MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-06-12 20:23:16+00:00
> Users would absolutely switch operating systems/mobile phones if one suddenly stopped playing Netflix, streaming music, or even working with banking apps. DRM interests have all the power here because if content platforms are pulled from a platform, that platform dies for the majority of the population.

Consider what happens if they actually do this. Millions of people have that phone platform and aren't going to buy a new phone for at least a couple years. Switching phone platforms is a large time investment for most people because all your stuff is on that platform's cloud services etc.

Meanwhile most of that stuff doesn't need a phone. You're watching Netflix on your big screen TV rather than your tiny pocket device most of the time, aren't you? Your bank has a website. So if it stopped working on your phone, you wouldn't immediately buy a new phone, you would just use the website. But now the streaming service and the bank are immediately getting millions of user complaints that their app is broken.

Either of the major platforms could also use any of the malicious compliance schemes they use for other things. Find some over-broad or unreasonable contractual provision in the "must supply DRM" agreement that you don't like anyway, point to it as a justification for making a change to the DRM system in the brand new version of the OS, and disable the DRM in the older versions of the OS that are on 95% of existing devices, blaming the services for putting that term in the contract and obligating you to do it.

Then the users don't have to switch platforms, they "only" have to buy a new device and can avoid the platform transition cost. For the ones who do, the vendor gets to sell more devices. For all the ones who don't, the DRM pushers still get millions of user complaints and a strong incentive to release the app without the DRM in it.

And if they do release the app without the DRM in it, now the new devices don't need the DRM either ("we found a vulnerability in the later version too and had to disable it as well"), and now the users have no reason to switch platforms over it so the DRM can stay gone forever.

This is the same problem the incumbent duopoly causes for all other app developers. And that's bad -- the duopoly should be broken up -- but it does currently exist, and it could, if it wanted to, use that to do something good. (You might also consider what would happen if they both decided to lose DRM at once.)
by paxys | 2025-06-12 20:23:41+00:00
And it's even worse if you are accessing Apple services on a non-Apple device. No matter how many times I click "trust device" when logging in to icloud.com it will still make me do the password + one-time code song and dance the next day.

Another pointless annoyance - if Face ID fails when making a payment or installing an app (like it frequently does for reasons like sleeping in bed or wearing sunglasses) it won't fall back to PIN but ask you to enter your Apple account password. Why?? And of course when you're on that prompt there's no way to open your password manager without cancelling out of it entirely. Makes for a fun experience at the checkout counter...
by api | 2025-06-12 20:23:42+00:00
It's generally understood that way in psychology. The term "narcissistic supply" is used for the constant approval and praise and adulation that narcissists crave, and the symptoms of its revocation are similar to some forms of drug withdrawal. A narcissist who is confronted or even just cut off will often fly into a blind rage or revert to what seems like an early childhood state of mind and throw tantrums.

There's some evidence that neglectful or abusive parenting during certain developmental phases might predispose one to it, basically creating a very deep emotional imprint of "you aren't good enough and must constantly earn love." There's probably more to it than that but I could see that being a factor. For adults there's probably also an ideology / belief system dimension.
by LordDragonfang | 2025-06-12 20:23:55+00:00
There's supreme irony with Tailscale being the one posting this -- because one of my biggest annoyances with the service is that, afaict, there's no way to set up a device so that it never expires.

I just had two devices - one of which was my main server - I was using it with require re-auth out of nowhere and break one of my workflows. If I had not already set up separate remote access to the server, it would have been really annoying.
by dakr | 2025-06-12 20:23:59+00:00
I don't think it's as simple as that. Many strings were attached, many changes were made to work that had already started. It's a mess to be sure, and NASA was not the only cook in the kitchen by a long shot. I'll just leave this here, people can make of it what they will: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System
by Capricorn2481 | 2025-06-12 20:24:31+00:00
Your second paragraph makes no sense, other than to make the expectation of effort sound like classism. Wearing clothes other people made is not a summary of your ideas, it's an expression of your aesthetic.

