MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ghc | 2025-07-17 12:53:38+00:00
> You ignored the entire issue. It was extralegal. If they wanted to do something about it, they should make clear laws and enforce them.

That's actually not true. The SEC & FDIC have broad authority to issue recommendations regarding risk. There are clear laws on the books dating back to the 1930s. The only people claiming it's "extralegal" have financial interests in crypto. Here: https://www.fdic.gov/news/inactive-financial-institution-let... . They issue the same kinds of advisories for foreign currencies, subprime assets, penny stocks, etc.

That authority is no different than the authority granted to the FDA, FTC, etc. and it's got decades of case law behind it.

> I don't like that. I want to be able to question USAID and what my president is doing.

What they're doing is actually the opposite of what you say. If you listen to what Horowitz is saying, he's stating these "theories" as if they're well-known facts, preemptively shutting down questioning about his motives or the veracity of his sources.

Saying things like "Everybody now knows Biden was not actually the president" is not questioning, it's a classic propaganda tactic called "Card Stacking", where someone trusted or with authority presents speculation or half truths as fact, ignoring contradictory evidence or uncertainty to manipulate public opinion.

The USAID statements are another example: USAID supplies & money may have been used by terrorists, against the anti-terrorism provisions written into its charter. The mission of USAID, however, was to stop terrorism from springing up in the first place by reducing food insecurity in unstable places. You know what else directly funds terrorism? Cryptocurrency (https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-disrupts-h...). But you don't hear Horowitz say we should ban Crypto over it. He's using half truths to promote his financial interests and legitimize his support for those in power who promote these interests.

Yet another example is how he promotes blockchain for USG spending, as if the USG doesn't have extremely detailed records of how money moves and is spent. Here's an article about the "lost" $400B: https://apnews.com/article/pandemic-fraud-waste-billions-sma...

Key points: Much of the waste is fraud by organizations requesting relief money. The gov't knows who got the money and is prosecuting over 1000 people over it. The waste happened because of lax oversight by the first Trump administration during campaign season, not during the Biden administration as implied by Horowitz. Finally, it was probably not due to nefarious intentions (despite campaign season), but due to the extraordinary circumstances of the pandemic.
by tempfile | 2025-07-17 12:54:00+00:00
This article takes dramatic flair to the point of caricature.

> A copy is outdated the moment it is downloaded. A copy has no protection against illicit reading. A copy can never be revoked.

In many cases, these are features, not bugs. Importantly it is not obvious a priori when it is a feature or a bug. Sometimes whistleblowers share files "illicitly". Sometimes governments try to remotely delete their mistakes.
by mystraline | 2025-07-17 12:54:27+00:00
I've never engaged the project admins. But if they're like Tor and their responses to deanonymizing OS reporting (basically hostile and attacking), it wouldn't surprise me.

My issue with possession of CSAM is that its statutory without mens rea. That means if my client gets an image without my knowledge or approval, I'm still blamed for it. And blame is a bloody felony. Some jurisdictions call for absurd punishments of 10y prison per image.

There are a few rooms I'm in. They are heavily moderated and narrow discussion. One is an speech-to-text from OpenMHZ police scanner for my area. But I also discourage usage - I'm highly technical, and I fear average users would get in over their heads and have a very bad time.
by 627467 | 2025-07-17 12:54:39+00:00
> didn't realize Italy was like that

Seems aligned with the idea of "perpetual copyright" Italy has been pushing: https://www.aippi.org/news/italy-cultural-heritage-protectio...

And these "quirckiness" isn't exclusive to Italy, many countries in Europe have much tougher views on individual freedoms, regulate speech much stronger than crowd in HN is used to.

Granted you may rarely get jail time, just the fact that you should worry about your criminal record is enough to prevent people to even voice ideas
by pahgawk | 2025-07-17 12:54:42+00:00
Hi, author here! When writing this, I was thinking more in the space of procedural character animation and motion graphics than UI animations. That's part of why I want a system with nice parameters, so that I do have the ability to fine tune and tweak the motion to fit the context. My background is in classical animation so it's something I might just keyframe by hand in a non-code context, or in Flash when it's easier to jump back and forth between code and non code. Although I think having it parameterized still can lead to interesting opportunities for variation in procedural animation!
by AAAAaccountAAAA | 2025-07-17 12:55:02+00:00
They definitely have a victim complex. Few years back, when I complained of the then-insanely poor performance and scalability of the Synapse server, they told me to spend a few thousands of bucks on a high-performance personal server, and to educate myself to set up and maintain a Synapse instance, which was then and is still much harder to do than running most other server software.

Hell, I was told I was a some sort of bad person for being unhappy with room joins taking hours or even days.

After exhausting all other options, they have improved their software a lot (it's still not perfect, but definitely usable), but their poor attitude has soured their reputation, and made it really difficult to be enthusiastic about Matrix.
by jollyllama | 2025-07-17 12:55:23+00:00
My view on all this has become a very elitist one.

