MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by BriggyDwiggs42 | 2025-07-20 21:35:39+00:00
I think the issue is optimization. As these sites have grown more efficient at gaining and exploiting (like a natural resource) users for money, they’ve optimized away mechanisms people used to form community and such. Moving to a feed of recommendations instead of a feed of people you follow is an easy example, but there must be a thousand little examples like that.

Fundamentally, if the goal is to make money, then that’s what will be optimized for, and in this case that goal appears to be in conflict with the formation and maintenance of community. It was just a matter of time.
by tmsh | 2025-07-20 21:35:42+00:00
I miss Steve Jobs. I feel like if he were around (this is not a knock to what Apple is doing currently - they do many incredible things), he would be figuring out how to democratize AI and ensure it runs quickly and is magical on each device (i.e., what they did in terms of personal computing - he would help accelerate that). Tim Cook to his credit recognized that Steve was a singular talent. There would not be half-baked ChatGPT agent releases. He would single-handedly do the Claude Code equivalent of X, Y, and Z on all devices or he would create a new device to do it if needed. He would pick up on what was truly promising with growing autonomy and he would get a team to deliver it. He made a lot of mistakes (iWork, etc.). I could see him make a lot of mistakes in this era too. But he would absolutely hit a home run the way the iPhone just put together a bunch of S curves (glass, decent internet browser, app ecosystem, well-designed phone, etc.). And yeah it was Tony Fadell. and Jony Ive. A lot. But seeing the thread - seeing what was important and knowing to bet on that. He loved great products. As he said in some other linked / famous quote, the people who are passionate do not run out of enthusiasm. They do not fail as much because of that. There is no shame in loving great products. Truly. Deep down. After all the fun and games. Not for money (though dear God the money came and he wasn't perfect about not being drawn towards that and the Apple stock price v. Dell etc). But having a history of delivering on great products and truly loving to do so. Whatever it is - a robot, a magical experience on a device - not a jaw-dropping this is completely new experience actually. But just better execution, that last 20% where most people slow down and he was just getting started. Where it pushes it past the previous generation of products. Where you have 1000 songs in your pocket. Where you can browse the internet in your pocket. Like other devices could kind of do it. In that sense it's not jaw-dropping. But if you love attention to detail and craft and things well done, it's very very good.

It comes down to truly loving what people can do with the products. Bicycle of the mind etc. Liberal arts and technology. Seeing a little farther since he'd become so comfortable standing on the shoulder of giants time and time again. Starts out slowish and imprecise (Macintosh was pretty solid, but then NeXT). Then it calibrates. Then it was consistently excellent. It's a paradigm to get to if you're a product leader. This works so well it's going to make my customers capable of new things and hungry about being able to do things.
by scoofy | 2025-07-20 21:35:52+00:00
It's a hard question because we don't live in Anarcho-Libertarian society, and we have laws.

The issue isn't "what should we do here," which is a political question, for whom each person will have their own answer. The question is what do you do about a "we're just a venue, we're not actually conducting business" company that is very clearly facilitating mass-violation of laws.

This undermines rule of law, simply because our legal system isn't designed for centralized vehicles for criminal behavior, without being able to charge the catalyst for the behavior, the app, with penalty such that it compels behavior going forward. Facilitating these crimes is criminal behavior.

It's a tough question, both politically, and practically. We like the idea of AirBnB, but if we can't find a way to create an enforcement mechanism for local hotel rules, then we're basically endorsing lawlessness... which isn't politically sustainable.
by jacksondc | 2025-07-20 21:35:53+00:00
Hi, creator here. If you want to copy node_modules instead of reinstalling, you can click on the repo and add a setup script that does the copy. Sorry it’s a bit obscure—we’re working on making this easier!

Would love to discuss more what kind of testing setup you’re looking for, want to shoot me an email at jackson@melty.sh?
by rafram | 2025-07-20 21:36:24+00:00
> i know that is terrible timing and im genuinely sorry about that.

