MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by riedel | 2025-07-31 10:43:08+00:00
I can totally relate. Even going to the toilet is difficult on hyperfocus. Stupid thing is that to make things 'interesting' for my brain they often have to get overdue, adding unnecessary stress until that point. But it is all about acknowledging that in my case and working with it. I guess other people are a lot further down the spectrum or have jobs where this does not work. But I also know how much this ability actually helped me in the past (and annoyed other people I guess)
by williamdclt | 2025-07-31 10:45:43+00:00
How is this funny? You make it sound like it's hypocritical or self-unaware. I'm finding the opposite: it's exactly because these people are aware of what social media does to them (and/or close friends and relationships) that they want it to be out of kids hands who'd be even more impacted by the negative aspects of it.

In other words, they're not saying "it's okay when I do it but not kids", they're saying "even as an adult it's impacting me, let's not poison kids"
by TheNewsIsHere | 2025-07-31 10:45:55+00:00
It wasn’t just programming either. It was anything with computing. I remember when you could walk into a book store and find a wall of books on Linux, so many of which came with “the Publisher’s Edition” of a Linux distro. That’s how I learned (and obtained!) Linux for the first time. I was hooked.

Where else was a kid going to get a full Linux suite (with just a dial up connection) and a sound basic education for it, in 2003?

I never quite took that for granted, but I still miss being able to walk into a bookstore and walk out with a book with software included. There was something really special about that.
by potato3732842 | 2025-07-31 10:46:38+00:00
We need to stop calling these insane perverse situations the outcome of "well-intentioned regulations". Every single one of theses regulations passed over the warnings of people at the time who predicted they would cause or contribute to exactly the outcomes we see now. The regulations and their peddlers are about as well intentioned as the carbon fiber submarine dude. The peddlers of these regulations wanted the regulations and ignored everyone who told them something they didn't want to hear. That's not well intentioned. That's behavior on a spectrum from ignorant to malicious.
by amiga386 | 2025-07-31 10:46:44+00:00
It seems somewhat overblown.

It claims HTTP/1.1 "is inherently insecure". This seems like hype, and indeed the countdown is to when some guy gives a talk - it's a promotional website for that guy.

What appears to be the issue is that HTTP/1.1 (as defined in RFC 2616) is ambiguous, and differing server implementations have differing interpretations, leading to security bugs - great, we can fix those bugs. We already obsoleted RFC 2616 and wrote RFC 7230 and RFC 7231 to eliminate this class of attacks, provided implementations follow it. It appears everything listed so far is servers/proxies that don't follow RFC 7230.

I suppose it does raise the question: do you know what your HTTP client/server's behaviour on ambiguous requests is? It would be nice to have a comprehensive test suite to find out.
by muzani | 2025-07-31 10:49:55+00:00
It's great when you're in the driver seat. It's not great when they need to launch in 3 months and management throws a bunch of intermediate engineers at you who can't do anything without "type safety".

Software will continue to grow to the point where people move rapidly until they hit a limit. We laugh at future devs being weak, future devs laugh at our tech being unsafe.
by viraptor | 2025-07-31 10:50:43+00:00
> This gives the government the power to deny you access to mass communication

They already can in the ID scenarios. Since they issue IDs.

> You're also at the mercy of them to actually adhere to the "no logging" part

That's part of the equation. To be tracked, two parties have to fail: the issuing side needs to log the details and the verifying side needs to log the details, and then agree to share them when they don't have to. There are existing laws that would enable this in simpler ways.

> to sell anonymous age verification cards at adult stores, liquor stores, tobacco stores, etc. Paid in cash.

What you mean is: share your ID details with those places repeatedly and require people to travel to them from remote areas (there's lots of places where that would mean a day trip at least). I'm not sure that's better. Also making that process time-limited would be really costly.

> An even better idea is to not do any of this

Sure, but that's not the scenario we're in anymore.
by uyzstvqs | 2025-07-31 10:51:24+00:00
Because most parents are oblivious to the danger, and are not taking action on their own. Meanwhile the unrestricted internet can be just as dangerous to a child's development as alcohol or drugs, if not more.

