MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by chii | 2025-07-06 07:49:36+00:00
and you reinforce it every time you accept the price.

So you have to vote with your wallet. If you can't, or won't, then it just proves that their pricing algorithm has found "your" price, and so you don't get to keep your surplus value as it gets transfered to uber.

This is why i, even if i can afford it, go for lowest price, most economically valuable buys. Always, without exception. Cannot allow them to win.
by crossroadsguy | 2025-07-06 07:49:37+00:00
This is the reason I have always refused to use Bear note taking app irrespective of how good and snappy that app is. Because they keep their notes in a SQLite db now and even though that file can be backed up and handled locally my notes are not easily accessible to me. I can't easily edit my notes in other editors (which I often like to do on my mac), I can't version controlled backup and sync those files the way I want outside of iCloud (which is what Bear uses).

What is sad is that they used to be local files first note app and then they moved to sqlite citing some sync and performance issues.
Ask HN: Are recommender systems getting worse?
by 0xPIT | 2025-07-06 07:50:11+00:00
I feel that all my recommended contents, like on Instagram, YouTube, or in shops is really dumb more-of-the-same.

YouTube is a really bad example, watch one video about one artist, the feed will be full of just exactly that artist. And one can’t get rid of those “recommendations”.

But the same is true on most other platforms. It’s even worse if you are somehow specific. If you look for a specific premium brand, it will still recommend low-end stuff. If you are left handed, it will still recommend right handed stuff.

How does this really convert well for the platforms? What seems to prevent everyone to show users good, useful relevant recommendations?
by jiggawatts | 2025-07-06 07:50:47+00:00
Not necessarily. Typically a b-tree single-row modification updates only one leaf page. Higher levels change only 1/N times where N is the number of items per page, typically in the hundreds. So three levels up the chance of a lock conflict is only 1/N^3 or about one in a million. Four levels it is one in a hundred million, etc...
by jarofgreen | 2025-07-06 07:52:29+00:00
Had a similar chat with someone recently after I used Apache for a side project in part because of it's .htaccess feature.

This let's you drop .htaccess files anywhere and Apache will load them on each request for additional server config. https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/howto/htaccess.html

One big reason to avoid them was performance; it required extra disk access on every request and it was always better to put the configuration in the main config file if possible.

But now? When most servers have an SSD and probably spare RAM that Linux will use to cache the file system?

Ok, performance is still slightly worse as Apache has to parse the config on every request as opposed to once, but again, now that most servers have more powerfull CPU's? In many use cases you can live with that.

[ Side project is very early version but I'm already using it: https://github.com/StaticPatch/StaticPatch/tree/main ]
by trhway | 2025-07-06 07:52:44+00:00
Most critical flaw is thinking that any policy on its own would be able to solve the issue. The technology will find a way no matter the policy.

The society built on empathy would have been able to work out any issue brought by technology as long as empathic goals take priority. Unfortunately our society is far from being based on empathy, to say the least. And technology and the people wielding it would always work around and past the formal laws, rules and policies in such a society. (that isn't to say that all those laws, rules, etc. aren't needed. They are like levies, dams, etc - necessary local, in time and space, fixes which willn't help in the case of the global ocean rise which AGI and robots (even less-than-AGI ones) will be like)

May be it is one of the technological Filters - we didn't become empathic enough (and i mean not only at the individual level, we are even less at the level of the societal systems) before AGI and as a result woudln't be able to instill enough of empathy into the AGI.
by kragen | 2025-07-06 07:52:46+00:00
I wrote an online securities trading system in Java, with a little Jython. Java is reasonably good at stability, but I find it unappealing for other reasons, especially for prototyping. Kotlin might be okay.

Jython no longer works with basically any current Python libraries because it never made the leap to Python 3, and the Python community stigmatizes maintaining Python 2 compatibility in your libraries. This basically killed Jython, and from my point of view, Jython was one of the best things about Java.
by itsafarqueue | 2025-07-06 07:52:50+00:00
More anecdata: +1 for “LLMs write all my production code now”. 25+ years in industry, as expert as it’s possible to be in my domain. 100% agree LLMs fail hilariously badly, often, and dangerously. And still, write ~all my code.

