MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by simianparrot | 2025-07-20 11:26:37+00:00
Airplane tickets used to cost a lot more for economy class, even adjusted for inflation and fees. To get the equivalent service and quality today you simply have to pay more, you just have the choice of paying very little for very low quality because there’s more flights and more planes.

https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/even-with-fees-the-miracle-of...

Same can be said for most electronics and even clothes. I’m not saying that a high price label guarantees high quality, just that the spectrum of cost vs quality has broadened, even within big name brands. There’s now cheap and expensive Nike ranges, for example, where there used to be only the quality expensive tier.

But if you look at the cost of, say, quality furniture today and adjust for inflation, it’s going to be around the same as quality furniture 50 years ago. We just have the choice to pay a lot less for much worse now.
by Chloebaker | 2025-07-20 11:26:41+00:00
Not a day goes by where I don't mourn the desecration of the em-dash, but its frustrating for people that write “authentcally” (referring to academic work) to get accused of AI writing, when something is well phrased and carefully thought out. I do agree on the fact that its quite Luddite to expect people to slave away at a document outside of an academic context, using AI does make you much more efficient
by latexr | 2025-07-20 11:26:55+00:00
This brought me back to when I used to run Linux without a GUI. I remember using mplayer for videos then but don’t recall what I did for images. I don’t have a need for this project, but congrats on making it and on a clear README with instructions and relevant screenshots (rarer than it should be).

One thing is leaving me scratching my head. The names stands for “Phono in Terminal”, but what is “phono”?
by Telemakhos | 2025-07-20 11:27:30+00:00
> what's the difference between a law and a rule

In ancient Greek, I'm not sure there is one. νόμος covers a lot of ground that English divides into laws, rules, and customs. There are, of course, other terms for each category: νόμοι for laws; κανώνες for rules, both in the sense of laws that straighten crooked behavior and straightedges for drawing straight lines; and καθεστῶτα for institutions or customs; but νόμοι generally does duty for all of them, especially in, say, Herodotus, who means all three with the word.

The victim of murder is the victim of the murder; in ancient Athens, anyone who wanted (ὁ βουλόμενος, an important concept in early democracy) could bring a charge against you, but there was no prosecutor for the state. That's why anyone who wanted could bring the charge. The idea that the state is the victim is a very new phenomenon. There also wasn't much in the way of public law enforcement in Athens, at least not in terms of a standing police force, which doesn't really come around until the eighteenth century.
by ghaff | 2025-07-20 11:28:54+00:00
Generally agree.

In snowbelt (and even somewhat sub-snowbelt) regions, cars would pretty much rust out at 50K miles and starting when conditions were wet or cold could be an adventure.

And, while I have the option of buying an expensive "handmade" (with the aid of expensive CNC equipment) dining room table--which I have done--I also have the option of buying a sturdy and nice-looking mail-order bed for $300 that I assemble.

Housing is the main thing but, as you say, that's mostly a matter of location. There are a ton of cheaper locations but many don't want to live there--even if they're fairly accessible to a major city.
by motorest | 2025-07-20 11:28:58+00:00
> Cool. How many "complete, fully working" products have you released?

Fully featured? One, so far.

I also worked on small backing services, and a GUI application to visualize the data provided by a backing service.

I lost count of the number of API testing projects I vibe-coded. I have a few instruction files that help me vibecode API test suites from the OpenAPI specs. Postman collections work even better.

And I'm far from an expert in the field.

What point were you trying to make?
by fcpguru | 2025-07-20 11:30:23+00:00
I thought synthetic training data was a different concept:

Use a current LLM to generate a bunch of fake reddit posts, other websites, code, etc. billions of artifacts but change certain properties of our real world. You could make the sky red, and dogs able to talk, and dolphins as well you get the idea. Anything goes. Generate not just a crazy world but all the artifacts from this world. Then train an new LLM on this crazy data. Now ask questions. And rather that silly changes like sky is red, you can do really fundamental changes to the laws of physics and from that, learn something new about the real rules.
by pas | 2025-07-20 11:30:24+00:00
people are addicted to features though

that's why these pure/fair/libre phones were failing to reach any market share and even sustainability.

but things are slowly getting better, projects underway to get smoother better performance on every platform, taking better care of the battery (limit charge to some percentage), use more efficient stack - from network to graphics, Bluetooth and WiFi and of course all the other radios.

