MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF | 2025-06-04 17:38:44+00:00
A Five Whys might be appropriate.

Why won't Meta be punished for this? Because they won't be convicted.

Why won't they be convicted? Because the court system is corrupt, trials are expensive, and Meta has more money to throw behind lawyers than anyone who cares to sue them.

Why is the court system corrupt? Because corruption is spreading through every aspect of the US government, as corruption, like black mold in a kitchen sink, tends to do when not actively fought.

Why are trials expensive? Because the law is complicated and there isn't much support for privacy, so this isn't open-and-shut like a murder case, it would be a long drag-out fight between the few people with little money who care about privacy, and a huge corporation powered by the fear and apathy and helplessness of billions of people.

Why does Meta have so much money? Because nobody stopped them when it would have been easy. Because corruption of democracy and erosion of privacy have been ongoing for decades, maybe forever.

Why isn't corruption being actively fought? The working class (Net worth under say 5 million) are on back foot against it. Nobody has time to vote, protest, organize, unionize, run for office, fix things, help the homeless, when you can't afford a damned thing, when a pregnancy is a career-ending problem, when you can't even get an abortion safely in many states, when you're one ambulance bill from a "not a debtor's prison" constructed debtor's prison.

Why isn't there much support for privacy? Same reasons, plus public education lags behind on this issue. Tech moved very fast the last few decades, and there's no public education for adults, so people don't really get sat down and told what the risk is of mass surveillance. The stories get written, sometimes, but not listened to. Nothing very serious gets done when you can always flip channels and see something funny, which is what Meta and TikTok sell to people. You can always flip channels and tune out, and it might take years to say to yourself "I think I have a crippling Internet addiction".

What's the actionable?

1. Always fight anyway. Get stuff off of Meta. Publish Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. Help friends get away. Do what you can.

2. Do things in physical reality.

3. Vote in every god-damned election you can vote in. Vote blue even if it's a shit sandwich, because most Americans are stuck under FPTP voting, and life is better under Democrats, do I need to explain the word "gradient" to a website full of startup hackers?
by tadfisher | 2025-06-04 17:38:48+00:00
It's a traditional benefit of decoupling the sales and maintenance of vehicles from the manufacturer. The manufacturer should not care who buys their parts, so it should be purely an additional revenue stream. ASE certification means any shop can carry out warranty repairs and the manufacturer doesn't have to have repair shops and staff in every city/town.

That said, it's not just Tesla that has broken this model; Volkswagen Auto Group in particular are famous for requiring proprietary tools and software packages to diagnose and repair their vehicles, and refusing to sell tools/software to independent shops. I think some manufacturers are just more tightly coupled to dealerships, so there's a profit motive in forcing all repairs to happen through them.
by parentheses | 2025-06-04 17:39:29+00:00
Humanity's abilities are always enhanced by their tools. This simply changes the judgement of art in the face of easier execution.

Let's say I used a custom power saw to carve a statue faster than ever before and more precisely. Would that reduce my influence and my application of taste? No. I would in fact be able to produce a piece faster and have more room for making more attempts.

Neural network based art tools are all giving us the same thing - easier execution. This means greater production and the ability to try most possibilities. The fact that creating art is more accessible to the public means that more creatives can be in the arena, making for more competition.

Any creator grapples with this change over time. Woodworkers of old prefer their techniques to modern power tools, painters prefer physical media, carvers prefer real blocks of marble/whatever. All of these things have modern digital equivalents, but the establishment of existing artists refuse to leave their posts. They hold their ground that the medium is critical to the art.

Art moves and changes slowly because of this human bias against new solutions. Go to any museum of modern art and you'll find that most of it could have been executed as such 20+ years ago. It's just that art takes time to accept a new way of doing something.
by globie | 2025-06-04 17:39:59+00:00
Here's a (very) small sample gathered from a search for "webrtc" on cve.org and picking high-severity CVEs affecting browsers:

* CVE-2015-1260

* CVE-2022-4924

* CVE-2023-7010

* CVE-2023-7024

* CVE-2024-3170

* CVE-2024-4764

* CVE-2024-5493

* CVE-2024-10488

Of course, I agree that it's not relevant to ffmpeg. But seeing "WebRTC" triggers the same part of the brain that looks out for unescaped SQL statements. Good opportunity to point out the difference in this implementation.
by Narciss | 2025-06-04 17:40:02+00:00
> As a manager, your empathy needs to be highly conditional.

I don't see that as true. Your empathy always needs to be there, but your response is conditional on the situation. "I feel you, but..." and then offer a perspective that pushes the solution forward. Or even better, "I feel you, and..." to remove the defensive wall of your direct report.

