MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sprinkly-dust | 2025-06-21 07:09:53+00:00
It is my experience that this is what Google does with their Pixel phones. It is really quite simple to unlock the bootloader and do whatever you want on a Google Pixel you own (i.e unlocked, no carrier). They even give you this really handy Android flash tool which uses WebUSB to fully restore your device when you mess up. Heck, custom ROMs like GrapheneOS and CalyxOS are even able to sign their own images and allow you to lock the bootloader with a non Google OS.

However, all this comes with the caveat that SafetyNet will flay you alive. The cat and mouse game with Magisk and other methods to maintain root undetected is moot when I've used apps these days that make a fuss when you have developer settings enabled. To be honest, that seems acceptable to me, I can do what I want with my device, software vendors like banks and the like have a say in how I choose to access their more convenient services. I can play nice with them if I want, even using a second phone perhaps, but I have a choice.
by wiseowise | 2025-06-21 07:10:20+00:00
> Why do we justify blocking ads, even when we know the content we’re consuming isn’t free to create and even if the content is free, it still costs money to store and distribute?

Shall we do the same to open source?

“Watch this ad for 30 seconds before checking out a branch! Git commit, oops: RAID SHADOW LEGENDS”
by comp_throw7 | 2025-06-21 07:10:56+00:00
> My response to that is: it's good to want things. He doesn't get to ask the world to forget his name.

Is this anything other than a naked assertion of force, that might makes right? He couldn't stop it, therefore it's fine that it happened to him? (Also, it's extremely... something... to describe "he asked a journalist to not print his name on the front page of the NYT" as "asking the world to forget his name", as if his real name was already the primary referrent by which he wielded his influence, and he wanted to shield that power from scrutiny. This was obviously not the case, and is _still_ not the case despite the article, which is why nobody has actually made a compelling argument for why including his name in the article was _good_ rather than _something Cade Metz had the power to do_. I in fact don't particularly think that Cade Metz did it to deliberately hurt Scott, I just think he's a blankface who didn't care that his usual modus operandi would sometimes hurt people for no good reason and was unable to step out of his frame enough to actually check whether what he was doing made any sense, in that instance.)

> I actually talked to therapists when this whole story broke out, and none of them said this "patients must not be able to Google your blog" thing was an actual thing. People just believe it because they like Scott Alexander and believe whatever he tells them.

That you describe it as "patients must not be able to Google your blog" makes me not particularly trust the reports of those therapists. I, too, talked to some therapists, who thought that Scott's concerns were reasonable. Not that there was an overriding professional duty, sure, but that wasn't the claim, either. I dunno, man. The attitude you have towards this really seems like, "well, getting slapped isn't that bad, and you're not strong enough to stop him... maybe stop complaining?" What good thing happened when Cade Metz put his name in print? If you want to adopt a principled stance against pseudonymous writing online, do that. But don't pretend that Scott's failure to keep a pristine separation between his real name and his entire history of online writing somehow makes it so that the NYT printing his name is merely the maintaining the status quo ("ask the world to forget his name"), rather than dramatically expanding the circle of people for whom his identity was deanonymized.
by MailleQuiMaille | 2025-06-21 07:11:09+00:00
> The result is most applications were severely dumbed down to work on a smartphone.

Good point, and it could be argued the user soon followed that dumbification, with youngest generations not even understanding the file/folder analogy.

I think we can go dumber ! Why need an analogy at all ? It will all be there, up in your face and you can just talk to it !
Show HN: Rancho – An AI tutor that teaches with games and videos
by cshah44 | 2025-06-21 07:11:15+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m Chaitya, a student at IIIT Bangalore, and I recently built Rancho, a free AI-powered tutor for school students.

It teaches tough concepts using creative explanations, AI-generated videos and interactive games — all in one unified interface, designed to make learning feel like play.

As a student myself, I was frustrated with how dull and static online learning felt. I wanted something more intuitive, more visual, and more fun. So I built Rancho to reimagine how students engage with difficult topics.