Writing is free. About as free as anything can be. It's not classism to ask people to put some actual thought into their ideas. It's just reality that people won't want to read slop.

>I find it interesting that the 6 replies to my comment assumed that I was talking about myself

No, it's just colloquial English on a forum to write you as an address to the reader, not literally to the person you reply to. As in, "if you (someone) feels they can't write without AI, then writing may not be for you (that person)."
by thephyber | 2025-06-12 20:24:34+00:00
(1) Headlines are necessarily lossy due to the limited character count.

(2) It says US-backed, which suggests to me that US investors helped fund it.

(3) It says Israeli tech, which rhymes with 2 previous spyware companies which have been torn to shreds in the public media and US courts for their lack of controls/oversight of how their customers used their software (violating the spyware vendor’s policies, the Israeli government export license, and the ToS of the software the spyware software exploited).

(4) the US-backed + “targeted a journalist” combined is an attack on the foundation of US as a country (on the assumption that the journalist wasn’t engaging in something like terrorism).

I’m bored by people who attack headlines. We all know that they aren’t accurate and can’t be 100% descriptive. And it’s not even clear that you could be appeased by any other formulation of the headline.
by pstuart | 2025-06-12 20:25:14+00:00
> conservatism actually has some worthwhile values

Did you read the whole of my comment?

As to who to ascribe as "conservatives", the GOP and its voters are a not entirely unreasonable association.

If you have public communicators for "modern conservatism" that you'd care to share I would be happy to check them out as I'm interested in broadening my understanding of the world.
by impulser_ | 2025-06-12 20:25:39+00:00
Why is it always foreign airlines that crash?

The US flys significantly more than any country in the world and operates the most Boeing airplanes including the 737 and 737 Max, yet there hasn't been a single major accident like this and the Max crashes in the US.

Are these planes not maintained to the same standards, are the pilots not trained on these types of planes as much as in the US?
Show HN: App Use – Enable AI to control your mobile apps
by itsericktorres | 2025-06-12 20:26:04+00:00
Hey HN! I built an open-source Python library that lets AI agents control mobile apps.

Its heavily inspired by browser-use Here's a quick demo https://x.com/itsericktorres/status/1932996729458110482

From our experience testing mobile workflows or automate repetitive app tasks has always been a pain. You either write brittle UI automation scripts or do everything manually. And after testing out browser-use and seeing all the cool things people were building for web without the pains of normal automation I decided I wanted to build something like it but for mobile

So I built App Use around Appium. The agent takes screenshots, analyzes the UI, and performs actions step-by-step while explaining what it's doing. We've tested it on everything from shopping apps to social media—it can handle complex multi-step flows like creating accounts, making purchases, or posting content.

The tool is basically all the things you love about browser-use but for mobile

Getting started is pretty easy just pip install app-use and head over to https://github.com/erickjtorres/app-use for a quick guide on how to get started.

If you are familiar with browser-use then you'll feel right at home!

I'd love feedback, especially if you've struggled with mobile app automation before or have ideas for making this more robust.

Let me know what you guys think! And if you have any questions!
by pavon | 2025-06-12 20:26:29+00:00
It depends. I'd like to argue that you have to enter the information one way or another, why not share it and save others the work in the future, but in reality it is often quite a bit slower. MusicBrainz likes to collect more information than a normal CD riper would ask for, with more pages to click-through, so that is a bit slower. However, the main annoyance is when you have to make a correction that isn't auto approved, and then you have to wait 7 days before your tagger/ripper software will see changes you made. I wish there was a better workflow to tell Picard to use a pending edit[1].

I still always use MusicBrainz, and enjoy contributing to it, but more like others enjoy contributing to Wikipedia, rather than as an efficiency boost.

[1]https://tickets.metabrainz.org/browse/PICARD-1278
by johnfn | 2025-06-12 20:26:31+00:00
> First, let me assure you - yes, we (as in, the Rust Project) absolutely do care about the performance of our beloved compiler, and we put in a lot of effort to improve it.

