MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by shmerl | 2025-06-11 14:50:46+00:00
Makes perfect sense to me. But I guess those in denial or DRM proponents will prefer to ignore the obvious.

The abusive and overreaching nature of DRM was expressed pretty clearly by those who actually abused it:

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

> The industry will take whatever steps it needs to protect itself and protect its revenue streams ... It will not lose that revenue stream, no matter what ... Sony is going to take aggressive steps to stop this. We will develop technology that transcends the individual user. We will firewall Napster at source – we will block it at your cable company. We will block it at your phone company. We will block it at your ISP. We will firewall it at your PC ... These strategies are being aggressively pursued because there is simply too much at stake.

Note the repeated usage of "your" which increasingly creeps into user's private digital space. Being in denial about this isn't an excuse for these problems.
by rustcleaner | 2025-06-11 14:50:52+00:00
Probably the best one-liner fix in law I can think of, is to make it a imprisonable felony to give money to someone or an organization for the purpose of speaking a particular message as their own, and accepting money in exchange for speaking a message as your own. Basically ban advertising, or at least make each commercial basically say "General Motors has paid us to tell you that ... ... ..." instead of the sexy seductive style we have today. Ads, if they are to exist at all, should be limited to factual/quantitative statements about performance and reliability, and must not use any suggestive/qualitative statements. We need to make the various pillars of modern advertising criminal offenses: the main one is the use of psychological/memetic trickery to spread and make memorable a message for commercial purposes, then there's the financial incentive to shit up our cyberspaces with sponsored messages. The only place I should EVER EVER EEEVERRR find an advertisement for (say) a plumber, should be in the local directory for businesses under the plumbing section, and the list must be sortable and filterable by basic transparent criteria (no hidden magic feed algorithms).

It is legal to swindle someone in this country, so long as they get swindled enthusiastically and don't think they got swindled. I think being induced to buy a hamburger at midnight by a well placed ad, instead of just reheating some left-overs, is a swindling even if your dependency on this model for your economic survival has you kneejerking on me! The goal is we all turn into self-sufficient economic agents, not be labor-cattle induced by advertising memes to go into interest bearing debt by a thousand little charges.
by SAI_Peregrinus | 2025-06-11 14:51:09+00:00
Han unification[1] prevents the representation of all Chinese characters. There are multiple languages that use Chinese characters, but they don't all use the same characters. Unicode decided to only use Han Chinese characters, so names using other sorts of Chinese characters can't be written with Unicode. The Han "equivalent" characters can be used, but that looks weird.

Think of it as though Unicode decided that the letter "m" wasn't needed to write English text, since you can just write "rn" and it'll be close enough. Someone named "James" might want to have their name spelled correctly instead of "Jarnes", but that wouldn't be possible. Han unification did essentially this.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification
by horsawlarway | 2025-06-11 14:51:25+00:00
So at least in one sense - there is a tantalizing prospect here for AI that was lost for search engines.

Model weights are snapshots, and we can preserve them.

It would be like if we could keep a snapshot of the search index for google every 6 months. Doesn't matter if the "current" version is garbage, if my search target exists in an older copy that's not as corrupted, and I can choose to use that instead.

And at least this time around, I think this was built in from the start - you pin against a specific model for most serious business use-cases.

I can store open model weights locally, cheaply.

---

So I 100% agree that the ads are going to come (I can't forsee any possible alternative outside of banning ad based content promotion - which as an aside... I'm strongly in favor of proposing as serious legislation, particularly in the context of AI).

But this time the ad riddled version still has to be better than the old version I can boot up and run.

It'll be interesting to see how that tension plays out.
by toast0 | 2025-06-11 14:51:48+00:00
> - Targeting low end devices first was a huge mistake. The web stack they were building on was simply too inefficient for that to work with the devices at the time. If they'd targeted high end devices then it would likely have worked on low-end devices by the time they were ready to ship it anyway (perhaps this plays into them rushing and having unrealistic timescales)

The problem with targeting high end first is sales / production risk. A phone based on a new OS is a risky purchase, and it's hard to convince someone to spend $500 on a high end phone without much software available. A $100 low end phone without much software available is an easier sale.

