MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by socalgal2 | 2025-06-21 17:19:50+00:00
Music selection is great. Music recommendation (and video recommendation) is utter crap. I know running something as big as youtube means there is unlikely to be a true competitor but there is sooooooooo much low-hanging fruit to do a better job.

My home page is on average 60% wasted/irrelevant.

I'm a little surprised they haven't added "AI" yet. They add some prompt "tell us what you like". I tried it the opposite "Do not show me cat videos!" and of course it was just keyword based and started showing me cat videos.

On the video front, my Japanese is pretty good. I watched one high level Japanese language video. Now my feed is full of beginner Japanese language videos. I'm pretty confident if I could ask some LLM "Don't show me beginning level Japanese videos" it could figure it out.

Same with Music. If I play any song from the 80s their shit algo will decide what I want is "hits of the 80s", not "more songs similar to the song I just played". Again, I feel like I could tell an LLM that. Play me songs by band X and songs similar to band X". "Play me songs that influenced band X" (LLM can reference interviews for that).
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-06-21 17:20:14+00:00
Americans have mainly eschewed smart money for index funds, so you have a few fund managers deciding where the money should go, controlling maybe about 70% of the stock market money. Our infrastructure is basically at a standstill still where we throw lots of money at things for not very much results. Our tech investments still make lots of money and progress, but trump is trying to turn us from a high value tech economy into a lower value assembly economy, which is just way too dumb as it’s rhetoric opposite direction of what China is doing.

China is very different with its own successes and problems. It’s stock market still has way too much insider trading for it to be very useful for capital allocation, infrastructure is mostly government driven with the veil of private investment who bets are always going to made whole, and a property market that basically mimics Japan of the 1980s heading into the 1990s. Private investment in manufacturing and tech is where most of its success is at.
by smokel | 2025-06-21 17:20:17+00:00
Having root access implies that you can do all sorts of things: change files, install new software, new kernel modules, etc. Locking this down makes the attack surface for malicious parties much smaller. Many exploits start in user-space and then obtain root access to install rootkits.

Of course you lose freedom, but that is exactly what is needed, because some people just cannot help themselves from exploiting that freedom.

Unless someone figures out a way where we can safely share computing power and connections to real-life services (e.g. banking, having an identity, communication in general), I think there is no real alternative.

Perhaps having separate internets for various purposes would be an option. Ond where we can socialize anonymously, but not trust each other, and one where it's pretty boring, but where you can safely buy goods using your paycheck.
by sksjvsla | 2025-06-21 17:20:50+00:00
Before migration (AWS): We had about 0.1 FTE on infra — most of the time went into deployment pipelines and occasional fine-tuning (the usual AWS dance). After migration (Hetzner + OVHCloud + DIY stack): After stabilizing it is still 0.1 FTE (but I was 0.5 FTE for 3-4 months), but now it rests with one person. We didn’t hire a dedicated ops person.

I am curious why you think AWS services are more hands-off than a series of VPSs configured with Ansible and Terraform? Especially if you are under ISO 27001 and need to document upgrades anyway.
by lisper | 2025-06-21 17:20:51+00:00
This author [1] has a fundamental misunderstanding of cons cells and what their purpose is. Cons cells are a primitive. They are best understood in contrast to the C model where memory is an array, i.e. an associative map from integers (or at least some abstract data type with a total ordering) onto values which are also integers (or at least sets of objects that can be mapped into finite sets of integers).

The key difference between the C primitive and the Lisp primitive is that the Lisp primitive does not require anything to be mapped onto integers whereas C does. You have to be able to increment and decrement pointers in C. You can have a fully functional Lisp with no numbers at all. In fact, this was the whole point of Lisp when it was invented: providing a model for computing on symbolic expressions rather than numbers. There is a reason that the original Lisp paper was called, "Recursive functions of symbolic expressions and their computation by machine" rather than "Cons cells: a new computational primitive".

