MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sensanaty | 2025-06-21 10:30:34+00:00
> The real problem is public corruption.

So the solution is private corruption where nameless corporations and CEOs get to take public money with 0 oversight instead?

I'm not a yank myself, but in the Netherlands the national railway (NS) is "jointly" owned but run as a private business and is a complete clusterfuck, exactly because we for some insane reason believe that running public transport should be profitable. Prices get raised every year (and we already have some of the most expensive train costs in the world), there's less trains, conductors get paid like shit and treated like garbage (hence them striking often), the trains are late more and more often, they're filthy etc. I don't want to drive, but if me and my partner decide we want to go to a different city by train, it costs us easily double what the equivalent car journey would cost. Of course, if we didn't subsidize cars as heavily as we do that'd probably be a different story, but that's venturing off-topic.

Similarly in the UK, privatization led to nothing but chaos there, and now they're left with ludicrous prices compared to all other modes of transport, because again, things are being run as a private business and they're expecting profits to be made.

Public transport should be a public good, and we should not expect it to be profitable. If it's possible, that's great, but we should aim for quality of service above anything else. How about we instead divert the gigantic chunk of money that goes to maintaining roads and making sure drivers have few inconveniences and instead start investing that in actual public transport instead?
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-06-21 10:31:11+00:00
Apropos of the shortcuts here, I always wonder why developers don't go out of their way more often to memorize the Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, ... shortcuts in use basically everywhere today except the terminal. I believe they stem from the IBM Common User Access (CUA) design standard.

In particular the fact that Ctrl + anything letter-oriented makes something that is word-oriented instead, for example Ctrl + Left Arrow and Ctrl + Right Arrow let you skip word-by-word in documents, and Ctrl + Backspace lets you delete entire words at a time. This feels like it should be way more common knowledge than it is, like how copying and pasting any multiline document into your browser's URL bar will almost certainly format it into a sane single-line format.
by spauldo | 2025-06-21 10:31:13+00:00
I believe all of the current theories being seriously considered hold that whatever is causing expansion isn't gravity, so yes I do talk as if gravity is distinct from what is driving the expansion of the universe.

Regarding being "pinned," that still fails to account for inertia. The idea that there's a specific piece of space that we're stuck to implies there's a rest state at which there is no motion independent of any observer. We know that's not the case.

My original point was that gravity and the other forces that hold us together are so much stronger than whatever is causing expansion that the expansion of space doesn't affect us at small scales. The space we're occupying is expanding. We're not dragged along with it. The Triangulum galaxy doesn't move away from us because gravity keeps the Local Group together. We do see the expansion of space between us and distant objects, but that's because there's no force strong enough to hold those distant objects to us. That's not because we're "pinned" to our location, but because the space between us is getting larger.
by beagle3 | 2025-06-21 10:32:37+00:00
You didn’t address points I already raised about mean() - how does it handle an empty vector? How does it handle NaNs ? You have to read the documentation to figure that out. In K, the implementation is in front of your eyes; NaN handling follows from “over” / reduce / addition semantics; and empty vector from reduce and division by zero semantics. It is all consistent by construction, and follows from basic properties. The same cannot be said about mean() or sum().

The call to .ravel() is strictly less powerful than ,// which would flatten a matrix, but also a lisp/xml style recursive list structure. And it is the actual implementation, not some weird name! It is “join over until convergence”.

With respect to sorting, in K you would also likely use the built in relational operator “?” (select).

Notice how you need to import pandas and numpy, and then know their docs well to find the routines you want and how they behave in edge cases? And that’s in addition to actually knowing Python?

K has all of that built in. You just need to know the basics (which takes more work than knowing Python well, admittedly). Most from there is derived by construction. It does have some 80 or so non-trivial primitives, but then you need much fewer libraries, often none.

(And, that’s not a for/against thing, but … in case you wonder, the K executable does that in about 200K binary without dependencies; REBOL achieves similar terseness of final programs by completely different means and philosophy, and also packs that into a 400K executable)
by sksjvsla | 2025-06-21 10:33:23+00:00
Thanks for the compliment.

We used AWS EKS in the old days and we never liked the extreme complexity of it.

With two Spring Boot apps, a database and Redis running across Ubuntu servers, we found simpler tools to distribute and scale workloads.

Since compute is dirt cheap, we over-provision and sleep well.

We have live alerts and quarterly reviews (just looking at a dashboard!) to assess if we balance things well.