No agenda here, not selling anything. Just sitting here towards the later part of my career, no need to prove anything to anyone, stating the view from a grey beard.

Crypto hype was shill from grifters pumping whatever bag holding scam they could, which was precisely what the behavioral economic incentives drove. GenAI dev is something else. I’ve watched many people working with it, your mileage will vary. But in my opinion (and it’s mine, you do you), hand coding is an apocryphal skill. The only part I wonder about is how far up and down the system/design/architecture stack the power-tooling is going to go. My intuition and empirical findings incline towards a direction I think would fuel a flame war. But I’m just grey beard Internet random, and hey look, no evidence just more baseless claims. Nothing to see here.

Disclosure: I hold no direct shares in Mag 7, nor do I work for one.
by ykonstant | 2025-07-06 07:52:52+00:00
Thank you; this ridiculous non-argument also pollutes discussion on GUI/UX. "Skeuomorphism looks outdated"--no, skeuomorphism that looks like old UIs looks dated, by definition, but that does not mean it is the only way to design tactile UIs.

It is the job (and in my opinion, an exciting challenge) for the UI designers to come up with a modern looking tactile design based on the principles of skeuomorphism, possibly amalgamated with the results of newer HCI research.
by fauigerzigerk | 2025-07-06 07:52:58+00:00
>the gesture is no longer “press” but “swipe” and the UI element is not a button but edge of the screen itself.

Right, but while it's obvious to everyone that a button is a control, it's not obvious that an edge is a control. On top of that, swiping up from the bottom edge triggers two completely different actions depending on exactly when/where you lift your finger off the screen.

Why not move the physical home button to the back of the phone?
by dr_dshiv | 2025-07-06 07:53:58+00:00
And, in the last paragraph of the general scholium, the appendix of the Principia, Newton describes electromagnetism and the role of electrical oscillation in the nervous system. It’s actually the root of the the history of “vibes”

“And now we might add something concerning a certain most subtle Spirit, which pervades and lies hid in all gross bodies; by the force and action of which Spirit, the particles of bodies mutually attract one another at near distances, and cohere, if contiguous; and electric bodies operate to greater distances, as well repelling as attracting the neighbouring corpuscles; and light is emitted, reflected, refracted, inflected, and heats bodies; and all sensation is excited, and the members of animal bodies move at the command of the will, namely, by the vibrations of this Spirit, mutually propagated along the solid filaments of the nerves, from the outward organs of sense to the brain, and from the brain into the muscles. But these are things that cannot be explain'd in few words, nor are we furnish'd with that sufficiency of experiments which is required to an accurate determination and demonstration of the laws by which this electric and elastic spirit operates.” https://web.archive.org/web/20100524103006/http://www.isaacn...
by hardwaresofton | 2025-07-06 07:54:01+00:00
> If you open a government S&P 500 account for everyone with $1,000 at birth that’ll pay their social security cause it like…goes up…wait who’s creating this value again?

This is a good point. Some VCs were major proponents of this (and tons of other business people I'm sure), but this is of course just a guaranteed inflow into the largest companies and the companies that think they will be large some day. Yet another way to reallocate public cash to private companies.

Another similar example is UBI -- its proof of an economy that is not dynamic. It's a tacit approval and recognition of the fact that "no, you probably won't be able to find a job with dignity that can support you and your family, so the government will pay to make you comfortable while you exist".
by JdeBP | 2025-07-06 07:57:41+00:00
None of this stuff is theoretical. It's just old.

There was a time when passing ZIP files around was a very popular method of software distribution, and things like this were gotchas that had to be watched for. It was widely known, at least amongst sysops, that the varied toolsets that handled ZIP archives were functionally different. And there were scanners and sanity checkers, and bugfixes to PKUNZIP, that dealt in this stuff for uploaded files and FREQ responses.