I am blessed that I work in a really switched on team. We focus on keep the talent density high, and on open and transparent communication. Practically everyone in our 70 odd team is a killer, so I have not heard any word of complaint from my team members around other teams. But if I did, I definitely would try to fix it via the open and transparent communcation policy.

I highly recommend reading (or rereading) No rules rules..the culture at Netflix. That's the kind of culture that I strive for, and that I want to foster across the organizations that I work with.
by GuinansEyebrows | 2025-06-04 17:40:12+00:00
i mean, frankly, if the words aren't rooted in societal prejudice, i don't really care much *. kids have to go through a phase of exploring language and part of that is swearing and insults. i was lucky to have parents who explained to me that sometimes it's okay to swear but to measure your situation and environment and act accordingly - a lesson framed in language but applicable to all aspects of life.

plus it's real funny when kids say "shit".

* even still, this can be an opportunity for learning empathy. i definitely accidentally switched a slur i'd read for a totally different term of endearment when talking to a friend as a kid and... well, i regret it a lot but i never did it again.
by stego-tech | 2025-06-04 17:40:17+00:00
The reality is that the current AI boom is just supercharging a longstanding trend of massive surveillance. Governments and the monied classes distrust everyone else by default, and continue instituting surveillance to protect their interests at the expense of everyone else.

It’s also everywhere:

* Academia has seen a glut of sensors and tech to surveil labs, classrooms, students, and faculty

* Retail and service workers are tracked via camera or phone and yelled at remotely by the boss if they’re not appropriately productive in any given moment

* Small businesses often leave telemetry and default data collection policies in place, letting private companies monitor their staff and business

The only tools available to us at this point are sabotage, awareness, and resistance. We need to build a society where people trust each other by default again, instead of assuming harm until proven otherwise. We also need governance and regulations at every level stating that surveillance of any sort must be as narrowly scoped as possible, that data retention is limited to as little as practicable, and that sharing of surveillance data with any party other than those compelled by law and warrant is illegal.

We’re in an era of peak productivity and flat wages, with the largest wealth pumps in human history funneling more money into fewer hands. This kind of surveillance isn’t just offensive or unacceptable, it’s grotesque in its treatment of our fellow humans.
by nostrademons | 2025-06-04 17:41:30+00:00
Most of their job actually consists of having coffee dates, as well as looking like an impressive, put-together "thought leader".

A rank & file VC is essentially a salesman. Their job is to understand everything that's going on in their sector, and have warm intros available so they can sell the founders of the actually-promising startups on having their firm invest. In general, you don't do this in the office. You get out and meet lots of people in the industry.

Likewise, if you're a founder going into fundraising mode, your full-time job is to be a salesman. You go out and meet lots of investors and blow shit up their ass so they all believe you're the next hot thing, and then you play them off against each others so they keep escalating their termsheets. I've had founders tell me that everything you do in the fundraising game is performative - you should treat it like a months-long acting gig where everything you do is designed to elicit the desired emotional reaction to get investors to open their portfolios.
by vessenes | 2025-06-04 17:41:43+00:00
No; he's failed to engage in the pathos part of convincing -- he's whistle calling to his liberal readership base by implying the administration is dumb -- he's not seriously engaged with where the country is at, at least in this short essay lite.

I agree with you that saber rattling is a major change in foreign policy for the US. There aren't a lot of stops between "reserve currency" and "former reserve currency". That said, there also aren't a lot of options globally.

I think the benefactors of the saber rattling might be a little closer to Pennsylvania avenue than you suggest, though.
by liesandxander | 2025-06-04 17:42:35+00:00
Yeah unfortunately the rich are always against the same for them; aka government regulations.

Our modern rich were raised in a more religious time and our understanding of neuroscience today makes it pretty obvious they're still just patronizing geezers who think we owe validation of their story.

When by the numbers every billionaire could not wake up tomorrow and we'd barely notice. It's not even a school shootings worth of victims.

All their "be metrics driven" gibberish did not work out the way they'd hoped. Just a handful of morons humanity will carry on without some day.
by JackSlateur | 2025-06-04 17:42:50+00:00
The only purpose of tests is the help you define good behavior and bad behavior, and keep it that way

So, when you write tests, your main job is to think (define what is good and what is bad)

As such, using IA to write tests is writing useless tests

I got a job interview this monday; I asked the guy : "do you use IA ?" He mumbled something like "yes" Then, I baited him: "It's quite handy to write tests!" He responded: yes, but no (for the above reason)

He got the job
by ajross | 2025-06-04 17:42:52+00:00
Maybe, but it's worth pointing out that even that wouldn't prevent the exploit in question. Facebook didn't have to transfer this cookie locally, the app and web site could just as easily have exchanged it via some RESTful API server somewhere (well, on the same origin as the Facebook JS in question).