K8s on EKS was not pleasant, I wanna make sure I never learn how much worse it can get across European VPS providers.
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-06-21 10:33:30+00:00
By one of the 7 metrics analyzed, the lifecycle use of 3 organic cotton bags would have been considered higher by the Danish study (https://www2.mst.dk/udgiv/publications/2018/02/978-87-93614-...), but that's obviously the most extreme example and not representative.

I also think that you reusing the same bags for 20 years and never forgetting them is an extreme example and not representative, and when you're at the cashier and realize you forgot your bags, the only realistic option if single use bags have been regulated away is buying another reusable-but-will-see-a-single-use bag.

I have a drawer full of those, and I think I've already thrown one bag full of those out during my last move. More importantly, the annoyance from this and dissolving paper straws has made me swear to never vote for a "green" party that pushes these performative bans (plastic bag litter has never been a major problem in my area), even though I would agree with many of their other policies, both social and environmental. But I'm not going to vote for someone who will go out of their way to add annoyances to my life.
by belorn | 2025-06-21 10:33:50+00:00
Those are two different problems. Paying creators and requiring online platforms to follow laws and not participate in crime like fraud are not the same issue.

If they want to sell a service in exchange for payment, then they are free to do so. For legal reasons they are not doing that. The explicit legal definition used by lawyers and politicians is that advertisement supported services are not a payment, but an optional content that the viewer might or might not look at. This optional aspect of advertisement is how laws distinguish between it and a sale. From a legal perspective there is a difference between selling a sample product for 1 cent, compared to giving it away for free. One is a sale, and the other is a free giveaway, and thus they are under different legal definitions.

There are similar legal theory for when a platform should be held legal responsible their products, for their advertisement, and when local laws applies and how. News papers, radio, and TV has each been forced to handle local advertisement laws and regulation, and there is a reason why most had departments to curate which advertisement they could publish. They also get held responsible if they break local law.
by ACCount36 | 2025-06-21 10:34:16+00:00
I am sick and tired of seeing this "alignment issues aren't real, they're just AI company PR" bullshit repeated ad nauseam. You're no better than chemtrail truthers.

Today, we have AI that can, if pushed into a corner, plan to do things like resist shutdown, blackmail, exfiltrate itself, steal money to buy compute, and so it goes. This is what this research shows.

Our saving grace is that those AIs still aren't capable enough to be truly dangerous. Today's AIs are unlikely to be able to carry out plans like that in a real world environment.

If we keep building more and more capable AIs, that will, eventually, change. Every AI company is trying to build more capable AIs now. Few are saying "we really need some better safety research before we do, or we're inviting bad things to happen".
by tonyedgecombe | 2025-06-21 10:34:44+00:00
Just in case anybody believes this.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2019/05/10/cyclists...

https://usa.streetsblog.org/2018/01/03/study-cyclists-dont-b...

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2009/dec/15/cycling...
by rundigen12 | 2025-06-21 10:34:55+00:00
Read to the end and... what was the point of that? Where's the payoff?

There was a claim near the top that some things are easier to compute when viewed as cracovians. then some explanation, then suddently it switches to numpy and showing the time is the same.

New title: "Cracovians are a Waste of (the Reader's) Time"?
by octo888 | 2025-06-21 10:35:11+00:00
What is "IsAdmin" doing in the "create user" request DTO in the first place? The examples seem to indicate inappropriate re-use of data models.

Would it not be better to:

type CreateUserRequest struct { Username string Password string } type UserView struct { Username string IsAdmin boolean }

etc?

No need to just have just 1 model that maps 1:1 to your DB row. This applies to all languages
by mindcrime | 2025-06-21 10:35:37+00:00
I guess feeding AIs the entire internet was a bad idea, because they picked up all of our human flaws, amplified by the internet, without a grounding in the physical world.

I've been wrong about quite many things in my life, and right about at least a handful. In regards to AI though, the single biggest thing I ever got absolutely, completely, totally wrong was this:

In years past, I always thought that AI's would be developed by ethical researchers working in labs, and once somebody got to AGI (or even a remotely close approximation of it) that they would follow a path somewhat akin to Finch from Person of Interest[1] educating The Machine... painstakingly educating the incipient AI in a manner much like raising a child; teaching it moral lessons, grounding it in ethics; helping to shape its values so that it would generally Do The Right Thing and so on. But even falling short of that ideal, I NEVER (EVER) in a bazillion years, would have dreamed that somebody would have an idea as hare-brained as "Let's try to train the most powerful AI we can build, by feeding it roughly the entire extant corpus of human written works... including Reddit, 4chan, Twitter, etc."