...

sure, most of this is unfortunately unnoticeable compared to the billions of people glued to the absolutely TikTokified Internet :/

(well, hopefully we'll get through this phase of developing social immune system for a new medium faster than we did after the printing press, after the radio, and after TV)
by krapp | 2025-07-20 11:30:49+00:00
I think the fear of being confused for AI is a generational thing. Wait until the first "AI native" generation takes over and AI is the primary means by which people communicate with one another and interact with the world, the very concept will seem alien and absurd.

Of course "writing" itself will likely become passe as literacy drops with attention spans, and most AI interaction is done through dynamically generated video and audio. That process is already underway.
by achempion | 2025-07-20 11:30:51+00:00
> A Starbucks frappucino cost 0.55c to make

I saw variants of this phrase a lot, but I don't think it's accurate. I wouldn't be surprised if 0.55 would be close to a payment processing fee alone.

My very rough estimate is frappucino costs close to $5 to make. I used Starbucks located in Manhattan, New York to make it even more cliché.

- Ingredients & disposables: $1.03

- Direct labor (including shift supervisor): $1.30

- Occupancy (rent, insurance): $1.54

- Equipment depreciation: $0.14

- Utilities: $0.10

- Supplies, cleaning, waste: $0.10

- Management, marketing, investment: $0.60

- Card processing, other: $0.16

Total: $4.97
by deadbabe | 2025-07-20 11:31:16+00:00
Web is obsolete. Going forward AI is the first and maybe last step to getting information about a topic. No need to sift through ads, forum drama, clickbait blog posts, comments etc… just straight compiled information into your brain as quickly as possible. Yea sometimes it’s wrong, but sometimes things you find on the wild web are wrong anyway, just deal with it.

I find that when people pine for the old web, what they’re really asking for is some way to connect to other people and see things that people have written or made just for fun in a genuine way, without it being performative, derivative or for other motivations.

In theory social media should have been this, but people’s constant need to accumulate validation or tendency to produce meme-like content adversely affects the quality of their output, giving it a machined style feel that rarely feels genuine or true to their human nature. Instead of seeing people’s true personalities, you see their “masks”.

Thus the issue is not rooted in a technical problem but rather a cultural one: people no longer naively share things that don’t fuel their ego in the most perfect way.
by elaus | 2025-07-20 11:32:10+00:00
> Same can be said for most electronics and even clothes.

I wish that were my experience as well. However, I've found that most brands simply add a huge markup for their name while investing very little into quality. As a result, you end up paying three times the price for just 20% better quality.

When it comes to electronics, I feel like I can judge that for myself, and my gut feeling about clothing was confirmed after falling down a YouTube rabbit hole of "clothing teardowns."
by PeterStuer | 2025-07-20 11:32:14+00:00
I don't think I explained it well if that is what you get from it.

When I say 'I get the angst', I do not mean ungrounded fears. e.g. Captured regulation killing off open model creation and use and locking AI behind a few aligned actors making sure the tech's advantages go to the select few and their serves being one of them. When I say 'dramatic change' I do not mean dramatic as in a comedy play, but real deep societal impact with a significant chance of total turmoil.

What I tried to address is the dismissive 'reactionary' response of belittling and denying the technology itself, not just in some 'tech' circles, but almost endemic in academia. "It's nothing new", "just a 'stochastic parrot'", "just lossy compression", "just a parlor trick", "a useless hallucination merry-go-round", "another round of anthropomorphism for the gullible" etc. etc.
by 0wis | 2025-07-20 11:32:19+00:00
Not that sure. I know Bosch, Liebherr and Samsung fridges bought in the 2000’s that lasted 10+ years, some of them that keeps running even after being used heavily (being moved, used by families of 5…etc). They are repairable and some got repaired. They are 2-3000€+. Which is 2-3x the average monthly salary.