The reason they didn't do that is pure obscurity: if they blasted a tracking cookie over the internet they would have been caught faster. Trying to design "security" features by pushing the "obscurity" boundary around is usually wasted effort.
by realityfactchex | 2025-06-04 17:42:57+00:00
Markdown.

Then Pandoc can convert that .md file to a nice formal PDF using your template, so it looks like it came from LaTeX and is suitable for academic-style reading. This is good for PDF user manuals.

Or the Markdown can be put into a markdown-friendly slide engine (take your pick) and a slide deck can be made from it.

Or the Markdown could go into a Markdown-friendly wiki engine (take your pick) and be used as documentation there.

Or the Markdown could go into a Markdown-to-richtext editor to be copy-pasted into chat apps that don't have good text-based formatting editors built-in.

Basically I think Markdown is the top universal format for write once, use anywhere. Just use a good collection off "destination endpoints", and the first time delivering to that "endpoint", it might take figuring out the best way to get it there. IME there are always very nice ways, since people love Markdown, and not much come close to its universality.

Markdown even works in Obsidian, etc.
by dashqueen | 2025-06-04 17:43:15+00:00
This doesn't quite fit into the article and is probably too inside baseball for a general business audience, but as I see it, there’s a real and serious argument to be made here about how Section 174 changes restructured the cost architecture of tech employment (yes, even for big, cash-rich companies). When salaries could be fully expensed, the effective marginal cost of headcount was lower. Amortization means the same engineer now triggers a significantly bigger near-term tax bill. At scale, that’s a serious shift in how labor costs flow through the P&L… functionally, op-ex becomes capex, and cash flow implications for big players run into the billions. But maybe it’s me!
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-06-04 17:43:19+00:00
That's oddly specific. What's your criterion for "Renaissance over", and why does it fit 1527?

I mean, if you're defining "Renaissance" as "High Renaissance only", and "over" as "sack of Rome", then yes, I suppose that fits. But the High Renaissance is only about 40 years, whereas the Renaissance is much larger.
by w10-1 | 2025-06-04 17:43:30+00:00
The divergence between interest rates and the dollar is historic and bodes ill for investors and company builders who historically have been able to rely on the relative stability of the US.

As a reminder, the Mary Meeker slides on AI reported that the US share of top companies in the public equity market went from ~50% in 1995 to ~85% recently.

Still, the signal from US debt might reflect only changes in a few dominant players (and we famously have adversaries investing in US debt -- Middle East, China, Russia). Also the big beautiful bill shows even Republicans want to spend now and pay later, so this might be unwinding the false expectation of austerity during the Republican trifecta. Both are transitory and neither really goes to seriousness.

The real question is whether we've lost seriousness by continuously moving upstream, into financial and information services and technologies. Our willingness to sell IP/infrastructure now rather than protect and control (milk) it over time reflects a generational lack of diligence. (Sorry - not trying to diminish exit strategies for interim investment tiers.)
by tsimionescu | 2025-06-04 17:43:52+00:00
We teach math starting with basic arithmetic, starting from the middle. We don't go explaining what numbers are in terms of sets, we don't teach Peano arithmetic or other theories that can give logical definitions of arithmetic from the ground up.

Plus, it is literally impossible to do any kind of math without knowing arithmetic. It is very possible to build a modestly advanced career knowing no assembly language.
by swiftcoder | 2025-06-04 17:44:03+00:00
I'm not sure I agree about any of these being desirable as specified.

* App-to-app network communication really only seems sane between apps from the same vendor.

* Unique fingerprinting of the device is explicitly not desirable. They should have access to a unique anonymous identifier for the device, which cannot be compared between apps from multiple vendors.

* Browsers talking to native apps again seems like something that should only be possible if both the web domain and the app belong to the same vendor. I don't have a huge problem with Facebook.com talking to the Facebook app - I do have a problem with random 3rd-party sites talking to the Facebook app.
by mplanchard | 2025-06-04 17:44:18+00:00
This is a popular meme[0] about our industry, in fact:

> Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale

> Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus, from [the] classic sci-fi novel, Don’t Create the Torment Nexus

[0]: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/torment-nexus
by radicalbyte | 2025-06-04 17:44:41+00:00
Here proof that we shut the app down whilst the issue was being fixed, in English. There are more details in Dutch including the letters to Parliament we had to make covering the details. If you're Dutch use Google.

https://nltimes.nl/2021/04/29/coronamelder-app-taken-offline...

Here's the paper showing the Facebook had access to the logging and whole range of very suspect permissions:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1905.02713
by pier25 | 2025-06-04 17:44:41+00:00
A couple of months ago I spent like $25 in a campaign for a small product I launched. It translated into literally zero real traffic let alone sales.

