here is why everybody wins by embracing it and how to use it:

Citizens should not be merely surviving with or without a regular job, they should by all means have a normal life. They can devote to their passion projects or work part-time and have a much better work-life balance.

Businesses have a new parallel economy to conquer and make profits of. New business models emerge based on all-in-one subscriptions which drastically reduce costs and head count.

Governments have a new stream of tax revenue to collect and enhance public infrastructure.

How to adopt it in real life:

Register with your face bio-metrics. They are irreversibly hashed and stored in a distributed public database. Your bio-metrics is your data. No one owns it and you can delete it anytime.

Visit cyber-gubi during any of the last 3 days of each month to collect your basic income. There is an inflation indexer which analyzes transactions and adjusts income for next month correspondingly.

Once you have accumulated some cyber-gubi casually start mentioning it to merchants you buy from locally. Explain the concept and how they benefit from it.

Businesses sign up in a wait-list. When there is enough businesses to form a balanced market economy the system opens and they start arbitraging between pricing and salaries paid in cyber-gubi. See docs for more details. Spread the word with business associations and local councils. Convince authorities to accept cyber-gubi as a tax method.

Introduce new business model based on circular economy and all-in-one subscriptions for consumption while cutting costs along the supply chain.

Governments prove their identity and register in the system to start collecting taxes.

Cyber-gubi is non-speculative and not-exchangeable for any currency. It's only application is as utility and use-value. This allows it to be injected into the real economy without causing inflation. When fiat is scarce and crypto is speculative cyber-gubi solves both problems at once.

Avoid the next Great Depression by actually constructing your own system instead of waiting for centralized organizations to impose their solutions on you.
by alexjplant | 2025-06-21 08:58:41+00:00
I've never had this happen with a laptop but as a musician I've been zapped by a microphone a bunch... not an infrequent occurrence if you play electric guitar and sing at the same time. Twice in the past year I've been hit during soundcheck at a gig because of bad grounding at a venue. Last time my solution was to plug everything into the same outlet via a power strip but I invariably end up off-kilter for a few minutes after being electrocuted through my mouth as I'm about to play :-(
by AngryData | 2025-06-21 08:58:47+00:00
Cloth of any decent quality is not hard to alter to fit, often clothes were made with extra material with the expectation of being altered likely multiple times to fit different people.

Also people did't really buy cow feed at the time, they were grazed on nearby fieldgrass in the summer and fed harvested hay grasses from their own fields in the winter. And it doesn't take all that much work to use a scythe to cut literal tons of grasses. With just a minimum of practice you can cut 2-3 acres of grass a day without straining yourself, provided you are fit, which any pre-modern farmer would be.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-06-21 08:58:59+00:00
Many devices if you load up fastboot mode (is that the right name?) it will give you chipset and other information and it will have secureboot info there. It's permanently locked to chain into the AVB image. AVB is a much more complicated beast that specifies the existence of multiple partitions including (IIRC) one for storing authorized keys, one for the recovery, and a bunch of other stuff.

It's possible this has changed or was never widespread in the first place. I have a very limited (and historic) sample size.
by srean | 2025-06-21 08:59:01+00:00
> Hinton and LeCun intentionally failed to cite prior work by others (including himself)

This is a well established and easy to verify fact.

A peer of mine from Hinton's lab once told a story of how one researcher (presumably from his lab or from one of his coworker's lab) intentionally mispelled citations so that the author's citation count does not go up on google-scholar, citeseer etc.

He did not name the names though.
by mycatisblack | 2025-06-21 09:00:51+00:00
Here’s something many people probably don’t know.

I live in a west-Eu country with several well-defined language borders. Each time we cross a border (on holiday), the youtube ads change language. When I’m logged in. I don’t have a driver’s license, yet the most common ad I get is for second hand cars. I’m in a relationship, yet I regularly get ads for dating sites. I have a job, get ads for jobhunting advice. And the other day I got an add specifically for people born before my birth-year minus one.

YouTube’s ads are on the same level as Spotify’s nagging for their subscription: it’s meant to annoy users into buying their ad-free plan. They use real ads as a thin veneer.
by qwery | 2025-06-21 09:01:23+00:00
You're right to point out the "relevance factor" is not what people commonly take it to be. The context is (as always) crucial. Of course, the degree to which an individual tolerates advertising varies for a multitude of reasons.