I'm probably being ungrateful here, but here goes anyway. Yes, Rust cares about performance of the compiler, but it would likely be more accurate to say that compiler performance is, like, 15th on the list of things they care about, and they'll happily trade off slower compile times for one of the other things.

I find posts about Rust like this one, where they say "ah, of course we care about perf, look, we got the compile times on a somewhat nontrivial project to go from 1m15s to 1m09s" somewhat underwhelming - I think they miss the point. For me, I basically only care if compile times are virtually instantaneous. e.g. Vite scales to a million lines and can hot-swap my code changes in instantaneously. This is where the productivity benefits come in.

Don't just trust me on it. Remember this post[1]?

> "I feels like some people realize how much more polish could their games have if their compile times were 0.5s instead of 30s. Things like GUI are inherently tweak-y, and anyone but users of godot-rust are going to be at the mercy of restarting their game multiple times in order to make things look good. "

[1]: https://loglog.games/blog/leaving-rust-gamedev/#compile-time...
by soulofmischief | 2025-06-12 20:26:46+00:00
> It turns out you can in fact eat a candy bar and have pizza and not become obese

That is extremely dependent on an individual's metabolism. When I was young I had hyperthyroidism and could not keep enough weight on. I could, and needed to, consume a huge amount of calories without gaining a pound. Now, my thyroid's burnt out, and my sleep is terrible, and it feels like I gain wait from breathing in air.
by andrewla | 2025-06-12 20:27:12+00:00
I'm a skeptic as well, but calling it a "scam" is a bit extreme. I think QC proponents are acting in good faith, and I believe that it is worth chasing a little longer since we don't yet have a convincing model for why QC will or won't work (although I think the Gil Kalai's work in this area is intuitively correct I don't think that we have a physical explanation for why quantum error correction would not work).

The current emphasis on NISQ systems is a bit of a desperate measure because the most we can get out of such systems is evidence that quantum computing can work in theory; they do not advance us towards having a workable quantum computer.
by al_borland | 2025-06-12 20:27:17+00:00
On the side of things, the risk of never needing your password is people tend to forget it.

Just the other week I was helping someone setup a TV and they thought they didn’t have an Amazon login, because they never needed to login. This was a Prime member.

1Password defaults to having users reauthenticate every 2 weeks. I do find this a bit annoying, but I find the occasional reminder of my password to be a necessity evil. Even doing it every 2 weeks for years, there are some days I have trouble bringing it to the front of my mind. And that would mean a hidden piece of paper somewhere with the password written down in case it’s forgotten. As I get older I should accept the idea that I should have these emergency systems in place if my mind does go, but it makes me uncomfortable.
by watusername | 2025-06-12 20:27:47+00:00
Just to expand a bit on the sibling comment, IPAs downloaded from the App Store are encrypted with a DRM scheme with a key tied to the Apple account. The binaries actually stay encrypted on-disk and the OS has facilities to transparently decrypt them when executed. The usual way of decrypting is to actually execute the app, attach a debugger (normally not possible for production apps) and read the decrypted code from memory.
by tehjoker | 2025-06-12 20:28:36+00:00
More genocidal rhetoric. The nazis are infamous because in part, they were doing settler colonialism in Europe. They were getting free land from lesser beings and promising homesteads to their officers. Israel is doing settler colonialism to people that had nothing to do with WW2 and the holocaust. If you have a problem with the Germans, take it up with Germany.

My understanding is that in Gaza, it is a common understanding that they are being subjected to a Nazi extermination campaign by people (Christian and Jewish Zionists) claiming the Holocaust made them do it (meanwhile, the Zionists stole reparations money from Holocaust survivors and considered the survivors weak).

