MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by coldpie | 2025-07-24 13:18:25+00:00
You're correct, but I guess they're banking on their users preferring to get the binaries straight from the source instead of through an unaffiliated third party. There are also other benefits to paying, such as being able to file issues against the official repository. Seems like a pretty reasonable compromise to me, to be honest.

The license even says you may redistribute the binary you acquire from them:

> User may redistribute the Binary Release received under this Agreement, provided such redistribution complies with the OSI License (e.g., including copyright and permission notices).

https://github.com/wixtoolset/wix/blob/main/OSMFEULA.txt
by troupo | 2025-07-24 13:18:40+00:00
Those obnoxious "cookie" dialogs? Yes, they cover fingerprinting as well. E.g. some innocent company wants to keep your precise geolocation data for 12 years: https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1817122117093056541

Cookie banners were never about cookies or privacy. The industry designed them with some very explicit goals in mind: to force users to opt-in to pervasive tracking, and to blame "how unusable web has become" on GDPR
by SeanDav | 2025-07-24 13:19:01+00:00
You stopped too soon - those apparently OOP semantics ultimately require decidedly non-OOP machine code at the real level it is executed. Everything else is just abstraction.

Trying to argue that you are, in fact driving a steam engine, requires one to assume a level of abstraction and definition, in order to set an arena in which a discussion can occur.
by monuszero | 2025-07-24 13:19:38+00:00
So, Aaed was our intern last summer - and he’s the real deal. I got to work with him on some really cool bespoke robotic end-effectors and the guy has great design instincts. Picked up mechatronics skills like a sponge, grokked hamming codes in like 30sec from a whiteboard doodle. Super hard worker too, he would stay late in the electronics lab to work on the motor design for what turned out to be CARA - we had fun testing the backlash one evening and ever since I’ve been trying to shoehorn one of those actuators into a project.

Potential and active founders here should consider reaching out (i think a startup setting would suit him better than corporate research), though he’s obviously got his own stuff going on and a degree to finish!
by criticas | 2025-07-24 13:19:46+00:00
It's unfortunate election insecurity is only an issue when the other side wins. Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) were quick to label the claims about Biden's anomalous win in 2020 including irregularities in Georgia, Arizona, and Colorado as "conspiracy theories"; Red State Republicans only investigate voting irregularities in Blue cities. Take Texas - It's possible cheating only occurs in the counties around Houston, Austin, and Dallas, but if that's the only place you look, it's the only place you'll find it.
by victorbjorklund | 2025-07-24 13:20:16+00:00
There are many different open source licenses, and what counts as "open source" can depend on your definition. In theory, you could write a license that makes the source code freely available but restricts binary distribution, or excludes certain groups or use cases from using the software (like not allowing AWS to resell it as a service). Some would argue that's no longer truly open source, but legally, you can add almost any condition to your license.

In this case, it sounds like they're charging a fee for their pre-compiled binaries and possibly using an end user agreement to restrict redistribution. But since the source is available, anyone could compile it themselves and share the binary, unless the license specifically forbids that.

Realistically, though, many people who want the software will just pay for the convenience of the official binary rather than go through the hassle of compiling it or finding someone else who did. So, while the situation is a bit unusual, it doesn't seem like a major issue in practice.
by wrp | 2025-07-24 13:21:07+00:00
> writers...developed full books in their mind first

When reading long, closely reasoned passages of medieval philosophy, I've wondered about their development process, when there was no such thing as scratch paper.

> Kids that grow up with LLMs will just think differently.

People are just glibly saying this sort of thing, but what specifically is coming? I'm now wrestling with the problem of dealing with university students who don't hesitate to lean on LLMs. I'm trying to not be dismissive, but it feels like they are just thinking less, not differently.
by jmpman | 2025-07-24 13:21:43+00:00
Police used to use airplane based thermal imaging looking for homes which were abnormally warm, back before LEDs. Kyllo v. United States Went to the Supreme Court and found this as a “search”.