The regulation should just specify a few standards that parental controls must meet, such as the standard that every new action in any app must first be approved by a parent, and it should regulate that minors may not use or have possession of unrestricted internet devices. The actual development of that technology, and the frameworks to integrate apps with them, should definitely be up to private companies and open-source projects.
by potato3732842 | 2025-07-31 10:53:36+00:00
>keeping neighborhoods unchanged for generations, making sure everyone up-and-down society gets veto power over any project

You're giving government too much benefit of the doubt. It's not even private stakeholders vetoing these things. Often times is even opposed to these small projects in ways that the most tiny cheap concessions couldn't mitigate. A great many of these projects are dying because the government and its bureaucracy can't/won't approve them, not because anyone doesn't want them.
by SapporoChris | 2025-07-31 10:55:00+00:00
"Workout for 2.5 hours a day, plus 60-90 minutes transport on a bike, you can pretty much eat anything you like."

Trivial to debunk. Assuming 150 pounds. Weight lifting 2.5 hours: 1051 calories Cycling Moderate 1.5 hours: 1051 calories I'll generously add 2000 calories for the rest of the days activities.

Water intake daily 3.7 liters. 3.7 liters of soda: 1600 calories Burger and Fries: 1000 calories, 3 times a day: 3000 calories.

Calories burned daily total: 4102 calories Calories ingested daily: 4600 calories Yearly weight gain: 498*365/3500 = ~51 pounds.

You can flex the numbers a number of ways, but it's obvious that you cannot pretty much eat anything you like. Exercise does not make up for a bad diet.
by zdragnar | 2025-07-31 10:55:00+00:00
What they're doing is having someone else manage their stocks, but by some strange coincidence their manager makes amazingly successful trades.

Sensor Scott opposes the blanket ban because insider trading is already illegal, and thus the ban makes punishable otherwise entirely legal behavior. And he's right- it isn't, and shouldn't be, illegal or considered wrong to be successful, if done the right way.

There's a middle ground somewhere in there I'm sure, but given how suspiciously well some members of Congress have done, and how there's been seemingly not enough accountability of it, I'm not terribly empathetic.
by jononor | 2025-07-31 10:55:51+00:00
There is a hack for that: write the comments before and/or as you write the code. When things are still unclear, weird. Of course do a final pass on them to ensure that they are correct and useful in the end. This is one example of document as-you-go, instead of doing it after "the work" is done. I find it generally leads to better outcomes. Doing documenting only at the end is in many ways the worst way to do it.
by darkwater | 2025-07-31 10:56:38+00:00
> Tech debt is specifically borrowing against the right way to do something in order to speed up delivery but knowing that either the code will need updating later to cope with future requirements or that it is definitely not done in a reliable/performant/safe way and almost certainly will need visiting again.

Thing that many people do without even realizing they are incurring in tech debt. This kind of developers are the one that will just generate more tech debt with an LLM in their hands (at least now).
by piva00 | 2025-07-31 10:57:04+00:00
It's the direct result of the political ambitions of Netanyahu, using Hamas as a wedge for Palestinians to have less power[0][1].

> According to various reports, Netanyahu made a similar point at a Likud faction meeting in early 2019, when he was quoted as saying that those who oppose a Palestinian state should support the transfer of funds to Gaza, because maintaining the separation between the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza would prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Oct 7th is the direct result of a policy to keep Palestinians out of a two-state solution, it's the direct result of Netanyahu's politics play.

[0] https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up...

[1] https://www.jpost.com/arab-israeli-conflict/netanyahu-money-...
by Zambyte | 2025-07-31 10:58:05+00:00
The nice thing about using a language model over using a traditional search engine is being able to provide specific context (ie disambiguate where keyword searches would be ambiguous) and to correlate unrelated information that would require multiple traditional searches using a single LLM query. I use Kagi, which provides interfaces for both traditional keyword searches, and for LLM chats. I use whichever is more appropriate for any given query.
by theptip | 2025-07-31 10:58:17+00:00
This will be one of the big fights of the next couple years. On what terms can an Agent morally and legally claim to be a user?