All of the "problems" with cons cells are not problems with cons cells at all, they are problems with punning cons cells, i.e. using cons cells to implement higher-level abstractions without properly hiding the fact that the underlying implementation is a cons cell. The exact same thing happens in C when you run off the end of an array or cast a pointer to (void *). These are not problems with pointers per se, they are problems with using pointers to implement higher level abstractions (like finite arrays) without properly hiding the underlying implementation.

Punning cons cells and abusing pointers have similar consequences: segfaults in the case of C, and (typically) "NIL is not a valid argument to..." errors in Lisp. Both of these are the result of bad abstraction discipline, not a problem with the primitives.

---

[1] The author is Xah Lee, who is pretty well known in the Lisp community. He is widely considered a troll, an opinion which I personally share. I've tried to make my assessment of this post as dispassionate as I can, but I thought I should disclose the fact that I have a pretty strong bias.
by Manuel_D | 2025-06-21 17:21:40+00:00
First of all, thank you for being upfront about the fact that your rejection of these studies is not based on their methodology, but because your don't like their results.

It's more like I have two different buses. When kids get on bus A, ~80% of them arrive at destination X and 20% at destination Y. When kids bet on bus B, 2% of them arrive at destination X and 98% of them arrive at destination Y. It sure looks like bus B isn't merely affording the kids "time to think" but is in fact altering their destination, does it not?

The patients in the study are diagnosed with the same criteria for gender dysphoria in the DSM. Heck, the author in the study I linked wrote the criteria for gender dysphoria in the latest iteration of DSM. I'm always puzzled by people who insist that the study was including patients that weren't actually experiencing gender dysphoria.
by purplehat_ | 2025-06-21 17:22:07+00:00
Here's an equivalent little script for Debian Linux (but should work on most distros), based on classhasclass's comment:

NEW_MAC=$(printf '02:%02x:%02x:%02x:%02x:%02x\n' $((RANDOM%256)) $((RANDOM%256)) $((RANDOM%256)) $((RANDOM%256)) $((RANDOM%256))) sudo ip link set wlan0 down sudo ip link set wlan0 address "$NEW_MAC" sudo ip link set wlan0 up

You should replace `wlan0` with whatever you see in `ip link show` for your wireless interface, for me it is `wlp0s20f3`. I replaced the `openssl rand` command because it was generating some invalid MACs; this is hopefully only valid ones.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-06-21 17:23:34+00:00
While I think there is certainly a lot of questionable content because of monetization, some of my favorite YT channels exist because of it.

For example, there's a guy who rebuilt a early-1900's sailing boat from scratch, funded almost entirely by revenue from his channel. The videos are crazy high quality hand-construction porn and would never exist without the monetization aspect. Oh, and I had no prior and no current interest in boat building.

Most of the channels I follow (via RSS, rather than YT itself) are like this, and YT generally does an excellent job at putting new channels in front of me from time to time that marry my interests (even one's I didn't know I had) with phenomenally great story telling via video.
by dragonwriter | 2025-06-21 17:23:35+00:00
> So why not just think in terms of lists, which can be nested, rather than cons-cells, which are only rarely used for anything other than to construct lists?

Cons cells are used to construct other higher-level data structures, like trees, not just lists.

But this whole discussion seems to just be a version of the usually static vs. dynamic typing discussion, where the “you have to think in terms of cons not lists” side is the static typing side saying that without handcuffs making it statically impossible to do the wrong thing you can't ever stop thinking about the things that could be done even if you aren't doing them and the “you can think in terms of lists without a problem” is the dynamic typing side saying “no, we actually don’t need to think about other possibilities unless we actively choose to use them”.
by undopamine | 2025-06-21 17:23:38+00:00
I always see Merchant of Record payment processors get recommended in every thread like this on twitter, while it's bad for beginners.

MoR processors, since their per-state thresholds have been crossed, charge sales tax starting from your very first sale, which you'd otherwise not have to pay, since YOUR sales volume are far from reaching anywhere near thresholds.
by HDThoreaun | 2025-06-21 17:23:54+00:00
Taking something without paying for it is theft. You can get into whatever legalize you want but that doesn’t change the fact that you are doing what the vast majority of people recognize as the common definition of theft. Is it illegal? No idea frankly but it’s certainly a decent reason for YouTube to stop serving you videos. Getting mad at YouTube for not serving you when you are not playing by their rules makes absolutely no sense to me and really just seems overwhelmingly entitled.
by Barbing | 2025-06-21 17:25:21+00:00
Anecdotally, YouTube will show to boomer home owners scam solar product ads which they'd never show their younger, more scam-resistant counterparts. So they at least make some adjustment.