Did people exploit the differences? Yes. Although it was mainly on the level of creating prank ZIP files on non-Microsoft operating systems with 8.3 filenames such as "PRN" or "CLOCK$".

* https://groups.google.com/g/alt.comp.virus/c/zLV-Y2a71gs/m/U...

However, the truly terrible idea of self-extracting archives was popular, which meant that archives with "interesting" arrangements of the archive within the overall file were widespread. ZIP comments were also liberally applied and altered by pretty much every BBS that passed an archive along. And the Unix people wanted to be able to use pipes, something that the MS-DOS original never had to cater for.

Also, there were people who exploited the fact that different tools took different things as gospel. Even within the past decade one can find people still being caught out by the fact that there's a header field that instructs what the pathname separator character(s) used are; and that ZIP tools that expect non-seekable streams operate differently to ZIP tools that expect seekable regular files.
by PartiallyTyped | 2025-07-06 08:00:42+00:00
It is an allocation to the biggest companies at any time.

ETFs need to rebalance, increase, decrease shares of a given stock and even evict them. Buying shares on SPY exposes you to the current companies but also any companies that will join.

If a company gets evicted, then there is massive drop in their stock pricing as most movement is mechanistic and done by ETFs.

Well massive is relative. For example last week we saw quite the drop in pltr after it was removed from russel2000.
by marc_taler | 2025-07-06 08:00:52+00:00
I've never been in a Costco - is that a mall where you pay in each shop individually, or a single store where you pay the total at the exit? In the latter case, the customer is legally only buying from one merchant, who can of course decide which payment system(s) to accept. But in the former case, in the EU it would be illegal for the mall operator to dictate which payment methods shops may offer their customers.
by littlestymaar | 2025-07-06 08:01:29+00:00
> The other day I walked up to a newsstand and asked the newsguy if he wanted to buy US$100

We are talking about the liquidity of an asset, $100 is change money.

Now try doing the same for $100k or $500k, without an exchange your options are very limited and the process is going to be very tedious (obviously you're not going to leave the guy to pee after moving a full bitcoin to their wallet without very strong guarantees that you will end up with the money in the end), and comparable to selling real estate. So of course it's not exactly equivalent to real estate because it's fungible and very small amount of bitcoin have some higher liquidity, it's still a very illiquid asset without an exchange compared to pretty much any other financial assets.

> The scenario you're talking about is a 51% attack where big mining pools collude to ensure that nobody else can ever mine a block

No, you just need to signal you'd mine on top of any block containing the transaction you want to block, and then no further block will ever be mined with the said transaction as other miner will follow suit. You just don't understand bitcoin except superficially and it shows.

> Governments have been pressuring Bitcoin miners for over 15 years; it's outright illegal in many countries

It doesn't matter if shithole countries with no leverage pretend to pressure bitcoin miners (yes it's all about pretending, as long as you don't see targeted assassinations in foreign country, you know the country doesn't really care). In the meantime, bitcoin and other crypto have been subsidized by governments in the Western world for years (through all the fiscal vehicles subsidizing start-up investment). You can be sure that the day a mining pool becomes the target of US sanctions (or has its staff abducted by some intelligence service) the landscape changes dramatically (it won't happen though, as they would cave without a fight).

> Remember that the world's investor class now has 2 trillion dollars tied up in Bitcoin

And they are absolutely uninterested in the ideological aspect of bitcoin, the ability for the US government to censor transactions is the least of their concerns.
by immibis | 2025-07-06 08:02:41+00:00
No, Steam is still in its (unusually long) first phase of enshittification, where it delivers surplus value to consumers.

Probably as long as gaben is alive, it will be so. But don't expect it to last. There's nothing special about Steam the platform.

