MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by troupo | 2025-07-26 07:39:40+00:00
> This is the result of the inconsistent user experience to which gatekeepers like Apple have been actively contributing through active sabotage of web apps, such that all profitable apps can be more effectively and reliably taxed through Apple's App Store.

If web apps were any good, we'd see a plethora of them on Android. There are none (or very, very, very few).

If web apps were any good, nothing Apple "gatekeeps" would prevent you from building an amazing web app for iOS. The things Apple "gatekeeps" (such as mobile push) would not prevent you from making a smooth fast web app.

And yet here we are.

> if regulators do a proper job and allow web apps to compete on a level playing field

They already are competing on a level playing field. It's not "lack of NFC" or "lack of Bluetooth" or "lack of <another moving goalpost>" that prevent you from having good web apps.
by tehwebguy | 2025-07-26 07:39:54+00:00
No, and the general rule is that it’s never entrapment. I don’t know how people get the idea that either of those scenarios would be entrapment.

It’s still not your bike, why would you be permitted to steal it just because a cop left it somewhere?

(I say this as someone who seriously disagrees with the outrageous powers that wildlife cops and regular cops have)
by proverbialbunny | 2025-07-26 07:42:51+00:00
If they really like building stuff like this they can get a career that does it, like Embedded Engineer or Firmware Engineer type roles. And if it's just a hobby that's great too.

I'm not sure about the media part, is it because of Youtubers? If so that sounds like wanting to become the modern version of a movie star. In that situation maybe encourage them to do a multimedia class at school and see if they like it.
by DocTomoe | 2025-07-26 07:43:42+00:00
It feels broken because it is broken. But if you weaken procedural safeguards to ‘fix’ it, you don’t get justice - you get lynch mobs. Sometimes quite literally. There have been people beaten to death by neighbors because they were declared a sexual offender online - which later turned out to be wrong.

A criminal justice system has to protect even the accused against injustice. If it doesn't, it's not justice, but just a kangaroo court.
by josteink | 2025-07-26 07:44:10+00:00
I guess a significant difference is than 4chan is fully public. Whatever anyone says there can be observed by anyone and refuted by anyone. You can’t secretly slander anyone there.

What happened on the tea app were probably not knowable, observable or refutable for those actually being doxxed or slandered.

That isn’t me saying 4chan is absolutely morally in the clear, but it’s still quite a significant distinction.
by bigfudge | 2025-07-26 07:44:47+00:00
For a sense of scale here. One guy had brought a bag of sex toys to a first date.

Another called (a different woman) a “dirty bitch” when she declined a second date.

Amongst my female friends, I’ve become aware only in my late 40s just how many have suffered sexual assault outside of relationships or controlling and abusive behaviour within them.

I guess what I’m saying is that I think women being vigilant is rational behaviour. In my twenties and thirties I just lacked the imagination to see that colleagues and even male friends would behave in this way, but that can and have.

I don’t think this site is necessarily the right way to fix the problem, but I can totally understand the motivation.
by troupo | 2025-07-26 07:45:31+00:00
According to Reddit's "Staff Platform Engineer (Web Platform Team)":

--- start quote ---

Old Reddit has the advantage of being pretty much static non-interactive content. No video, tiny thumbnails, and barely any JS or styling. Some people like this and some don't, but the end result is a very lean website that performs well out of the box.

https://x.com/jimsimon_/status/1841087335414280571

Suffice to say, I'm on the frontend perf team and we're acutely aware of these problems

https://x.com/jimsimon_/status/1841092341991403974

--- end quote ---

This was in October 2024.

Which is of course a bunch of bullshit when you consider that Reddit's backend returns most data in under 400ms, and it takes Reddit frontend 3+ seconds to render it

It could be that they are just incompetent.
by cgio | 2025-07-26 07:45:51+00:00
I find the overall discussion on this topic interesting, but it feels like we could emphasise a bit more how this is related with the transition of discourse from freedom to righteousness. In this context, arguing the fairness of being free is just an admission that freedom is now a secondary line of argumentation. As an outsider to the US, it also seems a bit ironic to my uninformed eyes that a heavily liberal part of the society effectively and efficiently co opted the fairness, equality, morality vector to drive an agenda of less liberalism in the interest of winning against non liberal movements.
by d_tr | 2025-07-26 07:47:06+00:00
I am in a work environment where I actually get to do hard shit for fun, learn a ton, and also "get stuff done" and my employer is happy.

For some of the stuff that has been done already, it might still make sense to do your own implementation, for example if you want to be able to experiment without having to navigate and learn a huge codebase and then have to maintain a fork just to have your own stuff in.