Also wouldn't we farm & sell our ad-free accounts

PS: maybe they could just show us Coke ads, whichever ubiquitous brands necessarily advertise to stay in our consciousness etc.
by vkou | 2025-06-21 17:25:55+00:00
Fascism is the last step in the merger between the state and corporate power, the state is currently trying its best to take the country there, and the sycophants who are ready to assist it are getting in line.

And if you want to close your eyes and believe things aren't that dire (they are), at minimum you have to admit that this is a regime that is incredibly blatant and open in its corruption and embrace of the spoils system. You'd have to be an utter idiot[1] to not try to weasel in to get your hand into the public purse.

---

[1] Or hold on to something resembling moral principles when mountains of money and power is at stake, which in that part of the business world is a synonym.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-06-21 17:26:02+00:00
This, 100X this. The EU wants to have the shiny SW toys the US has spent decades and trillions building, but without forking up the money needed to develop them. They want everything done on cheap labor. Paying rank and file engineers shit tonne of money is not part of European business owner culture (barring few exceptions). You're expected to be grateful you've been given a job.

Expecting to make several times the national average gets you ousted as an evil greedy capitalist pig that wants to gentrify society, even though EU is full of stealthy elite royals and billionaires who own most of the continent's wealth, cosplaying as average people. So as long as you have a financial/tax system and a social contract that vilifies those seeking enrichment and upwards mobility through work and innovation, you're not gonna get FAANG competitors sprouting up thin air.

China could do it and become independent of US tech and they started off financially way worse than the EU. So the EU's tech failure is 100% self inflicted from policy short sightedness and mismanagement, by catering policies to the well off boomers and retirees, instead of the youth.

Stop taxing income, and start taxing inherited wealth more and you might see a change, just get off your asses politicians and actually do something, less talking and more doing. Otherwise keep buying American software running on Chinese hardware, while you hold grandiose speeches of tech independence.

There are reason why Linus Torvalds, Bjarne Stroustrup, Guido van Rossum, Anders Hejlsberg packed their toys and moved to the US to work for big-tech, instead of enjoying the amazing quality of life back home in Europe. Maybe the EU should talk to them and put them in charge of EU tech leadership, instead of the clueless unelected career bureaucrats like Von der Leyen and their lobbyists who's biggest success is selling the most diesel engines.
by ppqqrr | 2025-06-21 17:26:04+00:00
Chromium, Electron and VSCode are all the rage to fork as an LLM application base. In truth it doesn't really matter which you start from, they all lead to the One Local LLM App. There's already a fairly deterministic path of development, we're just waiting to see who wins the race in execution and marketing.

In the meantime, the bigger opportunity with relatively little competition at the moment is the Web itself, not which application to browse it with. The Web absolutely sucks, and that's most of the reason we even feel the need for an "elevated browser experience" in the first place (i.e. lifted trucks on the information highway).

The Web sucks, because it was built naively, then optimized for profitable friction. But all of it stood on the assumption that the cost of production on the web involves highly skilled human labor. LLMs have shattered that assumption, but the effects have not manifested. Which is to say that the entire existing Web is probably going to become a marginal, legacy corner of a much bigger base of LLM-driven hypermedia contents that is yet to come.
by em-bee | 2025-06-21 17:26:45+00:00
nine.testrun.org is owned by deltachat developers. it is about as trustworthy as, say, matrix.org. the only better alternative would be self hosting.

the question is not what is the best, most secure, most private, option, but what has the right balance between easy onboarding, ease of use, security and privacy. and maybe deltachat is not the best possible, but it is pretty good. remember, when security and privacy are to onerous then you don't have security or privacy because people will refuse to use the tool.
by Viliam1234 | 2025-06-21 17:28:49+00:00
I haven't seen porn in an ad, but there was a month when I kept getting deepfake Elon Musks giving investment advice every time I tried to watch something on YouTube.