> billboards [...] countryside

I think people simply find this to be an ugly thing. They object to the ugliness of it. They're in the countryside -- i.e. not the town/city -- and they find themselves unable to escape (even here!) from this seedy miasma. Putting disgust into words is not a simple thing, perhaps this is the reason for the inconsistent reasoning you've noticed.

All advertising is ugly, it's an ugly business -- money grubbing manipulation. It's inherently weird to be subjected to the endless torrent of uncanny twisted art that is advertising every day for your entire life. The ads on Youtube are normalised by the same force that normalises all the other advertising -- the ads in one context normalise the ads in another. The ads on the side of the bus, on the LCD panels on the train, on the same screen that shows the timetable at the station, before the movie starts, by the seemingly sensible ads in Costco. One hand washes the other.
We moved from AWS to Hetzner, saved 90%, kept ISO 27001 with Ansible
by sksjvsla | 2025-06-21 09:02:29+00:00
Earlier this year I led our migration off AWS to European cloud (Hetzner + OVHcloud), driven by cost (we cut 90%) and data sovereignty (GDPR + CLOUD Act concerns).

We rebuilt key AWS features ourselves using Terraform for VPS provisioning, and Ansible for everything from hardening (auditd, ufw, SSH policies) to rolling deployments (with Cloudflare integration). Our Prometheus + Alertmanager + Blackbox setup monitors infra, apps, and SSL expiry, with ISO 27001-aligned alerts. Loki + Grafana Agent handle logs to S3-compatible object storage.

The stack includes: • Ansible roles for PostgreSQL (with automated s3cmd backups + Prometheus metrics) • Hardening tasks (auditd rules, ufw, SSH lockdown, chrony for clock sync) • Rolling web app deploys with rollback + Cloudflare draining • Full monitoring with Prometheus, Alertmanager, Grafana Agent, Loki, and exporters • TLS automation via Certbot in Docker + Ansible

I wrote up the architecture, challenges, and lessons learned: https://medium.com/@accounts_73078/goodbye-aws-how-we-kept-i...

I’m happy to share insights, diagrams, or snippets if people are interested — or answer questions on pitfalls, compliance, or cost modeling.
by krm01 | 2025-06-21 09:03:25+00:00
Designer–engineer here. After 15 years building products [1] ,from scrappy side projects to multibillion-dollar platforms, I’ve found the most productive way to think about design is as a growth accelerant. The OP reaches a similar insight but keeps it in the realm of product development. That framing is precisely where the friction between engineering and design tends to arise. Design isn’t about making the code look nicer... it’s the bridge between engineering execution and business growth.

Take Dropbox’s much-debated rebrand. Many on HN dismissed it as superficial. What they missed is that Dropbox’s growth had plateaued. The new visual language wasn’t meant to "improve the product" for existing power users. it was engineered to make the product feel approachable to an audience the company had never reached. It worked.

When designers focus on the measurable business impact of their work—and engineers stop treating design as a decorative afterthought—cross-functional frictions fade and growth compounds.

[1] https://fairpixels.pro
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-06-21 09:03:57+00:00
It's arguably ~2500 years old, dating back to the Pythagoreans, who believed that "all is number" and had a very large and complex system of musical rituals.

The modern manifestation is mostly the intellectual product of Konrad Zuse, who wrote "digital physics" in 1969.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_physics

Wolfram, Tegmark, Bostrom, etc. are mostly downstream of Zuse.
by ManlyBread | 2025-06-21 09:04:43+00:00
The value I get for paying YouTube doesn't match the price.

Ad blocking is already free and was free for two decades, why would I want to start paying for it now? It's not like I am breaking ToS (despite their pop-ups stating otherwise) and even if I did it is my computer and it is entirely up to me what kind of content it is and isn't going to display.

Personally I don't care if creators get paid or not, I have enough financial problems as it is and I have no capacity to add the problems of complete strangers on the internet to the pile.