If you can get important software built for your platform, sales are easier, but sales/usage numbers drive developer interest. Also, it helps if the platform offers capabilities developers need; maybe it's my bias, but the number of platforms that launch without everything a messaging app needs was mind bogling --- everyone seems to understand that messaging apps sell phones, but they don't find out the requirements for them until very late.

Apple does just fine without targetting low end (although they do sometimes target mid range), but they live in a different world, and it took decades to build that market placement.
by KingOfCoders | 2025-06-11 14:52:09+00:00
We had a hot e-commerce app in Germany at the time of Windows Phone (exit to eBay). Microsoft pressured us to port to their platform with several visits (pre Covid :-) I (CTO) told them they could send us some phones and devs would start a port on the side. They didn't sent us anything but still kept pressuring us. It was insanity. I loved my yellow Lumia 920.
by cogman10 | 2025-06-11 14:52:11+00:00
Let me just provide a bit of hope.

I'm not a huge fan of AI stuff, but the output quality is (usually) above that of what BSers were putting out.

While I still need to double check my BS team members, the problems with the code they are pushing is lower than what it was pre-AI everywhere. To me, that's a win.

I guess what I'm saying is I'd rather have mediocre AI code written than the low quality code I say before LLMs became as popular as they are.
by kj4ips | 2025-06-11 14:52:15+00:00
This is a prime example of "If you make an unusable secure system, the users will turn it into an insecure usable one."

If someone is actively subverting a control like this, it probably means that the control has morphed from a guardrail into a log across the tracks.

Somewhat in the same vein as AppLocker &co. Almost everyone says you should be using it, but almost no-one does, because it takes a massive amount of effort just to understand what "acceptable software" is across your entire org.
by pier25 | 2025-06-11 14:52:34+00:00
Indeed but I was arguing about a general point.

I'd be surprised if any of your Node projects had less than 100 total deps of which a large number will be maintained by a single person.

See Express for example. 66 total deps with 26 deps relying on a single maintainer.

https://npmgraph.js.org/?q=express

But even in the case of the official aws-sdk they recently deprecated v2. I now need to update all my not-so-old Node projects to work with the newer version. Probably wouldn't have happened if I had used Bun's S3 client.
by BeetleB | 2025-06-11 14:52:39+00:00
> Complex argument parsing is something that I'd only generally be doing in python, which is handled by the argparse library.

Yes, I'm referring to argparse. If you had to write a new script every few days, each using argparse, would you enjoy it?

argparse was awesome the first few times I used it. After that, it just sucks. I have to look up the docs each time, particularly because I'm fussy about how well the parsing should work.

> otherwise write it once and then copy it to use in other projects. Same with loggers.

That was me, pre-LLM. And you know what, the first time I wrote a (throwaway) script with an LLM, and told it to add logging, I was sold. It's way nicer than copying. Particularly with argument parsing, even when you copy, it's often that you need to customize behavior. So copying just gets me a loose template. I still need to modify the parsing code.

More to the point, asking an LLM to do it is much less friction than copying. Even a simple task like "Let's find a previous script where I always do this" seems silly now. Why should I? The LLM will do it right over 95% of the time (I've actually never had it fail for logging/argument parsing).

It is just awesome having great logging and argument parsing for everything I write. Even scripts I'll use only once.

> Depends on how I'm extracting input from a config file, what kind of config file, etc. One of my favourite things to do in programming is parsing file formats I'm not familiar with, especially in a white-box situation.

JSON, YAML, INI files. All have libraries. Yet for me it's still a chore to use them. With an LLM, I paste in a sample JSON file, and say "Write code to extract this value".

Getting to your gym analogy: There are exercises people enjoy and those they don't. I don't know anyone who regularly goes to the gym and enjoys every exercise under the sun. One of the pearls of wisdom for working out is "Find an exercise regimen you enjoy."

