MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mrweasel | 2025-07-20 12:40:19+00:00
The issue where I am is that all adoption agencies facilitating adoptions from other countries have shutdown. All of them because of massive scandals where the adopted children was more or less sold or the parents where lied to. Adoption from abroad is tricky at best, and now it's no longer possible.

As for children within the country, the majority is multi-handicapped children, most of which cannot say at a normal home full time. So the adopted family basically become a place to put the children during the odd weekend or vacations. This isn't a family life, this is you helping the government at your own cost with no benefit to you. As harsh as that sounds, it's not something most people can do. It's incredibly taxing mentally, and you're still not getting your wish of a family.

That's not to say that there aren't children being adopted, but the waiting list is 10+ years. Most children are placed in foster care, which is very different.
by salawat | 2025-07-20 12:40:42+00:00
Anything that requires the end user to internalize PKI is dead on arrival.

A) The interface won't get intuitive enough.

B) The asshats will still find a way in.

C) Ain't nobody ever met someone in the real world and gone "Yo dawg, what's your public key?"

Encryption is just a machine that turns already hard problems into key management problems.
by neom | 2025-07-20 12:40:55+00:00
I think that is a cool way of looking at it - build on what you said, to me it might be a bit like in both instances (dreaming and llms) - it's maybe a bit related to what they are trying to do (presuming dreams have a purpose) + the resource they have to do it in + the context they have to couple in to get the point across + something related to the abilities of the user? Lets for fun say there is a subsystem that understands and runs dreaming, you only have so much time, plus it's a weird modality, and you're trying to do something... maybe it's fine enough to just serve up the story no matter how muddled it is, what you might be talking about in LLMs is a similar thing? Dreams have a ticking clock where the brain chemistry is literally changing and the opportunity for that type of processing is about to disappear, and eventually the human will awaken, LLMs have a context window size. Fun thinking, anyway.
by rob_c | 2025-07-20 12:41:00+00:00
Not far off.

The author either submitted to the inevitable. Or, decided that they don't want to make change.

Hate the cheap fashion, make a choice, buy proper products they just cost more and require the slightest of effort to care for.

Hate bad writing, move on read something else.

Dislike the quality of product X buy Y.

Frankly if you had told me the quality of product you would be and to buy for example in the MacBook air for <<$1k a few years ago I'd have laughed. There are food brands which are still going that make the same quality products and don't sacrifice, but they now cost more than the competitors because they don't compromise.

And that's just the beginning. The moaning about China, AI, people is just the same "I can't do anything to improve my lot in life" you see too much online.

Stop reacting to things happening to you and start doing things.
by flexagoon | 2025-07-20 12:41:29+00:00
> It's the "security" of their 30% App Store cut.

> most PC manufacturers don't have their own app store.

I feel like you misunderstand what Secure Boot does. It has absolutely nothing to do with userspace apps or app sideloading. It's true that you can't easily sideload apps on Apple devices - but that has absolutely nothing to do with Secure Boot, neither do userspace apps have anything to do with it on any other device.
by maqp | 2025-07-20 12:41:56+00:00
So it goes something like this

1. Attacker does TLS-MITM with rogue certificate to replace the the public key of user B on their website with the attacker's public key in real time

2. A gets the MITM attacker's public key instead.

3. A sends introductory message containing their public key.

4. MITM replaces A's public key with that of theirs with colliding fingerprint

5. MITM keeps reading messages in between.

Later when they meet and compare public key fingerprints, they won't detect the attack.

This makes a lot of assumptions, but it's merely complex in terms of number of steps. It's not computationally infeasible.

Also, a better attack is of course to just hack the endpoints and exfiltrate private keys and passively read all messages since PGP lacks forward secrecy, and since that's according to Snowden, been happening for over 10 years, it's probably the modern approach. Much less noisy.
by aiisahik | 2025-07-20 12:42:10+00:00
Quality comes at a cost. That cost has gone down for some types of products (iPhones, TVs) but gone up for other types of products (housing).

