MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rglullis | 2025-07-16 15:20:34+00:00
> it's important to understand that limitations are moved to Mastodon "layer" in that case.

Mastodon may be my preferred social network nowadays, but it's despite the prevalent philosophy from the development team. It's also arguably the reason that the Fediverse can not manage to grow to more than 1 million MAU.

>Because power corrupts and gets abused

The solution to this is not to get rid of power and keep everyone in the same small crab bucket. It's to make access to the powerful tools as universal and ubiquitous as possible.

> I push files to a web server and restart its process.

Your friend not being sensible enough to know when to use a tool vs when to keep it simple is not a problem of the tool. Also, talking about deployment methods seems so orthogonal to the discussion that I am not sure it makes sense to carry this conversation further.
by tialaramex | 2025-07-16 15:20:53+00:00
> there’s not as much as you’d think

Nah, I'm pretty sure there's exactly as much (assembly) as I'd think because I spent some time prodding it before writing the question in the first place.

You likely understand what it does much better than me, but I'm under no illusion that there's a lot of this code, nor indeed that it's problematic to use this code.

However I'm not at all convinced that porting "hand written assembler to higher level generators" is a good strategy for this specific code. It serves to launder the creativity, so that maybe some day one lawyer can convince another lawyer that A and B are distinct works despite every actual process along the convoluted path from A to B being mechanical... but it doesn't seem like it gets us closer to having a sustainable alternative.

And that's what I actually am interested in here, I think we want a Special Purpose language focused on emitting guaranteed constant time machine code for an algorithm. So that actually gets to the same Readability and Correctness goals you state, but rather than hoping to get away with writing Go (or any GP language) we accept that it's never going to make sense for a General Purpose language to prioritise this. IMO We're more or less guaranteeing one day we accidentally ship an Oracle.
by cogman10 | 2025-07-16 15:20:54+00:00
I agree.

That doesn't change the reality of self-interest.

If someone is struggling to take care of themselves, why would they have children? Heck, if you have people working 80+ hours a week just to stay housed, when can they find time to have kids?

Cruel societies punish people for having kids. We have a cruel society. The 90s "welfare queen" talk caused the US federal and state governments to gut social programs specifically designed to aid and support people in having families.

For so many people, affording the necessities requires 2 incomes. Childcare either takes out an income or it incurs a huge new necessity.

And then there's always the impact of "what if the child has a disability" in that case most people are really truly screwed in the US if that happens.
by oc1 | 2025-07-16 15:21:35+00:00
I'm skeptical of Anthropic's product approach with Artifacts. They made a real winner with claude code and their subscription decision (basically giving up on the profitable api metered billing to win over the professional user base) for this product. Otherwise they are making now the same mistakes Openai did with the GPT Marketplace. As a customer i don't want millions of half-baked ai mini apps to choose from. This is what i'm getting with Artifacts and those gpt stores - decision fatigue and disappointment. I want the best app to solve my problem - this almost certainly won't be these hobbyist custom instruction wrappers but well designed apps by professionals (who know the limitations of these platform won't allow them to build the best-in class solution). Just like Claude Code isn't an artifact but a complete standalone app that doesn't fit into the limitations of such marketplaces.
by sjw987 | 2025-07-16 15:21:49+00:00
Europe's entire future is on the line right now. Forget many years..

Higher energy prices, and increased defence spending (from a low starting point) to meet the new US governments requirements are exacerbating the cost of living crisis continent wide. Europe already wasn't innovating, and is now losing the small amount of industry it does have, to energy prices, to China's entry into EV production, and EU regulation. The demands to spend more on our own defence by the US administration comes from a US administration which has flirted with the idea of not even defending NATO.

The cost of living crisis, coupled with "AI" (LLM) is hollowing out an already pretty hollow service economy across Europe, and is creating disillusionment which is causing Europeans to shift to either extreme side of the political spectrum. In my country, the UK, Reform, a politically inept and untested party is currently leading in the polls for the next election. This party, as well as many like it in Europe, is even leading in the polls despite well known Russian political influence in them.

On top of this, the demographic crisis, while not made worse by tons of dead men sent off to war and exodus, is still affecting Europe and the only reason it isn't notable to many people is due to immigration filling the gaps. Immigration, which is lowering wages and in many peoples eyes, changing their cultural landscape for the worse, increasing their likelihood in voting for fringe political parties.

As much as Russia might lose from this war, they'll probably rebuild their army to a higher degree than European forces are right now. We hear constantly about ammunition and weapons shortages across Europe, failure to meet requirements for what Ukraine needs to fight back, and a general unwillingness from the population to even fight. Russia has oil, gas, and mineral wealth, which will always be of importance to Europe whenever this war does end. Europe is so reliant, that whatever words are spoken, the EU has spent more on Russian energy than it has sent in aid to Ukraine.
by Gormo | 2025-07-16 15:21:53+00:00
How do you stop users who aren't using the custom browser from accessing these 'tinyweb' HTTP sites? How do you prevent content scrapers and search indexers from accessing them? How do you suppress direct incorporation of 'mainstream' web content into 'tinyweb' content?