That's a luxury they have. In the gym. What about physical activity that's part of real life? I don't know a single guy who goes to the gym and likes changing fence posts (which is physically taxing). Most do it once, and if they can afford it, just pay someone else to do it thereafter.

And so it is with programming. The beauty with LLMs is it lets me focus on writing code that is fun for me. I can delegate the boring stuff to it.
by marcusverus | 2025-06-11 14:53:05+00:00
"Within 36 hours" is doing a lot of work here. Zero cops died as a result of the protests.

Officer Sicknick (the cop who died of a stroke the next day) was pepper-sprayed by rioters, but not physically assaulted in a way which might cause a stroke. He did not collapse at the capital on Jan 6, but at 10PM the following day (your confusion on this point is understandable, given that the Wiki article deceptively implies that he collapsed on Jan 6). His autopsy found that his death was due to "natural causes".

The gaslighting around Jan 6 is really outrageous.
by AnEro | 2025-06-11 14:53:21+00:00
So we aren't seeing any risk in anyone being able to have one's medical data if the other party has the money for it? Especially when some of that medical care is being banned in regions this data isn't treated legally like medical data and have bounties on people reporting on that healthcare received else where?

Instead, the conclusion is just western women are accountability dodging sheeple that are just being coddled?
by thaumasiotes | 2025-06-11 14:53:30+00:00
> Maybe not so much astroturfing as much as a kind of corporate hasbara

What's the difference? In astroturfing, someone pays people to form an organization, claim to have no external support, and do some kind of activism.

In hasbara, the government of Israel pays people to not form an organization, claim to have no external support, and do various kinds of pro-Israel and pro-Jew activism. This looks like astroturfing with the major vulnerability of the no-external-support claim shored up.
by aaronax | 2025-06-11 14:53:31+00:00
30-60% RH range in a house surely must not be this strongly related to moisture content of wood? ("10% change in moisture content over the year")

https://www.wagnermeters.com/moisture-meters/wood-info/how-r...

This table shows up to a 4% moisture content seasonal difference in a climate controlled house (20-50% RH).
by Galanwe | 2025-06-11 14:53:36+00:00
> For downloads, s5cmd can saturate a 40Gbps link (~4.3 GB/s)

I'm surprised by these claims. I have worked pretty intimately with S3 for almost 10 years now, developed high performance tools to retrieve data from it, as well as used dedicated third party tools for performant file download tailored for S3.

My experience is that individual S3 connections are capped over the board at ~80MB/s, and the throughput of 1 file is capped at 1.6GB/s (at least per ec2 instance). At least I have never managed myself nor seen any tool capable of going beyond that.

My understanding is then that this benchmark's claims of 4.3GB/s are across multiple files, but then it would be rather meaningless, as it's free concurrency basically.
by ethbr1 | 2025-06-11 14:53:49+00:00
(Don't take any of the below in a negative sense! It's awesome you built a privacy-first solution and care about these things, to the extent practical. Below just musings)

I assume the attack vector here is more along the lines of 23andme bankruptcy -- if developer is bought by a new corporate entity / priorities change, what guarantees exist that privacy architecture won't backslide via updates?

Users shouldn't be concerned that a minor update or corporate sale will change the bargain they made around their privacy.

Honestly, it'd be great if there were scaled third-party cloud key escrow services coupled with enforced legal guarantees.* ^

It feels like we did cloud wrong from a legal/privacy perspective by not separating keyholder from data-at-rest-holder (legal entity wise). Tenant-based encryption is basically there... just still mingling data and key ownership in the same entity.

GDPR / right to be forgotten would be trivial if there were always a third party (who enforced requirements on any first party) I could submit a request to, that would burn my keys on their side, thus rendering first-party stored data un-practically-retrievable.