“Where, as here, the Government uses a device that is not in general public use, to explore details of the home that would previously have been unknowable without physical intrusion, the surveillance is a ‘search’ and is presumptively unreasonable without a warrant.”

The argument seems to cover this scenario too?
by matthewdgreen | 2025-07-24 13:22:07+00:00
This isn't exactly browser fingerprinting (though it may involve browser fingerprinting.) But the biggest open question I have right now is: what is Meta doing to get around Apple's iOS privacy protections?

A couple of years ago, Apple launched App Tracking Transparency as a way to reduce tracking across their iOS app ecosystem. People predicted that this would be devastating for companies like Meta and Snap, and it was -- briefly, for Meta. But Meta seems to have rebounded very quickly, maybe Snap not so quickly. The rumor I've heard is that Meta threw every brain they had against the problem of finding new ways to track app users, which presumably involves some similar type of fingerprinting. The revenue success strongly indicates were successful. But if this is true, nobody has much written about it.
by WhitneyLand | 2025-07-24 13:22:31+00:00
If you structure your prompt around small, stateless functions with explicit inputs/output, answers may look cleaner, but that advantage is not at the language level. You can do the same in TypeScript et al and get the same results.

I don’t doubt that anecdotally you’ve had favorable results. However, I’m not aware of any research that backs up this claim. Or forget research - I’m not aware of any simple examples / prompts that would show it in a reproducible way across different LLMs.

Corpus size tends to dominate performance.
by saghm | 2025-07-24 13:22:50+00:00
The main benefit of x.f(y) IMO isn't emphasizing x as something special, but allowing a flat chain of operations rather than nesting them. I think the differences are more obvious if you take things a step further and compare x.f(y).g(z) and g(f(x, y), z). At the end of the day, the difference is just syntax, so the goals should be to aid the programmer in writing correct code and to aid anyone reading the code (including the original programmer at a later point in time!) in understanding the code. There are tradeoffs to using "method" syntax as well, but to me that mostly is an argument for having both options available.
by optymizer | 2025-07-24 13:23:30+00:00
Honestly, open source software should come with a price. I think the "starving artist" approach is detrimental long-term.

Sure, there is great value in having a free (in both senses) operating system, but at the same time the year of Linux desktop is a running joke.

To be blunt, money motivates people to do the work they otherwise would not do. It's soul crushing to run the 400th manual test. It's not sexy to work on a lot of the bugs that affect real users, so, when there's no money in it, the work tends to focus in areas of passion and feature development.

Maybe if we all sent $1 to open source projects we use, there'd be enough funding to hire QA people and engineers to fix things like Ubuntu's suspend/resume on my Lenovo laptop, you know?
by Sanzig | 2025-07-24 13:23:37+00:00
The fingerprint collection happens mostly using client-side JS (a bit of server side with HTTP headers, but the really high entropy stuff is client side).

Conceivably you could develop some sort of heuristic that detects when a script is simultaneously poking at a whole bunch of APIs associated with common fingerprinting techniques (canvas capabilities, WebGL, screen size, installed fonts, etc) and then kill it. But it is certainly much harder than blocking cookies.
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-24 13:23:58+00:00
If you want to make money during a gold rush one strategy is to sell picks and shovels. I don’t know the whole story but vendors like New Relic have a huge marketing spend, you see them with huge booths at conferences.

Note Amazon could be short for “Amazon Web Services” so they are sure spending on “Amazon” as a keyword.
by akimbostrawman | 2025-07-24 13:24:22+00:00
>accessories like screen covers and cases

Why would those be region locked there are hundreds of 3rd part accessories that sell world wide regardless of phone model especially for a device as popular as pixels.

>device less feature-packed than you regular Samsung phones.

What feature? GOS offers the most secure and private phone feature [1] while Samsung can only offer buggy pre installed ad and spyware...

[1] https://grapheneos.org/features
by ragnese | 2025-07-24 13:24:28+00:00
EDIT: Forgot to confirm that I do, in fact, use Kotlin for a fairly large and moderately complex backend system (multiple deployed systems, including one HTTP REST-ish API).

