MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mft_ | 2025-06-29 13:14:07+00:00
Time and time again, stories on totally different topics hinge on: during or just after the pandemic, there was a major change in cost of doing just about everything. Now of course, the pandemic was A. Big. Thing. and there was also an overlaid global supply-chain disruption when the Ever Given blocked the Suez Canal in '21.

But: fundamentally, why did all of this happen, and why haven't prices normalised (i.e. dropped) since?

Does anyone have a hypothesis, beyond 'corporate gouging', which I can accept, but seems too simplistic to explain what seems to be an enduring global phenomenon?
by osigurdson | 2025-06-29 13:14:23+00:00
I had a look at this artists YouTube page. Clearly he is just not very popular despite winning some awards, having various CBC interviews, being endorsed by the city of Edmonton and playing for Justin Trudeau.

As has always been the case with music, success is extremely rare. For every winner, there are a million losers. So, better to think of it more like a lottery than a normal industry / job.
by ttcbj | 2025-06-29 13:14:40+00:00
I have been reading the book “apple in China” after hearing the author on a podcast. It has fundamentally altered my view of apple as a company. From a consumer perspective, I thought it was a an amazing company. But looking behind the scenes, I came to understand how morally compromised it has been for a very long time. In retrospect, I feel complicit in things I didn’t understand I was part of.
by cherryteastain | 2025-06-29 13:16:37+00:00
> What are the base cases? A base case is an ancestor whose Britishness does not depend on a parent, e.g. someone who was naturalised, or born in the UK before 1983 (which makes one unconditionally british regardless of parents). That's right, further into the future we get from 1983, the taller these call-stacks can get.

This is insane to me, coming from a country that simply has a central database of all citizens and foreign residents, and a citizenship check is probably something like a single SELECT on an SQL table.
by johnecheck | 2025-06-29 13:17:51+00:00
Your analysis is spot on. UBI funded by taxes is redistribution.

Is that a bad thing? It would obviously have some negative effects. We'd immediately see damage to luxury brands and yacht sales. The art markets would crash. Stock markets would feel some pain.

The upside though? My hunch is that making most people feel secure enough to risk starting/joining businesses is fuel for a strong and innovative economy. The fact that so few of us are able to take those risks is a constraint on growth.
by geoctl | 2025-06-29 13:18:47+00:00
Thank you. I understand it's hard to concisely define what Octelium is because it is designed as a unified/generic secure/zero trust access platform, a term that almost nobody would relate to. It's more of a generic Kubernetes-like architecture/infrastructure for zero trust secure access that can fit many different use cases (i.e. human to workload and workload to workload environments). Well, it can be used as a typical WireGuard/QUIC-based remote access/corporate VPN. It can be used as a ZTNA/BeyondCorp platform with identity-based, L7 aware, context-aware ABAC via policy-as-code with CEL and OPA where you can control access at layer-7 (e.g. HTTP request headers, serialized JSON body content, etc...). It can also be used as an ngrok alternative (both secure access via OIDC/SAML/GitHub IdP as well as anonymously which can fit for hosting, testing APIs, etc...). It can also deploy your containerized resources and automatically provide client-based/clientless secure access to them (kinda like a PaaS) and it does provide dynamic configuration and routing to upstreams via policy-as-code (e.g. route to different API versions, use different SSH credentials, different API keys, different postgres user/password based on identity/context, etc....). It can also fit as an API/AI gateway and a scalable infrastructure for MCP architectures/meshes. Therefore, it's not really a ZTNA/VPN in the rigid sense, it's a more generic platform where what it does to secure/remote access is similar to what Kuberentes does for containers.
by ReptileMan | 2025-06-29 13:19:22+00:00
God of war 2 was made on 300mhz cpu and 32mb of ram.