Maybe YouTube puts us into different ad groups, or something like that.

So, from my perspective, YouTube ads have an opposite effect... when I see something advertised on YouTube, I automatically suspect that it is some kind of scam.
by vehemenz | 2025-06-21 17:29:17+00:00
Adguard works better right now, at least for my purposes.

I'm not sure why, but uBO Lite randomly stops working at times. I've had to fire up the test page (https://ublockorigin.github.io/uBOL-home/tests/test-filters....) many times after enabling experimental filters, but it just doesn't seem to "stick."
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-06-21 17:29:17+00:00
> the way windows are styled/handled. so i'd like to see a BeOS styled compositor/window manager.

pekwm with the right theme looks close enough and tabs windows together, which IMHO is the biggest feature: https://www.pekwm.se/themes/benu.html

(Of course, that's an X window manager, so AFAIK it can't be combined with this)
by aszantu | 2025-06-21 17:29:20+00:00
Couldn't get rid of some assistant that I would have to have registered with Samsung last phone. When it broke I switched over to a used Nokia. Little bit less convenient but I wish they wouldn't keep pushing that annoying spyware stuff on us... I'm perfectly fine to just use my phone for browsing and staying in touch with ppl... Why the f. Do I need Google Assistant which I also can't cancel...I swear, next phone will be one of those bricks for the elderly...
by brudgers | 2025-06-21 17:29:50+00:00
am I doing something wrong?

Whether or not what you are doing is wrong, the pattern of posts here on Hacker News does not conform to community guidelines.If this is the first mention, now you know.

what can I do to be heard?

Maybe start by listening. It is impossible to help other people with the problems that are important to them until you know what they believe their problems are.

For most people in the world, their important problems are not business problems. And often, just listening is helpful. Good luck.
by vjvjvjvjghv | 2025-06-21 17:30:52+00:00
This will make outdoors activities even harder. With no Right to Roam law like Britain has, it will be even more difficult in the West to navigate between public and private land. And when I look at the map, they are trying to sell off areas that have very popular hiking trails.

And the money this will generate will probably barely pay for a B-2 flights.
by IshKebab | 2025-06-21 17:31:46+00:00
I totally disagree. There have once or twice been adverts that I've seen where I've thought "yes! I do want one of those!". Obviously I like those adverts.

If there really was a way to magically make all adverts relevant then yes - users would like them!

But that's a totally impossible ask. Not only do websites mostly have no idea what's relevant to me (even with all the tracking) but they obviously have huge financial pressure to show me crap that I wouldn't ever want.

So, yes. Relevant advertising is good, but also basically impossible.
by aeonik | 2025-06-21 17:31:59+00:00
Modern app bloat in one analogy:

Business logic size: ~20 bytes Total app size: ~47 MB = 47,000,000 bytes

Bloat factor: 47,000,000 / 20 = 2,350,000

Let’s scale this up and say the business logic is 1 pound.

Then the whole app would weigh: 1 lb × 2,350,000 = 2,350,000 pounds

What weighs ~2.35 million pounds?

- A fully loaded Boeing 747-8: ~987,000 lbs - Another fully loaded 747-8: ~987,000 lbs - A blue whale: ~330,000 lbs

TOTAL: ~2,304,000 lbs

The business logic is like shipping a 1 lb object (a book, a flash drive, whatever) by loading it into two fully loaded 747s and strapping a blue whale on top.

Just to run 20 bytes of logic.
by mindslight | 2025-06-21 17:32:23+00:00
The Democrats (or whatever other party emerges as actual opposition) need to make part of their "picking up the pieces and rebuilding" platform a declaration making it clear that when the looters are finally kicked out, all of these "sales" of public assets to private parties will be declared fraudulent conveyances and undone - with refunds in then-inflation-devalued dollars, and subject to deductions for any damages to the assets.
by mdaniel | 2025-06-21 17:33:11+00:00
> Do you update the cluster state more than 1000 times per second? Curious what operation needs that.