Key features:

AI-generated video lessons

Turn concepts into a game-based experience

Creative explanations and quizzes

It’s in open beta and offers free credits on signup. I’d love your feedback, ideas, or brutal honesty.

Try it here: https://www.rancho-ai.com/
by PurestGuava | 2025-06-21 07:12:11+00:00
YT Premium revenue goes to the same creators you watch otherwise but they get compensated more for your views than they do for any other person's views.

e.g. Linus Tech Tips posted up their share of revenue from AdSense in 2024; YT Premium made up 37% of their revenue despite being 29% of their views.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeCP-0nuziE

Whether that makes a given creator more money versus Patreon depends on how much you watch them, frankly.
by anon7000 | 2025-06-21 07:14:08+00:00
Not true, cable TV runs ads and costs money. Many sports channels cost money in a cable package and still have ads. The *paid* Netflix plans have ads now.

It’s pretty clear that companies can’t stop salivating over how lucrative ads are, and will continue to shove ads down our throats inside of paid products as long as we live.
by CactusRocket | 2025-06-21 07:14:42+00:00
I don't really use Whatsapp, or any IM client on my phone, but do have a few friends use Telegram so I'm using it on my computer. We're looking at alternatives. We tried out Signal, and that feels extremely basic and spartan, like old ICQ or AIM. We tried Matrix (with the Element client) and it feels much more featureful and modern. And the federated aspect feels much better than the centralized nature of Signal.

Can you explain a bit more about where you feel the complication comes from?

This group of friends are mostly not very technical. They were able to create an account on matrix.org perfectly fine. They felt a bit strange that they had to pick a username "like in the past" and not use their phone number. But at the same time they felt pretty nice not giving away their phone number to a foreign company/organization.
by kseistrup | 2025-06-21 07:14:49+00:00
Yes, it is kind of sad. I did give said friends (who were strictly online friends in faraway countries that I had never met in “real life”) the option of a handful of other instant messaging means of reaching me, and I also made sure to convey that the reason was my zero-tolerance for Facebook/Meta and not because I wanted to ditch them as friends. I have also tried to reach out through email and sms, and didn't get a response, so that's where it landed.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-06-21 07:15:11+00:00
There was a brief moment when China threatened to retaliate against American services [1]. Shortly thereafter, Trump chickened out [2].

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-11/trump-tar...

[2] https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/05/fact-sheet-pr...
by seethedeaduu | 2025-06-21 07:15:37+00:00
> happy minding their own business

Trans women until VERY recently were forced to go into prostitution and were excluded by the wider society. Trans people were not force teamed into any war, or rather, this is partially right, they were forcefully forced to pick a team by the side that aims to take away their bodily rights, protections, and mark them as undesirables again.
by djaychela | 2025-06-21 07:16:56+00:00
I would strongly disagree (respectfully). I'm in the UK.

I've been using Signal for years, precisely because of WhatsApp and Meta and what they really stand for. Kids (adult) and family are all on it because of me.

Initially, I was the only person who used it, but I refused to used WhatsApp and got four of my friends (who were the only real group chat users I was interested in talking to) to use Signal. We all regularly use it, even though they are all on WhatsApp. They know my ethical objections to WA and Meta. Every Friday there will be a group call - even though we're all on iPhones now (I was on Android for many years).

One in particular takes the mickey out of me for it sometimes because he says "What difference are you making? One Person? Makes no odds."

But it -does- make a difference. A tiny one, maybe, but it's something that has been worth making the effort for. I think it's important to tread the right line between expressing why you're doing it and not making yourself unpopular but I think it's an important thing to try to do.

And now if anyone asks if I have WA I just say I don't use it, you can either text me or use Signal. I have probably 20 contacts on there, and anyone who I have meaningful connections with uses Signal. Once installed it's basically zero friction for them, they just find me there instead of WA.