As a user I want the agent to be my full proxy. As a website operator I don’t want a mob of bots draining my resources.

Perhaps a good analogy is Mint and the bank account scraping they had to do in the 2010s, because no bank offered APIs with scoped permissions. Lots of customers complained, and after Plaid made it big business, eventually they relented and built the scalable solution.

The technical solution here is probably some combination of offering MCP endpoints for your actions, and some direct blob store access for static content. (Maybe even figuring out how to bill content loading to the consumer so agents foot the bill.)
by cheschire | 2025-07-31 10:58:19+00:00
Sorry, to be clear I meant no significant problems with the tech.

Sure, it was opinionated tech, but that would’ve been ok if they had stuck with it like C# itself and fleshed it out more, which only would’ve happened had they implemented the entire OS in it. The fact that they couldn’t is in my mind the exact reason the tech failed.
by __jochen__ | 2025-07-31 10:59:52+00:00
I agree the naming is a mess. There is the Australian Digital ID system (https://www.digitalidsystem.gov.au/how-the-system-works) which allows third party providers.

Whatever the capabilities of the Australian government ID services, there is a way to issue privacy-preserving tokens that could do all the things you'd need without being trackable the system was properly designed. (I have not studied the protocols of the Digital ID spec to say whether that's the case).
by skeezyboy | 2025-07-31 10:59:57+00:00
You say you only calculate rate of return on the "capital you put down"...Im not following here, do you think because youre spending profit from the farming operation that loan for the farm is paying for itself? The tbills pay for themself.... you have to work the farm for 20 years to pay back that 5 million. Its an apples and oranges comparison there.
by benterix | 2025-07-31 11:00:53+00:00
I thought a lot about this. In life, we have things we have to do (work, chores) and thing we like to do (could be anything, also work, why not).

So the problem appears when you start to feel that you spend your life on things you have to do, and you have very little time for things you want to do. This is something everybody experiences at some point.

For me, one of the most happy periods of my life was when I was working 4 days a week, for example. It gave me a lot of space to actually feel I'm living. It also gave me a slightly greater sense of control over my life, and the time to appreciate it. As for the type of activity, it's secondary.
by WJW | 2025-07-31 11:01:00+00:00
> BPS depends on terrestrial stations instead of satellites, like Loran, which was used in the past.

> BPS is at least as easily jammed or disabled as GPS.

So which is it? Because LORAN was much harder to jam than GPS. The jamming resistance of any positioning system is mostly based on the ability to overpower the legitimate signals arriving at the receiving antenna. The problem with satellite based positioning systems is:

1. Satellites have relatively little power available to them, which makes their broadcasts rather weak. Terrestial transmitters can be much more powerful.

2. Satellites are very far away, which causes the received power to be very attenuated. Terrestial transmitters can be much closer.

There are many valid reasons to choose GNSS over terrestial approaches, but jamming resistance is not one of them.

Source: I was a weapons engineering officer for the Dutch Navy for many years and jammability of our positioning systems was a constant concern, to the point of ships being equipped with LORAN-C receivers well into the 2000s as a backup for GPS.
by Tor3 | 2025-07-31 11:01:04+00:00
I'm reacting against the word "intuition" here. Nobody said it isn't a wave. But it's not like a wave as our intuition says.

(Though it does not _always_ look like a wave - check out the timelapse video from Kuji harbor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1B1J6sgFxk - that's why you'll sometimes see people talking about it looking like a (very) high tide. As an example of the nightmare "wave" which doesn't stop, and is thus un-intuitive.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3618dZoiaPE which is incidentally also from Kuji, but from 2011)
by brushfoot | 2025-07-31 11:01:33+00:00
> they said the same thing about books, "young people are hypnotised!"

It really doesn't matter what "they" said about books. We are talking about screen time. And screen time has measurably harmful effects on child development.