We haven't been bound by moore's law because we just waste computing power because programmers are expensive. No one is trying to optimize nowadays except in very niche places. And when push comes to shove we just start wasting slightly less. Like adding a JIT to a script language 15 years too late.
by mzajc | 2025-06-29 13:19:38+00:00
$ dig ns brave ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NXDOMAIN, id: 65203 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1

Another fake non-ICANN TLD? I thought people stopped falling for these.
by daneel_w | 2025-06-29 13:20:35+00:00
My stance is that common connectivity shouldn't cost an additional $3.70 a month on top of already egregious traffic costs. The price per IP today is about $30. The lifetime of the investment is infinite and upkeep is in the grand scheme of things nothing. The markup profit is insane. It's a new behavior, pure usury, seizing an opportunity to profit on a crisis. To offer some contrast (without getting into the sizes of their respective turfs) Oracle doesn't charge a dime.
by sillyfluke | 2025-06-29 13:21:57+00:00
>I have a 6 year old phone that was cheap when it was new, and it still runs 100% of what I use my phone for

What's especially annoying about iphones is that my decade old andriod phones without any os updates work more robustly on the modern web than a 2021 iphone with its original os. You can blame it on chrome dominance. but it's pretty much bullshit if you're a company with Apple's treasure chest and you are no longer able to push out any buy-me features to make up for your outdated build and release cycle.
by 3PS | 2025-06-29 13:22:40+00:00
For prices specifically I think it's fair to say that inflation only goes in one direction, but for larger market trends, IMO the key here is _habit building_.

Many things were technically feasible pre-pandemic but not done habitually: remote work, streaming movies instead of going to the theater, ordering delivery instead of dining out, and so on. The pandemic forced many people to change their habits and get over any initial inertia (e.g. investing in a WFH setup or home theater). The result is that when the world returned to normal, the markets didn't: consumer habits had already moved on.
by surgical_fire | 2025-06-29 13:23:35+00:00
> Voting with your feet will save you from that.

When relevant countries act in tandem, it would work.

I would really like to see a billionaire vote with their feet to protect their wealth by moving ro Somalia or something like that.

A country can also limit their ability to operate from abroad when they move.

In real life, value producing is inherently tied to the society which allows value to be produced.
by digitcatphd | 2025-06-29 13:24:26+00:00
All these arguments remind me of early LLMs. In fact, most of the arguments are nearly identical. Heck, even Bitcoin back 10 years ago was demonized and now governments are pushing for national reserves.

If you have used GPT o3, you have used Agentic models. If you use Claude Code or Cursor, you have used Agentic models. If you have used Claude + MCP, you have used agentic models.

This isn't theoretical - its already being applied. In fact, Langchain just hosted an entire conference to showcase how Fortune 100 companies were using LangGraph and I can assure you if they could have used a more simple architecture they would have.

If you wait around until everyone considers it to be acceptable in the mainstream all the good opportunities to create disruptive tech will be gone. So please - keep publishing this luddite trash and throw shade on the sidelines. I will keep doing agent research and building with it. We will see in 10 years who was wrong I guess.

https://www.qodo.ai/blog/building-agentic-flows-with-langgra...
by dtagames | 2025-06-29 13:26:40+00:00
Since MCP is itself an API protocol, we have to say no. I think what you're after is, "Will MCP interactions under the hood replace or supplant traditional GUI interactions where the human is expected to click several things on a website?"

To that, I would say it's possible. The problem is not with MCP existing or not existing. The underlying APIs that make every app possible on the backend are already there whether you wire them up to the front with a GUI or MCP.

The problem is that API calls almost never map directly to UI appearance. Typically, the app has to examine quite a bit of state to decide what API call should be sent, what parameters it should contain, and what should be done to the UI with its result.

Those connections are built by humans with a deep understanding of the underlying API. Often the UI and "user intent" side of the house is entirely separate from the API or "data provider" side and it takes some finesse to marry the two. MCP offers no help here and asking an LLM to guess which API should be called is likely to make things worse unless it's carefully corralled.

To me, this creates a serious moat for vertical applications that are tightly focused on one kind of RAG use case, whether they use MCP or not. If the app exhibits an "intuitive" understanding of the working data and adjusts the UI in a way that makes sense to the user, it adds value that's difficult for a competitor to copy -- and impossible for anyone outside the subject domain.