I know network effects are massive, and it won't shift any time soon, but I think it's important to draw an ethical line in the sand, and it's something I decided to do a long time ago. One guy gave me a WA ultimatum and I just said "OK, but that's not for me, I'm not using it", and that was that for about a month. Then he installed Signal.

Any business that communicates via it I express my preference and if they insist that's how they message (had this with an insurance company!) then I say I won't use their business any longer.
by TZubiri | 2025-06-21 07:17:18+00:00
Yeah I heard about net neutrality, against it. At least in my country, Whatsapp used to be free even if you had no internet. Now due to net neutrality, it's not. All it accomplished is that Whatsapp is not gratis, but they still have the monopoly, so it was a net loss. Can you hand to your heart say that forcing people to pay for internet to receive and send de facto phone messages is somehow better? When you don't pay your phone bill you get cut from tiktok and messaging by the exact same policy. With the phone line and sms you can still receive calls and messages, but whatsapp gets cut because it's internet and that's what you get with net neutrality.

Regarding the responsibility for user actions. I'm assuming you'd think the same of Facebook in the cases of Myanmar and the Trinidad Tobago cases? I was just trying to hold the original article in estoppel without espousing a specific view, I think it's nuanced with a lot of grey areas.
by pm3003 | 2025-06-21 07:17:19+00:00
Matrix comes to mind (Synapse server and whichever client you choose). It has good encryption and can be federated. Downside is that it gets heavy for old devices when you're in a lot of encrypted group chats.

XMPP is very efficient and delightfully simple to use and administrate. I never tried E2EC with it, but there are options on the clients, like OMEMO. It has limited federation.

The simplest server IMO is Openfire, but offers range from Lua-written Prosody to the extremely expensive Isode servers that can do complete federation, HF radio XMPP and probably coffee and pizzas too.
by shafyy | 2025-06-21 07:17:51+00:00
I also ditched WhatsApp long ago. And while I probably "lost" a few connections with people I knew from other countries, I stay managed to stay in touch with people who are important to me. Either because they downloaded Signal just to talk to me (I have a few friends who like to emphasize passive aggressively that every time we talk, LOL), or use Apple Messages, SMS or good old email.
by safety1st | 2025-06-21 07:17:58+00:00
This article from Green Stars, whoever they are, is making the argument that you should switch away from Whatsapp because Zuck leaned hard into US conservative politics, and because of Cambridge Analytica and other ways that Meta has played fast and loose with its tracking of you.

I feel like that's all just wayyyyy too esoteric to the average person. I mean if those things (company founder has bad politics and too much invasive tracking) were a hard pass I would pretty much have to throw away my phone. We might care a lot about tracking here on HN but the average person really doesn't.

On the other hand, the big thing in the news right now is that Whatsapp will soon roll out ads. People don't really care that Zuck stole their data and kissed Trump's ass. But they do hate ads. I think the more ads Whatsapp shows, the bigger the opening will be for someone else to come along and convince people to switch.
by Manuel_D | 2025-06-21 07:18:13+00:00
A child put on blockers that would have desisted absent hormonal intervention is also a child that goes through the "wrong puberty". Chances are a good number of your psychiatrist's patients that became comfortable in their same sex gender, who would have been put on blockers and set on a track towards transition if your psychiatrist took a permissive approach towards hormonal intervention. Any responsible cost-benefit analysis of blockers has to weigh the effect it has on persistence rates.

And the cohort studies among gender dysphoria patients that don't receive blockers do show a majority desistence. This isn't just Zucker's practice finding majority rates of desistence. And your personal stake is still no justification to repeat defamatory statements about him.
by elric | 2025-06-21 07:18:29+00:00
I wouldn't be adverse to paying for YT (or similar services) if they took cash payments. But no, you have to get a subscription. Which involves giving Google your personal details, thus giving the world's biggest data hoarder even more data.

Imagine going back in time 20 years. You want to buy a newspaper from a stall. And the vendor tells you to wait and stare at an add for 30 seconds before you can pick up the magazine. The alternative is that you give that vendor a copy of your ID and credit card. It's insane.