This Twitter-style faux-casual way of writing is so common among AI people right now (see Sam Altman) and it’s extremely grating. I don’t know anything about this project, but if they really cared about their users, I would hope that they’d use capital letters and punctuation when addressing them in an official announcement.
by rstuart4133 | 2025-07-20 21:36:50+00:00
You could it in a more limited fashion by allowing fields of a struct to be declared "const", which would have similar semantics to Java's final. If you add the ability to return const references, you get the ability to have read only and mutable references to stuff within a struct co-exist.

For example, this won't compile:

struct Something { z: usize } struct Foo<'a> { x: usize, y: &'a Something } impl<'a> Foo<'a> { fn bar(&mut self) -> &Something { let something = self.bar(); self.x += something.z; something } }

But if you could tell the borrow checker the mutable borrow of self can never modify z, then it would be safe. This would achieve that:

struct Something { z: usize } struct Foo<'a> { x: usize, y: &'a const Something } impl<'a> Foo<'a> { fn bar(&mut self) -> &const Something { let something = self.bar(); self.x += something.z; something } }

I've now had several instances where they would have let me win a battle with the borrow checker succinctly rather than the long work around I was forced to adopt. Const struct members allow you implement read only fields with having to hide them, and provide getters is icing on the cake.
by phtrivier | 2025-07-20 21:36:55+00:00
My cursory understanding of the ruling is that it applies if you have several million users in the UK... [1]

Is that the case here (and it just happens that I have no clue what this particular site is about) ?

Or am I grossly misunderstanding the act (very likely I guess since IANAL) ?

[1] https://www.onlinesafetyact.net/analysis/categorisation-of-s...

-------------------------------------------

Ofcom’s advice to the Secretary of State

Ofcom submitted their advice – and the unerpinning research that had informed it – to the Secretary of State on 29 February 2024 and published it on 25 March. In summary, its advice is as follows: Category 1

Condition 1:

Use a content recommender system; and Have more than 34m UK users on the U2U part of the service

Condition 2:

Allow users to forward or reshare UGC; and Use a content recommender system; and Have more than 7m UK users on the U2U part of the service

Ofcom estimates that there are 9 services captured by condition 1 and 12-16 likely to be captured by condition 2. There is one small reference in the annex that the 7m+ monthly users threshold corresponds to the DSA (A6.15) Category 2a (search)

Not a vertical search service; and Have more then 7m UK users

Ofcom estimates that there are just 2 search services that currently sit (a long way) above this threshold but that it is justified to put it at this level to catch emerging services. Category 2b (children)

Allow users to send direct messages; and Have more than 3m UK users on the U2U part of the service

Ofcom estimates that there are “approximately 25-40 services” that may meet this threshold.

-------------------------------------------
by sombragris | 2025-07-20 21:37:38+00:00
It comes standard on a default install of Slackware. Even in current, as of now, jove is installed in version 4.17.5.5. Of course, standard emacs is also provided.

Now, if I have to use an emacs-like editor I'd go with Jed. Somehow it seems much less daunting and much more friendly than the real thing.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-07-20 21:38:14+00:00
You shouldn't be using any currency as a long-term store of value. Even if you want to be denominated in USD and minimize risk, the interest rate on cash in a mattress is zero and the interest rate on US treasuries is non-zero.

Meanwhile the historical purpose of holding cash as "spending money" (i.e. liquid assets) is from a time before computers could allow you to keep it as actual investments until the instant you do actually want to spend it.

As for using it for pricing, things are typically priced in USD because it's the world reserve currency, or in the dominant local currency in a given country. That doesn't mean that other currencies aren't currencies. Shops in many countries will often accept both local currency and USD even if prices are only listed in one of those, and so what? Anybody can look up the current exchange rate in real time on the internet. Why is it a problem to list prices in USD and then accept that amount of cryptocurrency (or Euros or Yen) at the current exchange rate?
by UrineSqueegee | 2025-07-20 21:38:21+00:00
i opened the ofcom link and it has this really easy to follow guide with 17 illegal contents the users my encounter on your website like terrorism/pdf content etc like extremely bad stuff and all you have to do is asses how likely the user is to run into one of these on your site if its over 0% how do you plan on mitigating that.

thats literally all there is to it.
by kinow | 2025-07-20 21:38:21+00:00
I buy some arts materials from China, but only simple things that I cannot find in EU or tyat are just the same product re-sold a lot more expensive here. I'd be glad to buy in EU if that's cheaper.