Ooo, ooo, I know this one! It's for clusters with more than approximately 300 Nodes, as their status polling will actually knock over the primary etcd cluster. That's why kube-apiserver introduced this fun parameter: https://kubernetes.io/docs/reference/command-line-tools-refe... and the "but why" of https://kubernetes.io/docs/setup/best-practices/cluster-larg...

I've only personally gotten clusters up to about 550 so I'm sure the next scaling wall is hiding between that and the 5000 limit they advertise
by Jtsummers | 2025-06-21 17:33:19+00:00
Program management around space systems has been pretty awful. They fundamentally misunderstand IT systems and proper sustainment. There are major programs which stockpiled computers from 2015 so they could replace like-with-like, for Windows workstations. Programs that stockpiled monitors from 2010 so they could have the same monitors when some failed (these are not imagery systems where color consistency might matter, these are bog standard workstations).

Until they have a major failure, they're unlikely to change because the same industry partners (military contractors) that fail to deliver end up in the program offices sending contracts to the same companies that fail to deliver.
by sksjvsla | 2025-06-21 17:33:34+00:00
Totally valid concerns — I don’t disagree that DIY hosting comes with real risks that managed platforms abstract away (but AWS could close your account too).

We didn’t go into this blind though — we spent a lot of time testing scenarios (including Hetzner/OVH support delays) and designing mitigation strategies.

Some of what we do:

• Our infra is spread across multiple providers (Hetzner, OVH)) + Cloudflare for traffic management. If Hetzner blackholes us, we can redirect within minutes. • DB backups are encrypted and replicated nightly to various regions/providers (incl. one outside the primary vendors), with tested restore playbooks.

The key point: no platform is free of counterparty risk — whether that’s AWS pulling a region for legal reasons, or Hetzner taking a server offline. Our approach tries to make the blast radius smaller and the recovery faster, while also achieving compliance and cutting costs substantially (~90% as noted).

DIY is definitely not for everyone — it is more work, but for our particular constraints (cost, sovereignty, compliance) we found it a net win. Happy to share more details if helpful!

Oh, an imagine being kicked out of AWS and you used Aurora.. My certified multi-cloud setup with standard components should not make you cringe.
by jjulius | 2025-06-21 17:34:56+00:00
I want to preface this by clarifying that I am by no means intending to defend this at all - I backpack frequently and greatly value our public lands, and don't want to see them sold. However...

As it stands now, the text of this specifically calls for only .5 to .75% of the 250M acres for both USFS and BLM lands to be sold. No more than 1.5% of the 250M acres will ultimately be sold off. Further, they need to be sold off for specific purposes, and these purposes need to be cost-efficient for the buyer. The map on the page absolutely looks scary, but that fear is diminished a fair bit when you realize that less than a percent of the lands in each color will be sold, and those that are sold are likely not going to be spaces that are deep in the forest and are expensive to reach and develop.

By no means do I want to see this happen, I just wish that folk like Wilderness Society were a bit more clear on what to expect.
by gruez | 2025-06-21 17:35:21+00:00
I might be sympathetic to this argument if the severity actually differed, eg. people calling mean tweets "violence" or something, but that's not what's happening there. I don't see any meaningfully difference between "I'm discriminating against you because you're Chinese" (culture/nationality) and "I'm discriminating you're Han Chinese" (ethnicity). I doubt the average racist actually knows the distinction between the two anyways, and I doubt people are going to be like "oh you're discriminating based on culture instead of ethnicity? I guess that's fine then!".
by draugadrotten | 2025-06-21 17:36:06+00:00
> If you use ad-blocker: they'll embed ads into the video.

Someone will eventually make an AI adblocker that will dynamically update the video with all ads removed or replaced. For example, let's say that I specify to my AI streaming video editor that "detect all bottles and glasses with alcohol and replace their contents with water and their labels with Liquid Death"

Similar technology will be/is already used to e.g. display a Coke can for some markets and a Beer can for other markets, depending on who paid for that market.