This explains the Cursor moat, which seems misunderstood. Cursor is the mostly tightly integrated and best example of a RAG application in any domain. It's no surprise that software development is the first industry to see a benefit from this concept. We write everything for ourselves first. But apps that implement this kind of "closed loop" RAG over a specific subject domain and data will replace the traditional kind that only have a GUI or CLI.
by soulofmischief | 2025-06-29 13:27:06+00:00
Sure, you could argue that some people prefer to not live a destitute life, and that influences the high price of housing. But that is reductive, ignoring a host of other factors, which again, you might be able to boil down to preference (wealthy capitalists prefer to make more money) but again, it's reductive and offers a somewhat shallow perspective and not much to act on.
by shortrounddev2 | 2025-06-29 13:27:07+00:00
Excellent post, I enjoyed it quite a lot. I often tell people that if they want to meet new people, get a dog. If you want to meet girls, get a puppy. When I was in college I would see other guys my age (early 20s at the time) walking a new puppy around campus and they became magnets for girls.

Plus, humans were MEANT to have dogs, and dogs were meant to have humans. We grew up together; dogs are one of our first forays into genetic engineering. We created an animal which was perfectly acclimated to human companionship
by Chris2048 | 2025-06-29 13:27:23+00:00
> Go ahead commit fraud in visa applications?

That would be "fraud", not fraud.

> what is that you are even saying?

I think I was clear; your morally based personal conception of "fraud" isn't relevant to what actual practise is, and this is especially relevant to an administration that might not even be acting legally in the first place.

Maybe these things are fraud, or would be judged so if it goes to court, assuming such a right applies, and you aren't illegally deprived of it; maybe these standards aren't even legally valid.
by giantg2 | 2025-06-29 13:27:29+00:00
The main reason for inspection laws is to control American Foul Brood. It's very destructive and since bees travel miles, it can spread similar to a public health outbreak. Africanized bees are only a concern in some area, but can be a threat to human life. The fact that Delaware wants to inspect for them does seem to be overreach as their range seems to be stalled much further west for unknown reasons. The inclusion of mite inspections seems like overreach as there are no therapies to completely eliminate them and they are already in every hive.
by DonHopkins | 2025-06-29 13:27:32+00:00
>P.S. If you build an MCP server that makes your computer emit the smell of fresh bread, we need to talk.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29225777

DonHopkins on Nov 15, 2021 | parent | context | favorite | on: Xerox scanners/photocopiers randomly alter numbers...

The iSmell developers were hoping to make money the same way, by selling big smell combination pack cartridges that you have to entirely replace after any one of the smells ran out.

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

>The iSmell Personal Scent Synthesizer developed by DigiScents Inc. is a small device that can be connected to a computer through a Universal serial bus (USB) port and powered using any ordinary electrical outlet. The appearance of the device is similar to that of a shark’s fin, with many holes lining the “fin” to release the various scents. Using a cartridge similar to a printer’s, it can synthesize and even create new smells from certain combinations of other scents. These newly created odors can be used to closely replicate common natural and manmade odors. The cartridges used also need to be swapped every so often once the scents inside are used up. Once partnered with websites and interactive media, the scents can be activated either automatically once a website is opened or manually. However, the product is no longer on the market and never generated substantial sales. Digiscent had plans for the iSmell to have several versions but did not progress past the prototype stage. The company did not last long and filed for bankruptcy a short time after.

This Wired Magazine article is a classic Marc Canter interview. I'm surprised they could smell the output of the iSmell USB device over the pungent bouquet from all the joints he was smoking:

You've Got Smell!

https://web.archive.org/web/20160303130915/https://www.wired...

>DigiScent is here. If this technology takes off, it's gonna launch the next Web revolution. Joel Lloyd Bellenson places a little ceramic bowl in front of me and lifts its lid. "Before we begin," he says, "you need to clear your nasal palate." I peer into the bowl. "Coffee beans," explains Bellenson's partner, Dexster Smith. […]

>"You know, I don't think the transition from wood smoke to bananas worked very well." -Marc Canter

The failed quest to bring smells to the internet (thehustle.co)

https://thehustle.co/digiscents-ismell-fail

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17476460

DigiScent had a booth at the 1999 Game Developers Conference, with scantily dressed young women in skunk costumes.