An other thing to account for is the price of repairs. If your appliances costs less than one hour of a mid-skill technician, it’s hard to justify the spending. Same for doing it yourself if you’re time is worth a lot. The only solution is to by high end, which is always risky and more cash intensive. Most people will prefer buying cheap and change to new if required
by ben_w | 2025-07-20 11:32:45+00:00
> What did the Romans brought us really?

War, pestilence, famine, and death.

An excuse like "everyone else was doing it!" only goes as far as making my ancestors "not spectacularly evil", it definitely does not make them "good".

The railways are in the plus column, but would you accept your country being taken over by several different groups of aliens who draw random-seeming lines on the maps that even split up your existing cities between them, each forcing their own language and religious customs on their bit of your land, being really brutal in their suppression of any resistance campaigns, in exchange for a network of teleporter booths?
by Ray20 | 2025-07-20 11:32:49+00:00
Only the parable does not work. Objectively. The fact that the poor are forced to spend more because they cannot afford something is complete bs. I can't imagine any area (maybe except perhaps interaction with government bureaucracy) where the parable would be relevant.

Shoes that last a decade are cost a lot more than five pairs of cheap shoes that last two years. And the same with furniture and everything else.

"Pay less in the long run" is a pure marketing ploy for dumb pompous people with money to make them pay more.
by ColinWright | 2025-07-20 11:33:42+00:00
Seen here:

https://www-senat-fr.translate.goog/compte-rendu-commissions...

================================================================

Quoting the translation:

Mr. Dany Wattebled , rapporteur . - Mr. Carniaux, as Director of Public and Legal Affairs, you represent Microsoft France before public decision-makers. Can you guarantee before our committee, under oath, that the data of French citizens entrusted to Microsoft via UGAP will never be transmitted, following an injunction from the American government, without the explicit agreement of the French authorities?

Mr. Anton Carniaux . - No, I cannot guarantee that, but, again, it has never happened before.

================================================================

Original:

M. Dany Wattebled, rapporteur. - Monsieur Carniaux, en tant que directeur des affaires publiques et juridiques, vous représentez Microsoft France auprès des décideurs publics. Pouvez-vous garantir devant notre commission, sous serment, que les données des citoyens français confiées à Microsoft via l'Ugap ne seront jamais transmises, à la suite d'une injonction du gouvernement américain, sans l'accord explicite des autorités françaises ?

M. Anton Carniaux. - Non, je ne peux pas le garantir, mais, encore une fois, cela ne s'est encore jamais produit.

================================================================

Thread on Mastodon:

https://toot.cat/@devopscats/114879479938557566
by weinzierl | 2025-07-20 11:34:07+00:00
People fall largely in two categories: Those who condemn the past and those who glorify it.

Of course the reality is between. Whenever something experiences mass adoption, of course quality will decline, e. g. airplane seats with mass adoption of flying.

But so, so many things improved dramatically in quality. I could give you endless examples but just think about cars.

Despite anecdata to the contrary the reliability of cars increased over the decades.

Most 60s cars had rust problems after a couple of years. By the 80s this was largely solved.

Most 70s cars had all kinds of mechanical problems but by the 90s this was largely solved.

Most 80s cars had lots of electronics problems but by the 2000s this was largely solved.

Sure we still have software issues and the whole transition to EV's makes has us deal with new problems, but do I want any of my old cars back? Hell no!
by shelsilverstein | 2025-07-20 11:34:48+00:00
This is missing the point of the post.

New iPhones and Android phones eventually have to be replaced because the software is no longer supported. Flip phones continue to be supported, if we would just use them to call people, which would use up less of our lifespan than smartphones, playing games and using social media. Note: I personally wouldn’t suggest flip phones for everyone, because smartphones are expected for some types of MFA now.