It leads to worse outcomes across the board. Sleep disorders. Obesity. Mental health disorders. Depression. Anxiety. Decreased ability to interpret emotions. Aggressive conduct. And this is to say nothing of ADHD (7.7 times higher likelihood in the heaviest screen users) or social media's effects on adolescents. [1][2]

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10353947/

[2] https://www.webmd.com/add-adhd/childhood-adhd/childhood-adhd...
by Tony_Delco | 2025-07-31 11:01:41+00:00
I learned to program in C, and even though I use other languages more often these days, I’m very glad C was my starting point.

It forced me to understand memory, resource management, and what actually happens when you call a function or access a variable. No abstractions to hide behind — just the machine and you.

Even now, when performance matters, I often go back to C-level tools and techniques — mmap, manual memory control, system calls — because they give me the precision I need.

More importantly, learning C gave me fundamentals I don’t think you get as deeply with higher-level languages. It made it easier to pick up other languages, not just syntactically, but conceptually. I understand what they abstract away — and at what cost.

C isn’t perfect, and it’s not the right tool for everything. But if you want to understand computers, I still think it’s one of the best places to start.

And like it or not, there are still things that — for legacy, for portability, or for raw control — can only really be done in C.
by CRConrad | 2025-07-31 11:01:50+00:00
> It's clear this "redesign" was as you said, a panic project to cover for not delivering on AI, again for a second year and having nothing to show for WWDC.

Hm... So is their current system universally regarded as absolute shit, or what? Or does everyone[1] think it's pretty great now, but will switch to "it's shit!" immediately as of the WWDC?

Like, WTF is wrong with "We have a great system, it's still just as great, and even better now that we've worked mostly on stability and bugfixes."?

Are corporations nowadays all freaking Cinderella, or what?

___

[1]: Well, everyone who would consider buying into the Apple ecosystem.
by y42 | 2025-07-31 11:02:04+00:00
The problem is not that they are incompetent in IT, the problem is, IMHO, that they not scale their support with their product. Because they can't.

Yes, the process described is nuts. But it's not an IT process, it's a business process. And there it is about cost saving, trying to automate things and keep them secure at the same time. The reason is: They have to take care of hundreds of millions of customers. Eemploying what, 10.000 support personell? Doing simple math here: One support employee covers 10k customers. Impossible.

This happens everywhere in big tech. Accounts get banned, deleted, people loose data and whatever can go wrong. And all you have is - if at all - some anonymous e-mail address, automated answers and generic online documentation.

Problem is not that FAANG is incompetent in IT. It's just not feasible to cover Millions of individual problems if you grow to a certain size.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2025-07-31 11:02:25+00:00
There is better commentary on the same basic point regarding SEPA / Faster Payments / FedNow and how the US lags world-leading practice in the other thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44738579

It's a bit more substantial, and less complaints about the semantics of the wording.
by e40 | 2025-07-31 11:02:46+00:00
Agreed, but it’s not just government. I just spent 2 days in a Kafka-like hell where a credit card I had for 22 years was closed by Citi. At every stage the many people I spoke with wanted to help but couldn’t, because the software had made the decision and it was final. No human was in the loop. And it wasn’t until many hours of phone calls that we even learned the reason for the closure. This army of humans employed by Citi are just slaves to a computer system.
by robenkleene | 2025-07-31 11:06:30+00:00
Flat design removed the technical barrier of entry for design, which made a design move away from a difficult-to-use app (a la the Adobe Creative Suite) and towards something like an office suite app (Figma is more similar to Google Slides than Adobe Photoshop). And office suite apps were already popular as web apps (e.g., Google Docs) before Figma.

> …and everyone is learning Figma, that’s a viral adoption mechanism that is not possible with Adobe products.

This wasn't possible before flat design, design was a hard technical skill requiring use of light sources, noise for texture, and carefully constructed gradients and shadows. Flat design is mainly just text on large swaths of color, which makes it much easier for someone to just jump in and edit a Figma file (e.g., this was not possible with the much more complicated Photoshop setups folks were using before to create designs like this https://www.anandtech.com/Show/Index/4485?cPage=3&all=False&...)