I got likes from what looked like bot accounts from random countries (Kazahstan etc) even when I was quite certain I had limited the ads to certain countries. Then I was spammed with scams on the ads dashboard who appeared out of nowhere.

Absolute waste of money.
by DannyBee | 2025-06-04 17:44:49+00:00
I don't think this is true, and honestly, I think it would be a mistake to consider it - they can't serve everyone, down that path is madness. FWIW - I even have a JSON parser in my RTOS-that-must-run-in-less-than-512k.

I also think that target of "embedded systems from the 90's" makes no sense because the tooling for the embedded system, which is what would conceivably want to handle patch format, ran on the host, which easily had access to a JSON parser.

But let's assume it does matter - let's be super concrete - assume they want to serve 95-99% of the users of patch format (i doubt it's even that high).

Which exact pieces of software with even >1% market share that need to process patch format don't have access to a JSON parser?
by bsder | 2025-06-04 17:45:18+00:00
> Why Elixir + Erlang are not more popular for high concurrency projects is a mystery to me.

1) Because the amount of "high concurrency" you can handle with a single machine with "standard" languages keeps moving up every year.

2) Because you had a single, nigh undocumented, very impenetrable to port implementation of BEAM for the longest time.

3) Because "Erlang" isn't the magic. OTP is the magic. And that requires that you shift your mindset dramatically. And you can do the OTP abstractions in other languages!

4) I think Scala sucked up a lot of Erlang's oxygen for a long time. Erlang is helping with that.
by ajross | 2025-06-04 17:46:11+00:00
Drove 200 miles on FSD just yesterday. It's been months, maybe more than a year since I've had to intervene with the system for any reason beyond convenience ("I the human am smarter about lane selection so I'll drive" -- even then it's only about 50/50 that I'm actually right).

Obviously in the current environment it's not worth having the fight. Musk's brand implosion will be studied for decades as probably the biggest preventable destruction of shareholder value in history.

Nonetheless the cars remain great cars, even if it's no longer appropriate to say so. FWIW: used values have dropped too. If you don't want to line DOGE pockets or whatever, you can get a great deal on one from Carvana et. al.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-06-04 17:46:26+00:00
I think that this is completely backwards. As James Mickens put it: pointers are real; you can't just put a LISP book on top of an x86 chip and hope it learns the lambda calculus by osmosis. Computer science is, to be honest, not interesting or useful without a machine to use it on. Therefore trying to teach it to people without reference to a machine is a grave error.
by stego-tech | 2025-06-04 17:46:28+00:00
This. Coming from MSP world, the number of SMBs who harbor such an intense hatred of their own workers to the point of demanding total surveillance is basically all of them; customers refusing surveillance packages are the exception, not the norm.

Irony is that surveillance cuts both ways, and big companies know it. Any data you collect can and will be subpoenaed at some point, and that’ll multiply your damages paid out in the process.
by rangestransform | 2025-06-04 17:46:39+00:00
For us to build a high trust society again, we must enforce the law uniformly and consistently through unscalable and “legacy” means like police walking the beat and doing actual human investigative police work. Though murder is down, there is an uptick in property crime, and especially an uptick in people believing that property crime should not be prosecuted at all if the perpetrator is any less wealthy than a billionaire.
by steren | 2025-06-04 17:47:07+00:00
> Google's pricing also assumes you're running it 24/7 for an entire month

What makes you think that?

Cloud Run [pricing page](https://cloud.google.com/run/pricing) explicitly says : "charge you only for the resources you use, rounded up to the nearest 100 millisecond"

Also, Cloud Run's [autoscalling](https://cloud.google.com/run/docs/about-instance-autoscaling) is in effect, scaling down idle instances after a maximum of 15 minutes.

(Cloud Run PM)
by cogman10 | 2025-06-04 17:47:23+00:00
BYD makes some of the best EVs on the planet and CATL some of the best batteries. The only reason they aren't dominating in the US is because of trade agreements keeping them out.

My current car is a 2018 tesla, I'll drive it until the wheels fall off. My next EV won't be. Primarily because I can't support a Nazi.
by DannyBee | 2025-06-04 17:47:46+00:00
"That doesn't mean it's not going to be difficult to use that parser. Not everyone has the luxury of being able to use third-party code, or having the time allotted to write a JSON5 parser."

Why are these people the target market?

I understand it may be important to you, but that isn't the same as "matters to target market/audience".

On top of that, the same constraints you mention here would stop you parsing current git patch formats, and lots of other things anyway. So you were never going to be using modern tools that might care here.

This is all also really meta. Who exactly is writing software with >1% market share, needs to parse the patch format, and can't access a JSON parser.

Instead of this theoretical discussion, let's have a concrete one.