If your goal is precisely to create an parallel ecosystem that's "airgapped" from the mainstream web, and you're already going to have to develop custom clients, content formats, and server-side configuration to implement it on top of HTTP, and engage in lots of development work to imperfectly isolate the two ecosystems from each other, why wouldn't you just develop a parallel protocol and start with a clean slate?
by easterncalculus | 2025-07-16 15:22:12+00:00
I'm not convinced that the SWE crowd of HN, particularly the crowd showing up to every thread about AI 'agents' really knows what it takes to run a global network or what a NOC is. I know saying this on here runs the risk of Vint Cerf or someone like that showing up in my replies, but this is seriously getting out of hand now. Every HN thread that isn't about fawning over AI companies is devolving into armchair redditor analysis of topics people know nothing about. This has gotten way worse since the pre-ChatGPT days.
by Calzifer | 2025-07-16 15:22:20+00:00
Also

> it is also not possible to theme the settings areas.

I don't see a reason why this should not work. If by settings area the author means the settings page which in modern Thunderbird is more or less a web page in the content area, it should be stylable with userContent.css instead of userChrome.css.

The hard part is to find the right @-moz-document selectors for each individual content page.
by epc | 2025-07-16 15:22:42+00:00
The only way I succeeded was to argue with real numbers and costs. The business side liked to frequently claim that we did $XXX in business every minute using the web site, so I started using that (if the web site is down for an hour, we lose 60*XXX in revenue, right?).

Get the burden rates for staff, calculate the realistic costs of doing DR preparations and exercises vs the realistic costs of recovering from an actual incident.

Factor in loss of staff (for whatever reason).

You can dig up the costs from other companies but you can only make it real to management if you use data and numbers from your own enterprise.

Make it a documented, financially driven business decision that they cannot ignore. They may well decide not to invest in DR/continuity prep. In that case, document your activities and start looking for new employment, they do not value the business enough to invest in protecting it from absolutely predictable, let alone unpredictable, I/T events.

I was spouse–adjacent to Google for many years and really admired their DR/continuity work and exercises. I don't know if that's written up anywhere but it really seemed to be embedded in their operational philosophy (at least up to 2020, my semi–inside exposure to Google ended then).
by Pxtl | 2025-07-16 15:23:33+00:00
Personally I'm taking another kick at Linux desktop in advance of Win11, I installed Mint with Cinnamon... and I gotta say, I'm kinda disappointed how many pain points there still are. Type in your admin password every 5 seconds just to install routine updates, ugly-ass GRUB screens, confusing UI, and SDL2 games being half-broken with resolution-switching and audio. Installing software still involves bouncing around figuring out if I want the Flatpak or to add a new Apt source or what.

So I'm assuming these "5% desktop market share" aren't using that kind of distro.
by almostgotcaught | 2025-07-16 15:23:43+00:00
> solves the long compile times

this only goes so far - if you try to eg bind O(10k) methods using nanobind (or pybind ofc) you will be compiling for a very long time. for example, i have a threadripper and with a single large TU (translation unit) it took about 60 minutes (because single TU <-> single thread). i had to "shard" my nanobind source to get down to a "reasonable" ~10 minutes.
by briangriffinfan | 2025-07-16 15:24:06+00:00
> It's not that people "are less willing to believe there is stuff they don't understand", it's "people are fed up of being marketed to by centuries of con-people trying to spin the idea that they understand something deep and insightful that we don't, and we need to turn to them for help with it".

Everything you said was baked into my post already, so it's funny to me that your conclusion ends up being the exact phenomenon I was talking about. I don't feel like going point by point but nothing you said was something I haven't considered.

Yes! Sometimes there are experts in higher-up places that do simply just understand something deep and insightful that you don't, and they may not have a peer-reviewed scientific study justifying this. You are allowed to not accept this - it may even be true, although I don't think so - but how are you going to keep thinking about what you might not know yet if you're already convinced you know about as much as the author does?

Like... are you going to keep thinking about the ideals in Star Trek if you think you know more than Gene Roddenbury? Are you going to keep thinking about what Lord of the Rings means if you're absolutely certain no author could really be THAT insightful? I've already come to a conclusion here: no.
by mylifeandtimes | 2025-07-16 15:24:06+00:00
Is it better than google search 20 years ago, when most web content was authoritative and not SEO crap?