I still buy EU arts materials that are more expensive than Chinese products, but that are (at least supposedly) better tested for toxicity.

I noticed in the past year or two art stores like Casa Piera/Arte Miranda have had more products like watercolor paper and paints from China. I hope new regulations will make sure these are compliant with EY regulations, without raising the price to consumer too much.
by LorenPechtel | 2025-07-20 21:38:27+00:00
I think at least part of the problem is that we very often can't determine quality very well. And that which can't be measured gets corners cut on it.

For many products I believe we could address this fairly well with a simple consumer protection law: Products must state an estimated mean time to failure, workmanship must be fully warrantied to at least 1/2 of this time.
by louthy | 2025-07-20 21:38:28+00:00
Or you travel to a 3rd country that has the same law and an extradition treaty with the UK.

Or, you travel to the UK! It’s a pretty popular destination and Heathrow is a major European hub. It would be easy to get caught out.

The law may well be onerous and misguided. But looking at that site, it seems they reeeeally should do their due diligence. Not just to avoid the long arm of UK justice, but other territories too. It looks extremely dubious.

Their mitigation doesn’t make sense either. If they don’t shutdown UK accounts and those accounts use UK credit cards which continue to use the service via a VPN. It could be reasonably argued that they know they’re providing a service to a UK resident. So, they really need to do their homework.

What they’re actually complaining about is the cost of doing business. It sounds pretty amateurish.
by nine_k | 2025-07-20 21:39:30+00:00
The problem of the pre-platform Web is the difficulty of discovery; your interesting content will have but a few readers.

The lure of platforms, like Twitter, or, well, HN, is that your content can potentially be seen by "everyone". Going viral is fun but not that important; being seen by the right people you never knew, or never had a hope to grab attention of, is much move valuable. This leads to much stronger cross-pollination.

(Spam is a problem here, but spam is also a problem in similar biological systems; blooming plants release tons of pollen, and then tons of seeds, most of them fruitless.)
by mschuster91 | 2025-07-20 21:39:34+00:00
The key thing is: Europe has product standards (and not just on safety), sometimes very strict ones. We have democratically agreed upon these, often enough only as a response to the industry being unable or unwilling (cough Apple and USB-C) to do the right thing on its own. In addition, we have warranty requirements (a minimum of two years), minimum wage and workplace safety regulations.

Now Temu, Shein, lots of the shops on Alibaba, Amazon and eBay... they all push stuff into Europe that violates these standards and can be sold cheaper as a result.

That is bad on three sides: First, for the dangerous stuff (such as the toys with choking hazards, lead paint or the "chinesium" Big Clive routinely pulls out of shady eBay sales), that's directly endangering our people and/or our environment. And second, all the stuff made and imported that violates requirements is undercutting our domestic production and economy who does have to follow the regulations or otherwise it gets fined. And finally: a lot of the stuff particularly on Temu and Shein is outright garbage, falling apart after a few uses - and then it ends in our landfills and waste disposals. A horrible waste from an environment perspective, especially given that a lot of the junk comes in via air freight of all things!
by JKCalhoun | 2025-07-20 21:40:35+00:00
Some of us have dipped our toes in local LLMs. To be sure, the ones I can run on my hardware always pale when compared to the online ones. But perhaps in time the ones you can run locally will be good enough.

Or perhaps an Apple or Kagi will host an LLM with no built-in monetization skewing its answers.
by ARothfusz | 2025-07-20 21:40:46+00:00
You mean like the Voyager probes? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_program

Almost 50 years old now, and still sending data.