Most of these problems would go away if we had "online cash" (please don't start talking about cryptocurrency). Want to watch a video? Watch an add or pay €0.01. Of course all the money-laundering hysteria will prevent that from happening.

Ultimately, terrorism is why we have ads.
by anigbrowl | 2025-06-21 07:19:10+00:00
The primary thing that makes advertisements disagreeable is their irrelevance.

Bane: For you

I dislike them because they're loud, flashy, annoying, and (most of all) because YT saturates them. It even tries to put them in the middle of songs when it detects a transitional pause. And they are served so often. It's literally worse than broadcast TV, which is an incredibly low bar to step over.

Platforms should not allow advertisers free speech. They should limit the content to static imagery/shots, dissolves, and spoken narration, ie the form rather than the content. Don't tell it can't work, this was how adwords worked on Google Search for years and everyone made handsome profits. Advertising is cancer if allowed to go full spectrum. The people who work at Youtube should be deeply ashamed of what they have allowed it to become and the trash monetization incentives they've established.
by CactusRocket | 2025-06-21 07:19:48+00:00
It's not in the same ballpark, but this entire topic is about "An Ethical Replacement for WhatsApp". Should we then accept potential privacy issues with another service, if they are somewhat of an improvement overall? Or should we rather strive to find an alternative which also addresses or avoids those potential privacy issues.

I've been really hesitant to view Signal as a privacy friendly alternative to WhatsApp, because they still don't offer any way to make an account without a phone number, while a phone number is definitely not required to run a chat service.

Also the fact that servers are run by just one organization is very troubling to me. It's just not the right direction.
by not_your_vase | 2025-06-21 07:19:56+00:00
On one hand, yes, I agree: duplicating the full functionality of a website for the sake of having an app is far from being ideal.

On the other hand, I also believe that this 200 MB comes mainly from 2 sources: bad engineering from the application developer, and bad engineering from the platform developer. These are not toolkit dependent, however. Bad engineering will create bad products, regardless of the tools used, even when some tools are harder to misuse to create bad products.
by CaptainFever | 2025-06-21 07:20:11+00:00
I just use yt-dlp (YTDLnis on Android, which has a great UI that makes it quite YouTube-like). Downloading instead of streaming (read: downloading then automatically deleting) is so much better.

1. It's all offline play, so I can use my favorite players like VLC. Also, no buffering (after the initial download, of course).

2. I can do anything I want to the video: make edits, splice ads out, extract audio, generate subtitles or dubs, etc.

3. It saves Google server costs! Well, comparing to streaming the same video from them multiple times with adblock on, at least.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-06-21 07:21:26+00:00
I wonder what PDC's test and warranty processes are.

Hopefully, it's not like this:

Customer: "Hello, can you hear me? I'd like a refund in gold or survival meals."

Tech support: "Sorry, what?"

Customer: "It didn't work!"

Tech support: "Did you try turning it on and off again?"

Customer: "There's nothing left to reset. There's no plug, button, wire, or electricity, only a smoking crater. But at least it should've last a few milliseconds." [0]

Tech support: "I'm afraid I'm going to need a valid serial number, vendor ID, order number, and support contract PIN to proceed providing exceptional service."

Customer: "Oh well, corporate tech support flowcharts strike again. It was worth a shot. Go into the wasteland in peace, my friend."

0. The Computer Designed To Die in Milliseconds (yt @scottmanley) https://youtu.be/FYdAT0v4DHs
by CactusRocket | 2025-06-21 07:21:44+00:00
Also depends on where you're coming from. My friends use WhatsApp and I don't because of privacy considerations. If they switch to Signal, I might still not use it because they want my phone number (and their servers are centralized, owned by one organization). So for them, amongst each-other, it would be fine to all switch to Signal probably. But for those of us who have been avoiding it altogether so far, it might not change anything whatsoever.
by tguvot | 2025-06-21 07:21:54+00:00
Past implosion tests: https://www.yahoo.com/news/iran-carried-implosion-tests-nucl...

uranium enriched to 60%. you don't have anything to do with it but build weapons

iranian nuclear scientists meeting with chief of missile program and other stuff https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2025/06/18/...
by CactusRocket | 2025-06-21 07:23:10+00:00
You need to install the phone app to be able to activate it. If you've been offline on the desktop app for too long, you need the phone app again to re-active the desktop app. I've also noticed a lot of issues synchronizing messages between computers using the desktop app, without having the app on a phone.

