MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by octo888 | 2025-07-19 10:20:47+00:00
Careful what you wish for. What you may get in one hand they'll take in another. They're pulling other crap like cleaning fees for a grain or two of sand too. Should the EU our saviour protect us against that?

Plenty alternatives to renting a car in Europe. Hit them where it hertz. Take a punt on smaller companies that are competing with eg total all inclusive insurance. Yup they're a bit more expensive sometimes but can result in an better overall experience (there are lots of scammy local companies too)
by rglullis | 2025-07-19 10:21:37+00:00
I think you got your timeline of events in the wrong order. Bolsonaro was just a low-level congressman when Lula was convicted.

Not saying that Bolsonaro has any moral high ground to stand on, though. He is as corrupt as it gets. But if anything, I'd say that his problems really started when he was already elected and colluded with the Supreme Court to get Lula out of prison in exchange of killing the investigation against his sons.
by dwedge | 2025-07-19 10:22:03+00:00
The chance of someone breaking in to steal your sensitive files is next to nil I agree.

The chance of someone breaking into your house is sadly much more likely, and them choosing to take any computers they see is almost a certainty at that point.

Your drives are unencrypted. What's your next step if you come home tonight and find the house ransacked and the server gone?
by andrepd | 2025-07-19 10:22:21+00:00
I've been using uBlock in advanced mode with 3rd party frames and scripts blocked. I recommend it, but it is indeed a pain to find the minimum set of things you need to unblock to make a website work, involving lots of refreshing.

Once you find it for a website you can just save it though so you don't need to go through it again.

LocalCDN is indeed a nobrainer for privacy! Set and forget.
by charleshn | 2025-07-19 10:23:29+00:00
Frontier models went from not being able to count the number of 'r's in "strawberry" to getting gold at IMO in under 2 years [0], and people keep repeating the same clichés such as "LLMs can't reason" or "they're just next token predictors".

At this point, I think it can only be explained by ignorance, bad faith, or fear of becoming irrelevant.

[0] https://x.com/alexwei_/status/1946477742855532918
by ajb | 2025-07-19 10:23:31+00:00
I think there is a general principle here:

- evolutionarily evolved feelings do not need to be logically consistent with the evolutionary benefit, as a long as they cause the evolutionarily beneficial behavior

An example that I observe is in guinea pigs. These are quintessential prey animals, and benefit from being under cover. If domestic guinea pigs don't have cover for a few hours, and are then given it, they run under the cover. Do they then breathe a sign of relief, and show signs that their emotion is one of renewed safety? No, they jump up and down, and squeak noisily in excitement! Apparently being under cover is cool.
by noduerme | 2025-07-19 10:23:51+00:00
> the environmental impact of jackasses mining jackass coin, or jackasses training LLMs is not insignificant

(this was actually stated in agreement with the original poster, who you clearly misunderstood, so there's no "what-about" involved here. They were condemning all kinds of consumption, including the frivolous ones I mentioned).

But

I'm afraid you've missed both my small point and my wider point.

My small point was to argue against the parent's comment that

>>reducing ressources consumption to the minimum required should always be a concern if we intend to have a sustainable future

I disagree with this concept on the basis that nothing can be accomplished on a large scale if the primary concern is simply to reduce resource consumption to a minimum. If you care to disagree with that, then please address it.

The larger point was that this theory leads inexorably to the idea that humans should just kill themselves or disappear; and it almost always comes from people who themselves want to kill themselves or disappear.
by ajsnigrutin | 2025-07-19 10:23:59+00:00
Sure, but you've got to eat something.

Now, if mcdonalds padded 5kB of calories of a cheesburger with 10.000 kilobytes of calories in wasted food like news sites doo, it would be a different story. The ratio would be 200 kilos of wasted food for 100grams of usable beef.
by demirbey05 | 2025-07-19 10:24:08+00:00
Progress is astounding. Recently report published about evaluation of LLMs on IMO 2025. o3 high didn't even get bronze.

https://matharena.ai/imo/

Waiting for Terry Tao's thoughts, but these kind of things are good use of AI. We need to make science progress faster rather than disrupting our economy without being ready.
by zizee | 2025-07-19 10:24:18+00:00
Then they should easily fall within the regulation section posted earlier.