Clothing cost after accounting for inflation has actually not increased. There are many of high quality textiles companies that only produce hand made organic cotton sourced from sustainable farms etc. Some of them are actually not too expensive - check out Isto from Portugal. Yes, i'm willing to pay $50 for a tshirt instead of the usual $25 from Uniqlo or Zara but most people are not.

The article is from Spain - the birthplace of Zara, Inditex and fast fashion. Spain is also known for sitting on cheap plastic chairs outside drinking cheap beer for hours. The quality of housing interiors is pretty poor - despite wood parquet flooring being no more expensive than in other parts of the world, almost every house here (even after renovation) has laminate, concrete or ceramic flooring. Yet plenty of people here have the top of the latest Playstation or iPhone.

Which we all get - if housing start costing close to 40% of your paycheck which is typical for a young person in Spain, is that $50 high quality tshirt or $80 / sqm parquet really what you should logically do with your left over money?

High quality items has traditionally been a luxury good - one reserved for the rich. Back then we simply did not have the choice to buy low quality items which allowed us to shift more spending on things that we actually cared more about. The real lament is that most of us actually care less about the quality of clothing and furniture than we would like to believe.
by lioeters | 2025-07-20 12:42:20+00:00
> JeeLib is an Arduino IDE library for JeeNodes (made by JeeLabs)

Source code: https://github.com/jeelabs/jeelib

Website: https://jeelabs.org/202x/sw/jeelib/

The latter redirects to a page that shows Git commits, but it's a hidden page in a Dutch site about online casinos. It does look a bit shady. In the GitHub org of jeelabs, there are only two authors and neither seem to be based in the Netherlands.

Here's an archived website that documents the jeelib library.

https://archive.ph/nmF5Q

Relevant line:

> a Sleepy class for ultra low-power sleeping of ATmega and ATtiny µC’s

From a quick skimming of the codebase, I couldn't find this class. If I were the author, I would have forked the Sleepy class for my own use.

Edit: Here's the definition of the Sleepy class.

https://github.com/jeelabs/jeelib/blob/6df2d8da785aca77790e9...

It uses avr-libc's sleep functions.

> <avr/sleep.h>: Power Management and Sleep Modes

https://www.nongnu.org/avr-libc/user-manual/group__avr__slee...
by scosman | 2025-07-20 12:42:27+00:00
HomeKit Secure Video has a cloud, but it’s locally encrypted with keys Apple doesn’t have before it leaves the house. It supports a bunch of cheap cameras and doorbells (which will try to phone home, but you can block them from internet access without breaking local HomeKit).

Not exactly what you’re asking for, but great ease of use at a good price, and good privacy.
by casey2 | 2025-07-20 12:42:32+00:00
They did the same to Dlsite, a while ago, made them rename all the tags and then delist lolige, but more notably alot of games with sailor uniforms and/or high school character/settings.

If you think it's illegal under PROTECT then you should enforce the law, not use credit card companies to force people to use a VPN. And if it's illegal it should be illegal everywhere, not just where people are paying rather than sharing. Clearly if many people are paying for a work it's less likely to be obscene
by jcgrillo | 2025-07-20 12:42:46+00:00
Does the tool degrade gradually over time or is it sudden? If the former, you're much better off over the 10 year span with the high quality tool, because the time you spend dealing with its degraded performance is much less. IME it's almost always better to go for a high quality, old, used tool than to buy a low quality new one. Usually the wear parts are replaceable or rebuildable as well.
by ants_everywhere | 2025-07-20 12:43:08+00:00
When I worked at a big tech company, the life quality of software engineers was undergoing what old timers perceived as a significant decline.

The official response of the CFO was that the quality can't be declining that much because people aren't quitting an an accelerating rate.

This is the same phenomenon as your suspicion. There's some metric (e.g. people keep buying our widgets) and you stress test demand for it by making it cheaper to produce. If demand holds up there's no problem from the company's perspective.