Is it better than google search 20 year ago, when "google-fu" was a thing (look it up, google-fu refers to the ability to "ask a far more nuanced question about the kind of information you are looking for").
by angmarsbane | 2025-07-16 15:24:16+00:00
My take is that the spirit of the law is to compensate spouses for sacrifices and risks they took in support of the other spouse. So for example, if Spouse A reduces their earning potential for Spouse B (ex. a military spouses are disadvantaged in their careers b/c they move constantly, if a doctor moves to a rural area that can support their career but not their spouse's career etc) then Spouse A should be compensated by Spouse B because Spouse B's career growth depended on Spouse A sacrificing theirs. Other examples are if a Spouse stays home to care for dependents, if a Spouse puts another Spouse through graduate / medical / law school etc. It's about acknowledging that you gained because of someone else's actions and compensating for that, honoring your debts as it were.

I do not feel that the alimony I paid aligned with the spirit of the law, but it did align with the letter of the law in California.
by stronglikedan | 2025-07-16 15:24:43+00:00
> It seems to me the basic design of app are often the best

Considering the plethora of options, I'd say it's impossible to say what is better until an alternative is tried. And then you can only say that particular alternative is not better than basic, but you still can't say basic is best.

People that style their apps try many alternatives, and often find things that work better than basic for them.
by skrebbel | 2025-07-16 15:24:53+00:00
Fwiw I actually agree with you. My point is that early in the war, it was commonly thought that just the western sanctions alone would totally cripple the Russian economy. Or that they'd soon run out of arms, or anything like that. None of that happened. It's not pro-Russian to establish that they were more resilient than what many people anticipated/hoped. This doesn't take anything away from Ukraine's resilience in the face of years of obscene unwarranted aggression which is easily 10x more impressive to me.
by gruez | 2025-07-16 15:25:22+00:00
>I'm implying that I'm convinced they are not storing statistics on (thus leaking) every queried hostname. By your very own admission, they clearly state that they perform statistics on a set of malicious domains provided by a third party, as part of their blocking program.

Right, but the privacy policy also says there's a separate program for "a very few carefully vetted security researchers" where they can get data in "summary form", which can leak domain name in the manner I described in my previous comment. Maybe they have a great IRB (or similar) that would prevent this from happening, but that's not mentioned in the privacy policy. Therefore it's totally in the realm of possibility that secret domain names could be leaked, no "really having a go with the shoehorn" required.
by jeffbee | 2025-07-16 15:25:25+00:00
You know, I recently went through a period of thinking my MacBook was just broken. It had the janks. Everything on the browser was just slower than you're used to. After a week or two of pulling my hair, I figured it out. The newly-configured computer was using the DHCP-assigned DNS instead of Google DNS. Switched it, and it made a massive difference.
by vel0city | 2025-07-16 15:25:27+00:00
If consumers can't even buy these drugs, why do the direct marketing at all? Are you trying to suggest the consumer doesn't have much weight in the prescribing decisions of their doctors?

Clearly the pharmaceutical companies think there's a strong reason to directly market these drugs to consumers even if they can't directly purchase these drugs. The ads almost always say "ask your doctor about..." not "think about prescribing x to your patients..." If these ads didn't do much the industry wouldn't be spending billions of dollars on them.
by DiogenesKynikos | 2025-07-16 15:25:38+00:00
> The whole airlift took about a month! No denying, ofc US helped Israel caught with their pants down, but making it like US just brought 200 tanks overnight, is laughable. Regardless: Israel turned the war around. Israeli forces were forced to stop on their march to Cairo. What kind of victory is that for Egypt?

Israel would not have been able to turn the war around without the massive US airlift. As I said, the Israelis were literally running out of ammunition by the time the US airlift began. Without the airlift, they would have had to cease offensive operations and conserve ammo. The airlift enabled them to wage an entirely different type of war, without fear of running out of ammunition, tanks, airplanes, etc.

What Egypt proved in the war was that it was a serious military threat to Israel. Six years after the Six-Day War, which was a complete humiliation for the Arab forces, Egypt successfully pulled off a sophisticated crossing of the Suez Canal. It broke through the IDF's fortified line, and then decimated a large Israeli armored counter-attack, knocking out hundreds of Israeli tanks. That was a huge psychological shock to the Israelis.

Even though the Israelis turned the tide of the war, they were acutely aware that they had been caught with their pants down and had needed massive American aid to get through the war. Nobody could guarantee that the next round would end the same way. That was the major motivation to seek peace with the Egyptians.

There were other factors involved as well, like the American moves to woo Egypt away from the USSR, but the key thing that broke the deadlock and convinced the Israelis that they should negotiate with Egypt was the Israeli realization of their own vulnerability.
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-07-16 15:25:39+00:00
Australia.

We looked into anything that could be done to minimise the chances of such a thing happening to innocent parties, but the only option was to make a complaint about an individual officer. There's no (easy, obvious) way to question the system they use to determine "validity" of raids or due diligence prior to requesting a warrant, or evidence required to justify a warrant.