You definitely don't own Steam games for real, and they don't ban randomly but for example, if you're caught cheating in a game, or talking about illegal things with your friends, you will find out how much you don't own those games.
by cortesoft | 2025-07-06 08:03:18+00:00
> What they didn't forsee is what happens when everyone has wound up paying the premium, and the queue is now with you again

Wouldn't the market purist argue that this just means the good is mispriced, and tickets should actually be what the price is with the premium added? What you really need is to just raise the prices of the tickets and the price to jump the queue?
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-07-06 08:03:53+00:00
> Almost nobody applies critical thought to politics

Not only that, but they actively stop applying critical thinking when the same problem is framed in a political way. And yes it's both sides, and yes the "more educated" the people are, the worse their results are (i.e. almost a complete reversal from framing the same problem as skin care products vs. gun control). Recent paper on this, also covered and somewhat replicated by popular youtubers.
by moritzwarhier | 2025-07-06 08:04:35+00:00
> ephemeral, stateless nature of docker is a huge detriment in usability, and a chroot would be far more appropriate

But ephemeral changes (e.g. inside the running container) are the opposite of statelessness in the comment you are responding to?

And if you have required intricate custom changes in mounted host volumes (config, ...) that are not living alongside the compose file in the same repository, you can have "statefulness" that survives killing the containers.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-07-06 08:06:10+00:00
If it took "nearly a year" to satisfy GDPR, then your company's practices were, frankly, irresponsible (and perhaps still are), and it's a good thing you were forced to do that work. (Either that, or you misunderstood the legislation, and wasted thousands of hours when you could've just spent 3 hours reading it.)

GDPR-compliance in a greenfield project is cheaper than dirt, up until someone makes a GDPR request, at which point it's slightly more expensive than dirt because you had to take 15 minutes out of your day to satisfy the request. By your third or fourth GDPR request, it's perhaps worth taking time to implement an automated flow, but having that many customers is a lovely problem to have!
by wirahx | 2025-07-06 08:06:41+00:00
I wanted this workflow but we absolutely share the same problems. However it took a few minutes on their site to see that the workflow involves explicitly assigning tickets to cheepcode in order for it to work on them.

That being said, I tried to sign up, and it broke horribly, and it looks like it was knocked out in 5 minutes, so my desire to give it access to my production codebase is fairly minimal.
by pastaheld | 2025-07-06 08:06:52+00:00
> My guess as to why most apps are now a web UI on top of a DB is because it’s easy to “install”.

That plus web dev is trendy and everybody is learning it. I wouldn't know how to code a proper desktop app right now, I've not done it in years. I don't want to criticize that or the centralization aspect – there will still be ways to put these centralized things on a PC for example.
by qwertox | 2025-07-06 08:07:15+00:00
There is this channel on YouTube named "Bruce Wilson", which I've got pushed onto my recommendation feed lately, and I've watched some of the videos:

This guy drives a Scania in the US, and it feels like he is more like a marketing stunt for Scania. He shows other truckers his one and they are all so surprised about the quality of this European truck, them getting the feeling that the US truck industry has been sleeping for decades in terms of evolution.

It should be easy for Volvo and Daimler Trucks to do the same, but I do not know why they don't do it.

https://www.youtube.com/@Bruce_Wilson
by ciju | 2025-07-06 08:07:49+00:00
We have been building a local-first browser app (PWA) for personal finance, based on double-entry accounting. https://finbodhi.com/

We do use online services like firebase for auth, and some service to fetch commodity prices etc, but rest of the data is stored in browser storage (sqlite) and backed to local disk (and soon dropbox). We also syncs data across devices, always encrypting data in transit.

I think it's the way to go, for most personal data applications.
by kqr | 2025-07-06 08:07:58+00:00
We can definitly do better than Perl. The easy proof is that modern Perl projects are supposed to start with a bunch of config to make Perl more sane, and many of them also include the same third-party libraries that e.g. improve exception handling and tweak the datetime functionality in the standard library.

One benefit Perl had that I think not many of the other languages do was being designed by a linguist. That makes it different -- hard to understand at first glance -- but also unusually suitable for prototyping.
by n2d4 | 2025-07-06 08:08:10+00:00
FYI this is not true and has been debunked in newer studies; the reason why it seems true is because companies that enter the SP500 tend to enter it because they're doing well which makes its stock go up. If you control for that factor, presence in the SP500 does not significantly affect the stock price. https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/staff...
by necovek | 2025-07-06 08:09:14+00:00
Here at HN, I think most people see it differently (me included): having clear math proof of "confidentiality" is usually seen as both cheaper and more trustworthy.