(Note on a long-enough timeline, it's not clear how this is all going to end up. E.g., if something like Apple's Liquid Design catches up that'll move the needle back in the other direction towards more complicated software to create complex lighting and refraction effects. Note that the problem with Figma isn't that it can't add these features, it's that adding them will make the software more complicated, which will reduce the value-add of it being a web app, because the more complicated the software is, the more difficult it is to use collaboratively. Simplicity is really what facilitates collaborative editing.)
by Tainnor | 2025-07-31 11:06:54+00:00
I think for that kind of thing, Prolog would be sufficient. Lean is more powerful, but it requires you to supply proofs - Prolog can just automatically run inferences.

(Although I wouldn't be surprised if somebody had already recreated something like Prolog in Lean with a tactic that does more or less what the Prolog interpreter does)
by t0lo | 2025-07-31 11:07:18+00:00
I don't want privacy to be gone. I want a free internet to still exist for those who are educated enough to bypass firewalls and monitors, I would kill to have a knowledge gated internet again, but I want barriers to harm for children. Why do we card kids for R18+ games but not the internet. It's fundamentally stupid and unhealthy for our society.

If everyone moved back to non algorithmically addictive forums and self segregated by age I would have no issues with that and wouldn't see the need for regulation. That is not the world we live in and we have so obviously seen people self select a terrible and damaging digital world that gives idiocracy a run for its money. Hysteria is sometimes a warranted reaction.

I think it is an important step making social media illegal for children to them reclaiming reality, and re seperating the adult and child social worlds like they used to be. The implementation is the main part for many and I get that.
by cess11 | 2025-07-31 11:08:05+00:00
There shouldn't be any "israeli population" in the West Bank. To a large extent it is armed and commonly also in uniform, without being in IDF service.

From 1999 to 2018 colonial population in the West Bank grew from ~177000 to ~430000 or so. Since the current israeli government took power they've massively accelerated colonial efforts in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and also moved away from military administration in a blatant rejection of international law. I.e. before the response from Hamas in October 2023.

Hamas are popular because they've achieved results, and are perceived as relatively moderate and flexible in politics. Their main competitor, PIJ, disavows parliamentary politics entirely as long as the occupation is in place, considering it a waste of resources and naive pandering to foreign governments that they have no faith in.
by cess11 | 2025-07-31 11:08:19+00:00
Some prominent israeli politicians routinely declare that they are the vanguard and front line protection of 'Western civilisation' that are fighting the barbarism of the indigenous savages.

Back in 2007 or so polls among israeli teens showed that almost every young israeli jew believed that "arabs" are intellectually inferior, have no culture and are inclined to unreasonable violence. This is quite common in settler colonial settings, you kind of need to have a story about why you and your in-group are justified in oppressing your immediate neighbours. Since then 'anti-arabism' hasn't gone away, rather the opposite.

Large portions of israeli society support ethnic cleansing among citizens, for example. This is the foundation for discrimination and apartheid within Israel, and due to how state anti-discrimination agencies work there is relatively little data on discrimination of mizrahi and sephardi jews even though it's well known to exist.
by cess11 | 2025-07-31 11:08:27+00:00
"Its the governments job to punish those who hurt their citizens and ensure that it doesn’t happen again."

Right, so that's why Hamas took captives and tried to initiate negotiations. This was prompted by the annexation of the West Bank, starvation in the Gaza strip and other factors.

Israel found that their backers in the USA and elsewhere weren't going to force them to seriously negotiate and have since moved on to fulfilling the genocidal intents their leaders declared early on.
by cess11 | 2025-07-31 11:08:34+00:00
Israel could have gotten the captives back within a week or two from October 7th but refused, likely because this wasn't a popular opinion among jewish israelis at the time.

It still isn't, and even if there was a captive exchange the political mainstream in Israel would not retreat from the occupation of the Gaza strip, just as they aren't going to end the occupations in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Lebanon or Syria, unless forced to do so by other states.