I'm of two minds about it.

I started working with Kotlin back when Java was still a very ~~stagnant~~ stable language. I definitely find Kotlin's syntax to be much more comfortable, expressive, and in many ways much more simple than Java's.

But at this point, the only big technical features that still put Kotlin over Java for me is the handling of nulls by the type system (which is, admittedly, mitigated decently well in practice by Java tooling configurations and ugly annotations), and value types (zero heap-allocation wrapper classes).

Another thing to keep in mind is that now that Java is actually adding features again, the Kotlin developers will have to also play "catch-up" to Java in ways that it didn't have to when it first gained popularity. It puts Kotlin in an awkward spot when Java's implementation of sealed classes and interfaces was initially better and more flexible than Kotlin's, or when Java's `switch` is now more powerful than Kotlin's `when`, etc.

Kotlin is also betting heavily on their multi-platform stuff, which I'm skeptical about. It seems to me that it will further slow the ability to add useful features to the language if you have to cater to the lowest-common-denominator between Java and JavaScript (and Objective-C? -is that how it works for iOS?) runtimes. Instead of being the best language for a given platform, it'll just be a pretty good language for a few platforms. I wish them all the best in dethroning JavaScript from infecting every computing platform and domain, but I'm just skeptical.

So, honestly, I don't actually recommend people start new projects in Kotlin. I'd suggest going for Java, or something that's meaningfully different in semantics and philosophy like Clojure or Scala. I say this, but I'm not actually sure that I'd be able to follow my own advice, because I really don't want to have to stomach Java's syntax, idioms (way too many annotations), and stupid null handling.
by sofixa | 2025-07-24 13:24:49+00:00
> slightly higher tire wear (due to weight)

And thus higher tire particle pollution. And it's not slightly, EVs are on average 10-15% heavier than similar ICE vehicles. We've now found that a lot of the various small particle pollution (e.g. in bodies of water) come from tires.

So, while still drastically better than ICEs, they still have externalities (pollution, time wasted in traffic, vehicle accidents) and there should still be efforts to try to reduce the number of cars on the roads instead of just replacing them 1:1 and calling it a day.
by tavavex | 2025-07-24 13:24:53+00:00
> No one for example complained about the attractive main character in Stellar Blade?

Actually no, not really. The whole outrage around Stellar Blade was largely manufactured, spurred from an right wing influencer's mischaracterization of a (retracted) line from IGN France. IGN France and its milquetoast quote represents all the 'insane leftists' that people loved to portray in that discourse as having started the attack on the game. All the drama that stemmed from there were simply the result of people digging their heels in - right-wing people taking up SB to be their perceived savior, the unapologetic disruptor that cuts through 'ugly Western designs', while left-wing people naturally put themselves on the other side, claiming that it's a mediocre game that right-wingers only like for the sex appeal, thereby feeding the cycle. But this wasn't started by the left, there was no initial outrage, all of this was just bait. But many people still see it from the perspective of the people who incited it.

And I mean, look around. Lots of games have attractive protagonists. How much outrage was there when NieR: Automata came out from 'the left'? Lots of games have extremely appealing designs, and the fact that no one seems to go against them and that they keep selling should tip you off that the perceived unanimity you're talking about is a niche and extreme opinion.
by Vinnl | 2025-07-24 13:25:12+00:00
So, one thing I don't quite get about fingerprinting:

> For example, websites can see web browser version, number of CPUs on your device, screen size, number of touchpoints, video/audio codecs, operating system and many other details

If, for example, I upgrade my web browser in two weeks (i.e. I get a new version number), doesn't that mean that the site has lost me?

Sites like https://coveryourtracks.eff.org seem to focus on how unique your fingerprint is, but doesn't it also matter how stable it is over time?
by superkuh | 2025-07-24 13:25:43+00:00
Indeed. curl | sh is literally the #1 recommended and most common way to install the rust development toolchain (because it changes too rapidly to effectively be in any repos). It's crazy that a language that prioritizes security so highly in it's design itself is only compiled through such insecure methods.