Everyone wins aside from me, the end user. I am paying for something that is already free to do, I get nothing out of it (I still have to run stuff like Sponsorblock to get the content I actually want) and I participate in the upkeep of a business model that not only doesn't have my interests in mind but also has no issues with tricking me (there is no content moderation for YouTube ads and there are plenty of cases in which users are served scam ads).
by untitled2 | 2025-06-21 09:06:05+00:00
Whining about algebra not being in most CS curriculums is just a lie. Every university in the world has (if it doesn't, it's not a university) maths as a minor regardless of what your major is. And everyone I know, including me, took algebra as a minor being a CS major (if you didn't, question your choice of career).
by yvklxrcv | 2025-06-21 09:06:12+00:00
I think plastic bags, like most things in life is more nuanced than is or isn't bad. We should look at the whole lifecycle costs and usage patterns of not only the bag itself, but it's effects on the people using them. Does a type of alternative make it hard to carry them by foot or by bike? It could be worse if a bag promotes car usage

I've seen some people start using those durable big bags as disposable ones instead of basic plastics in many areas where normal bags weren't available, causing potentially over a hundred times more energy to be consumed and thrown away, the opposite of what was wanted
by collingreen | 2025-06-21 09:07:41+00:00
Homo economicus to the rescue! Every consumer has perfect knowledge, spending power, and access to effectively unlimited choice which is why when they want lower quality things it's a calculated, careful decision weighing all the options and the long term impacts on both themselves and the future of the industry.

Monopolies and pricing power clearly destroy this utopia but even without those I try to remember Pratchett's "boots theory" whenever I start to blame the consumer for "accepting" abuse from the capital in power of what gets made, when, and for whom.
by jkafjanvnfaf | 2025-06-21 09:08:51+00:00
The only series that release "every 12-18 months" are sports games and Call of Duty, and I can assure you that the overlap between that audience and the Persona one (which has five main-series entries of which barely anyone has played the first two) is extremely small.

Have you considered that you may just be very out of touch?
by keybored | 2025-06-21 09:10:11+00:00
They investigated plastic bags specifically and found that plastic bag litter specifically went down (according to reading before the Conclusion).

Yeah why? Because you get the choice to take a plastic bag with you or not at the checkout. That’s why. That’s you choice. You have much less (just indirect) choice when it comes to how much plastic the stuff you buy is wrapped in. But wait. That’s a lot of it. Even most apparently cardboard wrapping makes me second guess if there is a microfilm of plastic over it.

So we have to hyperfocus on this type of plastic. The one that is the consumer’s choice. And plastic straws of course.

Even less of a choice is commercial fishing equipment being dumped in the ocean. Or things being dumped from other commercial activities.

They got data from citizen-scientists from plastic cleanup. Were those volunteers?[1] If so, plastic pollution propaganda is so important that the important work of plastic cleanup is given to concerned citizens as a bleeding heart hazing ritual. Is that how serious we are about the issue?

The nearest small sports arena is made of synthetic grass which is pellets of plastic. But that’s fine. Plastic bags.

[1] Or that might just be a stereotype by me
by imtringued | 2025-06-21 09:10:18+00:00
People get on board with George Hotz because they share the frustration of using ROCm on consumer GPUs, where the experience has been insultingly dreadful to the point where I decided to postpone buying new AMD GPUs for at least a decade.

I'm not quite sure why he decided to pivot to datacenter GPUs where AMD has shown at least some commitment to ROCm. The intersection between users of tinygrad and people who use MI350s should essentially be George himself and no one else.
by hammyhavoc | 2025-06-21 09:11:29+00:00
You can feed errors back in, but on anything of meaningful scale, context windows are going to be the largest bottleneck.

Context window size limits aside, Claude Code seems to atrophy or misinterpret existing context even prior to compactions very frequently. The more tokens within the context windows the shittier and shittier it performs—not that it's great to begin with.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-06-21 09:11:30+00:00
> PCs had root access by default, so why wasn't it a significant problem for them?

They weren't networked. They were notoriously buggy. And most importantly, they weren't warrantied [1].

Root should always be an option. But once you root, it's fair for the warranty to be voided.

> OS vendors such as Google and Microsoft have been deliberately "manufacturing concent"

Nitpick, the propaganda model [2] attempts to describe traditional mass media. Two of its five pillars (ownership and sourcing) fall apart in a world with smartphones and social media.

[1] https://www.studocu.com/ph/document/university-of-rizal-syst...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model#Criticism
by agent327 | 2025-06-21 09:12:24+00:00
As a thought experiment, is it realistic to get every tax payer to pay for funny cat videos? Because that will be a reality in your non-capitalist utopia.

Or maybe there just won't be any cat videos, because the state has decreed them unnecessary or even harmful? How about political messages, is the state going to allow those to be posted on its platform? There are bound to be a few that go against state policy...

