MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jenadine | 2025-06-21 14:17:26+00:00
> There are 'gods' that are 'better' than others

I don’t think that’s valid. Gods usually come with a set of values or a specific worldview, and these are inherently subjective. You can’t really rank them as "better" or "worse" in any meaningful way.

Let’s take an example: imagine I believe in a paperclip-god. The core value here is producing as many paperclips as possible, and I’d argue that anything that doesn’t serve this goal is inferior. Under this belief system, it might be okay to enslave or even kill humans if it leads to more paperclips. I could use logic and even scientific reasoning to defend this idea as a "better" system for maximizing paperclip production.

Now, you might object and say that humans are more valuable than paperclips, but we'll never agree. The value of the goal itself, whether it’s maximizing paperclips or valuing human life, is subjective. There’s no objective reason why one goal is inherently superior to the other.
by lawn | 2025-06-21 14:18:58+00:00
Maybe you mean the "My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts" blog post on fly.io?

Where they have this nugget about plagiarism:

> But if you’re a software developer playing this card? Cut me a little slack as I ask you to shove this concern up your ass. No profession has demonstrated more contempt for intellectual property.

So I guess if you have concerns about them using any code you upload using this tool you can shove it up your ass.
by sksjvsla | 2025-06-21 14:20:25+00:00
You can't do single server setup for your workloads if you are ISO 27001 compliant and, further, you must have a separate server for logging and monitoring.

No matter load, there is a need for complexity for this certification.

Not all employees log in daily. For a scheduling app, most people check a few times a week, but not every day.

Daily active users (DAU) = around 10,000 to 20,000

Peak concurrency (users on at the exact same time) = generally between 1,500 to 2,000 at busy times (like when new schedules drop or at shift start/end times)

Average concurrent users at any random time = maybe 50 to 150

Why cloud costs can add up even for us:

Extensive use of real-time features and complex labour rules mean the app needs to handle a lot of data processing and ultimately sync into salary systems.

An example:

Being assigned to a shift has different implications for every user. It may trigger a nuisance bonus, and such a bonus could further only be triggered in certain cases, such as when you had the shifts assigned compared to when it start time.

Lastly, there is the optimizing of a schedule why is computationally expensive.
by snozolli | 2025-06-21 14:21:53+00:00
TUI (text user interface)

I find it interesting that everyone is using TUI when I've always seen CUI (Character User Interface). I come from a DOS and Windows background, and it seems like TUI comes from the *nix world.

And Notepad was not the only option for Windows devs.

Dr Dobbs and other tech magazines used to have ads for a variety of editors. And linkers, which were the bane of 80s programmers' lives. There was a whole era of programmer-oriented software that seems to have been largely forgotten.
by gruez | 2025-06-21 14:21:59+00:00
>After all, as last two years have so amply demonstrated: people are fine with genocide.

Last two years? Try last few decades at the very least. People only care about the war in Gaza more because it's controversial. For non-controversial cases people just agree it's bad but shrug their shoulders.

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

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darfur_genocide
by diggan | 2025-06-21 14:23:14+00:00
> Didn't know that. I learned the other day that one can paste a password into the URL bar and drag it to a password field on the website that's annoyingly blocking paste (on Firefox at least). Probably a bad idea for security reasons (telemetry?).

You could probably drag it directly from the password manager to the password field, instead of using the URL bar as an intermediate (which indeed is a bad idea as whatever you enter there usually gets sent somewhere).
by FredPret | 2025-06-21 14:24:47+00:00
> If I handed you 1 apple,

At this point I hold one object that we agree to label "apple". Note that even seeing it as a single object is a layer of abstraction. In reality it's a clump of fundamental particles temporarily banding together

> and then handed you another apple,

What's "another apple"? What does it have in common with the thing I'm already holding? We label this thing to be also an apple, but it's a totally different set of atoms, from a different tree, perhaps from the other side of the planet. Perhaps the atoms formed in stellar processes light years away from that of the other apple.