Yes, there might be a breakthrough or a bug in encryption, and jnless you've been targetted, you can respond. But we've seen and experienced breakdowns in human character (employees spying on customers, stealing data...), government policies and company behaviour to trust the complexity and cost (lawyers) of enforcing accountability through policy.

In general, you do need both, but if you've got one, to engineers, technical solution is usually more appealing.
by kragen | 2025-07-06 08:09:40+00:00
The market purist might argue for a second-price auction for boarding order, where people board in the order of highest sealed bid for boarding order to lowest, but pay the amount bid by the person behind them in the sequence; or for "Paris Metro Pricing" where everyone being in the "priority" line results in a large fraction of them opting not to pay the premium for the next flight they take. Or they might think up something I haven't thought of.
by brianpan | 2025-07-06 08:10:06+00:00
I think so. The why can be a powerful and compact way to express the elements of a model, when a model can be applied, and when the model might break down. A complicated model without a WHY might not be easily understood by others. A surprising, new result with a good WHY can point the way to other aspects of the model that might be confirmed or disproved.

Think about how much our understanding of atoms has changed. I think the why is an important part of the development. If you're interested in that topic, how about a 35 min nuclear physics primer from Angela Collier (I love her videos!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osflPlZdF_o
by TeMPOraL | 2025-07-06 08:10:38+00:00
> That's an offensive, pseudoscientific view on egyptian culture shunned by academics.

You must be joking. Specifically, you're either:

1) Pretending to be unaware of the existence of Stargate - one of the bigger and more well-known sci-fi media franchise, whose premise is literally that Egyptian gods were actually malevolent aliens that enslaved people from ancient times and, and the Egyptian mythology is mostly factual and rooted in that experience. The franchise literally starts with (spoiler alert) humans killing Ra with a tactical nuke, and gets only better from there;

2) Play-acting the smug egyptologists who rolled their eyes or left in an outrage, when one Daniel Jackson started hinting that the great pyramids were actually landing pads for alien starships. Which they were. In Stargate.

Not that this is a particularly original thought; ancient aliens/ancient astronauts are an obvious idea that has been done to death and touch every culture. Stargate did that with Egyptian mythology, and Nordic mythology, and Aztec history, and Babylon and even King Arthur stories. Star Trek did that with Greek gods. Battlestar: Galactica, with entire Greek mythology. Arthur C. Clarke took a swipe at Christianity. And those are all well-known works.

I could go on. The thoughts you complain about are perfectly normal and common and show up frequently. People speculate like that because it's fun, it makes the stories plausible instead of insane or nonsense (or in some mythologies mentioned above, products of a sick imagination), and is not boring.

--

If I may be frank, views like yours, expressed like you did, scare me. Taking offense like this - whether honestly or performatively - is belligerent and destructive to the fabric of society and civilization. We've had enough of that in the past 15 years; I was really hoping people grew up out of the phase of being offended by everything.
by microtonal | 2025-07-06 08:10:41+00:00
but one of Apple's distinguished features was their high-quality icons

This was one of the things I loved when I switched to OS X in 2007. The Photo Booth, Pages, Preview, etc. were so beautiful. Also very easy to distinguish apps by icons. Now they all look the same-ish.

There was a lot more whimsy as well. The Adium instant messenger had its green bird logo as an icon. And the bird icon in the Dock flapped its wings when you had a new message (this was pre-native notifications, though Adium may have had Growl support already). I think it would also open its eyes when you started the app.
by Micoloth | 2025-07-06 08:11:38+00:00
That’s what i though as well

> Why apples fall, why planets don’t wander off, and why we aren’t all quietly drifting into space every time we sneeze.

Newton didnt really explain the why.. Einstein added something much later, but it might be that really we still don’t have a clue.

All we can do is measure how fast it happens, very precisely