The whole thing just felt to me like it was blindly rubber stamped all the way through because "protect the children". Pity my daughter was a child and absorbs such experiences... My son was also a child, but he's less affected by such things.
by whitehexagon | 2025-07-16 15:25:48+00:00
That sounds good in principle, but is there a more private configuration that doesnt send DNS resolutions to cloudfare, google et al. ie. avoid BigTech tracking, and not wanting DOH.

dnsmasq with a list of smaller trusted DNS providers sounds perfect, as long as it is not considered bad etiquette to spam multiple DNS providers for every resolution?

But where to find a trusted list of privacy focused DNS resolvers. The couple I tried from random internet advice seemed unstable.
by foobarian | 2025-07-16 15:25:51+00:00
> We live in extremely safe times compared to

This sentence in a HN article from a day ago caught my eye [1][2].

> Second, between the mid-1930s and mid-1950s, the US maternal death rate fell by 94 percent, according to Sarygulov and Arslanagic-Wakefield. Early antibiotics in the 1930s, followed by the mass production of penicillin in the 1940s, “drove down incidences of sepsis, [which were] responsible for 40 percent of maternal deaths at the time, and made caesarean sections safer,” they write.

94 percent!

[1] https://www.derekthompson.org/p/what-caused-the-baby-boom-wh...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44572527
by idrathernot | 2025-07-16 15:26:05+00:00
I purchased a suppressor for my 9mm handgun that I use for recreational target shooting. It isn’t as quiet as the movies, but the suppressor paired with a higher mass bullet makes a world of difference compared to unsuppressed. The tone of the sound is lower and lacks the deafening crack of a rounding going supersonic and makes the activity so much more comfortable.
by __rito__ | 2025-07-16 15:26:30+00:00
This is what I have seen as well. When Python became ubiquitous in the industry, they started teaching it in the colleges.

I come from a core science background. I studied Physics. And it was like this in my institute: FORTRAN -> A lot of C, small amount of FORTRAN -> C -> Python. I was taught C, but from the exact next year, it was switched to the Python ecosystem.

It was done much later when Python became the standard in research universities, the language of recent research papers, etc.

A generation of Scienctists learned C/FORTRAN/MATLAB in college/grad school as it was taught, but they switched to Python early/mid career. Teaching Python in undergrad followed.

I also taught a mid-career Economics professor Python. She used SPSS before for her papers. Humanities professors doing data crunching are now switching to Python, too. There is a clear trend.
by naysunjr | 2025-07-16 15:26:49+00:00
Yeah this. What should irk about search bar is cannot be moved. The static nature of UI these days stinks when back in the day we aimed for more composable user facing apps. Mod games by dumping a model file in a dir; boomed recomposed the experience.

Now it’s all micro transactions so an MBA doesn’t have to work anymore.

Now those are power user and dev tools and users get what they decided was the just right info dense or sparse design.
by troad | 2025-07-16 15:27:02+00:00
> According to programmers from 20 years ago, they were like religions. Each had its own philosophy and a loyal group of followers crusading online, getting into heated debates, all trying to win over more adopters.

It's very weird reading something you lived through described in these terms, as though it were being described by an anthropologist.

Can't help but wonder what the future will have to say about today.

"In 2025, programmers used 'frameworks' to hang 'apps' from some kind of 'web'. They believed these frameworks gave them magic powers. Many even fought in 'flame wars' on this topic, which experts believe involved the use of fire to destroy webs woven by competing programmers."
by awongh | 2025-07-16 15:27:03+00:00
By volume how much of human speech / writing is pattern matching and how much of it is truly original cognition that would pass your bar of creativity? It is probably 90% rote pattern matching.

I don't think LLMs are AGI, but in most senses I don't think people give enough credit to their capabilities.

It's just ironic how human-like the flaws of the system are. (Hallucinations that are asserting untrue facts, just because they are plausible from a pattern matching POV)
by andsoitis | 2025-07-16 15:27:07+00:00
Watch (or read) The 3 Body Problem[1]. If you substitute AI (artificial intelligence) for AI (alien intelligence, specifically the San Ti), then it could give us a roadmap for what to expect, including the fact that there are likely going to be humans who invite or specifically enable AI to supersede humans.

If AI vendors are truly concerned about the problem as expressed here, I would advance that it is a poor strategy to thinking "we have a limited transparency window now" and bank on that; a much smarter strategy would be to assume a more adversarial dynamic and assume that AI is already actively hiding intentions from us, manipulating us to grow comfortable. Only the paranoid will survive. An alternative position would suggest that the AI vendors don't fully believe the risk is real.

[1] https://www.domusweb.it/en/news/2024/04/10/in-3-body-problem...