They allow usernames as an alternative to sharing your phone number with other people. You still need a phone number (and the phone app) to create and activate an account.

It's very phone-first.
by dguest | 2025-06-21 07:23:44+00:00
Mostly donations [1]. The yearly budget is around $30M, which is a lot but pretty tiny for an app so many people use. They only have around 40 employees [2].

Personally I think the small staff, donation-based funding, and security-focused security constraints are a plus: the platform seems way more stable than most and does what it needs to do.

[1]: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_Foundation
by top_sigrid | 2025-06-21 07:24:00+00:00
Youtube pushing ads in this way has convinced several non-technical friends who couldn't care less about their browser-choice to switch to Firefox with uBlock origin. Blocking ads in Chrome became such a hustle and is basically not working for Google's own services. Recommending people how don't care to not use chrome in the past was basically hopeless and now I have seen some switch basically from their own. Which I don't want to interpret too much into, but gives a little hope.
by swarnie | 2025-06-21 07:24:32+00:00
Video game consumers have always baffled me and this data just adds to it.

Who are the 7 million people going out to buy the 20th Persona game? What are you actually hoping to get from it that isn't just a slight variance on something you've already had multiple times before?

I have friends genuinely excited to go buy Mario Cart for the 17th time this year... Once you've made two objects move along an enclosed route at differing speeds and slapped Nintendo marketing on top hasn't the game play evolved as much as possible?

Could the money not be better spent coming up with new and interesting concepts rather than copy pasting the same stuff out every 12-18 months?
by Someone | 2025-06-21 07:24:58+00:00
That works for very few numbers. From that Wikipedia article: “In mathematics, the Lucas–Lehmer test (LLT) is a primality test for Mersenne numbers”

That’s fine for GIMPS, which only searches for Mersenne primes, but doesn’t work in general.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primality_test#Fast_determinis... mentions several tests that do not require factorization, though.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-06-21 07:25:22+00:00
Very simple. I don't self flagellate because it hurts and I don't like it. And there's no need for me to self flagellate. So why would I? In exactly the same way, there's no need for me to watch stupid ads. I've had ad blockers ever since they came into existence. There is no incentive for me to disable them. When I need to, I actually pay for content on Amazon, Spotify, Netflix, Apple, etc. It's not a money issue.

I haven't done that with Youtube because 1) I don't need to, 2) Google is pretty bad about paying content creators properly (they prefer keeping the money for themselves) and 3) I feel no guilt whatsoever about not sponsoring trillion dollar companies by exposing myself to the pain of watching their shitty ads.

Luckily for Google, most people aren't smart enough to figure out ad blockers. Which is why they are making lots of money with Youtube and why they are a trillion dollar company. Good for them; no need to feel sorry for them.

Luckily for me, Google seems pretty conflicted about fixing this properly because they are making so much money with the way things are. If they lock down Youtube properly (not that hard technically), users and content creators might move elsewhere. They can't afford to. So good for me.

It's that simple. There is no moral dilemma here.
by djaychela | 2025-06-21 07:25:43+00:00
That's a great utopian ideal (and one that I subscribe to), but there is no way that is happening outside really nerdy circles such as we probably inhabit.

It is of course possible to create signal clients that are forks of Signal.

I don't see how this is an -ethical- issue though providing the ethics of Signal align with that of the user (they do with mine), and if they're doing something unethical then you should not be using them anyway (hence me not using WA)