The post also says that a lot more clothing is produced and sold that is cheap quality, resulting in more waste. Fast-fashion is also popular, which results in more low-quality material being thrown away than the previous slower release of new styles.

imo the way to help would be to:

- Save enough money to buy higher quality used appliances, clothing, furniture, etc. and stop funding the companies that do this.

- Don’t use social media or websites/apps that promote (through ads or just photos/video) purchase and consumption of low quality goods. Buy used products instead.

I think there’s an opportunity here for everyone to get involved. You can still purchase high quality products, because the point is to increase product quality for future generations.
by binary132 | 2025-07-20 11:35:08+00:00
The more time you spend in software engineering the more you realize that this is actually brilliant and helpful, not bad. And IME, the more expressivity I have fluently at my disposal, the more complexity I tend to create. I’m not saying I don’t enjoy more complex languages, but reducing cognitive load and easing collaboration with more junior engineers are easily the best features of Go, hands down (although I can’t say the new generics necessarily always help with that).
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-07-20 11:35:32+00:00
The TP-Link Tapo cameras I have are wireless and seem to work well enough. I'd recommend to run them through frigate or some other independent surveillance software if you don't want them internet accessible.

They're quite cheap when they're on special, and Amazon seem to have specials on them relatively regularly.

(as much as I don't like to recommend Amazon for anything)
by nativeit | 2025-07-20 11:35:57+00:00
Trappist quad ales feature a high alcohol content, which makes them sweet but somehow not cloyingly so. Robust Belgian yeasts generate a surprising amount of effervescence, which keeps things light despite the heavy doses of malted barley, and produce esters that generate flavors of banana bread and dark stone fruits that compliment latent notes of burnt sugars and caramel.

That’s a pretty standard description of some of the best ales on the planet (produced by monks in Belgium), if anyone’s curious.
by FreakLegion | 2025-07-20 11:36:01+00:00
I've seen Steve's talk. Like all historical accounts it's just a story. It pulls some details into the foreground and pushes the rest back. Other stories arrange the details differently, for example marking Silicon Valley's beginning quite a bit earlier, with the founding of HP, a decade before the Department of Defense existed. Steve's version isn't some transcendental truth, and people aren't wrong to disagree with it or with you.
by impossiblefork | 2025-07-20 11:36:21+00:00
I don't see how this can be resistant to manipulation.

I don't see how it can be resistant to foreigners flooding the system with their text or to people creating multiple accounts to have an outsized influence.

I think if those problems could be solved it would be the best thing in the world, but the funnel procedure and the meritocratic promotion don't matter in the absence of those things. There are also many ways to do what this system proposes. A threaded discussion system is also good.

The problem is instead the lack of manipulation resistance from multiple accounts and people who shouldn't have accounts at all.
by subscribed | 2025-07-20 11:36:44+00:00
Interesting, my experience with Levi's and Wrangler is equally the opposite, and to the larger extent - 501's, 510's would barely survive 6-9 months of wearing, while Wranglers (mostly Arizona And Texas) happily roll into... <checks purchase date> third year.

Washing in 30 degrees, always tumble drying on low (dryer has a humidity sensor and stops when it's dry, doesn't overdo).
by dijit | 2025-07-20 11:36:47+00:00
They were really trying with MeeGo, we used to joke that we had the most expensive clock app in the world because it had been remade so many times. People forget that R&D can be super expensive. Apple definitely cooked there.

Symbian though, I mean, considering the hardware constraints was crazy!

The smartphone variant of Symbian needed 2MiB of Memory and supported Qt... madness.
by jiggawatts | 2025-07-20 11:37:39+00:00
Apologies if I misunderstood your question, but I suspect it doesn't matter because the answer would be the same in any event.

This whole discussion for me is a bit like hearing that my child is safe at the kindergarten because the male staff promise to always use condoms.

The relative safety of various cryptographic approaches (or fancy protocols) is irrelevant when the fundamental problem is that it is deeply suspicious that the government keeps trying to insert themselves into my private life. In my crude analogy, they'd be a registered sex offender working in child care.