Probably the single saving grace about the current situation is that the AI's we have still don't seem to be at the AGI level, although it's debatable how close we are (especially factoring in the possibility of "behind closed doors" research that hasn't been disclosed yet).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_Interest_(TV_series)
by khasanov | 2025-06-21 10:36:05+00:00
I used to run web-studio and had a talented full-stack developer on one of the projects.

He showed himself as a very hardworking, dedicated, loyal & honest person.

When I've decided that I need a co-founder a few months later, I just called him and offered it straightforwardly.

4 years together building products since then.

I evaluated personality only, and that worked for me.
by AlienRobot | 2025-06-21 10:36:06+00:00
First it was "I hate how much ad companies track me and build profiles on me."

Now it is "I hate how ads are irrelevant."

People need to understand that ads will never be 100% perfect, otherwise you would buy something every time you saw an ad. 99.99% of the ads will miss the target, and that is normal. It would be insane if it worked any other way.

For what it is worth Google has a page where you can customize what sort of ads are relevant to you. https://support.google.com/My-Ad-Center-Help/answer/12155451...
by grishka | 2025-06-21 10:36:07+00:00
This doesn't strictly require a PC. There's this trick with using the wireless debugging feature to connect the phone to itself. You can do it with a terminal app like Termux but Shizuku is a nice GUI that streamlines this process and exposes an API for other apps to use. After a quick web search I found https://github.com/samolego/Canta which is, again, a GUI app that uses Shizuku to uninstall apps via adb.

I agree that it's not easy, but anyone sufficiently annoyed by these non-otherwise-removable apps who is able to follow instructions should be able to get it done without needing a computer or special knowledge or messing with the command line.
by Zak | 2025-06-21 10:36:36+00:00
I'm pretty sure I'm against this. I could be convinced otherwise by documentation of significant fraud involving compromised devices (especially Android phones) that would have been stopped by a device attestation scheme.

I should note Google has such an attestation scheme, and there are reliable defeats for it in most situations given root access. Apps have been able to insist on hardware-backed attestation which has not been defeated for some time, but that isn't available for old devices. Almost none do so.

If this had a meaningful impact on fraud, more apps would insist on the hardware-backed option, but that's quite rare. Even Google doesn't; I used Google Pay contactless with LineageOS and root this week. I'm currently convinced it's primarily a corporate power grab; non-Google-approved Android won't be a consumer success if it doesn't run your banking app, and the copyright lobby loves anything that helps DRM.
by xg15 | 2025-06-21 10:36:54+00:00
Yeah, nope. All apps have "special security needs" according to their manufacturers. Every app that relies on spying for revenue will use that to disable itself. (Or worse, actively malfunction - e.g. that banking app could switch into a special mode where it does transactions on its own that are not in the interest of the user. If the user has accepted all liability, there isn't much they could do against that)

I'm alright with limiting liability for an unlocked/customized phone (for things that happen from that phone) - but that's a legal/contractual thing. For that to work, it's enough for a judge to understand that the phone was customized at that time - it doesn't require the app to know.
by hnlmorg | 2025-06-21 10:37:25+00:00
Same is true for most big games franchises though.

People continually buy the next EA sports game even though it’s basically just the old game but with the year incremented.

People still spend £50 on new copies of 10 year old Nintendo games like Mario Kart 8. And let’s be honest, the last great Mario game released was Super Mario Galaxy.

If there’s one thing you can guarantee, it’s that people will waste their money on stuff they like. And if there is one truism that HN commentators forget, it’s that software doesn’t need to be academically perfect to be good software for their particular target audience. In the case of games, it’s being more enjoyable than the alternative of not playing that game. Which, frankly, is a pretty low bar a lot of the time.
by lurking_swe | 2025-06-21 10:38:21+00:00
i suppose cars are “extremely useful” in suburbs and rural neighborhoods. And if public transportation is lacking (if driving is faster).

In a city, a carshare is much more practical in my opinion. No need to stress about street parking and getting tickets on days that they clean the street. Or wasting 10 minutes finding parking. Or worrying about car maintenance. Or spending a few grand annually on car insurance, maintenance, and gas.