Calling both of these things "apple" is a required first step to having two of them, but that is an of abstraction, a mental trick we use to simplify the world so we can represent it in our minds.

I'm not a particle physicist but I hear electrons *can* be counted without any unwitting help from our lower-level neural circuitry.
by NetOpWibby | 2025-06-21 14:25:32+00:00
I don’t have a YouTube account and yet their algorithm creates a feed for me anyway. Pretty sweet.

This means they’re also collecting data about some random person in my area but I don’t have a Google account either so that data isn’t really useful.

Ad block FTW

At some point I gotta do a network-wide block instead of per computer.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-06-21 14:26:03+00:00
You're literally describing how content censorship already works on YouTube and Meta. Both companies curate content and have selective - opaque - policies about what gets boosted and what gets deboosted.

Also remember that legitimate creators keep being demonetised for no reason because AI moderation has a brainfart and no human is in charge.

And then there's the clusterfuck around malicious copyright strikes made for bad faith reasons by non-owners.

With public infrastructure there's at least some nominal possibility of democratic accountability - not so much in the US, large parts of which are pathologically delusional about public infrastructure as a concept, but it should be an option in countries with saner and more reality-based policies.
by someone7x | 2025-06-21 14:26:40+00:00
> In my estimation, all nations are lagging in the definition of what constitutes a public utility. In a decade we will be facepalming why advertisements were even needed for this common infrastructure.

I’m just glad others feel this way.

Why the hell can’t I have my own spam free email account from the post office? Because the ads, the precious ads.
by immibis | 2025-06-21 14:28:04+00:00
I have my own email server with a wildcard address (I still use gmail for anything that's actually important). I put certain addresses in shady forms a few times. I get a couple of spam messages per day to those addresses - always the same spam few spam campaigns. One is offering to sell me electric bicycles or partner with me to sell electric bicycles (didn't really pay attention) and more recently I started getting business proposal advance fee spam. The volume is pretty manageable and if I wanted, a pretty simple filter tuned for the spam I actually get would catch all of it and no ham.

I got spam to postmaster once for some reason. That's a nice way to make admins aware of your spam campaign.

Spam is presumably more of a problem when you're more well-known and you don't have the option to control your own filters.
by em-bee | 2025-06-21 14:28:50+00:00
the performance issue sounds like an implementation/design problem rather than a feature issue. most linux filesystems have extended attributes, and i am sure feature wise, the fields could just be mapped onto those.

indices are a standard feature in databases, and yes, they can slow down some queries while speeding up others, so you should use them judiciously. maybe BFS has an issue there, but that does not negate the concept.

practically speaking, what i want is a gui filemanager that lets me set arbitrary keys and values on files, display them and filter for them. indexing them is not required.

btw: UK style power sockets all have individual switches to turn them off or on. maybe elsewhere people aren't bothered because they are not used to the idea.
by galangalalgol | 2025-06-21 14:30:30+00:00
I think the theme you and other posters are stating in various ways, is that being expised to persuasion always has negative value. The motivation for some actors can be good, but it will never be universal. When seeking out information to make a purchase, one of the primary taks is to identify and filter out persuasion in the process, in the form of sponsored listings, or reddit shills. I have seen calls to ban paid persuasion, or even all paid speech. I don't know if that is compatible with the notion of free speech, or if I agree it is a good idea, but it certainly would have some good effects in addition to any bad ones.
by pfdietz | 2025-06-21 14:31:42+00:00
The idea that cesium is present in metallic form is chemically very dubious.

Cesium is extremely reactive, as is noted. In particular, it will readily reduce U(+4) to U(+3). Nuclear reactor fuel is primarily uranium dioxide, so there is ample material there for this putative metallic cesium to react with. Cesium is the most electropositive element, so it will give electrons to (reduce) almost anything.