From the consumer's perspective, every project is doing this and the entire world is declining in quality but prices aren't going down.
by Fade_Dance | 2025-07-20 12:43:10+00:00
Well it's neither schizophrenic nor using human reasoning. It's a machine using transformers no reason to overly anthropomorphize it, but sure the parallels do exist to some degree.

These tools are obviously not reasoning tools in the classic sense, as they're not building off of core axiomic truths like classic logic. These truths may be largely embedded in the probabilistic output, due to the input universe that we feed it being based on human reason, but it's certainly not in a power of these tools. That said, of course we are attacking on more and more of this ability (ability to check databases of facts, iterative "reasoning" models, etc) so they are becoming "adequate" in these respects.

The dreaming comparison seems quite apt though. I entirely get what you mean by rereading the dream word and seeing it suddenly transformed to another city name, yet somehow also "fitting". For some reason I'm keenly aware of these sorts of relationships when I think about my dreams. I will think of a situation and immediately be able to identify the input memories that "built" the dream scenario. Usually they involve overlapping themes and concepts, as well as some human specific common targets like "unresolved, emotionally charged, danger, etc" (presumably running through these types of brain neurons provides some sort of advantage for mammals, which makes sense to me).

What an LLM does is essentially create a huge interconnected conceptual web of the universe which is fed, and then uses probably ballistic models to travel through these chains, much like how dreaming does a trance like dance through these conceptual connections. In the former example though, we have optimized the traversal to be as close to a "mock awake human" as possible. If the dream poem is dreary in nature, and Rostov sounds dreary, and you were hearing about the dreary London rain earlier in the day, and you have a childhood memory of reading through a dreary poem that made you very sad, that's the perfect sort of overlapping set of memory synapses for a dream to light up. And when looking back, all you'll see is a strange fantasmic and (usually, not always) frustratingly inaccessible conglomeration of these inputs.

This sort of traversal isn't just used in dreaming though. To some degree we're doing similar things when we do things like creative thinking. The difference is, and this is especially so in "modern" life, we're strongly filtering our thoughts through language first and foremost (and indeed there's a lot of philosophical and scientific work done about how extremely important language is to humanness), but also through basic logic.

LLM's inherent some of the power/magic of language, in that it is deconstructing the relationships between the concepts behind language that contains so much embedded meaning. But they aren't filtering through logic like we do. Well, reasoning models do to some degree, but it is obviously quite rudimentary.

I think it's a good analogy.
by joenot443 | 2025-07-20 12:43:42+00:00
Since 2018 every new car needs a rearview backup camera. Since 2022, AEB's been included, too. Fuel economy and emissions standards are also considerably stricter than they were 10 years ago. The list goes on, and on, and on.

I think it's completely fair to say we haven't gotten worse at making cheap cars, we've just legislated them out of existence.
by thomassmith65 | 2025-07-20 12:43:51+00:00
The argument that customers are demanding lower quality products only makes sense if they have a choice. That isn't really the case (not without a lot of rhetorical contortions, anyhow).

When the iPod first appeared, customers did not see its enclosed battery as desirable. They put up with it. Soon enough, no batteries are replaceable.

Few car buyers wanted touch screen controls, but the entire auto industry transitioned to them, almost at once. Customers put up with them.

The problem is not that companies focus on customers and reluctantly provide crappy products. The problem is that customer focus died shortly after the year 2000.
by chrisldgk | 2025-07-20 12:44:40+00:00
While React and JSX/TSX might be somewhat of an abstraction on top of HTML and CSS, you absolutely still need intricate knowledge of HTML and CSS to build anything good with React.

In the end what you get out of your React code after your build process is vanilla HTML, CSS and JS. While you might be able to abstract some of those things away using libraries, all you‘re doing in your React code is building and manipulating HTML DOM trees within your React code and styling them using CSS (or using some abstraction like CSS-in-JS, CSS modules, etc.). To do so efficiently, you not only require knowledge of how exactly HTML and CSS work but also what React tends to do under the hood to render out your application. Even more so when things like a11y are required. A good dev also knows when to use JS to reimplement certain interactions (hover states, form submits, etc.) and when to use the native functionality instead (for example CSS pseudo selectors or HTML form elements).