(And a third party because, similar to the browser+CA system, balancing power against each other to enforce guarantees of good behavior seems effective)

* Legal guarantees like "no caching keys for longer than X" or "no unencrypted user data at rest"

^ Cloud hosting encryption keys would also solve the ugly UX edge of strong encryption around "I lost my key... help?"
by Yoric | 2025-06-11 14:54:19+00:00
> - It's really unfortunate that Rust wasn't a bit further along during the Firefox OS era. A lot of the Rust UI pieces that are now being developed would make a really strong foundation for something like Firefox OS. And could perhaps also have enabled a better story for "breaking out" of the confines of the web platform.

What do you mean, "Rust UI"? In FirefoxOS, the idea was that all applications were developed solely with web technologies.

More Rust would have been nice, but would only have made sense with the support for compiling towards wasm (or asm.js, at the time).
Ask HN: How did you get your first 50 users after launch?
by barnabas-szoke | 2025-06-11 14:55:04+00:00
I launched a small tool last week to solve a problem I personally ran into: saving articles and never actually using them. So I built something that turns saved content into a reading queue + searchable knowledge base. It's live now, and while I've posted in a few communities (Reddit, HN), traction has been really slow - around 15 signups so far. Right now I'm trying to figure out if it's just early or if the idea isn't clicking with others.

For those of you who’ve been through this:

- What helped you go from 0 to 50 users?

- Did you do cold outreach?

- Did Reddit, Product Hunt, or another channel work well?

- How do you promote without sounding like you're promoting?

Also, at what point did you decide it was time to move on?

What signals helped you decide to double down vs. shut it down?

Curious to hear how others navigated this stage, what worked, what didn't.
by xinayder | 2025-06-11 14:55:34+00:00
It used to be better when Material Design came out. It was more rectangular, looked better. Take a look at Android 10. It was much more "expressive". Now, it's just round, as if they're trying to copy the trend set by Apple.

I updated my Galaxy S21 to Android 15 and I hate it. The new design occupies TOO MUCH space, I could check almost all my notifications (I only have 3-4 apps that send me notifications) with a quick scroll from the top, but now a single notification occupies like 1/5th of the screen, making it much more difficult to take a look at all my notifications at once.

The other stupid thing, they moved the media playback to the quick settings panel and made it a tiny widget on the lock screen, on the bottom, where you barely pay attention to it. I removed this widget thinking it would restore the old functionality, but I was wrong. Now, whenever I listen to music, I cannot control playback from the notifications panel or the lock screen, I must manually open Spotify and control it from there.

I don't know what drugs UX designers are on but I can safely say this is not convenient for the user and we didn't ask for it.
by pickledoyster | 2025-06-11 14:55:41+00:00
The report in the OP raises valid concerns about SDKs from third parties, including Google and Facebook. Your own site showcases the Reflect SDK which is, I quote:

> The Reflect SDK is the iOS framework that powers the Reflect – Track Anything app and is designed to help you: > > Create forms to track customer product usage and experience > Collect customer biometric data [...]

Source: https://ntl.ai/products/

Let's just say I'm skeptical about your claims.

Edit: provided a more extensive quote and link to source.
by AlwaysRock | 2025-06-11 14:55:45+00:00
I lost one parent to cancer but the other has been cancer free for over ten years now. I'm devastated by the lose of one parent but incredibly grateful for the one who beat their cancer.

Is that winning? I dont know. But the likelihood that my other parent would still be around if they got their same cancer now is already higher than it was when they passed. Nothing can bring my other parent back but we can prevent others from losing their loved ones.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-06-11 14:55:56+00:00
The protesters are not a homogenous bunch, even if most of them are peaceful, there will always be rabble rousers and thugs wanting to take advantage of minor chaos to cause major chaos. Gross generalizations are then common (look, there was a rabble rousers, so they are all rabble rousers!) magnified by deceptive media techniques (show just the rabble rousers, and replay that same clip 50 times today to give the impression that this is more violent than it really is, hey, where is our photoshop person?).