I told them about a game called "The Sims" I had been working on for a long time, and was hoping to finish and release some time soon.

They unsuccessfully tried to convince me to make The Sims support the iSmell, and even gave me a copy of the SDK documentation, because they thought it would enrich the player's experience of all those sweaty unwashed sims, blue puddles of piss on the floor, stopped up toilets in the bathroom, and plates of rotting food with flies buzzing around on the dining room table.
by gen6acd60af | 2025-06-29 13:28:25+00:00
Well, when you see it alongside these...

* Not X—but Y.

* No X. No Y. Just Z.

* This isn't just about X—it's about Y.

* If this resonates—I'm listening. Because X isn't just a Y. It's a Z.

* Few Words Summary in Bold: One Sentence Restatement.

* [OBVIOUS PLACEHOLDER BLOCK NOT REMOVED FROM TEXT CONTAINING ANY OF THE ABOVE]
by alienbaby | 2025-06-29 13:28:45+00:00
Perhaps it would be easier to go through a few typical use cases and implementations, and describe how they work with less brand naming and technical fancywords.

I scanned the github, and your reply above, and I still don't really get it.

I imagine I would understand it better if I was more fluent in the vocabulary you use and understood what some of the platforms and interesting names did from the get go.

So yea, my 2p - break it down into some use cases from simple - intermediate - advanced, use more straight forward language and less platform / product names. Technical terms are fine, but try not to string a zillion of them together all in one go... it reads a bit too much like a sales pitch trying to cram in as many acronyms and cool sounding things as possible.
by Aaargh20318 | 2025-06-29 13:29:28+00:00
> If you want to meet girls, get a puppy.

Since puppies turn into full grown dogs quite quickly, how often do you suggest I replace the puppy?

> We created an animal which was perfectly acclimated to human companionship

This is why I think having a cat is so much more satisfying. A dog loves you unconditionally, not by choice but because it was literally bred to do so. Despite this you still have to keep it on a leash. Cats by contrast stay with you because they want to, despite having every opportunity to move in with someone else.
by Majromax | 2025-06-29 13:30:31+00:00
> Do you have any insight as to why, seemingly, there is no contractual obligation on contractors to make a working system.

Often, you'll find that procurement is handled by someone working off of an incomplete set of written specifications. The procurement officer probably has no expertise with or informal knowledge of the problem to identify problems in advance, and even if they do legal requirements (ironically designed to ensure fair and transparent procurement) might force them to disregard informal knowledge over the formal specifications.

After the contract is signed, sunk cost fallacies and optimism biases take over. If the project goes over budget it might be easier to cut back on features than admit failure or demand more money, and the project will go over budget once real users start seeing the in-progress work and change requests pile up. Project managers want to be seen managing a successful project; nobody's rewarded for being the first to predict failure.

This is a kind of principal/agent problem that the private sector partially manages with equity or deferred compensation, but the profit motive has a very limited role in government and you'd probably not want to give stock options anyway. Beyond that, even the political overlords have short time horizons of 'the next election', and announcing a grand new project is almost as good as delivering one.

A high-profile example of this problem is the Canadian federal payroll system (https://www.oag-bvg.gc.ca/internet/English/att__e_43045.html), which has led to billions of dollars in fix-ups over a decade or so.
by sgarland | 2025-06-29 13:30:39+00:00
OK, fair-ish point. You won’t find major examples, because it’s not a CVE if you willingly download and execute malicious code. I hope you can understand the theoretical (but very real) risks of doing this, though.