All this is to say that I disagree with the notion that React devs don’t know or understand the underlying technologies. It might be different and more abstracted, but it’s still the same technologies that require the same or more understanding to be used efficiently.
by kerkeslager | 2025-07-20 12:44:48+00:00
This is only bewildering to people who refuse to admit the problems of our current economic system because our current economic system benefits them.

Advertising needs to go. Advertising is why worse products at higher prices beat out better products at lower prices. Advertising isn't information, it's lies: nobody tells you the problems with their product or things their competitor does better. We don't need advertising to find out about products: word of mouth, experts, and independent review sites are much better sources of information already. And it's a huge drain on our economy: once you let one company advertise, then advertising is no longer optional for all their competitors.

Advertisers of HN will surely refuse to admit these pretty basic, obvious facts, use their advertising platforms to make sure pro-advertising talking points are louder than reason, and the enshittification of everything will continue.
by wwfn | 2025-07-20 12:44:53+00:00
I think that's a good take. Market pressure for durability decreases with brand awareness. Though I think the article argues there's little market pressure regardless.

I'm also worried it's all survivorship bias. If you acquired 100 items in 2010 and 5 of them lasted until 2025, it's hard to say if the 5 surviving would be the same 5 from another household or if the items you still have were all on the hardier end of that particular items quality distribution. Another house with 100 items from 2010 will have a different 5 remaining in 2025. If that's the case, the chance you'd buy those 5 again and even have 3 with the same 15 year life span is (1/20)^3 (I think. is that math right?)
by bawolff | 2025-07-20 12:45:01+00:00
> Genocide would truly be illegal.

That's basically as illegal as anything possibly could be.

153 countries have signed the genocide convention. This treaty requires countries make domestic laws punishing not just genocide but also inciting it. Even just being the supervisor of someone who commits genocide is a crime if you don't try to stop & punish your subordinate.

Its also considered part of customary intl law, which means that even if a country doesnt sign the agreement, its still binding on them.

In addition to all that it is an international crime, so can be punished by the ICC or other international tribunals.

This isn't just theoretical, people have gone to jail for genocide.

I dont know what more you want here. Its literally the most illegal thing on earth.
by chung8123 | 2025-07-20 12:45:13+00:00
The distribution of peoples needs even out. The quality settles where the "good enough" is. That could be super high quality or just mediocre. Once that settles the super high quality has a new price point (economies of scale are no longer being subsidized by the people that need less). If that price point is too much for the people of quality to pay the product disappears.
by klabb3 | 2025-07-20 12:45:42+00:00
> Most things are still available at the same quality your parents remember

Just no. The old reputable brands are enshittifying the same way. I’ve multiple times seen it first hand, with brands like Levi’s and Fjällräven. One year of wear is enough to disform the textile entirely. The fabric from those older clothes are still sturdy and whole, with only discoloration at the folding spots. No holes either from decades of use.

I magically found a sturdy canvas backpack 10 years ago and went back to the store recently to check what they had: same brand, but now all polyester.

The difference in quality is immense. Especially textile: clothes and shoes. I don’t expect the same prices, I’m happy to pay more for quality. But the brand alone often means nothing.
by kbr2000 | 2025-07-20 12:46:19+00:00
It permits you to config more complicated backups more easily. You can inherit and override rules, which is handy if you need to do for example hundreds of similar style backups, with little exceptions. The same with include/exclude patterns, quickly gets complicated with just rsync.

It generates indices for its backups that allow you to search for files over all snapshots taken (which gives you an overview of which snapshots contain some file for you to retrieve/inspect). See dirvish-locate.

Does expiration of snapshots, given your retention strategy (encoded in rules, see dirvish.conf and dirvish-expire).