Any such repeated attempt at spying on the public, blocking opposing political voices, silencing journalists, or anything at all that even smells like those things must be vehemently opposed. Platitudes and assurances can never be enough from a government with a history of abusing this kind of power.
by ofrzeta | 2025-07-20 11:38:07+00:00
> Gemini Pro 2.5 has a context window of 1 million tokens and wants to rise that to 2 million tokens soon. 1 token is approx 0.75 words, so 1 million tokens would be in the ballpark of 3k pages of code.

You mean around 3000 files with 3000 characters? That is a lot. I've played with some other LLMs in Agentic AIs but at work we are using Copilot, and when I add context through drag and drop it seems to be limited to some dozen files.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-07-20 11:38:39+00:00
I don't disagree with your point, but I suppose my wish then is that there were not low-quality (low-cost) everything in the world right now.

<ramble>

I'm not unsympathetic regarding the poor, I grew up poor myself. And my single working mother raising two kids got by on hand-me-down furniture from her mother (probably, as you and the article suggest, of decent quality though).

Having the option for (new) inexpensive everything allows us to accept low-quality; even encourages it (as has been pointed out, there's a Dopamine hit from purchasing a new thing … I don't know if the same rush comes from purchasing a used piece of furniture from a Goodwill — I suspect though it does somewhat). And, as we know, the landfills, oceans, become the destination for all this consumption.

I admit that I am surprised that I am finding myself wishing that we, the Western world, were poorer again. It seems though that manufacturing has caught up to (down to?) the ability to provide new crap for us even if we were poorer.

One wonders what the Great Depression would resemble in the 21st Century. Would we still have the latest, but crappy, gadgets and such? I sure can't imagine new car sales would not be seriously impacted.

</ramble>
by jillesvangurp | 2025-07-20 11:38:51+00:00
At the same time, apps are also a bit in decline. People still make them but the whole race for making it to the top 10 in the app stores seems to have faded away. And a lot of them are simple web page wrappers. People still install some apps but more on a need to have basis than that they are constantly adding/removing apps. So, I don't buy this "the web is in decline" framing.

Change is a constant on the web. Things were very different in 1995 (plain html, no good search engines), 2005 (no widespread web capable smart phones usage yet, Google, AJAX), 2015 (peak social media and app hype), and 2025 (social media has shifted to new apps and lots of people are disengaging entirely, AI is starting to threaten Google, content aggregators serve most web content).

For 2035, I would predict that AI will drive a need for authenticity. Existing platforms don't provide this because they lack content signatures. We've had the tools to reliably sign content for decades. But we don't use those a lot except for DRM content behind paywalls (for commercial reasons). So, you can't really tell apart the AI generated propaganda, marketing, misinformation, etc. from authentic human created content by individuals you care about. And that might be contributing to people disengaging a bit. But you can see the beginnings of this on platforms like bluesky and signal which push end to end encryption and user verification. People might share AI nonsense via these platforms. But they seem to be less about that as say X, Tik Tok or Instagram are. We sometimes watermark our images. We don't digitally sign them. Why is that?

Just speculating here but the web could use a big upgrade here and do more than just certify domain name ownership. Which is fairly meaningless if the domain is some big network with many millions of users. What about certifying content itself? Reliably tie content to their creators in a way that can't be forged. IMHO this is long overdue and the related UX challenges are there but solvable in principle. DRM is a prime example of a fairly usable implementation. Just works if you paid for the content. Signed content would make it very challenging to pass off AI gibberish as authentic if it's not signed by a reputable private key. And if it happened anyway, that would damage the reputation of that key. I don't exclude the possibility of reputable AIs emerging. How would you tell those apart from the disreputable ones?
by CharlieDigital | 2025-07-20 11:39:00+00:00
Or be like me and not care about the Duke structure at all.

I don't sync my namespaces to file paths and instead only use namespaces to logically group imports. That let's me organize the visual structure of the tree independently of the logical structure.

Every IDE now has great navigation utilities that doesn't require click based navigation so I don't see the infatuation some folks have with syncing these.

In JS, end up creating stupid barrel files all over the place.