For me personally, I try to use a distro/platform specific package if it exists, since hopefully that means at least one human has read through some of the code, and probably installed it. If that’s not available, I do download the script to review before executing it (and not re-downloading it to pipe to a shell). I’m sure I wouldn’t catch everything, but I would probably catch odd embedded curl calls and the like.
by geoctl | 2025-06-29 13:30:56+00:00
Octelium is a zero trust architecture not a p2p VPN even though it can seamlessy operate as a WireGuard/QUIC-based remote access VPN among other things. Its architecture is closer to Cloudflare Access, Teleport, etc... as it provides dynamic L7-aware access control, secret-less access (i.e. injecting API keys and access tokens, database passwords, SSH private keys, mTLS private keys etc... without distributing them to Users), dynamic configuration and routing to upstreams, etc... via identity-aware proxies as opposed to just merely operating as a VPN at layer-3 as well as to providing OpenTelemetry-native visibility and auditing in real-time. True zero trust architectures such as ZTNA/BeyondCorp, apart from service meshes (e.g. Kubernetes service meshes), are problematic to be implemented as p2p VPNs to say the least. You simply need L7-aware identity-proxies to do the process of access control and visibility at the application-layer on a per-request basis.
by hxii | 2025-06-29 13:31:28+00:00
From my perspective (with our prices) - I have no idea how.

RAV4 starts at ~$62.8 with the most expensive being ~$85.5k.

Model Y starts at ~$73k with the most expensive being ~$85.9k.

At the lower end of the scale, neither is a good car, but especially the RAV4.
by poolpOrg | 2025-06-29 13:31:59+00:00
oh, that's not meant to stay that way.

first, we're going to release pre-built binaries for various platforms with our next stable release which will remove the need to install a go runtime as you'll have a standalone native executable for plakar / ptar.

then, the format is open and we'll publish a friendlier documentation should someone want to implement their own builder/reader.

finally, it's likely we'll publish a library + standalone executable in C, so that people can easily implement a binding to their favourite language and/or have a small executable in a language that traverses the decades :-)
by deepdarkforest | 2025-06-29 13:32:15+00:00
the difference is simple, addiction is the compulsive/habitual action of something that does not have positive effects, more likely negative than neutral. For example, being "addicted" to gym is fine, because even if you enjoy the dopamine after, not the actual exercise, it's still good for you overall, and you cannot really overdo it. Caffeine makes you more productive, and you cannot really spiral, hence why caffeine is legal, but opioid drugs are not.

But for tech, scrolling tiktok for 5 hours a day, definitely does not have positive outcomes. It's like gambling. It's dopamine hit for dopamine hit's sake, and the delivery system is actively harming you.
by ericmay | 2025-06-29 13:32:51+00:00
> I have a 6 year old phone that was cheap when it was new, and it still runs 100% of what I use my phone for, and most people use their phones for, perfectly.

Just to be clear your suggesting that your 6 year old iPhone runs a suit of social media apps, full graphics games like Minecraft (or whatever the hell people play these days I don’t know), fitness apps, connects to the latest audio devices like Apple’s AirPods Pro (as an example), works with CarPlay/Android Auto, has wireless charging capability, can place 3D objects in a room to help you plan out a new design, and allows you to use payments features like tap to pay? Plus equivalent camera and video quality?

Because if your phone doesn’t do all of those things and perform as well and have great battery life too, your 6 year old Android phone doesn’t really do what most people use their phones for today.
by mhb | 2025-06-29 13:33:37+00:00
If you're really intent on fostering higher quality, honest discussion maybe don't just make exceptions for the the post about Israeli mistakes which they actually investigate.

There are reasonable discussions to be had, but the submissions which might catalyze them are quickly flagged (as opposed to defended, like this one).

Examples:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44409805

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44409708

If you're going to defend how this inflammatory post is some kind of exception to your policies, you're going to have to do a better job.
by xyproto | 2025-06-29 13:34:09+00:00
> If you cannot explain your beliefs, how do you expect others to just take your unverified and unsubstantiated claims as something worth considering over any random claim from any random loony?

Even without an explanation, you can use statistics to find the fruits of the beliefs, though. Does 100 people believe in not working and rather join a cult that worships the watermelon god? Fine! How did that work out for them in the span of 3 generations?

I think that some beliefs can have value and merit, just based on measures of quality of life and society.