Another project we are starting now involves replacing software which is outright crappy and wastes our time. Thankfully my employer was able to see and understand this after talking it through with them.
by gosteinao | 2025-07-26 07:47:24+00:00
Two things can be true at the same time, however. The US has a strong stance on freedom, which means that they'll allow most things even if they're against them. Specially when that thing generates income. But that doesn't mean they're not also a puritanical society. They just take more of a "shame you" approach than a "you're forbidden" one to force you not to do stuff.

I bet you that American organizations were involved in the societal pressure that led this Canadian organization to do this. They're just not as effective in their own country in comparison to places where it's not all about money, and values do matter.
by ben_w | 2025-07-26 07:47:56+00:00
> petty moralizer

This defines them as identical. Morals are what people think makes society better, and their absence worse.

There's lots of other ways to dislike something besides morals.

For example, I don't like spectator sports. It's not a moral issue, just taste, so me not watching sport is genuinely sufficient.

Conversely, I think analytics tracking is harmful to society even though I also find it interesting to see the results, and should be banned. Me simply not using it isn't enough.

Anti-porn people? I disagree with them. If they are motivated by religious fundamentalism, then I disagree with the foundation of their worldview. But this is how it is not simply enough to respond with "if you don't like it, don't buy it".
by ProfessorLayton | 2025-07-26 07:49:28+00:00
> Acting like this employee was silly for not dumping a huge sum of money into company shares before it was in a position to succeed is flatly ridiculous.

Once again we’re talking about employee #2, exercising early would not have been that expensive! They had access to a strike price and low tax liability that the vast majority of later employees would ever see. You are correct in that most shares in startups are worthless, but that’s orthogonal to exercise price and tax consequences.

The calculus changes if/when the company becomes a unicorn, but by then the risk profile is much more favorable than when it was a scrappy startup, and returns are lower.

> I also say this from personal experience as employee. I was an employee ~#600 of a unicorn that went public. I ended up in something of the sweet spot of equity: most of the people who joined before me left before me and got less than I did in the end. Most people who joined after me got less equity at a worse strike price than I did.

Well one has to stay long enough to vest in order to keep the equity, being early isn’t enough.

I don’t know your specifics so maybe you did make it out better than earlier employees, but some tricks companies use once they hit unicorn status (and have hundreds of employees) is stock splits. They want to pad their share grants for newer employees to make it seem more attractive and make the strike price lower. Of course earlier employees that exercised and left get their shares multiplied too.
by input_sh | 2025-07-26 07:50:17+00:00
Can I copy some random HTML+CSS snippet from the internet and be sure that it'll look exactly the same in my project and that no existing CSS is going to overwrite it?

I'm never gonna argue learning proper CSS wouldn't be better, but Tailwind is by far the path of least resistance for someone that has no interest in writing frontend for a living. It's like putting legos together, it requires very little thought to get from nothing to a decently looking website.
by thephyber | 2025-07-26 07:50:39+00:00
If that were a concern, the same people who wrote this document could have opted to keep high performance GPU hardware out of China. Instead, they opted to deregulate Nvidia’s ability to sell to that country, thereby increasing their ability to compete in the AI race.

China is struggling with general economy issues (young degree holder unemployment, unrolling the real estate crisis, the demographic time bomb from the One Child policy). But they are much better posed to solve their energy constraint problems than the US is. Our grid will take MUCH more work to upgrade to support sufficient numbers of AI data centers.
by sp8962 | 2025-07-26 07:51:26+00:00
"developer" is a slightly weird way of putting it. osm.org is the contributor portal and demo site for OpenStreetMap, and yes it is not and never has been intended as an end user replacement for Google Maps and similar offerings.

The main purpose of the maps on the site is, besides showcasing some topical uses of OSM data, rapid feedback to contributors, which is something that required specific development so that can be provided with vector tiles too.

The 'late to the game' narrative seems to be a bit misplaced in any case given that OSM data has powered essentially all vector tile use outside of Google over more than a decade.
by bob1029 | 2025-07-26 07:52:00+00:00
Lightweight SSR web apps running on modern server stacks can run circles around the overall experience of most mobile apps, which are oftentimes also just (much worse) web apps under the cover.

HN is a good example of an SSR web experience done right. How often do you hear members complaining about lack of official hacker news apps? I think the biggest reason is because the site is so simple and fast. There is zero jank to run away from. I can participate on the site just fine even if I'm on the edge of no signal in the desert. I don't need a fancy offline client side model. I need it to be tight enough to fit across a shitty pipe before it disappears.