I'm Jewish and I cannot tolerate this shit. It is an evil stain on our people that will mark us for millennia. Anyone who does not speak out at this moment is complicit in genocide.
by atleastoptimal | 2025-06-12 20:28:52+00:00
The China thing people always bring up, but it's notable that the complete expropriation of private property and radical communist central planning preceded the massive periods of famine in China from 1950-1970, and only after free market reforms, creation of the special economic zones and integration into the world market did China see massive growth in general welfare.

Notably, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan had much faster improvements in GDP per capita and general welfare compared to mainland China, and today enjoy a higher standard of living, despite starting from a similar point in the 1950s.

Still, I agree with you, social programs are necessary, and China's top-down programs have perhaps given it distinct advantages it otherwise would not have now, but fundamentally free market capitalism as a foundation has routinely been the biggest driver of wealth over the 20th century. My examples (the "Asian tigers") do have strong social welfare programs, workers rights, etc, but they all fundamentally are capitalist countries whose wealth came largely from the benefits of commerce, free market incentives for technological innovation, and free enterprise.
by lupusreal | 2025-06-12 20:28:59+00:00
> Military and small planes (<10 PAX) crash all the time. We just never heard about it until after January.

We don't hear about military jet crashes unless they're F-35s. The controversial jet gets coverage because it gets eyeballs from people satisfying their confirmation bias. These are never put into context of course.

> The F-16 has been involved in over 670 hull-loss accidents as of January 2020.[312][313]

Fighter jets are simply dangerous, period. They're meant to be flown right at the bleeding edge, accidents are inevitable. But every time an F-35 crashes, the media makes a big deal out of it and idiots see that as confirmation of their belief that the F-35 is bad. Even if the F-35 is bad, it crashing sometimes wouldn't be evidence of that. Occasional crashes are just what happens when fighter jets get flown a lot. It's going to happen whether the jet is good or bad.
by quantadev | 2025-06-12 20:29:30+00:00
The important discovery is not that sensory experiences correlate strongly with specific areas of the brain. That's been known for decades. What I think is possibly new here is that the musical waves are genuinely getting "in sync" (temporally). Neuron firing is too slow for this to happen due to the normal conventional interpretation of how the brain works, which is that info travels from synapse to synapse. It essentially disproves the "calculational" (synapse based) model of consciousness, and it proves that even qualia itself is based on waves.

Sure it's possible that something akin to simple harmonic oscillator spontaneous synchronization could be happening (i.e. this: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/RYeNu159Sgc) but even if this 'dumb' sync is playing a role it still isn't evidence against the wave-based nature of qualia.
by grishka | 2025-06-12 20:29:36+00:00
Also, on both macOS and Android, there's a time component to device unlocking. You would sometimes get this stupid "your password is required to enable touch ID" or "extra security required, pattern not used in a while" thing with no way to disable it. It's beyond infuriating to me. It's my device. It should not tell me what to do. I get to tell it what to do and it obeys, unquestionably. I'll evaluate my own risks, thank you very much.
by CharlesW | 2025-06-12 20:30:16+00:00
Harmony (https://harmony.pulsewidth.org.uk/) is amazing, and completely changed my relationship with MusicBrainz.

What are you using for tag reading/writing in Go? Robust, complete options are non-existent in JavaScript land (Deno, Bun, Node, etc.), so I ended up creating a Wasm version of TagLib with a TypeScript API.
by dimal | 2025-06-12 20:30:35+00:00
The type of person that would do that would have done the same thing without LLMs. LLMs don’t change anything except now they can just create their big ball of mud faster.

The pain of shitty code doesn’t go away. They can ship your crappy MVP faster, but technical debt doesn’t magically go away.

This is an awesome opportunity for those people to start learning how to do software design instead of just “programming”. People that don’t are going to be left behind.
by jwatte | 2025-06-12 20:30:47+00:00
Let's say a typical base service (network attached RAM or whatever) has 99.99% reliability. If you have a dependency on 100 of those, you're suddenly closer to 99% reliability. So you switch to higher-level dependencies, and only have 10 dependencies, for a 99.9% reliability. But! It turns out, those dependencies each have dependencies, so they're really already more like 99.9% at best, and you're back at 99% reliability.