You could argue that the same is true for broadcast TV, and I would 100% agree. The state has no business running or even funding public television.
by attendant3446 | 2025-06-21 09:12:46+00:00
I tried to stop using WhatsApp, but failed. I even promote Signal to my WhatsApp contacts (if they were to switch, Signal would be the most likely option). I succeeded with most of the people I talk to the most. Unfortunately, the majority of my contacts are still only on WhatsApp (and even less appropriate messengers like Telegram and Instagram). WhatsApp remains the lesser evil. I hope that one day I'll be able to stop using the last major tech service I rely on (at least those that don't allow anonymous access via a web browser), but today is not that day :(
by franga2000 | 2025-06-21 09:13:02+00:00
Malware van persist across reboots regardless of verified boot. What it can't do is persist through a factory reset.

But if you really want a thorough reset, simply re-lock the bootloader and flash stock firmware from there. Nothing can persist through that without an exploit in the verification chain and if you have that kind of exploit, you don't need the bootloader to be unlocked in the first place.

Also, there are devices out there that let you enroll your own keys, like the Google Pixel series.
by ryao | 2025-06-21 09:13:31+00:00
It has gone through many boom and busy cycles. If you go far back enough, it was very well funded. In particular, I recall reading about the US government investing 1 to 2 billion dollars during the Cold War into AI research to translate Russian into English. It had some very impressive demos on preselected Russian texts that had justified the investments. However, it failed to yield results on arbitrary texts. The translation problem has only been mostly solved in recent years.
by jjav | 2025-06-21 09:14:03+00:00
> and lost a couple og long-distance friends in the process

This is sad, but also a reminder that nothing that matters should be tied to proprietary walled gardens. All of those are ephemeral.

Anyone I care to stay in contact with, I communicate via email. An open standard owned by nobody, so it cannot go away. My email has been the same for 30 years and will be the same forever. If you knew me in the mid 90s or later, you know how to reach me.
by foldr | 2025-06-21 09:14:48+00:00
My pet peeve with the Figma drivers is that they tend to think of design as a 'phase' that happens before engineering. So as an engineer you are asked to implement a bunch of painstakingly laid out user interfaces that have never actually been used to do any work. IMO it's essentially impossible to design a good interface without feedback obtained from using it. Designers would be way more useful if they'd partner with engineers throughout the development process. But there seems to be huge cultural resistance to this mode of working. In fairness, a lot of business processes make more sense if you assume that having to talk to an engineer is one of the worst possible outcomes.
by nilirl | 2025-06-21 09:14:57+00:00
The model chose to kill the executive? Are we really here? Incredible.

Just yesterday I was wowed by Fly.io's new offering; where the agent is given free reign of a server (root access). Now, I feel concerned.

What do we do? Not experiment? Make the models illegal until better understood?

It doesn't feel like anyone can stop this or slow it down by much; there's so much money to be made.

We're forced to play it by ear.
by v5v3 | 2025-06-21 09:15:22+00:00
You don't get it. You are not the target

Most advertising is seeking the less intelligent consumer. Or the young and still naive consumer.

They outnumber you 1 million to 1.

It's why female musicians make more money putting their name to a makeup brand then their music.

It's why Elon will make some promise that is unrealistic.

It's why Apple put low paid everyday tech support staff in their stores and called them Geniuses.

You have to put yourself in the shoes of the mainstream buyer. They see a headline and believe it.
by b0a04gl | 2025-06-21 09:18:43+00:00
> "you can define assets in pure python using any framework or engine you want."

sounds flexible but what does that actually mean in practice? are there guardrails to keep things interoperable

> "engine-agnostic execution"

how that holds up when switching between, say, pandas and spark. are dependencies and semantics actually preserved or is it up to us to manually patch the gaps every time the backend shifts?
by AngryData | 2025-06-21 09:19:20+00:00
I mean one of the main complaints of the luddites was decreasing cloth quality despite the looms originally being able to produce higher quality cloth comparable to their own traditional weaving techniques. Powered looms and the dozens of other loom improvements from the previous 100+ years didn't inherently produce poor quality cloth, they were adjusted to produce lower quality cloths after they were already in operationin factories in order to increase profit margins. Powered looms were originally just modified hand looms, not some radically different design from the ground up. The flying shuttle predates powered looms and the luddites.
by ur-whale | 2025-06-21 09:20:40+00:00
I most certainly hear you, but : you have a completely idealistic point of view.

Which is a quasi-synonym for unrealistic.

As much as we'd all love the real world to be simple, rational and just, it simply ain't, and on a very vast scale.

As an instance of that general principle: people who do excellent work but lack basic social skills stay stuck 99% of the time.

And history is littered with their anonymous corpses.