The state of cesium in the vapor gap will be relatively volatile cesium compounds, like cesium iodide. The core temperature of a uranium dioxide fuel pellet greatly exceeds the normal boiling point of this salt.
by orbital-decay | 2025-06-21 14:32:08+00:00
Water is wet. Please check the history of their software stack and why it always was superior to alternatives when they didn't have a lot more money than ATI/AMD. The reason they power hyperscalers is because they catered to enthusiasts and academy researchers attempting to use their GPUs for general purpose computations in early 2000s, since GeForce 3. Then they used that experience to build CUDA which simply worked, and quickly gained mindshare. People have used their software for all imaginable purposes, which was a major factor behind their improvements and eventually becoming market leaders as killer applications for GPGPU have been found (simulation and then AI). This experience is not replicable even with dogfooding, which AMD also doesn't seem to do.
by Viliam1234 | 2025-06-21 14:32:12+00:00
> Just lasagna pics, birthday cakes, kittens, golden retrievers, baby goats, maybe an artsy photo of a leaf with #blessed.

Now you have to hope that 20 years later people on social networks won't suddenly decide that "golden retrievers" is a dog whistle for something bad, which would make your accounts retroactively problematic.
by sksjvsla | 2025-06-21 14:32:32+00:00
This comment is great. Upgrade processes should be part of your internal processes if you want to get ISO 27001 certification that is not just checking the boxes but actually something you use for more control of your development and release cycle.

AWS RDS does not upgrade major or minor versions of Postgres or, as you mentioned, MySQL. In that case, they might patch update it. But these patch updates are easy to do yourself and does not take long to be reminded of in your ISMS and then subsequently carry out.

The purpose of this post is not to justify cloud hyperscalers versus European servers. It is actually a post on how to manage a highly regulated, compliant, and certified server setup yourself outside AWS because so many people just have their ISO certification on AWS infrastructure and once they got that they are never able to leave AWS again.

If you have no client demand and no real need to work on updating your infrastructure yourself, then you can go ahead and not go for an ISO 27001 certification and let AWS RDS update as it pleases. But if you operate a complex beast in a regulated industry such as employment law, finance, and such, then you get some more fun challenges and higher need for control.
by imiric | 2025-06-21 14:33:24+00:00
Sure, but if the data is already there, it's a sifting and pruning problem, which can be done after ingestion, if needed.

It's better to have all data and not need it, than to need it and not have it. Assuming you have the resources to ingest it in the first place, which seems like the focus of the optimization work they did.
by mousethatroared | 2025-06-21 14:33:57+00:00
Not in this field but, if you're willing to sacrifice performance for security (by avoiding closed, western, hardware) how hard would it be to for a group of top hardware and software engineers to make a secure smartphone?

Id gather you could go very far with the following list:

- Proved correct micro kernel

- Encrypted messaging by default

- Encrypted memory

- Encrypted messaging between processes.

- hardware switches for modems, peripherals and battery
by AJ007 | 2025-06-21 14:34:49+00:00
When you start looking at alternative messengers outside of Matrix, XMPP, and IRC, there isn't much where third parties can operate or implement both servers and clients.

Certainly if no one can implement these two things it is functionally a closed source project. It also is a security failure from the standpoint of control, validation, and also future security and vulnerability patching (there's a graveyard of dead "secure" messaging apps.)

Is DeltaChat perfect from a security standpoint? No, but it's certainly well above the hurdle most people are at now. Most people are using non-encrypted communication that is actively scanned & stored, or e2e on paper stuff where one party controls the client, server, application, and storage (trust me e2e security.)

Telegram, Discord, Facebook Messenger, stop using that shit.
by mercacona | 2025-06-21 14:34:59+00:00
Here you speak about your data as if it were rocks you found trekking, but the data we’re talking here isn’t even paper or pictures: it’s digital data you can’t access or backup by yourself.

You definitely need uncontrollable entities all over the world for that data to exist. Somehow you’re doing what some of those entities allow you to do, and some want you to do. That’s my point.
by capitainenemo | 2025-06-21 14:35:12+00:00
The alpha channel ones would not apply to printing, and overall printing is an extremely lossy operation, where all those minute details get washed out in approximate ink levels and the muddiness of the physical world. It might not be totally foolproof, esp for a very accurate print process (don't use your photo printer maybe), but it's probably many orders of magnitude noisier..