Ref: https://www.rust-lang.org/tools/install

>Using rustup (Recommended) >It looks like you’re running macOS, Linux, or another Unix-like OS. To download Rustup and install Rust, run the following in your terminal, then follow the on-screen instructions. See "Other Installation Methods" if you are on Windows. >curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh
by twodave | 2025-07-24 13:25:49+00:00
There is (IMO) still a lot of value in having a searchable Internet index. If AI summaries were the only option it would be very difficult to know whether something is influencing the AI.

The problem is, of course, that we've already lost that battle with Google and other search providers. We know they're influencing the results. There is no open Internet anymore, but at least we can check the different search indices against each other. Checking different AI summaries against each other seems a pretty fruitless endeavor.
by sokoloff | 2025-07-24 13:25:49+00:00
I'd say more that it evolves rather than goes away. We've had our BEV for over a decade and it's the car we tend to choose to drive for short distance errands. We like it by all means, but when one of us needs to take the hybrid car for a weekend or a local business trip, we still have to plan out to make sure the other can manage whatever we need to do with just the BEV.

As dboreham says in the sibling comment, the range anxiety morphs into charger-availability anxiety. Even if I know a charger physically exists at my destination, if it's 45% or more of the range away, I still need to worry that it will be working, that my access will work, that it won't be occupied or blocked, etc.

In nearly 40 years of driving, I almost never researched gasoline availability (through the Nevada desert and in Central America, I did).

In a little over a decade of BEV driving, I've done a lot of EVSE (charger) researching.
by mrheosuper | 2025-07-24 13:26:05+00:00
It's both good and bad: Sometime it suggest some small channels about some niche topics that i found very interesting.

But i don't like how aggressive it is with suggestion. If i search some random topic, my newsfeed will be flooded with all videos about that topic many days later. So sometime i have to use different profile just to not "contaminate" the algorithm.
by yojo | 2025-07-24 13:27:09+00:00
I still disagree. The vanilla is just too much in a negroni. I’d rather use Dolin, or the Death & Co 50/50 Dolin/Punt e Mes mix if I think I can get through both bottles before they oxidize.

But Martini & Rossi is fine. It does the job well enough to understand the drinks, and you can start trying the pricier stuff once you decide if you even like them.

Also, hard disagree on “buy the cheapest gin.” Gordon’s is better than everything else on the bottom shelf at a regular liquor store, but often costs a buck or two more. Way better than Seagrams, or something like New Amsterdam that isn’t even a London Dry. I don’t have an Aldi to compare to. Kirkland Signature is fine if we’re doing store brands.

No argument on Campari. That’s just truth.
by chrisjj | 2025-07-24 13:28:10+00:00
> Meta, the owner of Instagram and Facebook, says it already has a multilayered approach to age checking. This includes its teen account feature – a default setting for anyone under 18 – that it says already provides an “age appropriate” experience for young users.

Yes you read that right. Age /checking/ includes /providing/ an “age appropriate” experience.
by rock_artist | 2025-07-24 13:29:16+00:00
I've used WiX for a specific project in my work when I've needed MSI.

TBH, enforcing maintenance fee for anyone who makes revenue feels unfair.

There are other open-source libraries that has dual-license with some kind of GPL variant and a commercial license. but there's at least some threshold.

Imagine indie developer or someone who wants to try and create something but without much revenue (eg 1k / year). so 10% of your revenue goes to the installer of your product...

I'm all in sponsoring open-source and investing in software but part of being sustainable is making it accessible. so maybe that indie developer who used WiX for their indie project ended up going to 100k/year and now can contribute. But if originally it was capped, they might choose other solution that fits the "indie" tight budget better.
by chamomeal | 2025-07-24 13:29:48+00:00
I think a lot of people feel repulsed by dynamic typing for the same reason I used to: they wrote a lot of JS, and now they write a lot of TS. The experience of working in a JS codebase vs working in a (well-typed and maintained) TS codebase is a wide, wide gulf. I love working in TS, and I absolutely despise working in JS.