The effect then is to inflame outrage on both sides, and now we are basically headed to BLM 2.0. Trump seems to have actually planned this out well (use the military to stoke outrage, and a protest in one LA neighborhood becomes a nationwide riot so he has an excuse to cancel the midterms?).
by codingdave | 2025-06-11 14:56:57+00:00
This advice is probably well intentioned, but is diametrically opposed to allowing people to clearly set boundaries. Sometimes, a direct "No." is the healthy response if someone asks you to cross a personal boundary. Where to eat lunch isn't a great example of such a case, but disallowing people to say "No" is a poor precedent to set between people.
by theptip | 2025-06-11 14:58:15+00:00
> People are often curious about how much energy a ChatGPT query uses; the average query uses about 0.34 watt-hours

My point was twofold, “the average query” becomes less meaningful as the variance increases. Sure one can _in principle_ report W-h spent on your account or query, but I think it will get more opaque and hard to predict. Average becomes less useful when agents can do an unpredictable amount of work with increasingly large bounds.

Second, and this was perhaps worthy of expanding in my post - I think in the radical abundance world that Altman is describing, energy and efficiency stops being something that people talk about. Fusion, space based solar farms, whatever, it’s easy to imagine solving this stuff. And I think you can even imagine this happening sooner if for example one provider stamps a “100% renewable datacenter” option on their AI product. Then you might not care about energy efficiency at all; in which case you just care about profit.
by gejose | 2025-06-11 14:58:16+00:00
Just to draw a parallel (not to insult this line of thinking in any way): “ Maybe it's because I only code for my own tools, but I still don't understand the benefit of relying on someone/something else to _compile_ your code and then reading it, understand it, fixing it, etc”

At a certain point you won’t have to read and understand every line of code it writes, you can trust that a “module” you ask it to build works exactly like you’d think it would, with a clearly defined interface to the rest of your handwritten code.
by freejazz | 2025-06-11 14:58:17+00:00
You're just talking about different standards of knowledge for a crime which has absolutely nothing to do with what I posted, which is that Trump has been arguing that there is no need for americans to receive due process - so the issue of evidentiary standards, which you are discussing, would be completely irrelevant in the scenario he advocates for. Once again, I ask you, as he retorted at a reporter "are Americans special?"
by nicoburns | 2025-06-11 14:58:58+00:00
> More Rust would have been nice, but would only have made sense with the support for compiling towards wasm (or asm.js, at the time).

Rust would have been used for implementing the web technologies, not by end users. I would note that many of the "web" technologies did not exist before Firefox OS (and Chrome OS) started adding them in a flurry, so really almost anything was on the table. The key thing was that they were open and specified.
by msdrider | 2025-06-11 14:59:14+00:00
You should clarify that these are women who deliberately induce a miscarriage (ie. a home abortion) or whose extraordinarily reckless and dangerous behaviours result in a miscarriage that may or may not have been deliberately induced, but either way are unconscionable and directly responsible for the child's death. You don't do your cause any favours when you present these cases as "miscarriages", knowing full well that many people perceive this as the unfortunate loss of a child by a conscientious and responsible expectant mother.
by rsync | 2025-06-11 14:59:23+00:00
If you don't want to install, or maintain, s5cmd yourself:

ssh user@rsync.net s5cmd Password: NAME: s5cmd - Blazing fast S3 and local filesystem execution tool USAGE: s5cmd [global options] command [command options] [arguments...]

If you move data between clouds, you don't need to use any of your own bandwidth ...
by kenrick95 | 2025-06-11 14:59:29+00:00
Hmmm okay so I come from Excel world and when I arrange my plans in timetable view (in Excel), I need to 'merge' several cells together. However if circumstances change and I have to rearrange those events to other days or other timings, it become a pain to unmerge cells and move them around.

I think this is one of the main reason I started this web app as a 'timetable' view first and then build other features later on
by ghusto | 2025-06-11 14:59:32+00:00
> world’s dumbest policy bypass: instead of doing uses: actions/checkout@v4, the user can git clone (or otherwise fetch) the actions/checkout repository into the runner’s filesystem, and then use uses: ./path/to/checkout to run the very same action

Good lord.

This is akin to saying "Instead of doing `apt-get install <PACKAGE>`, one can bypass the apt policies by downloading the package and running `dpkg -i <PACKAGE>`.