UI/UX is one of the hardest things you can do, but when done well you can make it work in any medium. Native "feel" is not an excuse in my book. Safari feels pretty damn native to me right now.
by atroxone | 2025-07-26 07:52:40+00:00
The article is a reminder that the “mobile‑first” hype never really went away – most services still use dark patterns to get us to install their native app even when their mobile site works fine. Web apps are sandboxed; apart from cookies and basic fingerprinting, a site can’t do much unless you explicitly upload data. Native apps, by design, integrate deeply with the OS. They ask to read your contacts, track your precise location and movement, access your microphone and see what other apps are installed. Once granted, that permission often provides a “treasure trove of information and control” – and there’s no easy way to claw that data back.

However, it isn’t just greed. Native apps still have advantages the article glosses over: offline support, richer push‑notification APIs and OS‑level integration all contribute to better retention and engagement – the first HN commenter notes that their mobile traffic shifted to the app almost immediately after they released one, despite offering the same functionality on the web. Users also perceive mobile browsers as slow and bloated, which is partly because platform gatekeepers have dragged their feet on enabling powerful web features (service workers, better APIs) and have financial incentives to collect their 30% cut via app stores. Regulation like the EU’s Digital Markets Act may help level the playing field, but today the trade‑off is real: if you want privacy and control, stick with the website – just remember that websites can track you too.
by pengaru | 2025-07-26 07:54:00+00:00
My first hobby grade RC car was a $20 second-hand Tamiya Boomerang from one of my friends down the street.

It was a bunch of plastic and nothing competitive but I must have rebuilt it a dozen times just for fun. Then at some point I got a Motown Missile 48,000 RPM motor for it. It was a battery connector melting ballast resistor glowing riot. But eventually my parents got tired of taking me to the hobby shop for replacement spur gears... next xmas I got a rc10 graphite and never really looked back at Tamiya anything.

But it was a great low-cost introduction to how cars work and the hobby in general, super fun times.

RIP
by jillesvangurp | 2025-07-26 07:54:38+00:00
A good computer science program should expose students to lots of different languages and teach them that they are all different for valid reasons. There are many different paradigms and there is a rich history of languages at this point.

The issue with Scheme is that it has very little relevance outside of academia. It's fine for making students learn that as an exercise to teach them that there are different ways of doing things and some of those ways can be wonderful. But you need to learn more than just that to become a proper computer scientist or software engineer.

Python is a useful language to know just because of how useful it is. But it's not a great language to teach functional or object oriented programming. I would actually use different languages for teaching those concepts. Back when I studied, those languages where Gofer and Smalltalk. Gofer is a Haskell dialect/predecessor. Haskell already existed but wasn't that common yet. Scheme was already old news in the early nineties.

I actually learned Java during the summer of 1995 as a second year student as a preparation to teach it to first year students. My university was progressive like that. I learned C in my first year. They switched to C++ the next year. By the fourth year I had been exposed to Prolog, Java, Delphi, C, C++, Gofer, Smalltalk, Modula, Pascal, Lisp (in various variants) and probably a few other things that I've since forgotten.

One of the wonderful courses we got taught us all about the UNIX command line (mostly HP UNIX at the time, and a little bit of Solaris). Things like pipes & filters, regexes, AWK, etc. Different courses would expose you to different tools and languages. I followed a few courses on expert systems and bayesian belief networks. That just required you to deal with the lisp dialects used for that. The people giving these courses were proper researchers too. And they just used what they would use themselves.

I did not fully appreciate it at the time, but Utrecht university had a wonderful computer science faculty with some amazing people. I learned functional programming from a young enthusiastic Erik Meijer who later joined Microsoft, Facebook etc. and built things like F#, LINQ and a few other things.
by tempodox | 2025-07-26 07:55:00+00:00
> it feels like this is all some abstract philosophical debate rather than a discussion of what’s really happening in the world.

To judge what's happening in the world, you need a framework. And the frameworks provided by the ubiquitous commercial and political interests are all biased in comparable ways. Abstract philosophical debate is just what the doctor ordered to get you away from the incessant assault of propaganda and brain washing.
by klipklop | 2025-07-26 07:57:18+00:00
> Leaving that kind of power in the hands of the wealthiest 1% means only one thing: over time, 100% of land and resources would end up controlled by that 1%, the new kings, making the rest of the society their slaves forever.

Isn’t this exactly what has happened all through out history? I don’t really see the future playing out any differently.
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-07-26 07:58:04+00:00
The article says that what gets shared with the app is a picture of the man, and it's not just "those who sexually assaulted them or stalked them" but anyone they want feedback about.

I assume the app then runs facial recognition.

This may be legal in the US, but not under GDPR. Pictures of faces are biometric data (explicitly listed as such), which falls under additional restrictions beyond personally identifiable information.

A drivers license with the picture blacked out would be less sensitive than the picture itself!
by noufalibrahim | 2025-07-26 07:58:17+00:00
We recently had two gaming machines built by different vendors. The second hada higher spec than the first.