It consistently creates long rsync commandlines you would otherwise need to do by hand.

In the end you get one directory per snapshot, giving a complete view over what got backed up. Unchanged files are hard-linked thus limiting backup storage consumption. Changed files are stored. But each snapshot has the whole backed up structure in it so you could rsync it back at restore time (or pick selectively individual files if needed). Hence the "virtual".

Furthermore: backup reporting (summary files) which you could be piped into an E-mail or turned into a webpage, good and simple documentation, pre/post scripts (this turns out to be really useful to do DB dumps before taking a backup etc.)

You'll still need to take care of all other aspects of designing your backup storage (SAS controllers/backplanes/cabling, disks, RAID, LVM2, XFS, ...) and networking (10 GbE, switching, routing if needed, ...) if you need that (works too for only local though). Used this successfully in animation film development as an example, where it backed up hundreds of machines and centralized storage for a renderfarm, about 2 PBytes worth (with Coraid and SuperMicro hardware). Rsync traversing the filesystem to find out changes could be challenging at times with enormous FS (even based on only the metadata), but for that we created other backup jobs that where fed with specific file-lists generated by the renderfarm processes, thus skipping the search for changes...
by motorest | 2025-07-20 12:46:55+00:00
> If you are far from an expert in the field maybe you should refrain from commenting so strongly because some people here actually are experts.

Your opinion makes no sense. Your so called experts are claiming LLMs don't do vibecoding well. I, a non-expert, am quite able to vibecode my way into producing production-ready code. What conclusion are you hoping to draw from that? What do you think your experts' opinion will achieve? Will it suddenly delete the commits from LLMs and all the instruction prompts I put together? What point do you plan to make with your silly appeal to authority?

I repeat: non-experts are proving to be possible, practical, and even mundane what your so-called experts claim to not work. What do you plan to draw from that?
by benjiro | 2025-07-20 12:46:57+00:00
Speaking from experience, its easy to make Postgres (for example), just trash your system usage on a lot of individual or batch inserts. The NVME drives are often extreme underutilized, and your bottleneck is the whole fsync layer.

Second, the durability is the same as fsync. The client only gets reported a success, if both wall writes have been done.

Its the same guarantee as fsync but you bypass the fsync bottleneck, what in turn allows for actually using the benefits of your NVME drives better (and shifting away the resource from the i/o blocking fsync).

Yes, it involves more management because now you need to maintain two states, instead of one with the synchronous fsync operation. But that is the thing about parallel programming, its more complex but you get a ton of benefits from it by bypassing synchronous bottlenecks.
by nicole_express | 2025-07-20 12:47:00+00:00
> You have the freedom of choice to use an old IPhone with an old Lightning cable, since they are "superior" to USB-C, and old IPhones are apparently of such high quality.

It's so bizarre to act like this is a crazy thing to do, like, yeah, my iPhone does have Lightning, I haven't upgraded since they switched to USB-C and have felt no need to? Like that was pretty recent? It's not like the Dock Connector where the only iPhones that support it use wireless networks that are being actively dismantled?
by Expurple | 2025-07-20 12:47:04+00:00
> You assume that corporations would not choose aggressive and hostile business models if they weren't forced to, which is obviously wrong.

But, in my scenario specifically, they will be forced to by market forces (to some degree). Being less aggressive is a competitive advantage. In my scenario, the market is going to be flooded with competitors, some of whom are going to use that advantage. Even if some users still prefer the other advantages of proprietary Apple (as they do in reality), at least the users who care can switch and benefit.

> This would not be possible with licenses that allow Apple to keep everything proprietary

Sure, you can't clone Apple with literally "zero software investment". They will always have some proprietary parts. What I mean is that, in my scenario, they would have fewer proprietary rewrites (from GPL) and would use common permissive dependencies more often. Thus reducing the amount of proprietary code, and making their stack more uniform, "shallow", and easier to copy. Being easier to copy sounds like a downside that they'd like to avoid, but it's also cheaper, so a tradeoff comes into play.