For a while I extrapolated my experience to mean “static typing is awesome and dynamic typing is horrible”, but then I started learning clojure, and my opinions have changed a lot.

There are a ton of things that make a codebase nice to work with. I think static typing raises the quality floor significantly, but it isn’t a requirement. Some other things that contribute to a good experience are

- good tests, obviously. Especially property based tests using stuff like test.check

- lack of bad tests. At work we have a very well-typed codebase, but the tests are horrible. 100 lines of mocks per 20 lines of logic. They’re brittle and don’t catch any real bugs.

- a repl!!

- other developers and managers who actually care about quality

All four of these examples seem pretty easy to find in the clojure world. Most people don’t learn clojure just to get a job, which is maybe a hidden feature of building your company with a niche language.

At the same time, I recognize that most of those examples are “skill issues”. Static typing does a good job of erasing certain skill issues. Which is great, because none of us are perfect all the time!
by brokencode | 2025-07-24 13:30:06+00:00
YouTube is 20 years old now. Either the encrapification is very slow or they landed on a decent ad model.

Plus there is a subscription that eliminates ads. I think it’s a great experience for users. Many creators also seem to do well too.

I think this should be the model for a new generation of search. Obviously there will be ads/sponsored results. But there should be a subscription option to eliminate the ads.

The key part here will be monetization for content creators. People are no longer clicking links, so how do they get revenue?

I think direct payments from AI companies to content creators will be necessary or the whole internet will implode.
by grep_name | 2025-07-24 13:30:43+00:00
I've lived my whole life in the southeastern US, and the comments online about this always make me feel like an alien. Everyone here always seems to imply that it's meaningless because "You have to say 'good', and if you don't say that people get upset," but I've just never once had that experience.

I almost never say 'good' in response to that question, even to a coworker I don't know well. In my friend groups, usually people will be straightforward about how they're doing as well. Maybe people don't know how to say 'bad' without following up with a story? It's easy once you start doing it. "Not great, but it's fine" or "I'm just keeping along / taking it day by day" is a fairly common response to get from me, especially lately, and it's always honest. Sometimes I will just say "TBH this week completely sucks for me" before continuing with what the conversation was about originally. If things are going well I will be effusive in my (still short) response ("I'm doing awesome actually"). And I do care about how the other person is doing when they respond. I've even gone so far as to ask, after finding out about bad news later in the conversation, "Damn, why'd you say you were doing well?".

I find it to be a deeply useful way to start a conversation. If you ask how I'm doing and you don't know me well, and I say something to imply I'm not having a good day, it completely changes the way the conversation should be conducted. Same goes for the other person's response. You always start every conversation on the same page ('how impatient / stressed is the other person right now?' is one of the most important pieces of context you can have). Over time, I've even found that it has the benefit of making me reflect on a regular basis on how I feel in the moment vs how I'm actually doing on a longer-term scale.
by ceejayoz | 2025-07-24 13:30:57+00:00
From your own source:

> In countries that get most of their energy from burning dirty coal, the emissions numbers for EVs don’t look nearly as good—but they’re still on par with or better than burning gasoline.

Trump's own EPA calls your argument the #1 myth about EVs. https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/electric-vehicle-myths
by Sanzig | 2025-07-24 13:31:34+00:00
I think it's both. It wasn't a problem when browsers were simple content display engines, but now that they are full VMs for application software, they need some of that capability just to function. FWIW, I think this was a mistake, but the genie is out of the bottle.

I suppose one technical mitigation might be a permissions dialog when a script requests access to a high-risk API like canvas or WebGL. But that's unfortunately something that won't work for most users, who will just click through the dialog.
by absoluteunit1 | 2025-07-24 13:32:34+00:00
> This had significant advantages in my career. The folks in the office —regardless of their proclivities— were amateurs, compared to some of the people I hung with, in my free time.

Could expand on this? What advantages in your career? Also, what do you mean by:

> were amateurs, compared to some of the people I hung with, in my free time.

Do you intentionally look to meet people with whom you disagree?