All this worry for what? A weekend getaway twice a month? Buying in bulk once a month?
by freedomben | 2025-06-21 10:38:45+00:00
Indeed, why would an employer pay us a high salary to sit by the pool? The benefits will go to the founders/investors and the customers. They'll benefit greatly from the increased output and lower costs, but the middlemen (SWEs) will be cut out. That's a great thing if you're a founder/investor or a customer, but not if you're the middleman. New opportunities may come around, but I don't think that's inevitable. It remains to be seen.
by q3k | 2025-06-21 10:39:23+00:00
I tried doing this a few years ago, mapping OpenGL 1.x primitives into WebGL was indeed a pain. There were some translation layers but they were either incomplete or targetting GLES, not classical OoenGL.

I then attempted to actually rewrite ETR to use GLES (or modern OpenGL in general), but that also turned out to be quite an effort given how the original engine/game code is structured.
by constrictpastel | 2025-06-21 10:39:48+00:00
I get ads for secret solar panel information that the 'Electric Companies don't want me to know about'. Concern-troll ads, that feel like psychological warfare, about every health ailment that I might potentially have. Boomer-bait 'Patriot-Power Pack! Survival food, ammo and eagle coins. Kolon-Klense type product depicting a woman sitting on the porcelain throne complaining that she can't crank a shit. Las but not least. An over-eager Sylvester Stallone excited to show me his one amazing....salt trick?
by AlienRobot | 2025-06-21 10:41:21+00:00
AdSense had that rule when you manually placed the ads on your website. Ever since they started doing automatic placements with AI or whatever, they simply spam the page with ads.

Pretty much all article-based sites, recipes, news, blog posts, anything built with wordpress to blogspot. Their algorithm seems to ensure that there is always 1 ad visible on screen at all times. With font sizes as big as they are these days this means 1 ad every two paragraphs.

And the auto placement is enabled by default on new accounts, and all these new "features," get automatically enabled from time to time. I'm sure there is a mountain of webmasters that didn't even notice that their websites have gotten filled with ads.

The worst one is that interstital that appears whenever you click a link. I'm pretty sure Google had a rule against that type of popup, and then they literally made the popup themselves.

On the other hand, all of this can be disabled.

The question is how much money does a website need to make to stay online. If it could survive with fewer ads, I'm sure there would be fewer.
by msgodel | 2025-06-21 10:41:30+00:00
It's just email and gpg so you'll get the same spam you do normally.

IMO people freak out about spam way too much. I'd rather have something that works with occasional spam than have to put up with the insanity of modern IM. Having push notifications from 10 proprietary IM apps is worse spam than a couple of emails a day from some retard trying to get me to download a "pdf." I don't block spam at all in my personal email (although I have a couple of tools automatically label it.) I'd rather have everything delivered.
by kerkeslager | 2025-06-21 10:42:18+00:00
ITT: advertisers, pretending there's something that could be changed about ads that would make them not ads.

Fundamentally, ads are bad. There just isn't a change you can make to ads that makes them okay.

At a personal level, ads distract us, they tell us we don't have enough, aren't attractive enough, just generally aren't enough. They don't inform us: a one-sided view of a product absent criticisms or comparison to competing products is effectively just a lie.

At an economic level, ads break any benefit to capitalism. Instead of companies competing to provide the best product at the lowest cost, ads make it so a worse product at a higher cost can become the market leader. Ads are one of the primary drivers of the enshittification of everything. Ads allow companies to launch with garbage products that nobody would ever pay money for, slap ads on them to monetize, and thereby prevent competing products actually worth paying for from ever even coming to market.

The only answer is to refuse, on principle, to view ads. If a company receives money from advertisers, you're the product, not the user. If a product has a "free" tier paid for by ads, paying to hide ads doesn't help because you're still competing with advertisers for that company's loyalty, and advertisers will always win in the end (i.e. ads in cable TV--mark my words, there will be ads in all the premium-tier streaming services eventually).
by herbst | 2025-06-21 10:42:34+00:00
Interesting. I kinda weird out by the face id tho. So the idea is that an actual fingerprint of my face is used to make sure I only claim it once.

What if I just generate faces with AI and use them? How could a system prevent that?

I wouldn't feel comfortable with a hash of my face on a public server. Even if it's just a hash.
by xg15 | 2025-06-21 10:42:57+00:00
Not even that. Companies are already lobbying massively for selective enforcement of copyright as to not harm the AI boom (immediate jail terms for individuals torrenting a movie, "it's a complex issue" for AI companies scraping the entire internet)

But even the DRM that is already there often only uses copyright laws as suggestions. E.g. YouTube's takedown guidelines are defined through their TOS, not through the DMCA.