> It wasn't that he was ignorant about what computers could do, but his entire mental model was built around files.

Yes, this is very common. The problem is that the people without technical expertise are the ones creating the business processes. They need to hire more engineers to show them what needs changed.

> And git! Don't get me started on git! The best minds of a generation stuck in a paradigm of downloading files to their local machine, making changes, then emailing git pushing them up to be approved? Madness!

This is taking it too far. No, the engineers should be the ones who get to deal in files because they are cognizant of the limitations - so long as they can adhere to best practices. Where this falls apart is when you get people saying "you don't need branching, just use main." To prevent that, stronger gatekeeping is needed.

Files for me, not for thee - unironically.
by gostsamo | 2025-07-17 12:55:52+00:00
They lost me on git. Some docs need to be shared and with good idea who, how and when should edit it, the rest of the audience can read and observe the latest sota of the doc. Some stuff has intermediate states and unnecessary biproducts which are nobody's business and loading a common server from 9 to 5 and then keeping it idle the rest of the time is both wasteful and annoying for all participants. Knowing what is your use case is kinda important and spending five minutes thinking about it might prove helpful.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-07-17 12:56:29+00:00
Workers in Oregon losing jobs is downstream of Intel not being able to produce the best chips, which earned the highest margins that Intel was used to earning. This has been in the works since the mid 2000s, and they still don’t have a competitive low power, high performance chip.

Also, Oregon is a terrible state to invest in as a business, especially one that is looking to pay high salaries.
by stinkbeetle | 2025-07-17 12:56:45+00:00
The diatribe appears to be sarcasm but I can't really understand what he actually advocates for. You can't "living document" source code by having a bunch of people all edit it at the same time like a google doc.

And the line about git is just wrong. You don't git push something "to be approved". If you can push it then it is "approved" to wherever you pushed it to.

Storing data on your own computer is a security risk sure. There are places that prohibit checking out source code locally. That has nothing to do with git though, in fact those places generally tend to still use git. Which is a database for your files and changes. You just need non-local computers to edit, compile, test, etc. Which is entirely possible.
by tialaramex | 2025-07-17 12:57:08+00:00
It is nice that, unlike C++, the C language standard does list all the Undefined Behaviour (in Annex J.2), it's a pretty long list and IMO it's terrifying, not so much because of specifics like this:

"A searching or sorting utility function is called with an invalid pointer argument, even if the number of elements is zero"

But because of broad choices like:

"The execution of a program contains a data race"

"An object is referred to outside of its lifetime"

These are essentially categories of mistake we know programmers make, and in C the result is... Undefined Behaviour. No diagnostics, no exit, no errors, just throw your hands in the air and give up, anything might happen.
by basfo | 2025-07-17 12:57:53+00:00
To me, it's kind of strange that buying and showing something that is sold legally (like a console purchased from China, which I assume went through customs, or even sold on Amazon in some cases) can make someone a criminal. I believe this should be protected under freedom of speech: he's legally buying a product and demonstrating what it does. Maybe posting a referral link and profiting from it could be considered questionable, but come on... If you want to stop piracy, start by blocking these devices at customs and investigating the businesses that import and sell them to the public. Never put someone in jail for what is, after all, a form of journalism.
by kasey_junk | 2025-07-17 12:58:50+00:00
I owned 2 minis and would just replace screens and batteries whenever one got bad. Keep one in a drawer, take the broken one to the shop, rinse repeat.

I did this for years because I liked the form factor so much.

My new buying criteria for my iPhone is simply “buy the smallest one offered”.

But I’m willing to accept I’m not a big enough market segment to move the market.
by jstummbillig | 2025-07-17 12:59:37+00:00
Disagree, because the very few very big AI players are (in contrast to the 90s) very solid. Yes, there is a breadth of absolute bullshit built on top of current AI, but if it were only ChatGPT-alikes and LLMs for coding from here on out, that in itself is enough real value, that requires very little imagination, a lot of implementation and there's more demand than can easily be satisfied right now for both.
by TYPE_FASTER | 2025-07-17 13:00:00+00:00
How you store the bits, how you transmit the bits, and how you visualize the bits are three very different things.

> Data needs to live in a database - not an Excel file.

> Access should be granted for each according to their needs.

I mean, for enterprise users it's pretty hard to beat an Excel file in SharePoint.

You could model the data, put it in a relational database, and build a simple web app for CRUD operations, but unless you're adding additional business logic, I've noticed a lot of the time you end up with a table view that's not as powerful as a spreadsheet and maybe a form to enter data.

I definitely agree that it doesn't make sense to e-mail spreadsheets around, but persistence and user interface are different layers.
Show HN: Speclinter-MCP, better specs for your coding agent
by orangebread | 2025-07-17 13:00:02+00:00
SpecLinter is an MCP server that was born from my personal workflow, so you will find that this may or may not work with your own.