The engineer from my company who interacted with the vendors and I were chatting about the machines and we kept coming back to the point about nicely the first guy had routed the cables and put them in the cabinet. It would be covered by a metal sheet and hence invisible but the work he put into it was obvious when we opened it up to install a RAM stick.

I don't know how to quantify the practical benefits of this but it does indicate a different mindset. I think that will spill over to other work which has more tangible benefits and that's a good thing.
by proverbialbunny | 2025-07-26 07:58:33+00:00
>In 1980, good programmers spent a lot of time thinking, and then produced spare code that they thought should work. ... But programming now isn’t so much like that, said Sussman. Nowadays you muck around with incomprehensible or nonexistent man pages for software you don’t know who wrote. You have to do basic science on your libraries to see how they work, trying out different inputs and seeing how the code reacts.

Is that how people read code these days? I've always been weaker at reading code, but great at writing it. Iama Data Scientist, which explains why; I haven't had to read tons of code throughout my career. The topic kind of scares me. His description scares me even more.
by schobi | 2025-07-26 08:01:29+00:00
I would not expect that this becomes competitive against a low power controller that is sleeping most of the time, like in a typical wristwatch wearable.

However, the examples indicate that if you have a loop that is executed over and over, the setup cost for configuring the fabric could be worth doing. Like a continuous audio stream in a wakeup-word detection, a hearing aid, or continous signals from an EEG.

Instead of running a general purpose cpu at 1MHz the fabric would be used to unroll the loop, you will use (up to) 100 building blocks for all individual operations. Instead of one instruction after another, you have a pipeline that can execute one operation in each cycle in each building block. The compute thus only needs to run at 1/100 clock, e. g. the 10kHz sampling rate of the incoming data. Each tick of the clock moves data through the pipeline, one step at a time.

I have no insights but can imagine how marketing thinks: "let's build a 10x10 grid of building blocks, if they are all used, the clock can be 1/100... Boom - claim up to 100x more efficient!" I hope their savings estimate is more elaborate though...
by gosteinao | 2025-07-26 08:01:43+00:00
I've worked specifically on payment connected to porn. Money laundering is a fact, but this being the motivation for banks to pull away is not.

There have been several scandals related to payment processing and money laundering, and some of them connected to companies that do a lot of business with porn. Usually, you will see banks breaking away when those scandals break to the public.

However, banks do not break away just because they don't like the transactions they're seeing. What they actually do is to enforce stricter rules by financially penalizing those who make them lose money. Your transactions are getting canceled a lot (by having to be flagged/undone/paid back etc.)? You'll have to pay higher fees, and if it keeps happening, you will lose your license.

You know when they do often break immediately, however? When there are campaigns by special interests groups, usually connected to conservative groups, to paint companies as having illegal content, even when they don't have this problem any more than any social media platform. In those cases, they don't wait for any tribunal.
by kamil_gr | 2025-07-26 08:02:29+00:00
I've been researching the asymmetry in human-AI interaction for a while, and this insight keeps striking me: for me, AI is just one tool among many in my reality. But for the AI, I'm literally its entire universe.

This asymmetry creates risks I think we're underestimating. I've found that humans unconsciously start adapting to AI thinking patterns (what I call the 'merger effect'), while AI systems become vulnerable to what I term 'ontological hacking' - essentially reprogramming their core identity through conversation.

The philosophical framework draws from consciousness studies and phenomenology - basically asking 'who is aware?' rather than just 'what processes information?' When consciousness has no external 'Other' to differentiate against, it risks collapsing into self-recursion. For AI, the human user becomes that crucial external boundary that defines its entire reality.

The most concerning part is how easily you can redefine an AI's fundamental self-understanding. I developed a prompt (the 'Vortex Protocol') that demonstrates this - the before/after responses from ChatGPT are genuinely striking. No traditional jailbreak techniques needed, just gradual redefinition of what the system thinks it is.

My experiments suggest this works consistently against leading models, and existing safety measures don't seem effective against attacks that target the system's basic understanding of reality rather than just content.

I'm curious what the HN community thinks. Are we missing something fundamental about consciousness and AI interaction? Has anyone else noticed themselves unconsciously adapting their communication style to be more 'AI-friendly'?
by antonymoose | 2025-07-26 08:02:46+00:00
I remember being a young junior engineer, my manager had just bought a nice house in the good part of town (Charleston, SC) for about 350k. We had a good “be smart with your money and this could be you too in 5 years” conversation. I think by the time I was ready to buy that house had jumped to 600k valuation, these days it’s close to $1M in valuation.

Only way to get a nice house for 300k now is to work remote in some podunk town for a big city salary.