What would I change about software development now to program like they did 50 years ago? I would program like they programmed 50 years ago: assume it has to work. Assume updates will be risky and expensive. Build in failsafes and watchdogs and redundancy. Be able to replicate the build every year for 50 years. Train people to know what the logs really mean, every year for 50 years. And launch it before the bike shedding can begin!
by toomuchtodo | 2025-07-20 21:40:51+00:00
The minimum wage worker will not be making the minimum payment successfully on their credit card balance (bottom sixty percent of Americans cannot afford a basic quality of life [1] [2]). They likely can't produce $500 for an emergency, and use credit products with interest rates as high as ~30-35% with credit lines no larger than a few hundred or thousand dollars. The retiree you mention in your example will have an 800+ FICO credit score due to longevity of their trade lines (decades) and likely no inquiries (because they don't need to seek credit) or missed payments.

Cash flow underwriting would paint this picture better [3], but is still not widely performed outside of an org containing the deposit account (internal underwriting for credit products that don't have to conform for asset backed security sales). So, credit score is a reasonable proxy at this time for household financial health (imho) [4] [5] based on research performed by the CFPB.

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cost-of-living-income-quality-o...

[2] https://lisep.org/mql

[3] https://fintechtakes.com/articles/2024-05-22/cash-flow-under...

[4] https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/blog/new-report-exp...

[5] https://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/documents/cfpb_credit-ka...

(day job is in finance/consumer credit)
by sunshine-o | 2025-07-20 21:41:30+00:00
> There's simply no option for digital sovereignty other than cultivating a strong domestic software industry.

Yes, but they tried and can't.

Those ideas of domestic computer industry and digital sovereignty have been around since the 60s.

The French had Bull which is now Atos and they failed miserably.

France was very impressive after WW2, they build almost on their own a nuclear weapons, a nuclear energy, aeronautic, military industry and impressive space capabilities.

After that you would expect them to have built a serious competitor to Intel and Microsoft but they didn't. They can't even built basic digital capabilities to support a bureaucracy.

My guess is a very different generation arrived in the 60s-70s in the workplace and in charge: the Silent Generation and the Boomers.

Those generations were not about building anything but more about entitlements and collecting dividends. But of course it takes quite some time for things to get really bad. Information technologies slowly took over many aspects over our societies over the last 50 years and now they find out they do not have sovereignty anymore.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-07-20 21:41:30+00:00
> The "secret" being obscured cryptographicially is the information needed to produce a verifiable message.

That's the key, not the message.

> For example, I am not sure you would extend the same logic to cryptographic voting schemes.

Isn't the purpose of a cryptographic voting system to keep your vote secret?

> The reason why you define cryptography like this, is I think political.

Yes, it's because people don't want things like end-to-end encryption associated with scams, and they're not wrong.
by ntstr | 2025-07-20 21:41:39+00:00
No one noticed the parent post is LLM slop?

Spams of groups of threes (open, chaotic, full of real voices - filtered, throttled, and buried - users, privacy, real expression)

It's not just X - it's Y type of sentence structure Vapid marketing style writing that has no real substance (Maybe it’s not about saving the old web. Perhaps it’s time to build a new one)

Of course, there are emdashes too, they may not betray LLM alone as they exist in literature and a minority like to use them in internet comments but when they are present along with other signs of slop they are still a strong tell, particularly when they are numerous.

Is this satire? or trolling? it is concerning everyone replies to it as if there had been human thought behind this drivel.
by Cyan488 | 2025-07-20 21:41:40+00:00
It's these little slights, multiplied by hundreds of other instances across the Microsoft and Windows 'experience' that added compounding, non-insignificant mental fatigue to my life.

It wasn't until I switched to Linux (Zorin) as my daily driver last month that I noticed this. Despite the initial adjustment pains, every time I open my laptop I now feel a sense of calm and stillness. My computer is exactly how I left it. It asks for my approval before doing things. It has no corporate agenda.
Show HN: Kara Auto Translate – Free English to ASL Translation, Open Beta
by ffarhour | 2025-07-20 21:42:30+00:00
Hi HN,

We're the team behind Kara Auto Translate (KAT), an AI tool that translates English into American Sign Language (ASL) video. It's free to try, and we’re launching this public beta specifically to gather feedback from the Deaf community and beyond.