This MCP server enables natural language spec description "use speclinter to parse a feature for signing up users" and turn it into a fully realized feature with a user story/epic and its respective tasks.

How does this differ from what Kiro just released? The differentiator is the integration of Gherkin feature files. These files act as the "linter" where the AI system is essentially validating the implementation to the user journey defined.

I found this workflow to be particularly useful because AI is very good at extrapolating from behaviors rather than pure technical spec.

Please give it a try; I'm always open to feedback. I have longterm ideas that I'm holding on to, but plan on releasing an expanded version of this concept in the coming months.

Thanks for reading!
by gchamonlive | 2025-07-17 13:00:21+00:00
No, but we don't need it to define what's our expectations of the effects from capitalism in it's later stages of maturity. Can we agree that the function of a corporation at least is to satisfy it's investors and maximise profits?

So lobbyism is just a manifestation of this function, the attempt of a corporation to communicate with society in order to influence decisions that impact their profits.

Corporations are not the only types of machines that have interest in making connections to other machines in the capitalist universe. Humans are also embedded in this universe, but for other interests.

Therefore it's reasonable to think that capitalism working as intended will in time start producing corporations that work against the interests of the common good.
by svat | 2025-07-17 13:00:28+00:00
For what it's worth, I worked around this by first calling Google's older OCR api (Cloud Vision), which gives the coordinates and bounding boxes for each word in the document. Then I pass this whole response to Gemini, and it's finally able to give me much more reasonable bounding boxes. Clearly overkill, and would be ridiculously expensive to do at scale, but works for me.
by jmyeet | 2025-07-17 13:00:31+00:00
I'm surprised this is Italy and not the US.

What I want people to take away from this is that governments in the so-called "developed" world act at the behest of corporations. In this case it's to criminalize something that should, at best, be a civil matter. But suing people is expensive and often they have no assets to claim so let's just make it a criminal offense and let the government pay for it and threaten them with violence (ie putting them in prison).

There's a not particularly well-known case of this in the US that I wish more people knew about: the case of Steven Donziger.

Chevron extracted oil in Ecuador and because of lax legislation and oversight, polluted everywhere. Farmers and indigenous people sued (in Ecuador). Donziger handled the case and an Ecuadorian court brought down a $9.5 billion judgement against Chevron.

Chevron filed a RICO suit against Donziger in NYC. A US Federal district court decided the judgement was unenforceable because (in the court's opionion) it had been obtained through fraud with fairly scant evidence of such. Donziger was disbarred. But it doesn't edn there.

In subsequent legal proceedings, Donziger refused to hand over electronic devices to Chevron's experts arguing--rightly--that it was a violation of attorney-client privilege.

In subsequent legal proceedings, Donziger refused to hand over electronic devices to Chevron's experts arguing--rightly--that it was a violation of attorney-client privilege.

A criminal complaint was made but the DOJ declined to prosecute. In an extraordinary move, a judge appointed lawyers at Chevron's law firm to criminally prosecute Donziger for contempt. He was on house arrest for years with an $800,000 bond... for contempt of court.

Criminal prosecution being available to private companies should scare everyone. The government and even the judicial system has been subverted to do the bidding of companies.

So, sadly, a criminal proseuction for revealing a gaming handheld doesn't surprise me at all.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-07-17 13:01:53+00:00
A bunny walks into a bakery. There he asks the baker if he has any carrot cake.

The bakers says: ‘No, I don’t sell carrot cake.’

So the bunny leaves, but returns the next day. He once again asks if the baker has any carrot cake.

Once more the baker answers: ‘No, I don’t sell carrot cake.’

Once the bunny left, the baker started making a carrot cake thinking the bunny would return the next day for the cake. And so the bunny did, and he asks: ‘Do you have carrot cake?’

To which the bakers answers: ‘Yes, today I DO sell carrot cake.’

So the Bunny says: ‘YUCK, isn't it disgusting, why do people sell these things?!’
by theshrike79 | 2025-07-17 13:03:09+00:00
You could also accidentally summon an Ancient One while trying to write a regex :D

Perl is a fine language, but it's like using a wood chipper with no safeties. It takes extreme care and know-how to use it without splattering ASCII everywhere and making an unmaintainable write-only mess.

For every beautiful and maintainable perl program (mostly irssi scripts) I've seen 99 abominations that are quicker to rewrite completely than decode wtf they are doing.
by EPendragon | 2025-07-17 13:04:05+00:00
I believe there is a difference between education and critical thinking. One may not have a certain level of education, but could exercise a great degree of critical thinking. I think that education can help you understand the context of the problem better. But there are also plenty of people who are not asking the right questions or not asking questions - period - who have lots of education behind them. Ironically, sometimes education is the path that leads to blind trust and lack of challenging the status quo.
by threemux | 2025-07-17 13:04:28+00:00
Dead wrong on Git, not to mention the general, inherent issues with locking your ability to freely share your data behind the monthly plans of cloud vendors. No, local sync isn't a replacement as it's often in a non-free binary format. Cross vendor compatibility issues are waved away as "having to work a little harder". Rarely has a sentence done so much work.