If you cannot see the difference between BitTorrent and Ai models, then it's probably not worth engaging with you.

But Ai model have been shown to reproduce the training data

https://gizmodo.com/ai-art-generators-ai-copyright-stable-di...

https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.13188
by piker | 2025-07-19 10:24:19+00:00
Agreed, but the point the author is missing is that complexity doesn't exist due to deliberate corporate lock in, but because the product is 40 years old and has had 10-11 ways to do just about everything it does. Unfortunately, as your case illustrates, there are still documents in the wild that depend on these legacy features. So to render with 100% fidelity, you end up in a sprawling web of complexity. Microsoft can afford to navigate that web (and already owns it). It's neigh impossible for an open-source product to do so.
by pyman | 2025-07-19 10:24:20+00:00
Talking about video streaming, I have a question for big tech companies: Why? Why are we still talking about optimising HTML, CSS and JS in 2025? This is tech from 35 years ago. Why can't browsers adopt a system like video streaming, where you "stream" a binary of your site? The server could publish a link to the uncompressed source so anyone can inspect it, keeping the spirit of the open web alive. Do you realise how many years web developers have spent obsessing over this document-based legacy system and how to improve its performance? Not just years, their whole careers! How many cool technologies were created in the last 35 years? I lost count. Honestly, why are big tech companies still building on top of a legacy system, forcing web developers to waste their time on things like performance tweaks instead of focusing on what actually matters: the product.
by spwa4 | 2025-07-19 10:24:23+00:00
Why, every single time governments want to raise tax, do they target individual people? The explicit goal was to increase tax collection from tech companies, and what do they do? Charge per employee, forcing everyone from startups (especially) to large tech companies, and everyone in between, from your garage to your phone company to really think about if they really need every software engineer they have.

This still effectively means the price difference between US and non-US software engineers (and ancillary, like data engineers) is increased by 1.04^15 (the risk-free interest rate on expenses, over 15 years). This works out to about US-based SWEs being about 33.5% cheaper. TLDR: this is not enough to prevent jobs moving to India. Or should I say, it means the US charges US companies per-employee income tax of 33.5% for every NON-US software engineer on top of their pay.
by fauigerzigerk | 2025-07-19 10:25:10+00:00
Not even EU institutions themselves are falling back on deaults that don't require cookie consent.

I'm constantly clicking away cookie banners on UK government or NHS (our public healthcare system) websites. The ICO (UK privacy watchdog) requires cookie consent. The EU Data Protection Supervisor wants cookie consent. Almost everyone does.

And you know why that is? It's not because they are scammy ad funded sites or because of government surveillance. It's because the "cookie law" requires consent even for completely reasonable forms of traffic analysis with the sole purpose of improving the site for its visitors.

This is impractical, unreasonable, counterproductive and unintelligent.
by c0l0 | 2025-07-19 10:25:28+00:00
The article touches upon an important point that applies to all complex (software/computer) and long-lived systems: "Too much outdated and inconsistent documentation (that makes learning the numerous tools needlessly hard.)"

The Debian Wiki is a great resource for many topics, but as with all documentation for very long-running projects - at least those that do big, "finished" releases from time to time - it seems tough to strike a balance between completeness and (temporal) relevance. Sure, in some weird edge case scenario, it might be helpful to know how this-and-that behaved or could be worked around in Debian 6 "Squeeze" in 2014, but information like that piling up also makes the article on the this-and-that subject VERY tedious to sift through if you are only interested in what's recent and relevant to Debian 12 "Bookworm" in 2025.

Most people contributing to documentation efforts (me included) seem very reluctant to throw out existing content in a wiki article, even though an argument could be made that the presence is sometimes objectively unhelpful for solving today's problems.