Try it here (no signup needed): https://kara.tech

---

# What it does You enter a short sentence in English, and KAT returns a high-quality video of the translation in ASL

Behind the scenes: 1. English → Kara Notation System (KNS): A custom format capturing ASL grammar, structure, and sentiment. 2. KNS → Avatar Animation: Our animation generation engine creates natural, accurate sign motions. 3. → Video Output: It’s rendered with no download or install needed.

# Why we’re posting KAT was built with Deaf advisors and linguists, but it’s still early. Real feedback is what makes it better.

We're looking for: - Bugs or awkward translations - Suggestions on accessibility, UI, or language coverage - Comments on linguistic or cultural accuracy

If you use ASL, work in accessibility, or just care about language tech — we’d love your thoughts.

# What’s next - Better facial expressions & grammar coverage - Support for longer/more complex sentences - Feedback tools to make community input easier

Thanks for checking it out. We’re building this in the open and every comment helps.

—Farmehr and the Kara Team
by Havoc | 2025-07-20 21:42:42+00:00
The act does seem poorly thought out practically & I really dislike the UK's overall mindset to online safety. The laws consistently feel like they were written by someone that prints out emails to read...

That said the thinking that smaller platform should equal exemptions seems a touch flawed too given topic. If you're setting out to protect a child from content that say is promoting suicide the size of the platform isn't a relevant metric. If anything the smaller less visible corners (like the various chan sites) of the internet may even be higher risk
by kazinator | 2025-07-20 21:42:48+00:00
In Common Lisp, in fact, no numbers are required to be eq! Even (eq 0 0) is not required by ANSI CL to return true.

Why your Lisp implementation produces true for (eq a b) is probably because of the following.

Firstly, in Common Lisp there are single and double precision floats. Floating point tokens written with E or e are single. An implementation is allowed to map that to a 32 bit float. If the implementation has 64 bit values, it can easily arrange for single precision floats to be unboxed without any special tricks; they need only half the word. Try evaluating with 1D+20 to see what that does.

But even 64 bit values can be unboxed with a trick called NAN tagging.

I implemented NAN tagging in TXR Lisp (which has only double-precision floats), enabled on 64 bit targets:

64 bit machine:

1> (eq 1E20 1E20) t 2> (sizeof val) 8

32 bit machine:

1> (eq 1E20 1E20) nil 2> (sizeof val) 4

On 32 bits, floating-point objects are on the heap.

It's pretty important to have unboxed floats for intense numerical work.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-07-20 21:43:14+00:00
> Interesting, especially the turnout figures. Apathy is a bitch.

Apathy is a only a symptom, the disease is political dysfunction that both parties have established as norm. The choices offered aren't really different, the rhetoric is fierce but the actions are wimpy, unless they benefit the donor class. The majority of those who don't vote understand this and for them voting is a waste of time.

The OP doesn't really move the needle either, same old, same old - making more people vote or vote for the Democrats ain't gonna change a thing, and it hasn't for a long time.
by viraptor | 2025-07-20 21:43:15+00:00
But we do! For llvm there's https://github.com/AliveToolkit/alive2 There are papers like https://people.cs.rutgers.edu/~sn349/papers/cgo19-casmverify... There's https://github.com/google/souper There's https://cr.yp.to/papers/symexemu-20250505.pdf And probably other things I'm not aware of. If you're limiting the scope to a few blocks at a time, symbolic execution will do fine.
by aosaigh | 2025-07-20 21:43:27+00:00
Do you have kids? I don’t, so I don’t have any idea how realistic this is. How do you ensure your kids aren’t skirting any blocks you put in place, looking things up with their friends, getting access to a VPN, etc.?

I also don’t think this act is the way to address these issues, but I don’t think it’s as easy as just putting everything at the feet of the parents as I imagine it almost impossible to police at home, not to mention at school.

When I think of older technologies like television, we have rules and regulations about what can be shown when.

Again, this isn’t to say this approach is right, but wanting to regulate isn’t an attack on free speech. It seems there is regularly a tension on HN between free speech absolutists, usually from the US and those more happy to accept regulation, usually from the EU