"good enough" is, indeed, just good enough to make it not worthwhile to rip out all the upstreams and roll your own everything from scratch, because the cost of the occasional outages is much lower than the cost of reinventing every single wheel, nut, bolt, axle, bearing, and grease formulation.
by worldsayshi | 2025-06-12 20:30:49+00:00
There's a big difference in criticality of different kinds of software. If the code you're writing will be 'the thing that runs the actual business logic in production' of course you should understand and own the code. And that code is very meaningful in the way you describe.

But so much of the software we need to solve various problems is not mission critical. Like tooling. Or any low stakes software that can be easily replaced. Or some script that makes your life a little bit easier. Or maybe even a small gui app that helps you compose some specific configuration for that other software. Tools where the output is easy to verify and can stand on its own and can't be used by an attacker to exploit your systems.

If you put a lot of effort into tooling that you can throw away the moment better tooling appears you can make the mission critical software leaner.

> actually important for engineers to do in order to understand the system

It is one tool for it and an important one. But it is not the end all tool for understanding or trusting code. If that were the case you'd have to rewrite all code you ever had to maintain. You rely on a stacks of software all the time that you do not write.

AI indeed makes mistakes but so does humans so we have to validate the code we use with multiple such tools.
by joshstrange | 2025-06-12 20:30:52+00:00
Nope, not even close. IT depts continue this practice to this day.

I had a friend in ~2015 that said they all had barcode scanners plugged into their computers (not 100% what they used them officially for) and so people would print their password as a barcode and stick it under their desk so they just had to scan the barcode to login (most/some/all? USB barcode scanners present as a keyboard and simply send scans as keypresses) due to silly password rotation rules. He said the people that didn’t use the barcode trick would instead just have a post-it note on their computer or, at best, under the keyboard or in a drawer.
by bgirard | 2025-06-12 20:32:08+00:00
The flip side of this is that I had a Ring doorbell in a home I lived in. Moved out and split up with my ex. Years later I installed a new Ring doorbell and I got a message from her shortly after installing it saying she was getting notifications again from my new Ring camera.

Kind of scary now to wonder if there's any loose accounts somewhere that's leaking sensitive information due to never requiring reauth.

I think the worse offender is iMessage. It's very easy to not understand that your SMS messages are -sometimes- going over icloud and can be seen on old apple devices you might have given up. I tried to unregister my phone number from iMessage about 5 times and it just doesn't work for me.
by horsawlarway | 2025-06-12 20:32:24+00:00
Yeah, but dummy loads are cheap. Probably cheaper than changing any designs in other places.

It's straight forward to add a giant resistive load that just converts electricity back to heat.

I can get 10kw heaters for just a couple hundred bucks or 1.5kw heaters for literally $20 usd. And that also switches on/off easily.

For hydro... just boiling water with a heater is going to be pretty much unbeatable if we're playing the "waste energy" game. No need to approximate it slowly with your pump motor and risk other infrastructure.
by quantadev | 2025-06-12 20:32:39+00:00
There's a specific frequency of brain waves which are always correlated with wakeful consciousness. I never looked up whether 'binaural' stuff is normal in that same freq range or the lower ranges. The lower freq ranges are still present even during unconsciousness (or anesthesia), and so focusing the brain on those frequencies would either 1) help concentration or 2) help sleep? I'm not sure which.
Ask HN: Which tools are most useful for organic marketing?
by thephyber | 2025-06-12 20:33:07+00:00
Recently left startup / corporate world for a lifestyle company. Now seems like an amazing time to build things using AI (which has become freaking amazing in the past few months).

I have built a few MVP apps. What are some of the more useful or innovative tools which can be used for organic marketing?

Hoping to find a mix of AppStore Optimization, Google SERP Optimization, tools to grab attention on TikTok / YT Shorts / IG Reels. Waitlist / interest gauging. Or maybe old-fashioned in-person marketing (posters, merch, etc).