Maybe it would be worth a shot to fork the wiki (by copying all content and have a debian.wiki.org/6/ prefix for all things Squeeze, a /7/ for Wheey, a /12/ for bookworm, etc.) for each major release and encourage people to edit and extend release-specific pages with appropriate information, so readers and editors would have to "time-travel" through the project (anmd problem/solution) history in a more conscious and hopefully less confusing way, and make it easier for editors to prune information that's not just relevant for release N+1 any more.

I'm very open to learning more about anyone's thoughts on how to solve this well: How to keep documentation in "living documents", editable not only by a small group of contributors (like many projects to with mkdocs et al. as a replacement for an actual wiki), but also keep the "historic baggage" both easily discoverable (for when it's relevant and useful, because that does happen), yet not have it stand in the way of all those who will be confused and obstructed by its presence.
by alpaca128 | 2025-07-19 10:25:41+00:00
> can a company make the world better by making proprietary software?

If you assume a company that does not have any profit driven incentive to be anti-competitive and less accessible to some people, yes. But that's like assuming dictatorship can work if the dictator is just wise and benevolent enough. It's nice to think about but not viable in reality.

> it raises the barrier to entry and forces companies to choose agressive and hostile business models in order to get that investment back

You assume that corporations would not choose aggressive and hostile business models if they weren't forced to, which is obviously wrong.

> If a new "More Ethical Apple" could be started instantly with no software investment

This would not be possible with licenses that allow Apple to keep everything proprietary, which is what any profit driven company is incentivized to do. In other words, you need GPL for this scenario to be even theoretically possible.
by nosianu | 2025-07-19 10:25:53+00:00
> because cats can climb trees are more of a danger to humans than dog/wolves

That's on an individual level only though? Dogs/wolves are pack animals. I once stood in an empty eastern European city street and a pack of smallish/midsize street dogs came running straight towards me. For the first time I truly understood our ancestors fears[#]. If it had been just one or two dogs, especially with their at most middlish size I would not have cared. A whole pack is a very different ball game.

.

[#] They just ran past me, fortunately.
by deanc | 2025-07-19 10:25:57+00:00
Retargetting etc is massive revenue for online retailers. I support their right to do it if users consent to it. I don’t support their right to do it if users have not consented.

The conversation is not about my opinion on tracking, anyway. It’s about the impracticality of implementing the legislation that is hostile and time consuming for both website owners and users alike
by kristoff_it | 2025-07-19 10:26:02+00:00
We plan to have in Zig a testing `Io` implementation that will potentially use fuzzing to stress test your code under a concurrent execution model.

That said, I think a key insight is that we expect most of the library code out there to not do any calls to `io.async` or `io.asyncConcurrent`. Most database libraries for example don't need any of this and will still contain simple synchronous code. But then that code will be able to be used by application developers to express asynchrony at a higher level:

io.async(writeToDb) io.async(doOtherThing)

Which makes things way less error prone and simpler to understand than having async/await sprinkled all over the place.
by saghm | 2025-07-19 10:26:55+00:00
Yeah, and then most of them left and came here, which the article cites as having caused a "radical" divergence:

> Almost all Puritan clergy left the Church of England after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and the Act of Uniformity 1662. Many continued to practise their faith in nonconformist denominations, especially in Congregationalist and Presbyterian churches.[2] The nature of the Puritan movement in England changed radically. In New England, it retained its character for a longer period.

It's not crazy to think that this could have had an outsized influence on the US given how influential New England was in the early days. Even 120-130 years after the point that the quoted section mentions, when the colonies were transitioning into what's now the United States, close to a third of them were part of New England.
by xg15 | 2025-07-19 10:27:27+00:00
Not a biologist, but I'd think it depends what you then do with your stories.

If you treat it as a hypothesis to be tested, I don't see a problem - I think any way to come up with hypotheses is valid, as long as you're not repeating already investigated paths without new evidence.

On the other hand, treating a story as "true", only because it sounds somewhat compelling and logically consistent is a trap. This is how you get dogmatism and fringe stuff.
by sokoloff | 2025-07-19 10:27:45+00:00
Democrats also do not always do what the electorate wants.