The author attempts to moderate at the end by saying sometimes you need a local copy. However, as this option becomes rarer, so do the tools that support it. Eventually, you won't even get to make that choice.

As for development, "merging" is far more complicated than for text documents and cannot be left to an automated system.

Is sharing files less secure? Surely. Is it worth it? Yes.
by stockresearcher | 2025-07-17 13:05:09+00:00
The social security taxes you pay are used to buy credits. You can buy a maximum of 4 credits per year. Once you have 40 credits you are allowed to draw benefits from the system - when you are old enough. If you only have 39 credits, you don’t get social security.

When you go to collect benefits, there is a complicated formula based on income records that is used to turn your taxes paid into what is essentially a lifetime annuity. If you keep working, you keep paying social security taxes and you keep buying credits, but your annuity doesn’t change - you are forfeiting 100% of the tax you paid.
by sjw987 | 2025-07-17 13:05:16+00:00
We've been in a bubble ever since people starting believing "data is the new oil".

Data has only driven advertising, and it's done it in such a botched way that it's tearing down the whole discipline of advertising. These companies know all the little tidbits of information about all of us that they need to put the right products directly in front of our eyes multiple times per day, and they still get it wrong.

Advert engagement goes down, people who use advertising realise their budgets are being wasted on the wrong audience and the whole thing will pop. It was naïve to ever believe that data really means anything. At a certain scale it just becomes loads of noise.
by rvnx | 2025-07-17 13:05:19+00:00
I think he means that leftists with a real political will wants to cancel private property in favor of a single shared property.

Which means no copyright, or copyright owned by the state. And the state to be in charge to collect royalties from foreign countries.

Wokeness and the hammer and sickle covered in blood are symbols that often appears concurrently true left parades (at least in Europe, though actually occasionally in the right too)

So I think he connected the two concepts by association.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-07-17 13:05:20+00:00
How do you personally do that branching without git? What tool(s) do you use?

> So you make a branch, a bunch of you discuss and edit in real time. Once everyone is ready, you stop and test

What if you want to test your work out, and don't want to wait until everybody else has finished with their work and stopped working to test? What if you don't want to try to coordinate 100 different instances of "everybody stop working (but also make sure the build isn't broken), I want to run tests" per day?
by Chronoyes | 2025-07-17 13:05:28+00:00
I have an opposing viewpoint here. Incompressible to me how normalised copyright theft has become in the commercial emulation space.

There are huge YouTube channels such as Linus Tech Tips reviewing $100 devices that contain copyrighted games that would have retailed for over a million dollars. This is not normal and is very different from an individual downloading some ROMs.

And to clarify the story, this guy is being investigated because it was suspected he was selling these devices, not just reviewing them.
by latexr | 2025-07-17 13:05:29+00:00
> a bunch of you discuss and edit in real time.

So now you have to get everyone into the same headspace at the same time and schedule coding sessions across timezones?

What if two people independently feel like doing some quick incompatible changes late at night? Do they have to message everyone on the team to see if it’s OK? Or do they make a branch of the branch of the branch to test it by themselves? How is that more convenient? And in that world, how can you do those tests privately, without everyone on the team (plus the service you’re using) being able to see them? And what happens when you don’t have an internet connection (or your service is down) but you want to continue working?

I agree with the parent comment, there are too many unanswered questions in your proposed scenario.

The whole blog post in general feels incongruent, and it’s not surprising to me you’re getting conflicting feedback. You’re conflating different scenarios and proposing broad vague ideas which are not only impractical for a multitude of scenarios, they remove user agency and give more power to corporations, which is exactly the opposite of what we should be doing.
by dylan604 | 2025-07-17 13:05:34+00:00
It’s clearly easy to get them reversed evidenced by the large number of people admitting it. I too had them reversed growing up, but took until I really got into learning weather in preparations for storm chasing way back before the internet. At least until I learned how expensive it is, and life had other plans for me.

Mocking someone for not understanding something you do is not a good look, and you should really try to be more empathetic. We all didn’t know something at one point.
by jsnell | 2025-07-17 13:05:42+00:00
Workspace has published policies about how the customer's data may be used: https://support.google.com/a/answer/15706919

> Your content is not used for any other customers. Your content is not human reviewed or used for Generative AI model training outside your domain without permission.

And I think the default assumption has to be that those policies are actually followed. If you think they aren't, the burden of proof is on you to show they aren't.