I think if you're really concerned, you'd print it once, apply physical black tape on it (or cut out with a razor), then scan that :)
by someone7x | 2025-06-21 14:35:33+00:00
You seem so certain on the betrayal of the content-creators.

> Read up on vid.me, which broke YouTube's "monopoly" back in 2016-2017

Okay, sounds interesting.

> May 21 (Reuters) - Alphabet's (GOOGL.O), opens new tab Google has persuaded a federal judge in California to reject a lawsuit from video platform Rumble (RUM.O), opens new tab accusing the technology giant of illegally monopolizing the online video-sharing market.

I see what I expected: that google cheated and got away with it. Where is the betrayal?

https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/google-defeats-rumb...
by furyofantares | 2025-06-21 14:35:35+00:00
I remember in the 80s/90s when it seemed every movie sequel sucked. Just cashed in, and not really planned for from the beginning.

I don't think it's ever really been true that video game sequels sucked. Maybe Zelda 2 and to a lesser extent Mario 2 - but game developers seem to break new ground on sequels a lot. In fact I think sequels have been better than originals more often than not throughout game history.

For one thing it may just be more common for the first to not reach its full audience.

But my experience as a game developer is also that, when you start out making a new game, you probably kinda suck at making that game. Games sometimes suck for most of their development until they suddenly get good near the end.

And by the end, you get really good at making that specific game. A lot of game design has to come together to enlighten further game design decisions, and you really come to know what's fun by the end of it. Not to mention the technology you build for it!
by Xelbair | 2025-06-21 14:35:41+00:00
Of course I would hate it.

Ads are just mental warfare against you. Its someone trying to manipulate you for profit.

If I drive somewhere I know where I want to go. If I need supplies I can pull over and check on the map where the nearest store is.

In such case I don't care what store it's, just it's proximity.
by the__alchemist | 2025-06-21 14:35:48+00:00
Regarding being able to explain (This is a reply as much to OP as this, as they both bring up the concept): Are you sure you're not testing for memory and verbal skills vice technical ones?

I've built a lot of cool shit! For the projects I've worked recently, I can talk your ear off. For one I haven't touched in a few years? I will sound like I don't know what I'm talking about, unless I reviewed it recently, or the right memories were jogged!
by salawat | 2025-06-21 14:36:29+00:00
The next generation just wants a world where they have a shot at doing meaningful work, prospering, and maybe being able to hew a place for themselves. It's telling to me that these billionaires are busy guiding us in directions whereby all business goes through them, they hold the purse strings, their hold on the purse strings is solidified by government enforcement or non-enforcement, and socioeconomic mobility only happens at their behest, and systems they can influence, but no one else can are this generation's economic wunderwaffen.

Say what you will about The Greatest Generation, and those that went through the Great Depression, but they did leave a legacy of knowledge recorded, and discoverable/accessible based on being organized. Ever since the 80's/90's, we've attacked that system, and poisoned that well of inter-generational knowledge transfer.

And here we are now about to blunder into the same mistakes they made. It's heart wrenching to see.
by snozolli | 2025-06-21 14:36:42+00:00
and screen reader support

If you look at how classic Win32 applications are constructed, I don't think you need anywhere near the support for screen reader software that you do with modern applications. All of the elements of a dialog box, for example, are constructed from a standard set of controls, and can be interrogated programmatically for their text.

I don't know anything about the internals of BeOS software, but I would bet that it's closer to Win32 in this regard than it is to more modern UI systems.
by xtiansimon | 2025-06-21 14:37:17+00:00
> “Perfect is the main enemy of good”

Interesting to see this debate evolve.