How many times did they have executive and both houses since Roe v Wade without passing law to enshrine the right to abortion?

Surely they could have released the Epstein list as well.

We can argue which party is “worse than the other” for sure, but both serve themselves and neither is a bright shining star of serving the actual people IMO.
by whstl | 2025-07-19 10:29:07+00:00
I wish we could have this discussion without going into exaggerated extremes like "Linux". The OS rarely gets into discussions of rewriting dependencies.

I recently had to rewrite a table component and it took about an hour with extra performance and it became faster-to-use and tailored to my company's needs. One hour, give or take! With measurable performance improvements, and it's simpler to use for our use cases, and it doesn't prevent anyone from using the old one.

Comparing one-hour or even one-day work with rewriting Linux is ridiculous fear-mongering.
by sameermanek | 2025-07-19 10:30:50+00:00
Honestly, US is really not in a good shape to support your argument.

If aristocratic figures had so much power in EU, they wouldnt be fleeing from the union.

In reality, US is plagued with greed, scams, mafias in all sectors, human rights violations and a economy thats like a house of cards. In contrast, you feel human when you're in EU. You have voice, rights and common sense!

It definitely has its flaws, but atleast the presidents there are not rug pulling their own citizens and giving pardons to crypto scammers.. Right?
by spwa4 | 2025-07-19 10:31:21+00:00
Given the wage difference ... what does it matter? You make 200%-300% after tax in the US what you make in high cost areas of Europe (despite that the pre-tax difference is closer to 75% to maybe 125%). Normal US pay is comparable to tax-haven pay elsewhere: Europe (London, Luxembourg), Middle East (UAE), Asia (Singapore).

So in "a few years" (let's say 2-3 years) you'd be able to make between 5 and 10 years' worth of European net pay. If you don't raise your spending, that will easily cover your living expenses during the next recession, even if you spend all of it unemployed.

And that's if you start now. If you've been doing this for 10 years already ... wow.
by buran77 | 2025-07-19 10:31:43+00:00
> "they made their decision, let's see them enforce it"

This was one lesson the common people never wanted to learn because it was so much easier to live on the belief that their system is intrinsically immune to abuse, it's just better, magically almost. It was bolstered by the same people's desire to feel better by pointing fingers at the "weak fools" living under dictatorships, incapable to fight. "We have rights and guns, we'll pick up arms and fight any abuse".

But when the abuses came pouring almost everyone piffled, living on the next belief that time will fix things. Sometimes it did. Or maybe one of these times will bring the shocking realization that it's easy to talk big in good times and hard to act in bad times when your skin is in the game.
by messe | 2025-07-19 10:32:05+00:00
> If I launch 2 network requests from my async JavaScript and both are in flight then that’s concurrent.

That's because JS conflates the two. The async keyword in JavaScript queues things for the event loop which is running in a different thread, and progress will be made on them even if they are never awaited. In Rust, for example, nothing will happen unless those Futures are awaited.
by KronisLV | 2025-07-19 10:32:58+00:00
Stumbled upon issues when updating from an older MariaDB 10 release to MariaDB 11 when some Go software was trying to connect to it using a MySQL driver. Seems like people have similar issues with other stacks as well as well: https://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=111697

I could just use MariaDB drivers where available, but honestly MySQL seems more popular and the MariaDB SPAC and layoffs soured my view of them; ofc PostgreSQL is also nice.
by Neil44 | 2025-07-19 10:32:59+00:00
It's not as straightforward as that. It's more like scammers getting other people to buy gift cards which are redeemed in steam and other games then the value getting moved around as in-game currency between game accounts (game-bucks, special items) before being cashed out again to make tracing very hard. Essentially laundering. I assume certain titles attract scammers because people will not want to pursue the claims due to embarrassment. Why would Mastercard give a hoot that a game has boobs in it? They care about loosing money.
by iinnPP | 2025-07-19 10:33:31+00:00
You'll find that people "stop caring" about just about anything when it starts to impact them. Personally, I agree with your statement.