Seems that phrase “perfect is the enemy of the good” is a relativistic argument. But the title’s frame is “ethics”, which one definition describes as “what is good in and of itself”. In that frame, perfection is the point, no? Though, I imagine you argue in this framework by elevating some aspects to that high standard, and work to convince other aspects are secondary. Otherwise, result is a preference argument where the trade offs you made are silent or obscured behind the practicality of your choices.
by tialaramex | 2025-06-21 14:37:32+00:00
Although there are vim memes, the whole "Oh no, I'm trapped in the editor" problem with modal editors is certainly there for vi which begins in the 1970s.

By 1994 when I was first using vi, (not vim) the rather faded "cheat sheet" I was handed already had remarks about the need to teach beginners how to leave the editor. I think I went years writing :q! which isn't the fastest way out but does do what I meant.
by ksec | 2025-06-21 14:37:39+00:00
I know OVH and Hetzner gets mentioned a lot as European Cloud, but I thought I should bring UpCloud [1] for HN's attention. I believe their CPU core are actual CPU core and not vCPU as in a single thread ( Although I cant find reference to it which is annoying )

I also sometimes think OVH and Hetzner are not a fair comparison as much as I want competition to HyperScaler. Hetzner uses consumer grade component with a few server grade selections.

[1] https://upcloud.com
by physix | 2025-06-21 14:37:51+00:00
It was cool reading your article.

We're also bootstrapped and use Hetzner, not AWS (except for the occasional test), for very much the same reasons as you.

And we are also fully infrastructure as code using Ansible.

We used to be a pure software vendor, but are bringing out a devtool where the free tier runs on Hetzner. But with traction, as we build out higher tier services, it's an open question on what infrastructure to host it on.

There are a kazillion things to consider, not the least of which is where the user wants us to be.
by quickthrowman | 2025-06-21 14:38:08+00:00
I sell construction work. Sometimes my customers will have me price up something that someone else priced to them and they will send me a competitor’s redacted scope letter with the pricing blanked out so I can bid ‘apples to apples’ aka the same scope of work.

I’ve unredacted proposals using the ‘unflatten’ command in Bluebeam Revu (which is by far the best PDF editor) which allowed me to underbid my competitor and win the job (and at a higher price than I would’ve submitted).

Definitely an ethical grey area, but an edge is an edge ;)
by billy99k | 2025-06-21 14:38:09+00:00
"IfWorld ID becomes one of Reddit’s third-party providers, it would be good news for Tools for Humanity, which was founded six years ago with the lofty goal of providing a universal basic income to the world by offering them cryptocurrency called Worldcoin in exchange for scanning their eyeballs with an Orb."

This sounds like satire or evil.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-06-21 14:38:23+00:00
USPS (and most government mail services) are to provide communication to every citizen. USPS delivers to every address in the US. So the government can send ballots, send census forms, send tax forms, etc. Sure you can use FedEx to send a parcel to remote Alaskan town, but if you watch the tracking you'll see that they just hand off to USPS in Anchorage.

USPS is not a natural monopoly, it's a government service that no one else wants to do (nor would they).
by thaumasiotes | 2025-06-21 14:38:48+00:00
> Did you know that the naturals are a subset of the reals?

Well, all I can say here is that my intuition suggested to me that proofs about the complexity of a set are generally not extensible to much-less-complex subsets.

But OK. If you want an objection stated in terms of Richardson's theorem, where are we invoking the sine function?

> Irrespective of where you're convinced it's 100% true that equality of two functions is undecidable in general.

So what? We're not trying to decide the equality of two functions in general. We're deciding the equality of two functions in specific.

> If Richardson's doesn't convince you there's also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice%27s_theorem

>> Is P equivalent to a given program Q?

Again, why is this supposed to matter?

Here are two programs in C:

int main(int argc, char* argv[]) { return 0; } int main(int argc, char* argv[]) { return 3 + 1 - 4; }

Is it undecidable whether those two programs are equivalent?

Rice's theorem says there is no algorithm which will take two programs as input and return yes if they're equivalent while returning no if they aren't. But no attempt has been made to supply such an algorithm.