Since a main argument is seemingly that AI is worse, let's remember that AI is querying these huge pages as well.

Also that the 14kb size is less than 1% of the current average mobile website payload.
by Mawr | 2025-07-19 10:33:42+00:00
Comparisons between software and structural engineering make no sense, ever.

Structures are one-and-done projects with engineers having access to concrete data on material strength, load calculations, etc.

Software projects are never ending, always chasing ever changing requirements. There are no comforting rules of math and physics to fall back on. There are no "load and safety" calculations that another software engineer can perform on a program to verify its integrity.
by z7 | 2025-07-19 10:34:35+00:00
Some previous predictions:

In 2021 Paul Christiano wrote he would update from 30% to "50% chance of hard takeoff" if we saw an IMO gold by 2025.

He thought there was an 8% chance of this happening.

Eliezer Yudkowsky said "at least 16%".

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sWLLdG6DWJEy3CH7n/imo-challe...
by johnisgood | 2025-07-19 10:35:35+00:00
OK, but look at the original statement, that cash is mainly used for illegal activities. I do not think that is true.

Now, check this out:

> Cash was the most frequently used payment method at the POS in the euro area and was used in 52% (59%) of transactions, but the share of cash payments has declined.

> Cash was the most frequently used payment method for small-value payments at the POS, in line with previous surveys. For payments over €50, cards were the most frequently used payment method.

> Cash was the dominant means of payment in P2P transactions, accounting for 41% of such payments. Cards and mobile apps were used for 33%, credit transfers for 9% and instant payments for 6% of P2P transactions.

https://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/ecb_surveys/space/html/ecb.s...

This is to be expected though:

> The most frequently used instrument for online payments was cards, representing 48% (51%) of transactions. The share of e-payment solutions, i.e. payment wallets and mobile apps, was 29% (26%).

> The large majority of recurring payments were made using direct debit, with credit transfers ranking in second place.

Regarding privacy:

> A majority of euro area consumers (58%) said they were concerned about their privacy when performing digital payments or other banking activities.

I think they genuinely care about privacy and are not thugs.
by noduerme | 2025-07-19 10:35:37+00:00
It's not nonsense. I've hosted, moderated and managed sites that were only obliquely related to porn or gambling, and you wouldn't believe the level of rejection for running ads or getting payment processing that they are faced with. And I ran a casino for 4 years. I coded it and I ran it 24/7, and believe me, I did everything by the book. The CC companies do not give a shit as long as they make money. Chargebacks cost them a lot in time more than in actual cash, and they have categories of risk for every merchant who may expose them to that risk. The highest categories of risk are porn and gambling.

Any entity that uses a CC gateway and has any exposure to either of those risks is exposing itself to all the risk. The CC companies almost certainly told Valve that they would be considered a porn site and face a 1.5%-2% higher processing fee for every transaction.

No nonsense involved, that's how it works.
by jononor | 2025-07-19 10:35:53+00:00
What exactly do you mean by replace? Replace in particular roles (causing the humans to shift into new roles), or replace as in nothing useful left for humans to do? Those are two very different trajectories.

So far in the industrial revolution we have been experiencing the first. Waves of automation that displaces workers in one role, and then new roles open up for humans (often involving the machines). I believe that for the foreseeable future human + AI tools (symbiosis) will be a much stronger than AI alone. Of course it will tend towards more and more AI per human over time. The same way modern manufacturing is "machine tending", where a few workers might supervise a factory that outputs what would have taken thousands of workers in the past. If the thing being produced is has unrealized demand, then we would expect that being able to do it more effectively would just mean more production, possibly to the extent that the same or even more humans are needed to produce it. So the real questions are - which things does humanity have a lot more demand for (2-1000x) - and can be made more effective with AI in the loop / on the team. And the flip side, which things are we near max demand for, and can also be made more effective with AI. Jobs in those areas are going to be decimated, move away as quickly as possible.